Upcoming Events

On her blog, Caroline Watt posts some more details about the conference, and in particular about the contributions from her own department:
"There will be two papers reporting latest KPU work (precognition research using the ganzfeld method, and studies replicating Walach and von Lucadou’s Correlation Matrix Method)."
https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/2018/...ciousness/

She includes a poster for the conference, from which we learn that David Luke is "sometimes regarded as the rockstar of psychedelic research" and Bernardo Kastrup is "a proflic author on philosophical issues". (I think we know what they mean.)
https://koestlerunit.files.wordpress.com....jpg?w=640

There is also a detailed programme here:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/sites/spr.ac.uk/fi...GRAMME.pdf
[Edit: wrong URL corrected]

Going back to the Edinburgh contributions, with the help of the titles in the programme, it was possible to find recent abstracts of related work at the "Edinburgh Research Explorer" portal, as copied below. Sometimes one gets the impression that the message coming from Edinburgh is "it's all very interesting whether there's anything real behind it or not". The message of these two studies seems to be "it looks as though there's something real behind it".

(1) Ganzfeld

Caroline Watt, Emily Dawson, Alisdair Tullo, Abby Pooley, Holly Rice.
Testing Precognition and Altered State of Consciousness With Selected Participants in the Ganzfeld. A Pre-Registered Study.

A paper with the same title was presented by Caroline Watt at the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association in August:
The present study was the first to contribute to a registration-based prospective meta-analysis of ganzfeld ESP studies ...
We sought to maximise the anticipated psi effect size by selecting participants ...
Results. Twenty-two direct hits were obtained out of 60 trials, corresponding to a statistically significant 36.67% hit-rate. Therefore our hypothesis that the randomly selected future target would be identified to a greater than chance degree was supported.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/...66a3).html

(2) Correlation Matrix Method

Ana Flores, Ian Tierney & Caroline Watt.
Studying Mind-Matter Interaction Through Non-Local Entangled Correlations.

A paper entitled "Where mind connects with matter: Replicating the correlation matrix method" was presented by the same authors at the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association in August:
This article describes two experimental replications of a new methodological paradigm called Correlation Matrix Method ...
 In both experiments the number of significant correlations produced between participant influence and values produced by random number generator were very significantly more than the ones produced by the control method. Limitations in the method, and in the analyses are discussed, also suggestions for further experiments are explored.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/...cbd5).html

A related Research Note by the same authors is also in press in the Journal of Parapsychology:
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/...9ed5).html

Thanks for this Chris - encouraging stuff!

Whats interesting is that Caroline Watt is a skeptic, and keeps getting positive results. I think they could get a better hit rate if they used a stricter selection criteria for participants as well, but 36% is pretty good!

Which of the two experiments do you feel has better results?

Which of the two experiments do you feel has better results?

It's a bit difficult to tell from the abstracts, but as the second one says "very significantly", it sounds to me as though it was more significant than a p value of 0.03.

I have never really got to the bottom of the Correlation Matrix Method, beyond an impression that the statistics would need very careful handling. So it would be interesting to know about the discussion of "Limitations in the method, and in the analyses".

K9! on Skeptiko has posted details of a conference on parapsychology entitled "Parapsychology: exploring the science of the paranormal", organised by the Open University Psychological Society, at Warwick on 10-12 May next year:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/up...ost-125811

43rd SPR International Annual Conference

Holiday Inn, Leicester, 2 p.m. Friday 20th to 2 p.m. Sunday 22nd September 2019

FIRST NOTICE AND CALL FOR PAPERS

https://www.spr.ac.uk/news/43rd-spr-inte...conference

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page:

Caroline Watt will give a talk entitled "Precognition: From Life to Lab" at 7.30 on 5 February at the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh:
https://www.arthurconandoylecentre.com/e...line-watt/

The SPR Facebook page has information about a forthcoming talk by Ciaran O'Keeffe about "Psychic Criminology" at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmith's, University of London.

Actually, they have talks there most Tuesday evenings, which are open to the public free of charge. The programme is here:
https://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/speakers/

The remainder of the talks this term are as follows:


26 Feb             
Professor Mark Blagrove (University of Swansea)
Dreaming and memory consolidation
(Preceded by an experiential dream workshop – open to all, no need to book
https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=11827 )

5 Mar              
Dr Ciaran O’Keeffe (Buckinghamshire New University)
"I see what the killer sees”: An examination of Psychic Criminology

12 Mar            
Professor Michael Banissy (Goldsmiths)
Tasting words, seeing music, and feeling the pain of others: What can synaesthesia tell us about the human mind?

26 Mar           
Dr Josie Malinowski (University of East London)
Lucid dreaming

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, is holding a fundraising event on 23 March (this year, despite the date being given as 2018), featuring a wine reception and "PEN Award-winning historian and widely known voice of esoteric ideas", Mitch Horowitz:

https://ymlp.com/z4AIxI

ParaMOOC2019, a free online course on Parapsychology Research and Education organised by Nancy Zingrone and Carlos Alvarado, will take place between the 6 April and 19 May:
https://theazire.wiziqxt.com/course/5674...ramooc2019

For some reason, the presentations this year seem to be almost entirely about survival rather than psi:

Dr Carlos S Alvarado, the co-director of The AZIRE, an online project of Alvarado, Zingrone & Associates, and a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation (USA). Dr Alvarado will present “Survival of Death and the Development of Parapsychology”,  on Sunday, April the 7th, and “European Interest in Survival of Death: The Case of Ernesto Bozzano” on Saturday, April 13th.
Dr Janice Miner Holden, editor of the Journal of Near Death Studies, and Professor of Counseling Education at the University of North Texas (USA), will present "Near-Death Experiences and the Survival of Physical Death", on Sunday, April 14th.
Dr Phil Morse, retired Professor Emeritus of Education at the State University of New York at Fredonia (USA), will present “The Amazing, Unimpeachable Mediumship of Leonora Piper,” on Saturday, April 20th.
Dr Masayuki Ohkado, Professor in the Graduate School of Global Humanics and Faculty of General Education at of Chubu University (Japan), will present “How Real are Past Life Experiences under Hypnosis?, on Saturday, April 27th.
Dr Alejandro Parra, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (Argentina), will present “Unusual perceptual experiences in hospital settings and anomalous experiences in nurses” on Sunday, April 28th.
Dr Julie Beischel, co-founder and director of Windbridge Research Center (USA), will present "The Four Types if After-Death Communication Experiences (ADCs), on Saturday, May 4th.
Dr Callum Cooper, Instructor in Psychology at the University of Northhampton (UK) will present “Apparitions and Other Experiences of the Bereaved,” on Sunday, May 5th.
Dr Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), will present “Mind-Body Independence and Survival of Death,” on Saturday, May 11th.
Dr Michael Nahm, researcher at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (Germany), will present “Terminal Lucidity,” on Sunday, May 12th.
Dr Stephen E. Braude, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, will present “Post-mortem Survival: The Central Issues” on Saturday, May 18th.

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - here are details of the Society for Scientific Exploration's 2019 conference, to held 5-8 June at Broomfield, Colorado. The theme is "Consilience", which apparently means "the principle that evidence from unrelated sources, especially science and the humanities, can converge and produce unified conclusions" (though that definition doesn't leave me much the wiser).
https://www.scientificexploration.org/conferences/2019

I think "eclectic" is the polite word for the subject matter of the presentations, which range from mainstream parapsychology through homeopathy and the I Ching, all the way to the authorship of Shakespeare. I've never really understood why people should want to lump fringe theories in conventional fields, with the study of anomalous phenomena (except when sceptics due it for the purpose of ridicule).

ParaMOOC2019, a free online course on Parapsychology Research and Education organised by Nancy Zingrone and Carlos Alvarado, will take place between the 6 April and 19 May:
https://theazire.wiziqxt.com/course/5674...ramooc2019

Here is a post by Nancy Zingrone on Carlos Alvarado's blog, with more details of the course:
https://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/20...sychology/