Parapsychology

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Parapsychology has been defined in several ways. The Parapsychological Association, an organization affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, defines it as "the scientific and scholarly study of certain unusual events associated with human experience," where "unusual" is means "scientifically anomalous." Elaborating, they state:

These anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP ... , PK, and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation. Most parapsychologists today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms, although it is not clear whether they can be fully understood without significant (some might say revolutionary) expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge. Other researchers take the stance that existing scientific models of perception and memory are adequate to explain some or all parapsychological phenomena. (links not in original)

History and claims

Main articles: History of parapsychology and Claims of parapsychology

Status of the field

Many professional scientists study parapsychology. It is an interdisciplinary field, attracting psychologists, physicists, engineers, and biologists, as well as those from other sciences. One organization involved in the field, the Parapsychological Association is an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). . At present (2006) there are about two hundred and seventy five members in the Parapsychological Association. As with all areas of study, parapsychology is a field which encompasses scientists, in-depth but non-professional students, novices, the intellectually unsophisticated, and the mentally ill. However, the mentally ill are probably more prevalent in the field of parapsychology, because the mentally ill may turn to parapsychological explanations for their symptoms in an attempt to prove that they are not delusional.

As a general rule, while trained scientists may not be as likely to believe in parapsychological phenomena as the general public, they are far from monolithic in their disbelief. Surveys of this group are rare, but in their 1994 paper in the Psychological Bulletin entitled Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton quote a 1979 survey:

A survey of more than 1,100 college professors in the United States found that 55% of natural scientists, 66% of social scientists (excluding psychologists), and 77% of academics in the arts, humanities, and education believed that ESP is either an established fact or a likely possibility. The comparable figure for psychologists was only 34%. Moreover, an equal number of psychologists declared ESP to be an impossibility, a view expressed by only 2% of all other respondents (Wagner; Monnet, 1979).

Because parapsychology touches on areas of profound human ignorance such as physics and the nature of consciousness, and also areas of deep meaning such as religion, superstition, and traditional beliefs, it is extremely controversial. This controversy has taken on a very emotional tone, with skeptics of parapsychology feeling besieged by a wave of superstition. Skeptics have attacked scientists involved in parapsychology as frauds and pseudoscienctists who bias their results to fulfill their emotional needs . Proponents of parapsychology have responded that the skeptics are promoting "scientism" rather than real science by acting as if results which contradict established knowledge cannot be real:

A characteristic of many scoffers is their pejorative characterization of proponents as "promoters" and sometimes even the most protoscientific anomaly claimants are labelled as "pseudoscientists" or practitioners of "pathological science." In their most extreme form., scoffers represent a form of quasi-religious Scientism that treats minority or deviant viewpoints in science as heresies (Truzzi, 1996).

Skeptics have responded, in the words of Carl Sagan that "…extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Parapsychologists riposte that they have attained levels of proof which are more than sufficient to prove their results in any other field of science. And so the controversy goes.

Another factor which makes parapsychology highly controversial is that there is no theory which can account for parapsychological results. Psi seems to be able to establish informational links both to the past and the future. Its effects do not seem to drop off according to the inverse square law, as with other physical forces. And information gathered using psi does not seem to require energy to facilitate its transfer. Also, there does not seem to be any limit on the complexity of information gained by psi. For instance, a scientist would require not just extremely accurate and complex recording apparatus to read a mind, but would also require extremely complex interpretation abilities. However, if parapsychological results are real, it seems as if humans can easily interpret the transfer of information from one mind to another, and also from the environment to the mind.

Parapsychology is also very threatening to those who believe, with a great deal of justification, that to admit that psi exists would encourage religion, superstition, and psychic frauds, as all these are based either on manifestations of psi, or on reports which are hard to distinguish from it. Skeptics fear that this would undermine the foundations of science and reason.

Parapsychology has been subjected to innumerable skeptical attacks. These are to be differentiated from useful scientific criticism, both by their hostile tone, and the lack of scientific reasoning . One rather insignificant example is that, as of October 20, 2006, The Skeptic's Dictionary defined parapsychology thus:

Parapsychology is the search for paranormal phenomena, such as ESP and psychokinesis. Most scientists try to explain observable phenomena. Parapsychologists try to observe unexplainable phenomena...

This is an unscientific attack, because it assumes a priori that parapsychological results cannot ever be explained (that is to say, described in such a way that parapsychological manifestations can be accurately predicted), in which case parapsychology must be a pseudoscience. It would have been better to say that Most scientists try to explain observable phenomena. Parapsychologists try to observe unexplained phenomena. However, this would have put parapsychology in the same realm as many other fields of science, in which data is gathered on as-yet unexplained phenomena. The quotation also implies that parapsychological results are actually not observations of anything substantial, else parapsychology would not be merely the "search" for paranormal phenomena. Such attacks, while unscientific, do make exceedingly good soundbites, which seem quite adequate to convince many people (including apparently the skeptics themselves) that the skeptical position has truth on its side. Parapsychology also has an enormous number of unscientific thinkers among the ranks of its unscholarly proponents. The difference is that unscientific skeptics of parapsychology often specifically shroud themselves in the mantle of scientific objectivity.

There have been a huge number of parapsychological experiments performed under controlled laboratory conditions. According to Dr. Dean Radin,

In 1993, the late parapsychologist Charles Honorton from the University of Edinburgh considered what skeptics of psi experiments used to claim, and what they no longer claimed. He demonstrated that virtually all of the skeptical arguments used to explain away psi over the years had been resolved through design of new experiments. This does not mean the experiments conducted today are “perfect,” because there is nothing perfect in the empirical sciences. But it does mean that the methods available today satisfy the most rigorous skeptical requirements for providing “exceptional evidence.” As we’ve seen, such experiments have been conducted, with successful results.

Many of these experiments have been done with the aid of skeptics of parapsychology, and also with the aid of professional conjurors, in order to eliminate as much as possible all controversies concerning the analysis of the data gathered, and to prevent fraud on the part of the subjects. According to parapsychologist George Hansen,

Although the public tends to view magicians as debunkers, the opposite is more the case. Birdsell (1989) polled a group of magicians and found that 82% gave a positive response to a question of belief in ESP. Truzzi (1983) noted a poll of German magicians that found that 72.3% thought psi was probably real. Many prominent magicians have expressed a belief in psychic phenomena. …. It is simply a myth that magicians have been predominantly skeptical about the existence of psi.

Some experiments have tested the ability to use ESP to get above-average scores when guessing targets such as cards, pictures, or videos. Other experiments have tested the ability to foretell future events, both consciously, and unconsciously by using electrodes to measure galvanic skin responses to future stimuli. There have also been many experiments testing the ability to influence [[random number generator|random number generators. Many of these experiments have had positive results, with subjects scoring significantly above chance. This significance, when analyzed using statistics, has often been astronomically high. However, such results only seem impressive to those educated in statistics, because the results have been only a few percentage points above chance. For instance, where chance = 25%, a psychic might score somewhere between 27% and 32%. Some of the studies have returned results which are not significantly above chance (which is defined as odds greater than 20 to 1). Others, especially those performed by experimenters and subjects who disbelieve in psi, have scored significantly below chance (this is called psi-missing). When results of these studies are combined in meta-analyses, they return astronomically high results in favor of the existence of psi (or some unknown factor). This is so even when common statistical tools are used to rule out "file drawer" cases which might occur when insignificant results are not reported. Despite these results, however, parapsychology remains highly controversial, due to the lack of a theory which explains its results.

Some skeptics believe that there is a tendency for parapsychology researchers to select "good days" and discard "bad days" for the people in the test samples. But the "Theory of Runs" maintains that the chance of a long run of successes (or failures) increases drastically when the periods of success or failure are selected as part of a larger sample. See: Feller, William (1968), An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, vol. I, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, p. 86. For a more recent discussion of the theory and the "arcsine law" see or

Andrew Greeley, a Catholic priest and a sociologist from the University of Arizona, studied surveys on belief in ESP from 1978 through 1987, and he also studied the mental health of believers in ESP. The surveys he studied showed that from 1978 through 1987, the number of American adults who reported psychic experiences rose from 58% to 67% (clairvoyance and contacts with the dead were reported by 25% of his respondents). According to Greeley, the elderly, women, widows and widowers, and the conventionally religious report a higher incidence of such experiences. He also tested the psychological well-being of people reporting mystical experiences with the "Affect Balance Scale" and found that people reporting mystical experiences received top scores. Greeley summarized his findings by writing:

People who've tasted the paranormal, whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement.

A few parapsychologists are skeptics, for example Chris French and his colleagues at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in London, and Richard Wiseman and his colleagues at the Perrott-Warrick Research Unit in the Psychology Department of the University of Hertfordshire, both of which units include individuals who are members of the Parapsychological Association. These researchers do not approach the field with a belief in the paranormal, but are rather interested in the purely psychological aspects of those who report paranormal experiences, along with the study of the psychology of deception, hallucination, etc. These researchers also have provided their own guidelines and input to other parapsychologists for the design of experiments and how to properly test those who claim psychic abilities. While some of these guidelines have been useful, many have suffered from a naive understanding of scientific practice in general and in parapsychology in particular, from a distorted view of the methodology actually in use in the field, and the unfortunate habit of some skeptics of making sweeping statements about the applicability of counter-hypotheses to lines of research without actually investigating the appropriateness of those counter-hypotheses to the details at hand. (See, for example a mostly-positive review of one of these guidelines written by skeptics.)

The field of psi research is not without high level support, with a number of eminent scientists being of the belief that the field is worthy of funding and study. Key among these would be Nobel Laureates Brian Josephson and Wolfgang Pauli, as well as Hans Eysenck, Robert G Jahn, and Rupert Sheldrake.

Interpretation of the evidence

Scientists who support parapsychology research hold that there is at least a small amount of data from properly controlled experiments that can be trusted for a small number of psi phenomena. Some of these scientists hold that this evidence is not definitive, but suggestive enough to warrant further research . Others believe that a great deal of evidence has been collected, which, if it addressed more conventional phenomena, would be sufficient to provide proof.

Common criticisms of research

Many people, especially like John Beloff and Stephen E. Braude, cannot easily dismiss the entirety of all the positive accounts – many of which came from scientists and conjurors of their day. Many began as skeptics - but then changed their minds to become believers and supporters of psychic phenomena when they encountered the inexplicable; and so believe that continued research is justified. Easily recovered critical historical research reveals these individuals were certainly out of their league when it came to the close up deceptions of fraudulent mediums and adept charlatans. (Podmore, 1910 & Price and Dingwall, 1975)

Other parapsychologists, such as Dean Radin, and supporters such as statistician Jessica Utts, take the stance that the existence of certain psi phenomena has been reasonably well established in recent times through repeatable experiments that have been replicated dozens to hundreds of times at labs around the world. They refer to meta-analyses of psi experiments that conclude that the odds against chance (null hypothesis) of experimental results far exceeds that commonly required to establish results in other fields, sometime by orders of magnitude. Gifted subjects scored 2% above chance. (Utts and Josephson, 1996)

Skeptics say that this is an old argument (eg. see Rawcliffe 1952, pages 441 & 442). For meta-analyses to be useful, the question of whether or not each of these experiments themselves have been efficiently carried out must be addressed. In the unsophisticated "language of the street" this would be known as "garbage in garbage out". All of the early experiments that were conducted by noted men of science in Italy and Germany with Eusapia Palladino "proved positive".

Other objections

There are a variety of other objections to parapsychology as well.

Parapsychology as Taboo

Some believe that paranormal phenomena should not be studied. There are various resasons for this attitude, among them that the subject is forbidden by religious doctrine, promotes superstition among the public by giving scientific credence to bunk, or opens the investigators to some sort of "spiritual attack". Parapsychology is also seen as a taboo subject in science and the academy, and individuals who show an interest in studying psychic phenomena, even from a skeptical point of view, often find themselves losing or being pushed out of employment, or denied funding. Anthropologist of science, David J. Hess, has written on this topic.

Parapsychology as a Danger to Society

Some believe that parapsychology should not be pursued because it somehow represents a danger to society. As is stated in the Y2000 NSF report Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding: Belief in the Paranormal or Pseudoscience:

Other facts

German psychiatrist Hans Berger originally used the electroencephalograph (EEG) on humans in 1929 as a tool to study whether telepathy might be explained by brain waves. (Beyerstein, B. L. 1999)

The first and only Ph.D. in Parapsychology awarded by any American university, was the University of California, Berkeley awarding the PhD to Dr Jeffrey Mishlove in 1980. Subsequently some activists unsuccessfully lobbied the Berkeley administration to revoke the degree. Reportedly, as many as 46 people in the UK have doctorates in parapsychology. However, with the exception of Dr. Mishlove, mentioned above, the so-called "46 people in the UK" have doctorates in other disciplines, principally in psychology, but completed doctoral thesis work which included or were devoted to research projects in parapsychology. Such individuals are also expected to be competent in the disciplines in which they received their degrees. Examples of these individuals include: Dr. Susan Blackmore (it says "PhD in Parapsychology, University of Surrey, 1980" on her webpage CV , though), Dr. Richard Broughton, Dr. Deborah Delanoy, Dr. Serena-Roney Dougall, Dr. Chris Roe, Dr. Simon Sherwood, Dr. Christine Simmonds, Dr. Matthew Smith, Dr. Carl Williams, Dr. Richard Wiseman, among others.

Joseph B. Rhine began examining psychic abilities after hearing, and being deeply impressed, by a lecture given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, about the scientific reality of having established contact with the dead. (Rinn 1950)

Noted Parapsychologists

List of parapsychologists

Critics of parapsychology

References

Parapsychology Foundation. "Definitions of Parapsychology", retrieved October 21, 2006.
Parapsychological Association. "What is the PA? Mission Statement", retrieved October 21, 2006.
Parapsychological Association. "Parapsychology FAQ Page 1: What is parapsychology?", retrieved October 21, 2006.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/MarkBeddow1.11.04.pdf Telepathy, Parapsychology and Psychiatry By Mark Beddow
^ http://twm.co.nz/FAQpara3.htm WHY IS PARAPSYCHOLOGY CHRONICALLY CONTROVERSIAL?
^ The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena by Dean I. Radin Harper Edge, ISBN 0-06-251502-0
http://members.aol.com/ddrasin/zen.html Zen . . . And the Art of Debunkery Revised edition, (C) 1997 by Daniel Drasin
http://skepticalinvestigations.org/anomalistics/perspective.htm Anomalistics The Perspective of Anomalistics By Marcello Truzzi
http://www.angelfire.com/ok/TheDeepSkies/SaganQuotes.html Carl Sagan Quotes
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1996/subtle.htm Subtle Connections: Psi, Grof, Jung, and the Quantum Vacuum By Ervin Laszlo
http://members.aol.com/ddrasin/zen.html Zen . . . And the Art of Debunkery Revised edition, (C) 1997 by Daniel Drasin
Entangled Minds by Dean Radin, Simon & Schuster, Paraview Pocket Books , 2006
Lindorff, D. (2004). Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
Eysenck, H. J. (1998). Intelligence: A new look. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Dunne, J. B. and Jahn, R. G. (2003). Information and uncertainty in remote perception research, Journal of Scientific Exploration
Sheldrake, R. (2003). The sense of being stared at: And other unexplained powers of the human mind. New York: Random House.
Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding: Belief in the Paranormal or Pseudoscience, National Science Foundation, 2000.

External links

Independent research organizations

Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was founded in 1973 by astronaut Edgar Mitchell to explore the frontiers of consciousness through rigorous scientific research.
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The original scientific society founded in London in 1882.
American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR).
Rhine Research Center and Institute for Parapsychology, originally part of Duke University, now an independent research center. The accomplished physicist Irving Langmuir, a founder of many studies in atmospheric electricity and plasma physics, visited Rhine at his laboratory in 1934. Rhine admitted (rather proudly and contentiously) to Langmuir that he had discarded data that was "wrong" because it did not support his belief in extrasensory perception. See Langmuir's 1953 talk Pathological Science at Princeton University
Parapsychology Foundation
Parapsychological Association This organisation has been a member of the AAAS for over 20 years.
International Academy of Consciousness

University research organizations

Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh.
Parapsychology Research Group at Liverpool Hope University.
Global Consciousness Project at Princeton
The VERITAS Research Program at the University of Arizona
Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology Research Unit of Liverpool John Moores University.
Psychology Research Cluster at University College Northampton.
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) at Princeton University.
Division of Personality Studies (DOPS), a unit of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia.
Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit (APRU) at the University of Adelaide.
Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths University of London.
Perrott-Warrick Research Unit in the Psychology Department of the University of Hertfordshire.

Other

Entry on parapsychology in the Skeptic's Dictionary
Dean Radin's A Field Guide to Skepticism from his book The Conscious Universe.
The Project Alpha Experiment
The online Library of Exploratory Science contains the complete text of many of the major peer reviewed journals in parapsychology and psychical research.

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