So here’s a profile I’ve been waiting for — of Daryl Bem, the Cornell psychologist who published an article, in 2010, purporting to demonstrate the validity of some forms of psychic foresight.
It turns out that Bem was a mentalist in high school, fully aware that his craft relied on making the audience think that his deductions about them, “based on tangible clues,” were the result of magic. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and then Cornell, he used to perform a version of the act on the last day of the course:
To read more, click here.“It was a pure swindle,” Bem says … At the end of the show, he always revealed the truth. The experiment had nothing to do with ESP; the point was to demonstrate that the students shouldn’t always trust their intuition.
One day a University of Pittsburgh researcher who was studying psi—an umbrella term for telepathy, precognition, and other seemingly paranormal phenomena—came to see Bem perform. Amused as he was by the show, he thought Bem was being unfair to psi. “He said, ‘Daryl, I don’t think you know the psi literature,’!” Bem recalls. “So he sent me a bunch of stuff to read.” Bem was skeptical but fascinated.*