Skip to main content

Chris French - Five Way Interview

As well as being Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Chris French regularly appears on TV and radio and is an expert skeptic on the popular BBC show, Uncanny. His new book is The Science of Weird Shit.

Why science?

Science may not be perfect – because scientists are only human and are susceptible to the same foibles as everybody else – but for my money it is by far the best approach we have for trying to figure out the truth about how the universe works and our place in it.

Why this book?

I taught an optional module on anomalistic psychology for over 20 years at Goldsmiths, University of London. The topics covered, including alien abduction claims, ghosts, people claiming psychic abilities, and belief in conspiracies, are topics that most people, whether believers or sceptics, find inherently fascinating. The module allowed me to discuss a wide range of relevant psychological phenomena, such as the unreliability of memory, hallucinatory experiences, and various cognitive biases, but also to emphasise the need for critical thinking. I had wanted to write a popular science book on anomalistic psychology for many years but only found the time to complete that project following my retirement.

There are clearly two very different questions: do paranormal abilities and other weird phenomena exist at all, and why people believe in them. Is the starting assumption in anomalistic psychology that they are all misunderstandings of psychological or biological phenomena, or do you start with an open mind?

The primary focus of anomalistic psychology is to see if we can come up with non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal phenomena and, wherever possible, to produce evidence in support of those alternative explanations. So, we assume, purely as a working hypothesis, that paranormal phenomena do not exist. But an important part of proper scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you may be wrong. I am not convinced that paranormal phenomena really do exist on the basis of the current evidence as I see it. However, stronger evidence may be produced in the future that leads me to change my mind. Also, I have put a great deal of time and effort into directly testing paranormal claims. To date, the results have not supported the claims. Being open to changing one’s mind in the light of evidence is, I would argue, true open-mindedness.

What’s next?

For the foreseeable future I will be very busy promoting my new book. I am doing talks all over the UK as well as at conferences in Lyon, Visegrad, and Las Vegas, and lots and lots of podcast interviews. Once things calm down a bit, I’ll give some thought to writing another book. I’ve got some ideas on that front but I’m keeping them under wraps for the time being.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m still excited about finally getting my book over the finish line. I realised the other day that I had written the original proposal back in 2010 but my day job at Goldsmiths was so busy that I just never found time to move the project forward. I’m still ridiculously busy even though I’ve retired but much more of my time is now taken up doing things I actually want to do!

 Photo © Stuart Gennery


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more