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The Science of Weird Shit - Chris French ****

This is a highly engaging topic, but before diving into the content of the book I ought to mention two issues with its title. The first is that in this age of algorithmic censorship, the final word of the title can cause problems - the publisher had an issue with publicity emails being caught by spam filters, and I'm nervous enough about the contents of this review being pulled that I won't use it in the text.

The other, more subtle problem is that it's only partially what the book is about - as the subtitle makes clear. Most of it doesn't concern the science of weird stuff, but rather the science of why many of us believe weird stuff. Those aren't the same things. Such is the joy of titles - often hard to get right.

But what about the book itself? Considering it's covering what can be quite a showy field, it takes a measured approach (in fact, I'd say occasionally it's a bit too academic in feel, focused on relating facts with limited storytelling). However, there is enough narrative to keep the interest going. Chris French begins by clarifying what's meant both by paranormal phenomena and his wider field of anomalistic psychology, which takes in things like ghosts and alien abduction which don't fit into the main paranormal buckets of ESP, telekinesis and communication with the dead.

One thing this does do is bring in topics like sleep paralysis, which definitely exist, but have traditionally been given supernatural explanations, where we now know that there are good scientific reasons for what is experienced. As well as the topics mentioned above, French does a good job of taking us through near-death experiences, the counterintuitive nature of probability that lead to coincidences being more likely than we realise, dreams that are supposed to predict the future and the limits of scepticism. It's common for true believers to argue that sceptics are just out to prove them wrong, but (despite the subtitle) French does plausibly seem to take an objective viewpoint and feels as if he would be very pleased if something real could be discovered.

Any book covering psychology these days ought to bring up the replication crisis early on and to make clear if any studies referenced have small sample sizes, or gave the potential for p-hacking and other statistical misdemeanours - which means the research needs to be treated with significant scepticism itself. French does go into this at some length, especially since evidence for phenomena that appear to contradict the known laws of nature needs to be very strong. However, this comes at the end of the book. This feels a bit like the way that newspaper articles often make a bold scientific claim for which there isn't good evidence, but only point out the limitations right at the end of the article. A fairer approach would be to put the concerns about psychology studies up front, and to make clear which of the studies referenced in the book have been replicated and are good quality.

Overall, I didn't find this book as much fun as I'd hoped, though I understand why it is written the way it is. Even so, French does an excellent job in making the reader more aware of anomalistic psychology, and giving us a picture of the current state of the field.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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