to ask if anyone has had a psychic reading that was extremely accurate?

Why should you possibly expect evidence TtWK
Until people start returning from the dead it aint going to happen.
There's no evidence as such. You either believe or you don't. Simple.

In your opinion it's nonsense TTWK.

Stone Age people believed in an afterlife. The Ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife.

One would hope we would have moved on since then. But no, people are still clinging on to the same old nonsense we believed thousands of years ago, despite the complete and utter lack of any verifiable evidence.

How depressing.

Who's to say there won't be the rise of another equally important concept as science?

Who indeed - and that's why so many of us would love even one of the self-proclaimed psychics to share their knowledge at a higher level. If they really have "lifted the veil" so to speak, they're wasting a heck of an opportunity for us all to advance our thinking

Of course you're right about those 10th century people who'd have marvelled at TV, space travel and all the rest; they might even have put it down to the paranormal

Doesn't mean it would have been, of course ...

FromSeaToShining - I think the psychic in the case you're referring to was Sylvia Browne (a more revoltingly callous, arrogant, unpleasant woman you'd be hard pushed to find).

The girl's mother died never knowing that her daughter was alive and robbed of all hope because of Browne.

She also wrongly assured Shawn Hornbeck's parents that he was dead.

Monstrous woman.

"People used to think the earth was flat because there was no scientific evidence that it was round"

They didn't, you know!

Whether or not it does exist, I am amused by the arrogance of the people here who say it CAN'T exist. People used to think the earth was flat because there was no scientific evidence that it was round. In fact, there was even no science as we know it now, back then, with which to prove or disprove. Who's to say there won't be the rise of another equally important concept as science? Relying on science to explain, prove or disprove the afterlife/spirit world might turn out to be as useless as asking Geography to prove or disprove all Mathmatical concepts.

I expect people from the tenth century would have scoffed at the notion of modern developments photographs, telephones, the internet and space travel.

Who knows what will be proved over the next millennium regarding the spirit world? Afterlife and the spirit world is not a new concept. Stone Age people believed in an afterlife. The Ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife. It's not some new-fangled concept from the 20th century, or a random post on MN.

She could have saved £25 by just waiting.

*I don't know about scarily accurate.....MIL went to a psychic when I was pregnant and paid £25 to find out what sex my baby was. She was told it was a girl. To be called after her MIL.

DS2 was, er, a boy.*

Be fair...she was close!

Which makes the psychic actually dangerous, because the authorities might stop looking or look in completely the wrong place. Good thing they don't use 'em for official investigations in that case.

dominogocatgo No, the bits you can see definitely don't do very much after death! As for the incorruptible soul, as by its very nature it wouldn't be measurable, proving that such a thing exists is likely to be... problematical. This also makes the moving of furniture, along with any other physical manifestation, unlikely.

Why are the messages from the other side always nice?
"I wasn't in pain when I died" "I'm at peace" "don't feel you are in anyway responsible for what happened."

Why do the dead never say "I died in fucking agony, and I blame you for not taking me to that first hospital appointment. It's your fault I'm dead."
"I fucking hate being dead, I'm miserable and lonely."
"You think I died of natural causes, but your mother poisoned me because I found out about her affair with Bert from next door."

You'd almost be forgiven that the punter is told exactly what they want to hear, perhaps so they will come back again, with more money!

I don't know about scarily accurate.....MIL went to a psychic when I was pregnant and paid £25 to find out what sex my baby was. She was told it was a girl. To be called after her MIL.

DS2 was, er, a boy. It's 50/50 and said psychic (located in Druid's Heath, Birmingham ) still got it wrong. MIL still consults psychics. I still despair.

Exactly, Annie. Someone posted above that she knew for a fact there was an afterlife. Maybe it was just a turn of phrase not intended to be taken literally, but obviously no one can know such a thing "for a fact." One can believe strongly in an afterlife but knowledge and facts have nothing to do with that. And indeed, that's what faith is all about anyway.

There was a famous case in the US when a self-styled psychic publicly declared that a young girl who had gone missing was actually dead, and her body was somewhere in water. (As an aside, why are they always "in water" or "near water"?) Actually, she had been abducted by a lunatic and spent a decade captive in his house, together with two other women who were also kidnapped as teenagers. They finally managed to escape. But I can only imagine all the additional pain that this woman's family had to go through based on an inaccurate "psychic" reading if they believed that the "vision" was true.

"It's true we'll never know for certain whether there is an afterlife or not"
A simple, and conclusive experiment would be to observe a dead person, and see if their condition improves. Previous studies have shown that sadly they remain dead. No talking, no moving furniture or predicting the future, nothing.

It's true we'll never know for certain whether there is an afterlife or not. That is to say, when we get there we'll find out, or if there isn't one we'll never know we didn't So you might as well go on believing there is one and it's good, as there's not a lot you can do about it either way. You can't make it exist by believing, nor cause it to disappear through lack of faith.

So believe what you like by all means, but clinging on to belief in something that is proven to be false is just delusional. And those commercial "psychics" have been debunked, their techniques exposed, over and over. Sorry. I don't know, will probably never know, whether anyone really can talk to the dead, though logic suggests not, but I do know those people on the telly aren't. And chances are that anyone you pay money to who offers to put you in touch with your late parent can't either. It's quite disrespectful to their memories IMO.

Much of the skill is in the way things are said.
"your dead father, his name wasn't John was it?"
"yes it was." "I thought so."
"no it wasn't" "I thought not"

I once saw Sally Morgan on tv. She waved her hand from her neck to her waist and said "he died form something in this area." Very good. That includes heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach, in fact about 95% of everything people die from!

But the women said "no, he had leg ulcer that went septic!" So Sally paused and then, waving her hand aver her midriff said "but he had trouble breathing, at the end." And the woman was ecstatic. "Yes he did, he really did!"

Well of course he had trouble breathing, he was dying ffs! Trouble breathing is a pretty standard symptom of death!

Honestly, you couldn't make it up. And the audience, sadly 95% women, were lapping up the drivel. Embarrassing.

Meerka, I knew someone who didn't claim to be psychic but could tell you things you weren't saying. It was really clever and I suspect a part of what cold reading is. An example would me saying to him something like "I've got a friend Jim I sometimes meet for a drink in the pub down the road" and he'd be able to tell you that Jim was ginger and very slim and had trouble with his bunions...and it would all be correct but random and nothing to do with what you were saying other than the subject person.

He said that by the tones and vibrations of the voice he could read into that a description of the person being talked about.

I reckon Derren Brown is able to do something similar.

The trouble with this thread, and all arguments re the supernatural, god v no god, ghosts v no ghosts, is that on one side you have logic, reason, science and rationality, and we're up against make believe, superstition magic powers and total nonsense. And with make believe and nonsense, you get to move the goalposts all the time, whereas we're stuck with those pesky laws of physics and nature.

So we can never win, because the psychics can say the spirits don't work that way, or ghosts don't come out when the tv cameras are there, or god put that false evidence there as a test of faith.

Arguing against stuff like this is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

You can't have it both ways, Rose. They are either out there pinpointing the locations of murder victims for the police, or getting confused and jumbled messages from crowds of spirits.....

Yep- if psychics could give the police accurate information why not use them all the time? Why isn't it just a routine part of police work? And what about the missing AirAsia plane. You would have thought that the anguish sent out by those poor people would have alerted every psychic on the planet. And Madeline Mccann? the Brady/Hindley victims?

I don't know that much about psychics but I would never expect anything to be too explicit. From what I've read they often get jumbled messages coming from many different spirits at once. It can't be easy.

I can't believe some people are still fighting the "psychics help the police" corner. It's a lie.

Why don't psychics all independently ask Jill Dando who shot her, and then when Jill gives her answer, they can all write anonymously to the police with the name.

When the police receive a whole load of tip offs from various people, each giving the same name, they would have to investigate.

Honestly, it's beyond comprehension why on Earth otherwise seemingly intelligent people fall for this guff.

So psychic ability only works if there isn't an objective observer watching? Bit of a coincidence, surely?

that isn't what I mean at all. Wrong picture.

If (if) there is anything in it in for example fackinall's abilities beyond cold reading, then just maybe it works by person-to-person contact. We don't know the mechanisms of kangeroo care, except that the person-to-person physical contact seems to be a powerful force. Kangeroo care is much more easily recorded because it happens much more often than any real psychic ability. If it was as rare as any true psychic ability must be then it might be as hard to measure its influence.

lipsync agreed, 99.9999% of 'psychic' ability is not real. I'm just not sure if that 0.0001% is or not - as said, everything tested so far indicates most is not real. But does that exclude the possibility that a tiny fraction of 'ability' is real?

one of the problems with testing things like ondansetron in preg women is that it's so difficult due to the practicalities. You can't do double blind tests. You can't put them in a lab for long and individual circumstances and responses vary so much. That's the point I'm trying to make.

The other point is that have any reasonably well administered longitudinal studies been done? I havent heard of any (not that I've really looked). But things have to be measured in the appropriate way for them, and that seems more like it'll get an accurate result than anything else. Until that sort of case study has been ruled out, I'm not sure that claims that it objectively doesn't exist can be any more reliable than claims that it does ... at the far end of the bell curve at least.

Anyway not sure I have anythign more to add. Happy discussing =)

As if the police are going to publicly acknowledge that they get help from psychics

But why wouldn't they, Rose, if psychics are credible and reliable sources of information?

it seems to me that there is a possibility that if people are generally happy to believe that eg dogs have a greater sense of smell than humans (scientifically proven) hence they know when their owner is coming home, perhaps people who claim to be psychic just have better attuned senses than 'normal' people.

FWIW, fackinell has been the epitome of graciousness on this thread IMO.

I've never been to a psychic, don't really want to - but I am sure there is more out there than we already know and can prove.