Are Mediums ... Real?

The answer begins with an “m.”

by The Candidly Team

Ok, breathe with us.

We’re clearly moving into some murky territory here. We fully realize there are strong opinions around this topic. Half of you are all ears while the other half are rolling your eyes so far into the back of your head you’re probably missing the end of this sentence.

But here’s the one thing I think we ALL feel about the topic of mediums:

Confusion.

Our bewilderment about them is understandably compounded by the fact that most “evidence” is based on personal experience, and if it’s not your personal experience, you can easily disregard it.

But here’s the thing. We’re all curious. We all have questions. So why not address them?

You with us? Let’s begin.

So for starters, we’re actually gonna brush right past the first question we all have, you know, the one that’s in the very title of this article. That is, “are mediums real?” Instead, we’re gonna phrase it “how can we tell if a medium is for real?”

Obviously many are not. Thousands are con-artists. And that, understandably, gives mediums in general a bad name.

But how can we explain the ones that are out there spouting ungooglable information to people who aren’t even paying them to do so? Maybe you read the viral article about the reporter who interviewed a famous medium who offered to give him a reading after their interview then proceeded to tell him details about his recently passed father that his mother hadn’t even disclosed. “He wants you to tell Ruth that she can get rid of his ties now.” Maybe you can already piece together that Ruth was the reporter’s mother, his dad had collected ties, and they were the only item of his dad’s that she’d kept after his death. All unbeknownst to her son. But known by a stranger.

Another recent article authored by psychologist Jeff Tarrant talks about his experience as a scientist who started to study people who have psychic or paranormal experiences after learning of a woman who found herself suddenly able to speak South American tribal languages she herself didn’t understand. Sound weird? Apparently, he thought so too and decided to run EEG imaging on her brain to see what might be going on. Long story short, what he discovered supposedly sparked his interest in continuing to study the brains of other psychics and mediums. Eventually, he concluded, “I have seen enough to make me believe that our minds are capable of much more than most of us dare to imagine. While we may not fully understand how or why, it seems clear to me now that psi abilities are a natural and normal part of human experience, and that scientists should dedicate more time and resources to exploring them.”

Right, so how do those of us who think like a reporter or a scientist make sense of this and determine whether there’s something mystical as opposed to fraudulent at play?

Well, there are a couple organizations attempting to do just that. It should be said that BOTH of these institutions clearly operate from the point of view that mediums are real. One is called The Forever Family Foundation, which holds a “vetting” process to evaluate and certify mediums and weed out those with real abilities from the fakes.

Another is called the Windbridge Research Center, started by a husband and wife team of Dr. Julie Beischel, who holds her Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology and Mark Boccuzzi. Mediums studied at Windbridge supposedly have to demonstrate their abilities under “controlled laboratory conditions,” according to their website. “Upon successful completion of eight peer-reviewed screening, testing, and training steps, vetted mediums are termed Windbridge Certified Research Mediums.”

Again, this entire endeavor is headed up by people who believe in psi abilities, however, they warn against fraudulent mediums who adhere to two main corrupt practices:

• Hot reading: This is when the person claiming to speak for the dead actually gathered info about the person receiving the reading before meeting, maybe looking them up online, etc. They then play it off like they’re receiving that information from a deceased relative in the moment they’re doing the reading.

• Cold reading: The person claiming to be a medium uses clues and signs from the person they’re speaking to in order to come up with information that sounds true to the person in the moment.

So what are the “controlled conditions” Windbridge Research Center says they use to weed out the frauds?

For one thing, the supposed medium doing the reading to prove their abilities can’t be in the same room as the person they’re reading for or know anything about them, but they’re asked to answer questions about the personality, appearance, cause of death etc. of the deceased.

In addition, the person being read for doesn’t even get to hear the answers in real time. The experimenters involved in communicating with both the mediums and the people being read for in the experiment don’t get any information beyond first names and don’t know which medium is reading for which person.

According to Windbridge (and notice the words according to), their findings have shown that “some mediums, under controlled laboratory conditions, can report accurate and specific information about deceased people.”

Other non-Windbridge studies have traced the brain activity of mediums when “communicating” with the dead and found things like decreased brain activity in the parts of the brain that control things like language even as they’re writing down complex information.

Another 2017 study showed that while people who claimed to have experiences as mediums “had higher dissociation scores” than your average Joe, they didn’t qualify as having pathological dissociation.

And if every word you’ve read thus far sounds squishy and confusing, that might be because it is. Whatever’s going on in the mind of a medium might be more mysterious at this point than we’d like it to be.

So while none of this might definitively change your mind where spiritual psychics are concerned, at least it lays out a compelling case for how we can parse out the complete frauds from the possibly fascinating.

But we cannot responsibly dive into any part of this process without acknowledging the inherent vulnerability of people turning to mediums for a reading and talking about something called motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is “when biased reasoning leads to a particular conclusion or decision, a process that often occurs outside of conscious awareness,” according to PsychologyToday. People speaking to mediums might not realize the ways in which they’re vulnerable and therefore biased toward believing the messages being relayed to them. “Grief from the loss of a loved one is a horrible experience, so it’s not surprising that people will be highly motivated to get information that will make them feel better,” wrote cognitive scientist Paul Thagard Ph.D.

And that very threat of a bad actor playing on the hopes of a grieving person is what makes it even harder to look at the subject of mediums without bias or emotion.

It’s not a topic to be taken lightly.

Being aware of our biases and vulnerabilities and being wary of the fraud that exists is a critical first step when approaching the topic of mediums.

The next steps? Well, we’re sorry to say, they remain … mysterious.

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