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What drew you into parapsychology?
Some parapsychologists enter the field because they had a personal paranormal experience, but not me. I was curious to find out what might lie behind such experiences.

The term “parapsychology” can raise eyebrows. Do you encounter opposition to what you do?
There is occult baggage attached to the field, which is really not related to what we actually do. We are scientists. Sometimes other scientists describe parapsychology as a pseudoscience, and that’s unfair. I’ll stick my neck out and say that the methodological standards of parapsychologists are sometimes higher than those of psychologists. For example, since 2012 I’ve been operating a parapsychology study registry; psychologists are only now starting to take study registration seriously. Parapsychologists are making extraordinary claims, so we have to ensure our research eliminates as many artefacts and normal explanations as we can.

“There is occult baggage attached to the field. That is not related to what we do”

Do you approach your work as a sceptic or as a believer?
I try to look from both sides, but if someone has a paranormal experience, often there are normal psychological explanations.

What kinds of experiences do you study?
The most commonly reported experiences are of extrasensory perception (ESP), for example a person feeling that they know who is calling on the phone before actually answering it, or feeling they can dream about the future. Recently I’ve been working on these precognitive dream experiences.

Dreams can be interpreted in so many ways. How can you test whether people are truly dreaming about the future?

It’s true that with spontaneous, everyday dreams, you can find all sorts of meanings. The more creative you are, the greater the likelihood of finding a connection between your dreams and something in your life. When you are looking at real-world experiences, you can’t work out the chance probability of any dream coming true. So when it comes to testing dream precognition, you have to create an artificial scenario in the lab.

How do you do that?
You would have, say, four postcards, each one a different art print; nobody knows in advance what they are. One of them will be selected at random. The study aims to figure out whether people who claim to have precognitive experiences can dream about this event before it happens.

First, we ask the participants to sleep in a sleep lab. They know that in the morning they’ll open an envelope and see a picture. The hypothesis is that their dreams that night will relate to the picture they will see. Everybody dreams five or six times a night, so we wake the participants up throughout the night and ask them to report their dreams. In the morning, we randomly select one of the postcards and show it to them.

Next, we get an independent person with no connection to the participant and who doesn’t know what postcard the dreamer saw. We ask this judge to rate which of the four postcards is most similar to the dream reports. By chance alone, we’ll get a match 25 per cent of the time, so that’s the baseline we’re working against.

What did you find?
Our research found no evidence that people’s dreams predict the future.

Why do people make such claims for dreams?
People remember dreams that seem to come true. Over time, and particularly if you believe in the paranormal, you would attend to those dreams, and that leads to the feeling you’re having lots of precognitive dreams. A normal psychological explanation is that you are selectively remembering dreams that seem to correspond to subsequent events and forgetting the dreams that don’t. But little research has been conducted on precognitive dreaming, so it is too early to say we fully understand what causes these experiences.

Have you looked at other phenomena?
I have studied the psychology behind ghost experiences, with Richard Wiseman. We went to very interesting locations, such as Hampton Court Palace in London and the underground vaults in Edinburgh. We had members of the public going around different areas of Hampton Court and the Edinburgh vaults and marking on a floor plan those spots where they were having unusual feelings, like the hairs standing up on the back of their neck, or chills. We built a map of the ghostly hotspots, and then we took physical measurements, such as the light level, draughts, temperature, humidity and so on, and tried to find if there were any physical factors that might be leading people to have strange experiences.

What was the outcome?
We found that aspects of the physical environment were associated with people’s spooky experiences.

Is there any evidence for the paranormal?
Research using something called the Ganzfeld method has received a lot of attention. It’s a way of testing for ESP. One person – the receiver – is in a room, bathed in red light, wearing headphones playing white noise and talking aloud about what’s going on in their head. In another distant room, a sender is looking at a randomly selected target, which might be a picture or a video clip, and attempting to mentally communicate the image to the receiver. The verbal reports from the receiver are compared to four possible targets. It’s a blind process; the person doing the comparison doesn’t know the answer.

Again we know that if you have four possible targets you’d expect 25 per cent success by chance. Many such experiments have been meta-analysed several times and most of the analyses have come up with evidence suggesting a success rate greater than chance. They seem to be finding about a 30 per cent success rate.

That doesn’t seem like a whole lot…
Well, small effects can be important. The statistician Jessica Utts has pointed out that the Ganzfeld effect size is triple the effect of aspirin on heart attacks. Many parapsychologists would argue that by the standards applied to any other area of science, that’s good evidence, but I’m not persuaded that this provides conclusive evidence for ESP. I am in the camp that thinks there is an anomaly, but I am not sure how to interpret it. One complicating factor is that when meta-analyses are conducted retrospectively, as they usually are, decisions made by the analyst can influence the outcome – which studies to include, for example.

What is the most startling thing you have encountered in your career?
I once conducted a study that obtained quite large effects supporting the ESP hypothesis. A few parapsychologists congratulated me, but I doubted the results. So I conducted a replication study, and discovered a subtle artefact in a computer program that accounted for the earlier positive results. This episode vividly demonstrated to me that a researcher’s expectations can have a dramatic influence on the extent to which they scrutinise an experiment.

Is funding for this sort of research easy to find?
We’re in an unusual situation. The Koestler Parapsychology Unit’s funding came from a bequest. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was terminally ill, and his wife Cynthia killed themselves in a suicide pact in 1983. Koestler had a lifetime interest in the paranormal and dualism – the belief that the mind and body are separate and distinct – and he left his entire estate to support parapsychology research at a British university.

Are you a dualist?
No. I describe myself as a materialist. I’m not a person who thinks there is an immaterial aspect to us. I think that there will be an explanation for paranormal experiences in material terms. But I don’t think we will necessarily find a straight connection between paranormal experiences and, for example, unusual activity in the brain’s temporal gyrus: there may not be a single explanation.

“I think there will be a material explanation for paranormal experiences”

Do you sometimes wonder what Koestler would have made of a materialist running the research that he funded?
Materialism does not rule out the possibility of paranormal phenomena. If parapsychologists provide compelling evidence of paranormal phenomena, then I would expect there to be some adjustment to what we currently understand about physical laws and consciousness in order to incorporate this evidence.

Since the Koestler Unit began 30 years ago, dozens of PhD students have conducted their parapsychological research here, and some have gone on to establish new research units at other universities. I hope Koestler would approve.

Where do you think parapsychology will be in another 30 years?
I think parapsychology will probably disappear – we’ll ultimately integrate it with neuroscience and psychology. Even if we find that there is some paranormal experience that cannot currently be understood by physics, I would expect that it could become integrated so that we can make sense of these experiences in physical terms.

Does the scarcity of evidence for parapsychological phenomena leave you feeling disappointed?
No. I’m not in this field to mystery-monger. I’m looking for answers to questions about people’s paranormal beliefs and experiences. These questions are open to the scientific method, so we just need to do our research carefully and patiently.

Have you seen any evidence of what you would call psychic ability in your work?
Not indisputable evidence, no.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Chasing shadows”