Customer Reviews

The Psychology of the Psychic

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If you're a firm believer in psychic abilities, you may find this book's skeptical stance to be a little disheartening. Read it anyway! It's loaded with useful and fascinating information.

Psychology of the Psychic is a fair and honest look at mentalists, psychics, clairvoyants, "spoonbenders", and others who claim paranormal talents.

Of particular interest to me were the techniques that showmen and charlatans use to convince others of their abilities, and how those techniques may be inadvertently used by those who believe they have experienced psychic phenomena.

If you're a believer, this book will allow you to separate the wheat from the chaff, and identify the outright frauds.

If you're a non-believer, this book will show you why so many people have faith in the paranormal, and will give you lots of ammunition when Aunt Bertha tells you about the marvelous new psychic she's been consulting (and handing over her checkbook to).

A terrific, thorough book, with solid research presented in an easy-to-read and enjoyable manner.

Kammann and Marks take a serious, scientific approach to debunking many popular misconceptions, such as myths about the full moon. Although "psychic" spoonbender Uri Geller has long been forgotten by most people, their experiments on his "powers" and their look at the Stanford Research Institute's validation of those powers is fascinating. A must-read for people who are interested in critical thinking and in knowing the truth rather than accepting what they're told without question.

I agree with another reviewer that this book is useful even for the staunch believer in ESP. It is a very entertaining reading which is not often the case (I found Martin Gardner`s books rather boring and sometimes arrogant). The two authors are never arrogant. I particularly loved the last chapters that show how common "non-scientific" thinking is among said scientific communities. He gives some examples then concerning psychiatry and medicine. If you remember the Uri Geller craze you will enjoy the opening chapters also.

I agree with the reviewer who called it a "bogus treatise." I read this book after personally witnessing a remote viewing experiment (documented on my website). I did not read the whole book, only chapters 1-7 and 16 (I wasn't interested in debunking Uri Geller). Chapter 3 begins with a Robert Browning quote "...you'll find what you desire", I assume targeted at "believers" in the paranormal. But it equally applies to the authors. In their "replication" of Targ's remote viewing experiments the authors selected as the viewers a few students and a housewife who "believed themselves to be psychic to some degree." Of course, they did not believe in the existence of the phenomena they were testing -- otherwise they might have allowed themselves to make the assumption that it might require someone who practices. If you were testing "exceptional athletic abilities" would you select a subject who played softball once a year and "believed he was athletic to some degree" or would you select a professional athlete? For remote viewing, you could select members of the Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild, for example. Their intent was not to study the phenomena using an open-minded scientific approach, but to "debunk" it - in the typical sarcastic style.

Like most skeptics, Kammann and Marks pretend objectivity, when their real mission is to debunk every aspect of the field of parapsychology. For instance, they have zero belief on any level in the possibility of such things as telepathy and remote viewing. For them, it is not possible, so they set out to simply prove this assumption. Yet, simple physics allows for the possibility of some form of thought transference. Just as energy in the form of thoughts transfers from one part of the brain to another part via the neurotransmitters, why wouldn't it be possible for the corresponding molecular frequency to be picked up by another brain? The evidence for telepathy between twins or during dreams is overwhelming, but they ignore it all. See, for instance, Dream Telepathy by Ulmann, Krippner and Vaughan. So, in their attempts to pretend objectivity, Marks and Kammann really set out with the key goal of trying to debunk Uri Geller. They use as their proof photographs that are so blurred that it is impossible to see what the photographs are of, yet these, they assert "prove" that Geller is a fake. It is shameful. Try reading Charles Panati's The Geller Papers if you want the truth about how Mr. Geller did in physics laboratories across the globe. The problem with these types of skeptics is that they live in the mutual admiration society world without realizing that they are not true skeptics but rather narrow thinkers who wall off any chance of discovering anything of value by chanting Groucho Marx' famous credo: "What ever it is, I'm against it!"