Psience Quest Interview No. 5: Graham Nicholls

Oh wow, I must have missed this thread (I think I miss loads - is there a way of only accessing "new posts" like you could on the Skeptiko forum, as all I can see is the main forum page which shows only the most recent post within a specific category?)

Thank you so much for this Roberta and Graham, it's much appreciated & provides food for thought.

I happen to disagree with some of Graham's conceptualisations of the various states of concsiousness (imo & experience.....which I dare say is easily comparable to Grahams , for eg. for me it is clear there is some connection or continuity between the states of "lucid dreaming" and any other "soul travel" type experience like "OBE" or "remote viewing" etc (and "REM" is not always present during all dreams, lucid or otherwise, either), but Graham dismisses the idea entirely as  "symptom of new age unscientific approaches to OBEs and people repeating uninformed opinions across the internet. "

As somebody who has deeply studied within numerous disciplines ("spiritual", scientific, psychological etc) and had hundreds if not thousands of such experiences, I quite profoundly disagree with such a dismissal! I have come to an experiential conclusion they are connectioned in some way of my own accord based on my countless experiences of numerous connected states of consciousness, as well as having read every single western book authored on the subject (some 2 decades ago and prior).

That said, I find his comments very interesting and provide much food for thought!
Thanks again both Roberta and Graham

[Laird]

is there a way of only accessing "new posts" like you could on the Skeptiko forum

Yes! When you are logged in you can click in the header (the second one, it's grey and can be found beneath the black rectangle, which itself is beneath the uppermost header in which each entry's font is blue and accompanied by an icon) on "View Unread Posts" which does the same thing as Skeptiko's "New Posts". There is also a "View New Posts" link which based on its functionality would be better named "View Very Recent Posts". And then there is a "View Today's Posts" link which pretty much does what it says it does - shows you all posts made within the past 24 hours.

When you are not logged in (and even when you are), you can click on "Portal" in the top header, which is not so comparable to those other three options but does give you a bit of a sense of most recent threads/posts.

Perfect  thanks Laird! I'm usually logged off when browsing  the Portal link seems very useful though 

[Laird]

the Portal link seems very useful though

Yep, and you might even find that the most useful part of that Portal page is the "Latest Threads" section of its sidebar.

In case it's of interest to anyone, this paper by Tressoldi et al. refers to a couple of reviews of ESP during induced OBEs, but (unless I'm missing it) not any individual studies that produced statistically significant results.

The older review (Alvarado, 1982) is available here:
https://www.academia.edu/366168/_1982_._...46_209_230

The abstract says:
The evidence for ESP occurrence, as well as for the possible ESP-conducive properties of the OBEs, is considered to be weak, although there have been some striking results.

Unfortunately the more recent work referred to, a book chapter entitled "Anomalous self and identity experiences", by Cardena and Alvarado (2014), doesn't seem to be available online. But I can't see any reference to psi in the abstract, and OBEs are mentioned as just one of the topics covered, so evidently psi during OBEs isn't a central subject of the work:
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-12706-007

The chapter by Zingrone, Alvarado and Hovelmann in the "Handbook for the 21st Century" (2015) has a section on OBEs, but doesn't mention any work on veridical OBEs since the date of the above review by Alvarado (1982).

Letseat at Skeptiko has started a thread about Tressoldi's work:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/pa...ions.4356/

Jim Smith posted a link to a paper by Charles Tart, published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in 1998, in which he discusses his own experimental work on Out-of-Body experiences:
http://www.newdualism.org/nde-papers/Tar...-73-99.pdf

Some of this work suggests that hypnotically induced OBEs aren't the real thing anyway, in which case the lack of evidence for veridical induced OBEs wouldn't be surprising. Tart also discusses the well known experiment, published by him in 1968, in which a woman was apparently able to read correctly a 5-digit random number in a concealed position. (But the sceptical suggestion there is that the subject simply stood up in bed and read the numbers by normal means, as she wasn't under observation at the time.)

On the subject of veridical OBEs in the lab, Kit Pedler's book "Mind Over Matter," p. 115, (1981) has this about an experiment done by Karlis Osis with Ingo Swann:
"Osis put Swann in a laboratory again with attached electrodes to monitor his brain waves and other physiological states. A target for Swann to 'visit' was then randomly selected and put into an open-topped box suspended near the ceiling of the laboratory. Swann could not see the object as it was put into the box. He was then asked to identify the object. Eight experiments were done and then descriptions and drawings made by Swann together with the actual identity of the object were submitted to an external judge not involved in the experiment who was asked to match description with object 'blind'. All eight descriptions were correctly matched with the actual object description [sic]. This result has odds against it occurring by chance of 40,000 to 1."

Unfortunately, though Pedler usually seems to be quite good about citing his sources, there isn't one for this part. But I did find an online account by Swann (apparently from his book "Everybody's Guide to Natural ESP") that mentions the experiment. However, his description makes it sound much more like clairvoyance than like apparent vision during an OBE:
"When everything was in working order, the lights were dimmed, and I was asked to try to go out of body, float up to the tray, and peer down at it from the ceiling. If my nose continued to run, I was out of luck. There was no way of reaching into my pocket for a tissue without disrupting the entire EEG system.
If I merely imagined I was up at the ceiling, there was little chance of "seeing" what was on the tray. Yet there were all sorts of impressions whirling through my mind - the action in the street outside the building, what was going on in other rooms nearby, and a few fleeting images of what I took to be views of the tray's contents. I'd try to dictate the impressions into the intercom and tape recorder.
What was actually happening was a jumble of forms, vague, swiftly changing, as if in my mental perceptual apparatus there was a kaleidoscope of some kind, constantly evolving and reshaping bits and pieces of images. Every once in a while, one of these would solidify for a moment before vanishing. I'd become aware of colors and different shapes existing in some kind of relationship to each other. When I tried to verbalize these impressions, as was the design of the experiment, a typical response would go something like this: "Uh, I see a shape. It has corners, but I can't tell if it is square or oblong. I'm seeing it as a house, but I know a house can't be up there in the box, so maybe it is a toy house. But then it's not very thick, so maybe it's ... [I'd draw a blank on words] ... next to it is something small that looks like a cross or a safety pin, uh, I'm now seeing a diaper, but that's an obvious association to the safety pin, uh, the square-like thing is red or pink and seems to be about one-half inch thick."
When the experiment was over, I was unhooked from the electrodes and we viewed the target. It turned out to be a small red address book (not a toy house), and next to it was a small golden cross strung on a safety pin. But there were other things on the tray box that I hadn't perceived at all - such as a free-form cut-out of paper, and a series of numbers. So part of the experiment was a success, while another part of it drew a blank.
I was disabused of any idea that my ESP was going to operate like a TV screen in my own mind, or that my out-of-body perception was going to be crystal clear"
https://www.survivalafterdeath.info/arti...nn/esp.htm