Cold reading
General statements, questions phrased as statements and quick adjustment to the sitter's reactions produce apparently specific hits.
Tested, contested
Mediumship
Mediumship is the claimed ability of receiving information from people who have died. Status: tested, contested.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, empathy, astral projection, healing and aura reading.
What people describe
Mediums describe receiving impressions from people who have died — a name, an initial, a way of dying, a phrase or an object that mattered. Some say they hear or see the dead; others describe a sense of presence and knowledge that simply arrives. Readings usually move from general statements towards details that the sitter confirms or rejects.
How it entered the record
Modern mediumship begins in 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, reported rapping spirits; four decades later Margaret Fox demonstrated how she had made the raps by cracking her toe joints. The séance boom that followed drew scientists such as William James, who studied the medium Leonora Piper, and sceptics such as Harry Houdini, who exposed fraudulent mediums in the 1920s.
Free, one email to start
Get the letter
One email to start, then occasional notes when something is worth reading — no daily sends.
The experiment
Beischel and Schwartz, 2007, and later work at the Windbridge Institute
Read the paper: Beischel & Schwartz (2007), “Anomalous information reception by research mediums”, EXPLORE 3
How it was run
Quintuple-blind: the reader never meets the sitter, does not know their name, and the experimenter scoring the transcript does not know which sitter it belongs to. Sitters then score two transcripts without being told which is theirs.
Sample
Eight mediums, small sitter pools — usually under 60 readings per study
Result
Some studies report scoring above chance; the samples are small, the mediums self-selected, and independent replication outside the same group is thin.
This is the most carefully designed corner of the field. It is also the one where the experimenters and the practitioners are closest, which is exactly the condition under which effects tend to shrink in outside hands.
Claim
Receiving information from people who have died
Status
Tested, contested
Where the word comes from
The modern sense dates to the Spiritualist movement of the 1850s, when a "medium" meant the channel between the living and the dead.
What psychology offers instead
Subjective validation
Sitters remember and count the hits and quietly forget the misses, especially when grieving.
Hot reading
In some documented cases, mediums gathered information in advance from obituaries, social media or assistants.
How to test it fairly yourself
A fair test keeps the medium from seeing or hearing the sitter, gives several sitters the same set of readings without labels, and asks each to pick out their own. If people choose correctly no more often than chance, the readings are not specific to them.