Generally I get one of three reactions when I tell people about my research in parapsychology. The first is simple lack of interest. It’s not that the person is abrupt or rude. “Oh that’s interesting” they might say with a glazed look and we move on to other topics.
The second is one of distaste or even shock. “You actually believe in that stuff?!” is a comment I got from an academic psychologist at a conference on veganism. Until then we were having a pleasant conversation about his work in child development but after my ‘revelation’ he soon found a pressing reason to leave. His words seemed to reveal an assumption that no one – or at least no one with any degree of intelligence or rationality – could consider parapsychology worthy of serious investigation. Such attitudes will be the subject of a future blog post.
But there is a third category. One that I’ve found to be surprisingly frequent. In these cases, the person is interested – or even excited – to learn that I’m a parapsychologist and proceeds to confide in me some ‘spooky’ experience they’ve had. Most have told hardly anyone before me. It’s like I’m a safe space.
I encountered this reaction several times when informing colleagues that I was about to start my PhD. At the time, I was working at the University of Leeds, supporting academics to secure research funding. Several people told me about experiences they’d had of telepathy, precognition, and even a poltergeist. Outside of work I heard about communications with the deceased and instances of psychokinesis.
Last year I gave a talk to the Ilkley U3A with the title ‘Is it really possible to bend spoons, read minds, and talk to dead people?’ where I presented the science of parapsychology. After I’d finished, I asked for questions. But instead, what followed was a series of anecdotes ranging from clairvoyance to remarkable synchronicities. It felt like people needed to share what had happened to them in a place where they knew they wouldn’t be judged; that these experiences were special to them, perhaps even sacred.
Such happenings are much more widespread than most people believe. One study found that almost 40% of the UK have had at least one such experience and concluded that “the paranormal is (still) normal”.
So-called educated society suffers a great loss in excluding stories like these from much of what is considered intelligent discourse. And it is one of the joys of what I do that people feel able to share their experiences with me.
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
