Customer Reviews

Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold

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This is an exceptionally well-conceived, thoughtful and important book. It's one of those rare books that I would recommend to basically everyone I know -- if I were a rich man, I'd buy them a copy.

Let me explain why I'm so excited by Broderick's work. Having grown up on SF, and being a generally open-minded person but also a mathematician/scientist with a strong rationalist and empiricist bent , I've never quite known what to make of psi. (Following Broderick, I'm using "psi" as an umbrella term for ESP, precognition, psychokinesis, and the familiar array of suspects...). Broderick's book is the first I've read that rationally, scientifically, even-handedly and maturely, reviews what it makes sense to think about psi given the available evidence.

(A quick word on my science background: I have a math PhD and although my main research areas are AI and cognitive science, I've also spent a lot of time working on empirical biological science as a data analyst. I was a professor for a 8 years but have been doing research in the software industry for the last decade.)

My basic attitude on psi has always been curious but ambivalent. One way to summarize it would be via the following three points....

First: Psi is NOT wildly scientifically implausible after the fashion of, say, perpetual motion machines built out of wheels and pulleys and spinning chambers filled with ball bearings. Science, at this point, understands the world only very approximately, and there is plenty of room in our current understanding of the physical universe for psi. Quantum theory's notions of nonlocality and resonance are (as many have observed) conceptually somewhat harmonious with some aspects of psi, but that's not the main point. The main point is that science does not rule out psi, in the sense that it rules out various sorts of obvious crackpottery.

Second: Anecdotal evidence for psi is so strong and so prevalent that it's hard to ignore. Yes, people can lie, and they can also be very good at fooling themselves. But the number of serious, self-reflective intelligent people to report various sorts of psi experiences is not something that should be glibly ignored.

Third: There is by now a long history of empirical laboratory work on psi, with results that are complex, perplexing, but in many ways so strongly statistically significant as to indicate that SOMETHING important is almost surely going on in these psi experiments...

Broderick, also being an open-minded rationalist/empiricist, seems to have started out his investigation of psi, as reported in his book, with the same basic intuition as I've described in the above three points. And he covers all three of these points in the book, but the main service he provides is to very carefully address my third point above: the scientific evidence.

His discussion of possible physical mechanisms of psi is competent but not all that complete or imaginative; and he wisely shies away from an extensive treatment of anecdotal evidence (this stuff has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere). But his treatment of the scientific literature regarding psi is careful, masterful and compellingly presented. And this is no small achievement.

The scientific psi literature is large, complex, multifaceted and subtle -- and in spite of a lifelong peripheral fascination with psi, I have never taken the time to go through all that much of it myself. I'm too busy doing other sorts of scientific, mathematical and engineering work. Broderick has read the literature, sifted out the good from the bad, summarized the most important statistical and conceptual results, and presented his conclusions in ordinary English that anyone with a strong high school education should be able to understand.

His reviews of the work on remote viewing and precognition I found particularly fascinating, and convincing. It is hard to see how any fair-minded reader could come away from his treatments of these topics without at least a sharp pang of curiousity regarding what might actually be going on.

I put a few days effort into checking up his analyses by going back and reading some of the original papers he cited, and in every case I found his summaries completely accurate and impressively insightful.

What is my conclusion about psi after reading his book? Still not definitive -- and indeed, Broderick's own attitude as expressed in the book is not definitive.

I still can't feel absolutely certain whether psi is a real phenomenon; or whether, as an alternative explanation, the clearly statistically significant patterns observed across the body of psi experiments bespeak some deep oddities in the scientific method and the statistical paradigm that we don't currently understand.

But after reading his book, I am much more firmly convinced than before that psi phenomena are worthy of intensive, amply-funded scientific exploration. Psi should not be a fringe topic, it should be a core area of scientific investigation, up there with, say, unified physics, molecular biology, AI and so on and so forth.

Read the book for yourself, and if you're not hopelessly biased in your thinking, I suspect you'll come to a conclusion somewhat similar to mine.

As a bonus, as well as providing a profound intellectual and cultural service, the book is a lot of fun to read, due to Broderick's erudite literary writing style and ironic sense of humor.

My worry -- and I hope it doesn't eventuate -- is that the book is just too far ahead of its time. I wonder if the world is ready for a rational, scientific, even-handed treatment of psi phenomena.

Clearly, Broderick's book is too scientific and even-handed for die-hard psi believers; and too psi-friendly (although in a manner solidly based on the evidence) for the skeptical crowd. My hope is that it will find a market among those who are committed to really understanding the world, apart from the psychological pathologies of dogmatism or excessive skepticism. But, time will tell.

I note that Broderick has a history of being ahead of his time as a nonfiction writer. His 1997 book "The Spike" put forth basically the same ideas that Ray Kurzweil later promulgated in his 2005 book "The Singularity Is near." Kurzweil's book is a very good one, but so was Broderick's; yet Kurzweil's got copious media attention whereas Broderick's did not ... for multiple reasons, one of which, however, was simply timing. The world in 1997 wasn't ready to hear about the Singularity. The world in 2005 (or at least, a substantial part of it) was.

The question is: is the world in 2008 ready to absorb the complex, fascinating reality of psi research? If so, Broderick's book should strike a powerful chord. It certainly did for me.

I enjoyed this book because very few skeptics have been willing to suspend their disbelief long enough to do their homework and tackle a controversy as intense, persistent, and at times as confusing as psi. With a healthy skepticism firmly anchoring his opinions, and with much intellectual struggle, Broderick concludes that something interesting is going on. What that something may be is not likely to be understood any time soon if it is forced to stand outside the gates. Hence the book's subtitle.

If you want to read a good "outsider's" review of the history and findings of psi research, one that is about as accurate as any necessarily selective history can be, then this is the book to read. I found Broderick's musings on the implications of psi the most interesting part, perhaps because he is also an accomplished science fiction writer and used to projecting into imagined futures.

- Dean Radin, author Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality

Damien Broderick: Outside the Gates of Science

This is THE book for those seriously interested in the current status and future of the scientific study of what has variously been known as "psi", "parapsychology", "esp", "psychokinesis" etc. and more recently by the blander, more "neutral" terms "anomalous cognition (AC)" or "anomalous perturbation" (AP).
Broderick's basic proposition is that psi (to stick with the more familiar term) has as much or more experimental support as many other areas within the mainstream of science, and that phenomena of such challenging potential should be subjected to the full rigours of scientific examination, not relegated "outside the gates of science" because of past prejudices, poor theory, and association with shonky practices.
This is not, as Broderick points out, a textbook of psi. It is written by an author who has spent decades exploring the subject and getting to know the people and projects on the inside. Broderick takes a basically skeptical stance, but that of an intelligent and informed skeptic. His position is essentially a materialistic one, in the sense of dismissing simple-minded dualistic or "spiritual" views, but even these are presented fairly and the arguments against them clearly spelled out.
He passes lightly and quickly over the early history of the study of parapsychology (there are several good sources of this material), and spends a good part of the book in a detailed look at more recent and scientifically rigorous research, such as the "Star Gate" remote viewing program run by the CIA (if you think that that alone removes this research from contention, be prepared to be surprised or amazed!), the PEAR program carried out by Princeton University, May's Decision Augmentation Theory, and others.
If your acquaintance with the field is limited to popular works on "psychic powers" you might want to consider a crash course in the basics of scientific method and current research and thinking in neurophysiology, human genetics and physics (especially quantum theory) before embarking on this review. This is not an easy read, but written by a skilled writer who has done the hard work of coming to grips with what current science actually has to say about such topics as quantum entanglement, the role of consciousness in the collapse of the wave function, problems of backward causality, and other difficult to grasp topics, rather than taking the easy road of the handwavers and "quantobabblers" whose logic seems to be that "psi is mysterious; quantum mechanics is mysterious; therefore psi must be connected with quantum mechanics".
Broderick's style is what you would expect of one of today's best science fiction writers - erudite, captivating and witty (two chapter headings, for example- "the half-truths are out there" and "quantum leaps and pratfalls").
The most interesting part of the book, in my opinion, is the section on theories of psi. Broderick comprehensively and critically examines currently extant theories and finds most of them wanting. He is especially good in his critique of theories linking quantum phenomena and psi (REAL quantum phenomena, that is, not the "quantobabble" of some popularisers).
Broderick's conclusion? Basically, that psi has been repeatedly shown to exist under carefully controlled conditions, and the continual repetition of such studies to try to replicate this basic finding is pretty pointless. If psi exists, as seems virtually undeniable, it must serve an evolutionary function and can be properly ubderstood only within the framework of science and not as something spooky or supernatural. He echoes the words of Richard S. Broughton,: "If you want to know how it works, first find out what it's for." We need a comprehensive research program WITHIN the gates of science, driven by sound and rigorously tested theory, to increase our understanding of the nature of the beast, to develop methods of pinning down the phenomena and finding ways to amplify or make them more useful.
If you have a serious interest in understanding these strange phenomena, whether as a "believer" or a skeptic, this is one book you must read.

Damien Broderick is one of those rare individuals in science who, when faced with something about which he is very skeptical, instead of spewing attitude and opinion actually does the heavy lifting of finding out what the data says. I speak from authority here because I am one of the people mentioned in his book, and I know that everything he has written about me -- you have no idea how rare this is -- is actually factually correct. Damien is an excellent writer, and he has a probing mind that does not settle for the superficial. He has produced what I believe is the best skeptical book ever written by an "outsider" concerning the controversial field of consciousness research. This book deserves to be in your library.

In "Outside the Gates of Science", Damien Broderick discusses the state of paranormal research, including its history, current anomalous data, and the efforts to develop a coherent theory. The book is somewhat rambling and chatty, and the organizational outline is more apparent at the conclusion than it is in mid-text. If the central point of the book is stated anywhere, I must have missed it. But upon reading it, the point is fairly clear: Psi phenomenon have been demonstrated repeatedly under controlled laboratory conditions and in the field. While the results are not CONSISTENTLY repeatable, the demonstrated events are bizarre (remote viewing, backwards causation, precognition) and the theories proposed to explain them even more bizarre (quantum phenomena at macro scale, wave coupled entanglement independent of special or time proximity, human will as a causal agent), the active field is no more bizarre than quantum physics (and the speculations of quantum physicists) has been over the last century.

But parapsychology is not accepted as a legitimate field to even study by most professional science societies and journals and its valid results are dismissed with hand-waving rationalizations. Broderick provides an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable state: Dualism. Phenomena like the observed Psi are expected and easily explained within a dualist metaphysics. But because most scientists are wedded to a philosophy of strict materialism, they reject the evidence, and even the field that produced the evidence that challenges their worldview. Broderick himself has this same prejudice. He dismisses any dualist theories of psi without even discussing them in the book, and instead limits himself solely to the quantum-inspired materialist models that some psi researchers have proposed.

The star of the show for Psi phenomena is remote viewing. This is an effort, to discern at a distance, details of a site, activity, or location. A typical laboratory test of this phenomenon would involve a target individual being given directions to one of 5 or 6 distinctive sites, then going there. The Remote Viewer (RVer) would then describe or draw the location, and a separate individual would then look at pictures of the 5 or 6 sites, and select which of them best matched the RVer's description. A success rate above 18-20% is an indication of RV success. Initial experiments reported in Nature in the 70s lead the CIA to form the Stargate program to apply the technique to intelligence. This program lasted over 20 years, and included a significant investment in laboratory tests as well as intelligence gathering. The CIA lost interest, and after transfers to several other intelligence agencies, the program was terminated in the late 90s. The most successful of the Stargate alumni, Joe McMoneagle, has done these tests dozens of times live in front of TV cameras, with an 88% success rate. The intelligence program used a multi-viewer methodology, in which a scene is built up from the observations of multiple RVers. Other alumni have continued the multi-viewer methodology - with one finding the several undiscovered archaeological sites, and another describing, 2 months before his capture, the palm trees, river, hole in the ground, disheveled appearance, beard, gun, and peaceful capture of Saddam Hussein. A British MOD study in 2001 found a 35% success rate, using non-psychic psychiatrists, and techniques they downloaded off the internet.

So what is the response of science to this data? In a TV test done for National Geographic, the announcers declare McMoneagle's success to be a mere statistical aberration, with a 1:6 likelihood, and non-replicable. The SCICOP reviewer of the Stargate program admitted they produced statistically significant results, but still dismissed them because: the program was secret, it studied too many phenomena, and there was no solid theory behind it. In a BBC interview on a different Psi phenomena, which showed a 45% success rate in a protocol where the null was 25%, skeptical chemist and science writer Dr. Peter Atkins declares it bunk: "that's just playing with statistics". When asked if he had actually reviewed any of the data he was critiquing, he replied "No, but I would be very suspicious of it".

Broderick's analogy is to roger Bannister and the 4-minute mile. It is as if skeptical physicists and physiologists had declared the 4-minute mile impossible to run. Then Roger Bannister ran it in 3:59 in front of hundreds of witnesses. But then the skeptics step in and say: "no, there must have been a tailwind or freak gust, or condensation inside the stopwatch provided extra friction for the gears so it ran slow, or he jumped the gun and somehow tricked the audience into hearing it early , ..." Or whatever. And Bannister will never be believed until he disproves each and every one of these increasingly outlandish possibilities.

I think Broderick's point is conclusively made, and his analogy apt. The gates of science are closed for illegitimate reasons. The results of this closure is the starvation of funds for Psi research.

Aside from the RV phenomena, other Psi phenomenon deviate less from the null, and are much less extensively studied. The quanta-inspired theories he discusses all strike me as weak and implausible, and the prejudice against dualism even among Psi researchers seems to be harming the field.

Overall, while I enjoyed the book, its core points are made more compellingly and much more clearly by Chris Carter in Parapsychology and the Skeptics.

Broderick fills a niche ignored by most writers on psi -- that of the (mostly) objective observer. Psi literature falls into one of the two camps: the believers and the skeptics. Neither side will admit defeat and they're long past contributing to the dialogue. It's high time to stop adding to the noise.

This book is a welcome relief and a hell of a fun read, too. Broderick has a spritely, humorous style, apropos to the material and his own scientific skepticism comes under self-effacing fire from the research he unearths. What he discovers, and what it's high time to discuss (as opposed to the endless fighting between authors' cognitive worldviews which are unlikely to change), is the remarkable data that already exists and the pitfalls and perils of studying psi. That's a real place to start.

Outside the Gates of Science is an intellectual odyssey of sorts, paralleling the journey Damien Broderick thinks it is time his subject matter, ESP, itself undertakes. It is almost as if he has been persuaded against his will, kicking and screaming, to come in out of the cold -- to realize that there really is something of substance to these wild claims he has resisted so long of exceptional human abilities. The book reads like a tug of war with himself. He verges on indignation that ESP (or psi for the more general term) continues to be suppressed by mainstream science and its skeptic guard dogs. Yet his prose shows a grudging reluctance to let go of previous doubts -- a reluctance to just bust loose and embrace the wildness.

But that in itself is the charm and the value of the book. If someone this resistant to the idea that there just might be something real going on with psi has found himself being dragged by the mounting evidence to the point where he must admit, even if through clenched teeth, that it is time that science took the whole subject seriously, then by golly the scientists had better listen. But the most skeptical among them will undoubtedly run headlong away instead. If Damien Broderick has become a convert, they themselves could easily be next.

Damien Broderick, the writer of this book, asked me to pass along these comments:
Someone called Joe P. complained: "The book is also sloppy... Broderick jumps into PEAR without any setup at all."

That's a misleading way to summarize the book's introduction to PEAR:

"The most striking evidence gathered by non-parasychologists during the last quarter century was conducted at Princeton University. Until recently, Dr. Robert Jahn...was Princeton's emeritus Dean of Engineering. One of the world's leading experts in advanced aerospace propulsion technology, he worked with major industry and government research laboratories in fluid mechanics, ionized gas physics and plasma dynamics.

From 1979 until its closure at the end of 2006, Jahn also directed one of the most remarkable and impressive bodies of public research into psychic phenomena. Jahn's PEAR team--Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research--came as close to proving the reality of psi as you could imagine (although a recent large-scale international attempt to replicate one of its key findings has failed). Jahn and his principal associate, developmental psychologist Brenda Dunne, showed astute political horse-sense in avoiding what they term "gee whiz" experiments, flashy psychic bombshells of the Uri Geller spoon-bending variety."

Joe P: "He introduces people and concepts without any explanation at all, so unless you're a psi enthusiast and know who Dr. Dean Radin is..."

Dr. Radin's work and theories are extensively cited; Dean himself provided a pleasant endorsement on the back jacket, cited by amazon.com.

Joe P: "or what the Ganzfeld is, good luck knowing what the devil he's talking about for a while."
Here is the definition provided in the book's substantial Glossary:

"GANZFELD PSI (GF or sometimes GZ): A technique intended to enhance the psi function by reducing sensory input to a bland minimum, without going all the way to sensory deprivation (which actually increases "internal noise"). It has been one of the most successful means of building a credible database of ESP events, and the site of a fruitful debate between parapsychology and its critics."

Joe P: "He calls the Ganzfeld experiments precognition when they are actually about telepathy."

Oddly enough, the book's first non-quote use of the term is the phrase "early use of the ganzfeld telepathy protocol," and it nowhere calls Ganzfeld experiments precognitive.
Not that there'd be anything wrong with that, as the Ganzfeld technique was designed to enhance perceptual psi, whether in real time, precognitively or retrocognitively. (The book does note that following a successful meta-analysis of Ganzfeld tests, "Charles Honorton and his colleagues drew together all the forced-choice experimental precognition experiments reported in English between 1935 and 1987..." That is, having done X, they went on to do Y.)

I wanted to like this book, because I'm a firm believer in the reality of psi. And to some extent, I think Broderick succeeds in supporting its existence by presenting some of the vast array of solid experimental evidence in its favor. He goes into great detail about the Star Gate remote viewing program and actually manages to offer the best defense I have ever seen of the PEAR Labs work at Princeton, an oft-scorned psychokinesis program that obtained results that, while small, are highly significant. He also presents a number of the most intriguing quantum mechanical theories for how psi might work.

Unfortunately, the book is freighted with a lot of unpleasant baggage that stems from Broderick's obvious position as a skeptical materialist without a speck of the spiritual in him. He spends much of his time on a kind of People magazine-esque look at the odd personalities involved in psi research instead of the data. He's snide, smug and dismissive about aspects of the psi subculture that he's clearly decided a priori are the realm of New Age loonies: survival of consciousness, a holistic universe, and so on. And he's aghast at anything that smacks of the spiritual (even if it has nothing to do with religion). He spends much of the latter half of the book trying to rationalize his way out of the idea that according to quantum theory, a conscious observer is indeed necessary to create reality, a fact that is supported by the latest experiments by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna.

When confronted by any whiff of holism, zero point energy or anything else speculative, no matter how compelling, Broderick resorts to phrases like "horrifying" and "makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." He comes off sounding like a dogmatic rationalist skeptic who was forced backward into belief about psi by the mountain of evidence, but cannot bend his mind around any other possibilities, even if there is good evidence to suggest they might be true. Holism of reality? It's at least a solid idea, based on the reality of quantum entanglement. But he dismisses it as what James Randi would call "woo woo". Reality needing the conscious observer to produce actuality from all the myriad probabilities? Can't be; it's too Deepak. Mind functioning independent from the brain in some way? Not a chance. Broderick is a thoroughgoing materialist and won't even consider the possibility. Skepticism and rigorous thinking are vital in these areas, because there is a lot of quantum nonsense and wishful thinking out there. But cynicism is more appropriate to Randi and his unsavory crowd of scoffers. The author drips with barely concealed contempt for some of the ideas presented in his book, and every time he showed such an attitude I wanted to fling the book across the room.

The book is also sloppy. I'm an author, and I'm qualified to critique on these grounds. Broderick jumps into PEAR without any setup at all. He introduces people and concepts without any explanation at all, so unless you're a psi enthusiast and know who Dr. Dean Radin is or what the Ganzfeld is, good luck knowing what the devil he's talking about for a while. He calls the Ganzfeld experiments precognition when they are actually about telepathy. And so on. I found these lazy mistakes more frustrating as the book went on.

Broderick does redeem himself somewhat in the section on the possible theories of psi, from retrocausality and novel looks at the nature of time to the "many worlds" theory. Indeed, this section of the book is the most comprehensive I've seen in terms of presenting a variety of possible theoretical underpinnings for these phenomena. But as soon as he makes a point he undermines it, as if he's not quite willing to commit and must backpedal to avoid looking like--gasp!--a believer. He basically shrugs off one of the most promising concepts of quantum mechanics as it relates to psi--entanglement--as unlikely, but then proceeds to present other theories that fit what he would like to be true (the primacy of pure materialism) while being completely unsupported by any evidence, unlike entanglement. Plus, he gives more credence to the ridiculous "many worlds" theory than to ideas that have far more evidentiary value but don't suit his materialist, evolutionist paradigm. C'mon, Damien, you tie yourself in knots trying to find physical models to avoid consciousness as primary in the creation of reality, yet you'll entertain the idea that each of the trillions of probabilities that resolve each millisecond splits off its own discreet universe? How the heck is that any less preposterous than an omniscient Deity?

Oh, and then there's the author's bolstering the credibility of some of the psi theories by referring to their inclusion in...science fiction novels! Um, maybe I'm dense here, but sci-fi isn't exactly on the level of a peer-reviewed paper in JAMA or Nature.

Broderick tries. He really does. But this is a book suffering from multiple personality disorder, as if he started it at one point, had a breakthrough in therapy, then finished it. It feels like he could only push himself to believe SO FAR...then no more. His gauge of the plausibility of other theories or phenomena is not objective, but based on how they suit his model of reality. Basically, "Outside the Gates" is an interesting book from a very narrow, biased point of view...a book that tries and succeeds in bolstering the case for psi but at the expense of the entire subculture in which psi resides. It's as if the author had to disclaim, "OK, so I believe telepathy and remote viewing are possible, but look, I still think survival of consciousness after death and holism are nonsense, so can I keep my materialist skeptics membership card?" It's an unfortunate taint on what could have been a rigorous but open-minded piece of work. For a better, more balanced treatment of the subject, I recommend Dean Radin's "Entangled Minds" or "Extraordinary Knowing" by Elizabeth Mayer.

This book is excellent for skeptics and disbelievers who'd prefer to hear what someone thorough - who doesn't *want* to believe in anomalous cognition - really thinks is happening. Broderick is thorough (357 pages so) and calculating in his assessments of research and demonstrations of psi. Too thorough for my tastes, but then I'm reputed to be an impatient who has a hard time sitting through reviews of laboratory studies about psi. I love stories of people's exploits recounting what they actually did with their unusual experiences, and there's some of that here in Broderick's surveys. I was one of the people you knew in school, who were astonished by the skills Broderick must possess in math such as geometry and trigonometry. I'm most interested when there's something wacky going on which catches my attention, as I found in calculus or chemistry.

Overall I enjoyed what Broderick wrote and concluded, including his estimations of several players in research and practice. Broderick's facts match my intuitions and first-hand experience of those researchers, trainers and intuitives I've met, have seen making presentations, or whose books I've read. In fact, if the opportunity presented itself I might enjoy talking with Broderick, in the same way I'd enjoy talking with Neil Peart (of Rush) for his astonishing and inspiring lyrics. Peart's seemingly an avowed mind allied with Western science, but an absolutely brilliant lyricist and thinker.

What I find especially valuable about Broderick's attitude is his obeisance to clean science, wherein all data are acknowledged and accounted for, rather than a surreptitious tossing out of that which scares you or doesn't suit your tastes. True empiricism is especially rare to find in any world, and it's always valuable. A long-time friend whose work was mentioned in this book is treated favorably by Broderick, and he suggested that I read it because of my abiding interest in the fields it discusses. Because my friend tends toward humility, I didn't even know his work was mentioned before I read it.