Beyond the Senses
An interview with Caroline Watt by Crispin Jones
On the theme of senses I am interested in exploring those which are beyond the realms of the conventional - psychic abilities and the paranormal. Whilst I am very skeptical about the veracity of claims in this area, I am interested that people believe in these phenomina. To better understand these senses which are beyond our understanding I presented a set of questions to Caroline Watt who is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Edinburgh University and who is a member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit.
Location: A mail exchange between Edinburgh/London, January 2007.
Q. First of all can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the work undertaken by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit?
A. The KPU is an informal grouping within Edinburgh University’s Psychology Department. I’ve worked with the KPU for over 20 years now. I started as a research assistant, did a part-time PhD, became a research fellow, then senior research fellow. After the head of the Unit, Professor Robert Morris, died in 2004, the unit was restructured, and I ‘survived’ that restructuring with the new job title senior lecturer in psychology.
I do more teaching and admin. now than previously, some in parapsychology, and some in more mainstream areas such as methodology and statistics. The KPU has just two staff, myself and Dr Peter Lamont. My interests are in the area of experimenter effects (the influence the parapsychological experimenter may have over the results of his or her studies) and also in the area of the psychology of paranormal belief. I have also recently recruited a PhD student who is doing her thesis in the area of alleged paranormal healing and health psychology. Dr Lamont’s background is in history and he is interested in the development of psychology and psychical research as a science.
Q. How is your group viewed by the wider psychology community - are you regarded with skepticism, or is your work more orientated towards studying people's belief in the paranormal (which I would imagine is less controversial)?
A. With regards to psi research, I think if the community is familiar with what we actually do, then they see that we are conducting well-controlled studies and they are are open-minded and interested in the work.
People sometimes have preconceptions that are rather skeptical, but these are usually based on a lack of familiarity with the research. Much of what I do is oriented towards a more psychological approach - e.g., belief in the paranormal, the health consequences of visiting paranormal claimants such as mediums and healers. This is less controversial, admittedly, but it may also be more fruitful because parapsychologists have not yet found a way reliably to produce psi phenomena in laboratory conditions.
A participant in a ‘Ganzfeld’ study, which is a form of mild sensory isolation thought to be conducive to receiving ESP impressions.
Q. The theme of this issue of idCAST is "the senses", can you talk about some of the phenomena you study which are considered beyond the scope of the conventional senses?
A. Parapsychologists use the term ‘psi’ to refer to these phenomena. In my latest experimenter effects study, I trained experimenters who were either strong believers or strong disbelievers in psi to administer a psi task to volunteers. The psi task was a ‘remote helping’ task.
You could think of it conceptually as similar to when you say to a friend who’s about to do a challenge like a driving test or an exam: ‘I’ll be thinking of you’ or ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you’. Does your intention to help your friend actually have any effect?
The set-up was to have two individuals in two separate and distant rooms. One participant was the ‘helper’ and one was the ‘helpee’. The helpee had to do a simple attention focusing task – their goal was to try to maintain their attention on a focal object and to press a button whenever they noticed that their attention had wandered. So the number of distractions was being counted. At the same time, in the distant room, the helper tried at random intervals mentally to assist the helpee to have fewer distractions. At the end of the session, we compared the number of distractions during help periods with those during the control periods. The experimenter and the helpee did not know when the help periods were taking place.
This study found statistically significant evidence of ‘remote helping’. But more interesting from the point of view of experimenter effects was the finding that all of the significant results came from sessions run by believer experimenters; the results for the disbeliever experimenters were at chance. So it appears that the belief of the experimenter affected the outcome of the psi task, which is consistent with claims made by other parapsychologists.
Q. idCAST is aimed at Interaction Designers (designers who work primarily with technology), can you tell us a bit about the overlap between paranormal phenomena and technology - are there new manifestations of paranormal abilities which feature the manipulation or control of technology or computers?
A. There are a number of different research paradigms in parapsychology that depend on an interaction with technology. For example, participants are asked to affect the output of random number generators in psychokinesis research. Also in many remote influence studies, psychophysiological measures such as EEG (brain electrical activity) or EDA (electrodermal activity – a measure of how much your skin sweats which in turn is an indicator of autonomic arousal) are used as the variable of interest. These latter studies could be viewed as ‘healing analogue’ studies, in that the basic idea is to establish whether one person can influence the psychophysiology of another, remote person.
Q. Who is conducting this research at the moment, are there any interesting results from their work?
A. That's too big a question to give a concise answer to, I'm afraid. Readers might like to visit the website of the Parapsychological Association and explore that. Some names worth checking out: Dean Radin, Edwin May, Daryl Bem, Roger Nelson, Marilyn Schlitz.
Google Scholar is also wonderful for digging up what's out there on the web.
Q. Do you think that technology plays the same role which belief in the paranormal once did, in that both serve to absolve people of the responsibility for making decisions?
A. I don’t think technology has replaced this function played by paranormal belief. They probably co-exist depending on the preferences of the individual. Research shows that for many individuals, paranormal belief gives a sense of control over an otherwise unpredictable environment, but it is probably an illusory sense of control. If you pray to the gods that won’t stop the volcano erupting, though it might make you feel better about the threat. Technology gives a genuine sense of control. Depending on which button you press you can send an email to one or to one hundred individuals. There is no one else to blame but yourself if you press the wrong button.
For scientists monitoring volcanic eruptions, technology is forcing them to take the decision whether or not to evacuate – before the rise of technology they could have claimed the eruption was unpredictable. Now they have to publicly face the consequences of possibly making the wrong decision.
Q. We live very much in the age of the computer, the ultimate manifestation of the rational part of the human mind. I'm interested in whether there is a rise in belief in the paranormal when the culture is so dominated by these rational machines?
A. Polls taken over the last few decades have shown that belief in the paranormal is fairly steady, with around 50% of Americans reporting a belief in some kind of paranormal phenomenon, such as extrasensory perception, ghosts, life after death. I think for many people, computers are a great way to facilitate communication and interaction over long distances.
I don’t think the public thinks too much about the technology behind these rational machines; instead they are concerned with more pragmatic issues such as how they can instantly send their holiday photos to their relatives around the world.
Q. To pick up on your answer - perhaps I was trying to make too clever a point, I agree that most people don't overly concern themselves with the philosophy behind the development of technology, rather as you observe they simply want to email their holiday photos.
The point I was trying to make was that historically in times of rapid technological advancement people have become interested in the paranormal - the Victorian fascination with the occult for example. Do you think that some form of belief in the paranormal is a fundamental human quality - do you think that in spite of any possible scientific explanation whether the 50% who believe in the paranormal will remain fairly constant?
A. I don't think that paranormal belief is a reaction to technological advancement. In fact in victorian times the development of radio (i.e. communication at a distance) inspired a lot of people to experiment with telepathy. Yes I think a certain proportion of the population are predisposed to believe in something 'magical' - whether it be a god, the power of crystals, or mind-reading. I think these beliefs give a sense of control, for those who need that sense of control. Many of these beliefs - e.g. belief in god - are not testable with scientific methods. However, certain paranormal claims, e.g. mind-reading, can be tested scientifically.
Thank you very much.
Interview by CrispinJones
Links
Koestler Parapsychology Unit website
Parapsychology Association website
Image Credits
Research images from Caroline Watt.