Parapsychology and the Paranormal

Angela Ashton, Cryptic Shadows Founder and Paranormal Scientist talks about the Paranormal and PSI.  Along with being a Paranormal Investigator and Paranormal Scientist, Angela is currently involved in Parapsychology studies and experiences different levels of PSI Power, mostly in the form of Retrocognition with some instances of Precognition.

“Paranormal” has been in the English language since at least 1920. It consists of two parts: para and normal. In most definitions of the word paranormal, it is described as anything that is beyond or contrary to what is deemed scientifically possible. The definition implies that the scientific explanation of the world around us is the 'normal' part of the word and 'para' makes up the above, beyond, beside, contrary, or against part of the meaning.

Para has a Greek and Latin origin. Its most common meaning (the Greek usage) is 'similar to' or 'near to', as in paragraph. In Latin, para means 'above,' 'against,' 'counter,' 'outside,' or 'beyond'. For example, parapluie in French means 'counter-rain' – an umbrella. It can be construed, then, that the term paranormal is derived from the Latin use of the prefix 'para', meaning 'against, counter, outside or beyond the norm.'

Psi Power

The term psi comes from the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and is used as an informal abbrevation for "psychic phenomena". As such it covers all uses of the mind beyond the reach of accepted science. It is not an acronym and should therefore not be typed as "PSI" - a mistake I know I tend to make myself!

 

What Is Psi? What Is ESP?

The term psi is sometimes used interchangeably with ESP. In fact ESP stands for "Extra Sensory Perception". As such ESP covers phenomena known as "anomolous cognition", for example mental telepathy. Psi is a more general term that also covers "anomolous operation". In other words, ESP is the subset of psi that deals with knowing things - psi itself is a much wider field that also includes using the power of the mind to do things.

 

Parapsychology and Psionics

Psi research, studying the potential untapped power of the human mind, is the main focus of parapsychology and parapsychological research. The applied usage of psi power is known as psionics. This is what we informally call "mind over matter".

Parapsychology and psionics are hotly disputed subjects, with many critics dismissing them out of hand. It is true that many apparent psi successes are difficult to reproduce under laboratory conditions - however perhaps this is not surprising for something that comes from the mind. Psi powers fit into the category of phenomena for which there is little solid scientific evidence but a wealth of anecdotal experience. It could be classified as "unproven but interesting".

Types of Psi

Some of the mental powers that fit under the category of "psi powers" include:

Teleportation Telepathy Telekenisis (also called psychokinesis) Precognition

 

Clairvoyance

What Is Clairvoyance?

The term clairvoyance means "clear seeing" and is sometimes referred to as "second sight" or "the third eye". It is often categorised as a form of psi power / ESP although some people prefer a more mystical explanation.

Strictly speaking, clairvoyance refers only to visual information. A classic example of clairvoyance is remote vewing. However the term is also used rather loosely and some people also use the word clairvoyance to refer to picking up sound (technically, "clairaudience") and other information that is beyond the strict definition of the term.

The combined term for all these forms of psychic information gathering - clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition and more - is "clairsentience". What is known informally as a psychic clairvoyant reaing will often contain elements of all these disciplines depending on the abilities and preferences of the psychic or medium.

Parapsychologists have studied clairvoyance for years however there is still no clear evidence one way or the other since it is difficult to test and measure. Some people believe that clairvoyance is a natural ability, others that it can be learned - you can buy training courses or attend classes that claim to develop and improve any latent natural ability one might have.

At the other extreme, clairvoyant powers are often claimed by spiritualists and mediums and the developing of such powers is considered to indicate an increasing rapport with the spirits.

Retrocognition

The term retrocognition refers to the knowledge of things that have already happened. That doesn't sound too exciting until you add the words "which could not be known by normal means". In many ways retrocognition is the opposite of precognition and is sometimes called postcognition.

Like precognition, retrocognition is a psi ability that can take many forms. For instance psychometry can be considered a form of retrocognition.

Psychometry

Psychometry differs from many other forms of divination in that it is primarily concerned with seeing into the past ("retrocognition") rather than the future ("precognition"). Psychometry in parapsychology should not be confused with the psychological discipline of psychometrics which concerns testing and analysis of psychological traits.

The word psychometry was invented by US physiology professor Joseph R. Buchanan in 1842. It literally means "soul measurement" - from the Greek "psyche" (soul) and "metron" (measure).

 

At its most effective, psychometry allows the psychic to gain a picture of the events surrounding the past of an object. If this information is accurate then it could potentially be of use in detection of crime.

 

How Does Psychometry Work?

Touch or, at the least, close proximity appears to be essential for effective psychometric reading. Many scryers have reported greater success with metallic objects - that could provide some clues to a possible scientific basis for the phenomenom.

Buchanan hypothesised that an object contained some form of "memory" of its past, a sort of soul, that psychics can read and interpret. Some people liken this to the theosophical concept of the Akashic reord.

 

Others have suggested that psychometry is in some way akin to aura reading.

 

"Pseudo-psychometry" is an effect often presented by mind magicians ("mentalists") and there are many ways to achieve the effect of which the most well-known is probably Theodore Annemann's. As always, the fact that something can be faked does not mean that it is never genuine.

Perhaps the most spectacular form of retrocognition is past life recall or regression. Here the events perceived often occured in the far past and could not possibly have been known about by normal means.

Whether the psychic really "lived" these lives or is picking up on some sort of historical "psychic shadow" is a question for philosophers. It doesn't change the nature of the experience.

Precognition

What Is Precognition?

The term precognition means "prior knowledge" and is used to refer to any form of knowledge about future events that cannot be explained by normal means. Examples of precognition can be as basic as a feeling - "something bad's going to happen" - or a detailed vision of future events, for example in the form of a precognitve dream. Such visions can be clear and straightforward or as cryptic and ambiguous as the prophecies of Nostradamus.

Where precognition is taking place at an emotional level of gut feeling, it is sometimes referred to as "presentiment".

Premonitions and prophecy are common in history and folklore. On a small scale most of us have probably experienced them ourselves - knowing what someone is about to say or thinking about a friend moments before they phone.

There are three main problems with establishing the validity of precognition. The first is that very often what appears to be some form of ESP may in fact simply be subconscious intuition. It can be difficult to tell them apart. For instance, there are a lot of non-verbal cues that could give us an idea of what someone is about to say or do, especially if we know them well.

The situation is made worse by the fact that many premonitions and predictions are vague. Was an event really predicted, or was the prediction vague enough to have referred to any number of possible events? It's easy to make a vague prediction appear right after the fact.

The third major problem is statistical. Many, many instances of precognition occur every day - most are false and never reported. How many times have we "felt" that we shouldn't fly today, or that this will be our lucky week to buy a lotto ticket? Most of the time these premonitions come to nothing. Yet on the rare occasion one proves right and we tell the media about it, that particular premonition becomes big news.

Parapsychology researchers attempt to devise experiments to avoid these problems. The most well-known involves Zener cards. A deck is shuffled and the psychic attempts to predict the order in which they will be dealt. In such an experiment no-one knows the order of the cards so there can be no subconscious cues, the outcomes are specifically defined and the results can be analysed statistically.

Philosophy and Physics

If precognition does exist, it poses great philosophical questions and challenges much of our world view. Does it mean that the future is fixed? Is the prophecy definite or simply a likely possibility? Can we change the predicted future or will our actions simply bring it to pass? Such questions have formed the basis of much science fiction.

It's interesting to note that precognition might not actually be in conflict with the laws of nature. Many of the fundamental equations of the universe are "time reversible" - time could equally well run backwards as forwards. Why should we not remember the future? Our perception of time as being one-way is itself the oddity, a phenomenom known as the "arrow of time".  Just as our perception of this world as having only one dimension through space and time seems impossible after the things I have seen and experienced in this life time.

Paranormal researchApproaching the paranormal from a research perspective is often difficult because of the lack of acceptable physical evidence from most of the purported phenomena. By definition, the paranormal does not conform to conventional expectations of the natural. Therefore, a phenomenon cannot be confirmed as paranormal using the scientific method because, if it was, it would no longer fit the definition. Despite this contradiction, studies on the paranormal are periodically conducted by researchers from various disciplines. Some researchers simply study the beliefs in the paranormal regardless of whether the phenomena are considered to objectively exist. This section deals with various approaches to the paranormal: anecdotal, experimental, and participant-observer approaches and the skeptical investigation approach.

Anecdotal approach to the Paranormal

Charles Fort, 1920. Fort is perhaps the most widely known collector of paranormal stories.An anecdotal approach to the paranormal involves the collection of stories told about the paranormal.

Charles Fort (1874–1932) is perhaps the best known collector of paranormal anecdotes. Fort is said to have compiled as many as 40,000 notes on unexplained paranormal experiences, though there were no doubt many more than these. These notes came from what he called "the orthodox conventionality of Science", which were odd events originally reported in magazines and newspapers such as The Times and scientific journals such as Scientific American, Nature and Science". From this research Fort wrote seven books, though only four survive. These are: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932); one book was written between New Lands and Lo! but it was abandoned and absorbed into Lo!.

Reported events that he collected include teleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with coining); poltergeist events, falls of frogs, fishes, inorganic materials of an amazing range; crop circles; unaccountable noises and explosions; spontaneous fires; levitation; ball lightning (a term explicitly used by Fort); unidentified flying objects; mysterious appearances and disappearances; giant wheels of light in the oceans; and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat). He offered many reports of OOPArts, abbreviation for "out of place" artifacts: strange items found in unlikely locations. He also is perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction, and was an early proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Fort is considered by many as the father of modern paranormalism, which is the study of the paranormal.

The magazine Fortean Times continues Charles Fort's approach, regularly reporting anecdotal accounts of the paranormal.

Such anecdotal collections, lacking the reproducibility of empirical evidence, are not amenable to scientific investigation. The anecdotal approach is not a scientific approach to the paranormal because it leaves verification dependent on the credibility of the party presenting the evidence. Nevertheless, it is a common approach to paranormal phenomena.

Parapsychology

Participant of a Ganzfeld experiment which proponents say may show evidence of telepathy.Experimental investigation of the paranormal has been conducted by parapsychologists. Although parapsychology has its roots in earlier research, it began using the experimental approach in the 1930s under the direction of J. B. Rhine (1895–1980).[13] Rhine popularized the now famous methodology of using card-guessing and dice-rolling experiments in a laboratory in the hopes of finding a statistical validation of extra-sensory perception.

In 1957, the Parapsychological Association was formed as the preeminent society for parapsychologists. In 1969, they became affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That affiliation, along with a general openness to psychic and occult phenomena in the 1970s, led to a decade of increased parapsychological research. During this time, other notable organizations were also formed, including the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine (1970), the Institute of Parascience (1971), the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research, the Institute for Noetic Sciences (1973), and the International Kirlian Research Association (1975). Each of these groups performed experiments on paranormal subjects to varying degrees. Parapsychological work was also conducted at the Stanford Research Institute during this time.

With the increase in parapsychological investigation, there came an increase in opposition to both the findings of parapsychologists and the granting of any formal recognition of the field. Criticisms of the field were focused in the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (1976), now called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and its periodical, Skeptical Inquirer. Eventually, more mainstream scientists became critical of parapsychology as an endeavor, and statements by the National Academies of Science and the National Science Foundation cast a pall on the claims of evidence for parapsychology.[citation needed] Today, many cite parapsychology as an example of a pseudoscience.

Though there are still some parapsychologists active today, interest and activity has waned considerably since the 1970s. To date there have been no experimental results that have gained wide acceptance in the scientific community as valid evidence of the paranormal.  But then again scientific evidence is just that...evidence gathered as to cause a belief that something exists.  Scientific evidence is needed to form the belief for proof.

Belief polls

While the validity of the existence of paranormal phenomena is controversial and debated passionately by both proponents of the paranormal and by skeptics, surveys are useful in determining the beliefs of people in regards to paranormal phenomena. These opinions, while not constituting scientific evidence for or against, may give an indication of the mindset of a certain portion of the population (at least among those who answered the polls).

One survey of the beliefs of the general United States population regarding paranormal topics was conducted by the Gallup Organization in 2005. The survey found that 73%of those polled believed in at least one of the ten paranormal items presented in the survey. The ten items included in the survey were: extrasensory perception (41% held this belief), haunted houses (37%), ghosts (32%), telepathy (31%), clairvoyance (26%), astrology (25%), communication with the dead (21%), witches (21%), reincarnation (20%), and channeling spiritual entities (9%). These items were selected as they "require the belief that humans have more than the 'normal' five senses." Only one percent of respondents believed in all ten items.

Another survey conducted in 2006 by researchers from Australia's Monash University sought to determine what types of phenomena people claim to have experienced and the effects these experiences have had on their lives. The study was conducted as an online survey with over 2,000 respondents from around the world participating. The results revealed that around 70% of the respondents believe to have had an unexplained paranormal event that changed their life, mostly in a positive way. About 70% also claimed to have seen, heard, or been touched by an animal or person that they knew was not there; 80% have reported having a premonition, and almost 50% stated they recalled a previous life.

Polls were conducted by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward of the University of Central Oklahoma in 2006, and compared to the results of a Gallup poll in 2001.They found fairly consistent results.

Percentage of US citizens polled

 

                  Poll:                 Farha-Steward         Gallup

psychic/spiritual healing       56         26                   54         19

ESP                                        28         39                   50         20

haunted houses                     40         25                   42        16

demonic possession            40         28                   41        16

ghosts/spirits of the dead    39         27                   38         17

telepathy                                24         34                   36         26

extraterrestrials visited

Earth in the past                    17        34                   33         27

clairvoyance and prophecy  24        33                    32        23

communication with

the dead                                 16         29                   28       26

astrology                                 17         26                   28       18

witches                                    26        19                    26       15

reincarnation                           15        28                   25        20

channeling                               10        29                   15        21

Other surveys by different organizations at different times have found very similar results. A 2001 Gallup Poll found that the general public embraced the following: 54% of people believed in psychic/spiritual healing, 42% believed in haunted houses, 41% believed in satanic possession, 36% in telepathy, 25% in reincarnation, and 15% in channeling.[39] A survey by Jeffrey S. Levin, associate professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk found that over 2/3 of the U.S. population reported having at least one mystical experience.

A 1996 Gallup poll estimated that 71% of the people in the United States believed that the government was covering up information about UFOs. A 2002 Roper poll conducted for the Sci Fi channel reported that 56% thought UFOs were real craft and 48% that aliens had visited the Earth.[

A 2001 National Science Foundation survey found that 9 percent of people polled thought astrology was very scientific, and 31 percent thought it was somewhat scientific. About 32% of Americans surveyed stated that some numbers were lucky, while 46% of Europeans agreed with that claim. About 60% of all people polled believed in some form of Extra-sensory perception and 30% thought that "some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations.

                                             belief% - not sure  *  belief% - not sure

More difficult to explain away are the examples of retrocognition where someone is consciously aware of the details of a previous happening. These "visions" can either be seen as a movie or through the eyes of one of the participants. Unfortunately this is one of the many forms of psi ability that is not amenable to laboratory testing - for most psychics, such flashes occur spontaneously and cannot be reproduced at will.Another theory is that psychometry is unconscious ESP. The object is essentially acting as a focus for the reader's psi power.The basis of psychometry is that the psychic takes an object and - usually as a result of physical contact - is able to "see" its past. This might take the form of knowing to whom it has belonged or simply feeling strong emotions connected with it. For example, has this weapon ever been fired in anger?As with precognition, retrocognition can occur at many levels. At its simplest it's simply a "feeling": regonising a place, person or set of circumstances; somehow "knowing" what happened in a certain situation. The common feeling of "deja vu" could be a low level form of retrocognition. As always, skeptics often explain such feelings as coincidence or information subconsciously gathered by ordinary means.The experience of clairvoyance differs from person to person. In the field of ESP and psi research, it normally takes the form of simply sitting in a room and concentrating. Informally, many clairvoyants prefer to use various techniques and equipment as suits their personality and beliefs. There is a viewpoint that all forms of scrying are in fact simply clairvoyance exhibiting itself through a mechanism of the psychic's choice.It has been suggested that such abilities might be connected with the pineal gland in the brain however I'm not personally aware of any scientific research to support this.In adition, clairvoyance strictly refers to obtaining information from the current time period. However in practice the term is not always restricted to contemporaneous events. Many clairvoyants also claim to receive images the past and/or future (the latter being precognition). In this case, their clairvoyant abilities are seen as part of a larger psychic power.Some people argue that all forms of scrying are in fact subconscious application of psi powers. Clairvoyance / Clairsentience Despite the dismissal of parapsychology by much of the scientific establishment, there are some groups doing serious research into the subject, for instance Edinburgh's Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU).