Paranormalia

Dean Radin's Psi Research List

I'm very glad to see this list of psi research articles compiled by parapsychologist Dean Radin. The articles are all downloadable, and cover a range of topics - exactly what's needed.

By way of introduction Radin says:

In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of classes of experiments. I will continue to add to this page and flesh it out, including links to recent or to especially useful ebooks. This page may eventually become annotated, then multithreaded and hyperlinked, and then morph into a Wiki.

I hope to go through the full list in the months to come, and will recommend it to visitors. In the meantime, I have commented on one of the papers in a separate post, below.

How To Make Psi Disappear

Dean Radin's new list of psi articles includes one which he referenced on his blog some time ago, and which I mentioned here quite recently. It's one of those richly comical moments that bubble up in sceptic discourse from time to time, so I thought I'd add a bit more detail.

The paper was published in The Humanistic Psychologist in 2005, by psychologists Edward A. Delgado-Romero and George S. Howard. Their general drift is that experimental findings in psychology are much less reliable than is realised, due to little acknowledged factors such as the file drawer problem. Here they propose to investigate the case of parapsychology. They take as their starting point the Wiseman-Milton meta-analysis, which concludes that the accumulated results of methodologically sound ganzfeld experiments is non-significant. To confirm this then carry out their own experiments, but worryingly, after doing eight studies they have an overall hit-rate of 32%. Not only does this match the positive meta-analyses, when added to the Wiseman-Milton study it brings it, as they say, 'precariously close to demonstrating humans do have psychic powers', a conclusion which they admit makes them feel 'very uncomfortable'.

What to do? A thought strikes them.

In the ganzfeld procedure, participants are run in pairs. According to psychic theory, if one member of the pair is psychic (P) but the other is not (n) there will be no transmission of information. Only PP pairs can successfully send and receive messages. What exactly does this imply?

It implies, they believe, that the statistical approach in the ganzfeld methodology is fatally flawed. If the research literature is recalculated to accord with this idea, the significance in the database practically vanishes. To confirm their hunch, they do one last study, pairing up people whose psi-hitting in their previous studies indicates that they have psychic powers. As they suspect the result is now not significant.

These are enormously disappointing data for individuals who believe humans possess psychic powers- especially because the sample had undergone a selection procedure to increase the percentage of Ps in the sample. Due to this last data set, we do not believe that humans possess telepathic powers.

That said, they admit to remaining 'perplexed' by the 32% figure obtained in an enormous number of other psi studies. Perhaps, they suggest, it's

comparable to Meehl's (1978) "crud factor," which suggests that everything is correlated with everything else to a small degree. Meehl cited this as evidence that a null hypothesis is never literally true. Or, perhaps it simply reflects our enduring preference for significant results over studies that obtain nonsignificant findings.

I'm used to critics tearing published psi experiments to ribbons, with caustic remarks about potential security flaws, alleged failure to randomise properly, and so on. But when disbelieving psychologists do their own experiments they sometimes seem to lose touch with reality altogether. They wander onto a field about which they know almost nothing, and casually reorganise matters to suit themselves, without the slightest reference to anybody or anything.

Until now I'd never heard of anything called 'psychic theory', or the notion that transmission of information depends on both receiver and sender being psychic. The authors give no reference for it; it seems to have just popped into their heads. No serious parapsychologist, as far as I'm aware, talks about people having 'psychic powers'. The prevailing paradigm is that it's a property of consciousness, a form of knowing that is potentially available to anyone, but which in practice is favoured by certain conditions and characteristics. And no parapsychologist would dare declare, on the basis of a single study, that the existence of psi has been proved, so it seems reckless, to say the least, for critics to declare, on the basis of a single study, that it does not exist - never mind crowing about how devastating this must be to its advocates.

The problems are discussed by Radin in a tart rejoinder to the journal. If the authors had done some homework, he suggests, they would have realised that there is no file drawer problem in parapsychology, for the simple reason that it's such a small discipline that pretty much every extant study can be tracked down. Intriguingly, while discussing the Wiseman-Milton study the psychologists point out in a footnote that its sampling method represents a serious departure from the norm. If this is corrected, they concede, it greatly increases the effect size. Yet, as Radin says, although they profess to be puzzled by this, it doesn't stop them using the study as an authority. (An analysis based on a 'theory of crud' is hardly persuasive, Radin adds.)

I wondered how a paper so deficient in an understanding of established parapsychological principles could ever have made it in to print. My guess is that it's a symptom of the way that parapsychology is marginalised, and the views of its experts distrusted. Since from a certain point of view telepathy is a fiction, there must be something wrong with the way parapsychologists do their experiments. So it's something that anyone can have a go at, even complete beginners. The worst that could happen is that they get positive results, but then they can use the opportunity to figure out the mistake, and in so doing make a real contribution to science. In their own minds, they're at no more of a disadvantage than the veterans who have been doing it for forty years.

But perhaps that's just my attempt to make sense of something that is actually incoherent. The feeling I'm left with is of otherwise intelligent people having temporarily gone mad. It's the Enchanted Boundary phenomenon described by Walter Prince: confronted by something that seems to imply a complete breakdown of logic, they engage in wild mental contortions that they hope will restore order. It's not science so much as the effect on the academic mind of cognitive dissonance - a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, and it's good to see it sometimes illustrated so graphically.

Science as Propaganda

In the comments to a recent post a sceptic tried, in the usual way, to convince us to abandon our delusions. He cited various references, including a fMRI study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2008, which claims to have demonstrated that psi does not exist.

Again, as is often the case, the study says more about the urgent disbelief of debunking psychologists than it says about psi. It's shortcomings were widely noted at the time, but since sceptics take it so completely at face value I thought I'd give it another look.

The experiment was carried out by Samuel Moulton, a Harvard psychology graduate, and his mentor Stephen Kosslyn, who is well-regarded for his brain studies on mental imagery and visual perception. The authors consider that the evidence for psi so far is highly dubious. Anecdotal experiences can be attributed to cognitive illusions, while the outcome of ESP experiments is ambiguous. By contrast, they think that brain scanning technology is sufficiently reliable to settle the matter. If psi exists then, ergo, it ought to show up in fMRI scans.

Accordingly they recruited 19 bonded pairs of people - twins, couples, friends - which they whittled down to 16, one acting as sender and the other placed in the scanner as receiver. The receiver was shown two pictures, one being 'sent' by the sender and the other a control, and asked to guess which by pressing a button. The results came out at 50%, as expected if chance alone was operating, nor did anything unusual show up on the scans.

They conclude:

Analyses of group data revealed no evidence whatsoever of psi. Psi and non-psi stimuli evoked widespread but indistinguishable neuronal responses . . . The results support the null hypothesis that psi does not exist.

The study shows an impressive attention to detail, and in its technical aspects looks extremely solid, eg:

Functional series were analyzed using FMRIB's Improved Linear Model (FILM; Woolrich, Ripley, Brady, & Smith, 2001), which removes nonparametrically estimated temporal autocorrelation in each voxel's time series before applying the general linear model (GLM). For each series we modeled neural responses to the psi stimulus, non-psi stimulus, and feedback stimulus, as well as their temporal derivatives by convolving the basic waveforms (based on onset time and duration) of these variables with a double-gamma canonical hemodynamic response function (Glover, 1999). The same temporal filtering that was applied to the data was also applied to the model. For every functional volume, the following linear contrasts were employed to create statistical parametric maps (SPMs): non-psi > psi, and psi > non-psi.

So these guys know their stuff. Or do they?

Moulton and Kosslyn talk as if they're pioneering a new method which will settle the psi controversy once and for all. But they make no mention at all of any of the successful previous psi research using scanners, which even by this time was quite significant. Critics gave them such a hard time about this, they eventually went to Dean Radin to ask him what they'd missed (see a description here) - something they might have usefully done at the outset.

Then there's their method of producing ESP, which I did not at all recognise. If it wasn't tried and tested, it's not surprising that it was unsuccessful here. The more so, considering that the receiver is in a noisy machine and being asked to perform tasks in quick succession - hardly conducive to the relaxed state of semi-disassociation that is known to be ideal for generating psi.

And interestingly, despite their insistence that their methodology beats 'behavioural' research, it still centred on a cognitive process, of conscious knowing. At least one of the earlier fMRI studies bypassed this by looking to see if a light flash stimulus on the sender provoked the same response in the receiver's brain as in the sender's - it did.

In the earlier studies, moreover, efforts had been made to find participants that really could have produced psi. These authors knew enough to understand that bonded pairs are more likely to produce psi interactions than those that are not. But they seemed to think that alone would guarantee it. Earlier successful fMRI experiments selected people who had demonstrated psi abilities, for instance having worked as healers or taken part in a successful previous study.

There are other possible explanations for the negative results. Perhaps the ESP activity was there, but masked by the activity relating to visual perception. Or the signal might have simply been too weak to pick out from the noise. It's not clear why the experimenters were impressed by the absence of activity in the brain relating to psi if there was no psi in the first place - unless they saw the sender's intention as a material entity that was bound to register visibly among the receiver's neurons.

What really catches the eye is that one of the receivers actually did show potential evidence of psi - in the form of a relative absence of brain activity that correlated positively with the psi stimulus. The authors concede this would count as a positive result, but devote the best part of two pages trying to explain it away as an 'uninteresting artefact'. Having discussed and rejected two hypotheses, they eventually decide that the anomaly reflects the participant's 'idiosyncratic reactions to perceptual, conceptual, or affective differences between the psi and non-psi stimuli'.

Their reasoning is highly technical and difficult to appraise. But it begs a number of questions. If a single positive result can be neutralised in this way, could not similar arguments be applied in the event that other participants showed positive effects? Is there any guarantee that any of the three people whose data was rejected did not also show positive results? And what is the point of looking for evidence in the first place if it can be so easily dismissed? Surely this weakens the authors' insistence on the power of fMRI scanning to settle matters once and for all.

This is one of the more curious features of debunking studies. The sceptics embark on a process in the expectation of getting null results, are embarrassed to get positive results after all, but save the day with post hoc reasoning such as, 'yes but it wouldn't have happened if we'd done the randomisation differently'. (Radin references a wonderful study published in the The Humanistic Psychologist in 2006 by two psychologists, who carried out eight ganzfeld experiments and were shocked to get the usual 32% significance rate. To deal with this they redesigned the experiment to their own specification, and got a null result, which they then used to explain away all the rest.)

Someone who is not an out-and-out sceptic might spot the authors' hostility towards the idea of psi and wonder what effect this might have on their reasoning. To those of us who know about psi research, it stands out a mile. Their preamble makes it abundantly clear. They go to the trouble of quoting in full a rather good example of a crisis ESP episode - a woman waking one night experiencing powerful symptoms of choking and blood falling down her head, and learning two days later that her son was shot in the head at this time - but wave such testimony away on the grounds that it's probably all caused by confirmation bias, clustering illusions, etc. Even if ESP was proved, they say, it would just be an unexplained anomaly. They admit that claiming a single null result to be proof of non-existence is problematic, but consider that their results are so clear-cut it's fair to make an exception.

As an exploratory experiment it has value, and arguably forms an interesting addition to the parapsychological database. But their ambition is manifestly not to add to the database but to discredit it, backed by the big guns of contemporary neuroscience. The real story here is one of individuals setting out to rid themselves of their uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Hence the triumphant press release that one can guess generated headlines around the world: 'ESP does not exist, Harvard scientists prove.'

The result is a curious illusion - an apparently careful, well-designed and thoroughly scientific study which is in fact only superficially so, and whose real effect is to reinforce materialist prejudices. Science as propaganda, one might say.

More on Wikimandering

Thanks to everyone who contributed comments on my post about Wikipedia. The case histories were especially interesting. Rather than add my own I thought I'd make a new post, by way of general reflection.

One line of thought - probably the dominant one - is that keeping the articles clean is too much of a struggle, given how determined is the sceptic opposition. Wikipedia is a lost cause; it will always reflect critical mainstream thinking. But that doesn't matter because there are plenty of other sources where interested people can go to find out about psi-research.

Another view - less popular, apparently, but persuasively argued - is that we should get stuck in and do something about it:

Wikipedia appeals to the entire cross section of humanity, from the elite to the Great Unwashed. The elites are going to believe what their fellow elites tell them to believe, but the average curious schoolkid may initially take what they see in a Wiki article at face value, and move on.

Getting a full picture of any paranormal related topic takes a heluva lot of digging. Pseudo-sceptics can be intimidating and convincing. Maybe I'm being pollyanna-ish here, but a civil, concerted campaign to counter-balance sceptic attempts at repressing the open discussion of spirituality is the right thing to do.

I have to say, this is my way of thinking too. I disagree with the expressions of disdain about Wikipedia - I think it's an extraordinary resource. And yes, I do use it all the time, mostly to get an instant take on people and situations in world affairs, stuff that would be impossible to get quickly from anywhere else. Of course I double check when required, but in the ten years or so that I've been using it I can't ever recall coming unstuck - which in my line of work could easily happen. And I'm always astonished by the effort and commitment that contributors put into it - and hugely grateful for it.

If that's my experience as a professional person, then I guess it will be others' as well. Its not an accident that Wikipedia comes up near the top of searches - it's because so many people find it useful. So I'm not convinced that someone who decides to consult Wikipedia on a psi-related topic - on a whim, perhaps, or having come across some article or controversy in a newspaper - will recognise the sceptical barracking for what it is. On the contrary, it will shape their view. And this is surely something we can't be indifferent about.

It's true there are a lot of other good sources (and thanks to the commenter who kindly included this blog). But I don't agree that such people will easily find their way there, or that they would necessarily make any sense of what they found. That's why something like Wikipedia is needed - for beginners as opposed to intermediate level and advanced.

If I'm right about this, there are two options (actually I'm sure there are more, but this is something to be going on with).

One is to take the battle to the sceptics on their own terms. It's not as though their pages are immune to hostile tweaking. It won't be pretty, and we'd have to accept that we will never actually win, but we could get enough of a leverage at least to improve the quality of the psi pages for the benefit of newcomers.

Another option might be to create an independent portal with entry-level, Wikipedia-type articles on psi topics. I've long thought that something like this would be a good idea. It would essentially duplicate the material that already exists, and perhaps expand it, but without the heckling. Critical opinions and studies should be referenced, of course, and ideally the full range of sceptic alternatives should be represented - just as they are in any decent parapsychological paper. But sceptics would not be able to interfere without actually hacking into the site.

Whether to do one or the other - or both, or neither - touches on a much larger issue, whether we want to be in the business of advocacy. My impression is, there's less appetite for that on our side than there is among our opponents. For sceptics, influencing opinion is what it's all about. Wikimandering is just the sort of thing that their organisations are there to do. It's a fundamentalist thing: evangelising comes naturally to them.

We're more about generating ideas, studies and experiments than in 'spreading the word'. We're receptive to people who come to us, but we don't go looking for people to convert, minds to change. We don't have an equivalent of CSICOP/CSI. And looking around, I can't see any research organisation wanting to get behind an initiative like this. But like the reader whose comment I quoted, I'm starting to think it's the right thing to do. If we don't stand up for what we believe in, then why would anyone else believe it?

To the commenter who kindly offered her services as an editor, but asked if this was all just talk, I'd answer - thanks, that's appreciated; and, quite possibly but not necessarily. A lot depends on whether there's someone out there who is able and willing to undertake this sort of project. I don't have the skills myself. It needs to be a very particular sort of person - someone who thoroughly understands websites and Wikipedia, who is determined and patient, can manage a team of editors, and in is it for the long haul. All as a labour of love. It certainly shouldn't be undertaken lightly, or it could do more harm than good. So let's not rush into anything.

But I can contribute, and act as a communications hub in the first instance. So as far as getting the ball rolling goes, if anyone wants to get in touch to kick around ideas, then please do.

Guerrilla Skeptics

I use Wikipedia a lot in my journalism work, and I must say I've always found it an excellent resource. I know it has to be treated with caution, but in practice I assume it will be more accurate than not. So mostly I take it on trust.

Recently I've been poking around on the site to see how psi topics are presented. My impression is that a novice would come away with a pretty jaundiced view. It's obvious that sceptics are busily re-editing articles in their favour, and a reader has kindly sent me a link that shows how they do this. It's a project called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, run by Susan Gerbic, who recruits sceptics to give pages a makeover, both those that publicise their own side (ie debunkers, key sceptic figures, etc) and also the opposition's (celebrity psychics, paranormal claimants, etc).

This is a specialised activity and Gerbic's blog gives tips and techniques. Recently she's gone global, getting sceptics to edit foreign language pages. It's all about creating perceptions - or I suppose they would say 'correcting'. The use of the word 'guerrilla' underlines its essentially hostile nature, but of course in their view the battle against superstition is just that, a battle. So they'll use whatever weapons come to hand.

And Wikipedia presents a rather large opportunity. It's easy to deflate a positive perception and replace it with a negative one. We encounter it all the time in sceptic discourse. The use of a 'however' qualifier at the end of a paragraph is often all it takes: 'Believers say they have uncovered X effect, however more careful researchers . . .' Look at this paragraph on remote viewing from the entry for 'Parapsychology':

Several hundred such trials have been conducted by investigators over the past 25 years, including those by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) and by scientists at SRI International and Science Applications International Corporation.[59][60] Many of these were under contract by the U.S. government as part of the espionage program Stargate Project, which terminated in 1995 having failed, in the government's eyes, to document any practical intelligence value.[61] PEAR closed its doors at the end of February 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, said of it that, "For 28 years, we've done what we wanted to do, and there's no reason to stay and generate more of the same data."[62] However, physicist Robert L. Park said of PEAR, "It's been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton".[62]

This is cleverly done. One can see how an essentially neutral description might have been mucked about with by suitable insertions, particularly the rhetorical declaration at the end.

Always the aim is to round off any claim with a counter-claim. So in the section in 'Parapsychology' on random number generators a claim about meta-analyses consistently showing a statistically significant effect is followed by this:

The most recent meta-analysis on psychokinesis was published in Psychological Bulletin, along with several critical commentaries.[63][64] It analyzed the results of 380 studies; the authors reported an overall positive effect size that was statistically significant but very small relative to the sample size and could be explained by publication bias.

In other words, where the original claim was a general comment about many studies, this is a detailed comment about a single study. But precisely because it is detailed, it gives the impression of being more authoritative.

An awful lot of the sceptic material is just hostile opinion and rhetoric- as Park's comment above. In at least some cases this should be challenged.

In a review of parapsychological reports Ray Hyman wrote "randomization is often inadequate, multiple statistical testing without adjustment for significance levels is prevalent, possibilities for sensory leakage are not uniformly prevented, errors in use of statistical tests are much too common, and documentation is typically inadequate".[92]

Yes, Ray Hyman did write that in his review, but that's the only uncontested statement here. Citing a reference does not magically convert his hostile opinions into facts. Trouble is, this will not be at all clear to the casual reader.

Or this:

According to the skeptic Robert Todd Carroll research in parapsychology has been characterized by "deception, fraud, and incompetence in setting up properly controlled experiments and evaluating statistical data."[91]

In what world could someone like Todd Carroll, a compiler of spectacularly biased and poorly informed encyclopedia entries, be considered a serious authority? If this sort of thing is allowed on Wikipedia then what's to stop me inserting remarks like, 'According to psi-advocate Robert McLuhan, this type of critical commentary is tendentious tosh by people who haven't a clue what they're talking about."

We can't really complain about hostile editing, as long it stays within the Wikipedia guidelines for editors, which Gerbic seems committed to doing. As she sees it, it's all about insisting on backing up claims with evidence, which is what sceptics are all about. In fact I've even seen it suggested that Wikipedia is by nature a sceptical endeavour, since it depends on evidence. Some seem to have taken heart when its founder Jimmy Wales came out against homeopathy, a subject that infuriates them more than almost anything else.

I'm not sure how worked up I can get about Wikipedia's view of homeopathy or about celebrity psychics, who can look after themselves. Still, it's a pity that this key source for learning and education is so compromised as far as serious parapsychology is concerned. There is of course plenty of information about parapsychology, but little that isn't gummed up with sceptic disdain. Even aside from that, it looks rather flat and lame. What's to stop editors giving quotes from credible people - scientists, psi-researchers, experients who are well-known in other fields - that give their own enthusiastic responses? Why are the dullards, ignoramuses and professional nay-sayers getting such a free run?

We need to make it clear that our evidence counts as evidence. At the very least, if sceptics insert a long section at the end of an entry that promotes their views exclusively, under the heading of 'Criticism' or some such, then it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate to add a following section headed 'Responses to criticism', in which the key points would be rebutted, at leisure and without constant heckling.

I did briefly consider making contributions of my own, but where does one start? This is clearly a job for a specialist. We need our own Gerbic to help create a co-ordinated effort. For all I know, some-such project is being planned, in which case I look forward to hearing about it, and good luck!

The danger of course is getting into a tiresome tit-for-tat, with teams of rival guerrillas coming out at night and trashing the opposition's most recent efforts. In that case the victor would be whoever runs out of steam first. Actually I don't think it need come to that, and Wikipedia surely has ways of dealing with it. We don't need the last word; all we need to do is to put the carping in perspective, and ideally encourage readers to check out the subject for themselves in other sources, where they aren't going to be distracted by noisy sceptics.

Rupert Sheldrake at TED

Rupert Sheldrake is in trouble with sceptics again, this time having given a provocative TEDx talk. It enrages some scientists to hear unfamiliar new ideas in a high-profile public forum. Sceptic bloggers including Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers got in touch with the TED organisers to try to get them to withdraw the video. That's under review; let's hope they do the sensible thing and take no notice. In the meantime they have set up a comments thread so that critics can vent.

The talk is quite short: Sheldrake just has time to run through the 'ten dogmas' he lists in his book The Science Delusion, and then expand on a couple of ideas. These are his theory of morphic resonance and, a more recent interest, his theory that the so-called constants of nature like gravity and the speed of light actually aren't constant at all, but fluctuate - which predictably has caused a stir.

Sheldrake says his investigation into records of measurements all over the world show that the speed of light dipped between 1928-1945 by 20 kilometres per second. A senior metrologist he talked to agreed, but insisted the speed couldn't actually have dropped because it was a constant, so they just 'fudged' it (Sheldrake's word, the metrologist preferred them term 'intellectual phase locking'.) The problem was 'solved' in 1972, the metrologist said, when they fixed it by definition - after which no disagreement was possible.

The same is also true of gravity: the frequent variations that Sheldrake finds in the records are just 'errors', according to metrologists. The results are all averaged out, apparently. Sheldrake says he has been trying to persuade them to publish the figures online. He thinks that one day magazines like Nature will publish them weekly, just like stockmarket tables.

This is funny, possibly true, and also deeply provoking to mainstream opinion. No one likes having the foundations of their worldview shaken. For scientists who accept all the dogmas it must seem intolerable to hear these sorts of things declared on a respected public forum. So naturally that was the sceptic's first thought: why is TED giving credence to this claptrap? Can we stop them doing it in future? It really bothers them when a maverick escapes from his cage and contaminates mainstream thinking.

Thankfully a lot of people think that's what TED is all about: to present challenging new ideas and innovative thinking. If it doesn't take risks and rile the establishment sometimes, what's it for? As Craig Weiler notes, it's encouraging that so many people in the comments thread defended Sheldrake's right to speak, and TED's right to give him a platform.

It's also striking how polite the thread is. It seems Sheldrake has plenty of respect, even from people who don't fully agree with his ideas, or understand them. If Coyne and Myers hoped he'd be put in his place they must be feeling rather disappointed.

Psi and Cannabis

There have been a lot of false dawns about legalising cannabis, but a rational outcome seems possible at last. The recent landmark votes in Colorado and Washington have coincided with surveys that show large majorities in both the US and the UK in favour of scrapping the ban. Even the politicians are starting to catch up, with bills being presented in Congress. Here it's striking that, although David Cameron is still being a gung-ho drugs warrior, conservative voters are just as keen on change as Labour.

The ban always seemed incomprehensible to me. In my student days I gravitated naturally to the 'head' community. We passed much of our leisure time in clouds of hash smoke and psychedelic rock music, and enjoyed scandalising the buttoned-up types. We weren't noticeably less successful, then or since; drug taking was not a differentiator, except for a few people who seriously overdid it.

It's the same with the growing acceptance of gay marriage. These social issues interest me because I see the scientific proscription of psi in quite similar terms. Psi threatens the integrity of the scientific worldview in the minds of many scientists, just as, to conservatives, gays and drug fiends threaten the harmonious function of society. The analogy isn't exact, obviously: psychics and mediums are free to ply their trade in the way that drug dealers aren't (or at least aren't supposed to be). But the underlying fear is the same: of potential chaos and disintegration. From the outside, the sceptic movement looks like people coming together to affirm their sanity in a world threatened by growing mental deviancy.

I've remarked before on striking parallels between social conservatism and psi-scepticism, even if there is no obvious overlap between these communities in other respects. Arguably, it's just as irrational to insist that certain experiences that have been widely experienced and verified are in fact imaginary, as it is to impose bans on what people indulge in the privacy of their homes, and with zero risk to others.

There's also the element of austerity. We must take the hard road, and forbid ourselves the luxury of indulgence. Cannabis may make us feel good, but it's a dangerous high, a removal from reality. Homosexuality is decadence to the point of depravity. Psi offers the feel-good factor of wonders and miracles, instant healings, life in a paradisial world to come, and so on - but we must sternly resist its siren call.

But why? Sceptics are articulate about why they think psi isn't real - much less so about why it's a bad thing.

However when we start to focus on this more, there's a genuine debate to be had. Perhaps, from a social perspective, it's reasonable to be cautious about opening up to new ideas and practices. In the nineteen sixties drugs did seem to encourage a lot of whacky behaviour, and it must sometimes have seemed to the war generation that society was on the verge of breakdown. In a sense, the social effects that would follow from science validating the reality of psi are comparable to the social effects of legalising cannabis. With cannabis it's clear that there are dangers, particularly with regard to the mental health of young people, and I've mentioned a few times my own view that a social shift to acknowledging psi might have similarly distorting effects.

Telepathy: Are my thoughts my own? Or are they being beamed to me? Is someone trying to manipulate my behaviour by making me do irrational things?

Remote viewing: Can I be observed from afar when I'm undressing, having sex, pilfering from the petty cash box in the office? Is someone right now, in some dark room somewhere in another city, eyes closed, focused hard, images flickering under his/her eyelids, spying on me?

Precognition: Are unscrupulous dealers using psi to clean up on the stock market, at my expense? How can I get some of that action? Is it legal?

Psychokinesis: Did my hateful ex-husband/wife use focused power of thought to make me crash my car / lose my job / get cancer? Can I go to the police and get him/her arrested?

Life after death: Are spirits of the dead here in the room with me? Do they mean me harm?

There's a word for all of this, one that we believe we have emancipated ourselves from: witchcraft. Psychics and researchers may deny that these powers can be used to invade privacy or to do harm to others. But they would have to be extremely persuasive to counteract popular prejudice. It's what people believe that counts. If science says these things are real, then how can I protect myself from people trying to harm me from a distance?

We can see the beginnings of the problem in neuroscience, which has been making us think differently about the stuff in our heads. If our brains make us think and act in particular ways, if we don't have free will, then perhaps we aren't responsible for everything we do. In practice - at least as far as I'm aware - this new scientific 'reality' hasn't impinged too much on the real world: criminals and wrongdoers are still made accountable. But psi is potentially a whole other problem.

We talk about sceptics being 'closed minds' and identify the psychological barriers to belief. In a purely intellectual sense - from the point of view of empirical experiment and philosophical analysis - their arguments really are shallow. But might we be prepared to admit that science, being sceptical, acts as a barrier to something that humans have to accommodate themselves to carefully and gently? Perhaps it provides a kind of shelter, a sanctuary of reason, where we can exist without having to worry about these things, only about the people who believe in them.

My point is that psi-scepticism is a much more complex business than we might think. It's not just about ideas and arguments. As with cannabis and all the rest, it's about acclimatising ourselves to a potentially threatening new reality. Before we accept it we need to go in with our eyes open, and understand exactly what we're doing.

Will Storr's 'The Heretics'

I've been enjoying Will Storr's extraordinary new book The Heretics: Adventures With the Enemies of Science. Storr has previously written sceptically but entertainingly about ghosts. We spoke a while ago when he was researching James Randi, and the book does indeed contain a revealing interview with the Amazing One himself.

Like his previous book this is a journey of discovery: to find out what motivates people to hold 'unbelievable' ideas such as creationism, UFOs, homeopathy, etc. And yes, ESP, although with qualifications: the sceptics are more of a target here than the advocates. Besides Randi, he talked to a Bible-thumping creationist, Holocaust denier David Irving, climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton and various therapists, quacks, charlatans and complete idiots, as well as a few sensible people to get an objective view. It might have been called Conversations with the Crazies, as it has the same dynamic as TV films by Richard Dawkins. Writing about these people, he says

is like being a tourist in another universe. There is something noble about their bald defiance of the ordinary, something heroic about the deep outsider-territories that they wilfully inhabit, something comforting - in a fundamental, primeval way - about their powers of cognitive transport.

This sounds a bit patronising, but Storr is genuinely interested in these people, and in getting at what motivates their worldviews. He obviously has the reporter's knack of getting people to open up to him. Nor is he convinced that his scepticism is always justified. He confesses to a feeling of kinship, and thinks this may have to do with his own troubled early life, marred by emotional instability and delinquency, about which he is quite candid.

This blog's readers will be interested in the bit about psi sceptics, so let's come to that first. It's at the end of the book, by which time - especially having just been exposed to the clinical lunacy of David Irving - I was in a state of slack-jawed amazement. So I was dismayed to see Rupert Sheldrake being wheeled in as if he was the next to be given the treatment. In the sceptic scheme of things he'd be an ideal fit. Is the reader supposed to think that believing in ESP is as certifiably crazy as denying the Holocaust or believing in the literal truth of the Old Testament?

It's a bit unclear: Storr does admit at one point that he is deeply sceptical - his unconscious mind is broadcasting a 'great, dark lump of no' - but recognises this to be a prejudice and hopes that talking to people on both sides he will get a sense of who is telling the truth. He first buttonholes Sheldrake, who accuses both Richard Wiseman and James Randi of dishonesty. So Storr talks to both of them as well. Wiseman is very plausible - as Sheldrake wearily warned Storr he would be - but Storr is alert enough to recognise the inconsistencies in Wiseman's position, and notes how easily Sheldrake defended himself against Wiseman's attacks. He concludes: 'It was the opposite experience from which I had been led to expect.'

When we come to Randi, it's clear that Storr is sceptical about his status as 'truth's war dog', and that it's he, not scientists like Sheldrake, who are in the dock. Like the other extremists, Randi seems completely unaware of glaring inconsistencies in his position: one the one hand he abuses psi believers in the most offensive terms imaginable, yet he wants to be taken seriously as an investigator and rejects the term 'debunker'.

Storr also exposes the way that Randi ducks and dives to get out of actually having to test people for the Million Dollar Challenge. One case he describes in some detail is that of the Greek homeopath George Vithoulkas, who seems to have been deadly earnest about applying for the Challenge, and spent a lot of time and money arranging for a suitable hospital clinic to arrange the trial. To Vithoulkas's consternation he was blocked at the last minute by Randi, who went back on the arrangement he had previously agreed to, and demanded that Vithoulkas go back and start the whole process again. By this time Vithoulkas had had enough and threw in the towel. (One of Randi's team told Storr that this showed clearly that Vithoulkas was 'trying to find an excuse and quit the test'.)

Storr also manages to confirm the unreliability of notorious claims made by Randi with regard to Uri Geller, and also to Professor Gary Schwartz's investigation of mediums, when he pretended that psi researcher Stanley Krippner had agreed to be involved in judging Schwartz's data for the Challenge. Krippner told Storr he had not agreed to anything such thing.

The interview itself is a rather sad affair, but if you're interested in Randi it's probably worth the price of the book. This is a man at the end of his life, still sharp and malicious, but surprisingly frank about a troubled upbringing (although Storr does not comment explicitly, there's a Walter Mitty sheen about claims of extraordinary brilliance Randi is supposed to have displayed as a child.) Storr is mainly interested in his debunking career: he confronts him about various contradictions and makes him defend his various lies, overstatements and exaggerations, including the notorious claim, which he admitted to Sheldrake was untrue, that he had tested the 'psychic dogs' claims and 'they fail'.

By now Storr is starting to feel he is giving the old man a bit too much of a hard time, so to take some of the pressure off he gives him an opportunity to backtrack on previous hints that he supports social Darwinism. To his consternation, Randi does nothing of the kind; instead he makes explicit his view that society should take a hand in purifying the gene pool of stupid people.

As long as it doesn't interfere with me and other sensible, rational people who could be affected by it. Innocent people, in other words. These are not innocent people. These are stupid people. And if they can't survive, they don't have the IQ, don't have the thinking power to be able to survive, it's unfortunate . . . We would be free of a lot of the plagues that we presently suffer from. I think that people with mental aberrations who have family histories of inherited diseases and such, that something should be done seriously to educate them to prevent them from procreating.

The interview ends with Randi amiably agreeing with Storr that, yes, he does overstate, and sometimes lie and get carried away.

'No question of that. I don't know whether the lies are conscious lies all the time,' he says. 'But there can be untruths.'

All this confirms the central idea that Storr has been coming to, which is that we humans tell ourselves stories that help us make sense of the world.

All of it begins in the unconscious, where we experience hunches about moral rights and wrongs . . . When we come across an explanation of the world that fits perfectly over the shape of our feelings - a tale that magically explains our hunches and tells us that it is all okay - it can seem of divine origin, as if we have experienced revealed truth.

There is quite a lot on this. Inevitably Storr gets onto the illusion-making of the brain; his impassioned discussion of what, in the hands of academic psychologists, is a rather dry topic, is one of the best I've seen. In fact this is an excellent book by a very talented writer. I don't have space to mention some of the other interviews, but I was full of admiration at the effortless way he gets advocates of extreme positions to damn themselves from their own mouths. The encounter with David Irving on a trip with a bunch of racists to a concentration camp is riveting.

However where psychic research is concerned, as I've mentioned before, I'm not generally a fan of journalistic approaches like this. I thought Steve Volk's Fringe-Ology was rather good, perhaps because it views paranormal topics sympathetically. But in general I don't think that going round talking to 'experts' is a good way to try to resolve controversies like 'is ESP true or not'. It didn't surprise me that Storr was ricocheting all over the place after talking to various people, struggling to decide who was telling the truth. It makes for dramatic reading, but if you want to understand what's going it's surely better to focus on the scientific arguments and research rather than try to make subjective judgements about which advocates are the most or least reliable.

I also think there's a growing temptation to look for answers in controversies such as these to the power of the brain to create illusions, narratives, patterns, etc. In fact I'd argue that it's getting out of hand. The problem is that it can be used as a sort of blanket explanation for everything that we struggle to understand, or suspect may not be real, while at the same time it reinforces a very definite metaphysical view of human existence, that we are bugs crawling over a rock in space, and that the effusion of thoughts in our heads is just biological stuff, of no more account than vapours or smells. Implicitly it validates a particular scientistic view, that we actually aren't capable of believing what is true, that existence is meaningless.

I don't doubt the importance of myths and narratives in the formation and maintenance of our worldviews. For myself, I remain passionately convinced of the ability of empirical study and experiment, of philosophical discussion and analysis, to cut through this miasma - less dramatic and colourful, perhaps, but a more sure way to true understanding.

Sexist Sceptics Revisited

This article by a female sceptic is worth looking at. The author, Rebecca Watson, is one of the main writers on Skepchick.org. She's very active - a big fan of Randi, critical thinking, etc. etc. - and always assumed that she was part of the same community of likeminded folk. That is, until one day she took the men gently to task for hitting on women at sceptic conferences. Cue a tidal wave of misogynist abuse. Then Richard Dawkins weighed in with an extraordinary comment on Pharyngula and all hell broke loose.

Watson has now stirred the pot with this much fuller article on Slate.com. It gives an interesting slant on the sceptic movement, and is worth a read. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a lot of discussion about it, and about what it means to be a sceptic.

It's not just sceptics who behave badly online, obviously. But they seem oddly prone to it.

Chris Carter's Science and the Afterlife Experience

When Chris Carter's first book came out he mentioned he'd originally tried to do it all in a single volume, but was advised to separate it into three. As a writer who was trying to do something similar I could readily relate to that, but didn't think that I had that option. As a result I spent a lot of time trying to telescope complex arguments into a small space.

Carter, by contrast, has given himself the room to do full justice to the various different topics. His first two instalments tackled psi research and NDEs. With this latest book on survival-related research - spirit communications, apparitions and memories of a past life - he has carried his ambitious trilogy to a triumphant conclusion.

This is more than a survey; it's an uncompromisingly partisan argument in favour of survival. The last person to make the case with philosophical rigour was Robert Almeder some twenty years ago, and it's fitting that the book includes an foreword by him. An earlier one was by CJ Ducasse, which Carter frequently references, also perhaps CD Broad's Lectures in Psychical Research, but these of course didn't include near-death experiences or evidence for reincarnation. Stephen Braude's Immortal Remains is up there too, but, like Broad, he's more concerned with exploration than in making a committed statement. So it's not a crowded field.

The advantage of having plenty of room is that the topics are pretty comprehensively covered, with case studies representing a good range of evidence and illustrating all the main issues. It's also admirably laid out and structured. Much of the material is probably familiar to anyone who is reasonably well read in psychic research. On the other hand there were quite a few examples which I was glad to be reacquainted with, and others which were completely new, leaving me with the feeling that I don't know as much as I thought I did. One such is the chess match between living and deceased grandmasters, concluded in 1993, via a medium who knew nothing about chess - an extraordinary and apparently successful experiment.

I thought it was brave of Carter to tackle the cross correspondences, which to get the full impact of requires a knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman literature that few now possess. I'm still not convinced that they make the case for survival as watertight as the SPR researchers at the time clearly thought it did. But at the very least one can clearly see the convincing appearance of their deceased colleagues trying to come up with ways to persuade them that mediumistic communications are not just confabulations in the minds of the living.

But could that not be the case? The nub in books about survival is what to do about the super-psi hypothesis, the possibility that survival evidence can be more economically explained in terms of a virtually boundless psi capacity in living humans. I'm used to seeing this quite fully described with some seriousness - and in Stephen Braude's case, with a large degree of sympathy - as if it's a real contender. Carter will have none of this, and in what, for me, was one of the best chapters of the book, provides a full array of cogently argued examples to show why it is untenable.

That is one of the most striking characteristics of Carter's writing, his unwillingness to make the slightest concession to sceptics. This book takes full account of possible counter explanations, and indeed is largely concerned with showing why they must be set aside in the key cases he describes. But unlike the two earlier ones it does not focus very much on individual debunkers. When they do appear, it is to no great effect. For instance Paul Edwards is brought in as the chief prosecutor in the section on reincarnation, but since his basic position is that survival and reincarnation are simply incredible, and for that reason cannot possibly be true, one is left feeling that there is not much to argue about.

A part of me thinks that agnostic readers may object to this, believing that Carter is not giving their natural objections fair representation. After all, they may reason, if traditional materialist science rejects the idea of survival so completely, then its arguments must surely be stronger than Carter is letting on. Another part of me recognises that he is right, at least as far as psychic research is concerned: the evidence, across several different categories, locks together to provide an absolutely convincing case.

So I certainly don't disagree with Carter about his conclusions, which I think are absolutely warranted. I also think this book, and the trilogy as a whole, is a tour-de-force, and that it's vital that authoritative interpretations like this are available to set against the productions of sceptics like Richard Wiseman, which, alas, seem to get much more exposure. The really big question is whether the books we write about survival will ever make much difference to public perceptions.

Reading Carter's book reawakened in me that sense of wonder that something so entirely obvious should in our time be so effectively suppressed. The bottom line is that a great many people - clever and humane - will take their first steps in a new existence filled with puzzlement, confusion and perhaps even anxiety. That surely can't be a good thing. But if we want to address this, we will have to find ways to get them even to consider the question, never mind weighing up the pros and cons of the evidence.