One hundred and ten years ago, German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen announced his discovery of an invisible form of radiation that could make photographs of bones and organs inside a living human body. At first, many scientists called the discovery of "X-rays" a hoax, but when the skeptics put Roentgen's claims to the test, they quickly were convinced about one of the greatest discoveries in science and medicine. Indeed, just six years after his discovery, Roentgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics.Now comes a teenage girl from Saransk, Russia, who claims to have X-ray-like vision, which lets her see inside of human bodies, to make diagnoses that often are more accurate than those of doctors. First widely hailed in Russia as "the girl with X-ray eyes," 17-year-old Natasha Demkina has a growing following of patients, doctors, journalists, and others who are convinced her powers are real.In March 2004, the producer of a Discovery Channel documentary on Natasha asked the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and the affiliated Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH) to scientifically test the young woman's claims. In response, CSICOP research fellows Ray Hyman, Ph.D. and Richard Wiseman, Ph.D., and I designed a preliminary test for judging whether her abilities warranted further, study.

After Natasha, her mother, her agent, and the producer agreed to the test rules, we all flew to New York for filming the test on the City College of New York campus.Dr. Hyman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, and Dr. Wiseman, professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, have extensive experience in testing people who claim paranormal powers. I served more than nine years as an associate editor and investigative reporter for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

seems like supermans long lost sister.

If she can't pass a simple test like that; there is no way that she is legit. Yet another psychic bites the dust...

I find it funny that the mom claim 100% accuracy, up until she was actually tested in a way that would be able to be confirmed...Seeing mucus in the lungs or sand in the kidney is fine and dandy, but there is no way to confirm such a thing.

I will be sticking with my good old fashioned MD thankyouverymuch...

Well you dont see her for treatment or diagnosis, Just the "LAYING ON OF THE HANDS". Heck, Some people would pay $50- US just for that.


AND SOME DO!

There have been countless stories of Natasha's readings, that are said to be true. Now when she is finally tested in a controlled environment in the States, she fails. Was her failure caused by lack of concentration? Or was her performance in cold-reading revealed?
See the contradiction? How can a man have a normal skull and yet be missing a section of his skull with a metal plate as a replacement?

A writer's error? or the Interpreters?

I need a better article that'll make it easier for us to understand that she doesn't have X-Ray Vision. The article was written in a confusing way.

She said she 'saw' a metal plate and a missing skull section on a person who in reality has a normal skull and no metal plate or missing skull section.

No error there but your own.

After watching "The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes" I am appalled at the portrayal of Natasha Demkina. CSICOP researchers obviously had no intention of ever accepting her as genuine. The documentary was good in that it showed the one-sided anti-scientific bias and frequently misleading statements of the "scientists" doing the test, but it lacked in that there was no exposure of these flaws from other scientists. There are many available that have complained about the Draconian measures of CSICOP to debunk all acts of the paranormal, no matter how astronomically unlikely the subjects' results.

This girl was asked to diagnose 7 people with 7 different medical conditions. There are several problems with this kind of test, but accepting it as legit, there are two important issues:

1. Natasha had no scientific advocate. She told the examiners that she could not diagnose a removed appendix or a missing esophagus. To this the examiners bamboozled her by saying, "no problem, you can get two wrong." What they did not say is that it is impossible to get only 1 wrong in a test like this. You either get them all right or you get 2 or more wrong.

2. They ignored the true mathematical probability of success. The test required that she get at least 5 out of 7. Even if all 7 cases were cases she might be able to deduce, the odds of success would be 1 in 229. This is well beyond statistically significant. Four out of 7 would have been a more reasonable statistical threshold at odds of 1 in 55. That is less than a 2% chance of success. And, she did it!

Also, given that there were actually TWO people in the test group with missing appendixes, CSICOP says "see, we gave her two chances to get it right". Again, their bias is showing, as it is just as likely that this variance from what she was told caused her to choose the person who was different of the three remaining, which of course meant she got it wrong. Remember, she had never done anything like this test before, and had already said she could not diagnose a missing appendix.

Excluding the appendix and esophagus subjects means that she got 4 out of 5. The odds of doing so, with 7 subjects to choose from, are 1 in 229, which is the same as the 5 out of 7 that CSICOP required for the test to be a success.

As a statistician, I find her results very interesting and worthy of additional study.

Does this girl have X-Ray eyes? No. That is what some newspaper used to describe her so it could sell more papers. Does this girl have an ability to diagnose medical disorders without the use of medical equipment like MRI's and X-ray machines? From the result of only one test, there appears to be a strong indication that she does. More testing is required to be certain.

I would like to see a follow-up to this story, addressing the bias of the examiners and pointing out the results as a success. This girl could have an amazing talent and it deserves more testing and potentially study, not blind ridicule.

Thanks MathWiz for pointing out what should be obvious to any unbiased observer. Hard to find many of those in the world these days. I was troubled by the researcher's obvious lack of understanding of--even simple openness to--the girl's process. How can you expect to study a thing if you don't even credit it enough to consider what the actual process behind it might be?

Too often psychic abilities are "tested" as arbitrary magical events, spontaneous super powers with no context. The scientist's chiding comment that the girl should have been able to "see" the metal plate because such a thing should have been "obvious" betrays his materialistic bias. I would have loved to ask him what lead him to the notion that a metal plate would be more obvious to the girl's psychic awareness than the other conditions. The big problem is that the forces that define and determine the success or failure of psychic awareness are every bit as unknown to science as the mechanism of psychic awareness itself. If there are enough "unknowns" things can't help looking pretty random.

Beyond the statistical bias and bad science exposed by MathWiz, there is a phenomenon I've observed which further interferes with getting useful results. I once won hundreds of thousands of dollars in play money playing roulette at a Microsoft Christmas party. I got the exact winning number five times and got next to the right number something like fifteen times. My bets would follow the winning number around the table, getting closer and closer until I'd get it. I really freaked out the woman working the wheel and attracted a small crowd. So why don't I go to Vegas and become a billionaire, right? Because personal desire absolutely short-circuits my psychic gift. If I want something badly enough, I can't see a thing about it.

This is pretty standard with readers, axiomatic even: desire is the enemy of awareness. (After that party though, I was awfully tempted, but I've never had so much money that I wouldn't care if I won or lost. I'd be happy to risk someone else's money, if they'd like. You could keep all the winnings, promise.) This is one of the reasons I don't go looking for a scientist to test my abilities; my desire to prove something would interfere with the results. Any practicing psychic is gonna have a pretty vested interest in proving something to the scientist. Whenever I have interfered with the lives of others uninvited, tried to get them to let me read them, for instance, "'cause it would be good for 'em" it's turned out badly. Being a busy-body really gets in the way of my gift, so I don't do it. So I gotta wait for the scientists to knock on my door. So far, they haven't.