Parasychological paper makes mainstream psychology journal

The Daily Grail has a sort of digest of the paper by Cardena, here:
https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/06/the-r...-the-mind/

Article in Research Digest - the British Psychological Society.

Parapsychology has been unfairly sidelined, claims a new review of the field

A number of notable figures from psychology’s past held an interest in parapsychology or psi (the study of mental phenomena that defy current scientific understanding), including William James, Alexander Luria, Binet, Freud, and Fechner. But today the field is cordoned off; and when it encroaches into mainstream publications, as with the “Feeling the Future” experiments conducted by Daryl Bem in 2012, furore typically follows. To sceptics, the fact that these experiments produced positive results is ipso facto proof that psychology’s methods must be broken.

However, it’s only logical to take this view if you have already ruled out the existence of psychic phenomena and, at least among the US public, the majority haven’t. Even in the chronically suspicious British culture, one quarter of people have consulted a psychic. I too am personally quite open to the existence of such phenomena, so I’ve been eager for an accessible overview of the field of parapsychology as it currently stands. This is what parapsychology researcher Etzel Cardeña, Director of the Centre for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology at Lund University, attempts to provide in his new review in American Psychologist.

In relation to the comment by Anne Cleary, I'll give her paper a "sporting chance" but I gotta be skeptical about her approach at this point because it shows no signs of being anything new. Leaves me wondering: how many approaches to explaining or analyzing parapsychology have skeptics not looked at already? I don't think there are any left, that is until more effort is put in psi research and then they might come up with more as research continues. For now, I've heard every skeptical explanation under the sun.

The body of Cardena's paper is now available at no cost, at https://seriouspod.com/wp-content/upload...logist.pdf .

[Laird]

The body of Cardena's paper is now available at no cost, at https://seriouspod.com/wp-content/upload...logist.pdf .

Is this legal and legit from a copyright law perspective, nbtruthman?

[Laird]

(I ask because I'd love for us to be able to link to this paper from within our forum's introductory post, but we shouldn't do that unless the legals are all good).

I was curious about Anne Cleary's work, and found this article:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...125046.htm

It seems her main interest is in deja vu. She used the video game "The Sims" to expose subjects to two "thematically unrelated" but (possibly) geometrically similar themes - or example, a junkyard or a hedge garden with (possibly) the same spatial layout - and found that they were more likely to report experiencing deja vu when the spatial layouts matched.

Then she tried exposing them to a series of events which was spatially similar but "thematically" different, and asked them not only whether they were experiencing deja vu, but also whether they thought they knew what was going to happen next. If I understand the article correctly, about half those who experienced deja vu also felt they knew what would happen next, but in those cases their predictions about the future did no better - that is, they agreed no better with their past experience - than chance. Iin other words,even when they felt they were remembering something, they weren't remembering what happened after that something.

The conclusion is billed as "deja vu doesn't help us predict the future". This seems to go quite a bit beyond what the experiments actually established, but as the journal article is behind a paywall I don't even know whether that's an accurate report of Anne Cleary's conclusions.
(Edit: Judging from the abstract, it's probably not an accurate report of what the paper says.)

But what I really don't understand is why she should be keen to cite a paper which argues that there is strong evidence for precognition from experiments whose design should have precluded "cognitive illusions". It seems to run directly against what she is claiming. I suppose we'll have to wait for the paper, and hope that we mere mortals won't have to pay too much to read it.

Here is a TEDx talk by Anne Cleary about her research on the relationship between deja vu and precognition, and a link to another publication - again unfortunately behind a paywall. The description here reads as though she only assumed that there couldn't be a real precognitive effect, because the stimuli were randomly determined. In the previous work mentioned above, she apparently checked that the guesses about what was going to happen weren't better than chance. Of course, it would be nice to see the numbers in any case:
https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-11...-bias.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.375...19-01578-w

It's interesting that in the talk she says that in the previous experiments she had hoped to find genuine precognition, and that after she failed to do so she considered the experiment a failure and initially left it unpublished.

[Laird]

Etzel Cardeña has won the PA's 2020 Outstanding Career Award

This award goes to a PA professional or associate member to recognize sustained research or service contributions that have advanced the discipline of parapsychology. Prof.Cardeña has been the main editor of some of the best parapsychological books of the 21st century: Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century,

Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, and  Altering Consciousness [2 volumes]: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. He was also the founding editor of Mindfield: The Bulletin of the Parapsychological Association and a past editor of the Journal of Parapsychology.