Any scientific evidence for psychic phenomena?

 DAVID: A number of scientists that I’ve interviewed have told me that they didn’t think that there was any scientific evidence for psychic phenomena.

What would you say to these scientists about research in psychic phenomena?

DEAN: The usual reason for such comments is that these folks are simply telling the truth. They are not aware of the evidence. That’s an expression of ignorance, which is fine. We’re all ignorant about lots of things. But the fact is that there is an enormous amount of evidence for anyone who wishes to go looking for it.

Here’s one way of thinking about this. Rupert Sheldrake was visiting here [the Institute of Noetic Sciences] this week. Last week he was involved in a debate on the evidence for telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in London.

His opponent was a biologist named Lewis Wolpert, who is a well-known skeptic and promoter of science in England. In the debate Rupert was presenting the experimental evidence for telepathy, and Wolpert acted as the devil’s advo-cate. Wolpert’s position was that telepathy doesn’t exist because we know it doesn’t exist, and anyway there’s no evidence that it exists. If you expand those words to twenty minutes of repetition around the same theme, then that was his position.
Rupert, on the other hand, presented one study after the other—showing here’s some evidence, here’s some more, and here’s some more, and so on.

The debate was cast in terms of a scientific court, where the members of the audience—about a hundred people—were the jury, and there was a judge that would rule on the case. Well, 80 percent of the people agreed with Rupert.

The overwhelming majority was such a shock to the reporters present that a few days later it appeared as a news item in the journal Nature  with the title, “Telepathic Charm Seduces Audience at Paranormal Debate.” The article reported that the debate had won hands down in favor of telepathy. So, this is just a microcosm of what goes on all the time. Many scientists are unaware of the evidence because they either wish to not pay attention to it or because it just isn’t visible in their orbit.

There’s another aspect to this, which occurs when you discuss taboo topics.

There’s a big difference about whether something will be mentioned in private or in public. Rupert and I were comparing notes on this. We both found that, in private, most people—including the vast majority of scientists—will admit that, even though they may not know the literature very well, they’ve had personal experiences, or someone that they know and trust has reported things that do not seem like they can be accounted for by the usual explanations, like coincidence or wishful thinking. So, privately, many people are willing to admit that there’s something interesting going on, far more than publicly. As soon as you are going to commit something to paper, or to the press in some way, you become more circumspect about what you’re going to say. It’s a lot easier to then act the role of the skeptical scientist and say, Well, I don’t know of any evidence, which is portrayed as a dismissal of the topic rather than what it really is, an admission of ignorance.

Many of these scientists are not aware of my book, or any of the other books written on this topic, which as you know show in great gory detail that we do have ways of studying these things. We may not have very good theoretical explanations for them yet, but the fact is, for over a century, we’ve had empirical ways of studying psi. And if we believe in empiricism as reflecting something about what’s really going on out there, then there’s very little doubt that these phenomena do exist.

DAVID: It really is interesting how strangely taboo this particular research topic is. Most scientists that I talk to are either unaware of this research, or they immediately dismiss it.

DEAN: It’s partially because there’s kind of an understanding that if experiments of this type were really true, then they should have already appeared in Nature or Science  because it’s truly revolutionary. But what many scientists working in the mainstream don’t appreciate is that there are publication biases that prevent certain topics from appearing in the mainstream scientific press. Of course, anyone who’s been working in a controversial field knows this immediately, that certain things simply cannot make it to press. But if you haven’t worked in an area of high controversy you would never have any reason to suspect this.

You’d have no reason to guess that prejudice exists in science like it does anywhere else. So it’s frustrating, of course. Rupert and I have talked about this extensively, and we’re trying to crack this nut, but it’s a slow process. It’s like affirmative action: Prejudice carries enormous inertia, and it will not go away unless an affirmative stance is taken to counter it. Unfortunately, in science, there is no equivalent of affirmative action. So it can take a very very long time, as history has shown, for unpopular ideas to finally make it though. As Max Planck said, “Science progresses by funerals.”
. . .
DAVID: Why do you think the various psychic abilities that humans are capable of evolved to begin with?

DEAN: That’s a good question. It’s not clear to me at all that it evolved, because I think we’re dealing with something which is before evolution in a sense. It’s part of the fabric of the universe. It has to be, because if it was something that evolved, it would suggest that we have created ways of transcending space and time, which doesn’t make sense. How can we create something which, from a conventional point of view, would be a violation of “laws of science”? It can’t be that way.

So, another way of thinking of it is that we make the presumption—and one that most scientists have faith in—that the universe was here before people showed up, that we didn’t create it as a fact of thinking about it, and suddenly it all fell into place. In fact, we have to take that faith, otherwise science would stop, because it becomes a solipsistic universe, and anything we wish to be true would be true. So you start from the assumption that the world is given in some way and that we’re evolving in it. And if there’s any evolution at all, it’s the evolution of a realization that the fabric of the universe is not the way that Newton saw it. Or actually it is in his mystical sense, but not in the classical physics sense of the Newtonian-Cartesian world.

DAVID: So you see it as being an inherent part of the basic structure of the universe?

DEAN: Yes, there’s some aspects of the world for which we now have the term “nonlocality,” which nobody understands very well, but seems to be a fundamental, underlying aspect of the universe. If that is in fact the case, as it seems it must be, given theory and experiments, then in many ways psychic phenomena is something you would be compelled to predict. You would predict that occasionally people would have some sense or experience of this kind of interconnectedness.
. . .
DAVID: What are some of the practical applications of parapsychological research?

DEAN: Well, realistically we don’t know. Any time science stumbles across some new understanding of the world, it typically gets spun out into a few novel applications at the time when the invention or the discovery was made. But no one had any idea what would happen down the line.  (...)

From An Interview with Dean Radin

Dean Radin is a psychologist and engineer who has specialized in the study of anomaliesassociated with human consciousness, principally so-called psychic (psi) phenomena. He has investigated telepathy, psychokinesis, and precognition at Princeton University, theUniversity of Edinburgh, Bell Laboratories, SRI International, and as part of a classified program for the U.S. government, and he was president of the Parapsychological Association affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Radin earned his Ph.D. in psychology and M.S. in engineering, respectively, at theUniversity of Illinois, Champaign. His research awards include the Parapsychological Association’s 1996 Outstanding Achievement Award and the 1996 Rhine Research Center’s Alexander Imich Award for advances in experimental parapsychology. Dr. Radin is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is also the authoror coauthor of over two hundred scientific papers and popular articles as well as one of the most popular scientific books on psi research:  The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.

Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse
Interviews by  David Jay Brown