The Psychology of the Psychic

"David is another person who had a lot of influence over me. He was teaching at University College London when I did my psychology degree there. The Psychology of the Psychic , along with Flim-Flam! was one of the first sceptical books that I came across. David is a very good psychologist and his is a more detailed approach, focusing on parapsychological research – laboratory based research into ESP – and really dismantling some of those experiments. He said, this is what you’ll read in the journals and newspapers but this is what’s actually going on. It was the first time I’d seen someone take a look at scientific paranormal research in that way. There are all sorts of claims but the notion is that, rather than there being a small number of people with amazing powers, all of us to some very small and unreliable extent have ESP – extra-sensory perception – and therefore could tell something like the order of a shuffled deck of cards. To demonstrate that, parapsychologists get lots of people in a lab, shuffle the deck, get people to guess the order and then put all their results together and see if they do better than chance. The argument is that a very small and unreliable effect emerges. And David’s book is one of the very first to cast a sceptical eye over that literature. It’s a very wonderful book. There was one conducted by the US military to see if you could have psychic spying – what’s going on at this particular coordinate, or what’s going on in Russia. David pointed out these experiments had a lot of fundamental flaws to them. It’s like a detective story. You have to go deep into the experiment to understand exactly how it works and where the problems can be. I’ve conducted this sort of research too. It’s enormously time-consuming, but quite fun. If you look at reviews of Paranormality on Amazon, they are bimodal. Most people like the book and then a hardcore group giving it one star really loathe it, saying how much they dislike me as an individual. So yes, it is an area which attracts an enormous amount of controversy and bad blood. If you are very thin skinned it’s not the area for you. Often the debate gets nasty quite quickly."