Volume 73
Spring/Fall 2009
EDITORIAL
Winning Over the Scientific Mainstream
John Palmer
One of the most important goals of parapsychology over the
years has been to convince the mainstream scientific community
of the reality of psi, at least as a communications anomaly. I
think it is useful to reflect periodically on what progress we
have made in meeting this goal. My answer is, not much.
PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
Abstracts of Presented Papers from the 52nd
Parapsychological Association Annual
Convention, Seattle, Washington, USA, August
6– 9, 2009
ARTICLES
Clever Beasts and Faithful Pets: A Critical
Review of Animal Psi Research
Diane Dutton and Carl Williams
It
is fair to say that animal psi research is a relatively
neglected area of investigation in present-day parapsychology.
Theoretical debates about the nature of psi rarely make
reference to findings from animal work, and conceptual and
practical issues ensure that, with one or two notable
exceptions, most researchers do not involve animals in their
research programs. Yet an examination of the origins,
underlying assumptions, and findings of animal psi research
illuminates a number of conceptual and empirical debates that
are pertinent to parapsychological research in general.
Addressing the Survival Versus Psi Debate
Through Process-Focused Mediumship Research
Julie
Beischel and Adam J. Rock
Although parapsychological research most
often involves the Big Four—telepathy, clairvoyance,
precognition, and psychokinesis—with only “an occasional nod
toward survival and afterlife topics” (Braud, 2005, p. 40),
the continued investigation of the latter issues is pivotal
for our understanding of consciousness, the potential of the
mind, and the nature of life in general. One of the main
methods for scientifically addressing life after death
involves studying mediums—individuals who report regular
communication with the deceased.
Alleged
Encounters With the Dead: The Importance of
Violent Death in 337 New Cases
Erlendur Haraldsson
Over a
century ago the founders of the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR) conducted the first
large systematic study of apparitions
(Gurney, Myers, & Podmore, 1886; Sidgwick
and Committee, 1894). In their meticulously
thorough investigation they found that
apparitions were reported by so many persons
that they concluded that they are
experienced by people who are normal and
sane.
Decision Augmentation in a Computer
Guessing Task
John Palmer
In
recent years, many of the major psi testing
paradigms have involved what I call implicit
psi. These paradigms share in common that
the designated psi sources are not asked to
produce the hypothesized effect and may not
even be aware that they are being tested for
psi. Examples include research on
presentiment (e.g., Bierman & Radin, 1997;
Radin, 1997), the mere-exposure effect
(e.g., Bem, 2003), and the global
consciousness project (Nelson, 2001). The
theoretical foundation for implicit psi, at
least from a psychological perspective, is
Stanford’s (1977, 1990) psi-mediated
instrumental response model, and, more
recently, Carpenter’s (2004, 2005) first
sight model.
Hypnotizability
and Dissociation as Predictors of
Performance in a Precognition Task: A Pilot
Study
Etzel Cardena, David
Marcusson-Clavertz, and John Wasmuth
Honorton
and Ferrari (1989) conducted a meta-analysis of precognitive
experiments published between 1935 and 1987 and concluded that
there is experimental support for precognition and that it
could not likely be explained by real-time psi phenomena. A
later series of six experiments by Steinkamp (2003), however,
reported inconsistent support for a precognitive effect.
Particularly relevant to this study are the recent findings of
Bem (2008a), who created the precognition program and
procedure we used in this study (Bem, 2008b). He reported
(Experiment 3; Bem, 2008a) significant results in support of
precognition, especially among participants scoring high in a
measure of novelty seeking. In this study we evaluated whether
hypnotizability, dissociation, and belief in psi affect
performance on the precognition test. We decided to use Bem’s
program to try to replicate his previous studies and evaluate
its usefulness in our sample.
OBITUARIES
Gertrude R. Schmeidler by Ruth
Reinsel
Gertrude R. Schmeidler,
who resided for most of her life in Hastings-on-Hudson, New
York, passed away in Whittier, California, on March 9, 2009,
at the age of 96.
So many words come to mind when
thinking of Gertrude: modest and unassuming; soft-spoken, even
shy, and hesitant; very polite, always a lady. Even in the
most contentious faculty meetings, she never raised her voice,
and often played the role of reasonable mediator. She always
had time to listen to her students, and always took their
ideas seriously. Unlike so many mentors, she never imposed her
own research agenda on her students, but allowed them to
develop their own ideas. She was one of a kind, and she will
be sorely missed
BOOK REVIEWS
UNBELIEVABLE: INVESTIGATIONS INTO
GHOSTS, POLTERGEISTS, TELEPATHY, AND OTHER UNSEEN PHENOMENA,
FROM THE DUKE PARAPSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY by Stacy Horn
2009. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Pp. 289. $24.99
(hardback). ISBN978-0-06-111685-8.
Reviewed by Seymour
Mauskopf
“Freaky and terrifying” is the
description of the current box-office film hit “Paranormal
Activity” by Owne Glieberman in
Entertainment Weekly. The public, apparently, will never
tire of hauntings, poltergeists, séances and the like. It was
out of such nineteenth-century “paranormal activity” and the
associated spiritualist movement—and partly in reaction
against it—that psychical research and, later, parapsychology
came into being. Stacy Horn’s eminently readable book is,
basically, a narrative of the life and career of the founder
of parapsychology, J. B. Rhine. However, his name does not
appear in the book’s title, and the subjects listed in the
subtitle go far beyond the research foci of Rhine’s
Parapsychology Laboratory, despite Horn’s linkage of that
institution to them in her title. What this book does
effectively is to contextualize Rhine’s vision of
parapsychology as an experimental science in the broader, more
emotionally intense, less scientifically controllable
paranormal activities in which the general public was (and is)
really interested.
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: EXPLORING THE MIND-BODY
CONNECTION by Ornella Corazza. London: Routledge,
2008. Pp. xi + 170. £17.99 (paperback). ISBN 0-415-45520.
Reviewed by David Luke
As the title suggests, this book is concerned with the
near-death experience (NDE) in relation to the mind-body
connection, particularly in relation to Eastern, mostly
Japanese philosophies, and it considers the similarity of NDEs
with experiences occurring under the dissociative anesthetic
ketamine. These two separate approaches to the NDE issue were
originally explored in depth as part of Corazza’s recent
doctoral thesis at SOAS in London and are now considered
together in this book, though in a somewhat less integrated
fashion than one might expect, as we shall see. Initially the
book outlines some of the sticking points of mind-body
philosophy, particularly what David Chalmers calls “the hard
problem of consciousness” relating to how subjective
experience arises from the objective activity of the brain.
Taking as the starting point the Japanese philosopher Yuasa’s
conception of the whole mind-body, the introduction moves
through Husserl’s phenomenology to Varela’s
neurophenomenology, segueing into James’s fields of
consciousness and Sheldrake’s extended mind theory, prompting
Corazza to offer the notion of “the extended body” as an
alternative. Incorporating, quite literally, Edward Hall’s
notions of the corporal extensions of humans, such as language
as an extension of experience in time and space, and Weston La
Barre’s “evolution by prosthesis,” such as the creation of
submarines to allow underwater exploration, our author
tantalizingly adumbrates the extended body in the Japanese
tradition as a semi definite and indefinitely varying
body-space. We are also reminded that in the Eastern tradition
we not only have a body but we are our bodies.
SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE: DEFENDING SCIENCE, EXPOSING
PSEUDOSCIENCE. Edited by Kendrick Frazier. Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. Pp. 203. $21.98 (paperback). ISBN
978-1-59102-715-7.
Reviewed by Douglas M. Stokes
Science Under Siege is a collection of articles previously
published in The Skeptical Inquirer (SI), most of them within
the last 5 years. In some cases, updated commentary is
provided, and some new material, including a transcript of a
question and answer session following a keynote address by
Carl Sagan, is included.
The first contribution, by Paul Kurtz, the chairman of the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the
Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP), is a review of the accomplishments in the
first 30 years of SI. Among them, Kurtz cites the now infamous
investigation of Michel Gauquelin’s astrological research.
Curiously, Kurtz does not mention the controversies over
CSICOP’s own botched investigation in what has become known as
the STARBABY scandal.
PHENOMENA:
SECRETS OF THE SENSES by Donna M. Jackson. New York:
Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Pp. 174. $16.99 (hardcover).
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-16649-2.
Reviewed by Athena A.
Drewes
There are many things that go “bump” in the
night that amaze and astound us. Phenomena: Secrets of the
Senses offers us a treasure trove of paranormal and amazing
normal phenomena that our more than five senses experience.
Written for the layperson, notably school-age children,
Jackson’s easy to read book offers scientific information on a
variety of phenomena, some of which can be easily explained
through scientific study, while others defy explanation.
SPIRITS WITH SCALPELS: THE
CULTURAL BIOLOGY of RELIGIOUS HEALING by Sidney M.
Greenfield. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008. Pp. 239.
$24.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-59874-368-5.
Reviewed by
Patric V. Giesler
When scholars have published a host
of articles over their careers on different studies of a
particular topic, like “healing traditions of Brazil,” they
often present these articles in a book. One approach is to
reprint the articles as an anthology and add an introduction.
Another approach is to try to unify the various articles as
chapters of a book on that topic under an overarching question
or problem. Hopefully, the author revises each article to fit
or address that problem more directly than in the original
published versions. He or she may also add additional chapters
to help make the connections. This second, more difficult
strategy is what anthropologist Sidney M. Greenfield attempts
in Spirits With Scalpels. He draws from his previously
published articles for the meat of each of the three main
parts of his book. Eleven of these articles are listed on the
copyright page (p. 2), the same articles published in his
Brazilian anthology (Greenfield, 1999) and thus published here
for the third or fourth time, albeit now as chapters of a book
under a unifying problem and set of questions with the goal of
resolving them.
THE OUTLINE OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY by
Jesse Hong Xiong. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2008. Pp xi + 368. $39.95 (paperback). ISBN-10: 0-7618-4043-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7618-4043-5.
Reviewed by Lance Storm
Xiong presents an absorbing but self-confessed
“unoriginal” take on parapsychology, its history and impact on
science and society. The title of this quite voluminous and
broad-ranging book is puzzling in its use of the definite
article “The” (as in “The Outline . . .”), and at first, I
suspected a metaphysical sense in its usage. For reasons that
will soon become apparent, I quickly put it down to a simple
grammatical faux pas. As it happens, it would have been more
appropriate to use the indefinite article “an” (as in “An
Outline . . .”) because Xiong’s book is just one of many in
this ilk, and I don’t think it is so grand that it will stand
forever-more as a foundational text on parapsychology, as one
might claim for Wolman’s (1977) Handbook of Parapsychology.
However, the book is easy to read, and what must be mentioned
is Xiong’s attempt at establishing a “framework and system of
parapsychology” (p. ix). By the end of the book, my main
concern was whether Xiong had been successful in his attempt,
even with such “pearls of wisdom” as his recommendation that
parapsychology would be best served by predominantly testing
“star” subjects and focusing less on ordinary people—an
oversight he notes in Rhine’s work. With that instance alone
as a “framework” or “systemic” principle, he might be on the
right track, but participant preference is surely a matter
dependent upon context. But at this point in the book, and
then later, Xiong does admit that other aims are served by
testing novices or naïve participants, which is no more than
what parapsychology is currently doing anyway.
PRIMARY PERCEPTION: BIOCOMMUNICATION WITH PLANTS,
LIVING FOODS, AND HUMAN CELLS by Cleve Backster.
Anza, CA: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003. Pp. 168. $15.95
(paperback). ISBN: 0- 966435435.
Reviewed by Jerry Solfvin
The part of me that is attracted to
clever, multileveled titles wants to call this book
“Tracings,” because it reads like a cumulative polygraph
tracing of Cleve Backster’s public life. Backster’s writing is
so direct and straightforward that one gets the impression of
reading the undistorted truth, WYSIWYG, emerging directly from
his viscera. But like a polygraph tracing, this book only
reports the surface activities—leaving the reader to infer
Backster’s personal biases, hopes, or expectations, from the
surface tracings. Fortunately for the reader, Backster’s
tracings are not difficult to interpret.
Benefactors
Glossary
Index |
Spring/Fall
2008