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Made by Eric Grosse, Efe Cinar, Nikkos Anagnostopoulos, and Daniel Pozzo di Borgo

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Description:

This website talks about how there more to mediums than most people think. It describes that mediums are able to communicate with souls on the other side. It expands on mediums by talking about how they talk to other worldly spirits, the difference between mediums and psychic, and what to expect if you’re meeting a medium.

Connection:
This website connects to Unexplained, as well as Ancient Wisdom. It’s unexplained how the exact process of mediums communicating with the other side is done, if it’s even real. It is something that supposedly happens in a person’s mind, And there’s no real way to record what’s really going on other than brain activity. The site connects to ancient wisdom, As mediums and communicating with the dead it’s some thing that goes back hundreds and thousands of years.

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Description: This video talks about a Psychic Medium explaining and in his words "proving" that he can see dead people let alone talking to them.

Connection: I feel like this connects with our project because they are using patternicity. Because they are using very little information they have and do their best to make it seem like it connects to a much bigger issue/problem.

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Psychic Medium Matt Fraser Proves He Can See Dead People | Sneak Peek

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Description:
This website talks about how most modern "mediums" and "psychics" are now calling themselves "intuitive healers" and are focusing on helping people discover what they want out of life using their "energy."

Connection:
This website connects to Mystical Energy by explaining how clients need to tap into their inner energy and use it to discover what they really need out of life to become truly happy and successful.

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Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; Pamela Colman Smith

A woo-woo profession is getting a boost from the wellness industrial complex. Seems ... intuitive.

Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; Pamela Colman Smith

"Intuition is magical, but it's not reserved for a couple of people," said Laura Lynne Jackson, 46.

She's from Commack, N.Y., and makes her living as a psychic medium, and she was talking to hundreds who attended this year's In Goop Health Summit in New York City (tickets start at $1,000) who were there to learn how to tap into their inner intuition. "It's for all of you," she said.

Ms. Jackson, who was joined by four other professional "intuitives" at the event (which also featured speakers like medical doctors, nutritionists and C.E.O.s), is one of several new mediums entering the growing industry of self-care.

While psychics have traditionally profited from claiming to predict the future or communicating with deceased relatives, many are now working in the general field of wellness, calling themselves "intuitives" or "intuitive healers," who channel "energy" that helps people discover what they want out of life.

"A majority of the mediums that we work with are less interested in the party trick of showing off their psychic abilities and more focused on teaching people, women in particular, how to trust their guts and lean into their intuition," Noora Raj Brown, the senior vice president of communications at Goop, wrote in an email.

In a so-called Spirit Studio, Joe Perreta, 29, and Kim Russo, 54, both psychic mediums, hosted group readings where believers seemed to significantly outnumber skeptics, with teary attendees reaching for tissue boxes placed around the room.

During one session, Ms. Russo approached Lauren Lamb, 38, and said her mother, who had died, wanted to pass on advice related to redecorating a room. Ms. Lamb said she was redoing her house, and some of the details Ms. Russo provided felt inexplicably specific to her.

"How would she possibly know that? I'm a believer now," Ms. Lamb said. "I also think she was saying some stuff where she wasn't just channeling people, she was like, 'Here's my advice, and I was like, 'That's useful advice for people.'"

This exchange is a gift to critics looking for examples of how Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness media empire peddles expensive quackery in the name of self-care. But, spirit visitations aside, Ms. Lamb is far from alone. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Americans believe in at least one of four spiritual concepts identified as "New Age" (like reincarnation and astrology) and 41 percent believe in psychics.

One market analysis found that the "psychic services" industry grew steadily over the past five years, reaching over $2 billion in revenue in 2018 from activities like readings and public talks.

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Laura Lynne Jackson, in her office. Credit... Molly Matalon for The New York Times

Celebrities, many of whom - like Ms. Paltrow - have extended their brands to content (if only on their personal social-media accounts), increasingly include mediums in their self-care entourage. Rosanna Arquette and Kathy Hilton (mother of Paris and Nicky) plugged Ms. Jackson. Erika Gabriel, another medium, boasts that her clients include Minka Kelly and Tory Burch.

Lifetime promotes its show "Seatbelt Psychic" by declaring that the star, the medium Thomas John, is "a trusted adviser to influencers and celebrities" including Courteney Cox and Goldie Hawn.

Handily, dead celebrities can also be invoked: At In Goop Health, Deganit Nuur, a "clairvoyant intuitive," said John Lennon was "totally" one of her spirit guides. "I call him in all the time, and he's always like, 'Do this, do that,' and I'm like, 'Thanks, John!'" (Supposedly clairvoyant healing sessions with Ms. Nuur are available at the Four Seasons hotel's spas in New York City and Los Angeles.)

This is, of course, one of the planet's oldest professions.

In various ancient cultures, shamans were considered a link to the spirit world. Haitian Voodoo, Puerto Rican Brujeria, and Wiccan traditions all focus heavily on communing with spirits. In the United States in the late 1800s, Spiritualism, a religious movement in which séances to communicate with the dead were a central practice, was incredibly popular.

While the language is different, communicating with spirits on the so-called other side is also an accepted practice in Christianity. Angels are central characters in biblical stories, and when human beings die, telling believers that loved ones will "always be with them" as spiritual guides is common practice.

Media-savvy mediums are nothing new, either. In the 1990s Miss Cleo advertised her pay-by-the-minute services on late-night infomercials with the catchphrase "You have questions, I have the answers."

Today, in New York, turban-clad psychics, many with crystal balls and tarot cards, regularly lure Times Square tourists for $10 readings, and sandwich-board signs advertising psychic readings dot sidewalks all over the city. It is a self-regulated industry, with professional associations like the Windbridge Research Center in Tucson and the Forever Family Foundation in Oceanside, N.Y., offering certification, based on their own protocols, like psychological tests.

Sometimes duped-feeling clients call foul: in May 2015, a psychic named Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, 26, was charged with grand larceny after Niall Rice, a 33-year-old British consultant, accused her of taking thousands of his dollars. Ms. Delmaro was charged and spent eight months in jail.

A reading can be harmless fun, like reading horoscopes, but the incursion of psychics into health care might raise eyebrows. Anthony William, the self-proclaimed "medical medium," a.k.a., @medicalmedium, whose website includes praise from Pharrell Williams, Miranda Kerr and Robert De Niro, is behind a recent Instagram-fueled celery juice craze.

Mr. William advocates drinking a strict regimen of 16 ounces of celery juice every morning on an empty stomach. There is no science to substantiate his claim that this will solve all sorts of issues, only his citation of messages from "Spirit of Compassion."

Ms. Brown, of Goop, said content from mediums on the site is minimal albeit popular and is labeled "fascinating but inexplicable," as opposed to "supported by science." Mediums are screened by a phone call, sometimes by a Goop staff member, sometimes by a "trusted friend of Goop." According to Ms. Brown, the mediums do not know who they are speaking with.

The internet, with its troves of personal data, can be a boon to people claiming they are psychics - or a trap. A New York Times Magazine story published last month followed a sting operation in which a group created fake Facebook profiles and then attended an event with Thomas John, where he quoted details from the made-up lives they had created.

At the end of February, John Oliver ran a scathing segment on psychics, which focused on mediums, many of whom were caught making predictions that were wrong.

In the segment, Mr. Oliver explained the two ways mediums defraud people into believing they communicate with lost loved ones: cold reading and hot reading. Cold reading is a technique in which mediums ask a serious of general questions and then rely on verbal and physical cues to glean increasingly personal information from an individual. Hot reading involves researching the people who are going to be in the room beforehand and using details from their online lives to fabricate readings.

MaryAnn DiMarco, in her office. Credit... Molly Matalon for The New York Times

"If we look at the big question that mediumship is fundamentally exploring, it's really: Is there life after death? And why are we here? Is there a connection between us? What is the meaning of all this?" said Ms. Jackson, whose first book, "The Light Between Us," appeared briefly on the New York Times best-seller lists. (She will publish a second in June.)

A weekend retreat she is conducting at the Omega in June costs $355. She would not disclose how much she charges for individual sessions, adding that she is booked for a decade.

MaryAnn DiMarco, 48, a mediumand the author of "Believe, Ask, Act," said that her clients are increasingly not looking for predictions. "They're coming to me and saying, 'I have so much going on in my life. Can you teach me how to make connection so that I can make transformation happen in my life for the better?'" she said.

Joshua Agan, 33, turned to Ms. DiMarco after contemplating suicide; he had weighed 400 pounds, altered his diet and started going to the gym, but wanted more changes. "Once my body was taken care of, then it kind of naturally went into me kind of chasing the spiritual component," he said.

Mr. Agan, who owns a salon in Carmel, Ind., discovered Ms. DiMarco while attending a 2017 event hosted by Gabrielle Bernstein, a popular motivational speaker. He later flew to New York City with friends to attend a group reading and then, after Ms. DiMarco reached out to him personally with a message she said she felt she had to deliver to him, went back again for a one-on-one session, which she offered to him free of charge.

Ms. DiMarco, he said, allowed him to "step into my power and calmly let go of my existing experience," he said. "And trust my spiritual side to lead me in the right direction. It doesn't come with total assurance, right?"

Lisa Levine, 42, is the founder of Maha Rose, a wellness center in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn that also operates a retreat center near the Catskill Mountains. She regularly hosts workshops with Ms. Nuur, the "clairvoyant intuitive" at In Goop Health, and said she believes there are people who can connect with the "other side" and bring back valuable information, but that the medium's intention is crucial.

"Is their intention to be a conduit for the spirits and to be of service to their clients, or is their intention to make a lot of money?" Ms. Levine said. "Telling somebody something that you think they want to hear, although not necessarily damaging, is maybe just like putting a Band-Aid on something. And maybe that is all the person wants, a Band-Aid, or some type of 'it's O.K., your deceased mother forgives you or your passed father does love you.'"

"Our desire to believe will take a message a long way," she said.
Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting.

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Psychic Mediums Are the New Wellness Coaches (Published 2019)

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A woo-woo profession is getting a boost from the wellness industrial complex. Seems ... intuitive. Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; Pamela Colman Smith "Intuition is magical, but it's not reserved for a couple of people," said Laura Lynne Jackson, 46.

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Description: This is an image of a séance conducted by John Beattie in Bristol, England in 1872 that tells us about a séance, which is an attempt to communicate with spirits.

Connection: This connects to our topic because, even in these images they use white colored ghost like blurs on the screen to make it look like a ghost or a soul that they are conversing with which tells us more about patternicity in this case and a little bit of unexplained because we can't really tell anything from a singular image that we are seeing.

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Description: This Website talks about how Windbridge Research Centre study mediums and their opinion on them.

Connection: In the Website we can see that they are posting and showing us a lot of questions that Windbridge Research Centre tried to answer about Psychic Mediums and how real it is. They are giving a lot of different examples and talking about the sports analogy that goes by "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." I think this is connected to our topic because with their answers on the website i see a lot of skepticism were they are trying to play it in a way that shows nobody can prove that they are not doing what they claim to be doing.

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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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Description:
While comedic, this video bluntly explains how some mediums and psychics have earned their reputation by being scams. Adam talks about 19th psychics, and how they ripped off grieving people.

Connection:
The video shows how people played unsuspecting people, by preying on their emotions, connecting it to emotional connection. Proof by Verbosity is connected as well, as along with emotional connections. They would ask lots of questions, and fake ghost interactions to gain belief and money.

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The only thing mediums are in touch with are the cognitive blind spots of their victims. Adam Ruins Everything - Adam Conover, CollegeHumor's resident know-it-all and major bummer, takes on society's biggest misconceptions. Watch an all-new @Adam Ruins Everything on truTV every Tuesday 10/9C!

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Description:
This photo is described as ectoplasm forming on the face of medium Mary Marshall, during a seance at T.G. Hamilton's home.

Connection:
This picture connects to unexplained, because there is very clearly and unexplained aura/messed in the photo emitting from her face. It also connects to mystical energy because, as previously explained, it looks possibly like a mystical aura.

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Description:
Filmmaker Conor Reilly interviews self-proclaimed medium Mary McCarthy. Although Conor is a skeptic, he attempts to delve into the world of psychics and mediums to try and get a better understanding of why people see them.

Connection:
This video connects to Emotional Connection and Unexplained. The video mentions how people want to understand what comes after life more by seeking help from someone who "has connections to the afterlife." It also mentions that people seek help from psychics to reconnect with loved ones who have passed.

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Delving Into The World Of Psychic Mediums | Who Believes In Psychics?

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1) I learned that there are actually a lot of people that believe in Medium Psychics and that they have a lot of supporters that supports their method to sometimes help themselves when they want to talk or interact with their loved ones that has passed away.

2) I do have recently lost loved ones that I do really miss. It makes me consider whether or not mediumship and the afterlife is real.

3) I really enjoyed doing research on psychics. I've always wondered why people would believe a blatant lie, but now I understand the cunning trick that they use to lure people, for example, focusing on heavy emotional connection through ones loved one who had recently died.

4) I feel like I will definitely remember how this was connected to our project and which Pseudoscience techniques were involved. Also I will remember that a lot of Mediums are mostly using people that are in a bad place in their life because they recently lost a loved one and they try to pull them in to their trap by using their emotions.

5) I think emotional connections is one of the most harmful because humans are at their weakest when they’re the most emotional. I personally think patternicity is the weakest because it’s just seeing patterns in every day things. Depending on someone else, and their trauma, it could be a lot more harmful.

6) I think I would pass on my knowledge of pseudoscience red flags and how they are incorporated in scams like mediums and psychics, to prevent anyone from getting tricked into it.

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Description:
This is a vintage photo of Ectoplasm Conjuring. Around the mouth, nose and hair is supposedly ectoplasm from a séance that had recently taken place.

Connection:
This photo fooled many into thinking this woman had a special connection to the beyond, and once spirits were contacted, she'd excrete ectoplasm. This connects to the unexplained by keeping people in wonder as she fell into a trance and awoke with strange matter from the other side spewing out of her.