WFMU brings us an interview with Chicago sound artist and EVP experimenter Michael Esposito, controversy continues over TED’s decision to quarantine Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock’s TEDxWhitechapel talks, and the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) is open for Beta Testing, in this week’s edition of Psi in the News.
- Roy Stemmans remembers Archie Roy, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Glasgow University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, who passed away on 27 December, 2012. (Paranormal Review)
- If you love anomalous science and are active in posting to Reddit, there’s a Parapsychology page with almost no links associated with it that might benefit from some attention. (Reddit)
- Marc Demarest has announced that the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) — is open for Beta testing. “The Corpus currently includes more than 2200 book-length (monograph) texts, in English, from the 1790s until the late 1930s, covering Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences (astrology, Freemasonry, New Thought, mesmerism and magnetism, phrenology, the varies -mancies) with a few texts outside those temporal boundaries. Each text is in indexed PDF form, representing a photofacsimile of a particular edition of the text in question, and susceptible (for those of you who like it that way) to conversion into HTML or flat text forms.” (Chasing Down Emma)
- On Skeptiko, host Alexis Tsartkis with Michael Tymn of White Crow Books, discussing his work to ensure that these areas are not forgotten. We’ve featured a number of links featuring various aspects of the rich history of Spiritualism and mediumship from the White Crow Books blog. (Skeptiko)
- WFMU has a fantastic interview up, with sound artist and EVP experimenter, Michael Esposito. (WFMU.org)
- The Monroe Institute reports on a month of events, including their Professional Seminar, Transformational Change – New Perspectives on Consciousness. (The Monroe Institute)??
- UK Broadcast regulator Ofcom has issued the opinion that the British television show Most Haunted violated broadcasting standards with an episode that featured a medium channeling what was alleged to be a dead child. (9 News)??
- Inspired by Dr. Julie Beischel’s recently released e-book, Among Mediums: A Scientist’s Quest for Answers, the author Michael Prescott’s discussing writing a non-fiction work on the survival question. (Michael Prescott’s Blog)
- Prescott also has a review up of the White Crow Books reprint of Neville Whymant’s 1931 book Psychic Adventures in New York. (Michael Prescott’s Blog)
- And a detailed exploration of Will Storr’s latest book The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science . (Michael Prescott’s Blog)
- Writing for Science 2.0, Sascha Vongehr presents an article which details the contemporary history of precognition in a very straightforward matter that gives a helpful overview for those unfamiliar with the arguments from skeptics and proponents. (Science 2.0)
- In a gift to everyone waiting for the Psi debate to have a more public platform, the TED organization has quarantined Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock’s TEDxWhitechapel talks for further discussion and debate on their validity. Like zoological oddities they have been moved to “where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. ” (TED)
- Then after a number of edits, changes, and rewordings on the initial post they backpedaled a bit, still maintaining their distance from the talks, and will be putting them into two new blog posts, without directly addressed Sheldrake or Hancock’s rebuttals, where they can be the center of a public debate over the definition of pseudoscience. What there is to debate outside of TED’s anonymous advisors responding to Sheldrake and Hancock’s rebuttals is still unclear.(TED)
- Greg Taylor at The Daily Grail has a long form piece on the issues raised by TED’s decision to isolate the naughty talks. (The Daily Grail)
- Journalist Celia Farmer sees the TED situation as a critical juncture in the “war” between “the bullies or the “skeptic” or “debunker” movements vs the long suffering carriers of the Science Wild And Free torch.’ (Truth Barrier)
- Here is another piece, this one from Craig Weiler, on the potential repercussions of TED’s decision. (Weiler Psi Blog)
- Weiler continues in this piece, which discusses the further development of TED’s plans to organize a debate over why they, or their anonymous panel of experts, consider these talks representative of pseudo-science. He also gathers up a number of links to pieces discussing the issue. (Weiler Psi Blog)
- ?Another recent article from the Weiler Psi Blog features a guest post from Monique Stevenson dreaming of a day when mainstream science and Psi finally come together, with “The Letter The Scientific Community Will Never Write” (Weiler Psi Blog)
- For those interested in getting a better idea of Rupert Sheldrake’s research, Lumenz Networks has put up for sale a series of video talks from him on a wide variety of subjects. (Lumenz Networks)
- Sheldrake and Hancock are not alone, Thomas Nagel has fanned some flames as well with his recent book Mind & Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. (New Republic)
- An excerpt from Jan Ehrenwald’s book The ESP Experience. A Psychiatric Validation (New York: Basic Books, 1978) which looks at the question of survival after death, and the possibility of other explanations to account for anomalous information transfer in mediumship, out of body experiences and near death experiences. (White Crow Books)
- An interesting thought from blogger Brian Klingenfus, more “and more ghost movies are becoming, in essence, science fiction, basing the events off of parapsychological studies.” (Are You Afraid of the Dark)
- Writing for Live Science Ben Radford reports on his idea that out of body experiences exist purely within the brain. (Live Science)
- In an interview with the Dutch publication Diep Magazine, out of body experiencer Graham Nicholl’s discusses his practice and what he has gathered from it. (Graham Nicholls)
- Et Vita presents an interview with contemporary philosopher of science, Bernardo Kastrup, where he discusses his reasons for exploring a revitalized concept of ‘idealism’ to challenge the current materialist theories of existence. (Et Vita)
- Robert Searle reviews Russel Targ’s The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. (Esoteric Other Worlds)
- Stephen Wagner has an About.com piece on the topic of reincarnation that provides an overview of Ian Stevensen’s work studying cases of reported reincarnation in children at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies. (About.com)
- John Harney provides a brief review of James Stein’s recent book The Paranormal Equation: A New Scientific Perspective on Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance, and Other Inexplicable Phenomena. (Magonia Blog and Review of Books)
- Prolonging brain elasticity is one of the keys to continued cognitive development, and scientists think they have discovered a way to turn back the clock on brain aging. If able to be employed this technique could have dramatic results for expanded meditation training and Psi development. (Gizmodo)
Psi quote of the week:
“I think their attitude reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity.”
– Rupert Sheldrake, on researchers who aren’t interested in exploring the full implications of empirical evidence that scientific constants, such as the gravitational constant, aren’t constant.
Note: Special thanks to George Gregg, Tom Ruffles, of the Society for Psychical Research, Jack Hunter, Editor at Paranthropology Journal, and Matt Staggs, Editor at Disinfo.com, for a number of links included in this edition of Reality Sandwich’s Psi-in-the-News. And an extra special thanks to whatever organizational flaws or brilliance at TED that gave them the courage or short sightedness to handle the TEDxWhitechapel event in such a way to bring the debate over Psi to the public in a very palpable way.