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1. I was most surprised about the amount of money mediums make. While I knew they were popular, and knew that the numerous TV shows and celebrity endorsements would generally give them influence and fame, I was surprised to read that those in the medium industry generated over 2 billion dollars in 2018

2. This topic is interesting to me because when someone close to me in my family passed away, I was desperate for some kind of a sign to tell me that they were okay or that they were watching over me. If the light in my house would flicker or I’d suddenly feel cold, I was hoping it would be a sign but was always skeptical of pseudoscience and never believed in otherworldly phenomena. In my grief and emotional state, even as a skeptic, I was willing to believe anything. If a medium told me my loved one was speaking to me – would I have believed them? Today I’d say of course not, but in that state of despair and sadness would I have? While before I would have said that mediums are not harmful and can be therapeutic if you know that they are not legit and cannot provide any scientific explanation to their reasoning, seeing how much harm they also cause is infuriating. So many vulnerable people are taken advantage of, and it is interesting how many people continue to believe in their spiritual powers despite any concrete evidence and how profitable the psychic and medium industry is.

3. I think it is interesting the tactics that mediums use to convince people of their legitimacy. While I was always skeptical about mediums, I never truly understood how they perform. I’ve seen many clips of Tyler Henry and Theresa Caputo performing readings or “connecting” with the afterlife, and I was left shocked at the seemingly accurate descriptions they gave. This assignment was interesting because it helped me dive deeper into the world of mediums and taught me a lot of the tactics that they use, such as general and ambiguous questions, leading the individual to answer or fill in the blanks for them, using general clues that can apply to many people, for example using common names to make guesses like “I see a John or Jack.” These are both common names and it is allowing the individual to confirm their loved ones' names and, through body language and emotional cues, give the medium ammunition to make accurate guesses.

4. I am most likely to remember to be skeptical about everything and deploy my critical analysis skills when confronted with something I am unsure is true or not. This research further solidified my understanding of red flags in pseudoscience and how to critically process phenomena that seem too good to be true. By looking at the flaws and limitations of each source, I am able to find the most accurate result. I will also remember that mediums are often just really great actors that play on emotions and physical cues to make educated guesses. Mediums make for compelling TV, and being able to look past their illusion and recognize their techniques is something I will remember from this research as well.

5. I think that mediums and psychics are the most harmful because they often take advantage of grieving individuals for monetary purposes and fame. While some may think that it is a means to give people hope and comfort, we’ve seen it backfire on more than one occasion, and the consequences are detrimental. When someone experiences a tragedy that has a lot of unanswered questions marring it, many will seek the help of a medium to bring closure to the family and help them find the answers they desperately crave. Most people grieving a loss are extremely vulnerable, and mediums take advantage of their vulnerability. Take for example the Amanda Berry case where her mother died never knowing that her daughter was still alive. Sylvia Browne told Amanda Berry’s mom that her daughter was dead and her mother believed the psychic so strongly that she stopped pursuing her daughter’s case and did not continue searching for her as strongly as she did before. She not only causes her mother immeasurable pain but also halted her mother’s efforts in attempting to find her because her mother believed she had died and passed away before finding out the truth. The least harmful would be ghosts and ghost sightings. Ghosts have been a subject of discussion for many years and many cultures believe in their existence, even though many believe, it is not as harmful as capitalizing on somebody’s grief for money.

6. I would emphasize the importance of the critical thinking process and skepticism. Fact-check your sources, check recourses, and do research before coming to a conclusion. We are often guided by our emotions or we try to explain what is unexplainable, but gathering information to support the claim, evaluating evidence to ensure that the source is credible and the scientific method has been followed, and recognizing assumptions, emotions and biases can help us make informed choices, even for the unexplainable.

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Description:

This image shows a medium performing a cold reading and asking the subject “are you sure that doesn’t mean anything to you?”

Connection:

This image connects with emotional connections, where emotions can make us believe what we want to believe regardless of reasoning and rational thought. The medium doing the cold reading will often ask questions aimed to evoke emotion. The red flag is confirmation bias. The medium will ask questions like “are you sure this doesn’t mean anything to you?” and try to guide answers out of the individuals to get confirming evidence. By asking ambiguous questions, it allows the individual to navigate the conversation without consciously realizing that they are giving the medium the answers. The pseudoscience watchlist is that results can’t be verified, so there is no way to verify the accuracy of the information given by the medium and whether they truly communicate with the dead or make coincidentally close assumptions by using vague questions. Applying the critical thinking process and skepticism is important to evaluate the evidence, recognize emotional biases, and consider alternative explanations as to why the medium is asking questions that seem coincidentally accurate (such as asking if they passed away from cancer or cardiovascular disease which are both common causes of death) A flaw is lack of scientific method of the questions being asked and whether they are accurate because of knowledge or pure luck and generalization. A limitation is the lack of scientific evidence proving that cold readings are accurate.

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Description:

This image depicts Tyler Henry with tarot cards behind him, the galaxy (or universe), some hands and the eye of providence or the “all seeing eye” that many mediums and psychics use as a sign of spiritual illumination and revelation.

Connection:

This image connects with agenticity, where meaning and invisible beings are assigned to agents. The red flag is confirmation bias. You can see tarot cards in the image behind Tyler Henry, and those who partake in tarot readings are usually looking for confirming evidence and ignore evidence that doesn't coincide with their beliefs. The pseudoscience watchlist is appeals to emotion, where vulnerable people speaking to mediums unconsciously influence the medium’s line of questioning by the information they provide them with through body language, and emotion ultimately trumps rational thinking. Applying the critical thinking process and skepticism is important to evaluate the evidence because there is no current evidence that can describe how we generate conscious experience, and thorough research and fact checks enriches our understanding of consciousness and mediums. A flaw is the lack of scientific method, and the questions asked that do not correlate with anything but are asked based on the responses, emotion and body language of the individual. A limitation with mediums is the bias during the cold reading. Mediums will often use body language to find the answers they are looking for and will ask vague and general questions to arrive to those conclusions.

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Description:

This image shows a young girl writing messages from spirits using a planchette, a small board used for automatic writing and used as a form of ouija board in the 19th century.

Connection:

This image connects to unexplained, where scientific answers are hard to explain so we try to explain it ourselves. In the 19th century, the rise of mediums and the belief of spirituality was very prevalent. They did not have the scientific knowledge we have today, and they often misidentified external forces as something other worldly. A red flag is ancient wisdom, as they use the planchette to confirm the idea of spiritualism and ghosts regardless of the fact that many science-forward individuals such as Darwin during that time largely went against the idea of supernatural phenomenon. A pseudoscience watchlist is that results cannot be reproduced of verified, and the operator of the planchette boards can determine what appears on them and there is no way to verify if they purposely wrote that message or if it truly came from the other side.

The critical thinking process is applied, is the planchette is valuable resource to prove that spirits exist? If skeptics use the planchette, would they believe they communicated with the other world and believe messages could be received thorough an object. A limitation is that they did not have the same technology and knowledge we have now and it was easy to assign meaning to things that do not have meaning but just because something is unexplained, it does not mean that it is not explainable. A flaw is that planchette boards could only be controlled by the operator, and mediums would often appeal to emotion and biases to get their audience to believe the unbelievable.

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Description:
This website analyses Tyler Henry, a young medium who rose to fame after releasing his show Hollywood Medium and helping celebrities connect with their loved ones who have passed. The author of this article is a skeptic and does not believe in the legitimacy of Tyler Henry. Throughout this website we can see various techniques that the author identifies that Henry is using to give vague cold-readings and capitalize on grieving people to gain celebrity status and money.

Connection:

This website connects to emotional connections and calls out Tyler Henry for being an “emotional vampire” and using people’s immeasurable grief against them and make them falsely believe that he can communicate with the dead. The red flag is confirmation bias, where Henry will ask a number of vague questions until he gets them right and asks the sitter to “fill in the blanks,” thus allowing the sitter to confirm their own story. The pseudoscience watchlist is that Henry appeals to emotion. He walks vulnerable and grieving people through emotional connections to get them to believe in the legitimacy of mediums. Applying the critical thinking process and skepticism is important to evaluate the evidence, recognize the guiding questions that Henry asks to gather information and recognize emotions and biases that have the potential to impact the result of the reading and legitimize the cold-reading tactics that mediums use. A flaw is that a lot of people will blindly follow mediums because of celebrity status and clout and legitimize their work despite lack of evidence. A limitation is that there is no way to validate the claims made by Tyler Henry about individuals, especially on his TV show that is heavily edited and probably scripted and there is no scientific evidence.

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It was the psychomanteum that broke me. In episode 5 of Netflix's Life After Death with Tyler Henry, the self-professed California medium asks his dad to build him a "psychomanteum." He explains it's a practice that dates back to Ancient Greece. What it ends up being is a room in Henry's house, painted the colour of Doctor Who's TARDIS, with the pencil scribbles he does to meditate hung up in black frames and acting like windows. Inside the dark room, Henry spends an hour looking into a mirror that's angled away from him, trying to get impressions from the afterlife. It's the only time we see Henry's father on the show. I can only imagine the impressions that went through his head when his son explained to him why he needed this room.

Tyler Henry-jolly, clean-cut, seemingly in his early twenties, with strands of blond-highlighted hair he keeps brushing away from his face-came to fame as the star of the television show Hollywood Medium, in which he used his self-professed gift to relay messages to celebrities from their dearly departed. Now, he has been added to the ever-expanding Netflix catalogue of feel-good hooey, which includes Gwyneth Paltrow's goop lab and Zac Efron's travels with his health guru. On Life After Death, Tyler Henry gives readings to the fans on his long waiting list, while a B-plot finds him literally powerless in the face of a family mystery.

As a skeptic, I feel it important to first confront the central claim made by this show: that Tyler Henry can get impressions from the dead. There is no good evidence that the dead talk to us. What can play the role of mediumship, however, are two techniques called cold reading and hot reading, and while the former can appear banal when described, it can be very convincing in the right hands, especially if the "sitter," whom the medium "reads," is vulnerable and misremembers the details of the session.

If I wanted to pretend that I could hear from the dead and didn't have any information about the client sitting in front of me, I would use cold reading techniques. I would state a personality trait and its opposite: "The deceased was quiet and reserved, but when the mood struck, they could be quite the life of the party." I would use flattery: "They were a good person." I would say their death was tied to something in the chest area, a fuzzy fact that can be spun to include heart attack, difficulty breathing, any cancer in the chest, or even simply someone's last breath. I would use the vanishing negative: "She didn't work with children, did she?" Whether the answer is yes or no, it will be remembered as a hit.

These tricks have been described by Ian Rowland in his book The Full Facts Book of Cold Readingand by many others, because they work and continue to fool people. I don't know for a fact that Tyler Henry uses cold reading on the show, but it often looks like he does. The vague impressions he gets have to be clarified by the sitter, prompted by Henry asking, "Can you fill in the blanks?" Only, the blanks aren't rare; they're pretty much the whole text. He often has to ask for the dead person's name, and the vague bits he does volunteer are often confirmed by very visible changes in the sitter's disposition: they look at their friend with awe in their eyes or they start crying. You don't need to be a world-class observer to notice you've hit gold.

Given the unhelpful cues Henry seems to receive from the hereafter, the show can be summed up as a Macaulay Culkin lookalike who clumsily plays a game of Guess Who? with someone's trauma.

While trying to help a private investigator with a cold case, the miraculous information he gets from the dead is that the case was "mishandled." Why else would you contract a private investigator if you did not believe the case had been mismanaged by the police?

The opposite of cold reading is hot reading, and the show tries very hard to convince us that hot reading was not in the cards. Hot reading is cheating: it means to gather information about your client beforehand and to let it trickle out during the reading as if it were whispered to you from the afterlife. With social media, hot-reading someone can be as easy as scrolling through their Facebook posts.

There are instances on Life After Death where I suspect hot reading may have been used, despite the reassurances that Henry has no idea who he's about to read and that neither his assistant nor his mom, who drive him around, know who is waiting for him. A reading he does in episode 9 is peppered with three names that hit their targets. "Is there a Harold?" he asks. That's the name of the deceased grandfather they had been discussing. He then mentions precious stones. "Opals, rubies." Aunt Opal was Grandpa's sister. Later, he asks, "is there a Luke in the family?" That's the nephew. While a medium on television amply benefits from the editing out of misses and the showcasing of hits, this one seems a bit uncanny.

And then there's the apparent hot reading that gets cold real fast. In episode 4, Tyler uses Tarot cards before leaving his hotel room to see what today's reading will be about, and he gets the impression of a mother who passed away. When he's driven to the house and meets with a woman, he asks about an old lady, but it's a miss. Turns out that the woman's young son died drowning in Belize on a school trip and he was wearing a GoPro camera, which means that his death, horrifically, was recorded on video. Henry does not pick up on any of this: he doesn't see "water" and he doesn't talk about a "third eye" watching the events. He asks questions about whether the mom was away from him when he passed and whether anyone else was around him at the time, but he does not have the answers.

It turns out that the woman whose son drowned does not live in this house. And the "mother who passed away," who Henry claims he can see by the shed, is the mother of the homeowner, who is asked to come out of the house and confirm this. She's a fan of Henry's. And there is indeed a photo of the deceased mother by the shed, which the production acquired and shows us.

Did Henry look up the owner of the house he was being driven to? Was he fed information about her from his assistant? I have no way of knowing, but the brilliant thing about mediumship is that anything can be excused. You may think the impressions are about someone in your client's past, but it may turn out to be the ghost of the homeowner's mom or the family of the associate producer overseeing the shoot, a trick that was used on Netflix's The goop lab. And as Henry mentions in episode 5, "Sometimes, people we've never met can come through." That's awfully convenient.

Finding a happy medium

The show works really hard to convince you that Tyler Henry, who has over half a million Facebook followers and a bit more on Instagram, is an aw-shucks "medium next door." His fake smiles and grimaces, like a child's idea of how an adult therapist behaves, are contrasted with his growing fatigue. He is a gifted man on a mission to help people at a great cost to his health. But through the lens of skepticism, the illusion falls apart.

His consultation with the private investigator, who needs help on a missing woman case and on a cold case, is all for naught. He claims the missing woman used a different name but doesn't offer it. Of the cold case, he mentions difficulty breathing, but it turns out it was a hit-and-a-run, and when he meets with the victim's mother, he claims her son "went very fast." The mother feels her son was set up, but Henry does not pick up on this. A title card informs us that the police still do not know if foul play was involved and that the investigation remains open. At least Henry knows not to commit Sylvia Browne's sin. Browne claimed to be a medium, and on a daytime talk show, told the mother of a missing girl that "she's not alive, honey." The girl would be found alive nine years later.

While the show seeks to distinguish itself from Henry's Hollywood Medium by spotlighting "average Joes," many of the participants are either related to celebrities or are known to Henry himself. There's the sound engineer who works at the studio of hip hop duo OutKast. There's the owner and president of the Los Angeles Lakers, Jeanie Buss. There's the woman who worked for actress Bette Davis. In his psychomanteum, Henry saw a woman with a birthmark above her lip. He thinks it's a hit for Davis because in one movie, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, they drew one on her cheek. Henry also gives readings to a former teacher of his who saved him from committing suicide; the director of the place he volunteers at; the owners of the tea room where he began his mediumship career; and his school's librarian. Not exactly strangers. The show also often selects affluent people who live in opulent homes. Those who don't are shuffled off to public locations. On this show, every ghost is blissful and poverty does not exist.

Throughout, Henry is cast as the self-sacrificing hero. His lung collapsed on stage in early 2020 and his boyfriend reminds us, on the eve of Henry's new fifty-city tour, that he "almost died last time." Henry reports a three-hour panic attack in episode 7 because of his visions. In the final moments of the series, he boldly states, "Standing on that stage could be a risk to my life! But I have to do it." The money he makes doing this cannot be ignored. A ticket for his upcoming show in New York City costs anywhere between USD 65.50 and 384.00. His audience does not seem to care that he neither predicted COVID-19 nor his collapsed lung, which put him in the hospital for months at the beginning of the pandemic.

Something else Henry did not predict: Matt Lauer's history of sexual misconduct and the assault allegations that were levelled against him. In 2016, Henry sat with Lauer, then the co-anchor of The Today Show. And even though on his Netflix show Henry says he gets messages from living people as well, none of Lauer's victims seemingly came through. But Lauer's deceased dad came through: he was "immensely proud" of his son, according to Henry.

In fact, the B-plot on the show-of Tyler's mom finding out, through DNA testing, that her mother is not biologically related to her-showcases Henry's kryptonite: when it comes to getting clues from the great beyond to help his family solve their mystery, the ghosts are mute. He claims to be too biased. The family house in New Orleans gives him "no context" for his impressions. In a bit of irony, he has to consult another medium, who apparently proceeds to cold-read him and his mom. Like so many of Henry's own clients, his mom resonates with what the medium tells her and feels a sense of peace.

The medium is the message

In Henry's universe of muffled ghostly connections, spirits don't have much to say. They acknowledge the birth of a child they were not around to meet. They say justice will be served but holding on to guilt is no good. They are proud and at peace. These are messages we can readily glean from Hallmark greeting cards. If Henry really picks up on the garbled transmissions of spirits, what use is this power if all the ghosts have to give us is an A-OK signal? They never reveal the name of their murderer, or where their secret stash of money is, or the winning numbers of next week's lottery. They simply love you and want you to know that everything is good. Love is the Achilles' heel mediums exploit.

So what's the harm if this bit of emotional manipulation serves as an alternative therapy for grieving parties? I reached out to two people who investigate mediums regularly. Michael Marshall, project director for the Good Thinking Society in the United Kingdom, reminded me that not all mediums offer pablum: "At one psychic show I attended, a lady was told that her son's death wasn't suicide; it was murder. From that moment on, rather than bringing her comfort, the psychic set her out to look for evidence of a killer who doesn't exist."

Susan Gerbic, who has written about Tyler Henry for Skeptical Inquirer, told me that "anyone not having a positive experience is not going to make it in the final cut." It is television, after all. Some of the people who get a reading and then start to doubt its authenticity end up getting in touch with Gerbic. "They sense they just got taken for a ride. It's not the money [they spent] so much as the feeling that someone was manipulating you, got into your brain, and rumbled around." These victims let their guard down and found themselves betrayed by their own instinct to trust.

There is a good reason why psychics and mediums are often referred to as "grief vampires." Unwittingly, or perhaps as a wink to the skeptics, Tyler Henry says the following in the closing moments of the show: "There's a lot at stake. [...] People are desperate for any semblance of a connection to their loved one." (Italics mine.) Indeed. People are desperate. They have suffered incalculable grief. One of the sitters on the show lost two young daughters in a catastrophic mudslide. These people are vulnerable. To Out magazine, he once said he wanted to work with parents who lost a child to suicide. It makes my skin crawl.

A lot of money at Netflix is riding on Tyler Henry looking good for the camera. We would do well to remember how Tyler Henry is credited on the Internet Movie Database. Under his name, it simply says, "Actor."
@CrackedScience

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Netflix's Afterlife Show with Medium Tyler Henry Is Dead on Arrival

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It was the psychomanteum that broke me. In episode 5 of Netflix's Life After Death with Tyler Henry, the self-professed California medium asks his dad to build him a "psychomanteum." He explains it's a practice that dates back to Ancient Greece.

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Description:

This article on the website run by Gweneth Paltrow explores the work of mediums and gets their resource from the Windbridge Research Centre, a centre that certifies and studies mediums. This article references doctors such as Julie Beischel who does extensive research on mediums and how mediums are able to connect to the other side to provide us with both information about our late loved ones and comfort.

Connection:

This website connects to agenticity, where scientific answers are hard to understand so people naturally assign meaning to “agents.” In the article, there is mention that science has been gathering evidence for spirits and otherworldly beings for decades, but people refuse to accept it because people fear change and “shaking up the status quo is difficult.” They are assigning meaning to “invisible beings” and using science to back their argument up. A red flag is that they are appealing to authority by using doctors and celebrities to make the subject appear credible. Using Julie Beischel and stating that she has a doctorate degree is associating doctors and science with mediums and pseudoscience, two things that contradict each other. Gweneth Paltrow is also a popular celebrity and her website gathers large audiences, thus her endorsement of this article further acts to legitimize mediums and psychiatry. The pseudoscience watch list is that they are using scientific-sounding language to appear legitimate – this article uses words such as “consciousness,” “energy” and “materialism.” The limitation of this website is that there is no known evidence of the afterlife and the ability to communicate with people who have passed other than through mediums who claim can do it. A flaw is using emotional biases and stating that people refuse to believe in the afterlife and the power of mediums because they are afraid of change, rather than using rationale.

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Hypothesis and Emerging Research

Some early observations support this concept (or parts of the theory), and there is scientific interest in elucidating exactly what's at work.

For those who are deeply curious about the work of mediums, the Windbridge Research Center is an invaluable resource: Not only do they certify and study mediums, but they have published their findings in numerous studies. (Our guide to healers includes several who are certified research mediums through Windbridge.) As their Director of Research, Julie Beischel, Ph.D. (whose doctorate is in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology) explains it, Windbridge's mission is "to ease suffering around dying, death, and what comes next by performing rigorous scientific research" and sharing what they learn widely. We interviewed Beishcel about how she tests Windbridge's Certified Research Mediums, what they do (and don't) know about what happens when mediums connect to the other side, and how this might change the way we think about the survival of consciousness beyond the body-and provide some comfort for our time here, too.

A Q&A with Julie Beischel, Ph.D.

Q

What tests did you structure to vet the mediums who are currently part of your research group?

A

The testing procedure we used to certify the mediums on our team involved eight peer-reviewed steps but the most important one, Step 5, tested if the mediums could report accurate information about specific deceased people under controlled conditions. That ridiculously complex multi-part test was designed with the same two principles we use for all of our research: optimize the research environment and maximize the experimental controls. My favorite analogy for this is: You can't put a seed on a table and then call it a fraud when it doesn't turn into a tree. You have to give the seed what it needs-water, sun, soil-if you want to study how it grows. Similarly, if you want to study how the seed grows naturally, you can't supplement the soil or use an UV lamp. The sports analogy that also works is: You can't study football on a baseball field using hockey equipment and the rules for soccer and then claim you've disproven the existence of football.

We test things in situations that are similar to how they exist in the real world: The mediums performed the test readings on the phone for regular people wanting to hear from their deceased loved ones. But then we also control for all the normal explanations for the source of a medium's information: An experimenter (me) serves as a proxy on the phone in place of the actual sitter who does not hear the reading as it takes place and who later scores a decoy transcript along with their own transcript without knowing which is which. We also ask the medium specific questions about the deceased person's personality, appearance, hobbies, and cause of death. Different experimenters perform different tasks during the different phases of the experiment.

"You can't study football on a baseball field using hockey equipment and the rules for soccer and then claim you've disproven the existence of football."

This scenario controls for cold reading, cueing, rater bias, and fraud. Cold reading is a method where fraudulent mediums use cues from the sitter to create what seems like an accurate reading. Cold reading can also include the reporting of information so general it could apply to almost anyone. Cold reading is eliminated as an explanation in our testing because the medium receives no information prior to the reading, no feedback during (or after) the reading, and is asked specific questions about the deceased. The testing also controls for cueing (intentional or not) by the person who is on the phone with the medium (me, the experimenter), because I don't know who the sitter or the deceased is or the answers to the questions. It also controls for rater bias because the raters receive more than one reading to score without knowing which is theirs. Fraud or any unintentional sensory leakage are also eliminated as plausible explanations because the five participants in the experiment/test (medium, sitter, and three experimenters) are all blinded to different pieces of information.

This is obviously a time and resource-intensive procedure. We were able to build our team of Windbridge Certified Research Mediums through support from a grant and at the end of that grant we stopped certifying any new mediums. However, we have started collecting data from mediums all over the US about their experiences, practices, and histories using online surveys.

Q

What exactly are you studying and/or looking for?

A

At the Windbridge Research Center, we are asking three questions about mediums: Can they do what they claim to be doing? If so, what is unique about the people who can do it? How can it help society? Our three mediumship research programs, named Information, Operation, and Application, respectively, investigate: the accuracy and specificity of the information mediums report under controlled laboratory conditions; the experiences, psychology, and physiology (body and brain) of mediums; and the use of mediumship readings as a treatment for grief.

Q

What have you observed in terms of where in the brain they receive and process psi information? Is there a difference between psychic and medium information?

A

The rule of thumb is that all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums. While anyone can potentially have mediumistic or psychic experiences, mediums experience regular communication from the deceased and psychics regularly experience information about, or from, living people, distant locations or events, and/or times in the future or in the past (that they did not originally experience).

We did one EEG study and concluded that mediums' experiences of communication with the deceased is a mental state different than fabricating information or recalling facts previously obtained. However, because mediumship involves the mediums talking, which uses facial muscles, EEG, which is susceptible to muscle movement artifacts, is really not the best method for studying mediums' brain activity. We have designed a study using alternative brain imaging techniques to look at mediums' brain activity during communication with the deceased, as well as several other conditions, including obtaining psychic information about the living, for comparison. The use of imaging technologies is expensive so we will need to acquire funding in order to perform the study.

We are also studying the mediums' actual experiences during mediumistic and psychic tasks. As would be expected, the two types of psi experiences have similarities. For example, they both seem to involve multiple "senses" (seeing in the mind's eye, mentally hearing, feeling in the body). There are also differences: psychic readings for living clients don't seem to include taste as one of the senses experienced, whereas during mediumship readings, mediums may taste the deceased's favorite foods and share that information with the sitter to help identify the deceased. We just finished a study in which we analyzed descriptions of the two kinds of experiences from more than 120 self-identified mediums in the US. The results from that study will be available on our website once they are published.

Q

How involved is the frontal lobe?

A

That's a good question and no one knows the answer. Very little research of any kind has been done with modern-day mediums and even less has been done studying their brains.

Q

What are you ultimately trying to determine?

A

At the Windbridge Research Center we are ultimately interested in helping people alleviate suffering using research and education. Specifically, we hope to normalize phenomena like mediumship and spontaneous after-death communication experiences in regular people (for example, sensing the presence of the deceased, dreams about them, smells, or music) so people who have those experiences-which are very common-can stop feeling like they are crazy or delusional. The body of research on spontaneous experiences of a deceased loved one has found that they occur in roughly 30 percent of people at some point in their lives and that about 80 percent of people will have at least one experience in the first year following the death of someone close to them. Those are numbers people should have.

"No 'body' is getting out of here alive. But it's only the body-not the whole self-that will die. And really knowing that can make any life at least a little easier."

We are also very interested in treatments for grief. The healthcare community has very little to offer the grieving but experiences like mediumship readings in which the bereaved experience their continuing bonds with the deceased seem to have substantial positive effects. However, further research is needed before we can say for sure.

We are also interested in providing evidence-based materials demonstrating that consciousness survives after the physical death of the body as a way to alleviate the fear people experience contemplating their own deaths. This is relevant for people currently dying and their loved ones as well as for the rest of us. No "body" is getting out of here alive. But it's only the body-not the whole self-that will die. And really knowing that can make any life at least a little easier.

Q

Based on your research, do you have any theories about the relationship between consciousness and the brain? Can you imagine how science might eventually be able to determine what's going on there?

A

The theory that the brain creates consciousness is called "materialism" and it's just a theory that somehow got stuck in textbooks, classrooms, and movies. Materialism is equivalent to thinking that a radio creates the sounds that come out of it.

The alternative theory views consciousness as "non-local," a term coined by physician Larry Dossey. In the non-locality explanation, consciousness is not localized to the brain, not bound by space or time, it is infinite, and it is merely funneled or translated by the brain. This theory accounts for phenomena like mediums communicating with people after their deaths, children who remember past lives, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, the Army's Stargate remote viewing program, knowing who's on the phone before it rings, dreaming about tomorrow's events, and on and on.

"Consciousness-the signal-exists separate from the brain which is just the antenna."

An example people may be familiar with is a mother who knows her child just got in a car accident all the way across the country. How could her brain know that if it is here and her child is there? With non-locality there is no here or there, no now or then; consciousness can be any place and any time. We don't experience it like that day-to-day because our brain is busy remembering to eat and breathe and not step out in front of that bus.

Consciousness-the signal-exists separate from the brain, which is just the antenna. Yes, if the antenna is damaged, the signal comes out wonky or if it breaks entirely, the signal doesn't come through at all, but the signal still exists. Science has already been gathering laboratory evidence for non-locality for decades but people fear change and shaking up the status quo is difficult. Ideas that are different-even evidence-based, empirically-tested, peer-reviewed ones-often struggle for attention, acceptance, and funding, but that's where we are right now.

Q

What are your theories about what happens to the soul after death?

A

Soul isn't a word most scientists are comfortable with but it's a concept similar to the self, the mind, or consciousness. The different areas of research that support the idea that consciousness survives after the physical death of the body-the big three are mediumship, near-death experiences, and children who remember past lives-demonstrate that consciousness is non-local and will continue to exist after the body dies. It also seems that in this disembodied state, the consciousness continues to learn, and heal, and grow.

MORE ON CONSCIOUSNESS >>

Julie Beischel, Ph.D., is co-founder and Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to performing rigorous scientific research and creating educational materials focused on dying, death, and what comes next. (See their Facebook page here.) Beischel received her doctorate in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona in 2003. Her current research interests include examinations of the accuracy and specificity of the information mediums report as well as their experiences, psychology, and physiology; and the potential social applications of mediumship readings. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed research articles, as well as the books Among Mediums: A Scientist's Quest for Answers; Meaningful Messages: Making the Most of Your Mediumship Reading; From the Mouths of Mediums; and Investigating Mediums.

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Are Mediums Real? How Do Mediums Work? | Goop

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Hypothesis and Emerging Research Some early observations support this concept (or parts of the theory), and there is scientific interest in elucidating exactly what's at work. For those who are deeply curious about the work of mediums, the Windbridge Research Center is an invaluable resource: Not only do they certify and study mediums, but they have published their findings in numerous studies.

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This website looks into celebrity mediums and follow the actions of online vigilantes who have the mission to debunk mediums by going to their shows and wreaking havoc by giving fake information about dead relatives then publicly saying that they were lying in order to delegitimize them. Many of these “vigilantes” made fake facebook accounts to communicate false information with the mediums to see whether the mediums would capitalize on those private conversations and family details at their shows.

Connection:

This website connects to emotional connections because in the article the author refers to mediums as “grief vampires” because they use emotions and grief to profit through the illusion of summoning the dead and connecting with the afterlife. The red herring mentioned in this is confirmation bias, where the medium will use body language, physical clues and emotions to make vague guesses about the individual’s life and family. While some of the probing guesses may be inaccurate and only few are correct, the individual will still remember the questions that coincide with their beliefs. The pseudoscience watchlist is convinces by faith and belief in spite of evidence. The article found that many are convinced in their belief of mediums and the existence of spiritual beings despite of mounting evidence that debunks their existence. The critical thinking process and skepticism is important to recognize that many profit on people’s belief of spiritualism and addressing emotional biases and evaluating evidence is important to determine whether the source is credible. The flaw is that many celebrity mediums such as Theresa Caputo and Tyler Henry profit off vulnerable people experiencing grief. A limitation within the website is that it is exposing mediums to have profited billions of dollars off cold and hot readings yet many remain unsuspecting and continue to put their money and belief into them.

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Inside the Secret Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics (Published 2019)

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Are some celebrity mediums fooling their audience members by reading social media pages in advance? A group of online vigilantes is out to prove it.

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On the Drew Barrymore Show, medium Anna Raimondi communicates with Barrymore’s ex-husband's grandmother who was special to her. Barrymore is a self-proclaimed skeptic but is quickly brought to tears when Raimondi communicates with her ex-husband’s grandmother who claims to love Barrymore regardless of whether her and her grandson are together.

Connection:

This video connects to emotional connections, where Barrymore (a skeptic) is quick to believe the medium because her words resonate with her. The emotions she feels makes her want to believe that someone who she was close to is communicating with her and it blurs rationality. The red flag is confirmation bias, because the medium asks dozens of questions and, although some were not relevant, Barrymore is overcome with emotions and only remembers the correct questions. Appeal to authority is another red flag because Barrymore, a celebrity, is endorsing mediums and having one on her show where she is brought to emotion lends the appearance of credibility of psychic mediums. The pseudoscience watch list is that results cannot be verified. There is no saying whether the medium could actually communicate with the afterlife, and it is very possible that the medium searched up aspects of Drew Barrymore’s life to ask probing questions that seemed accurate to her. The medium also appeals to emotion and uses Barrymore’s emotional cues to guide her line of questioning and probing. The critical thinking process and skepticism is important to recognize when guiding questions are being asked and how the reactions and emotions can be used by mediums to make assumptions about someone’s life. A limitation is that there is no way to verify whether the medium looked up Barrymore’s past on the internet and a flaw is that there is that the emotions can impact a skeptic’s assumption about mediums and believe things that can be untrue.

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Watch Medium Bring Drew to Tears After She Communicates with Late Loved Ones

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This is a video clip from the Dr. Oz Show where Dr. Oz, a TV reality show doctor, sharing stories from viewers and audience members who claim they have gotten messages from their late loved ones. One of the audience members lost her son and claims her and her husband, a skeptic, received a flower made of shells right before their wedding as a sign from him. Dr. Oz then brings in a medium to explain how messages from the dead work, who mentions light and energy when describing how messages are sent from the afterlife.

Connection:

This video connects to emotional connections and simplicity. Through emotional connections we see that people will believe that the signs they receive are genuine. The husband in the video who received the flower claimed to have been a skeptic but said the flower as a sign from his late son allowed him to believe in mediums and messages from the afterlife. Emotions can blur reason and the grief from losing your child can make you want to believe in things such as communicating with the dead. Simplicity also takes part because scientific answers can sometimes be hard to understand, and people choose to believe things without taking into account coincidences and the law of large numbers. A flower made out of shells right before their wedding day is likely a coincidence, but in an emotional state of grief it is easy to mistake coincidence for reality. The pseudoscience red flag is appeal to authority. Dr. Oz is an influential doctor with a large following, but he is turning away from science and legitimizing the practice of mediums on national television. He is using his authoritative imagery as a credible doctor and legitimizing psychic mediums. The pseudoscience watchlist is the use of scientific-sounding language that is meaningless. The medium in this clip uses words such as “light” and “energy” to describe how mediums gain intel from the afterlife. Applying the critical thinking process and skepticism is important to evaluate the validity of the sources on Dr. Oz and to recognize emotional bias that leads skeptics to believe in unexplainable things such as connecting to the afterlife. A flaw is that Dr. Oz is a doctor and yet he is indulging in phenomenon that go against science and medicine. A limitation is that there is no way to validate his claims or the claims of those who say they have gotten signs.

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Outrageous Signs My Loved One Was Sending From Heaven

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This is a video of medium John Edward doing a reading on audience members. He is asking a lot of vague, open-ended questions and getting a lot of answers wrong. Edwards relies on the audience members to fill in the blanks and guide the story.

Connection:

This video connects to emotional connections and shows that Edwards is able to capitalize on emotion in order to make audience members believe by blurring rational thought and overlooking the fact that his guesses are often incorrect. The pseudoscience red flags are red herring and confirmation bias. Edwards uses red herring by asking a ton of questions and using the information to distract from his wrong guesses. He also uses confirmation bias because he asks a lot of probing questions and by playing on the target’s emotion and grief, even if only a few of his questions are correct that individual will only remember the correct guesses and legitimize him as a medium. The pseudoscience watchlist is that results cannot be reproduced or verified. When he chooses to speak to people that have passed, there is no evidence that this phenomenon is possible and there is no way to verify the accuracy of the info he asks his audience members. Applying the critical thinking process and skepticism to his readings would be useful in evaluating his readings and recognizing emotional biases where people tend to believe his readings because they are overcome with emotion and grief. A limitation of this video is that it only shows a small portion and does not give us the entirety of his readings – it only shows his mishaps and incorrect guesses. A flaw is that there is no scientific method to his questions.

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Made by Rhys Thompson, working individually.