What is a paranormal medium?

Answer 1

The term "medium" as applied in a paranormal context means a person with specific abilties. A medium is usally thought to be able to communicate with "discarnates". A discarnate is the name for an intelligent entity that has no physical body. The term parapsychologists use for this ability is "After Death Communication" or ADC. Persons who claim to be "psychic" generally are thought to have abilties including thought transference among living individuals (telepathy) or seeing, hearing or knowing about events (clairvoyance, clairaudience or clairsentience) in the present, past (retrocognition) or future (precognition). People who believe in survival of bodily death, such as Spritualists for example, say that mediumship proves that survival in fact occurs. While many examples of interesting "cross-correspondences" have been documented in which a single discarnate seems to have sent similar or related messages to several mediums that do not know each other, there is a logical problem proving mediumship and survival. It is possible that mediumistic communications are the result of ADC. But, putting aside fraud for the moment, it is also possible that precognitive or retrocognitive clairvoyance, clairaudience or clairsentience could also explain mediums' abilities. Suppose that had a deceased Aunt Edith. You went to a medium and you were told that your Aunt Edith was speaking. Suppose further that the medium told you some details about Aunt Edith such as a pet name she had for her husband which you did not know at the time. You checked after the sitting and discovered this was in fact correct. How might the medium have known this? Again putting aside fraud, the medium might have been in contact with Aunt Edith. However the medium might also have witnessed the moment that Aunt Edith and her husband Uncle Fred agreed on this word or the moment in the future when it was discovered from some other living family member that this information was correct. While the alternate explanations are almost as astounding as the notion of After Death Communication, they cannot be fully dismissed. To control for fraud in laboratory experiments, the sitter and medium are allowed no contact and do not even know each other in any way. Statements from sittings are often combined and sitters are asked to score the statements. Success occurs when a significant number of statements belonging to the correct sitters are recognized by those sitters from a larger comingled collection of statements. Guessing is controlled for by calculating the random chance expectation of guessing and determining if the medium's performance has exceeded that expectation, which in general it does.

Answer 2

A paranormal medium is a person who claims to have the ability to communicate with spirits or entities from the spirit world. They may use different techniques such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, or psychometry to connect with the spiritual realm and convey messages from the deceased to the living.