THE controversial session on the paranormal featured three pieces of research, each of which claims to find evidence for phenomena that most scientists consider impossible under the laws of physics.
Telepathy
The first study, into telepathy, was conducted by the controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
Many people have reported experiences in which they were thinking of a friend or relative who happened to phone them at that moment. Most scientists regard this as coincidence, reinforced by forgetting the many times we think of friends who never ring, but Dr Sheldrake has tried to test whether it is down to genuine telepathy.
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He asked 63 volunteers to select four friends, one of whom would then be selected at random to ring them at a pre-arranged time. On picking up the phone, the subject would say who he thought was calling.
By chance alone, people should get the right friend 25 per cent of the time, but Dr Sheldrake found that they did much better, with a success rate of 40 per cent in 571 attempts. Some callers were miles away — sometimes thousands of miles away — but distance did not affect the outcome. In a follow-up trial, the participants were videotaped to ensure that they were not getting messages from their callers. The four subjects tested in this way picked the right caller 45 per cent of the time.
Critics say his methods are flawed. In one set of studies, the subjects lifted the receiver before making their choice, allowing clues to the caller’s identity from the quality of the line. It is also possible that people get clues from the time of the call. “If the subject knows four people well, they will know who tends to be on time, who tends to be late and who early,” Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at Hertfordshire University, said.
Dr Sheldrake’s other work includes studies claiming to show that blindfolded people can tell when they are being stared at, and that pets can communicate telepathically with their owners. ()
Afterlife
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The second study reported yesterday was led by Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist who is interested in near-death and “end-of-life experiences” that occur as people are dying. He thinks these may provide evidence for an afterlife.
Although his work is not yet published, he has collected data in hospices on apparently paranormal phenomena. He says that many dying people experience visions of dead friends and relatives welcoming them to an afterlife, and that the relatives of dying people are “visited” by them at the moment of death.
He has also recorded events such as clocks stopping and bright lights at the moment of death. “One of commonest forms is a luminous object, composed of light and love, which hangs above the body. This is often interpreted as the soul leaving the body.”
Again, sceptics reject this as nothing but a mixture of anecdote, hallucination and coincidence. Clocks may stop because nurses disturb them while checking the time for a death certificate, and death-bed visions can be attributed to drugs and the confusion of terminal illness.
In many cases where people report visitations, they know that a friend or relative is seriously ill and death is a strong possibility. The association with sleep also suggests “hypnopompic” hallucinations, which occur immediately after waking.
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Paranormal
The third speaker was Deborah Delanoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Northampton.
Along with presenting an overview of the past 30 years of paranormal research, she discussed a study of her own in which volunteers were asked to try to arouse or calm another person just by thinking about them.
To determine whether this has an effect researchers measured electrical activity on the skin of the subject, in the same way as a polygraph liedetector test. Professor Delanoy’s experiments suggest that people can influence the physiology of others in this way with success rates better than chance. This may demonstrate that thought can convey a “healing effect”, but she is more cautious over the results than the other researchers.
As skin conductivity changes are usually not felt directly, she argues that many effects may occur primarily on an unconscious level, and could therefore be more common than most people think.