I see a boat, you see a sandwich
I wondered as soon as I read or heard (I forget which) that the coma guy was communicating by typing with the help of his caregiver. Uh oh, I thought. No he isn’t. If he’s doing it with someone else’s ‘help,’ then he’s not doing it. This has been tested. It’s the clever Hans effect. The ‘helper’ or ‘facilitator’ does the typing.
James Randi had the same thought, and he saw some video which further gave the game away. He finds it all very irritating.
From the Frontline documentary:
NARRATOR: The facilitator and autistic individual sat side by side, with a screen dividing their visual field. Sometimes they were shown the same picture, sometimes different ones. They tested 12 clients facilitating with 9 staff members, many who were trained in Syracuse. They ran dozens of trials. The results were shocking.
Not one correct answer. Not one. It was Clever Hans.
What’s worse, I’ve already seen some goofball right wingers comparing this to the Terry Schiavo episode and yammering about government death panels and the evils of “socialized medicine”. These facilitated communication frauds are fueling the paranoid anti-healthcare circus.
I have a bottle of an Homeopathic ‘remedy’ that types:
“Alternative Medicine is complete Bollocks”
(It is also sensitive to when I can see the keyboard, so it has spooky extra powers of vision, too)
I looked over the whole transcript and what I came away with was the similarity to prayer. The element of hope and wishing/wanting it to be so is present in such a desperate sense. The big difference being that with F/C you can’t claim that god always hears your prayers and sometimes the answer is just “no.” You can actually test to see consistently that the whole thing only works when the facilitator has access to the same info as the subject and never when she/he doesn’t. That’s really the startling bit. When Randi tests dowsers and mind-readers, they fail because their guesses are only right as much as guesses by non-dowsers/mind-readers would be, i.e. they do sometimes get something right, just not enough to be evidence they have any special way of doing so. The facilitators had a 100% fail rate, which is pretty spectacular evidence that nothing claimed for F/C even comes close to being true.
“The element of hope and wishing/wanting it to be so is present in such a desperate sense.”
Yes. I remember watching that program when it was new, and being just staggered by that guy at Syracuse – an academic! – who simply refused to believe what the double-blind test showed. The way he explained it away…’Oh they were nervous.’ Please.
I notice that a lot of certainty is being expressed (or was, in the Frontline report) that all the controlling done by the facilitators was unconscious on their part. Trying in detail to imagine how that could be the case when things are coming through on a letter-by-letter basis, rather than an idea or a sentence being transmitted, is something I’m finding very difficult. Can they really guide fingers to the right keys without having a smidgen of a conscious idea of what comes next and without the message being cluttered with lots of garbage letters and typos? I don’t know how many ouija board operators genuinely believe they’re merely channeling something coming from a spirit, but surely nobody (even a believer in the possibility it could be real) would even suggest that there aren’t many brazenly and knowingly faking it. Or is the implication that the F/Cers with the autists produced so much sexual abuse material because it was reflective of problems the facilitators themselves had?
Is there any word that any kind of simple test in the current case might be tried to settle the question? It would be dead easy to do, but there may be too much at stake for those whose permission might be required. What would Houben’s facilitated reply be if he himself were asked?
Randi has been attacked for judging the whole thing on the basis of a video report, in which, of course, things have been edited and may have seemed different to someone present during filming. But the reason people like Randi are saying this needs to be looked at properly is because the video that has captivated and convinced so many people does make it seem as if it’s a case of faked F/C. That people are gullible is hardly news, nor is the media’s slavery to whatever might sell as news. Nonetheless, fake or not, this story is an enormous black mark against the media for uncritically disseminating so widely as true something which looks so fake even on the surface.
Yes – check out the post by Steven Novella that I linked in News – well here it is. He emailed Laureys and got a not very satisfactory response. It would be quite easy to do a test (just send the ‘facilitator’ away then show Houben some things then see if he can say what they were) but no one much wants to do one. (Novella doesn’t blame Laureys – he’s apparently stuck with a situation not of his making).
Yes – the media should have known. Sigh.
Thanks. I think I began my last comment before you posted those last two items. Well, the right people are asking the right questions and getting very unsatisfactory answers. If there’s no fakery, proving it would be easy, so the question not only remains, but looms still larger in light of the response.