Interview with Dr Stuart Wilson - Psychologist and Parapsychologist
Next in my interview series… please let me introduce my old friend Dr Stuart Wilson.
Stuart completed his Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh on the cognitive aspects of “parapsychological” phenomena. He is now a Lecturer in Psychology (and the BSc Hons Programme Director of Psychology) at Queen Margaret University.
I could not find a picture of Stuart, so I have pasted a picture of Richard Wilson. Although they are not related, both come from Greenock.
What first got you interested in becoming a parapsychologist?
I’d always been interested in weird stuff (ever since I saw Ghostbusters as a boy), but the main influence in going to Edinburgh and doing a Ph.D were two books that I found lying around my girlfriend’s bedroom when I was an undergraduate. They were “Supernature” and “Lifetide” both by Lyall Watson.
Reading them made me want to learn more and do my own research in to what Watson called “the soft edges of science”. That’s when I made contact with the Koestler Unit and set the ball rolling. Now, however, I look back at those books with nostalgia, but not much else. The material in them isn’t anywhere near as impressive to me now as it was when I was 18. Unlike many people who get into parapsychology, I never had any impressive experiences beyond the standard bits of déjà vu and unusual coincidences.
Part of your parapsychological research has been into subliminal perception/perception without awareness, and how that might impact on psi functioning. Please explain.
The initial idea was that, if psi exists, then it must be a weak “signal” and would most likely be processed similarly to other weak signals. Subliminal perception effects are small, but there is evidence that our cognitive function can be influenced by stimuli that we are completely unaware of perceiving. It seemed to me that psi might be similar, so the work I initially did was looking at that…seeing if we could influence the same cognitive processes with two different (but weak) stimuli.
Recently, I’ve dropped the psi component and have become more interested in how subliminal perception and other unconscious cognitive phenomena can give rise to experiences that look psychic but aren’t. I think that many events that people interpret as being “psychic” or “paranormal” are actually the end result of normal unconscious influence, rather than being anything paranormal. The attribution of paranormality comes from the fact that unconscious influences are necessarily outside of awareness (by definition), so the end-result (intuition, prediction, correct knowledge) doesn’t come with information about where it came from. When this happens, people assume that the information or knowledge has appeared “from nowhere” - hence the psychic interpretation. I think that the role of unconscious processing is under-researched in the study of anomalous experiences.
If I gave you a magic funding cheque, and said “there you go, conduct whatever psi research you like” - what would you go into, and why?
First of all, I’d like to find out more about where your magic funding cheque has come from. This is a difficult question for me, because my opinion on psi research has shifted from what it was when I entered the field 10 years ago. If I had to do psi research with the magic money, then I’d like to do a 10-year proof oriented study - the ultimate Ganzfeld study, perhaps. This answer won’t be popular with parapsychologists, and I’m aware of all the arguments for pursuing process-related work rather than proof-oriented work, but my opinion is that there still isn’t enough convincing evidence. I’d rather have an answer either way (or as close to an answer as possible) and so I’d take whatever paradigm was considered to be the “gold standard” in psi research and design a series of studies over a prolonged period that would provide as close to an answer as possible - as agreed by the leading researchers. If it comes out positive - great, publish it in a mainstream journal and wait for the Nobel prize (ahem). If it comes out non-significant, then that’s something we need to know. It’s all very well pointing to meta-analyses and arguing about them and so on, but it does the field no good whatsoever, so that’s why I’d take a back to basics approach and see what happens.
If I didn’t have to do psi research, I’d probably pursue my interest in understanding the unconscious cognitive processes that give rise to psi-like experiences. I’d also love to do a cross-cultural study on paranormal beliefs, which would be the first stage in developing a theory of superstitious/paranormal/magical beliefs, focussing on the way by which our thinking about the world around us leads to such ideas.
