Isabel Voss
Can a person read another mind, name a hidden object, or nudge a machine by intention alone? Parapsychology has spent more than 140 years putting those claims in a laboratory, and this book lays out what the experiments actually found. The answer isn’t a tidy one, and the book says so plainly. Some effects keep turning up in the data at small sizes. Critics reply that small effects are what flawed methods and unpublished failures produce. Both readings fit the record, and you get the case for each, arranged in the order that makes it easiest to judge for yourself. The chapters work through: - The vocabulary every trial depends on: sender, receiver, target, hit rate, effect size - Mesmer’s magnetized tub, Victorian seance rooms, the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and J.B. Rhine’s Zener card work at Duke that turned a fringe interest into laboratory science - Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and the ganzfeld procedure, in which a receiver rests under halved ping pong balls and soft noise while someone in another room concentrates on a picture - Metal bending, dice tests, and random number generator studies - Experimental design and judgment: randomization, blinding, statistical power, what a p-value tells you about a tiny effect, and how meta-analysis pools many studies into one number - Survival research, covering triple-blind mediumship readings, the AWARE hospital study of near-death reports, and the past-life case files of Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker - Crisis apparitions and poltergeists, alongside the plain causes behind many haunting reports: infrasound, drafts, carbon monoxide, mold, and suggestion - The skeptical case at full strength: the Fox sisters’ confession, S.G. Soal’s data, Project Alpha, cold reading, and the Barnum effect - Project Stargate, the PEAR lab, quantum-flavored theories, and what one decisive experiment would have to look like You need no background in science or statistics. Every technical idea gets explained in plain terms the first time it appears, using real cases and real trials. That makes it a fit for curious general readers, for students meeting research methods for the first time, for podcast and documentary fans who want the actual record behind the stories, and for skeptics who want the strongest claims stated fairly before they dismiss them. The back matter is built for study: a historical timeline of the field, discussion questions at the end of each chapter with worked example answers, a glossary, works cited, and annotated further reading that points you to the original research. Read this if you want the honest record rather than a sales pitch in either direction. Once you reach the end, you’ll be able to meet any strange claim and ask the questions that matter: how was this tested, could anyone have cheated, how big was the result, and did another lab get the same thing?
