The main thing in designing a parapsychology experiment is ruling this out.
Like in the Bem-Honorton Ganzfeld experiments, subjects were in sensory-deprivation.
Or in Sheldrake's experiments on telephone telepathy, how can a sensory leak tell you what person is on the other end of the telephone?
There were some silly experiments published decades ago easily explainable by sensory leaks, like the Zener card stuff, but the field has moved on since then.
I feel like "oh it was sensory leaks" is one of the go-to explanations people use to support their preconceptions. But is it a good explanation? How is it a good explanation of the Ganzfeld experiments or telephone telepathy experiments?
And that's the difficult part, to catch every confound you can think of, or at least minimize them. For sensory leaks if you catch anything it's enough for you to go off of previous experience and make connections, with better accuracy than pure guessing or going off 'nlp' (or whatever sense of interest, could be something 'common' like prioprioception v hit detection in sports) alone since its more data to process, but not too much to overwhelm, enough to the subjects to 'cheat' having more sensory tools at their disposal and generate noise. Things in the world tend to have certain sensory attachments to them that are obvious in some ways depending the sense in question and symbolic/subconscious in others.
Parapsych seems at this point a temporary catch for these things before a particular focus gets shuffled into one of the older areas of study, I find it easier to catch it on that end rather than at the beginning, especially as removed from all things remotely academic as I am.
The main thing in designing a parapsychology experiment is ruling this out.
Like in the Bem-Honorton Ganzfeld experiments, subjects were in sensory-deprivation.
Or in Sheldrake's experiments on telephone telepathy, how can a sensory leak tell you what person is on the other end of the telephone?
There were some silly experiments published decades ago easily explainable by sensory leaks, like the Zener card stuff, but the field has moved on since then.
I feel like "oh it was sensory leaks" is one of the go-to explanations people use to support their preconceptions. But is it a good explanation? How is it a good explanation of the Ganzfeld experiments or telephone telepathy experiments?
And that's the difficult part, to catch every confound you can think of, or at least minimize them. For sensory leaks if you catch anything it's enough for you to go off of previous experience and make connections, with better accuracy than pure guessing or going off 'nlp' (or whatever sense of interest, could be something 'common' like prioprioception v hit detection in sports) alone since its more data to process, but not too much to overwhelm, enough to the subjects to 'cheat' having more sensory tools at their disposal and generate noise. Things in the world tend to have certain sensory attachments to them that are obvious in some ways depending the sense in question and symbolic/subconscious in others.
Parapsych seems at this point a temporary catch for these things before a particular focus gets shuffled into one of the older areas of study, I find it easier to catch it on that end rather than at the beginning, especially as removed from all things remotely academic as I am.