Tischner's Clairvoyance Experiments

 The 1925 book Telepathy and Clairvoyance by Rudolf Tischner (which can be read using the link here) is one of innumerable published works providing evidence for clairvoyance. The best evidence the book prevents is test results in experiments involving the reading of text written on triple-folded slips of paper. 

Upon mentioning such a technique, a typical skeptical reader will probably be thinking something along the lines of: "Oh, I bet I know what was going on -- the person being tested discreetly unwrapped the paper to see the text." But according to Tischner there was no possibility of such a thing. The tests occurred in good lighting, with the testers sitting right next to the person being tested. We read that the subject being tested held the triple-folded slips of papers in his hand, typically looking away from it, and never holding the slips up to his eyes. 

On page 53 Tischner describes the technique used to test a person named Re, using slips of paper 3/4 of an inch by 1 inch:

"Re stood with his back to me watched by Mr. R., while I stood 15-17 ft. from him and wrote several slips with a soft pencil, rubbing the back of the slip with my thumb-nail every time, then folding it three times, making the fold in the middle of the long side every time, so that each fold was at right angles to the previous one and the folded slip similar to a postage stamp in shape and about half its size. I knew Hennig’s paper on the possible tricks used in reading slips, having recently reviewed it, so I took all the necessary precautions to prevent Re from practising any of them. I did not give Re a chance of seeing the writing-pad at a distance of less than 9 feet, and always locked it up in my desk immediately after writing. I mixed the slips several times and threw them up into the air, thus obviating sources of error due to my knowing the contents of the slip. Mr. R. also wrote some slips, using his pocket-book as a pad—and putting it back into his pocket as soon as he had finished writing : I watched Re carefully all the time. Re generally holds the slips between thumb and index finger, but he sometimes holds them in the hollow of his hand, with arm stretched out horizontally to one side or obliquely in front of him. It is rarely that he holds a slip to his forehead, in fact, he mostly turns his head away from the hand holding the slip and avoids looking in that direction. He will try holding the slip in the other hand if the visualization is long in coming ; this he may repeat several times, but there is nothing suspicious about the procedure, the change of hands being effected quite low down, not level with his face."

We read a long series of pages discussing individual tests. Page 185 summarizes the results in a series of tests in which the subject Re attempted to guess what was written on the triple-folded slips of paper. The second column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the third column gives the corresponding guess. The fourth column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the fifth column gives the corresponding guess. 

These are obviously results way, way too accurate to be achieved by chance. 

In the latter part of the book Tischner answers some objections that such results might have been obtained without clairvoyance:

Page 151: 

"Henning states that it is possible to read the contents of slips written in pencil by the impression left on the pad. Experiment showed me that this was only possible when thin paper was used and the writer had a heavy hand, but I think that this would hardly be a source of error, as even the most simple and uncritical of experimenters would suspect something if the medium were to investigate the writing pad. I eliminated this possibility .in my experiments. In no case was the medium able to see the writing pad ; it was either left in a room the medium did not go into, or it was locked up in a writing table, previous to his entering the room, or else the slips were written on the cover of a pocketbook, which was immediately pocketed....Henning goes on to say that it is possible for the medium to read the writing by following it with his fingers on the back of the slip as if it were Braille type. I wrote my slips with a very soft pencil, to obviate this possible source of error ; then I smoothed the back of -the paper with my thumb nail. In the cases when I wrote only one word or a figure I took care that the written part should not be on the outer layers of the folded slip."

Page 152:

"It is an experiment worth trying, to unfold a slip with one hand, and try to read it, in such a way that persons standing by your side and watching you all the time, never see you do it. It is too much for my credulity to think that this is possible. Even Henning does not pretend that it is possible to unfold a slip completely unobserved even when the observations are being done by the typically simple-minded and credulous observer he has in his mind’s eye. He says it might be possible to peep into the slightly opened slip as into an uncut book. I have mentioned previously that I folded my slips with the writing quite in the middle, so that it would be impossible to read them in this way, hence this objection cannot logically be brought up against my experiments."

Page 154:

"It was my endeavour to take into account all the precautions and objections hitherto suggested, and not only did I fail to detect any fraud (that would mean little), but neither I nor any of my co-workers ever had the faintest impression that there might be a trick of any sort in any part of the experiments. The course of the experiments is so clear and natural and so little suspect, that it would seem quite as logical to suspect that someone who was sitting there talking to me should be committing a murder that very moment."

Page 164: 

"As already mentioned, all the persons present during the experiments, including the members of the Medical Commission, were of the opinion that fraud was impossible under these conditions, and that any voluntary or involuntary exchange of signals was out of the question in the experiments, where no one present knew what the object was; the only remaining alternatives were chance of supernormal faculty of some kind."

On page 134 Tischner correctly states this : "Attention may be drawn to the fact that materialism is completely disproved if telepathy and clairvoyance cannot be explained by physical theories." On page 170 Tischner states this:

"These experiments alone would suffice to prove the existence of clairvoyance. So we must recognize that such different series of experiments performed with different mediums are a very much more conclusive proof. Trickery, chance, and guesswork, the favourite loopholes of the sceptic, are useless against such evidence ; we cannot but accept the fact of clairvoyance."

Tischner has done a good job of responding to objections he has read about experiments of the type he did. Doing something in the same vein, I can try to imagine a thought process of someone making such objections, and explain the invalidity of his thought process. 

I can imagine how a skeptic named Tristan might reason:

"We know from science that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. And something like telepathy or clairvoyance could only occur if that was wrong. So from an experiment claiming to give evidence for some result overthrowing the scientific consensus, we should demand absolute perfection.  It would have to be the most perfect evidence, such as someone detecting what is inside locked steel boxes, while being videotaped the whole time. Any evidence less perfect than that we can throw away."

There are some fallacies in this reasoning. The first is that we do not at all know that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. Such a claim is merely a belief dogma of materialists. Most of the evidence advanced to support such a claim is bad evidence,  such as the evidence typically appearing in today's neuroscience papers, which are a cesspool of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, bad measurement techniques such as "freezing behavior" judgments, a lack of a decent blinding protocol, and cherry-picking data. There is actually to be found in the findings of neuroscience itself the strongest reasons for rejecting all claims that the mind is the same as the brain, or the mere product of the brain. I refer to things discussed in the posts of my blog here. The evidence that the mind cannot be the same as the brain and cannot be a product of the brain includes this evidence:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.
2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.
3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.
4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.
5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.
6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers. 
7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.
8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 
9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.
10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.
11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.
12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.
13. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.
14.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

So, contrary to Tristan's reasoning above, we do not at all know that the mind is the product of the brain, or the same thing as the brain; and we actually have very many very strong reasons for rejecting such a claim.  So an observational result such as clairvoyance is not actually any such thing as an unexpected result. If our minds arise from some mysterious process different from neural origination, then "all bets are off" about the limits of the mind, and we have no basis for claiming that observations of clairvoyance are even something we should regard as unexpected. 

The second flaw in Tristan's reasoning is that it treats each result supporting clairvoyance or telepathy as if it were the only result supporting such things.  Such a treatment might be reasonable if there was little or no evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy.  For example, there is zero observational evidence that elephants can fly. So if someone were to try to submit evidence that elephants can fly (such as producing an eyewitness report), you might be justified in claiming that such a piece of one-of-a-kind evidence so unique would have to be bulletproof for us to believe in flying elephants. But the situation with clairvoyance and telepathy is totally different. There is nearly two hundred years of written evidence in support of claims of the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance, very much of it written by distinguished scientists and doctors.  

So, in fact, every time a new piece of evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy is examined, you never find yourself in any situation of "this goes against everything that has been observed up until now." Instead, the situation is the opposite. It is "this is consistent with a giant mountain of evidence that has already been gathered." Of course, such evidence goes unstudied and unexamined by skeptics such as Tristan. So with each new case in which they are examining evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy, they cry "this goes everything that has been observed so far." False claims like that only show what lazy scholars such people are.

What should actually be occurring when we examine some previously unexamined evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy is a reaction such as this:  "This is consistent with a huge body of evidence already gathered that establishes the reality of clairvoyance and telepathy, and it is also consistent with a huge body of facts already gathered which suggest that the brain cannot be the same as the human mind or the source of the human mind."

The photo below shows a slip of paper that I prepared, using the same process described by Tischner.  I wrote on a small piece of paper in pencil the name Zacharias, folding the paper three times, with the second fold at a right angle to the first, and the third fold at a right angle to the second. We see both sides of the resulting slip of paper. You can see that you cannot even read a single letter when a paper has been folded in such a way.