Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits

The sleeper must awaken!

It would be interesting to know what the questions were (or even what genre) - to get a better sense of the significance of getting them right.

Unfortunately there is no indication in this article, or the abstract of the paper, and the journal article itself requires a subscription.

I'm glad lutusp has already jumped in here to decry the shoddy quality of "science" relied on to build the opinion piece kindly submitted here. He is correct that psychology often relies on data unrepresentative of humankind as a whole,

http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf

often engages in dodgy data manipulation after gathering the data,

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

and is usually part of a larger scientific universe of rushing to publish.

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/filedrawer.h...

That said, while we will always have to be wary of grandiose claims about preliminary study results,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and especially about "mind over matter" claims,

http://norvig.com/prayer.html

there are skeptical psychologists

http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_...

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_730.aspx

and other researchers in psychology who apply rigor to their discipline, so over time we may actually find out something about human behavior from psychology more reliable than the weak and debatable assertions found in the article submitted here.

AFTER EDIT:

Because the submitted article mentions the placebo effect, in the usual manner of popular articles, perhaps I should share here some links that are helpful for understanding what placebo effects are all about. Some of these online links cite quite a few useful scholarly publications.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/behold-the-spin-what-a-n...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/michael-specter-on-the-p...

"In other words, the best research we have strongly suggests that placebo effects are illusions, not real physiological effects. The possible exception to this are the subjective symptoms of pain and nausea, where the placebo effects are highly variable and may be due to subjective reporting."

Despite the numerous press releases on the Web pointing to publications co-authored by Ted Kaptchuk, who has NO medical training or credentials,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doc...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doc...

the statements typically found in those articles, such as "Recent research demonstrates that placebo effects are genuine psychobiological phenomenon [sic] attributable to the overall therapeutic context, and that placebo effects can be robust in both laboratory and clinical settings" are untrue.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...

"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554

"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."

Fabrizio Benedetti, a co-author of one of the most cited papers who is also a medical doctor, sums up his view this way: "I am a doctor, it is true, but I am mainly a neurophysiologist, so I use the placebo response as a model to understand how our brain works. I am not sure that in the future it will have a clinical application."

To sum up, despite claims to the contrary by a person without medical training who is often covered by the lay press, the best-considered view among medical practitioners with clinical experience is that the placebo response has no clinical application.

See also:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-thinking-make-it-so...

http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/revisiting-daniel-moerma...

>Ahh. Psychologists. Expectations calibrated.

A, a positivist reductionist. Expectations on intellectual sophistication and ability to comprehend the world beyond simplistic models calibrated.

> you dare question a website with 'scientific' in the URL? I like your moxie.

Yep, I had a lot of nerve doing that. :)

A while ago, in an article I noted that Wikipedia defined neuroscience as "the scientific study of the brain and nervous system", while psychology was defined as "the study of the mind, partly through the study of behavior." Within hours of my article's appearance someone inserted the word "scientific" into psychology's definition. Solved that problem.

> I recall reading something posted recently about how the way the grants in social sciences is set up ensures that you get a whole lot of papers that have a catchy 'truthy' hook to them, which will then get disseminated by the mainstream media and quickly forgotten.

Yes, even to the extent that two studies arrive at opposite conclusions but don't notice each other (and no one points out the contradiction). My favorite example of overlooked contradictions are two current, well-regarded psychological theories -- Grit and Asperger Syndrome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait) : "Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective."

So according to the Grit contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a "good thing", and typical of successful people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome : "Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger disorder, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests."

So according to the Asperger contingent, focusing on a few activities, or just one, is a mental illness.

How can this happen? The answer is that there's no central defining theory in psychology, so people are free to draw conclusions that don't need to be compared to tested, defining principles like relativity or evolution.

> It basically turned the fields into little more than generators of soundbites.

Well put. :)