This month’s podcast is a fascinating interview with Dr Caroline Watt. It coincides with the recent launch of her book; Parapsychology: A beginners guide (2016). The book draws on Caroline’s years of experience as a senior lecturer in Psychology, and a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU), based here at the University of Edinburgh. Last year was the 30th Anniversary of the KPU and we were lucky enough to catch up with Caroline following her successful Fringe show, to talk to her about the history of the unit, her scientific research, and people’s attitudes to parapsychology and the paranormal.
Caroline tells us that people believe in the paranormal much more than they admit. Fifty percent of the population report paranormal beliefs and almost half of those think they’ve had paranormal experience themselves. Caroline also tells us more about what parapsychology is, and what might lie behind unusual experiences. Opinion varies widely, and as Caroline says, there are ‘plenty of unanswered questions and experimentations still to be done’.
The research of the Koestler Unit has ranged from testing the existence, or not, of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis (the ability to mentally communicate with others), to studies on precognitive dreaming (the idea that you can dream about future events). These, and other topics such as out-of-body experiences, ghosts, hauntings and apparitions are discussed in fascinating detail in Caroline’s new book. The book has garnered much praise for offering a balanced scholarly appraisal of the subject of parapsychology. Professor Robert Rosenthal (Professor of Psychology, University of California, Riverside) describes the book is ‘a wonderfully clearly and engagingly written introduction to the domain parapsychology‘ and Etzel Cardeña (Professor in Psychology, Lund University, Sweden) says Caroline ‘excels at the very hard task of introducing a complex and contentious field in a balanced way. She has written an authoritative yet entertaining guide to what scientific research has shown (and not shown) about this fascinating field.‘
Available in Paperback £9.99
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