Tag: paranormal

Ian Stevenson – Science, the Self, and Survival After Death: Selected writings of Ian Stevenson, edited by Emily Williams

Carl Sagan, a lifelong skeptic of paranormal claims, in his last book (1996) identified Stevenson’s research as one of three areas of potential significance (the others were psi tests with random number generators and under mild sensory deprivation, i.e., the ganzfeld).

Stevenson was drawn to extrasensory communications and phenomena suggestive of survival and reincarnation because, if these processes could be established, they would demonstrate that human beings were more than their physical bodies. Stevenson came to concentrate on reincarnation because he saw that it posed an especially keen challenge to materialistic assumptions. It also had clear implications for medicine. Reincarnation might help to explain, among other things, the origins of individual differences and why a given person developed a given disease, one of the “leitmotif” questions of his career.

Reasoning in Believers in the Paranormal – The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

Reasoning biases have been identified in deluded patients, delusion-prone individuals, and believers in the paranormal. This study examined content-specific reasoning and delusional ideation in believers in the paranormal.

A total of 174 members of the Society for Psychical Research completed a delusional ideation questionnaire and a deductive reasoning task. The reasoning statements were manipulated for congruency with paranormal beliefs. As predicted, individuals who reported a strong belief in the paranormal made more errors and displayed more delusional ideation than skeptical individuals. However, no differences were found with statements that were congruent with their belief system, confirming the domain-specificity of reasoning. This reasoning bias was limited to people who reported a belief in, rather than experience of, paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that reasoning abnormalities may have a causal role in the formation of unusual beliefs. The dissociation between experiences and beliefs implies that such abnormalities operate at the evaluative, rather than the perceptual, stage of processing.

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 192(11):727-733, Lawrence, Emma; Peters, Emmanuelle

The Real Point is Control: The Reception of Barbara McClintock’s Controlling Elements

Nathanael Comfort – Journal of the History of Biology 32: 133–162, 1999.

Of McClintock’s much-vaunted interest in the paranormal, her friend Evelyn Witkin said it wasn’t belief, but that “she just felt we were at a point of profound ignorance, that we were overestimating our understanding of the way things worked.”  The reference was to nature, but it might have been to the nature of science.