Free Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there by Richard Wiseman

one another and a few feet apart. Next, angle one of the mirrors so that when you look into one mirror you see the reflection of the back of your head (see photograph). Finally, gently stroke your cheek with your finger and look at the image in the mirror.  
    This rather unusual set-up replicates the illusion created by Lenggenhager’s virtual reality system. Your brain ‘feels’ your cheek being stroked, ‘sees’ a person standing in front of you being subjected to simultaneous stroking, concludes that ‘you’ must therefore be standing there, and constructs a sense of self that is consistent with this idea.  
    When he took part in the demonstration, Ramachandran felt as if he was touching an alien or android body that was outside his own body. Many of his colleagues felt similar sensations, with some of them reporting that they wanted to say ‘hello’ to the person in the mirror.  
     

    Set-up for the mirror experiment.
     
    END BOX
     
    At the start of this book I described how seeing psychologist Sue Blackmore on television made me realise how studying the supernatural could reveal important insights into our brains, behaviour and beliefs. Blackmore has investigated many aspects of the paranormal over the years, but much of her work has focused on the secret science behind out-of-body experiences.  
     
    Witchcraft, LSD and Tarot Cards  
    Sue Blackmore’s interest in the paranormal dates back to 1970 when she was a student at Oxford University and had a dramatic out-of-body experience. After several hours experimenting with the Ouija board and then relaxing with some marijuana, Sue felt herself rise out of her body, float up to the ceiling, fly across England, travel over the Atlantic, and hover around New York. Eventually she travelled back to Oxford, entered her body through her neck and finally expanded to fill the entire universe. Other than that it was a quiet night.
    Upon her return to reality, Sue became fascinated with weird experiences, trained as a white witch, and eventually decided to devote herself to parapsychology. She was awarded a doctorate for work examining whether children have telepathic powers (they didn’t), went on several LSD trips to see if they would improve her psychic ability (they didn’t), and learned to read Tarot to discover if the cards could predict the future (they didn’t). After 25 years of such disappointing results Sue finally gave up the ghost and became a   sceptic. For many years she examined the psychology of paranormal experiences and beliefs, trying to figure out why people experienced seemingly supernatural sensations and bought into such strange stuff. Most recently she has turned her attention to the mystery of consciousness, focusing on the ways in which the brain creates a sense of self (although, rather disappointingly, the ‘Who Am I’ tab on her website delivers a straight biography).  
     

    Interview with Sue Blackmore
    http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/SueBlackmore.html
     
    One of Blackmore’s early investigations tackled a question that comes up frequently when I speak about the paranormal – why do identical twins often appear to have a strange psychic bond with one another? Many proponents of psychic ability believe that this odd bond is due to telepathy. In contrast, sceptics argue that twins will often think in very similar ways because they have been raised in the same environment and have the same genetic makeup, and that such similarity will cause to them to make the same decisions and thus appear to read each other’s minds.  
    To help settle the issue, Blackmore brought together six sets of twins and six pairs of siblings, and conducted a two-part experiment 42 .   The first part was a straightforward test of telepathy. One member of each pair played the role of the ‘sender’ while the other was the ‘receiver’. The sender was presented with various randomly selected stimuli (such as a number between one and ten,