Vision From Feeling

A test was being arranged between me and a Swedish skeptical organization to involve the detection of whether a person is male or female. I decided not to have such a test since olfactory (scent) pheromones are available that can provide non-paranormal means of information and that can not be screened off for this test.

Background

Paranormal claim
When I look at people, I experience feeling a detailed landscape across them but without actually touching the person. It is similar to when you move your hand above a candle flame or some ice cubes, you can feel a shape, consisting of the temperature distribution. This felt pattern then automatically translates into corresponding images in my mind, and those images depict internal health information and pictures of tissues and organs.

I also have some forms of synesthesia. When I read numbers I see them in color. Number 3 is always orange to me. And I relate to physics equations in colors and felt shapes. Synesthesia is when a person takes in one type of information in the normal way - something that they see, hear, taste, smell, or touch - and the brain then translates that real information into something of a different form and which is entirely synthetic and artificial! A sound can become a taste, a color become a feeling, and so forth. My experience of medical perception is similar to synesthesia, although I have not come across any examples in literature of medical or health synesthesia.

The health information I perceive has an interestingly high accuracy, even in detecting health information that should not be accessible to the ordinary senses of perception. In order to investigate this experience in the method of skeptical inquiry, I call it a paranormal claim, although I am quite sure there is nothing paranormal going on, and I am not psychic. The experience involves a real and vivid sensory experience, and I am investigating it through a series of studies and tests to find out what its accuracy really is, what type of information it can reliably detect, and basically to learn more about how it works. The goal is not to be verified as a psychic, but simply to learn more about this experience that I have.

The investigation so far
I begun investigating my claim three years ago, although I have experienced this for fourteen years. I begun by studying the claim, by testing out various test parameters and how those would affect the formation and quality of the perceptions, and so learned to define both the required and the allowed test conditions for a test. The study also taught me that I could claim to be able to detect which of persons is missing a kidney. I then designed a testing protocol, and had a large-scale test with the Independent Investigations Group IIG, in which I had to detect which of six persons was missing a kidney and whether it was the left or the right kidney that was missing, and to do this three times repeatedly with a different set of six people in each.

The test was to tell whether I might be psychic, and asked me to get all three correctly at 100%. I got one and a half trials out of three trials correctly, which with partial credit for the half-correct adds to odds of 3.8%, meaning that if 100 people were guessing at random, only 3 or 4 of them (3.8% of them) would achieve the same accuracy as I did. My goal is not to prove that I am psychic, but to find out more about this experience behind the claim. I considered these results high enough to allow for another test of my claim. Also adding into consideration was that I had issues with the persons in trial 1 which I got wrong, and that I was tired in trial 3 which I got partially correct - that I was able to tell the confidence level of my answers and correctly predict the accuracy beforehand.

The second testing occasion I had was at The Amaz!ng Meeting TAM8 recently. In a demonstration I was asked to say which of five persons was missing a kidney. Hardly large-scale enough to qualify as a test, as if I would have gotten it right there's no telling whether I would have used an actual skill, or just average guesser's luck. I chose the wrong person and failed the demonstration, but only to find that out of ten possible answers (two kidney spaces in each of five persons), out of the only two where I was not sure about seeing a kidney, the first one was my wrong answer, and the second one was actually the target person and side. And so I continue.

Uterus or not
I only do readings on skeptics, and among the experience I've gathered during readings with skeptics I've come across detecting that a kidney was missing, and that a uterus was missing. Both of these represent among the clearest and easiest of my perceptions, as well as being excellent for testing purposes, as it should not be possible to detect this with ordinary senses of perception.

Both of the two tests I have done already focused on the detection of a kidney being missing. When I contacted this third skeptical group I said that our test could focus on either a kidney or a uterus being missing, or possibly as a combination of both. They then offered the genious suggestion that we make it a gender identification test. Rather than go through the labor of trying to find persons who have had organs removed - kidney or uterus - it is as simple that women have a uterus and men don't. So as long as we find clever ways of concealing any indication of what gender the persons in the test have, this gender identification test should be very easy to arrange, and with less of a trouble with finding suitable persons for the test. Thanks to this brilliant suggestion by this wonderful skeptical group, I now have a way of arranging a larger number of tests and producing more data sets very quickly, that should settle the investigation of this paranormal claim very quickly! I am very excited about that.

Step 1 - Defining the claim - can I claim to sense gender?
To begin to evaluate the prospects of a gender identification test, I am now actively testing out my gender perceptions on people out in the public. It only takes a very brief and discrete glance at a person for me to form a perception, so I am not disturbing anyone and they have no idea of what I am doing. I look at a person from a distance and I try to be quick so that I am picking up less of the available visual clues from outer appearance, behavior and body language. This method of course occurs without any scientific controls and does not provide valid data about the possible capabilities of this paranormal claim, meanwhile it does enable me to assess what I think I could do, to define the claim around gender identification, a claim that then can be tested. To find out what I think I can do, and to then put that claim into a proper test setting to see whether there is anything to it beyond normal detection and perception.

What I experience around a perception is irrelevant
Just a note, the fact that I have visual and felt images and perceptions involved in my conclusions about a person's health status, does in itself not grant any additional validity or interest to this claim. This claim must be evaluated solely on the data that it produces during tests, also considering the testing conditions that were implemented in each case. The fact that there are "perceptions", and visual and felt images involved, means nothing at all. It doesn't matter how a paranormal claimant produces, or experiences, their conclusions, whether they be using cards, a dowsing rod, or any other method, and regardless of the internal or personal experience around those conclusions. All we want to know is the accuracy it can produce, and under what conditions, in order to evaluate whether there is anything going on that is beyond normal or typical sensing abilities in people.

I was surprised to notice that there were a lot of persons in the public where you could not guess their gender from a distance. Persons that do not dress typical to their gender, have unisex hair, are in their upper or past middle ages, and a bit on the heavier side, concealing gender-characteristic figure, and seen from behind and from a distance. Trying to use logic to guess their gender was in many cases difficult and even impossible. I would then quickly try to "sense" their gender by searching for internal reproductive organs in my perceptions of them felt from a distance, and as I got closer to them I could see from their faces or otherwise if they were male or female and see whether my perception was correct.

Needless to say I did very well, but then again this was not a controlled experiment and who knows what clues might have been available, regardless of if my logic thought it was being difficult or not. It is fun though, because I find people where I could never logically guess which gender they are, and to see what my perceptions say and to go find out if I was correct is actually quite thrilling, because my logic and the perceptions are two separate things - and often produce opposite conclusions!

Step 2 - Do a survey, record some observations
Now that I think I might be able to sense the gender of a person from a distance by seeing images of tissues and organs in the felt landscape that I feel around a person, I next need to go and write down some of my observations around this by doing what I call a survey. To simply write down my perceptions and impressions, and make note of any surrounding circumstances and information that may be useful toward test design. I did a survey once before during the earlier study that led to the IIG test and TAM demonstration, and learned many valuable things about the conditions during which I can experience the perceptions and what outer circumstances might be inhibiting on them.

I'd rather not
September 2010 - After some careful consideration, I have decided not to proceed and have a gender identification test. Humans produce pheromones for the specific reason of conveying through olfactory (scent) means to other humans whether they are a male or a female. No positive results of this test could have any significance regarding any paranormal ability. The best this test could do, is to provide negative results and lead to falsifying this claim of medical perceptions. I will still have such a test if it is arranged by someone, but since I am the person who goes through the most work as well as all of the expenses involved in arranging a test, I would rather focus my work on the arrrangement of a test on missing kidney or uterus, or other health information.