Sceptical Commentary

This piece appeared in the June 2005 issue of the 'Skeptical Adversaria', the newsletter of ASKE, the Association for Skeptical Enquiry.

Developing Perspectives on Anomalous Experience: June 4th 2005, Liverpool Hope University College

This conference consisted of papers presented mainly by research psychologists on the investigation of 'anomalous experiences'. The conference was well attended and the papers were of a very high academic standard. Fourteen were on the programme, but one speaker was unable to attend.

The first part of the conference (up to the morning coffee break) was devoted to reports of unusual experiences in everyday life. The first paper was by Prof. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, who is well known to all sceptics here and abroad. (The University of Hertfordshire has recently awarded Richard Britain's first Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology.) Richard reported the results of three experiments on 'dark room séance phenomena', specifically the movement of luminous objects. Sometimes the objects were deliberately moved by the experimenter and sometimes they were not. Suggestibility and belief in the paranormal influenced the recall of movement of the objects.

Dr. Ciaran O'Keeffe, Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University College, presented an overview of the variables associated with reportings of hauntings. Dr. O'Keeffe is currently the resident psychologist on Living TV's 'Most Haunted'. His paper involved a collaboration with Dr. Matthew Smith, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the same college.

Dr. Simon Sherwood, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at University College Northampton, next gave a very interesting review of reports of apparitions of black dogs. Dr. Sherwood noted that it has been estimated that between 17% and 32% of people have experienced some form of apparition of any sort. He has collected 50 cases of apparitions of deceased pets (dogs, cats and, in one case, a hamster). The focus of his paper was, however, apparitions of 'black dogs', which are characterised by their huge size and their large saucer-shaped eyes. Such apparitions are well known in folklore and have been reported for centuries up to the present day. Dr. Sherwood described common characteristics of reports of these apparitions and summarised normal, paranormal and supernatural explanations. (He presents his work on his website, which can be accessed by typing into Google 'apparitions' and 'black dogs'.

The final paper in this section was presented by another well-known figure in the world of scepticism, Prof. Chris French, who heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College. His collaborators for this presentation were Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton and Rachel Fox, all at the University of London, and Michael Thalbourne of the University of Adelaide. Chris presented recent results of research undertaken by him and his colleagues on people who claim to have had some form of contact with extraterrestrial aliens. Those claiming to have had contact scored significantly higher on a number of scales measuring personality characteristics such as hallucinatory experiences, absorption and dissociation, and they also reported more incidents of sleep paralysis. The researchers did not replicate previous findings concerning fantasy proneness, at least at an acceptable level of statistical significance, nor were those claiming contact more susceptible to false memories. There was no difference between the two groups on performance on ESP tasks, but contact reporters showed a marginal trend to do better on 'clairvoyance'. No differences were found on measures of 'fear of the paranormal' or the use of alcohol or drugs.

The second half of the morning's programme consisted of three papers on the theme of altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Dr. Chris Roe, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at University College Northampton, presented a paper on ESP and ASCs. Dr. Roe argued that the results of laboratory studies in parapsychology have tended to be weak and unreliable, but one promising finding has been that ESP effects are stronger when participants are experiencing an ASC such as dreaming, borderline states of sleep, meditation, and 'trances' as experienced by mediums. Prominent in parapsychology research has also been the use of sensory deprivation (the ganzfeld studies). Dr. Roe summarised some of the findings that have shown highly significant effects that may be attributable to extrasensory experience. There is evidence that those who are more proficient in entering an ASC (specifically meditators) show a stronger effect, but this may be because they 'hold back' on their performance when they are not meditating. (This problem has been encountered when investigating the effect of hypnosis on the performance of non-parapsychological tasks). This finding, of course, assumes the validity of extrasensory experience. A possibility also discussed by Dr. Roe is that the procedures for entering an ASC may have a ritualistic function in these studies. In other words, the effect is due to 'suggestion'. Again there are parallels here with research in hypnosis: participants expect that, following a hypnotic induction, their performance on various tests, including suggestibility, will be enhanced. Substituting the traditional sleep or relaxation induction with a 'dummy' induction, such as motivating instructions or instructions to the participants just to think about what is going on around them, yields the same increase in scores on the tests.

Dr. Christine Simmonds, Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University College, next presented a paper entitled 'Anomalous Experiences and Boundary Thinness in the Mind and Brain'. I was at a disadvantage in trying to follow this paper, as the concept of 'boundary thinness' is new to me. Boundary thinness is a trait that can be assessed psychometrically and is related to proneness to anomalous experiences.

The third and final paper in this section was by Prof. Etzel Cardeña, currently at the University of Texas-Pan American. Prof. Cardeña is well known in the field of hypnosis. Consistent with the findings on ESP and ASCs discussed by Dr. Roe (see earlier), Prof. Cardeña referred to evidence that ESP is enhanced during hypnosis. He presented some of the characteristics of the subjective experiences of 'hypnotic virtuosos' when different kinds of hypnotic induction have been used, and compared these to other reported ASCs such as in shamanism and deep meditative states.

The theme of the third quarter of the programme was research on ESP. Dr. Caroline Watt presented the first paper in this section. Dr. Watt is Senior Research Fellow and acting Head of the Koëstler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh. She is also President of the Parapsychological Association. Dr. Watt presented three studies on a 'remote helping task'. I understand that this task was devised by the late Prof. Robert Morris of the same department. In this task there are two participants; one has to focus all his or her attention on a candle and record, by means of a hand-held counter, when his or her attention wanders. In another part of the laboratory a second participant, the 'helper', is instructed to facilitate the other person's performance by concentrating on this idea. I understand that a significant 'remote facilitation' effect has previously been obtained in this kind of experiment. Dr. Watt's purpose was to examine characteristics of the experimenter that might influence the outcome. The main finding in this series of experiments was that evidence of remote facilitation of attention focusing was only obtained by experimenters who believed the reality of psi. Whether or not the participants believed that the experimenter accepted psi or had a good or bad record at producing psi phenomena made no difference when the same experimenters were used in each experimental condition.

The next paper was presented by Prof. Deborah Delanoy of University College Northampton in collaboration with Dr. Watt and the late Prof. Morris. The theme was 'Improving the Ecological Validity of ESP Research'. Prof. Delanoy drew a distinction between the standard laboratory studies of ESP and reports of spontaneous ESP in everyday life. The aim of her paper was to examine ways in which controlled research of ESP could be more ecologically valid with respect to 'real life' psi experiences. One of the topics of this paper was the use of training methods derived from folklore, recommendations of 'skilled psychics', and experimental research. The speaker also focused upon methodology that would enable participants in remote viewing experiments to generate their impressions in a place, manner and at a time of their choosing.

Prof. Daryl Bem, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, followed Dr. Watt. Of all the speakers at the conference, Professor Bem has the most impressive vintage, having obtained his PhD in social psychology in 1964, since when he developed an international reputation in the field, notably in the study of attitudes and cognitive dissonance theory. In more recent years he has turned his attention to parapsychology and has presented review papers that he and others contend demonstrate the reality of remote viewing (the ganzfeld studies). The theme of Prof. Bem's paper was studies of precognitive emotional arousal. Some previous research has provided evidence that when an emotionally arousing picture is presented to a person, not only does the physiological response to the picture take effect prior to the conscious registration of the contents of the picture, but prior to the presentation of the picture itself and, in computerised experiments, before the computer itself has selected the image to be presented! This finding, if it is valid, contradicts a fundamental law of physics, namely that one cannot have backward causality. Prof. Bem presented a series of experiments on this theme. One of his stated aims is to achieve the 'Holy Grail' of parapsychology research, namely to develop a protocol for demonstrating the reality of parapsychological phenomena – e.g. ESP – that can be used in any laboratory in the world and can generate statistically significant effects. (This precipitated a tea-time discussion amongst some of us as to just how typical is this kind of replicability in psychology generally. Some people expressed doubt as to how replicable are the results of many psychological experiments.) In this respect, one problem with the research that Prof. Bem presented was that, although he was able to obtain statistically significant results in a series of experiments, the number of participants required for statistical power was over 300. (Usually in these experiments chance level is 50% and Prof. Bem admitted to preferring the simplest statistical analysis, namely the sign test.) However, stronger effects were obtained for female participants and for meditators and the most significant results were predictably for female meditators. Hence, anybody wanting to do this kind of experiment could cut down on the time and resources needed by selecting their participants from such a population if one was readily available.

In the basic paradigm used by Prof. Bem, a picture on a computer screen is presented to the participant (in fact there are usually a pair of images). The computer then makes a decision whether or not to present the picture again (following the first presentation) but in such a way that, were it to precede the first presentation, it would modify the participant's emotional response to it. The results showed that the subsequent manoeuvre affects the participant's reaction to the image at its earlier presentation. For example, at the first presentation, participants may be asked to select which one of two images, designed to be emotionally arousing, they prefer. One of the images is selected by the computer at random and repeatedly flashed up on the screen. In standard psychological research it has been found that the participants' emotional reaction to repeated presentations of a picture dulls his or her emotional response to it by the process of habituation. The experiments conducted by Prof. Bem appear to show that this effect can happen in reverse time; a very slight tendency was found for the participants' initial preference to be influenced by the habitation procedure that followed. As I stated, this and other effects were extremely weak and required the running of hundreds of participants to achieve the appropriate level of statistical power.

The paper that was scheduled to follow Prof. Bem's was postponed until the end of the conference and, as I had to leave early, I missed the presentation. The title of the paper was 'Will we Ever Know whether ESP Exists?' and the presenter was Mr. Jezz Fox, who at present does not appear to be working at a university or college, but is undertaking some research with another speaker at the conference, Dr. Craig Murray (see later). Mr. Fox has developed systems for running surveys over the Internet and conducting experimental trials with participants (including the ganzfeld paradigm). Mr Fox presented arguments to support his contention that 'whilst it is not possible to use experimental findings to conclude that ESP does not exist, it is also unlikely that we will ever be able to use these findings to conclude that ESP does exist …. It seems that the experimental research being performed will not help to unify researchers in their opinion relating to ESP as a genuine human ability'.

The paper by Dr. Craig Murray, a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester, presented work that he has conducted in collaboration with Mr. Fox surveying 'out-of-body experiences' (OBEs). He described two projects investigating the body images of people who claim to have had OBEs). Of 243 university staff and students, just over a quarter reported having had an OBE and 79% of these reported having had more than one. Those reporting OBEs scored significantly higher on measures of somatoform dissociation, self-consciousness and body dissatisfaction, and lower on a measure of confidence in their physical presentation. There therefore appear to be pre-existing differences in the body experiences of people who do and do not have OBEs. People reporting having had OBEs tended to dream more in the disembodied state. The researchers also obtained evidence that the term 'out-of-body experience' is currently being used to refer to a range of experiences rather than just one; these include near death experiences, drug or chemically-induced OBEs, spontaneous OBEs, and autoscopy. The researchers supported a dissociational account of the OBE.

Dr. Robin Woffitt, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, then presented a paper in which he examined the language used in interactions when describing and discussing anomalous experiences. (I had to leave before the conclusion of this paper). Dr. Woffitt presented transcripts of the dialogue between experimenters and participants in what I understand to be experiments on remote viewing, in which each participant described his or her imagery. Dr Woffitt considers that this kind of analysis 'may offer important insight into the ways in which anomalous communication interacts with the organisation of ordinary verbal communication'.

Dr. Paul Stephens, Research Fellow with the Koëstler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, was unable to present his paper at the conference. From his abstract it is evident that Dr. Stephens's paper concerned the important issue of how one explains the occurrence of parapsychological phenomena such as psi, if they are real. This is something that none of the other presenters describing research on psi addressed. Dr. Stephens points out that parapsychology lacks an accepted theoretical model and any explanations have to be based on 'more esoteric and speculative areas of physics'. He argues that 'the different assumptions we make about psi effects can radically alter the physical requirements of any potential mechanisms' and he suggests alternative perspectives on some parapsychological phenomena. This is as far as I can present his work, but no doubt the interested reader can discover more on this topic by an Internet search.

I came away from the conference feeling more knowledgeable about, and more interested in, current work on anomalistic psychology and parapsychology. The ideas and the research presented (previous and original) were well presented, of a high standard, and relevant to an understanding of human psychology. Some of the presentations studied anomalous experiences in everyday life, the characteristics of the people who report them and the circumstances in which they are experienced, without needing to assume the authenticity of any paranormal or supernatural explanations to account for them. Other presentations described research designed to investigate the reality of psi phenomena. The medium by which such investigations are conducted is that of the psychological experiment with volunteer participants in the psychological laboratory, employing the usual statistical procedures for analysis.

One anomaly that I noticed at this conference on anomalous experiences was the fact that some people consider there to be no evidence at all for psi phenomena (and this is the usual sceptical line) whereas some presenters (who are all committed to scientific experimental psychology) appeared comfortable about referring to research in which these phenomena had been demonstrated, often at a high level of statistical significance. For example, on numerous occasions reference was made to psi phenomena being only manifest under certain experimental conditions, or being stronger in participants with certain characteristics; these results are very interesting and highly relevant, but the fact that psi phenomena occurred at all is surely the most startling conclusion.

If such phenomena exist then they are very weak indeed, but the fact that they exist at all would be of tremendous scientific significance. Replication is extremely important: the history of the study of these phenomena reveals that initially dramatic effects are claimed - e.g. astonishing feats of mind-reading or the psychokinetic displacement of large objects - but with increasingly stringent controls, the obtained effects become vanishingly small – e.g. a slight ESP effect obtained with hundreds of participants or the claimed ability of the mind to affect subatomic particles in an electronic random number generator). It may therefore be that the residual small, but statistically significant, effects that are currently being reported are still due to some leakage in the controls for such artefacts as experimenter effects or non-randomness in sequences of stimuli or conditions. Even if the effects prove to be robust, I am very sceptical as to whether laboratory studies of psi have any relevance to paranormal claims, - e.g. of psychic abilities - in everyday life. In fact, as it appears that any effects at all are likely to be miniscule, I see no particular purpose or advantage in them at all for human beings. (I was not convinced by Prof. Bem's idea that emotional arousal by backward causality may be of evolutionary importance.)

With one exception there was little discussion of any theoretical models that might underlie such phenomena. If it can be established that psi phenomena such as ESP and the backward causality phenomenon presented by Prof. Bem actually exist, however tiny the effects, then I see no reason why one should have to invoke religious or spiritual explanations for these. The discipline to turn to is physics. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to say whether there are any plausible theories in physics that would be able to account for such phenomena. I am aware that modern physics allows for the existence of paradoxical and anomalous events and processes that common sense and even classical physics do not allow for. (In the previous Newsletter I reproduced a letter to ASKE from Mr. Peter Bottomley, castigating Doug Bramwell for his article on the ASKE website, deriding those who seek support for paranormal abilities in quantum physics.) Also consciousness itself is a very special phenomenon.

I look at it this way. At one time, humankind thought of itself as being at the centre of our universe on the planet Earth. It gradually became apparent that this was not the case and that the Earth was a miniscule part of the universe, smaller in proportion than a grain of sand in all the deserts on Earth combined. Now we can once again think of the Earth and life on it, and in particular we humans, as very special. In the whole of our universe, matter itself occupies a tiny part; a tiny fraction of this matter consists of elements other than hydrogen and helium. A tiny fraction of this matter is formed from elements varied and complex enough to form a living organism. A tiny percentage of this matter forms organisms that are conscious. It seems at this point that we are now referring to something in our universe that is so incomprehensibly rare yet correspondingly so complex relative to anything else, as to be very 'special' – perhaps the most 'special' thing there is, if that is not being too anthropocentric.

Modern physics allows for, and even demands, such things as 'invisible' matter and energy, and extra dimensions. Even without possessing what are currently called psi properties, it may be that to explain consciousness we will need to draw upon modern physics and even physics that remains to be developed. This would certainly be a requirement if such phenomena as ESP and backward causality in conscious experience are real processes. However, before we go down that avenue, it must be established that we are dealing with clear, observable, replicable phenomena. There is no point in calling upon the rigorous science of quantum physics to provide explanations for phenomena if their existence remains to be convincingly demonstrated.

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