The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal

"There are different ways you can organize a book on this kind of topic. I co-authored a textbook a few years ago, with Anna Stone, Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience . We tried to make it as interesting as we could, but it’s a textbook. The way we organized it was to look at each of the different sub-disciplines of psychology and ask, ‘What light does this shine on the stuff that we’re interested in?’ So you can think about the paranormal from a developmental or cognitive point of view, neuropsychology, social psychology. With every sub-discipline you can say, ‘What lessons can we take and apply to what we’re interested in?’ This time round, I went more for a topic-based approach. So there are a couple of chapters on ghosts and ghostly encounters, a chapter on sleep paralysis, on alien contact, on reincarnation claims, on out-of-body and near-death experiences, and so on. It’s just a different way of organizing it. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve written a popular science book, so I was trying to make it engaging and fun, and bring in anecdotes and funny stories wherever possible. I hope people enjoy it. Yes, I can’t see a magpie without thinking, ‘one for sorrow, two for joy.’ It’s part of the culture, it’s part of our lives. I think we should just acknowledge that we’ve got an irrational side and accept that. That’s also true. That’s a lot of the reason that I was into it as a kid. It is exciting. But then you’ve got the other side of that, which people like Richard Dawkins would push , that the true explanations, the scientific explanations, are, if anything, more exciting and interesting. But you do have to have a certain level of education and intelligence to get your head around those things. For some people, the notion that there is an old guy up in the sky with a big white beard and he’s looking after everybody, including you personally, is a nice comforting approach. My general attitude is that you can believe whatever the heck you like, as long as it doesn’t have negative implications for other people. You can believe what you like, I can believe what I like. I can give you my reasons for what I believe, and you can take them or leave them, it’s up to you."