What just happened?! I don't know what to make of this.

[Believers]

I've had the strangest experience tonight and I don't know how to explain it.

I volunteer with a charity, and tonight myself and 3 others from there went out to a pub I've never been to before for a pre-Christmas drink.

At one point I went to the toilet and as I was on my way out a woman was on her way in. We exchanged pleasantries and went on our separate ways.

About 5 minutes after I'd joined my friends, this same woman came up to us, and sat next to me on the banquette thing. She took my hand and said she had to tell me something.

It was all a bit odd, but I figured she'd maybe had a drink, and I had no objection to her joining us. But then she said to me that she had xxx with her and he wanted me to know that he was happy, that he loved me and that it was time I moved on. She was crying as she said this and I started crying too because xxx was the name of my late dh.

I have no idea how she could've known any of this. None of us knew her, I'd never been to that pub before, dh's name isn't wildly unusual but not that common either, why did she come and find me after our brief encounter in the toilet etc.

I can't get my head around it! Any ideas?!

Dont you? How can that possibly be true? All the encounters like this are genuine mediums who have an accurate message to give to a random stranger? You believe that?

Mediums and fortune tellers can amaze me with insights that I can't explain, if they are good at what they do.

What they can't do is really communicate with dead uns or see the future. That's just silly!

"All"?

how many have you heard of in your whole life? I can only think of about 3 that people known to me have said....in all my years on the planet.

there seems to be a lot of aggression on this thread now.

Bye OP. Take care.

Someone cuddle the cats for me. <backs out slowly>

When I was walking home from school one day, at the age of eleven, I was chatting with a schoolfriend in an eleven year old way and we were talking about weird things that could happen. I casually mentioned to him that I could get home to discover my mum had to leave that day for another country where my grandad who lived in said country, had died the night before. And of course, you are all away ahead of me here, that is exactly what happened. I've had a few other similar things over the years.

I'm still not a believer, it was a coincidence, a weird and highly unlikely coincidence but a coincidence nevertheless, as I said earlier in the thread, the chances of winning the lottery are infintesmially small, and yet people win the lottery on a weekly basis.

The job of anyone trying to argue being approached by a stranger and being given specific information was a supernatural event is that first they would have to explain why it couldn't have been coincidence?

So many people mentioning the Randi experiment. If you read about it it ended a long time ago and apparently they kept moving the parameters to make it impossible to win.

What do the science lovers have to say about so that can read our thoughts? That is currently being used to help disabled people move prosthesis using their mind? That this AI is being proposed to be used in the workplace? It isn’t even particularly new.

If we know AI can read minds, why is it so impossible to believe people also can?
www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/mind-reading-ai-creates-images-from-your-thoughts/
www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-read-mind-attraction-b1815328.html

The criteria was always the same. The only rule that changed was to eliminate the more obvious time wasters. It was the challengers that frequently wanted the rules changing, using the special pleading fallacy.

I am still interested in people’s thoughts on AI reading minds as standard. If science can find a way to read minds, is it so impossible to believe that people also can??

Tell you what, take you proof to the judges for one of these prizes, every one so far unclaimed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal

Then come back and tell us what they have to say about it.

It doesn't read your mind. 😂 It uses technology and interprets electrical impulses in the brain. People who pretend to be mediums are not highly developed technology, they are human, just like you and me.

Playing devils advocate here, if you'd died in those circumstances and at that age, the most simplistic and clear (to a child) description is of a mountain falling on the school. So I dont think "actually it was sliding slurry engulfing" particularly debunks what was said by a 3 yr old.

So it could have gone like this:

Random woman does this all the time, usually spots people out having a drink in the pub.

OP comes in with mates and they all start chatting, woman is sitting nearby and hears names, workplaces, other clue - starts googling on phone.

OP’s name comes up, which leads to other links which leads to a story about DH death (condolences OP).

all details and names there.

She sees you go to the loo and follows so you will have a seemingly random encounter.

She approaches you after saying she’s had a message.

She doesn’t want paying - however, enough people may have seen what happened to think, I’ll go back to pub and hire her for a proper reading etc etc.

Thats how it would happen in my future bestseller anyway.

To answer the question of (if these people are indeed confidence tricksters) how people don’t remember all the “blank” runs, I imagine it could go something like this;
-”Barry is worried about the cats”
-”Sorry, what??”
-“Oh my gosh, I do apologies,, I thought you were someone else.”

and poof! just like that you’ve forgotten it.
I mean, it doesn’t sound believable, but then, none of it sounds believable.

Not only does the AI read your mind it can draw a picture of what you are thinking about with incredible accuracy. www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/mind-reading-ai-creates-images-from-your-thoughts/ If you read this link or Google it is well known that AI can see exactly what you are thinking about. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t have proof- which I linked to in my initial post.

Anyway, same question - if AI can read your thoughts why is it so hard to believe people also can???

I wonder if those people who are so convinced by the mediums who 'couldn't possibly have known that' also think that close-up magic and conjuring tricks are... actual magic?

It is exactly like that. We all ignore and forget loads of random irrelevant crap every day. We also hear what we want to hear, and see what we want to see.

After my ex-bf died (in sudden, unexpected and very upsetting circumstances), I used to see him semi-regularly walking in a crowd of people. It was absolutely him - his characteristic walking style, his unusual height, his jacket, his smile, everything. And of course he wasn't actually there. But I saw him as clearly as if he had really had been. If I had been the sort of person who insists on this sort of thing, I would have said he was definitely there as a ghost/manifestation/whatever. He wasn't.

It doesn't take a bloody psychoanalyst to work that one out.

Well I don't but I can't explain how the psychic knew my sister's wedding wouldn't happen here, my poor wasted bridesmaid dress, that she would marry abroad and no family would attend. We laughed about it but 2 months later it all came true.

I don't understand it, I'm not at all woo but it did happen and it is a bit weird.

I still could. I still have her notes. It’s easy to prove what sehe said happened. But that’s not science. She’d have to show she could repeat it. Otherwise it could be coincidence even if it’s pretty random and improbable.

But can you explain how Paul Daniels or David Blaine do their tricks?

Nor can I. It looks impossible. But that doesn't mean it's actually magic.

Derren Brown DOES explain how he does (most) things, and for that reason is very much worth watching on TV and seeing live. The things he does have people absolutely swearing that he is definitely psychic and there couldn't be any other explanation. Even, in one programme (I think it's 'Messiah'), a professional medium who says that she can actually sense his psychic power.

One morning I’m my early twenties I was living alone and my button came off my brand new trousers from Primark. I was skint and thought to myself ‘bloody hell I’ll have to buy a new pair now’ … and didn’t think anything of it. I left them in my room, wore something else, went to work and didn’t mention it to anyone.

Later in the day a colleague was going to a medium and asked me to come along. I did and had a reading. She claimed she had my grandad with her. Old-fashioned and practical in his day. As I was leaving, she said ‘Grandad says you should just sew the button back on’.

He was right too. And I did. I had not told a single soul about the trousers that morning.

*in

How long were you with the 'medium' for?

How many other things did she say? How many other statements did he pass on to you?

Obviously you remember the one 'hit' that happened to coincide with something that happened recently. A pretty generic one, but if you deliver 30 or 40 generic statements, at least one of them is likely to apply to the person sitting in front of you - who's already shown their willingness and desire to believe by being there.

This is a good basic starting point which covers topics such as shotgunning, warm reading, the Forer effect etc.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

A more interesting in-depth picture about how 'mediums' work
med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2016/12/KEL13JNMD-2011-Mediumship-Paper.pdf

I've got no idea how they do it, or did it in Paul Daniels case, but I know they are tricks.

With the psychic I saw how could she know my sister's wedding couldn't go ahead in England, how could she know she would travel abroad (to her future husband's country and marry there) If it is a trick it is a bloody clever one. Do you think she actually started the insurrection in his country that meant he couldn't leave? I suppose that is one possibility. Guessing I had a sister isn't a big jump, guessing she was getting married isn't that unlikely given the age I was, guessing she was marrying from another country is a bit more of a chance but the cancelling the wedding, having to get married abroad etc seems a bit of a stretch to me.

If she caused it I am deeply upset as it was my one chance in life to be a bridesmaid and it couldn't happen. Like Miss Havisham I sit and gaze at my unworn dress now draped in cobwebs. (not really but I actually wish I had kept it)

I've got no idea how they do it, or did it in Paul Daniels case, but I know they are tricks.

But you know they are tricks because they tell you they are tricks. What they do appears impossible. I can't explain how they do their tricks and nor can you. Doesn't mean it's actually supernatural. Same goes for the 'psychic' in your story.

In some cases (like the grandad with the button above) it's more obvious, even with such sparse details, that it's very basic cold reading and confirmation bias. Most people in their early 20s are likely to have lost a grandparent, less likely to have lost a parent. Most people of that grandparents' generation are likely to be practical and to nag their grandchildren to do things like sew on buttons, find things, etc. The vast majority of the statements in that reading won't have had any relevance so they are forgotten. Just one fairly generic statement out of 50 or 100 will chime with one of the 1000 little things that has happened recently, and when the person (who has shown their susceptibility by going to the reading) goes away, all they remember is the one thing that did happen to chime with a recent event, not the 99 that didn't (or the 999 events that the 'medium' didn't refer to).

But even the cleverer and more sophisticated ones are just tricks. It's a combination of access to information, guesswork, your memory playing tricks, all sorts of things. Try reading the Wikipedia page on Cold Reading, and watching the Derren Brown programmes. He does and 'knows' things that seem equally impossible. I've seen him live too and it is astonishing.

Science/technology are tools we use to do things we can't do ourselves like fly, perform fantastically difficult calculations or make Angel Delight. It's a logical fallacy to suggest we should be able to do something that a sophisticated tool/device can do - that's rather the point of them.