Supernormal

There is a well-known story about a French consultancy company who had their own very distinctive ideas. When confronted with something that worked in practice, their question was: does it work in theory? This is the difficulty faced by many scientists when dealing with parapsychology. Within their current materialistic framework, ESP does not work in theory since it contravenes their understanding of basic scientific principles: hence the need to explain the research away or attribute it to methodological flaws or fraud. However, as Lawrence LeShan pointed out in a recent book, impossible things do not happen, so it is your theory that needs modification if it is unable to explain the data. This is an uncomfortable situation.

Dean Radin will be known to many readers from his previous books The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds. He is a senior scientist with the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is one of the most distinguished and experienced parapsychologists, having been President of the Parapsychological Association. His books combine a comprehensive knowledge of the field with lucid accounts of his own experiments and sophisticated philosophical discussion of psychological factors affecting interpretation of experiments. Here he takes a slightly different starting point, reflected in his subtitle of 'science, yoga and the evidence for extraordinary psychic abilities.' The so-called siddhis are an integral part of yoga philosophy and these capacities are expected to develop in advanced spiritual practitioners such as the guru of Yogananda – Sri Yukteswar - and in the West figures such as St Padre Pio and the Bulgarian sage Peter Deunov. Exercise of these powers is not encouraged as they are considered something of a distraction from true spirituality. Dean explains the Indian background and shows that all the phenomena investigated by modern parapsychology have their counterparts in yoga philosophy.

The three parts cover the general background of legendary yoga superpowers, systematic research by modern science and speculation about future directions. In his foreword, Deepak Chopra already highlights the issues with prejudice when confronted with contravening facts. The outcome is frequently that people don't so much change their minds as interpret things to confirm their previous beliefs. He quotes Max Planck as saying that he regards consciousness as fundamental and matter as derivative from consciousness, since we cannot get behind consciousness.

Over 50 years ago, CD Broad outlined what he regarded as the basic limiting principles of science, with which parapsychology seems to conflict: it is impossible to have an effect before a cause, direct mind-matter interactions are impossible, mental events depend completely on the brain, and finally that we cannot gain information about anything outside the body except by means of the ordinary senses. These four limiting principles rule out a priori the entire subject matter of parapsychology: precognition, psychokinesis, healing at a distance, out of body experiences, survival of consciousness, clairvoyance and remote viewing. Textbooks rarely mention the topic, and, if they do, only to dismiss it (Dean provides examples of this). Towards the end of the book, he presents his own version of these limiting principles consisting of realism, localism, causality, mechanism, physicalism, materialism, determinism and reductionism. University students absorb these doctrines without realising that they are in fact assumptions and guidelines rather self-evident facts. Dean points out, like Rupert Sheldrake, that these doctrines have all been falsified by advances in physics.

The second part of the book presents scientific studies in telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis in living and inanimate systems, and clairvoyance. In many cases, Dean adds detailed accounts of his own research and methodology. He explains the role of meta-analysis and the nature of effect sizes, which are often small in extensive studies. He also elaborates on the nature of Bayesian statistical analysis as a useful method for objectively specifying how an investigator's previous beliefs ought to change when confronted with new data. The null or chance hypothesis is set by the investigator and the outcome should be determined by an analysis of the alternative hypothesis compared with the null hypothesis. Of course, this can be set up to make a result almost impossible, but it does provide a logical framework of measurement. Throughout the book, Dean demonstrates that the accumulated scientific evidence for these phenomena under consideration give odds against chance of millions if not billions to one, which should count as extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. This is especially true of Ganzfeld experiments.

The fundamental issue is one of the politics of knowledge and the psychology of belief. All too often, investigators like Michael Shermer have interesting things to say about the beliefs of other people, but they do not apply strictures such as confirmation bias to their own views. There is a strong taboo effect that keeps the current worldview in place, and this may well be reinforced by the predominance of sensing-thinking-judging personalities in the higher echelons of business, academia and government agencies. Intuitive-feeling people are much more likely to be open to the kind of research presented in this book and also more likely to have such experiences themselves. All this helps explain the resistance to changing scientific paradigms, but Dean puts his hope in the younger generation and sees some signs of progress. However, these younger people depend on their seniors for advancement and so there is an inherent conservatism built into the system.

On the basis of the scientific studies cited, Dean concludes that the supernormal abilities described in Patanjali's yoga sutras have been verified beyond reasonable doubt. One important pioneer in this field is the Dalai Lama, who has been in dialogue with scientists through the Mind and Life conferences for over two decades. This is another forum in which the spiritual and empirical scientific views can meet in a spirit of openness and rigour. The Dalai Lama challenges scientists to expand their views of reality, as does this book - much depends on how many scientists take the trouble to read it. Like his previous books, the current one is a very important statement and required reading for those on the cutting-edge of consciousness studies.