does, and through this kind of play, children
develop their knowledge about reality by
stepping back from or going beyond it.This capacity for creating other characters
and other worlds continues into adulthood in
daydream fantasies and in the enjoyment of
fiction- and poetry-reading, film-viewing and
theatre-going, electronic gaming, creative writ-
ing, painting, and other arts, which have been
described as ‘qualia machines’ offering up new
varieties of consciousness (Reinerth and Thon,
2016). When we feel ‘immersed’ or ‘absorbed’ in,
or ‘transported’ to, a world created by a written
text or a set of moving images, we may retain
more or less awareness of the environment in
which we are reading or watching. This might
depend on many other factors, including our
evaluations of or empathy with the protago-
nists, the richness of our mental imagery, our
familiarity with the story’s genre, and maybe
even basic demographic factors like gender
(van Laer et al., 2014).People also vary widely in their capacity for
‘psychological absorption’, a variable closely
related to hypnotisability. Absorption is usu-
ally measured with the Tellegen Absorption
scale (Tellegen and Atkinson, 1974; Jamie-
son, 2005) and those who score highly are
more likely to report a variety of unusual
experiences and respond more strongly to
drugs like psilocybin (Blackmore, 2017).Virtual reality technologies can now create
elaborate multisensory simulations which
are heightened by users’ ability to interact
physically with them. VR worlds can induce
motion sickness, or ‘simulation sickness’,
thanks to how they manipulate sensory per-
ception and feedback, and responses to VR
on dimensions like social paranoia or degree
of presence in the virtual world can be used to
predict future occurrence of PTSD symptoms
(Freeman et al., 2014). And so, the boundaries
between ‘consensus reality’ and other kinds
of reality continue to shift and blur.In contemporary Western culture, other
worlds are usually confined to shared forms
of fiction, or to private fantasy, but in many
other cultures they are deliberately cultivated‘the conceptually infused
alternatives to reality
that children conjure
up feed back on their
assessments of reality’(Harris, 2000, p. 7)
‘science fiction [is] the only
genuine consciousness-
expanding drug’(Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Of sand and
stars’, 1983)tHe GAnZFeLD ContRoVeRsY
the first ganzfeld experiment was pub-
lished in 1974 by the American para-
psychologist Charles Honorton. Attempts
at replication produced varying results,
steadily improving techniques, and many
years of argument, all culminating in the
1985 ‘Great Ganzfeld Debate’ between
Honorton and American psychologist
Ray Hyman (1985). Both carried out
meta-analyses of all the available pub-
lished results, but they came to opposite
conclusions. Hyman argued that the
positive results could all be explained by
methodological errors and multiple anal-
yses. Honorton argued that the overall
effect size was large and did not depend
on the number of flaws in the experiments,
and that the results were consistent, not
dependent on any one experimenter, and
revealed regular features of esP. In a
‘joint communiqué’ (Hyman and Honorton,
1986), they detailed their agreements and disagree-
ments, and made recommendations for the conduct of
future ganzfeld experiments.
In 1994, the original meta-analysis was republished in
Psychological Bulletin (Bem and Honorton, 1994), along
with impressive new results obtained with a fully auto-
mated ganzfeld procedure carried out at Honorton’s Psy-
chophysical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Princeton. this
‘autoganzfeld’ was hailed as a fraud-proof technique that
would finally provide a repeatable experiment for para-
psychology, but criticisms began again with the suggestion
that acoustic leakage might have occurred (Wiseman,
smith, and Kornbrot, 1996).
Another problem concerned nine studies carried out by
British psychologist Carl sargent at Cambridge University.
these nine comprised nearly a third of the twenty-eight
studies in the original meta-analysis and had the second
highest effect size after Honorton’s own. Having failed
to obtain significant results in her own experiments, sue
visited sargent’s laboratory in 1979 and found that the
experiments, which looked so well controlled in print,
were far from fraud-proof. she uncovered serious errors
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