Ouch . . . we’re going to drag facilitated communication into a discussion about ghosts? Whew. OK. Let’s just say they’re equally real, and leave it at that.
[hijack]
Facilitated communication?!?!?!?
Ummmmm…doesn’t everyone know that facilitated communication doesn’t work? Simple test: set up a screen so the autistic person can see an image, but the “facilitator” can’t. As the pair to describe the image. A judge who wasn’t present for any of this later tries to match images with descriptions.
Facilitated communication provides results equal to chance. Don’t tell me that it works, it doesn’t work, it is a delusion, those people who tell you that it has passed double-blind studies are not telling the truth.
Sorry.
[/hijack]
For once, the hijack is far more interesting than the OP. Since I can see the firestorm this will provoke, I won’t even bother with professional skeptic sites like CSICOP–I’ll just go straight to the medical literature for anyone who wants to argue the point. Here are some results from a Medline search covering five years; results both for and against FC are included.
**Facilitated communication: a failure to replicate the phenomenon, Eberlin M ; McConnachie G ; Ibel S ; Volpe L, J Autism Dev Disord, 23(3):507-30 1993 Sep **
" . . . Although some facilitators reported newfound communicative abilities during training sessions, no client showed unexpected literacy or communicative abilities when tested via the facilitator screening procedure, even after 20 hours of training. Separate analyses indicated that some facilitators influenced the communicative output of their clients."
**Investigation of the validity of facilitated communication through the disclosure of unknown information, Sheehan CM ; Matuozzi RT, Ment Retard, 34(2):94-107 1996 Apr **
“Three individuals (8, 10, and 24 years old with diagnoses of autism and mental retardation) participated in a message-passing format to determine whether they could disclose information previously unknown to their facilitators. Results showed valid facilitated communication from each participant. The facilitated speakers participated in 14 sessions, each lasting approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. A wide range of information was collected, coded, and analyzed for validity, consistency, language difficulties, behavioral compliance, and style of facilitation. Out of 720 communicative interactions, participants disclosed 77 incidents of unknown information. Each participant revealed unique behaviors and styles of responding, and all were able to demonstrate genuinely independent communication through disclosure of specific information previously unknown to a facilitator, although much inconsistency was noted. Results suggest that a phenomena as complex as facilitated communication eludes a cursory exploration.”
**The source of messages produced during facilitated communication with a boy with autism and severe mental retardation: a case study, Eberlin M ; Ibel S ; Jacobson JW, J Pediatr Psychol, 19(6):657-71; discussion 677-80 1994 Dec **
“Assessed the source of messages produced through facilitated communication with a youth with autism and severe mental retardation using message-passing and picture-naming procedures. Results indicated that the facilitator was the source of the communications produced during the assessment; correct responding occurred only when the facilitator had knowledge of the correct answer. These findings are consistent with the results of other research demonstrating cuing, influence, or control of facilitated communications by the individuals providing assistance (facilitators). Implications for ethical practices by professionals in the context of facilitated communications are briefly discussed.”
**Facilitated communication: the effects of facilitator knowledge and level of assistance on output, Smith MD ; Haas PJ ; Belcher RG, J Autism Dev Disord, 24(3):357-67 1994 Jun **
“Investigated facilitated communication with 10 adults with autism, and specifically examined the effects of facilitator influence and level of assistance as a function of facilitator knowledge of experimental stimuli. Six men and four women with autism served as subjects, ranging in age from 14 years to 51 years of age. Each subject had 6 experimental sessions, 2 with no help, 2 with partial assistance, and 2 with full assistance. Within each session, the facilitator had knowledge of the experimental stimuli in one half of the trials. Results revealed no cases of correct responding independent of facilitator knowledge of correct answers. Additionally, facilitator control was apparent in numerous cases in which typed output matched stimuli to which the facilitator, not the subject, had been exposed. Results suggest that clinical and educational use of the procedure should be curtailed pending further experimental investigation.”
**Multiple method validation study of facilitated communication: II. Individual differences and subgroup results, Bebko JM ; Perry A ; Bryson S,J Autism Dev Disord, 26(1):19-42 1996 Feb **
“Potential individual variations in the effectiveness of a shared communication method, facilitated communication (FC), were examined among 20 students with autism and related disorders. To minimize the limits or disadvantages of a single method, we used multiple methods, including auditory or visual input, and simple pointing responses to pictures or words, as well as typing. Data were collected after 6 weeks of FC, and follow-up data up to 7 months later. Findings differed across methods, but there was little clear support for the validity of FC in enhancing communication over communication that students produced independently. Significant facilitator influence of responses was found, but was far less extensive than in other studies. However, an “abdication” pattern of responding was found for some students, in which high performance observed with independent responding was lessened on trials when FC was introduced. That is, these students may become more passive communicators when FC is used. The complex detected and undetected influences in the process of communication through facilitation are discussed, as well as risk factors in the use of FC.”
**A validated case study of facilitated communication,
Weiss MJ ; Wagner SH ; Bauman ML,Ment Retard, 34(4):220-30 1996 Aug **
"The case of a 13-year-old boy with autism, severe mental retardation, and a seizure disorder who was able to demonstrate valid facilitated communication was described. In three independent trials, short stories were presented to him, followed by validation test procedures with an uninformed facilitator providing physical support to the subject’s arm. In Trials 1 and 3, several specific answers were provided that clearly indicated that the young man, not the uninformed facilitator, was the source of the information. Moreover, some responses seemed to imply that the subject was employing simple inferential and abstract reasoning. This case study adds to the small, but growing number of demonstrations that facilitated communication can sometimes be a valid method for at least some individuals with developmental disabilities. "
**An experimental assessment of facilitated communication, Wheeler DL ; Jacobson JW ; Paglieri RA ; Schwartz AA,
Ment Retard, 31(1):49-59 1993 Feb **
“This report presents a quantitative study of facilitated communication. Participants were 12 people living at an institutional autism program and 9 people who provided them with facilitated communication support. These subjects were the 12 most competent producers of facilitated communication in the program. They were shown pictures of familiar objects and asked to type the names of the objects under three conditions: (a) assisted typing with facilitators unaware of the content of the stimulus picture, (b) unassisted typing, and © a condition in which the participants and facilitators were each shown pictures at the same time. In this last condition the paired pictures were either the same or different, and the participant’s typing was facilitated to label or describe the picture. These participants were unable to succeed in the tasks without facilitator assistance. On trials when the facilitators and participants had different pictures, the only “correct” labels were for pictures shown to the facilitators and not shown to the participants. This finding demonstrates that the facilitators were unknowingly determining what was typed.”
Although I am sceptical about ghosts I think I’ll throw in a ditty for you.
My friend used to work for a company selling bathroom fitments in my home town Leeds.
The shop building (company has long gone) is situated in an old part of town. There is little of the old stuff standing but plenty of groundworks such as canal and river tunnelling remain.
Actually if you are truly interested I can put up a link to a VR site of the area so you can get an idea for yourself.
Back to the tale then - Next to his shop was a specialist bicycle shop I used to frequent but it was always , well not right. They moved after some time but only after they started doing some building refitting and I thought no more about it.
My friend used to work late producing installation artwork but felt he was being watched, he would tell me about locked doors being unlocked and small things which he simply put down to memory - until he saw the little girl.
He was down in the lower level which is about halfway below street level when he was turning off the power to the displays and she was on a doorstep, except that the doorway itself was halfway up the wall, the stairway had been removed. The bricked up doorway looks like it originally led to street level proper.
She didn’t make any noise but head face which he could clearly see did track round as he moved away.
His description was that she was about 5 or 6 years old and in a blue dress with a white full bib complete with collar.
He says that there was no eerie feeling it just seemed perfectly normal and natural.
Much later, like several months he dreamt that there was a furthe cellar below that room and that a stairway led down to another cellar directly beneath, which is not the usual thing.
Later some contractors were sent round to inspect the stability of the river and canal tunnels under the area and came looking around. What they found was a bricked up doorway and yes it did lead to two cellars, one below the other. In the lowest cellar there is a passage that leads into the foundations of the railway workings which sit atop the river and canal .
My friend claims that the lower cellar was as he’d described including the rusting gaslight fittings.
I tend to think of him as a little bit er …unusual but I was there when we met by complete chance someone who had worked there before him.
We didn’t know this guy at all but got talking somehow and without any prompting whatsoever he started talking about a little girl following him around the shop which is when my friend said what a coincidence it was because…That’s when we realised we were talking about the same thing at the same place, and this other guy had quit his job on account of it.
Now that creeped me out.
What creeped me out more was when I went to the cycle shop which had moved, I’d not been in since I moved away from Leeds.
Anyway it was " how ya doin " and all that stuff and I got round to congratulating the shop owner since he seemed to have larger premises and was doing well.
Jokingly I said that he’d be glad to be away from the old shop with its stories of ghosts and I kid you not when I tell you he went absolutely white, I thought he was going to faint.
This lad is not what you would call the credulous type either he’d left his previous job working on materials science for the aeronautics industry (specifically helicopter rotor blades) to set up his own business.
About two years ago some digging work nearby revealed what is believed to have been either a leper colony burial area or something of that ilk and the planned building was postponed.
I’ve no explanation and I could shoot holes thruogh most of ot but to have the same story from three differant people who have never met and who are not the story telling type is strange.It isn’t even something that is widely known either.
Hey another story that makes you believe.I think the child was murdered or maybe she died in an accident.Her tormented soul still wanders around searching for peace.This is a really interesting story.
I have one too.I studied at a boarding school and when i was in the 10th grade,we had this kid in the 9th who woke up in the morning to have his name scratched on his chest.Wierd huh?He never claimed anything.Well i saw his name scratched and its not like he’d bled or anything.The name was scratched on his chest.It was a shared room and the rooms were pretty open with windows and stuff and the door was always to be kept open so he could only have done it in the bathroom or at night when everyone was sleeping.I asked him whether he felt anything and he said no.P.S There was no wound or bleeding as it was just deep scratches that he could have made with his protractor etc.Anyway it could have been that nasty witch that was lurking around.Yet that is another long story.Ok its nothing really i just started this story once about hearing hard breathing and turning around to see something running.As i was talking about the second floor window(without a balcony),so this proved that the thing was about 20 feet tall.Anyway i actually got people believing.
CONCLUSION:
We attributed it to that nasty witch,though our warden had other ideas.Personally i think it was him but who knows?A kid had drowned in our campus swimming pool but i am only adding this to give the story a mysterious twist.I don’t think it had any impact of what ensued.
Hey,
What about out of body experiences,spirits,funny noises and all sorts of stories that you hear or experience.Well i just want to hear some ghost stories that you may have.
Please no more remote controlled vehicle stories.
Bye
Zeeshan
No. Ghosts do not exist.
Hope you can rest easy now.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
In the past people believed in trolls, fairies and all kinds of different creatures. People were actually convicted for their interaction with some of these creatures. Witches come to mind.
Now that nature has been “tamed”. Such stories are considered nonsense. The Ghosts dwell mainly within our societies and are based on the death of human beings. As such the belief lives on.
It’s not an absence of proof. It’s the absence of common sense.
This is a bit of a hijack, but I have to tell this story anyway.
All this talk of ghosts and whatnot made me think of something that happened to me during my last year of college, when I was finishing up my degree. My wife (at the time, girlfriend) and I were living 400 miles apart, and I was talking to her on the phone one night, and she casually said you know, I’ve never seen your new apartment, but when I talk to you I imagine you in a room that looks like… and then she described my room to me in a fair amount of detail. For example, she said that she envisioned it as having three high windows side-by-side on one wall (it did), green wallpaper, and (perhaps most strikingly) as having pictures on the walls that were black-and-white, but yellowed like newspaper. (The room had come with framed pictures on the walls, which were old, yellowed lithographs.) I got a little creeped out by this, naturally enough.
Since I’d read a lot of stuff by Martin Gardner and the CSICOP crew I knew what sort of pitfalls could make strange things seem to happen, and I decided to test this phenomenon a little further. I had a book in my apartment on Egyptian hieroglyphics, and I opened it to one of the illustrations and asked my wife to describe the illustration to me over the phone. It was a picture of a pink alabaster box from the tomb of King Tut, on a black background, and she told me that she thought the picture was of something pink on a black background. I tried this with a few more pictures, and she did equally as well on all of them. I really don’t see how this can be explained away. I was aware at the time of potential pitfalls (like explaining away misses and only remembering hits) but her descriptions (particularly in the case of pictures from the book, which were a more controlled experiment than descriptions of the room) were always correct, with no misses, and fairly precise (Hmmm… a picture of a pink alabaster box on a black background, with no other colors in the picture. “What do you see, sweetheart?” “Ummmm… something pink on a black background.”)
Anyway, I’m no cheerleader for the supernatural (for that matter, neither is she) and if I were to accept this as a real supernatural event, I would have to explain why nobody else seems to have even remotely that level of success. On the other hand, this isn’t the only story I have that I can’t explain, and even if there is an as-yet unknown rational explanation for them, it’s nice to be reminded that the universe is a big place, with lots of dark, shadowy corners left.
-Ben
Ben, better be careful, since these boards abound with guys who fancy themselves intellectuals, and may beg to challenge your wife to double blind studies.
Question is, whether your wife is up to the irrationally exacting standards of dyed-in-the-wool non-believers.
:rolleyes: 
Yup. You know they have the unreasonable demand that those claiming paranormal abilities actually be able to, ummm…, do the things they claim to be able to. Those terrible skeptics and their irrational demands! :rolleyes:
I don’t believe in ghosts.
And I grew up in a house that was supposedly haunted.
Ghosts are not real, but DEMONS are. IMHO, Ghosts, UFO’s, Psycics, and Ouija Boards are demonic. Hebrews 9:27 "And it is appointed once unto man to die, and after this the judgement.
I just had to delurk a bit to let out a warrented ‘Huh?’ Ouija Boards are demonic? It’s a parlor trick, man! Is the magic 8-ball demonic?
Seriously, though, evidence of ghosts is a bit scarce – well, non-existent if you don’t count unsubstantiated anectdotes, pictures of water droplets in graveyards, and a heckuva lot of wishful thinking – where is your evidence of DEMONS?
- Story continues… *
Anyway, being completely pre-occupied with what had just happenned with my wife, I totally ignored the guy who jumped out yelling “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”
How about the fact that the mass of a ghost was measured,as said by cecil himself.
Bye
Zeeshan
Got a link for that column, Zeeshan?
nope but i think its somewhere on the archives page,i’ve read all of them.I can’t remember which.It wasn’t of course stated like that since the scientists measured the mass of a ghost to be about 12 ounces(if i can remember correctly) by measuring the difference between a live patient and a dead one.Oh wait i think its in the article which is all about ouija boards.I think i’m not sure.Let me check,nope not that one,but someone reading this might be able to remember.
Of course the info is nothing definite and certainly not a proof,but would however add a certain realistic touch to ghost stories and campfires.
This is stuff out of my bad memory and please verify it before you start forming ghostbuster groups.
Bye
Zeeshan
I think that was in the Weekly World News, not in the Straight Dope.
All the “evidence” I’ve seen for ghosts is anecdotal (i.e., not really evidence at all). So more anecdotes is not more proof. There is no valid scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts. (I say “valid” because there is a lot of pseudoscientific junk available.)
As was said, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence…however, applying Occam’s Razor, there are far more simpler explanations (e.g., misunderstandings, illusions, dreams, delusions, hallucinations, lies, hoaxes, etc.) that don’t require invoking supernatural forces.