This thesis aims to construct, evaluate, and apply a cognitive proto-model which accounts for the trickery involved in the fabrication ofjust one type of psychic ability, namely; macro-PK. This cognitive proto-model describes how an observer analyses a demonstration of ostensible macro-PK. The model accounts for how an observer: construes such phenomena as either a magic trick or a display of g...

Ian Stevenson began studying children who claim to remember previous lives— an endeavor that will surely be remembered as the primary focus of his life’s work—almost by accident. Enjoying a successful mainstream career with some 60 publications in the medical and psychiatric literature to his credit, he had become chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Virgi...

Pharmaceutical research provides a useful model for doing convincing research in situations with intense, critical scrutiny of studies. The protocol for a “pivotal” study that is used for decision-making is reviewed by the FDA before the study is begun. The protocol is expected to include a power analysis demonstrating that the study has at least a .8 probability of obtaining significant result...

There is a large amount of evidence in the Parapsychology literature that indicates thatconsciousness not an emergent property neuronal interactions and can exist andfunction independently brain. Here we examine mathematical methods canbe used to derive dynamic equations for mind-matter occurring thebrain these observations imply existence of. We use moments method toapproximate effect consciou...

in 882, the spr was founded to investigate “that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic,” and to do so “in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems” (gauld, 968, p. 37). since then, the scientific acceptance of hypnosis (partly based on “mesmerism”) and that of parapsycho...

of the most important methods for preventing bias in modern clinical trials have a peculiar history. Masked assessment with placebo control seems to have appeared first during tests led by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 to investigate unorthodox claims of healing by 'animal magnetism' or 'mesmerism'. People were blindfolded and told that they were or were not receiving magnetism, when the reverse wa...

Recent research into metaphor and the role of imagination in categorization has been particularly revealing. The contemporary view of metaphor as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) attempts to provide a more useful and accurate account of human experience than the current objectivist explanations. In contrast to these, it emphasizes the importance of metaphor, imagination, and embodiment in ...

The principle of cause and effect is deeply rooted in human experience, so much so that it is routinely and tacitly assumed throughout science, even by scientists working in areas where time symmetry is theoretically ingrained, as it is in both classical and quantum physics. Experiments are said to cause their results, not the other way around. In this informal paper, we argue that this assumpt...