Notis 211, 2012-03-08. David Luke, ordförande för Parapsychological Association 2009-2011, kritiserade under sitt avslutningstal Richard Wiseman och andra som författat böcker i vilka paranormala upplevelser betraktas utifrån den anomalistiska psykologin.

/Nemo Mörck

Lukes tal publicerades i senaste numret av Journal of Parapsychology, och David Smith, en av parapsykologen Caroline Watts doktorander har valt ut några citat från det:

Take Richard Wiseman’s (2011) latest bestselling book on anomalistic psychology that came out this year, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. It gestures towards legitimate science but without taking a balanced or even an empirical viewpoint on certain experiences. For example, the neat explanation given for the great prevalence among the public of precognitive dreams is that, yes, these dreams occur with some degree of frequency but, no, they are not paranormal, they are just coincidental. In this view, dreams of future events are merely products of the law of truly large numbers…
…Wiseman (2011) and many other anomalistic psychologists (e.g., Blackmore, 1990; Charpak & Broch, 1994; Estgate & Groome, 2001; Hines, 2003; Mueller & Roberts 2001; Zunse & Jones, 1989) utterly fail to consider any experimental research into dream ESP, and rely solely on subjective estimates of probability and subsequently dubious calculations, all of which, not surprisingly, are completely different from one researcher to another. Consequently, 50 years or so of diligent experimental dream research using objective probabilities conducted since the start of Stan Krippner’s era at Maimonides is completely ignored at the expense of some logically sketchy tales…
…Reclaiming the dream experience, if you were to work with, record, and study your dreams every day as I did for just 18 months, then you might actually discover, like I did, that on average 1 dream in 10 had some compelling precognitive component. I am not the only one who reports this either as we have comparable figures from other dream diary studies (e.g., Bender, 1966; De Pablos, 1998, 2002). While such self reports are not evidential, can the law of truly large numbers actually account for these rates of occurrence? Indeed suggesting that such frequent occurrences are expected by chance is essentially the opposite of what psychiatrist Klaus Conrad (1958) somewhat oddly called apophenia, the discovery of patterns in (apparently) random data. Perhaps we should call this opposite phenomena of attributing chance probability to (apparently) related phenomena randomania, as a label for believing that everything one cannot currently explain is just due to chance and coincidence. One assumes that such a condition derives from a deep-seated rejection and fear of the paranormal – which I’ll come back to – a kind of paranoid normality.