Psi Text Resources Thread

Carlos S. Alvarado has a blog post commenting on a recent paper by John Palmer entitled "Training Anomalous Cognition in a Motor Task with Subliminal Auditory Feedback" (Journal of Parapsychology, 2018, 82:132-147):
https://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/20...tal-study/

Six participants selected for "high state and trait dissociation scores in a previous motor automatism experiment" had to guess the position of a randomly selected square in a 4x4 grid. A baseline score was measured first, then there was a training session with feedback, and then a test score was measured. I found the wording of the abstract a bit confusing, but the conclusion seems to be that although a number of statistically significant or suggestive results were obtained, comparison of the baseline and test stages produced no evidence of learning.

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - here's a post on a blog I hadn't seen before, "Cat in the Shadows". It's about a rather obscure phenomenon called the "vardogr":
"Vardogr" is a Norwegian word which means ‘‘the premonitory sound or sight of a person before he arrives’’. A person is seen, or their usual arrival sounds are heard- their footsteps on the path, their key turning in the lock, their passage along the hall..but when the person who heard these sounds goes to greet whoever they thought they had seen or heard arrive, there's nobody there. A short while later, the sounds are repeated, but are this time indicative of the person's actual physical arrival.
https://www.catintheshadows.com/blog/var...-that-word

I enjoyed reading this post, and certainly intend to read some of the older ones. The author is a paranormal investigator from Victoria, Australia, and describes herself as an "open-minded sceptic".

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, Craig Weiler has started a Parapsychology page on the Quora website, and has been posting contributions pretty frequently in the first week:
https://www.quora.com/q/rwtbmbxgygnumhcf

Just to say that Craig is continuing to post links at a steady rate on his Quora page. They are mostly to work that's a few years old, but they are an interesting selection, and I think they would be particularly interesting to people who are new to the field.

Mysterious Universe has a post about an article in a Russian army magazine by one Colonel Nikolai Poroskov, entitled "Super Soldier for the Wars of the Future." It makes some rather outlandish claims about Russian soldiers being trained in psychical combat. It covers the whole gamut of clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis and psychical healing - though as far as I can see not precognition, which you'd think might be the single most useful psi power in combat. The soldiers of the future can even control dolphns, apparently:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/04/c...-soldiers/

Mysterious Universe has a post about an article in a Russian army magazine by one Colonel Nikolai Poroskov, entitled "Super Soldier for the Wars of the Future." It makes some rather outlandish claims about Russian soldiers being trained in psychical combat. It covers the whole gamut of clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis and psychical healing - though as far as I can see not precognition, which you'd think might be the single most useful psi power in combat. The soldiers of the future can even control dolphns, apparently:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/04/c...-soldiers/

This has also been picked up by Sky News - the SPR Facebook page has a link to the report:
https://news.sky.com/story/russian-defen...t-11685277

It includes a bucket of cold water at the end:
But Yevgeny Aleksandrov, who chairs the Russian Academy of Science's committee for combating "false science", told Russian news outlet RBK that the parapsychological war tactics were "complete rubbish".
"Such research did indeed exist and was developed in the past but it was made secret. Now it's being brought out into the light again but such research is recognised as a false science," he said.

The SPR's annual report for 2017-8 is now available here. It includes detailed accounts of the Society's activities in various areas:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/sites/spr.ac.uk/fi...counts.pdf

The SPR has a review by Nemo C. Mörck of "The Spectacle of Illusion" by Matthew L. Tompkins, a book described by the author on his website as "written for general audiences on the topic of historical and contemporary relationships between magicians, scientists, and fraudulent mystics." Mörck finds it to be not very balanced or accurate, even given that it's a popular rather than a scholarly account:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/specta...l-tompkins

Three British academics, David Groome, Michael Eysenck and Robin Law, have written a short book entitled "The Psychology of the Paranormal":
https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology...1138307889

It's part of a series called "The Psychology of Everything" - "a series of books which debunk the popular myths and pseudo-science surrounding some of life’s biggest questions." These are described as textbooks. As it doesn't appear to have notes, a bibliography or an index, I assume it's meant to be a school textbook.

ESP is in there, as the first of the topics covered, but the tenor of the preview on Google Books suggests it's written with the familiar assumption that paranormal beliefs are all mistaken anyway, and that the only interest to psychologists is in working out why people believe in things that obviously don't exist:
https://books.google.com/books?id=iJ6RDwAAQBAJ

In contrast to that, Andreas Sommer has a blog post about a forthcoming book from Richard Noakes of the University of Essex, entitled "Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain," due to be published by Cambridge University Press in October:
http://www.forbiddenhistories.com/notice...-psychics/

"Modern" here refers to the 19th century, so apparently we're talking about the kind of physicists who were involved in founding the Society for Psychical Research.

Sommer comments:
"If Richard’s previous work on the hidden history of the physical sciences is any indication, his book promises to set new standards for future historians working on similar topics."