Shotgunning (cold reading)

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Shotgunning is a technique used by purported psychics and mediums. The psychic gives a huge quantity of information, some of which is certain to be correct.

All of Edgar Cayce, Sylvia Browne, and James Van Praagh have been accused of it. The television psychic John Edward is famous for it.

Martin Gardner cites an example of a Cayce reading from when Cayce's wife had tuberculosis:

... from the head, pains along through the body from the second, fifth and sixth dorsals, and from the first and second lumbar...tie-ups here, floating lesions, or lateral lesions, in the muscular and nerve fibers which supply the lower end of the lung and the diaphragm...in conjunction with the sympathetic nerve of the solar plexus, coming in conjunction with the solar plexus at the end of the stomach....

Cayce used the word lung, and this his followers take as a correct diagnosis; i.e., a psychic "hit."

See also:

• cold reading

External links

• Skeptic's Dictionary on shotgunning (http://skepdic.com/shotgun.html)

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) Shotgunning_(cold_reading) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgunning_(cold_reading)) version history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shotgunning_(cold_reading)&action=history) GNU Free Documentation Lizenz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License) CC-by-sa (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/)

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