Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh

Robert Morris - 1 February 1989

Reprinted from June 1987 issue of University of Edinburgh Graduates Journal

Professor Robert L. Morris, BS, PhD was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania and took his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. His doctorate is in psychology with a zoology minor at Duke University. Since then he has taught and done parapsychology research at the Santa Barbara and Irvine campuses of the University of California and at Syracuse University.

The Koestler Chair

In December of 1985, I joined the Faculty of the University of Edinburgh Psychology Department as the first holder of the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology which is endowed by a fund from the estate of the author, Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia. Several universities expressed interest in the fund when it was announced, but only the University of Wales at Cardiff and Edinburgh applied for it. Although this is the only endowed Chair of Parapsychology in Britain and one of only a handful in the world, it does not represent the start of parapsychology at Edinburgh. Dr John Beloff, recently retired from the Psychology Department, has been supervising postgraduate parapsychology research for the past fifteen years.

At present, the staff of our research group includes two postdoctoral research fellows, a research associate, and administrative secretary and currently we have four postgraduate students working on doctoral theses dealing with parapsychological topics. We hope to maintain between four and six students at the postgraduate level. I give occasional lectures to undergraduates and will supervise some fourth year honours theses. Shortly we will have a new flexible set of research environments. We also have access to a variety of research facilities within the Psychology Department.

An Integrative Parapsychology

With regard to our research itself, we are developing an approach that we feel will help us to interact most effectively with the University community as a whole. We call it an “Integrative Parapsychology”. It has several features. First, it defines parapsychology as “the study of apparent new means of communication, or exchange of influence, between organisms and their environments”. Such new means are collectively referred to as “psi”. By having communication as our central concept, we allow ready discourse with a variety of disciplines, since it is a concept common to many. Our second feature, in fact, is that we regard parapsychology to be an interdisciplinary problem area, with implications for areas of study ranging from the hard sciences such as Physics and Biology to the Social Sciences, including Social Anthropology and Scottish Studies. It is appropriate nevertheless that the Chair be based in Psychology since we are basically studying human experience and behaviour.

Our third feature is that we are adopting a non-advocacy position regarding the explanation for psychic phenomena. We feel that at present no set of explanations put forth is adequate to explain the range of reported experiences and controlled laboratory studies that have gone on record. Many people regard parapsychologists as a group of people with a fixed metaphysical belief system who are avidly deploying the tools of science to confirm that belief system. We feel this is a false impression and it does not characterise our own research. Fourth, in accordance with the above, we have two sets of working hypotheses, which we feel complement each other. One is the “psi hypothesis”, which states that the existing evidence is sufficient for us to take seriously the idea that a truly new means of communication is available to us, and that it is amenable to scientific investigation. The other is the “pseudopsi hypothesis”, which states that most of what we may be tempted to label psi is the product of our being misled, either by ourselves, through too little understanding of our own psychology and the ways our environment works, or by clever fake psychics who mislead us with their tricks. Both may be true—they are not mutually exclusive.

A fifth feature is that, in attempting to organise our understanding of the evidence supporting both the psi and the pseudopsi hypothesis, we have developed a simple model of what goes on when any one of us notices or observes events that lead us to infer that something psychic may have taken place. This model can then be used to help us generate a fuller description of what goes on in real-life situations and what we must describe about them if we are to evaluate them. It can also serve as a model for the design and conductance of studies to look for evidence of psi and its properties. The sixth and last feature of Integrative Parapsychology is that we will conduct our research as much as possible within the tradition of solid but flexible scientific procedure. This will include effective description of the phenomena and experiences to be investigated, the development of theoretical models which integrate parapsychology research with research in other disciplines, and extensive but not total reliance upon controlled experimental research.

Preliminary Model of Psychic Communication

There seem to be two major categories of apparent psychic communication, or psi. One is called ESP, or extrasensory perception, and refers to a situation in which an observer notices that an organism, generally a human, appears to have received information from some source in the environment, despite the presence of barriers that should prevent that communication from taking place. It’s like a communication system with a source, a message, and a receiver. If you have a vivid dream of a plane crash and the next day you read about a plane crash that resembles your dream, you may say to yourself, “I think I was psychically getting a message about that plane crash”. The plane crash and its circumstances would be the source, information about it the message, distance the barrier, and you would be the receiver. You would also be the observer, the one who noticed the correspondence between source and receiver and formed an opinion that psychic communication may have taken place.

A second category is PK, or psychokinesis. In PK, the person seems to be having an influence upon some aspect of the environment despite the presence of barriers that should prevent the transfer of influence. Once again, it can be seen as like a communication system, using the broad definition of communication as including the exertion of influence. For instance suppose you enter a gambling casino and see an individual who seems to be extremely “lucky” with dice and puts together a strong winning streak. You may decide that he seems to be exerting a psychic influence over the dice. The gambler is the source, the dice are the receiver, the message is the gambler’s announced intentions, the barrier is the physical surround of the dice (such as a rotating cage, etc.) that the casino has erected to prevent influence, and you are the observer. The communication model is perhaps a less perfect fit for PK, but it can still be useful in organising our thoughts.

This model can be expanded to include some additional aspects of what goes on when an observer becomes persuaded that psi may have taken place. Let us work down from the final event to the earlier ones. The final event is that the observer gets persuaded. What persuades the observer is that he or she has noticed a strong correspondence between two descriptions: a description of something happening inside a person (getting an impression or having an intention) and a description of something happening in the outside world (a plane crash or a roll of the dice). Descriptions of events inside a person are indirect—they may be the product of your own memories if you are both observer and psychic; or they may represent what someone has told you, or how they behaved, or what you have inferred about their intentions. Descriptions of outside world events, environmental events, are generally straightforward. Continuing to work backward, these two sets of descriptions refer to real events that took place at a time when there seemed to be barriers in place preventing the kind of exchange between them that would have led the events to be similar. So the observer is puzzled by, or impressed by, their similarity. The observer generally is interested as well in the likely causes of each of the two sets of events. If he thinks they shared some common causes, before the barriers were in place, then he will be less impressed. One quick example. You observe a gambler announcing that he will roll sixes, and time and again he does. You are noticing a strong correspondence between his description of his intentions and the description you all agree upon of which dice face are uppermost. You are aware that at the time he was concentrating on the rolling dice, there appeared to be adequate safeguards preventing him from cheating. But you wonder about what happened beforehand, before the barriers seemed to be up. Are the dice owned by the gambler? If so, they may be loaded, to make sixes come up. Thus the gambler’s intentions (make sixes come up) and the outcome (sixes do come up) may share a common cause (the dice are loaded). Some ways we can be misled

We can use the simple model we developed above to understand some of the ways we can be misled by ourselves or others into thinking that something psychic has taken place.

Barriers can be skirted in advance. Before the barriers are in place, there can be considerable interaction between events affecting the psychic and events affecting the environment. As we saw above, they can share many common causes. Also, the psychic may be able to influence events affecting the environment, for instance by pre-bending a strip of metal that will later appear to have been bent by “mental power”. Or, the psychic may take steps to learn things in advance about what their source in the environment is likely to be. People claiming to do psychic readings, for instance, can have ways of scouting in advance to learn the problems of those who come for advice.

Problems with barriers. The barriers may not be as impervious as they appear. Humans have a variety of different senses that we don’t ordinarily think about. Sources in the environment often emit a surprising amount of information, as in the case of people who reveal a lot about themselves through body language. We also are capable of exerting influences on our environment in ways we ordinarily don’t think about, such as through the heat in our hands. Sometimes barriers can be removed temporarily, to allow someone a brief glimpse of other events, for instance through the use of small convex mirrors deployed on one’s body such as to allow a quick scan of what’s going on behind oneself. Some barriers such as blindfolds are weaker than they seem. Entire books have been written about blindfolds. Sometimes a barrier that seems to be there isn’t really there, or has been circumvented by a physical device such as fine threads looped between the thumbs to drag objects across tabletops, and so on.

Descriptions can be influenced after the fact. Whatever is involved in generating a description of an event can be influenced by knowledge of information about the other event. For instance, if you make a prediction to me that I will soon meet someone that I will like very much, I may then tend to regard whomever I next meet as being a very nice person indeed. My awareness of your prediction (that is, your description of it) could lead me to describe the next person I meet in positive terms, thus confirming your prediction and making you seem psychic to myself and perhaps to other observers as well.

Problems in assessing similarity. Even if we have independent, reasonably objective descriptions of source and receiver events, we may still have biased judgements made by any observer who is trying to compare the two and would like to see them match up. If the target is a circle and the psychic guessed a square, the observer may blunt the differences, seeing them both as “‘squircles”.

Problems in inferring psi from similarity. Even if the two descriptions, independently developed, do emerge as very similar, and all else seems in order, are we then, at last, able to infer with confidence that something psychic took place? Not necessarily, since we are in general more inclined to notice the accurate oddmatch and ignore all of the other opportunities for an oddmatch where none occurred. If I keep an extensive dream diary, there are likely to be many opportunities for aspects of my dreams to match isolated events of the next day. It would be amazing if there were not such oddmatches occasionally. Yet when they do occur, we may often still be impressed by them, more so than we should be. Some fake psychics will capitalise on this by making a great many predictions and then calling attention only to those few that come true.

Problems in making observations. In addition to the above, we must be aware that any observer trying to gather good information may find that there are problems involved in making accurate observations about features of the model described above. (1) The observer may be screened completely from the relevant information. (2) The information available to the observer may be inaccurate. (3) The information provided is accurate, but the observer may be led to misperceive it. (4) The observer’s attention may be drawn away from the accurate information. (5) The observer may perceive the information accurately, but may also be led to misinterpret it. (6) The observer may interpret the information accurately but may then be led to misremember it.

Strategies of Parapsychological Research

As we can see from above, there are many ways that we can mislead ourselves or be misled by others. How can parapsychological researchers try to get round this? There are three general strategies, and they can be arranged in their order of precision and effectiveness.

Spontaneous case collections. One can do descriptive studies of people’s reports of spontaneous, real-life experiences, written up and elaborated through interview or questionnaire. Some researchers feel that such cases can, if well-enough documented serve as a proof of the validity of various psychic claims. Such cases suffer from many of the problems described above, however, and most researchers would prefer to regard them as sources of good material to suggest ideas for research; that they can provide a background for understanding, but are not a powerful form of evidence themselves.

Field Investigations. One of the main problems with the spontaneous case approach is that it deals with events that have taken place in the past, and we can never reconstruct all of the features of the past circumstances with complete confidence. A step forward is to do field investigations, to go somewhere where psi events are reported to happen repeatedly. Thus the investigator can attempt to be there during the events, thereby obtaining a fuller description of what actually goes on and also allowing for the possibility of doing some experiments in the natural environment, perhaps by changing certain conditions systematically and observing their effect upon psychic performance. Such experiments could be very valuable, but still, since they are done in a natural environment, it is often quite difficult to set them up in such a way that extraneous factors have been taken into account.

Controlled laboratory experimentation. The third strategy, and the one most frequently looked at as representing a scientific evaluation, is experimental research done in a controlled laboratory setting, where it is easier to rule out various of the problems described briefly above, and easier to describe for others what you have done so that they can attempt to repeat and extend your finding. Yet there is also the problem, shared by others who do research with humans, that the controlled environment of the laboratory can seem too artificial and doesn’t provide the emotional salience of the real world. There are six general strategies used in parapsychology, and for all six the general idea is to select a source and a receiver, put an appropriate barrier between them (distance and physical shielding are the most common), then vary events at the source and observe whether these variations are reflected in changes in events at the receiver. In testing for ESP, for instance, one can do restricted choice procedures, where the target is selected from a small set of options known to the receiver, such as the suit of a playing card, and the receiver must guess the identity of each card in a series. The receiver is making a restricted choice. In free response studies, the target is a randomly selected place, photograph, or something else of some complexity. The receiver then attempts to generate a series of impressions about the target, responding “freely” with whatever comes to mind. The responses are then compared with a set of possible targets, including the actual target, by a “blind” judge, to see if the correct target is consistently rated higher. In somatic studies the target is the onset and termination of emotionally meaningful events, while the receiver is being monitored physiologically to see if somatic arousal increases in the receiver during emotionally strong events in the sender. For PK, the source is now the psychic and the target is the receiver. In discrete outcome studies, the psychic is asked to wish, or will or intend for a certain outcome in a random system, such as wishing for sixes to appear on the uppermost side of 10 thrown dice. The assigned intention is systematically varied among the possibilities (1-6 for dice) and the receiver is monitored. For stable system studies, the psychic is asked to modify the monitored activity in some sort of stable but active system, such as the temperature level inside a sealed container. Static object studies involve attempts to induce motion in a stationary object.

These procedures can be used to generate a measure of influence between source and receiver. Systematic research can be done by varying conditions and observing the effect of those changes upon the outcome. Such studies must be done with extreme care. It is difficult to summarise the current status of such research and what it is telling us. There are few areas in which there is some consistency from study to study. In general, people tend to do better on ESP tests who, according to a variety of measures, are more socially outgoing, comfortable with their lives, and accepting of the possibility that ESP exists.

People also tend to do better in ESP tests when they have been put through a procedure to help their attention be turned away from external noise, such as auditory and visual information. For PK, people tend in general to do better when they are under conditions designed to decrease the amount of active striving—they do better where they don’t try too hard. Each of these findings is the product of groups of thematically related studies. Some studies do not find any relationship between the condition of the person being tested and their scoring. Those studies that do find a relationship, however, show a strong tendency to find it in the direction indicated above.

Our research at the University of Edinburgh will attempt to incorporate these groups of findings and extend them. Some of our research will explore techniques reported to develop or enhance psychic ability, drawing in part from the first two groups of findings. Other research will focus on looking at unusual interactions between people and equipment, incorporating the third group of findings, for PK.

In all our work we hope to be exploring both the psi and pseudopsi hypotheses, such that we will give the psi hypotheses as fair an opportunity as we can while at the same time trying to build a useful understanding of human experience and behaviour in other areas. The brief attached to the Koestler Chair was to undertake objective scientific research “‘into the capacity attributed to some individuals to interact with their external environments by means other than the recognised sensory or motor channels”. We are grateful to Edinburgh University and to the late Arthur and Cynthia Koestler for the opportunity to undertake this endeavour to improve our knowledge of the human condition.