A Quality Companion, With a Few Quirks

Oxford Companion to the Mind. Edited by Richard L. Gregory. Oxford University Press, 1987. 856 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

Steven N. Shore and Robert Cormack

ICKED UP by several book clubs and widely hailed in recent reviews, the POxford Companion to the Mind, edited by Richard Gregory, appears destined to become a popular standard reference to psychology for many years to come. The editor is a respected researcher in perception, and the scientific credentials of the contributors carry the presumed imprimatur of the Oxford syndics. So it was with considerable interest that we looked for some discussion of paranormal phenomena. There are more than a hundred index entries relating to paranormal phenomena in this compendium, including multiple references to individual articles. The discus- sions of the paranormal, in the articles on Extrasensory Perception, Paranormal Phenomena and the Unconscious, and Telekinesis, are indeed well done. The authors have taken a historical, skeptical approach and they quote some of the relevant skeptical literature on the subject. Perhaps the best of the articles, from this stand- point, is "Parapsychology: A History of Research," written by the late Christopher Evans. After a thorough, although brief, review of the stages of formation of the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century, and of laboratory tests in this century, Evans sums up the field: "While it is true that many feel that para- psychology or psychical research is still a legitimate area of study, most scientists who have studied the topic in any depth are inclined to the view that a hundred years of fairly dedicated research has yielded disappointingly little in an area which should have offered great riches." A similar view is voiced by John Beloff, a person well known to readers of SI, in the article on Parapsychology and the Mind-Body Question: "It is an astounding fact that, a century after the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, there is still a total lack of consensus regarding the actuality of any parapsychological phenomenon." While some of the references could have been more up-to-date (the publication date of 1987 is the culmination of about ten years of thinking and writing) at least a good selection of material is referenced, including some of the best of the standard believer books. Usually, detailed investigations that should be readily available are included. It would seem to end the subject when Gregory himself, in the article on the Paranormal declares: "So paranormal accounts do have empirical consequences, even though—in spite of the immense work of controlled experiments, especially on telepathy, and the collections of accounts of bizarre phenomena by Frederic Myers (1903) and later writers—we may seriously doubt whether there are any such pheno- mena." In the entry on Independent Thinkers, Patrick Moore dismisses all astrology and critically analyzes other paranormal beliefs. All well and good. The skeptic seems to find here the protocols of scientific

Steven N. Shore is with the Astrophysics Research Center, Department of Physics, and Robert Cormack is in the Department of Psychology, at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro.

84 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 13 investigation well detailed and well applied. It is thus disturbing to find that there is also an article on Astrology, which already seems inappropriate for this book, by of all people Colin Wilson. This is like letting a creationist write an appreciation of Darwin for a scientific review volume on evolution. The article is about four columns long, includes only standard believer references (including Hans Eysenck's Encounter article, A. L. Lieber's book on the lunar effect, and Michel Gauquelin's Cosmic Clocks), and makes no reference to the critical investigations of the past decades. The lunar effect and related studies are asserted to offer physical mechanisms for cosmic influences. This is in contrast to the sacrificial offering of traditional astrology, which is dubbed a pseudoscience (p. 51). On the same page, however, dowsing is ascribed to the detection of magnetic fields in a totally uncritical, and peripheral, statement. Without direct attribution, the original study that served as the purported basis of the Jupiter Effect, which claims that magnetic storms on Earth tend to occur during specific planetary conjunctions, the studies of blood hemorrhaging being correlated with full moons, and various other pseudo-physics demonstrations of celestial influences are cited as providing the basis for the new astrobiology. It is of little use that the article on Biological Clocks, by Martin J. Wells, discusses the physical and physiological basis for rhythmic patterns in living organisms—neither article cross-references the other. That such an article as Wilson's would have been commissioned in the first place and then allowed to appear in this volume seem the acts of an overburdened editor at best, and a serious lapse of judgment at worst. In the entry on Subliminal Perception, N. F. Dixon argues that the phenomenon is well established but that "there are still those who cannot bring themselves to accept the reality of subliminal perception. In the writer's opinion, this carefully sustained prejudice is itself a psychological defense against the threat of possible manipulation which is implied by subliminal effects" (p. 754). Such circular and unfalsifiable reasoning should not have been allowed to stand unchallenged. The article on Biofeedback by I. W. Pleydell-Pearce is another that many readers of SI would consider soft. The treatment is generally balanced, with no bald un- qualified claims left standing. There is, for example, a slap on the wrist for the clinicians: "In general, in clinical biofeedback, there has been too great an emphasis on widespread application of biofeedback therapy and too little attention paid to models and underlying theoretical conceptualizations of the disorders and treat- ments"—but even this rings a little hollow. Theorizing seems inappropriate when empirical foundations are in doubt. Graphical data present evidence of dramatic successes in biofeedback sessions, but the data are for small groups and presented in a way that seems to belie some of the skepticism of the text. Were these the author's choice? Finally, the summary of the field is more accepting than many investigations seem to support. Relevant SI articles are not mentioned, but the review of the literature is otherwise useful. These criticisms are not meant to detract from the overall quality of the vast majority of the articles, and the usefulness of this book to all who are interested in psychology and its myriad aspects. They are meant, rather, to point out the need to be aware that even in the most unlikely settings there are often little believer-planted time-bombs ticking away, awaiting only the glancing apprehension of the casual reader to trigger their action. •

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