The Science of Weird Shit

Professor Chris French was recently awarded emeritus status at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in recognition of a career devoted to the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He has been an important and influential bridge between the opposing camps of a perhaps over-zealous parapsychological community and a vociferous but often woefully ill-informed skeptical community. By providing a more moderate -- albeit still doubting -- voice, debates involving French have usually delivered more light than heat. His autobiographical work, The Science of Weird Shit, offers an insight into the highs and lows of his attempts to investigate and make sense of claims of the paranormal. French observes that despite its inherent scepticism his work concerned with anomalistic psychology has been marginalised by the powers-that-be, but argues for its importance given the ubiquity of paranormal beliefs and experiences among the general public: either there is some substance to these phenomena, or there is a great deal to be learnt about human cognition and perception by studying claims that persist in popular consciousness even though they cannot be scientifically substantiated.

The book is intended for a general audience, so is charming and informal, but this can be at the expense of technical detail or substantiation which allows sweeping claims or unscrutinised assumptions to sneak in. For example, he confidently asserts that “all forms of [complementary and alternative medicine] have this in common: they have either never been proved to work or they have been proved not to work” (pp 13-14), which of course is not supported by the evidence (e.g., Roe et al., 2015). The following chapters cover a range of unexplained phenomena, including haunting and poltergeist experiences, communication with the dead such as through mediumship, reincarnation cases, near-death experiences, and claimed encounters with aliens.

A general pattern emerges in which the claims are (mainly) not dismissed or ridiculed but, after careful consideration, a counter-explanation in terms of conventional psychological processes is preferred. In keeping with other sceptical accounts, these alternatives tend to be evaluated in terms of their plausibility rather than being subject to any direct empirical testing, and troublesome exceptions seem to be dismissed rather lightly. For example, after a brief introduction to mental mediumship, in which evidence of survival derives from the accuracy and personal relevance of the material being communicated, French rightly spends some time discussing cold reading as a possible conventional explanation for successes (see Roe & Roxburgh, 2013, for an extended introduction). But oddly, this comes after a very brief description of formal experimental work with mediums that controls for exactly these deceptive methods yet still reports significant above-chance accuracy (Sarraf et al., 2020) and there is no indication from the commentary here that these study outcomes could not be explained in such terms.

Similarly, French is not persuaded by the evidence for ghosts, which he describes as likely to take the form of vague senses of presence, and other bodily sensations (like shivers down the back) that take on ghostly features as a consequence of pareidolia -- the tendency to perceive meaningful images or patterns in random or ambiguous stimuli. This characterisation is indeed reflected in some of the research he cites, which for example explores the effects of suggestion upon reported experiences at allegedly haunted sites such as Hampton Court Palace (Wiseman et al., 2002). However, such explanations are clearly inadequate to account for the many stronger cases in which people report vivid and detailed perceptions, or have a shared experience with other witnesses (see Roe et al., 2023, for examples). It is important that explanations are tested against the most challenging evidence rather than the most amenable.

French has conducted influential research into sleep paralysis, which is an important mechanism when asleep to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Sometimes paralysis persists when waking so that people feel unable to move, and this may be accompanied by an intense fear and an overwhelming sense of a (typically malevolent) presence. It is not uncommon for people to interpret this experience as a haunting or similar demonic visitation, but it is clear that there could be a reasonable bio-psychological explanation. While French rightly concedes that “it would be going too far to claim that episodes of sleep paralysis fully explain human belief in spirits” (p. 55, my emphasis), there is an implication that many or even most experiences can be explained in these terms. However, this (again) can only be achieved by ignoring those circumstances which do not fit the formula, such as experiences that occur while wide awake, or which involve communication of previously unknown information.

NDEs are explained in terms of the standard ‘organic theories’ that emphasise the effects of cerebral anoxia and the release of endorphins in response to acute stressors, but this requires us to gloss over striking phenomenological differences between the NDE and other circumstances when people report the effects of oxygen depletion. Whereas the effects of anoxia have been characterized as involving confused thinking, a defining characteristic of the NDE is a sense of extreme clarity (sometimes described as more ‘real’ than everyday experience). Similarly, OBEs are explained in terms of body mapping errors, referencing the work of Olaf Blanke which involved stimulating the temporo-parietal junction in a manner that is believed to have triggered OBE-like experiences. However, the description of the supposed OBE in these experiments is frustratingly impoverished and offers little confidence that this could account for some of the rich and complex OBEs that have been reported in the real world (e.g. Alvarado, 1984)

In Chapter 6 French describes his involvement in an investigation of reincarnation claims among the Druse in Lebanon. He confirms his disdain for hypnotically induced regressions as a source of information, focusing particularly on the Bridey Murphy case, a supposed past life of Virginia Tighe. He notes (p 176) “unfortunately, subsequent investigations revealed that neither Bridey Murphy nor any of the people she spoke to ever existed”. While it is true that no registers of births, marriages or deaths were maintained in that area of Cork, so that no trace of Murphy herself could be found, a number of named persons (John McCarthy, John Carrigan, William Farr) were verified, along with colloquial language and practices (Wehrstein, 2019). French suggests that Tighe’s memories may have derived from “an Irish aunt and an Irish neighbour” (p 176), though it turns out the ‘Irish aunt’ was actually born in New York and lived most of her life in Chicago, and the neighbour refused to speak to reporters so that nothing is known of her background or of the degree of interaction she might have had with Tighe. In this way, urban myths are propagated.

French rightly notes the shortcomings of field research on reincarnation, which cases are typically contaminated by the time researchers appear on the scene, since they typically come to public attention only after the child’s family has encountered the deceased person’s family by which time it isn’t clear what information might have been exchanged informally. Of course, these issues were well known to researchers such as Ian Stevenson and Erlendur Haraldsson, and it’s again disappointing that French doesn’t devote any space to some of the stronger documented cases.

In summary, this is an entertaining book that is refreshingly devoid of hubris. It is clear that conventional explanations are preferred and as a result they are not subjected to the same degree of critical scrutiny as the opening paranormal interpretations. The book reviews research and findings from anomalistic psychology, which is concerned with “trying to produce and empirically test nonparanormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal phenomena”, and in this respect it offers important lessons in critical thinking, and also cognitive and perceptual biases. An unfortunate consequence is that much of the work of parapsychology is ignored or dealt with cursorily. As a biography of the career and research interests of the author this is fine, but the book is positioned as an account of the science of the paranormal. To do so with little mention of direct empirical research seems odd, rather like recognising that some improvements to health result from the effects of placebo and expectancy and then writing a book on medicine that only deals with placebo and expectancy.