Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience
Christopher C. French, Anna Stone · 2014 · Palgrave Macmillan
Summary
Textbook treatment of anomalistic psychology, surveying conventional psychological explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences.
Why it matters here
Major reference for the sceptical / cognitive-explanation side of psi-style claims.
Editorial note
Publisher and ISBN metadata verified through Bloomsbury and library catalog records.
Linked claims
Around half of bereaved adults report sense-of-presence experiences. Common, meaningful, hard to verify.
Hypoxia, hypercarbia, REM intrusion, endogenous DMT, and ketamine models reproduce many NDE features. Veridical cases resist the model.
Reports stretch back centuries. The few collective and 'crisis apparition' cases are intriguing; controlled study is essentially impossible.
Often subsumed under remote viewing in modern parapsychology. As an everyday claim, very poorly supported.
Reports stretch back centuries and across every culture. Most well-investigated cases reduce to pareidolia, infrasound, expectation, or fraud; the broader 'soul of the dead' reading is essentially unverifiable.
A tradition rich in reports — Joseph of Cupertino, Daniel Dunglas Home, TM 'yogic flying' — but zero reproductions under controlled conditions. The investigated cases reduce to fraud or illusion.
Most 'intuition' is unconscious inference. A small subset of presentiment studies suggests something else may also be in play.
Most claimed mediumship is reproducible by cold reading. Some controlled lab studies (Beischel and others) report small but anomalous effects.
A consistent core experience — peace, light, life review, OBE — reported across cultures and prospective hospital studies.
The reported experience of knowing, sensing, dreaming, or picturing a future event before it happens — sometimes called premonition, presentiment, future sensing, or anomalous anticipation. Real as a common human report; controversial as evidence the future is being directly perceived.
Famous macro demonstrations have collapsed under scrutiny. Lab work on random event generators shows very small effects, hotly disputed.
The CIA's declassified Stargate program ran for two decades and reported above-chance results. The official 1995 review judged the operational utility insufficient.
Most reports happen at sleep boundaries or in peripheral vision — exactly where the brain is most prone to producing humanoid silhouettes. The 'external entity' reading is a much larger claim.
Decades of ganzfeld and card studies report small effects at meta-analytic level. Critics argue methodological flaws explain them.
Related evidence hubs
Evidence around dying, near-death experience, and what (if anything) continues.
Whether anything of mind continues.
Reports of contact with the deceased.
Cryptomnesia, anoxia models, cold reading. Counter-anchors.
Structured experiences during cardiac arrest and crisis.
Telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, PK.
Lab-tested claims of telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and PK.
World religions and traditions, scored as systems.