Hood, Bruce - Supersense

17.

C. N. Johnson and M. G. Jacobs, ‘Enchanted Objects: How Positive Connections Transform Thinking About the Nature of Things’, poster and presentation at the symposium ‘Children’s Thinking About Alternative Realities’ (C. Johnson, chair), biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minn., 19 April, 2001.

18.

The Prestige , directed by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket Productions, 2006).

19.

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian responsible for inventing alternating electrical current.

20.

B. M. Hood and P. Bloom, ‘Do Children Think That Duplicating the Body Also Duplicates the Mind?’, unpublished paper.

21.

J. Capgras and J. Reboul-Lachaux, ‘L’Illusion des soles dans un delire systematise chronique’, Bulletin de Society Clinique de Medicine Mentale 11 (1923): 6–16.

22.

G. Blount, ‘Dangerousness of Patients with Capgras Syndrome’, Nebraska Medical Journal 71 (1986): 207.

23.

V. A. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (William Morrow, 1998).

24.

A. Ghaffari-Nejad and K. Toofani, ‘A Report of Capgras Syndrome with Belief in Replacement of Inanimate Objects in a Patient Who Suffered from Grandmal Epilepsy’, Archives of Iranian Medicine 8 (2005): 141–3.

25.

T. Feinberg, Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self (Oxford University Press, 2000).

26.

R. T. Abed and W. D. Fewtrell, ‘Delusional Misidentification of Familiar Inanimate Objects: A Rare Variant of Capgras Syndrome’, British Journal of Psychiatry 157 (1990): 915–17.

27.

H. D. Ellis and M. B. Lewis, ‘Capgras Delusion: A Window on Face Recognition’, Trends in Cognitive Science 5 (2001): 149–56.

CHAPTER NINE

1.

This example is taken from R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (Arrow Books, 2004).

2.

C. G. Gross, ‘The Fire That Comes from the Eye’, The Neuroscientist 5 (1999): 58–64.

3.

This discovery was first articulated experimentally by the Arabic scholar Alhazen, who invented the pinhole camera and explained why the image was inverted because of the optics of light entering the eye.

4.

Red eye is due to the reflection of blood vessels that cover the surface of the back of the eye. The light-sensitive surface of the back of the eye, known as the retina, is actually organized back to front, with light having to pass through the blood supply before reaching the light receptors.

5.

G. A. Winer, J. E. Cottrell, V. Gregg, J. S. Fournier, and L. A. Bica, ‘Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions’, American Psychologist 57 (2002): 417–24.

6.

S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1975).

7.

T. Depoorter, ‘Madame Lamort and the Ultimate Medusa Experience’, Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative , issue 5: ‘The Uncanny’ (January 2003), available at: http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/ uncanny/treesdepoorter.htm. ‘It is noteworthy that in different versions of the ancient myth of Medusa, it is sometimes the sight of her – her “being gazed at” by a spectator, while at other times it is the gaze of Medusa herself, her “looking at” a spectator that petrifies.’

8.

In February 2008, the appropriately named Third Penal Division of the Rome court ruled it a criminal offense for Italian men to touch their genitals in public. The ban did not just apply to brazen crotch-scratching, but also to the superstitious practice to ward off evil. See John Hooper, ‘Touch Your Privates in Private, Court Tells Italian Men’, the Guardian , 28 February, 2008, available at: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2008/feb/27/italy1.

9.

B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier , translated by C. Singleton (1528; reprint, Anchor Books, 1959).

10.

C. Russ, ‘An Instrument Which Is Set in Motion by Vision or by Proximity of the Human Body’, The Lancet 201 (1921): 222–34.

11.

J. Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (Picador, 2004).

12.

E. B. Titchener, ‘The Feeling of Being Stared At’, Science (new series) 308 (1898): 23.

13.

This comes from an unpublished study I conducted with 219 first-year students who had taken courses in perception and vision at the University of Bristol. In addition to filling out a standard questionnaire that measured paranormal beliefs ( T. M. Randall, ‘Paranormal Short Inventory’, Perceptual and Motor Skills 84 [1997]: 1265–6), they were asked to rate the statement, ‘People can tell when they are being watched even though they cannot see who is watching them’ on a scale of 1 (strong disagreement) to 6 (strong agreement). Only 4 per cent rated ‘strong disagreement’, and 9 per cent rated ‘disagreement.’ The remainder of the students agreed with this statement to some extent, even though, as a group, they scored lower than other large samples for paranormal beliefs.

14.

This example is taken from R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind p. 178 (see Note 1).

15.

P. Brugger and K. I. Taylor, ‘ESP: Extrasensory Perception or Effect of Subjective Probability?’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (2003): 221–46.

16.

J. Colwell, S. Schröder, and D. Sladen, ‘The Ability to Detect Unseen Staring: A Literature Review and Empirical Tests’, British Journal of Psychology 91 (2000): 71–85.

17.

The phrase is attributed to Carl Sagan, though he was paraphrasing a statement originally made by David Hume. For discussion, see M. Pigliucci, ‘Do Extraordinary Claims Really Require Extraordinary Evidence?’, The Sceptical Inquirer (March–April 2005).

18.

J. H. Flavell, ‘Development of Knowledge About Vision’, in Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children , edited by D. T. Levin (MIT Press, 2004).

19.

A. A. di Sessa, ‘Towards an Epistemology of Physics’, Cognition and Instruction 10 (1993): 105–225.

20.

J. E. Cottrell and G. A. Winer, ‘Development in the Understanding of Perception: The Decline of Extramission Perception Beliefs’, Developmental Psychology 30 (1994): 218–28.

21.

S. Einav and B. M. Hood, ‘Children’s Use of Temporal Dimension of Gaze to Infer Preference’, Developmental Psychology 42 (2006): 142–52.

22.

S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995).

23.

R. B. Adams, H. L. Gordon, A. A. Baird, N. Ambady, and R. E. Kleck, ‘Effects of Gaze on Amygdala Sensitivity to Anger and Fear Faces’, Science 300 (2003): 1536.

24.

K. Nicholas and B. Champness, ‘Eye Gaze and the GSR’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7 (1971): 623–6.

25.

M. Argle and M. Cook, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge University Press, 1976).

26.

This explanation was first suggested by Titchener, ‘The Feeling of Being Stared At.’

27.

R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (Park Street Press, 1981).

28.

According to Sheldrake’s theory, any system, including minds, can assume a particular shape or configuration. ‘Morphic’ means shape. A change in the shape of any one system affects the collective shape of all related systems. This is the resonance part of the theory. Subsequent systems resonate with other systems, enabling information to travel across space and time. The effect is stronger the more systems are involved and the more similar the future system is to the systems that generated the field. In 1989 the experimental psychologist Zoltan Dienes undertook research to investigate morphic resonance by testing it with remote viewing of repetition priming. In repetition priming, people respond more quickly and accurately with repeated presentation. He wanted to know if people trained on word recognition tasks influenced a different group of people through the effects of thought transference. Initially, he found a significant effect. Unfortunately, when he ran the study another two times, there was no effect. Dienes explains in mathematical detail why some theories should be tested and why others should not. More importantly, he explains the importance and difficulty of establishing truth in his new book, Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).