Interview with Dr Ian Baker - Psychologist and Parapsychologist
Ian Baker and I were both at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (University of Edinburgh) many moons ago. Since then, Ian has gone on to become a Lecturer in the Psychology Department at the University of Derby. He teaches a variety of modules, specifically on statistics and research methods, and on parapsychology.
Ian very kindly took time out to answer a few questions of mine.
What prompted you to become a parapsychologist? The money, the glamour?
I remember Bob Morris saying to me early on in my PhD studies that I could earn three times as much money in private industry than I could in academia. So I’m definitely not into this for the money! As for the glamour, one of my favourite quotes is by Anthropologist Matt Cartmill, “As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.” So I didn’t really get into this for the glamour either!
Of course, there are a number of people who are involved with the field of parapsychology who can claim to have achieved a certain amount of fame with the public, mainly through having done a lot of media-based work. I guess that this can be a route to the glamour if you want it, but I’ve never been very comfortable with the small amount of media experience that I’ve had. I think that I will largely leave that to the people who enjoy it.
The first time that I really became aware of the field was when my mother brought me a book of Fortean Phenomena from Maidstone market when I was about 11. Reading through the book was a real experience for me, and it started an interest that has been with me from that point on. However, at that point I didn’t really entertain the idea of researching phenomena such as this for a career. I was more interested in either becoming an archaeologist or a vicar. But I came to realise that being an agnostic was a challenge to a priestly vocation, and digging-up things seemed to be very destructive and a lot of hard work!
From around the age of 15 I began to become interested in ghost stories in my local area. This grew to actually doing investigations of such cases, and I even presented at my first SPR conference when I was 18 about a case that I did. I remember calling up Bob Morris in my mid-teens and asking him how I could do a PhD, to which he dryly, but supportively replied that “I might want to get some qualifications first”! But it was only really when I was doing my A-Level in psychology that I really started to entertain the idea of a potential career in this area. Once again, it was my mother who supported me by confronting me one day and asking me bluntly if this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I almost instantly replied “Yes”, and I realised at that point that this is what I wanted to do.
But it hasn’t always been that straightforward. I had some doubts after my Master’s degree, and again after my PhD. I’ve gradually come to terms with the fact that the label “parapsychologist” only defines part of what I do. I tend to see myself as a psychologist or as a scientist – everything else that I am interested in falls generally under these broad labels.
Where do you think parapsychology is heading? Rude health, historical footnote, or somewhere in between?
This is a good question. I think that overall the field has suffered a small crisis of late. Since around 2000, we have lost some of very important names to “the big research project in the sky”. In terms of their impact upon the field, arguable the biggest lost was Professor Robert Morris. In his latter years his research output was modest, but his influence over the field was huge. Although I doubt that he would have ever wanted to be considered to be a figurehead, I think that – possibly subconsciously – he was this to a lot of us. He never dictated how the field should proceed, but I think that he did have a subtle binding influence. When he died so unexpectedly, I think that it disoriented the field to some extent – particularly when combined with the other deaths that the field had suffered at that time.
But I have the impression that the field is gradually coming out of this period of mourning, and I hope that it continues to have a sense of identity.
With regard to its long-term status, I think that it is very hard to say. As philosophers of science have noted; parapsychology is an anomaly in of itself. Many other areas that have disputed more established paradigms in science have normally withered and died, or have been absorbed into the whole. Parapsychology has arguably had a separate identity since the 1930s and 40s, and still exists to a certain extent as such. I think that this has been, in part, due to the scientific-political model of Bob Morris and his contemporaries. Bob rarely tried to “strong-arm” people into supporting the field, but gently tried to persuade people or merely presented them with the evidence for and against and invited them to make up their own mind. He also seemed to have a singular ability to also get on well with people who have been relatively hostile to the field.
Parapsychology appears to be very healthy as the moment; at least in the U.K. Professor Bernard Carr pointed out in a recent article that 16 separate universities have some form of parapsychology, and the AQA has added anomalistic psychology to their A-Level qualification. Also, the Higher Education Academy (HEA) is in the process of forming a Special Interest Group in the teaching of parapsychology in Higher Education institutions (something I am involved with). All of these indicate that parapsychology has a future in higher education.
But parapsychology is an odd discipline in many ways. One of its strangest characteristics is that it is the study of anomalies, which are inherently defined by what other areas of academia consider to be anomalistic. Therefore I wonder if parapsychology will gradually be absorbed by other areas such as psychology or physics as the phenomena are slowly explained either as statistical, methodological or psychological variables, or as our understanding of the world expands to encompass these phenomena. However, saying that, there will always be a frontier of anomalies to attempt to explain – it all depends if exploring these are defined as being under the purview of a field called “parapsychology”. There are plenty of “anomalies” that don’t come under this heading.
Your PhD thesis was entitled “The Electrophysiological Processing of Remote Staring Detection”. What does this mean? And what did you discover?
A paper on the core elements of my PhD work that I presented at the last Parapsychological Association Convention in Winchester was reviewed by Bryan Williams for the blog Public Parapsychology (http://publicparapsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/brain-response-to-remote-stare.html). In essence, during my PhD research I was attempting to examine what brain activity might be associated with remote staring detection. This is a phenomenon that many people report when they feel as if they are being watched by other people, even though there should ostensibly be no reason for them to tell if they are being watched.
I examined this by putting two people into an experimental situation where they were in different rooms, with one of them (the starer) watching the other (the staree) at random intervals via a computer-controlled CCTV system. During this time, I measured a variety of electrophysiological variables from the stare, such as their electrical brain activity (electroencephalography, or EEG) and their general physiological arousal (via skin conductance).
Over a series of three experiments I found an interesting effect. Remote staring detection did not appear to have any brain activity associated with it on its own, but appeared to modulate the brain activity associated with the processing of other stimuli. But a strange effect in the third experiment led me to suspect some form of artefact was present: essentially there appeared to be a “remote staring effect” even when no starer was present! A final simulation study did find evidence of a tiny artefact that suggested we are very sensitive to extremely small changes between stimuli in experiments. This could have important implications for psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience.
What started out as a parapsychology PhD ended-up being one that focused more upon methodology in psychophysics.
Any other interesting research projects on the boil?
Not a great deal at the moment. I’ve been spending most of my time getting settled-in at the University of Derby and writing lectures! But I have just managed to secure a small amount of funding to conduct a study examining Decision Augmentation Theory (DAT), but I’m keeping the details quiet for now!
