…initial scepticism, Playfair became increasingly intrigued by the phenomena he investigated and was eventually persuaded of their genuineness. He researched a number of cases of ‘psychic surgery, automatic writing, materializations and poltergeist activity’,3Murdie (2018). and experienced a personal healing encounter at the hands of Edivaldo,4Fryer (2018). a psychic surgeon local…
…His conclusions may well have been right, but his tendency to over-state his case makes him vulnerable to criticism. 9Thouless (1968). Critique by Vernon Harrison In 1986 Dr Vernon Harrison, a senior SPR member and expert in photography and handwriting, published a powerful critique of the handwriting evidence in the…
…he would return very soon: he then told her also the reason why he had been unable to write. The woman went home pretty much at ease. What the solitary had told her was minutely fulfilled, her husband returned, and the reasons of his delay and his not writing were…
…The boy, who was unable to identify the writing in his package became upset at having failed the test. Following this demonstration, more children were chosen from among the audience. They in turn ‘read’ their hand-held packets correctly, giving the words broad in red; public (no colour); moon in black;…
…cursive handwriting. Figure 1: Gretchen’s German writing, and the normal handwriting of Dolores Jay Fig. 1: Gretchen’s German script, and a sample of Dolores Jay’s handwriting made during her normal waking state.4Reproduced in Stevenson (1984), 43. Criticism and Controversy Stevenson formed the view that the Gretchen personality referred to a…
…Lectures on Psychical Research.2Broad (1962). Broad’s writing on parapsychology was confined primarily to the topics of ESP and postmortem survival. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, was a topic he dismissed more quickly than one would have expected, given the thorough attention and care he lavished on the cognitive forms of…
…kind of spiritual telegraphy known, one of which however is peculiarly her own, and consists in writing with her finger, and leaving behind marks as of a lead pencil, while no such article is in her possession or even in the room. She will also take hold of the hand…
…At the time of writing (August 2017) the page consists almost entirely of critical comment, as is now the case with almost all Wikipedia articles on psi research topics. The article gives prominence to the Nature review of The Conscious Universe. It further adds objections by career sceptics such as…
…ambiguity. Results replicated the effects for geometric stimuli. Very similar patterns were obtained with emotional faces, indicating that these effects generalize across different types of high-level ambiguities.1Joos et al. (2019). Predictive Processing An experiment was designed by Kornmeier and colleagues to test whether predictions generated from perceptual patterns automatically influence…
