Among Mediums: A Scientist’s Quest for Answers w/ Dr. Julie Beischel-Hosted by Dr. Zohara Hieronimus

How do scientists study mediums? Science is not a body of knowledge; it is a set of tools for answering questions. Those tools can be applied to nearly any topic, even a controversial one like life after death. At the Windbridge Research Center, we use the scientific method to test hypotheses about mediums’ abilities and characteristics and the impact of readings on the grieving. Competent scientists follow the data wherever they lead and do not make unfounded assumptions about what is possible or about how the world works in reality. If they did act on such assumptions, we would still think the sun circled the Earth. Assuming that we fully understand every phenomenon in the universe is illogical. Many phenomena exist that science can’t explain. True science leaves room for discoveries. Just because something is “anomalous, the history of science suggests that this is simply not a good reason to ignore it” (Williams, 2019, p. 639). “Historically speaking, every major paradigm shift in science was literally a violation of the basic scientific principles of the time” (Westcombe, 2019, p. 619). All of the sciences, “including physics, periodically undergo conceptual shifts that account for previously unexplained observations” (Cardeña, 2019, p. 595). All practicing scientists don’t believe that suggests “the existence of [psychic abilities] is somehow anti-scientific and thus can be safely ignored” (Braude, 2019, p. 543). One criticism of mediumship in general is that because we can’t define clear mechanisms for how it works, any laboratory demonstration must be the result of fraud, error, chance, statistical manipulation, etc.