It鈥檚 a scary thought. What if telepathy is real, and we can read each other鈥檚 minds? And what if the paranormal is a genuine artefact of our fabulously complex brains rather than statistical hogwash or fraud? Will Robert Morris be the man to find out? For 15 years he鈥檚 run the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, one of a handful of centres dedicated to studying the paranormal. This lab is best known for the Ganzfeld experiment, run since the early 1990s and the result of years of negotiations between researchers and sceptics to devise a watertight test of so-called psychic phenomena. The apparent success of this experiment made headlines. John McCrone grilled him at the time, now he鈥檚 back to find out whether Morris thinks he鈥檚 made any progress.
What results are you getting?
The most recent Ganzfeld work has produced results showing that the odds against there being some paranormal effect would be in the millions to one.
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That sounds spectacular. But isn鈥檛 your problem always going to be that no matter how good your results, outsiders will say the experiments are fixed?
Well, yes. There is one definition of ESP as 鈥渆rror some place鈥�-as in 鈥淚 can鈥檛 quite find it but I know there is an error in there some place鈥�. My feeling is that as we鈥檝e progressed, and as people have read our research in detail, more and more are saying that our research looks harder to beat than they thought. Researchers need to get away from the notion of believing or disbelieving. People don鈥檛 talk about believing in other fields. I don鈥檛 use the word belief. It looks to me as though there is something new going on, but it wouldn鈥檛 blow me over if it turned out that there wasn鈥檛.
So what does parapsychology need?
Two things. One, effects of sufficient strength and consistency, so you know something is going on that isn鈥檛 readily understood by other means. And secondly, coming up with a mechanism. One big question is whether we are talking simply about one mechanism or three or four. If it is the latter, then our job is a bit more complex because we may be lumping together evidence for more than one mechanism.
Haven鈥檛 you become more of a 鈥渂eliever鈥�?
When I came here, I set the odds at about 85 per cent that we were studying something that would turn out to be above and beyond what present-day science could account for. During those years I鈥檝e probably drifted into the low to middle 90s. But I still remain confident that future scientists will figure it out.
What鈥檚 been happening to your results over the years?
Our results have been getting better. The two most recent Ganzfeld ESP studies that we did actually have the highest outcome.
So how does the Ganzfeld experiment work?
Basically, the receiver in the experiment sits in a sensory deprivation chamber, isolated in a sound-attenuated cubicle with walls a foot thick, halved ping-pong balls over his or her eyes, white noise playing through headphones, and dim red lighting. After some time, the person drifts into a dreamlike state that is supposed to increase any chance of picking up parapsychological impressions. Meanwhile, in another room about 80 feet away, a sender is concentrating on a photograph or video clip selected randomly by a computer from a hundred options to serve as the target.
What happens next?
The receiver describes aloud any thoughts or images being experienced. The experimenter, who can hear what she or he is saying but does not know the identity of the target video clip, sits in during the judging. During judging, the receiver is shown a duplicate of the target clip and three other equally likely to have been selected randomly as the target. Then the receiver decides which of the four seems the best match. If the choice is not influenced by the target, the 鈥渉it rate鈥� will be only 25 per cent on average. The isolation of sender and receiver should prevent cheating. Inadvertent hints have been cut out, such as the greasy fingerprints that might have been left if one manually handled photographs rather than used computers. Our latest set-up has images downloaded from a hard disc, which eliminates even obscure clues such as the time it might take a video machine to rewind between clips. Data collection is automated, duplicated and encrypted so that we can鈥檛 bin or alter trials that don鈥檛 turn out right. The judging process is recorded so we can check if an experimenter had cheated and was nudging a subject to the right result.
So, with a choice of four options, subjects should score 25 per cent by chance. What are you getting?
One of my colleagues, Kathy Dalton, and a student of mine called Charles Symmonds have achieved a hit rate in the high 40s overall. The main experiment, by Dalton, gave a rate of 47 per cent correct, based on 60 first choices out of 128 sessions-all involving different pairs of people.
Which subjects produce high scores?
Our best results were obtained with creative people-musicians and visual artists. As far as personality was concerned, we didn鈥檛 get any consistent links between extroverts versus introverts or things like that.
How does this square with a review in the Psychological Bulletin (vol 125, p 387, 1999) which pooled the results of 30 Ganzfeld studies and found no significant evidence for an anomalous effect?
That report didn鈥檛 include the data that I鈥檝e just been talking about. Some of the studies they looked at represented a variety of different procedures that people were trying-for example, to explore what kind of conditions might be favourable or unfavourable. That meant they included some that had quite strongly negative results-a product of processes we鈥檝e been trying to learn from. If you lump everything together, however, the results certainly are statistically significant.
But the review was by former lab members Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton. Has that hurt the Ganzfeld work?
One thing it certainly did was to clarify that some of the claims for the Ganzfeld were a little premature. There were some who were beginning to say we鈥檝e always wanted an experiment in parapsychology that just about anybody can use and get good results. And that鈥檚 just not the case with the Ganzfeld-you still have to use rather special conditions if you are going to make some use of it.
What is the secret of using it properly?
Taking a lot of care with how you recruit participants, how you welcome them into the lab, how you help them relax and feel as though it鈥檚 OK to do well or succeed at these kinds of procedures. It also seems important to select participants from groups who appear to produce better results and avoid those who don鈥檛 feel they will do well.
So the experimenter can affect the result?
That鈥檚 where some of the work by Wiseman, now at the University of Hertfordshire, and Marilyn Schlitz of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California, comes in. Wiseman has had a history of not getting good results while Schlitz has done fairly well. Now they鈥檙e trying to use a similar approach, not with Ganzfeld but another experiment. Wiseman still gets chance results and Schlitz gets positive ones. So they are also trying now to look at films of themselves and see the different ways that they work with people.
What is that new experiment?
It involves something called DMILS-direct mental interaction with living systems-where one person attempts to increase or decrease the measured arousal of another individual.
So would the person have electrodes attached to monitor their heart rate?
It tends to be electrodermal activity, so it would be like galvanic skin response- basically, sweat.
What about doing brain imaging studies?
We are at the planning stages now and we would expect to have the experiment designed and running in the next five or six months. If this effect is real, we want to identify which parts of the brain seem to be involved.
What other new experiments are there?
There are two other especially interesting experimental paradigms. One is called behavioural DMILS. We are increasingly interested in an experiment where one person attempts to increase the concentration of another. The recipient is given a concentration task and asked to press a button whenever they feel their concentration has flagged. Meanwhile, another person in a distant location has randomised time intervals when they are either trying to help the person concentrate or leave them alone. The second experimental paradigm is called a presentiment procedure, where you show somebody slides, some with very startling or disturbing images. You then test to see if they are starting to show a shift in arousal a few seconds before the startling slides appear on the screen.
What do your peers think?
快猫短视频s view parapsychology more favourably if they see a researcher is coming at it bottom up rather than top down. We may simply be uncovering some additional aspects of brain functioning that we haven鈥檛 understood very richly so far. We鈥檙e basically saying people have anomalous experiences which they don鈥檛 seem to understand, and we can help by applying the tools of science.
Do you get personal attacks?
Not really. Perhaps because people know we are trying to do as good a job as we can, we don鈥檛 get people insulting us to our faces. Wiseman, for instance, got his doctorate at our lab by studying some of the strategies for faking special abilities. And we now have Peter Lamont on our staff, who is a former president of the Edinburgh magic circle. So we are actively looking at deception and the tricks of the trade, how we can fool ourselves and fool each other. Most serious sceptics, the informed ones we deal with, are saying that they鈥檝e accounted for a lot of things, that there鈥檚 been a lot of sloppy research, but if it鈥檚 possible to get some sort of new effect with really well-done research, count them in.
In the wider context, didn鈥檛 the CIA admit wasting $20 million on psychic spying?
If you look carefully at what was concluded, they did not have evidence of an effect that was strong enough to be reliably used in the field. But they did not conclude that they had found a complete lack of evidence. Also, there have been debates about how much of the total scientific evidence the hired-in evaluators had access to (Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol 10, p 89).
What got you interested in the first place?
When I was in my early teens I found an aluminium box containing coloured marbles that was sitting at the back of a shelf. It turned out to be a device my parents had had built for testing parapsychological ability. They weren鈥檛 academics or psychics, but they took an interest. I asked them if they really thought these abilities existed. They said, well, scientists don鈥檛 seem to know. I asked why, and they said, as near as we can tell they are not looking at the evidence. And so that was the motivation. Not to demonstrate that this stuff exists, or that it doesn鈥檛. But just to say, let鈥檚 take a hard look at the evidence.
Do you ever wish you had picked another line of research?
It depends. Sometimes I really wish I worked in something where all I was doing was manipulating a few variables and I could have confidence that every time I did a study I would automatically get a nice tidy result. But on the other hand, I don鈥檛 think that would have been quite so much fun. I鈥檝e adapted to having people thinking I鈥檓 wasting my time a bit. Frankly, if I had it to do all over again, I would.