Psychic for a Day: How I Learned Tarot Cards, Palm Reading, Astrology, and Mediumship in 24 Hours
This is a great article for overbelievers in any of the following. The "Bill" referred to is Bill Nye, The Science Guy. With one day of preparation this person convinced five people he read them correctly. How can people who are skeptical about mainstream psychology and medicine not be skeptical about these things as well? Or at least treat them as the self-introspection tool they might be?
Psychic for a Day: How I Learned Tarot Cards, Palm Reading, Astrology, and Mediumship in 24 Hours: Bill and I thought it would be a good test of the effectiveness of the technique and the receptivity of people to it to see how well I could do it armed with just a little knowledge. Although the day of the taping was set weeks in advance, I did absolutely nothing to prepare until the day before. This made me especially nervous because psychic readings are a form of acting, and good acting takes talent and practice. And I made matters even harder on myself by convincing Bill and the producers that if we were going to do this we should use a number of different psychic modalities, including Tarot cards, palm reading, astrology, and psychic mediumship, under the theory that these are all "props" used to stage a psychodrama called cold reading...
I am not a psychic and do not believe that ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or any of the other forms of psi power have any basis whatsoever in fact. There is not a shred of evidence that any of this is real, and the fact that I could do it reasonably well with only one day of preparation shows just how vulnerable people are to these very effective nostrums. I can only imagine what I could do with more experience. Give me six hours a day of practice for a couple of months and I have no doubt that I could easily host a successful syndicated television series and increase by orders of magnitude my current bank balance. There -- if not for the grace of evolved moral sentiments and guilt-laden scruples -- go I. I cannot do this for one simple reason -- it is wrong. I have lost both of my parents -- my father suddenly of a heart attack in 1986, my mother slowly from brain cancer in 2000 -- and I cannot imagine anything more insulting to the dead, and more insidious to the living, than constructing a fantasy that they are hovering nearby in the psychic aether, awaiting some self-proclaimed psychic conduit to reveal to me breathtaking insights about scars on my knees, broken appliances, and unfulfilled desires. This is worse than wrong. It is wanton depravity.
Psychic for a Day: How I Learned Tarot Cards, Palm Reading, Astrology, and Mediumship in 24 Hours: Bill and I thought it would be a good test of the effectiveness of the technique and the receptivity of people to it to see how well I could do it armed with just a little knowledge. Although the day of the taping was set weeks in advance, I did absolutely nothing to prepare until the day before. This made me especially nervous because psychic readings are a form of acting, and good acting takes talent and practice. And I made matters even harder on myself by convincing Bill and the producers that if we were going to do this we should use a number of different psychic modalities, including Tarot cards, palm reading, astrology, and psychic mediumship, under the theory that these are all "props" used to stage a psychodrama called cold reading...
I am not a psychic and do not believe that ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or any of the other forms of psi power have any basis whatsoever in fact. There is not a shred of evidence that any of this is real, and the fact that I could do it reasonably well with only one day of preparation shows just how vulnerable people are to these very effective nostrums. I can only imagine what I could do with more experience. Give me six hours a day of practice for a couple of months and I have no doubt that I could easily host a successful syndicated television series and increase by orders of magnitude my current bank balance. There -- if not for the grace of evolved moral sentiments and guilt-laden scruples -- go I. I cannot do this for one simple reason -- it is wrong. I have lost both of my parents -- my father suddenly of a heart attack in 1986, my mother slowly from brain cancer in 2000 -- and I cannot imagine anything more insulting to the dead, and more insidious to the living, than constructing a fantasy that they are hovering nearby in the psychic aether, awaiting some self-proclaimed psychic conduit to reveal to me breathtaking insights about scars on my knees, broken appliances, and unfulfilled desires. This is worse than wrong. It is wanton depravity.
posted by Solomon | 10:00 AM
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