Reading
Brian Clegg’s book I felt there was some sleight of hand going on. He poses as a true sceptic rather than a
pseudo-sceptic, the latter being the sort that won’t look at the evidence
because it’s all nonsense, but it is obvious on which side of the fence he is
going to come down; the
reference to pseudoscience in the subtitle gives the game away. Yet because his stance is that of the
disinterested investigator willing to examine the issue from all sides,
stressing repeatedly that psychic abilities should not be dismissed out of
hand, his verdict is supposed to carry more weight than if he had adopted a
partisan standpoint from the outset.
Unfortunately, one of his major criticisms of parapsychologists is
cherry-picking, choosing the best results and discarding those not favourable
to their hypothesis, and he seems to have done some of that himself. The casual reader will obtain a very
selective view of the field from his book.
It
is important to stress that he is not addressing the entire field of psychical
research. As the subtitle suggests, he
is investigating alleged “powers of the mind”: telepathy, clairvoyance/remote
viewing, psychokinesis (which he consistently calls telekinesis for some reason,
though he does not advance any reason for adopting the older usage) and
precognition. Then he takes a close look
at the work of J. B. Rhine; the psychic cold war between the USA and USSR,
including the Stargate project (naturally referencing The Men Who Stare at Goats); the Princeton Engineering Anomalies
Research (PEAR) lab; and Uri Geller and spoon bending. Clegg does not address survival issues, though
he does mention cold reading, and the problem evaluating the Scole sittings because
of the spirits’ refusal to allow infrared during séances. There is nothing on apparitions or
poltergeists, the latter not even in terms of Recurrent Spontaneous
Psychokinesis – a living individual being the agent – as a possible cause (he
would doubtless argue that if there are problems influencing dice, psychokinesis
is not likely to work on heavier objects over longer distances). Even with this focus it is a lot of ground to
cover, and Clegg tends not to analyse any of the phenomena he examines in
depth.
The
root of the problem with the book is that Clegg does not have a parapsychology
background but is a popular science writer.
That means he has not immersed himself in the literature, and
selectively chooses what he needs to support a point; James Randi in particular
looms large as the model of a scientific investigator. Clegg’s references are embedded in the
endnotes, which helps to disguise the limited range of primary sources he has
consulted. While much of what he says is
pertinent and should be taken on board by researchers, you feel repeatedly that
you are only getting part of the story.
This may be for space reasons, but anyone who has a nodding acquaintance
with the literature will start to wonder if he is keen to skate over details that
might muddy his narrative. For example,
the chapter on PEAR relies on the project’s website and a 2005 article by
Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne in the Journal
of Scientific Exploration. There is no mention of their books Margins of Reality: The Role of
Consciousness in the Physical World (2009) and Consciousness and the Source of Reality: The PEAR Odyssey (2011),
which would seem to be essential to a reliable scrutiny of their work. Clegg’s dismissal would carry a lot more
weight if it had been based on deeper reading.
There
is a selective approach in other chapters too.
He makes great play of the telepathy experiments conducted by the early
Society for Psychical Research with George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn. (Incidentally
anyone looking for the SPR under ‘S’ in the index will be disappointed – as
sometimes happens with books published in the United States it is listed under
‘B’ as the ‘British Society for Psychical Research’, an organisation that does
not exist, presumably to distinguish it from the American Society for Psychical
Research, which does – just about.) Clegg
has taken his information on the Smith-Blackburn trials from C E M Hansel’s
sceptical 1966 book ESP: A Scientific
Evaluation without attribution, though he does cite Hansel’s book later
when discussing J. B Rhine’s laboratory.
The only reference Clegg provides to the Smith-Blackburn trials is an
article Blackburn wrote much later for the Daily
News, 1 September 1911, a reference to which is included in Hansel, though
it was only one of a number of articles Blackburn wrote for both the Daily News and previously for John Bull. The News
article is reprinted in the Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research – though there is no evidence that Clegg
has consulted the SPR’s literature because if he had he would have seen the
various responses it provoked, including from Smith himself – as well as
in Paul
Kurtz’s A Skeptic’s Handbook of
Parapsychology. Clegg does not
indicate, and possibly does not appreciate, that Blackburn was an unreliable
witness with his own agenda. Further,
Clegg does not, as Hansel does not, address the SPR experiments in which Smith
was involved after Blackburn’s departure, reported in exhausting detail in its Proceedings. Clegg would probably have found this series
similarly flawed, but to reach a balanced conclusion on the early SPR’s
experiments they need to be taken into account.
Unless that is, Clegg merely wished to provide sufficient evidence to
support an opinion he had already reached.
There
is a chapter on Uri Geller that recounts the well-worn story of his
spoon-bending career. Just to rub in how
credulous investigators can be we have a section on the sad business of the
mini-Gellers investigated by John Taylor, as recounted in his book Superminds (1975), though not anything
about the book Taylor wrote after his change of heart, Science and the Supernatural (1980). But while we can nod sagely at the
ridiculousness of anybody believing that Geller bends spoon and forks using
anything other than a bit of manual dexterity, what about that 18mm chrome
vanadium combination Snap-On spanner that Geller is said to have bent at the Silverstone
Grand Prix in 1998? To do that required
somewhat more force than Geller would have been able to muster with thumb and
forefinger. Admittedly he could have
hidden a pre-bent spanner in his underpants and made a switch at an opportune
moment, or perhaps achieved the effect with the assistance of a confederate, on
the assumption that mechanics wouldn’t necessarily recognise every single
spanner they own. But this is of a
different order to manipulating table cutlery, and Clegg should have included
it in his account.
He
also polarises the issue of reliability into psi proponents vs sceptics, drawing
heavily on people like Randi, Hansel and Martin Gardner, though curiously not
Richard Wiseman or Chris French, as if they are the guardians of truth against
the gullibility of parapsychologists.
That parapsychologists have been gullible is not in doubt, as Clegg is
quick to note, but he fails to add that often accusations of fraud come from
within the field itself. In particular
he mentions Walter J Levy and Samuel Soal.
Levy was exposed not by a crusading sceptic but by fellow
researchers. Betty Markwick uncovered
cheating by Soal, yet Clegg does not mention that she is the longstanding Hon
Statistical Advisor of the SPR. And
Clegg’s source for his description of Markwick’s analysis of Soal’s data? Not her seminal paper ‘The Soal-Goldney
Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Data Manipulation’, in the
SPR’s Proceedings, but Randi’s Flim-Flam.
Extra Sensory is clearly
written, albeit with more on quantum physics than seems strictly necessary for the
discussion of possible mechanisms for telepathy. Clegg covers the principles of the scientific
approach, always worth hearing, and the dangers of relying on anecdotal
evidence. His verdict on the banality of
much of what passes for parapsychology is sadly true, though his final words
seem curious: “It’s time to switch off the life support for parapsychology in
its present form and get the researchers to bite the bullet and go for the real
thing.” It was news to me that
parapsychology was on life support at the present time and it will probably
come as a surprise to practising parapsychologists as well. He is right though to be wary of experiments
that produce only tiny statistical effects that could be attributed to normal
causes in both equipment and statistical analyses, because the results are so
often ambiguous and unrepresentative of how psi is supposed to work in the real
world. It is also a sad fact of the
field that promising avenues of research have a tendency to peter out, often
after becoming mired in controversy.
However,
while acknowledging that there are methodological problems in parapsychology,
it needs to be borne in mind that Clegg is not the open-minded sceptic that he
claims to be, and he draws on only a small part of the findings that have accumulated. Teasingly he keeps the possibility of
telepathy open, but rather damned by the grudging “There is some evidence that
has not been proved worthless” (“not yet anyway”, he might have added). The rest of it can, in his opinion, be
written off as tainted by issues of coincidence, poor experimental procedure,
statistical noise, misperception and selective memory, and of course
fraud. One wonders what grounds for
optimism he has for thinking that there might be something in it that is still
worth investigation.
