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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more