First Sight Theory presented in Association of Scientific Psychology Symposium

Symposium

How Research in Parapsychology Can Inform Research in Psychology

 

Friday, May 23, 2014, 1:00 PM – 2:20 PM
Union Square 21

Chair: Jessica Utts
University of California, Irvine

Recently, rigorous analysis of several large data sets has indicated that certain parapsychological paradigms can reveal surprising and informative insights relevant to psychology and consciousness research. In this symposium, four scientists actively carrying out this research review data sets that provide insights and implications for psychological science.

Over the past few decades, meta-analyses and multiple-experiment publications in a number of disciplines have led to a renewed interest in what has been called “parapsychology” – psychological and psychophysical phenomena that are not easily accommodated within the present mainstream understanding of psychology. Behavioral and psychophysiological laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated under rigorously controlled conditions that individuals can respond to information that should not, according to prevailing assumptions, be available to them. If even a portion of these results is a true reflection of psychological reality, the implications for mainstream psychological science are considerable. However, psychological scientists are the least likely, of all academics surveyed, to take parapsychological results seriously, or to consider that these findings might reveal something useful about conventional psychological mechanisms. Meanwhile, several other disciplines (e.g., physics, biology) are starting to develop models accounting for effects that are apparently non-materially-mediated action-at-a-distance. The purpose of this symposium is to help psychologists who are not active in this area of research to understand some of the most recent findings in parapsychology, presented by four scientists with expertise in this arena (including a Charter Fellow of APS). The presentations will help psychological scientists integrate the lessons learned from the design, analysis and results of these experiments, with a specific aim of improving research in psychology. Pattern classification/machine learning techniques to blindly analyze large data sets will be covered, as will recommendations on registering experiments and appropriately evaluating physiological pre-stimulus differences before baselining psychophysiological data. The panel will also discuss research in medicine, biology, and physics that supports and augments these findings. Finally, the panel will offer new ways of thinking about the mind-body relationship.

Subject Area: Big Data: Understanding Patterns of Human Behavior

Recent laboratory evidence for the anomalous anticipation of random future events
Jessica Utts
University of California, Irvine
Several laboratory experiments published in 2011 appeared to demonstrate that individuals can anticipate future random events, a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by any known inferential process. A meta-analysis of more than 80 experiments conducted in 30 laboratories across 13 different countries strongly demonstrates that this effect is replicable.

Co-Author: Daryl Bem, Cornell University

 How presentiment can obliterate your psychophysiological results
Julia Mossbridge
Northwestern University
A recent meta-analysis indicates that pre-stimulus physiology can predict seemingly unpredictable upcoming events. This result suggests at the least that baselining physiology data while ignoring differences in baseline between conditions can mask interesting psychophysiological results, and at the most that there is something fundamental we do not understand about time.

 The influence of mind matters: The cases of telepathy and psychokinesis”
Dean Radin
Institute of Noetic Sciences
Methods for studying telepathy and psychokinesis evolved from ESP cards and tossing dice to psychophysiological techniques and the development of sensitive electronic systems. Based on the empirical database available today, a case can be made that the existence of these phenomena has been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

 A Psychological Theory of Psi
Jim Carpenter
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Reports a theory of psi as an aspect of unconscious cognition. It articulates what psi is for, in terms of everyday human functioning, and also how psi works, in terms of familiar cognitive principles. Psi is not rare and anomalous, but ubiquitously active, although unconscious. The theory is inclusive and integrative with general psychology.

 Stanley Krippner (Discussant)
Saybrook University

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