Research Program / Claims / mediumship-1

Mediumistic abilities can be developed through practice and preparation (e.g., practicing in trance states), and individuals can exhibit different types of external manifestations, such as ectoplasm.

灵媒能力可通过练习和准备来发展（例如在出神状态中实践），且个体能展现不同类型的外显形式，如物质化（ectoplasm）。

Concept mediumship · Domain Trans-Lifetime Personality and Consciousness Continuity · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Conduct a pre-registered, multi-center longitudinal randomized trial: approximately 400 beginners are randomly assigned to Ouija board, crystal gazing, trance training, and an expectancy-matched active control, with 12 weeks of training and 12 months of follow-up. Monthly measurements of absorption, interoception, sensory processing sensitivity, and Big Five personality, along with a no-feedback, blind-rated hidden target task; the primary endpoint is the change in objective accuracy on a held-out test set. Self-reported experience, target accuracy, and materialization are analyzed separately; materialization additionally undergoes material examination per mediumship-11.
Suggested paper title
Training, Expectancy, and Individual Differences in Unusual Perceptual Experiences: A Pre-registered Longitudinal Randomized Trial
What it would overturn
If training can reliably improve target identification accuracy after excluding conventional information channels, this would revise the information acquisition hypothesis that “practice can only improve performance in existing sensory, reasoning, and memory channels.”
Candidate labs / funders
Tanya Marie Luhrmann; Michael Lifshitz; Corina U. Greven; Institute of Noetic Sciences
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Proposes trainability and performance heterogeneity, but does not provide training dosage, success rates, or which personality corresponds to which ability; predictions for subjective experience are not more specific than learning and expectancy models, while materialization is an additional testable prediction independent of the main claim.
Note
The full table is graded based on complete claims; untested indicates that no direct test of the key specific proposition was found in this search, without proving that no one ever studied it historically; related evidence does not equal support for the original claim; all sample sizes are planned magnitudes, and power must be recalculated using the smallest meaningful effect and clustering structure; paper_title entries are proposed titles.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim mediumship-1, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/mediumship-1