Category: Psi
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NOTE: I used to have several older essays on the paranormal posted on my author site. When I recently updated the site, I removed all this material and decided to post it here. This essay was originally posted in 2004. —– Psychics and Trickery I'm sick of Uri Geller. I mention this because, more…
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I started to post this as a comment, but like Topsy, it "just growed"; so I made it a post in its own right. The issue we were discussing was why we are so inclined to doubt or deny psi phenomena and postmortem survival even in the face of considerable evidence. And the basic point…
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Here’s some big news: our own longtime commenter Bruce Siegel has written a book – and it’s a good one! The book is Dreaming the Future: How Our Dreams Prove Psychic Ability is Real, and Why It Matters, and it recounts Bruce's longtime experiment in precognitive dreaming. (The printed book is available now, and a…
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Matt Rouge offers a thoughtful guest post on psi and dogmatic (capital-s) Skepticism. Take it away, Matt! — (Eric Newhill, who is a frequent commenter here and an actuary and analyst at a large insurance firm, was kind enough to review this post for accuracy on statistical matters. Also, Michael always provides significant guidance on…
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For a few years I've had a book sitting on my shelf called If This Be Magic: The Forgotten Power of Hypnotism, by Guy Lyon Playfair. Originally published in 1985, it was reissued by White Crow Books in 2011, and I probably bought it around that time. But somehow I never quite got around to…
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I originally intended to post this piece as a palate cleanser after the "Charlie Charlie" viral Twitter phenomenon was exposed as an ad campaign for a movie. However, I'm no longer completely sure that the tweets were a hoax. Snopes.com offers an interesting analysis that's worth reading in full. Here's an excerpt: The UK’s Independent…
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There's a new Twitter trend: uploading videos of people trying to "summon a demon." The players place one pencil crosswise atop another pencil. After reciting the formula "Charlie, Charlie, are you here?" they wait to see if the top pencil will move. In some videos, it clearly does move. Could it be blown by someone's…
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Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Alan Joshua. Can you describe your new book, The SHIVA Syndrome? First, the title can be misleading. Although the Hindu god Shiva is on the cover, it is symbolic and only mentioned in the book. SHIVA is an acronym for a special mind research project. The novel is cross-genre,…
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Okay, so … bubbles. I find that I think of subjective experience (a redundant expression, actually, since all experience is subjective) as a big soap bubble. Each person’s private world is a separate bubble. All the bubbles constituting the subjective lives of different minds are floating together on (or in) a vast and deep sea…
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The American Society for Psychical Research is but a shadow of its former self. So says Guy Lyon Playfair in a recent overview of the ASPR's history published in the Fortean Times (not available online as far as I know). The Society, founded in 1885 as a companion organization to England's previously established Society for…