Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal

PSI WARS: GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE PARANORMAL Edited by James Alcock, Jean Burns, and Anthony Freeman. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2003. Pp. viii + 246 14.95 [pounds sterling]/$24.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-907845-487.

Since its modest beginning with two issues in 1994, the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS) has grown and now publishes 12 issues per year, with occasional special double-issues. In summer 2003, the JCS published such an issue on the topic of "Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal." This book appears to be a hasty republication of that issue, even duplicating the original JCS cover art depicting a bent rifle: a less-than-subtle indication of the themes of conflict and macro-PK.

A casual inspection of the book is rather disorienting, because the outside cover (front, back, and spine) does not reveal that the contents are a special issue of the JCS. This jars somewhat with the inside, which appears to be a complete duplication of the Journal contents. The first editorial introduction, from theologian Anthony Freeman, "A long time coming: A personal reflection," describes the ups and downs in his attempts to bring this special JCS issue on the paranormal to fruition. The reader has to put two and two together to deduce that the contents of this book are that issue--not a difficult task, but mildly irritating and leaving the reader with the impression of something that has been parachuted into book form without any further editorial intervention.

Freeman's contribution (more about that shortly) is accompanied by articles from the other two editors, physicist Jean Burns and psychologist James Alcock. These introductory chapters set the context for what is to follow, with Burns striking a sympathetic note towards physical theories of psi while Alcock's contribution is decidedly more skeptical in tone. The book is then divided into three sections, with five articles on "experiments concerning psi," two on "views about anecdotal accounts of psi," and two on "theoretical perspectives."

Because Freeman has been managing editor of JCS since 1994, his introduction makes interesting reading from a sociological point of view. He notes that although he wished to be balanced in publishing pro-psi and skeptical articles, he received many more pro-psi submissions than skeptical ones. He states, "There was a continuing degree of editorial unease where psi-related submissions were concerned, and they were handled differently from other papers for the remainder of the 1990s. The result was a protracted review process and consequent delays ..." (p.2). The journal editors decided the best way to give a balanced picture would be to solicit articles for an "even-handed" special issue. After delays and false starts (during which several psi papers had been received), for some reason the editors decided to wipe the slate clean and discard the papers that had previously been submitted (this must have been rather annoying for the authors concerned). In January 2002, JCS circulated a new call for papers for the special issue and this call is given in full in Freeman's chapter. There would be an attempt to achieve a balance between pro-psi and skeptical contributions, though the call indicates that due to the JCS having previously published pro-psi articles, "the page count and/or number of articles (would be) skewed toward the skeptic side" (p. 4, my parentheses). As it turned out, excluding Freeman's contribution, which says little either for or against the paranormal, my count is that there is an even balance of articles, and my page count indicates that actually more pages are devoted to the pro-psi papers. So, although parapsychologists' hackles might have risen when reading the call, in fact on the basis of these crude indicators of balance, they have come out of it quite well. In what follows, although I will mention every contribution, I will focus on papers that particularly caught my attention.

The editors' attempt to achieve a "balanced" special JCS issue raises the more general question of the dynamics of the debate about the paranormal. Too often this debate is polarised into pro and anti camps, and this book does not help in this regard. Debates that frame the argument as an "us and them" issue are particularly unhelpful in that they foster division rather than dialogue. A few of the articles in this book perpetuate this polarisation, as do the "Psi Wars" title itself and Freeman's differentiation between "pro-psi" and "skeptical" papers. It is an oversimplification to suggest that contributors might readily fall into one camp or another. Some do have a particular position, and their aim seems to be to persuade the reader that their position is the "right" one. Others seem to be trying hard to maintain a neutral and moderate tone.

Alcock's editorial introduction lists 11 "reasons to remain doubtful about the existence of psi," reasons that should persuade parapsychologists to "give the null hypothesis a chance." (p. 29) Alcock makes some very strong points and I think his chapter should be required reading for any student who is thinking of embarking on parapsychological research. However, at times his tone slips towards rhetoric. For instance, when discussing the recent failure to replicate Jahn's original Princeton PK-RNG studies (Jahn, et al., 2000), Alcock notes that "they did, however, on a post-hoc basis--as is so often the case in parapsychology--find some 'anomalies' in the patterning of the data" (pp. 37-38). Alcock's aside is a sweeping statement made without presenting any supporting evidence.

Following Alcock is a contribution by John Palmer entitled "ESP in the ganzfeld: Analysis of a debate." This is a useful paper that gives an account of the ganzfeld controversy, from its beginnings with the meta-analyses of early studies (Honorton, 1985; Hyman, 1985) to the attempts to account for null findings in a meta-analysis of more recent studies (Milton & Wiseman, 1999) by arguing that these more recent studies used "non-standard" methodologies (Bem, Palmer, & Broughton, 2001). By coding recent studies for "standardness" (based on the database of the 10 autoganzfeld studies from Charles Honorton's PRL laboratory), it is shown that the more "standard" studies have higher effect sizes than the less "standard" ones. Without getting further entangled in the thorny issue of how to define standardness in the ganzfeld, the fact that there are over six pages of debate on this topic in a special issue of the Journal of Parapsychology (Schmeidler & Edge, 1999, pp. 360-366) seems to indicate that it is not at all obvious what makes a standard ganzfeld procedure.

Palmer also discusses Julie Milton's update of her earlier meta-analysis with Richard Wiseman, stating: "Milton (1999) published a new meta-analysis.... She included eight new studies, but she excluded a highly significant study by Dalton (1997) because she considered it to be an outlier that unduly weighted the final outcome" (p. 58). This gives the impression that Milton conducted only a single meta-analysis, from which Kathy Dalton's study was excluded. Therefore, I was surprised to find, when checking the original paper by Milton (1999), that she actually presents two updated meta-analyses, one of which includes the Dalton study and one of which does not, and nowhere does she make the argument that outliers should be removed. In this respect I feel Palmer gives a misleading impression of the Milton paper. Regardless of one's position on outliers, I am inclined to agree with the comment made by editor Burns in her introductory chapter: "meta-analyses which go in and out of significance as more studies are added cannot be said to give robust evidence for a phenomenon" (p. 24). The task for parapsychologists is to work systematically to try to uncover the correlates of success in the ganzfeld, and I believe much more could be done in this regard.

Following Palmer, we have one contribution from Matthew Smith on the important question of experimenter effects, and one from Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe that reviews the post-Maimonides dream-ESP studies. Frustratingly, Sherwood and Roe point out the need for a meta-analysis of the studies they have collected but do not actually present us with such a meta-analysis. Then there is an engaging chapter from Adrian Parker entitled "We ask, does psi exist? But is this the right question and do we really want an answer anyway?" Although I enjoyed Parker's wide-ranging arguments, this chapter also highlighted how the book could have benefited from a more active editorial hand. The reader finds herself in the curious situation of having Parker refer to Sherwood's 2002 Parapsychological Association award-winner's address in which Sherwood reviews the post-Maimonides dream-ESP studies. This address is not a publicly available document, but it forms the basis for the chapter immediately preceding Parker's, a chapter of which Parker shows no awareness (yet which is a publicly available document, a particularly convenient one for the reader!). The section on psi experiments closes with a contribution from Stanley Jeffers on "physics and claims for anomalous effects related to consciousness" that might be hard going for non-physicist readers.

In the next section, about anecdotal accounts of psi, we have a chapter by Chris French that relates psychological research on eyewitness testimony and false memories to reports of anomalous experiences. French is one of those who might superficially be classified as a skeptic in the "psi wars," but actually his chapter is quite balanced in tone. Another such chapter is the following one by Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly on astrology, consciousness, and psi. Before 1950 there existed very few empirical studies of astrology, but the situation has rapidly changed so that today there are over 500 such studies. This permits the authors to summarise meta-analyses of these studies. In my crude attempt to estimate "balance," I categorised this as a skeptical paper only on the basis that the presented findings were not supportive of a paranormal hypothesis. However, the tone was even-handed and the authors were not triumphant in their conclusions; they merely made the moderate statement that "the possibility that astrology might be relevant to consciousness and psi is not denied, but such influences, if they exist in astrology, would seem to be very weak or very rare" (p. 175).

Finally, the theoretical perspectives section has a contribution from Fotini Pallikari considering theoretical explanations for apparent failures to replicate PK-RNG findings, and one from Peter Brugger and Kirsten Taylor arguing that ESP is an "effect of subjective probability" (p. 221). This final paper argues that apparent psi effects are in fact due either to implicit learning of non-random patterns in target sequences in cases of forced-choice ESP with trial-by-trial feedback, or to a coincidence of non-random calling with non-random target sequences in cases without trial-by-trial feedback. Most modern parapsychologists would disagree that forced-choice methods are "the standard ESP paradigm" (p. 235), though this was certainly true about 40 years ago. Also, Brugger and Taylor don't deal with the fact that free-response methods such as the ganzfeld typically have a participant respond only to one trial in a single session, therefore there is no opportunity for either response bias or implicit learning of the type postulated. Brugger and Taylor do, however, raise some interesting and potentially valuable suggestions for how parapsychologists could contribute to mainstream research in behavioral neuroscience.

The book ends abruptly, with no closing comments or index, again pointing to its contents having been parachuted in from the JCS special issue with no additional editorial input. The chapters, many of which individually do make interesting reading, do not relate to one another except at the level of the thematic groupings, and it is a shame that the editors didn't take the opportunity with the publication of the book to have the authors update their contributions to take into account the other chapters in this volume. There are a number of typographical errors that might also have been corrected before going into print a second time. Despite the cover art, the book says little about macro-PK, but readers will find a wide-ranging series of perspectives on the paranormal. As is appropriate in an academic journal, the arguments have some depth, and the provision of detailed references will help the interested reader to further come to grips with the paranormal.

REFERENCES

BEM, D.J., PALMER, J., & BROUGHTON, R.S. (2001). Updating the ganzfeld database: A victim of its own success? Journal of Parapsychology, 65, 207-245.

DALTON, K. (1997). Exploring the links: Creativity and psi in the ganzfeld. Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 40th Annual Convention, 119-134.

HONORTON, C. (1985). Meta-analysis of ganzfeld research: A response to Hyman. Journal of Parapsychology, 49, 51-59.

HYMAN, R. (1985). The ganzfeld psi experiment: A critical appraisal. Journal of Parapsychology, 49, 3-49.

JAHN, R., DUNNE, B., BRADISH, G., DOBYNS, Y., LETTIERI, A., NELSON, R., MISCHO, J., BOLLER, E., BOSCH, H., VAITL, D., HOUTKOOPER, J., & WALTER, B. (2000). Mind/machine interaction consortium: PortREG replication experiments. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14, 499-555.

MILTON, J. (1999). Should ganzfeld research continue to be crucial in the search for a replicable psi effect? Part I. Discussion paper and an introduction to an electronic mail discussion. Journal of Parapsychology, 63, 309-333.

MILTON, J., & WISEMAN, R. (1999). Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 387-391.

SCHMEIDLER, G.R., & EDGE, H. (1999). Should ganzfeld research continue to be crucial in the search for a replicable psi effect? Part II. Edited ganzfeld debate. Journal of Parapsychology, 63, 335-388.

CAROLINE WATT

Department of Psychology

University of Edinburgh

7 George Square

Edinburgh EH8 9JZ

Scotland, UK

Caroline. Watt@ed.ac.uk

COPYRIGHT 2004 Parapsychology Press
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group