Paranormalia

Chris Carter's Science and Psychic Phenomena

I've been having another look at Chris Carter's excellent book Parapsychology and the Skeptics, which I reviewed here. It's out in a new edition with the title Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics. It looks good (although the original was good too).

In a new postscript, Carter says he came to write the book after stumbling across a website devoted to debunking the belief in an afterlife.

Having read several serious books on the subject, I was shocked by the crudity of the author's arguments and by his utter ignorance of the vast amount of research that has been done on the topic over the past 12 years. I sent him an e-mail message, trying to get him to reconsider his dogmatic position, and, to my surprise, he responded with counterarguments. For the next few weeks, we engaged in a debate via e-mail, and I learned much about the so-called "skeptical" mind-set. I realized that it was based upon a certain set of metaphysical assumptions that were not treated as assumptions but as incontrovertible facts; and that it was also based upon an ignorance of certain facts that cast strong doubts on the validity of those assumptions.

I also realized that nothing I could possibly say would ever change his "skeptical" opinion. He had made up his mind, and that was that.

When I first read Carter's book I was impressed with the detail and clarity he brings to the descriptions of ganzfeld and other controversies. This time I've been paying more attention to his treatment of the philosophical challenge raised by psi, which is just as important. It's silly for sceptics to say there's no evidence for psychic functioning, but fair enough that they should have misgivings about how it fits in with established science.

A classic way to deal with the problem is to state that for psi to be true, science would have to be completely turned on its head, or "unravel all the way back to Galileo". I like this idea, like knitting coming undone (I think it comes from Steven Weinberg, or maybe James Alcock.) But intuitively I always thought it was crock. Psi has nothing to say about Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics, optics, chemical interactions, etc. It seems instead to have implications for the underlying basis of all matter, the realm of quantum mechanics, which at present is very imperfectly understood.

The Copenhagen interpretation, which seems to be the most commonly accepted, is that the act of measurement causes the collapse of the wave function into individual particles. The result depends on the observation; it is not a property of the electron itself. But in this interaction, if I understand it correctly, a mechanical device will do the trick just the same as a human observer. This never made any sense to me; it looks like an evasion, of the kind that physicists, not being philosophers, would easily content themselves with.

Carter focuses instead on mathematician John Von Neumann's idea that it's consciousness itself that collapses quantum possibilities into facts. This interpretation is a strictly minority view among physicists (although it was promoted by Eugene Wigner and others). How could consciousness, a product of matter, exert a causal influence on matter?

But it's remarkable, as Carter quotes physicist Nick Herbert saying, that the claim should come 'not from an otherworldly mystic in private meditation but from one of the world's most practical mathematicians deducing the logical consequences of a highly successful and purely materialistic model of the world - the theoretical basis for the billion-dollar computer industry'.

Carter goes on to describe a time-displaced PK experiment by physicist Helmut Schmidt, in which signals from a binary random event generator were recorded simultaneously on two cassette tapes, without anyone listening to them. One tape was given to a subject to listen to, with instructions to produce more 0s or 1s (usually in the form of clicks on the left or right of stereo headphones). When the results were analysed the influence of PK was observed. However the results also matched the other tape, which had been untouched.

One interpretation is that PK reached back in time to when the random events were originally generated. But a more interesting possibility, consistent with the Von Neumann interpretation, and put forward by Schmidt and his co-experimenters, is that events are not physically real until there has been an observation.

From this viewpoint, the PK effort would not have to reach into the past because nature had not yet decided on the outcome before the PK subject, the first observer, saw the result. Then, the PK effort should no longer succeed if we have some other observer look at the pre-recorded data previous to the PK subject's attempt. [An] experiment to study this situation ... has, indeed, reported a blocking of the PK effect by a previous observation.

The Von Neumann theory inevitably tends to invite quasi-theological speculation. What happened before there were conscious observers? If consciousness was needed to create humans - as conscious observers - then God or supernatural beings enter the equation. Carter quotes quantum theorist Euan Squires:

It is remarkable that such ideas should arise from a study of the behavior of the most elementary of systems. That such systems point to a world beyond themselves is a fact that will be loved by all who believe that there are truths of which we know little, that there are mysteries seen only by mystics, and that there are phenomena inexplicable within our normal view of what is possible. There is no harm in this - physics indeed points to the unknown. The emphasis, however, must be on the unknown, on the mystery, on the truths dimly glimpsed, on things inexpressible except in the language of poetry, or religion, or metaphor.

Sceptics could legitimately look for faults in experiments like Schmidt's to save themselves the bother of thinking about any of this. They can also complain - as they do - that quantum mechanics has been misappropriated and misunderstood by the spirituality community. But they would not convince me that there is not a mystery here, or that physicists are the people who really understand what's going on.

More Psi Wars

I reviewed Debating Psychic Experience here a year or so ago, and another review is coming out in the current issue of the SPR Journal. Meanwhile, parapsychologist Chris Roe sends me a copy of a recent exchange in the UK Skeptic magazine.

As usual the critics, represented here by Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman, want parapsychology to declare itself dead. Hyman contests the claim, based on ganzfeld meta-analyses and supported by Dean Radin and Jessica Utts, among others, that the reality of psi has been established. Wiseman argues that parapsychology is by now 'confined to the fringes of academia'.

However Wiseman also generously offers parapychologists 'one last chance' to prove themselves. They need to focus on one or two of the most promising approaches, he says, aiming for replications in a number of different labs, and pre-registering details in order to avoid the problems that arise with retrospective analysis.

If this approach yields a significant and replicable effect then the scientific mainstream would be forced to take the topic seriously and allow parapsychology in from the cold. If it fails the field needs to have the courage to accept the null hypothesis. In short, the time has come to put up or shut up.

Counter-arguments are put forward by Caroline Watt and Chris Roe. Watt, from the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, points out that parapsychology hardly exists as a discipline: there are fewer than 100 researchers working full time in the world, and many of those study not psi itself but other areas such as paranormal belief.

Roe, a psychology lecturer and psi-experimenter at the University of Northampton, adds that at least 16 UK universities have academic staff whose doctoral training is in parapsychology. Parapsychology has featured regularly at conferences organised by the British Psychological Society, and he personally has had papers accepted by its annual conference. Interestingly, the largest of the A-level (the standard pre-university qualification) examination boards for psychology includes 'Anomalistic Psychology' in its specification, including elements on testing of ESP and PK. This means, Roe says, that 'future undergraduates will come to university with a grounding in parapsychology and an expectation that the subject will be represented on any comprehensive undergraduate syllabus' - hardly characteristics of a subject confined to the fringes.

Roe vigorously contests Hyman's claim that parapsychology doesn't look scientific. According to what criteria, he asks. For instance, studies show that the use of double blind methods are common in parapsychology at a level of 85%, but hardly at all in physics and biology and only 25% in medical sciences.

When it comes to arguments about replication, Hyman picked a poor study but could just as easily have chosen a good one, Roe says. Also, there is a very strong correlation between standardness and effect size, and where the focus in meta-analyses is on standard studies you get something that looks very like replication.

So why aren't there more of these? In such a tiny field, the active players tend to be innovators looking for interesting new approaches, Roe continues, not technicians engaged in replication exercises. This rather reinforces Wiseman's point, and Roe agrees there need to be changes, but then there's the problem of funding.

These arguments are by now quite familiar, and many were covered in Debating Psychic Experience. It's worth noting, though, that Hyman hardly ever talks about flawed methodology these days in the way that he used to. An alert reader might wonder why, if psi-researchers' experimental methodology is no longer the target of critics' attention, they are still often getting highly significant results.

But Hyman does have a new gambit, and it strikes me as one that goes to the heart of the matter. He claims that some psi-researchers themselves agree that parapsychology has failed. These neoparapyschologists, as he calls them - he mentions Dick Bierman, Walter von Lucadou and Robert Jahn - appear to concede that psi fails to meet scientific criteria, and that the evidence for it will never satisfy scientific standards. In that case, he argues, the goal set by the founders of psychical research, that psi be accepted by mainstream science, is clearly unattainable.

Since the time of Calileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton, modern science has flourished just because it focused only on phenomena that were available for public scrutiny, were lawful, and could be independently replicated.

Quite so, and for science to restrict its focus in this way has made sense. But it does not follow that a phenomenon for which there is abundant evidence in a number of areas - often anecdotal, to be sure, but also confirmed by careful investigation - does not exist, merely on the grounds that it does not fully meet these three criteria. On the contrary, an entity that arises from consciousness would surely be expected to be fitful and elusive.

Jahn notes that psi's primary correlates appear to be subjective in character, including such nebulous factors as

teleological intention (need, desire); emotional resonance (bonding, meaning, personal importance); attitude (confidence, playfulness, low ego involvement); masculine/feminine distinctions (both psychological and biological); and perceived uncertainty or complexity, all of which may function at the unconscious as well as the conscious level'.

('Change the Rules!', Journal of Scientific Exploration), 2008.

Such an entity is likely to evade detection as long as it fails to conform to scientific objectivity, he says.

This is what Hyman's neoparapsychologists are really talking about. If psi lies outside science, as science is presently conceived, then as far as they're concerned, so much the worse for science. It's time, as Jahn says, to change the rules. In particular - as Rupert Sheldrake too argues in his new book - scientists need to abandon the illusion that what they do is somehow purely objective, as if human subjectivity never entered into it.

The problem, then, is how a methodology designed to deal with material entities can be modified so that it can also deal with immaterial ones. And how can its guardians be persuaded to relax their vigilance?

For Jahn there are plenty of precedents. Change is a characteristic of human endeavour, for instance in sports competitions, where a modification of rules can often lead to improvement. There's a similar process of continuous change and development in the creative arts, religion and spirituality, psychology and philosophy, he notes. (Also in politics of course; there are good reasons why the American constitution has been amended so often.) So why should not change also come to science?

A rather obvious reason is its sheer authority and prestige. Science continues to be a fertile source of new technologies, and continues to attract huge public interest in areas like cosmology and neuroscience. So why tinker with it? For critics like Hyman, changing the rules would destroy science: if you let in psi, you risk endorsing other, equally dubious claims, like N-Rays, cold fusion and polywater. Indeed, from his point of view, an article with the title Change the Rules! might almost have been a spoof penned by a satirical critic.

He surely has a point. Yet all this further exposes the ideological nature of science, as an institution based on nineteenth-century positivism. Reality is held to be synonymous with what is lawful, and psi's irregular and subjective nature puts it beyond the pale. It's as much about the reality that we want than the one we're in.

So the psi debate has shifted to a new and more interesting phase, to the nature and purpose of science itself. And at bottom it's driven by the same differences of temperament and vision that drive political arguments. The Hymans and Alcocks are the reactionaries, for whom the unstable, unlawful nature of psi is intolerable and want to prevent change at all costs. The Jahns and Sheldrakes are the visionary pioneers, mapping paths to a future in which the spiritual components of humans are at last recognised.

History tells us that their time will come, because change always comes eventually - whether we like it or not. Positions that once were defended to the death are overrun and disappear, and with hindsight it's incredible that anyone took them seriously. That will happen with the resistance to psi - of that we can be sure. What we don't know is how long it will take.

Einstein and Psi

It's always interesting to know what the super-stars of the science world think about parapsychology.

I'm reading Esprit: Men and Women of Parapsychology, Volume 1, a collection of reminiscences by some leading psi researchers, first published in 1987 and recently brought out in a new edition. These are investigators such as Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Gertrude Schmeidler, Jan Ehrenwald and Hans Bender. I'm barely halfway through, and may give it a detailed look in a later post. In the meantime, I picked out this nugget about Einstein.

As is well known, Einstein wrote a brief preface to Mental Radio, Upton Sinclair's 1930 book about ESP experiments. Typically these involve Sinclair sitting in his study and drawing something on a piece of paper, and his wife Craig in another room trying to reproduce it. More often than not she achieved a close match, as the book's illustrations show. It's an informal study, obviously, but a classic of its type.

Einstein's contribution consists of just one paragraph:

I have read the book of Upton Sinclair with great interest and am convinced that the same deserves the most earnest consideration, not only of the laity, but also of the psychologists by profession. The results of the telepathic experiments carefully and plainly set forth in this book stand surely far beyond those which a nature investigator holds to be thinkable. On the other hand, it is out of the question in the case of so conscientious an observer and writer as Upton Sinclair that he is carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world; his good faith and dependability are not to be doubted. So if somehow the facts he has set forth here rest not upon telepathy, but upon some unconscious hypnotic influence from person to person, this also would be of high psychological interest. In no case should the psychologically interested circles pass over this book heedlessly.

Was the great man giving ESP his blessing? Not exactly. The muddled appeal to "unconscious hypnotic influence from person to person" - what is that exactly, if not telepathy? Or did he really mean sensory cues? - suggests someone struggling to accommodate facts that contradict all experience and reason.

But the mere fact of someone of his standing not sucking his teeth and crying "fraud" is enough for it to be treated as a positive. At least he was curious and open-minded - an example for others to follow.

A few years later Einstein corresponded with Jan Ehrenwald, a psychiatrist who was writing about psi experiences emerging in therapeutic interactions, and wanted his endorsement. Naturally he flagged up the work of JB Rhine at Duke on ESP in card-guessing and psychokinesis in dice-throwing. What did Einstein think?

Einstein said he could find no explanation whatsoever for Rhine's results, but made his scepticism clear. He was alienated by the lack of any attenuation with distance, that it didn't seem to make any difference how far separated the subject was from the agent or the experimenter. In his belief this indicated the presence of a "systematic error".

He went on:

I wrote the introductory notes for Upton Sinclair's book owing to [our] personal friendship in such a way that it did not express my lack of conviction without compelling me to sacrifice my honesty in doing so. I must openly confess to you my scepticism due not so much to a close acquaintance with the relevant empirical observations and experiences but to my lifelong activity in the field of physics. I must also confess that I have not had any experiences in my own life that would point to interpersonal relationships that were not occasioned by sensory cues. When I add that the public tends to attribute more weight to my utterances than would be justified in view of my ignorance in so many things, I feel all the more duty bound to exercise utmost caution in reserve in these areas.

Having now read Ehrenwald's book Einstein wrote a second letter as follows:

I can judge as a layman only, and cannot state that I arrived at an affirmative or negative conclusion. In any case, it appears to me that from the physicist's point of view, we have no right to rule out a priori the possibility of telepathy. For that the foundations of our science are too uncertain and incomplete...

On the one hand I have no objection to the reliability of the method. Yet I find suspicious that clairvoyance [tests] yield the same probability as telepathy, and that the subject distance from the target cards i.e. from the agent, should have no influence upon results. This is improbable to the highest degree and consequently the result is suspicious.

He adds that he attaches more weight to tests with gifted subjects such as Craig Sinclair than to large-scale statistical experiments in which the discovery of a minute systematic error may upset everything.

He concludes:

In any case, your book was very stimulating to me and has somewhat "softened up" my attitude which from the onset was distinctly negative towards the whole problem. One should not go through this world with blinders...

It was a put-down, however tactfully expressed. Ehrenwald was "stunned" by it, as he later described in a belated reply written after Einstein's death and sent to "the Elysian Fields, please forward". However he noted that the scientist was open to the more obviously impressive "macro" experiments, and ventured to suggest that Rhine's experiments were simply indications of the same thing on the "micro" level. By now, too, Einstein's deep discomfort with "spooky action at a distance" had become evident in his rejection of quantum mechanics.

All of this seems perfectly reasonable to me. Many people would agree that the actual experience of ESP is far more persuasive than statistical indications of it. As a physicist Einstein had particular reasons for doubting claims about psi, but he conceded he didn't know much about it and wasn't prepared to go further than stating a general opinion in private.

Martin Gardner makes a similar point in an article about the correspondence (republished in Science Good Bad and Bogus), praising Einstein's "great tact and politeness" and "characteristic humility" - qualities which were comically absent from Gardner's own responses to parapsychology. Of course the snarky sceptic has simple explanations for what so mightily puzzled the great scientist. Recording errors by experimenters in Rhine's psi experiments would have neatly accounted for the distance paradox, as it wouldn't have made any difference where the subject was situated, two feet away or on another planet. And "spelling out" Einstein's suggestions about the Sinclairs, perhaps they were "unconsciously suggesting" to each other what they should draw.

Neither of which would remotely explain the experiments as they were actually described. Gardner would not have cared about that, but one feels that Einstein might have seen the point, if he'd engaged with them more closely.

Wiseman on Precognitive Dreams

'And so it begins,' tweets psychologist Richard Wiseman. He means the publicity campaign for his new book Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there, which is out on March 4 and which I wrote about here. The Guardian magazine section ran some excerpts yesterday: a big one on precognitive dreams, plus smaller ones on seeing patterns and out-of-body experiences. Let's have a look to see what he says about dreams.

Wiseman starts with the Aberfan mining disaster of October 1966, when a small mountain of coal slurry collapsed onto a Welsh school, killing 139 children and five teachers. This tragic incident impressed itself on the national psyche, and some 30 people subsequently reported having dreamed of the event before it occurred. He then points out that precognitive dreams are commonly experienced, at least once by a third of the population, according to recent surveys. He also mentions some well-known celebrity examples, for instance Abraham Lincoln foretelling his own assassination.

However since we dream about four times a night, an explanation rather readily offers itself, he goes on. Let's suppose over a period of three nights you have a variety of jumbled up dreams: auditioning for a part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, chatting to your favourite rock star Eric Chuggers while driving along a country lane, swerving to avoid a purple frog and crashing into a tree, falling into a vat of ice-cream, and so on. After waking on the third morning you turn on the radio and are shocked to hear that Chuggers has been killed in a car crash. Naturally you connect it with the dream about him - all the other dreams are forgotten.

It doesn't stop there, he adds: the creative imagination may get to work to create a whole edifice of meaning.

Because dreams tend to be somewhat surreal they have the potential to be twisted to match the events that actually transpired. In reality, Chuggers was not driving along a country lane, did not hit a tree and the accident didn't involve a giant purple frog. However, a country lane is similar to a city road, and a lamp-post looks a bit like a tree. And what about the giant purple frog? Well, maybe that symbolised something unexpected, such as the car that drifted on to the wrong side of the road. Or maybe it turns out that Chuggers was on hallucinogenic drugs and so might have thought that the oncoming car was indeed a giant purple frog. Or maybe Chuggers's next album was going to have a frog on the cover. Or maybe Chuggers was wearing a purple shirt at the time of the collision. You get the point. Provided that you are creative and want to believe that you have a psychic link with the recently deceased Mr Chuggers, the possibilities for matches are limited only by your imagination.

The rest of the extract mainly covers mainly the familiar 'chance coincidence' argument, the fact that since disasters (air crashes, earthquakes, exploding volcanoes, etc), happen somewhere in the world on a regular basis, and since billions of people are dreaming billions of dreams, it would be quite surprising if they didn't sometimes match up.

It's hard to argue with this as far as it goes. The Aberfan claims attracted a good deal of attention, but are vulnerable on a number of grounds and perhaps not worth placing too much emphasis on as evidence of precognition. To be fair, the psychiatrist John Barker who carried out the investigation and published his report in the Society for Psychical Research's Journal - Wiseman's source - makes this point himself. Where there is no record of a dream having been dreamed before the event that it apparently prophesies he can argue that it was selected from lots of other unconnected dreams, or distorted to make the match a better fit. Where there is such a record, which applies to 21 instances in the Aberfan data, this is harder to do. However, for these cases one can invoke the 'chance coincidence' argument, that the match between the dream and the event was real, but purely fortuitous.

I don't think that seemingly precognitive dreams are necessarily good evidence, but unlike Wiseman I'm prepared to take seriously the possibility of them being real. That's because I have come to accept that ESP is real, on a variety of grounds, backed by evidence from a large variety of sources.

I'd point out two things that are rather glaringly absent from Wiseman's analysis: the high degree of specific detail that can often be present, both in the dream and the event it appears to precognize, and any reference to credible scientific research that appears to verify anecdotal claims.

Taking the first point, I'm impressed by the high degree of specificity that can occur. A dream of an aircrash, matched with an actual aircrash the dreamer hears about the following day, is not interesting at all. However a dream in which the dreamer is impressed by an odd red and green symbol, overlaid on a scene of fire and destruction, is potentially interesting if this symbol turns out to be the airline logo on the side of a broken fuselage which the dreamer sees in a newspaper photo the following day. This is what I associate with such claims, and where several such details are involved it puts some strain on the chance-coincidence explanation theory.

JW Dunne, a pioneering aeronautical engineer, has several examples of this type in his 1930s best-seller An Experiment With Time, in which he described the process as he himself experienced it. For example he has a nightmare of being on an island which is about to blow up, and desperately trying to warn the French authorities that four thousand people will die unless they start an evacuation. The next time he sees a paper it carries headlines about a volcano eruption in Martinique, with the loss of 40,000 lives. He remarks that he initially read the headline number as 4000, which gives him the clue that the dream is precognizing his experience, not the event itself. The actual number of dead was quite different to both his idea and the one in the news report.

Dunne got friends to experiment, recording their dreams as soon as they woke up and being alert to anything that might match up with real world experiences in the following two days. These are usually trivial, but detailed enough to be noteworthy.

One woman dreamed of walking up a path and coming upon a gate, when a man passed on the other side, driving three brown cows in front of him and holding a stick over them in a peculiar fashion 'like a fishing rod'. While waiting for a train the following day she walked up to the end of the platform which gave onto a road, barred by a gate similar to the one she had seen in the dream. At that moment the scene she had dreamed about took place: three cows passed by on the other side, driven by a man holding his stick just as she had visualized it.

Another example: Dunne's cousin dreamed of meeting a German woman dressed in a black skirt, with a black-and-white striped blouse, and her hair scraped back in a bun at the back of her head. They were in a public garden. She suspected the woman of being a spy. Two days later she visits a country house, where she is told about an odd person staying there who is suspected of being a German spy. In the hotel grounds (that look like a public garden), she shortly afterwards meets the woman, who is dressed in a black skirt, with a black-and-white striped blouse, and her hair scraped back in a bun.

If it's true that these dreams were recorded before the experience of the matching event, I don't see how either of Wiseman's arguments could apply. It might indeed be the case that the dreamers had had other dreams that didn't match with anything that subsequently occurred. But if the time-lapse is merely a day or two then so what? And the odds of matches like this happening by chance are surely off the scale.

Then there's the scientific research. This tends to be a variation of experimental approaches aimed at finding evidence of ESP. In this case, instead of the target being selected before the experiment, in order to demonstrate telepathy or clairvoyance, it is selected afterwards. At the time the subject is recording his or her impressions, the target does not yet exist.

In the 1969 Maimonides series of ESP dream experiments, the subject sleeper, Malcolm Bessent, was woken at intervals one night and his dream impressions recorded. These revolved around a hospital building, a patient escaping and doctors in white coats arguing. A target word corridor was then selected by means of a elaborate protocol involving random number tables, by someone not involved with the dream side of the experiment. An image suggested by this word was then selected, a picture by Van Gogh Hospital Corridor at St. Remy. Bessant was then subjected to an 'experience' suggested by the image.

Judges subsequently matched the imagery Bessent described upon being woken with the word corridor, chosen from a total of eight target words. Five nights out of eight were similarly direct hits. The odds against are 5000-1, meaning that more than 5000 such experiments would have to be carried out before a similar coincidence could be expected.

These and other similar experiments are vulnerable to criticism, from psi-researchers as well as from sceptics. The sense is not that precognition has been proved or conclusively demonstrated, but that there are indications it might be real, and that these indications are worth continuing to investigate.

So where does all this leave Richard Wiseman's book? As I mentioned when I first heard about it, I wondered whether he would focus mainly on psychological generalisations or write also about his own debunking activity. I guessed the former, that he'd want to be positive and upbeat, stressing the achievement of science in unravelling the mystery, but without getting into arguments. That would seem to be the case, at least in this excerpt.

Yet it's an oddly distorted picture, achieved by glossing over or ignoring credible data that contradicts his argument. Precognitive dreaming could be illusory: it's an open question. The really interesting illusion being created here, I'd say, is the perception that such things have been explained away by the pitiless scrutiny of science, and therefore merit no particular attention.

Book review: Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion?

There's a new book of essays out, by prominent names on both sides of the debate. It's called Debating
Psychic Experience: Human potential or human illusion, edited by Stanley Krippner and Harris L. Friedman, with contributions by, among others, Dean Radin, James Alcock, Ray Hyman, Richard Wiseman, Chris French and Chris Carter.

I'm going to review it for a journal but it's been sitting around for a while. Truth is, I wasn't looking forward to it - I've read these sorts of 'debate' books before (eg Psi Wars edited by Alcock) - and I'm not sure how much good they do. The sceptics are better read in their natural habitat, like the Skeptical Inquirer, than being all polite and condescending in the presence of the opposition.

The parapsychologists meanwhile are often like the nerds sucking up to the bullies in the playground.  Bob Morris, late head of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh, bent over backwards to see the sceptics' point of view, as did his predecessor John Beloff. Fair enough, but I thought Beloff trying to convince sceptics about Eusapia Palladino was a bit optimistic, and they just seemed bemused (who is this person?).  I especially objected when Beloff wanted the rest of us to be nice to sceptics. He reviewed Nicolas Humphrey's Soul Searching - a travesty even by sceptics' standards - in the SPR Journal, and conceded that many readers might find it a bit ripe, but sternly advised them to "swallow their resentment". Gaah.

This book's good though, and I can recommend it.  I snoozed gently through the essays by Alcock and Hyman, who reprised their positions. Alcock kicked off with that quotation from Alice about ' six impossible things before breakfast' - also used by sceptic Lewis Wolpert as the title for his recent-ish book - which tells us what we already know about where they are coming from: this stuff can't happen, so it probably doesn't. Criticism of lack of repeatability and  methodological weaknesses seemed to Alcock to be 'very reasonable', and if parapsychologists were truly interested in pursuing the truth then they should at least acknowledge this. 'It reflects a triumph of hope over experience', he says, 'that so many have continued to devote themselves to parapsychological research over such long periods of time despite both the absence of theoretical or empirical progress and the continuing rejection by mainstream science'.

Then Hyman ditto: methodological flaws, meta-analyses unreliable, inconsistencies in data, etc, etc... Then Chris French, who actually was quite interesting in defence of his moderate brand of scepticism (I'll come back to that another time).  Then Michael Shermer, describing his experience of pretending to be psychic for a day.

It was when Chris Carter came on that I woke up. Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics is the first book in recent times that I can recall that tackles hardline disbelief head on, and is a bracing read. He has a new book out on near-death experiences, which I'm halfway through, and which is also excellent.  This essay is a forceful statement of the problems with the claims made by Hyman, Alcock and Wiseman - the three most vocal and articulate sceptics of parapsychology. He provided direct evidence that negates their claims, for instance that consistent replicable evidence has been provided, but also pointing out the historical dimension to this (with which I wholeheartedly agree) - the critics can't accept the data because it interferes so seriously with the prevailing materialist paradigm.

Then the rebuttals. Alcock and Hyman seemed affronted by Carter. They hated the idea that anyone might for one moment consider them biased. Sceptics were prepared to consider that psi might exist, but parapsychologists were not so open-minded, Alcock claimed: they were not even prepared to entertain the possibility that it might not exist. But really, why on earth should they? Why would anyone investigate something they weren't really sure existed? It's the sceptics who have a problem with this.

Hyman was peeved at Carter's 'unfounded accusations' (Carter had criticised him for his role in the notorious 1987 National Research Council investigation into techniques of enhancing human performance, in which he gave parapsychology the thumbs down, and for his attempts to nix the ganzfeld data). What's wrong with materialism, or wanting to defend it, he demanded.  When Hyman gets rattled he blathers. Given that his time and space were not unlimited, he said, he would restrict his comments to Carter's provocative opinions, rather than also try to address Dean Radin's, but he didn't restrict himself all that much. He devoted a lot of space to defending his role with the NRC, and in particular to defending Alcock, who he had appointed to help him. Alcock's conscientiousness in checking the data surely made him the ideal man for the job.

There's an odd lack of self-awareness here. Can Hyman really not see that a judgment about parapsychology delivered by two CSICOP stalwarts, personally dedicated to denying psi's existence - Hyman had recently helped get a Pentagon funded parapsychology project at Stanford cancelled - would not be universally recognised as fair and impartial? It astonishes me that he seems surprised about this.

In fact it's difficult to read about the NRC report without gasping at the sheer chicanery of it. A psychologist, Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University, a world-renowned expert in evaluating controversial research claims in the social sciences, should have been a valued member of the investigation. He concluded that of the five areas under discussion, only the ganzfeld ESP studies met the basic requirements of sound experimental design. He concluded that the studies under review had demonstrated a 1 in 3 result where 1 in four would be expected by chance (as has generally been demonstrated ever since). Yet Rosenthal was pressured to withdraw these findings, and although he refused they were left out anyway.

Dean Radin made an elegant reply to Hyman and Alcock, demolishing their claims of lack of repeatability with a summary of the research. (He provided a handy update and clarification of the meta-analysis controversy, which I might come back to in another post). Radin pointed out, as did Carter, that the worldview that the critics seemed intent on trying to protect had long disappeared.  Far from there being something "horribly and fundamentally in error in physics and biology and in neuroscience" (Alcock's phrase), the reality predicated by quantum mechanics seems positively to demand the kind of anomalies that psi throws up.

Michael Shermer. What to say? He bamboozled five women by pretending to be psychic. He finds it "insidiously insulting" to think that charlatans are routinely duping people into thinking their deceased loved ones have survived death. I don't think anyone seriously denies that people can be duped by clever charlatans, but it doesn't prove anything. This sort of stunt reinforces prejudices, but has nothing to do with scientific investigation.

As I say, I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm glad to see that there's a contribution by Damien Broderick, whose Outside the Gates of Science I reviewed here a year or two back, plus essays by other people I haven't come across before. A bit pricey (£31.95), but a readable and engaging update on the debate, and a good resource, so definitely worth trying to get hold of. I'll be sure to mention it again. 

Patricia Putt - Score for Sceptics

What to make of the comprehensive failure of Patricia Putt in psychic testing recently?

I hadn't heard of Putt before, but she is apparently well established as a professional psychic, aka Ankhara. She has had media exposure, turns up at hauntings, exorcises, and does readings for £25 a go. She decided to go in for Randi's million-dollar challenge, and Richard Wiseman and Chris French were deputed to carry out the preliminary tests.

The experiment involved ten young women in turns sitting in front of her for a reading. They were all white, same gender and age-group to keep any identifying characteristics to a minimum, uniformly dressed in gowns, features concealed by wrap-around dark glasses and ski-masks, and facing away from her. There was no verbal interaction; Putt wrote her thoughts down. The ten transcripts were then handed to the subjects who each attempted to identify the reading that applied to her. Not a single one did so correctly.

This is a pretty comprehensive failure. One can make various excuses: the test doesn't prove that Putt isn't psychic (she might just have been having a bad day, and it doesn't prove that nobody is psychic. But although both these are logically true, it doesn't look good.

You can also argue that people who go for readings aren't heavily disguised, as the subjects were here, so Putt wasn't working in the conditions she was used to. But this is exactly what tests like this aim to do, to prevent any opening for cold reading. And, just as important, Putt was quite happy to go ahead on that basis. According to French, she felt that she had been treated fairly, and it was only afterwards, having scored zero, and having thought about it a bit, that she identified that as the problem.

It interests me that although this comes under the heading of Randi's million dollar challenge, it wasn't actually Randi who carried out this preliminary test, but French and Wiseman, who unlike him take a moderate approach to debunking parapsychology, and can't really be accused of setting Putt up for a fail. Curiously - and correct me if I'm wrong - there are rather few well-documented cases of psychics actually failing the challenge - we're just told that they are all kooks who never got past the preliminaries. The only other one I can think of was also quite recent, the case of Derek Ogilvie, whose failure in tests by both French and Randi was pretty total. But if it's so easy to demonstrate that psychism is a mirage, one wonders why, in the many years the challenge has been going, there aren't many more cases like Putt and Ogilvie.

One possibility is that psychics are too canny to let themselves be tested in highly unnatural circumstances, ie giving readings to people facing in the opposite direction and swaddled up like mummies. But apparently some of them, like Putt and Ogilvie, are naïve. They have boundless confidence in their own abilities and willingly walk into what others might see as a trap, agreeing to work in circumstances that they have never tried before.

Randi's million dollar challenge has always been vulnerable to the argument that there isn't any proper testing going on at all - it's just an opportunistic debunking ploy. But when people like Wiseman and French start to carry out very public and  transparent testing like this, it can start to be taken seriously by people who might otherwise have given psychics the benefit of the doubt. It's difficult to think of anything more helpful for the sceptics' cause, and it's interesting that this should only happen when the challenge itself is about to be withdrawn. 

Apart from the matter of influencing public perceptions, I'm interested in the science here. I take psychism to be real not on the basis of single tests like this, but on the accumulated data of psychical research. So I'm wondering why Putt failed. Some possibilities: she's not psychic at all, but just thinks she is; she is psychic, but needs to have a normal interaction with her sitters; as Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail suggests, the sitters might be sceptics who deliberately chose the wrong reading (unlikely, as Greg acknowledges, but potentially an experimental flaw); or that somehow French and Wiseman inhibited psi from manifesting - the experimenter effect.

If any of these, or a combination of them, is correct, it's worth following up. I'm thinking of the famous remote viewing experiments in which Marilyn Schlitz got significant results while Wiseman, using exactly the same setup and subjects, did not.  So let's get Putt back and have her work in the same circumstances with sceptics and parapsychologists, and compare the results. Or get them working with mediums of the first rank, like Colin Fry, for instance, or John Edward, who worked under controlled conditions in Gary Schwartz's first experiments, with sitters concealed behind a curtain and not speaking.

I suppose the conclusion is that we can't rule out psi unless we at least give it a chance to appear. Once we've seen it in action, we can fiddle with the parameters and see what's required to make it appear or disappear. Then we can argue about it. One-off tests aren't a way of establishing anything conclusively.

Could this sort of co-operation ever occur? I think both French and Wiseman might be up for it, if there was the organisation and the funds. But that's a big 'if'. I can't see it happening unless someone has the incentive to make it happen, and there's not much of that around at the moment. 

Online psi classes

Glad to see that Caroline Watt's new online parapsychology course is up and running. Watt is senior lecturer at The University of Edinburgh's psychology department and teaches in its Koestler Parapsychology Unit. The introductory course, designed by her, runs over ten weeks and costs £200, which seems pretty reasonable.

It's not about ghost hunting, as some might think if they stumbled on it by chance, but aims to give a scientific view of psi research. Students are given readings of chapters from the latest edition of Harvey Irwin's excellent Introduction to Parapsychology, co-authored by Watt, along with journal articles, and audio interviews with parapsychologists and skeptics. They include some well-known names, eg Stephen Braude, Dean Radin, Jessica Utts, James Alcock and Richard Wiseman.

The course seems to be getting a good response, to judge by students' comments on the site and a generally favourable review by one of the first participants, French philosophy student Louis Sagnières. Sagnières thinks the articles are a bit tough without a background in parapsychology, which I can well understand - I admit to finding some experimental psi papers quite hard work, and regret my lack of any grounding in science, maths and statistics. Classes are divided into groups of ten, and he says the amount of inter-group discussion seems to vary from one to another. His only real gripe is the University of Edinburgh website, which handles the course and, he says, is somewhat slow and clunky, although he adds that other students don't seem to have noticed anything amiss. 

Full marks to Watt for creating a channel that offers a grounding in the scientific arguments around psi. Hopefully it's just a beginning. If there's ever going to be a serious debate about it, there need to be people who understand the arguments, and the more educational sources there are the more informed the discussion will become.

The Koestler Doctrine

Last year the Guardian published what I thought was a rather inoffensive article by Caroline Watt on the benefits of teaching parapsychology. Dr. Watt, a researcher and lecturer at Edinburgh's Koestler Institute, agreed that most mainstream scientists are not persuaded that there exists replicable evidence of psi phenomena. But she pointed out that polls show around half of the UK population holding paranormal beliefs, and of these half have had a paranormal experience. So it makes sense to study it.

It's also a great way to teach scientific methodology, she added, for instance how to identify possible sources of bias or artefact or contamination in a research study and the use of tools such as meta-analysis for examining controversial claims - ideal for stimulating critical thinking.

This got the gremlins out in force. A few samples:

It is outrageous that they cannot learn this from conventional science such as physics, chemistry or biology. Parapsychology is pretty much wholly a pseudoscience other than the 'debunkers' and has no place in the science classroom.

There is nothing within this topic to teach; no accredited results; no credible theories; no un-debunked researchers. What *exactly* are you "teaching"?

And this:

OK, I won't call you "ghostbusters"...will dimwits do

When I was at school we dissected animals and studied their entrails to learn how the digestive system works. If only we'd realised we could tell the future from them too

It was the usual ignorant caterwauling, but I did connect with this remark by 'cynicalsteve':

She's trying to have her cake and eat it....if she (Watt) thinks there's something in parapsychology, she should say what exactly; if she thinks it's nonsense, then she should say that. But she says both (not neither) on her site; which is naughty. So she's nothing more than a professor of hypocrisy - not parapsychology - "teaching" something in which she doesn't really believe...

Of course it wasn't Watt's pragmatic fence-sitting that enraged most critics so much as the mere notion that paranormal belief and experience are worth studying - a phenomenon in itself deeply worthy of examination (their rage, I mean).  But not knowing anything about her background I was surprised when some friends mentioned to me recently that they actually considered her something of a sceptic, a-la-Wiseman. That seemed rather odd, considering her position at Edinburgh. So when she gave a talk this week I was interested to go along and find out where she stands. 

Watt, a lively and pleasant Scot, started by updating us on the situation at the Koestler Institute, which if some of the rumours going around were to be believed was practically at the point of collapse, having dipped rather freely into the capital of Koestler's bequest. That situation seems to have stabilised, but there isn't enough cash to pay for a professorship. So Bob Morris, who died a few years ago, has not been replaced, and instead there are just two lecturers, of whom Watt is one.

Watt went on to talk about work with Wiseman on paranormal belief, a subject which surely has been done to death. But she also described a couple of experimental approaches. A current one involves healing at a distance, and the results are expected later this year. The other involved an attempt to influence subjects engaged in meditation, by pairing them with a person, who from another room tries to help them reduce the number of distractions they experience.

The aim here was actually to test the 'experimenter effect'. It was found that there was no effect when the experimenter tried to influence the participants, either by expressing enthusiasm and certainty in a positive outcome, or by the opposite. But there was a significant difference between experiments led by believers and disbelievers in psi. (Bizarrely, the effect was not to reduce the number of distractions in the believers' experiments but to increase the number of distractions in those carried out by disbelievers.)

This struck me as a useful addition to the psi database, although as so often with these things it still lacks the replication that would make it stand out. And Watt's own position? Pretty much as stated in the Guardian, as it turns out: people obviously have these beliefs and experiences, which it makes sense to study, but as to psi itself, there is still not enough to totally convince other scientists.

This 'Koestler doctrine', I guess, will be the standard line in British universtities where Koestler graduates are teaching and researching parapsychology (eg. Northampton and Liverpool Hope). And why not? It's true as far as it goes, it's reasonable, and it genuflects enough to 'serious science' to keep the critics off their backs. A genuine interest in researching psi does not necessarily come with a willingness to endure controversy and notoriety.

But if parapsychology as a discipline is content with this I doubt whether it will win many converts. One could equally claim that there is abundant evidence of psi, both in documented surveys and case studies, for which sceptics have advanced little in the way of serious alternatives, and in a body of experimental work which consistently finds evidence of psi, both in individual interactions between subject and agent, and also in statistical anomalies which, again, are unexplained by knowledgable critics. If parapsychologists were not in such a precarious situation they would say this.

It's true that the subject helps students think about scientific methodology, but the critics are right, that's a smokescreen - it's not what this is really about.  If parapsychologists think psi exists, somewhere along the line they need to have the courage of their convictions and say so unambiguously, as indeed some researchers like Sheldrake and Radin do. They then need to explain exactly what the challenges are, and keep hammering the message home until at least some of the less emotional sceptics get the point.

It's on the teaching side that Edinburgh really may make an impact. Watt has just designed an online course in parapsychology, which is apparently attracting a good deal of interest (we were apparently the first to see it). This sort of thing really could make a difference, and I'll come back to it as soon as I've had a chance to check it out. 

Book Review: Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer - Extraordinary Knowing

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind was published last year, and recently came out in paperback (she herself died of a long-standing intestinal disease shortly after completing it). I'd heard a lot about the incident she describes, in which a psychic helped her recover a lost object. Mayer's natural scepticism was confounded, and she embarked on a journey to try to understand what was going on. Sceptics grappling with psi often makes for interesting reading, and although not quite what I expected I was not disappointed.  

As psychic stories go, hers is in the five-star class. Someone had nicked a harp belonging to her eleven year old daughter. Having failed to get it back by conventional means, a friend suggested she try a psychic. What had she got to lose?

Mayer called up a dowser named Harold, who said: 'Hang on, I'll check to see if it's still in your neighbourhood.' Then: 'yup, it's still there, send me a street plan'. Two days later Harold came up with an exact address. Mayer couldn't simply knock on the door, so instead she posted flyers outside offering a reward. A man then rang to say he'd seen a poster outside his house about a harp, and the description matched one his neighbour had recently shown him - soon it was back in her daughter's room.

I'd imagine it's the sort of thing which, if it happens to you, you couldn't very well shrug off. It's not somebody else's lie or fantasy - it happened to you. A mere coincidence? Not really.

Before I bought the book I had somehow got the impression that Mayer was a militant sceptic who had difficulty accepting the event (rather as if it had happened to Susan Blackmore, say.) The story of that epic existential struggle I think has yet to be written, and I look forward to it - this is something else, although at least as valuable. Mayer was stunned - 'this changes everything' - yet at the same time she seems to have been quite fertile ground for a shift of worldview. It makes sense: as a widely respected psychoanalyst she combined scientific training - and the orthodox views that go with it - with empathy, flexibility and a willingness to listen. These are qualities one does not associate with militant sceptics, but which are ideal for understanding the source of the disquiet that she undoubtedly felt. 

This psychological resistance to psi is surely one of the most important issues that parapsychology faces, yet there has been surprisingly little written about it. I seem to have read loads of boring journal papers over the years that explore the typical psychological profile of  the 'fantasy-prone believer', implying that they are a race apart. But there has been almost nothing about what drives scepticism, which in many ways is far more striking and anomalous - the inability to see any evidence of psychism, the tendency to disregard logical challenges as if they didn't exist, the intense agitation expressed in the aggressive language, and so on. The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is well-known, but there's little public awareness of how it may affect anyone's responses to paranormal claims and experiences.

This is the strong theme running through Mayer's book. She was shocked to discover a whole world of experience and research that corroborated the harp incident - the kind of surprise that I think awaits a great many people.  She discovers the parapsychological journals, and reads about the Maimonides dream research, the ganzfeld controversy, talks to Hal Puthoff about remote viewing and Star Gate, and Robert Jahn about the PEAR research, and so on. She also has an interesting section on prayer experiments. But what especially fascinates her are the disturbed reactions that psi generates, from the notorious muzzling of psi proponents in the NRC report, to the peer reviewer who told a journal editor he could find nothing wrong with an article on telepathy, but still rejected it saying he wouldn't believe it even it were true.

It's not just militants who feel this way. She herself was unsettled by an incident in which, when hunting for a lost watch, she suddenly went onto automatic pilot, as it were, and found herself going directly to the back of a drawer where it had been hidden. She also has an interesting example from her clinical practice of a woman who, as a child, learned to intuit when her father was driving home drunk, giving her just enough time to hide herself and her younger sister in a closet so that they wouldn't get beaten.

During the late afternoons, I'd start listening for him. It was a funny kind of listening. It was like listening with my whole body, not my ears. I don't know how to describe it except to say I was tuned in, vigilant with every part of me. Suddenly I'd know - know he was fifteen minutes away and driving home drunk... My dad didn't drink all the time. So there was no predicting. I had to stay tuned in every day, be ready, and never trust any pattern.

But in later life this 'spooky knowing', as she called it, set off panic whenever it occurred.  Here Mayer refers to Freud, who argued that the human psyche is organized to escape the experience of fear. We use an array of defences to suppress and regulate it - usually unconsciously. We don't even know that we're defending, must less what we're defending against.

It's perhaps to be expected that Freud should feature often in a book by a psychoanalyst, but in this context also slightly surprising. If I hadn't read anything else about it I would be left with the impression that Freud had a real interest in telepathy, whereas I guess few people would consider his views little more than a footnote. Conversely she makes no mention at all of Frederic Myers, who really did have something original to say about it. I speculated this might be because she wanted to stick to contemporary work, or because Myers was motivated by an interest in survival of death, which she says somewhere she wanted no part of.

But in a way, her preference for Freud over Myers is emblematic of a view that regards as psi as a threat and a danger, rather than as an integral feature of consciousness and a window to a wider world. In that sense it describes, not psychical literature itself, or the views of people who immerse themselves in it and understand its implications, but the outside world that regards it with suspicion and hostility. Where Myers saw psi as an element of the whole and healthful mind functioning at various levels, Freud seems to have associated it with that dark world of dreams, a way of gaining access to an unconscious brimming with suppressed anxiety. As Mayer points out, Freud also abhorred the idea of 'oceanic' experiences, which he regarded as an infantile regression - he fled from music apparently fearful of the emotions it would evoke, and which he needed to control. But of course, it was Freud who went on to dominate the world, while Myers remains virtually unknown.

What's interesting about this book is that it exhibits a highly-educated and scientifically literate professional taking psi research seriously.  There isn't much of that about, but I sense we could start to see more of it - I found myself often comparing it in that respect to Damien Broderick's Outside the Gates of Science. These are writers who are not involved in parapsychology, and who are coming to it more or less cold. They can adopt an objective stance, but are nevertheless unafraid to go fully on record as being persuaded both by the experiences and the experiments. More than psychics or parapsychologists - who are seen perhaps as already embedded in that other world - readers will see them as guides, providing the reassurance that one can take this stuff seriously without going mad or turning into a figure of fun.

For others it will not be enough to see someone else making the journey - they will have to make it themselves. I don't just mean those shocking personal events which most of us may in any case never experience, so much as the experience of interacting with the research, of identifying all the potential 'normal' explanations, and deciding on their plausibility. That's rather missing here. Mayer's presentation of the ganzfeld and remote viewing, while generally fair, rather under-states the critical objections. It's right to point out that Ray Hyman couldn't find anything obviously wrong with the remote viewing and autoganzfeld protocols, but Mayer almost co-opts him as an advocate, or at least implies that he has thrown in the towel, both far from the truth.  About the PEAR work, she mentions that she scrutinised all the sceptical objections and was not persuaded by them, but does not give the reader any opportunity to make an independent decision.

Still, one can always do that oneself, and perhaps the virtue of a book like this is that it will spark interest. As I say, it does also make a hugely valuable contribution in underscoring just what it is about this subject that makes it so different, in the way that it messes with people's heads. This is surely what parapsychology has to work on, for its only when the causes of resistance to it start to be understood that its claims can really get a wide and serious hearing. 

Michio Kaku

I've yet to get a hold of Michio Kaku's new book The Physics of the Impossible, and most likely it'll be a while before I get round to it. But I'm intrigued by the publicity it's been getting, and its possible implications for parapsychology.

Kaku is a theoretical physicist at City University in New York, and a big player in the field of string theory. He's also a pretty effective science popularizer. He has got big attention with this book, only published in the UK today, by arguing that a lot of wacky ideas we associate with science fiction may not be completely impossible after all. 

Kaku puts forward three categories of 'impossibilities'. In reverse order, what he calls 'Type 3' include technologies that absolutely violate the known laws of physics, such as perpetual motion machines and precognition. These would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics. Type 2 are technologies currently at the edge of our understanding, but that might be possible one day, such as time travel.

Under Type 1, Kaku groups a number of things that are impossible today, but which do not violate the known laws of physics and so might one day become possible.  These include: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy and psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.

This is a pretty eclectic mix of ideas, theories and technologies. As to his reasoning, I'm a bit in the dark, as I haven't read the book. I understand that Kaku argues teleportation in terms of quantum entanglement - it's being done on the level of particles, so the principle is already there. Alien contact becomes more probable as astronomers scan planets in other solar systems, so that too is feasible. Robots already exist. He talks of invisibility on the basis of new materials that eliminate reflections and shadows. 

What gets my attention is the presence in the list of telepathy and psychokinesis. As I say, it'll be a while before I find out what his thinking is (comments welcome, in the meantime), but I'm guessing his approach is technology-based and that he proposes they will become possible when we figure out how to do them (in terms of parallel universes?)

Parapsychologists would have a couple of things to say about that: a) telepathy and psychokinesis are here now, and b) they don't involve technology. They would add that precognition, which Kaku thinks is really impossible, is closely associated with these things. But what interests me is how sceptics will respond. Normally they can't stand it when a high-profile scientists comes out in favour of telepathy, and they try to drown him out with a cacophony of jeering. I guess that won't happen here, though, because Kaku's idea of telepathy is precisely that it doesn't contradict known laws of physics, which is their main stated reason for objecting to it.

This is an interesting development. One outcome could be that Kaku's ideas could turn out to be too simplistic, and will be shot down by parapsychologists, pointing out that they don't relate to the considerable existing data. That would be a pity, although ironically since parapsychologists are so little regarded in the scientific community perhaps no one would notice. For even if the theory is not wholly convincing, it can only be a good thing if serious scientists bring psychism in the scientific arena. If the concept of telepathy can be raised without sceptics popping a fuse in public, perhaps the scientific world will start to calm down and talk about it rationally.