Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more