BELIEFS AND MORALSsensation as simply a spooky experience. Parapsychology investigates
claims of psychic abilities and life after death, while anomalistic
psychology studies bizarre experiences and beliefs, but both tend to be
looked down upon by more mainstream fields of psychology. And yet
there are many who believe in the paranormal (three out of four Amer-
icans according to one survey) and many who claim to have witnessed
paranormal or inexplicable events, so it seems a glaring omission for
psychology not to attempt to find out why.
Among the most famous experiments in parapsychology are those
that involve the elaborate Ganzfeld technique, in which one person
attempts to send mental images to a second person located in a sound-
proof chamber, wearing translucent goggles and headphones playing
white noise. The theory behind this procedure is that extra-sensory
perception – if it exists – is a weak signal that is usually drowned out
by the riot of sensory information that we’re bombarded with most of
our waking lives. The task of the “receiver” is to select from four images
the one that most closely resembles the image or video viewed by the
“sender”. In 2001, Daryl Bem at Cornell University combined the results
from lots of Ganzfeld studies (a process known as a “meta-analysis”) and
concluded that overall, these experiments have shown that the receiver
selects the correct image more often than you’d expect by chance, indi-
cating that there is a real paranormal effect. However, many sceptical
parapsychologists think that this effect only emerges because of flaws in
the design of the experiment, such as “sensory leakage” from the sender
to the receiver (i.e. information is somehow being communicated via
conventional means) and poor randomization of the stimuli, so that clues
are discernible from the order the material is presented in.
Another popular focus of parapsychology research is psychokinesis –
the purported ability of some people to influence physical matter with
their minds. This skill was made famous in the 1970s by the Israeli illu-
sionist Uri Geller, with his dramatic bending of spoons and speeding-up
of watches. In parapsychology, tests for the existence of psychokinesis
take place in highly controlled circumstances, and usually involve a
person attempting to use mind-power alone to bias the output of an
electronic random-number generator. If the pattern of numbers produced
under the deliberate influence of a person’s thoughts is different from
the pattern produced without human interference, this is taken as
evidence for psychokinesis. There was a fair degree of hullabaloo in
2006 when Holger Bosch at the University Hospital of Freiburg and his
colleagues combined the results from over three hundred experiments