Making Space for Psi

Making Space for Psi

Society for Psychical Research Study Day no.78

London 16.11.2019

Review by Fiona Bowie (SAME, Oxford University)

  

Bernard Carr introduced the Study Day on ‘Making Space for Psi’ with a tribute to John Raymond Smithies (1922-2019), a neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist and neurophilospher who pioneered the scientific study of psychedelics and their effects on the brain, who also looked at psychic phenomena. His first book in 1956, The Analysis of Perception (London: RKP) tackled the mind-brain problem and proposed a theory of  ‘extended materialism’. In 1967 he edited a volume on Science and ESP (London: RKP, republished 2008), which included contributions from some of the most respected philosophers and scientists of the day. In his introductory chapter, ‘Is ESP Possible?’ Smithies wrote:

It is the province of natural science to investigate all phenomena in nature impartially and without prejudice…. During the last eighty years there has been a good deal of research into these so-called ‘paranormal’ events. Many spontaneous cases have been studied and scientists have developed experimental methods of investigation… The results of all this work, it is generally agreed by even the severest critics, have led us in 1966 to the following position. We must either accept the validity of these phenomena or hold that all the workers reporting positive results (in experiments that stand up to the severest procedural analysis) are guilty of deliberate and often extremely ingenious and collective fraud (1967:1-2). 

He goes on to ask why, if this is the case, many scientists continue to reject even the possibility of ESP, without bothering to investigate the facts. The problem, he concludes, is the lack of conventional scientific hypotheses to explain ESP – it poses a challenge to materialist science and it would require a paradigm shift to accommodate the evidence. He proposes several possible hypotheses to account for ESP that require investigation. If the materialist conception of human personality cannot be made to fit the empirical evidence available, he argues, ‘we shall have to conclude that Psychical Research is one of the most important branches of investigation which the human mind  has ever undertaken’ (45).

            That a new paradigm is necessary and long overdue can be seen from the fact that over fifty years after the publication of Science and ESP one of the UK’s leading popular science journals, New Scientist, faced with the ubiquity of afterlife beliefs, rehearses some theories of innate evolved cognition and the failure to imagine non-existence, but offers no discussion of evidence for non-local consciousness. The idea that people might believe in an afterlife because they have experienced it (perhaps many times) and can access it an altered state of consciousness, whether through the use of psychedelics, in mystical or out-of-body states, through mediumship or hypnosis, is still an anathema. The only explanation proffered in relation to near-death experience is oxygen starvation – a theory that does not begin to stand up scrutiny and which can be easily dismissed. No scholars working on these areas from a non-materialist or open-minded perspective are cited (Graham Lawton, ‘Lure of the afterlife’, NS 23 Nov 2019:40-41). This is typical of virtually all mainstream science publications, which remain determinedly and reductively materialist. It seems that ESP or Psi has yet to carve out a space in contemporary science. The aim of this study day was to review of the progress, or lack of progress, for psi in various scientific disciplines.

David Luke, a senior lecturer in psychology at Greenwich University in London, gave the opening talk on ‘Space for psi from neuroscience’. The good news is that after a hiatus of nearly half a century in research on the effects of psychedelics in human subjects, there is a project underway involving UCL, Cardiff and Bristol universities on clinical and neurological aspects of psychedelic drugs. One interesting result with psilocybin (magic mushrooms) is that it causes a decrease in activity in the ego-related brain centres but increased connectivity between brain regions. Another unexpected result concerns the effects of DMT with people who are congenitally blind, some of whom report visual experiences and an enhanced ability to navigate their surroundings. This might have parallels in the ways in which hypnosis or mediumship can mask or enhance physical symptoms or characteristics. One of the most striking examples of the latter is the mediumistic healer Raymond Brown, who channels Paul of Tarsus. Raymond has very poor eye sight and wears thick glasses, but when channelling Paul, he has excellent sight and no need of glasses. The results so far of the work on psychedelics suggests that rather than producing consciousness the brain acts as a receiver. Normal conscious brain states act as a filtering mechanism or reducing valve. ASCs have the effect of removing or decreasing this filtering mechanism, giving access to a much broader range of experience.

Chris Roe, a professor of psychology at Northampton University and current President of the SCR, spoke on the ‘Space for psi from psychology’. Chris presented a survey of current psychic research, some of which points to a ‘noise-reduction’ model – psi is everywhere with the brain acting as a filter. Meditation before taking part in psi experiments has been shown to improve results. One of the more bizarre (from a standard scientific perspective) but widely observed and commonplace psychic faculties is pre-cognition. This facility would have clear evolutionary advantages, but demonstrating it requires some ingenious experimental designs. Dean Radin, for example, has tested autonomic pre-cognitive reactions in laboratory tests, and Daryl Bem designed an experiment in which people were more likely to choose a favourable future image. Chris Roe also cited W.E. Cox’s seminal (1956) article on subliminal precognition, published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research  (‘Precognition: An Analysis’, 50:3, 99-109). Cox correlated data on train accidents and carriage occupation, and argued that there was a small but measurable correlation between lower occupancy rates and rail accidents, suggesting that some people had a subliminal foreknowledge of disaster and avoided travelling on specific trains or days. While not without criticism (see, for example, Adrian David Nelson’s review of this and other more recent studies), it remains a rare example of a naturalistic as opposed to laboratory account of precognition. After reviewing current work on psi, Chris turned his attention to explanatory paradigms, mentioning in particular Jim Carpenter’s First Sight, which argues that far from being ‘para’, faculties such as telepathy, clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena are normal, natural and part of the human endowment. 

First Sight offers a new understanding of what psi is. It proposes that psi is a primary aspect of an organism’s engagement with an extended universe of meaning that is carried out perpetually and almost entirely unconsciously. In the most basic terms, psi is the direct, unconscious expression of unconscious intention as it is engaged with things that are outside the sensory boundaries of the organism. If the expression is an effect upon the organism’s own experience and behavior, and parts of reality distant from the organism are consulted in the process, we speak of this as extrasensory perception: the receptive or afferent side of psi. If the expression is an effect upon parts of reality outside the ordinary sensory boundaries of the organism, and no ordinary physical action upon those things is involved, we call it psychokinesis, the active or efferent psi domain. 

The First Sight model is based upon a pair of related analogies. They can be expressed in the form of questions. What if ESP is like subliminal perception? What if psychokinesis is like unconsciously but psychologically meaningful expressive behaviors? These two things can be seen to imply each other. Subliminal perception (and ESP) can only be discerned by the inadvertent but meaningful behavior that it evokes. Inadvertent behavior can only be seen to be psychologically meaningful by virtue of the unconscious events (subliminal or extrasensory) that have evoked them. 

http://firstsightbook.com/wp/?page_id=72

Carpenter sees the Ego-Self – consciousness, as the centre of an increasingly non-local field of information. As the quotation above suggests, Carpenter argues that much of what we think of as ESP works at an unconscious, subliminal level. Personality and experience can act to block or enhance our capacity to see, which could explain some of the positive and statistically significant but negative results of some psi experiments with gifted psychics on the one hand and arch sceptics on the other. Another suggestion is that the direction of attention can have a future weighting (which begins to sound much like the popular and ancient teachings of the Law of Attraction). So we are left with two models of psi, one conscious and one unconscious, which are not necessarily alternatives, both of which require further research.

The third speaker, Rupert Sheldrake, made the case for the ‘Space for psi from biology’. The starting point was the many unsolved problems in biology that require some kind of psychic explanation, such as the coordination of social groups, whether it be a school of fish, a flock of birds, or a termite mound. The processes involved in communication and coordination in ‘superorganisms’ are still not known (pheromones cannot explain the role of a queen bee or ant, for example). Sheldrake argued that some form of telepathy or similar psi explanation is necessary to make sense of many common but poorly understood biological phenomena. As Frederick W.H. Myers understood when he coined the term ‘telepathy’, it is not thought but feeling that appears to communicate most clearly across space and time. In experiments with lactating mothers, for example, they began to express milk when at work at a time when their child at home was crying or distressed. This was a physiological and not a conscious response. They would then think of the infant, and perhaps ring or travel home, but the conscious reaction was secondary to the unconscious physical one – suggestive of Carpenter’s theory of First Sight (above). Another series of well-known experiments conducted by Rupert Sheldrake involved the sense of being stared at. This ability to know when one is the subject of attention, even over a CCTV camera, is common and innate, much as prey animals sense when they are being stalked. Another set of experiments involved homing pigeons. Existing theories suggest that they use the earth’s magnetic field and physical landmarks to find their pigeon loft. This may well be the case but is not the whole story. Rupert Sheldrake found that even when the loft was situated on a moving target such as a boat, the pigeons were still able to find it. The conclusion must be that there is some other, additional force at work to help them locate ‘home’. Perhaps this force or connection is what is at play when animals such as dogs and cats follow their owners to a new home that they have never visited? 

The Scottish medium Gordon Smith tells the story of a friend who had a strong telepathic bond with his dogs. On one occasion he lost one of his collies when walking in a forest. The trees were so dense that sound didn’t travel more than a few yards. After several hours of fruitless driving around looking for and calling the dog he returned to the area in which she had disappeared. He turned off the engine of his car and stood in the dark sending out thoughts to Bess, the missing collie, telling her that he was there and would wait for her. At a certain point he knew that the dog had got his message and that he needed to wait a bit longer. After 15 minutes an exhausted, bedraggled Bess appeared. The dog told him telepathically that she had quickly realised she was lost. She had picked up his thoughts earlier in the day but by the time she reached the spot he had driven off. Eventually she had picked up his thought signal again and had managed to make her way to him. Gordon Smith adds that it was the owner’s fear that she was probably picking up (Gordon Smith, The Amazing Power of Animals, Hay House, 2015, pp.147-151).

Although Rupert Sheldrake didn’t mentioned it, I was reminded of Cleve Backster’s experiments with plants and telepathic communication. If plants wired up to sensors respond to an ‘owner’s’ thoughts or to a forester entering the room, then we should not be surprised that animals can similarly react, even if we don’t know the mechanisms for this communication. I used to observe with cockroaches and ants who ran across my house (in West Africa and the UK respectively) that it was enough to think about killing them for them to scatter. The cockroaches would stop waving their antennae at me and scuttle for cover, and ants would break their busy disciplined two-way line from outside the house to a kitchen cupboard and spread out across the floor. It was so consistent and repeatable – their actions responding to my intention and not to my picking up a broom or brush and pan.  I could only surmise that these creatures possessed some primitive but effective means of reading my mind.

When it comes to making space for psi, Sheldrake’s contribution to communicating his ideas and devising experiments involving the general public has been exemplary. He has also been at the receiving end of more criticism than most scientists, whether die-hard sceptics who refuse to examine the evidence, or the scientific  and general media who find it easier to ridicule what they find threatening or don’t understand. There may be a paradigm shift underway but there is still some distance to travel before Sheldrake’s ideas, however much they correspond to phenomenological experience of the world,  find general acceptance within academia. 

Bernard Carr, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary College, University of London, updated the audience on the ‘Space for psi from physics’. Carr talked about the need to go beyond standard quantum theory and develop a new paradigm. We were introduced to the long and impressive list of respected scientific forebears who had made notable contributions to the study of psychic phenomena, including men such as Balfour Stewart (1828-1887) the Scottish meteorologist and geophysicist, noted for his studies of terrestrial magnetism, Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt, 1842-1919), who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904, and Frederick Stratton (1881-1960), a Cambridge astrophysicist who made a study of hauntings. It would seem that the space for psi has diminished rather than expanded in many ways, certainly if attacks such as those by Arthur Reber and James Alcock are anything to go by. In a recent review of Etzel Cardeña’s article in American Psychologist (July-August 2018, ‘The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review), Reber and Alcock argue not on the facts of the case, the scientific evidence, but from the presupposition that parapsychological claims cannot  be true as accepting them would involve a departure from the standard science model. The oft repeated claim that scientists follow the evidence and build their theories accordingly, changing them when new data contradicts the standard paradigm, clearly has its limits. Indeed, Thomas Kuhn showed how hard it is to change a standard paradigm and the degree inertia that a model and its supporters represent. 

While the paper bothered us on several levels, our primary concern was that it was symptomatic of a larger, more important issue that was being missed. It is not a matter of reviewing the existing database, scratching at the marginal and highly suspect findings of meta-analyses for something that passes the “< .05” cutoff point. It is not a matter of rummaging around in arcane domains of theoretical physics for plausible models. It is more basic than that: parapsychology’s claims cannot be true. The entire field is bankrupt—and has been from the beginning. Each and every claim made by psi researchers violates fundamental principles of science and, hence, can have no ontological status.

We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: the data are irrelevant. We used a classic rhetorical device, adynaton, a form of hyperbole so extreme that it is, in effect, impossible. Ours was “pigs cannot fly”—hence data that show they can are the result of flawed methodology, weak controls, inappropriate data analysis, or fraud. Examining the data may be useful if the goal is to challenge the veracity of the findings but has no role in the kinds of criticism we were mounting. We focused not on Cardeña specifically but on parapsychology broadly. We identified four fundamental principles of science that psi effects, were they true, would violate: causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law.  

Arthur S. Reber, James E. Alcock, ‘Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True’, Skeptical Inquirer, 43:4, July/August 2019.

Cosmic urobos

After some fascinating exploration of the cosmic urobos, in which life increases by a factor of ten in twelve steps, and Einstein on a fourth dimension, via Daniel Dennett’s insistence that ‘We are all zombies, nobody is conscious’, the audience was treated to possible explanations of psi from the perspective of physics. These included transmission models of telepathy, which still beg the question as to what or where is the transmitter or receptor area in the brain; biophysical models, which tend to be too subtle to be measured directly; and quantum theory, which suffers from an explanatory gap between the molecular scale and people. Despite this problem many scientists are convinced that there is ‘something’ that links QT and psi, and Bernard Carr surveyed some of the work on non-locality of consciousness, the interconnectedness of everything, one-mind, and filter theories, by scholars and writers such as Dean Radin, Henry Stapp, William Braud, Thomas Edison, Margaret Mahler, Ervin Lazlo, Aldous Huxley, Larry Dossey, Johann Zöllner, Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, and Burkhard Heim, with his 12 Dimensional universe. One of Bernard Carr’s conclusions was that neither perception nor memory are located in the brain, and that the filter theory of the brain makes more sense than the view that conscious processes are generated and stored there. The fascinating speculations on the nature of space and time, their location and intersections with our world and other dimensions, were themes pursued in different ways by our last two speakers.

Jan Pilotti, who joined us from Stockholm in Sweden, is also a mathematician and theoretical physicist as well as a medical doctor and psychiatrist. Pilotti spoke on the ‘Space for perception, memory and psi’,  pointing out that the brain is not  the most complex thing in the universe, as is often stated. The most complex thing is a group of brains. We were introduced to scholars working on the metaphysics of the brain, starting with Gustaf Stromberg’s The Soul of the Universe from the 1930s, and Australian philosopher David Chalmers influential inaugural lecture at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in 2013. Chalmers favours a panpsychist model of consciousness – there is a little bit of consciousness everywhere. Swedish professor of cognitive neuroscience and psychologist Antti Revonsuo, in Foundations of Consciousness (2017) attempts to explain phenomena such as dreams, out-of-body and mystical experiences from a biological and neuroscientific perspective. At the other end of the spectrum Pilotti recommended Anita Moorjani’s very personal account of a near-death experience and subsequent miraculous healing and life reorientation in her book Dying to be Me  (2012), in which she wrote that during her NDE she felt all moments at once, past present and future, simultaneously. This led onto a discussion of future possible worlds, precognition and the ontological status (or lack of it) for the future, psychometry as a coupling through space and time and notions of an information universe. The role of NDEs and what they can tell us about space and time was the subject of our last talk of the day.

Jean-Pierre Jourdan is a medical doctor and director of IANDS- France (the International Association for Near-Death Studies), and was given the topic ‘Space for psi from near-death experiences’. He too is interested in space and the need for an ‘extra dimension’ to make sense of the out-of-body descriptions of the time during clinical death of those reporting NDEs. Based on numerous interviews and case studies, Jourdan argues that the point of perception in these cases makes most sense if we posit a fifth dimension. In one case, for example, someone described seeing and being able to read a plaque with an inscription that was under the table, covered by a sheet, on which their body lay. This was subsequently verified. The relationships between objects in a room are maintained in relation to one another but the NDEer in their out-of-body state can see them all at once, from different angles, inside and outside, simultaneously. Many of the examples used, and the arguments for an extra dimension, can be found in Jean-Pierre Jourdan’s article in the Journal of Cosmology ‘Near Death Experiences and the 5^th Dimensional Spatio-Temporal Perspective’ (2011:14, 4734-4762).  Some NDEers report exploring their surroundings by turning their attention to an object or place and find that they can zoom in on it. There is no real sense of displacement, more a redirection of attention that is sufficient to bring something into closer view. Those who choose to explore further afield describe the sensation of passing through closed doors, ceilings or walls. Others find that a slight shift of perspective is sufficient to ‘see everything from all sides simultaneously’ without any real movement. Normally solid objects seem to become transparent and can be seen from all sides at once, inside and out. Also common is an experience of timelessness, ‘no body, no time’. 

To summarize, the particularities that we have reviewed could lead one to suppose that consciousness could be the result of some interactions between 4D and 5D phenomena and/or universes, an hypothesis we cannot simply dismiss and that is considered very seriously by some neuroscientists (Smythies 1994, 2003) and cosmologists (Carr 2008) as well as philosophers (Droulez 2010). (Jourdan, 2011)

This conclusion to Jourdin’s article above, with its tribute to John Smythies, brings us nicely back to where we started. If nothing else, the wealth of experience and scholarship that has accrued since Smythies’ pioneering work attests that many people within academia do make space for psi and that different disciplines appear to be coming closer in their observations, even if we do not, as yet, have a single, convincing answer to the challenges posed by psychic phenomena.