Psychosis as an altered state of consciousness (ASC) Our deepening understanding of brain, mind and consciousness leaves us no option but to expand the neurobiology of psychosis to incorporate the concept of consciousness; its nature, levels, dimensions and dynamics, and the impact this function plays in the development of challenging, abnormal states of mind. Psychosis has been defined as ‘any...

Web 2.0 technology enables people worldwide to collaborate over the Internet, a phenomenon known as social collaboration. While the incentives for social collaboration are primarily enthusiasm for a particular subject, building a reputation, or gaining a benefit by doing something in exchange for using services or downloading files, the emergence of human computation games has shown that the pr...

Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention. We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio’s (2010) meta-analysis. Our analysis differs from Storm et al.’s in that we rely on Bayes factors, a Bayesian approach for stating the evidence from data for competing theoretical positions. In contrast to more...

Introduction Suppose you are determined to “prove” that green apples cause cancer. An Optional Stopping strategy (OS) is where you keep looking sampling experimental data until the observed correlation between eating green applies and cancer is significantly different from 0 (where “significantly” means that the null hypothesis is rejected by standard statistical tests). That is, you follow a r...

The author regards as "enemies" of parapsychological research (1) those critics who confuse parapsychology with popular superstition, (2) those parapsychologists who know all the pieces of evidence for the reality of psi effects but who lack the capacity to integrate and to evaluate that evidence as a whole, and (3) those professional psychics whose faltering attempts to apply psi for profit gi...

The veracity of substantive research claims hinges on the way experimental data are collected and analyzed. In this article, we discuss an uncomfortable fact that threatens the core of psychology’s academic enterprise: almost without exception, psychologists do not commit themselves to a method of data analysis before they see the actual data. It then becomes tempting to fine tune the analysis ...

The veracity of substantive research claims hinges on the way experimental data are collected and analyzed. In this article, we discuss an uncomfortable fact that threatens the core of psychology’s academic enterprise: almost without exception, psychologists do not commit themselves to a method of data analysis before they see the actual data. It then becomes tempting to fine tune the analysis ...

Cohen (1962) pointed out the importance of statistical power for psychology as a science, but statistical power of studies has not increased, while the number of studies in a single article has increased. It has been overlooked that multiple studies with modest power have a high probability of producing nonsignificant results because power decreases as a function of the number of statistical te...

The authors studied retrospectively 78 reports of "near-death experiences using subjects narratives and questionnaires, interviews, and medical records. Prior experiences suggestive of transcendence of death were more common among these subjects than among control populations, but prior experiences suggestive of extrasensory phenomena were less common. Subsequent changes in attitudes were more ...

The Electronic Fox Ears helmet is a listening device that changes its wearer’s experience of hearing. A pair of headmounted, independently articulated parabolic microphones and built-in bone conduction transducers allow the wearer to sharply direct their attention to faraway sound sources. Joysticks in each hand control the orientations of the microphones, which are mounted on servo gimbals for...