Devin Terhune very successfully defended his dissertation and is now doing a postdoc at Oxford. Part of the work he did here was highlighted in a recent media article (www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/30/hypnosis-neuroscience-psychology)
and the full reference for the paper is Terhune, D. B., Cardeña, E., & Lindgren, M. (2010). Disruption of synaesthesia through posthypnotic suggestion: An ERP study. Neuropsychologia, 48, 3360-3364.
Professor Caroline Watt, from the Koestler unit at the University of Edinburg, obtained the Perrot-Warwick Scholarship and is now seeking an assistant to work on a dream precognition project. Closing date for application is October 8th http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.detail&vacancy_ref=3013411
And the current issue of The New York Review of Books has the review of a book on the famous scientist George Price who famously and unscientifically opined: "Not 1000 experiments with ten million trials and by 100 separate investigators giving total odds against chance of one-thousandth to 1 [could make me accept ESP]." G. R. Price
"Science and the Supernatural" Science, 1955;122: 359-367
1) For Swedish speakers: I was interviewed for an online magazine www.onyxmagasin.se/overnaturligt.html along with a skeptic. I spoke about specific references (including the latest ganzfeld meta-analysis, for which there is a link in the article) and he wrote that it is a "myth" that psi phenomena can be replicated. When i wrote to him, he wrote back that meta-analysis have problems with the file drawer effect (i.e., negative studies not being published). After I replied to him that the meta-analysis actually discussed and corrected for that effect and asked him whether he had actually read the paper, I never heard back. I have found the majority of psi skeptics (actually "deniers" is a better word) to have failed to follow the literature that they are commenting on...
2) There was in Swedish TV a fantastic program on the inception of one of the great symphonies of all times, Shostakovich's 5th, in which he might have been betting, literally, his life. Michael Tilson. Thomas, the extraordinary conductor of the SF Symphony orchestra, conducts the program and the music. The program is repeated in Swedish TV on the 18th at 14.50, svt 2, or can be seen online at http://video.pbs.org/video/1295305133/
3) And a reminder, as per my previous posting, that next week we have 3 fascinating events, on the 22nd at 10, a conference on consciousness, that same day at 1400, the dissertation defense of my student Devin Terhune on hypnosis, and the following day at 10 a conference on hypnosis. Details on times and places are in earlier blogs.
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