Psi Text Resources Thread

[Ninshub]

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's quite an interesting article on the Pyschology Today website by Steve Taylor (Leeds Beckett University), entitled "Open-Minded Science: If the evidence for psi is convincing, why isn't it more widely accepted?":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...ed-science

Steve Taylor is a psychologist that writes Zen-minded spiritual books similar in themes to those of Eckhart Tolle, like Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds (and appreciated by the latter), but I didn't know he was knowledgeable about psi. Great to hear, as well as see this article on PT.

Steve Taylor is a psychologist that writes Zen-minded spiritual books similar in themes to those of Eckhart Tolle, like Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds (and appreciated by the latter), but I didn't know he was knowledgeable about psi. Great to hear, as well as see this article on PT.

Yes - the name didn't ring a bell and I checked whether he had worked on psi but couldn't see anything.

Sometimes articles like this are billed as "Scientist says there's good evidence for psi" but turn out to be by parapsychologists anyway. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Sometimes articles like this are billed as "Scientist says there's good evidence for psi" but turn out to be by parapsychologists anyway. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Surely you don't imply that parapsychologists are not scientists?

Surely you don't imply that parapsychologists are not scientists?

No. I just mean they're billed as if they're scientists without any particular interest in psi rather than proponents.

In that article, Steve Taylor referred to this Ganzfeld study:
In 2005, researchers at Notre Dame University conducted a series of eight Ganzfeld experiments, which found a highly significant overall ‘hit rate’ of 32%. The researchers admitted that, as skeptics, this result made them feel ‘uncomfortable’, since it came ‘precariously close to demonstrating that humans do have psychic powers’ (11). Seemingly spooked by this, the researchers quickly developed a further experiment, where they matched up individuals who had ‘hits’ during the previous eight experiments. For some strange reason, these pairs produced the highly significant negative result of a 13% hit rate (significantly lower than the 25% chance rate). Encouraged by this negative result, the researchers claimed that it invalidated the previous eight experiments, and concluded that they had found evidence that telepathy did not exist!

(11) Delgado-Romero, E. A. &  Howard, G. S. (2005). Finding and Correcting Flawed Research Literatures. The Humanistic Psychologist, 33, 293–303.

I couldn't find a copy of that online, but I did find a response by Bierman and Lobach, which contained some more details:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...iteratures

I'm still not sure how many trials went towards that 32% hit rate in the first 8 studies, but the final study on the basis of which they dismissed that result apparently got 7 hits out of 52 trials. That is below chance expectation, but I wouldn't describe it as "highly significant", as the p value is about 0.033. More importantly, the study was hopelessly under-powered. Statistical significance at p=0.05 would require 19 or more hits out of 52. Even if there had been a real psi effect raising the probability of success from 0.25 to 0.32, the hit-rate they found in their first 8 studies, 52 trials would have yielded a significant result only 29% of the time.

This is the kind of thing that is (quite rightly) cricitised by sceptics when it happens.

Some interesting articles in the December issue of Edge Science. I'm just reading the one about Remote Viewing and the attempt to find Saddam Hussein while he was in hiding. Some pretty impressive results by the look of it.

https://www.scientificexploration.org/ed...e-issue-36

The SPR Facebook page has a link to a Psychology Today blog post by Eric Haseltine ("Long Fuse, Big Bang" ) on the possibility of inheriting memories through epigenetics:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-phenomena

Haseltine views himself as a "hard scientist", generally sceptical about the "paranormal", but aware of the need to keep an open mind.

He also refers to his previous blog post discussing heart-rate-based presentiment studies by Rollin McCraty:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...the-future

"Despite McCraty’s strenuous efforts to eliminate spurious sources of experimental error, I remain skeptical that the heart, or any other organ, can "see" into the future. I’m similarly hesitant to say clairvoyance is “impossible” (because Heisenberg was right about the strangeness of the universe), but my intuition is that a far less exotic explanation for McCraty’s findings will ultimately emerge."

Jason Colavito has a blog post reviewing a forthcoming book entitled "Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars: The Panspermia Revolution and the Origins of Humanity", by Chandra Wickramasinghe, Kamala Wickramasinghe and Gensuke Tokoro:
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review...ighe-et-al

The book is essentially about the Panspermia hypothesis, according to which life on earth originated from outer space.

Colavito doesn't like the book at all, but the thing that caught my eye was this:
"They also bring up, credulously, dubious claims about the existence of psychic powers and argue that Buddhism produces scientifically confirmable benefits to human health and well-being."

I wonder where psi comes into Wickramasinghe's Panspermia theories. Does anyone know?

White Crow Books is due to publish "Talking about Psychical Research: Thoughts on Life, Death and the Nature of Reality" by Mary Rose Barrington next month. Their website has some thoughts from the author in response to the question "What is the point of psychical research?":
http://whitecrowbooks.com/books/sample/t...ature_of_r

Magonia Review has a positive review by Jenny Randles of David E. Presti's "Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science and the Paranormal" (2018):
http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2019/02/m...ou-go.html

The chapters were written by the participants at a retreat for open-minded scientists organised in 2010 by a "Bon shamanistic Buddhist", and cover different aspects of the paranormal: near death experiences (Bruce Greyson), reincarnation (Jim Tucker), mediums, apparitions and deathbed visions (Emily Kelly) and psychic experiences and spirituality (Edward Kelly).