Every month - that is the plan, anyway - I will review a book selected randomly from my Paranormal Library. This month, I will review Where Science and Magic Meet by Serena Roney-Dougal.
I've heard of Serena Roney-Dougal - more due to my reading of parapsychology, than anything else. I read up on her background and decided to buy one of her books - Where Science and Magic Meet - as it sounded intriguing. I hoped that it would help me with the dissertation that I am currently working on for school, which is about the explanations for "paranormal" experiences - an excuse to take a closer look at how geomagnetic field fluctuations can cause a person to have a haunting experience; how stimulation of the left and right angular gyrus can cause a person to have a sense of presence or out-of-body experience, and, of course, a chance to read up on psi and how it may be responsible for ESP (hoping to raise a few eyebrows in doing so!).
If you have any suggestions for books (as long as they aren't too pricey) or freely-available material that is relevant for how geomagnetic fields, quantum physics, psi/parapsychology, electromagnetic fields, and psychology can explain paranormal experiences, I would love to hear from you. I already have some key titles and papers, but any suggestions of ones I haven't come across would be welcome. I can be emailed at woodelf2012@gmail.com.
Where Science and Magic Meet by Serena Roney-Dougal
One of the things that struck me as soon as I began to read the introduction was that the author's style appeared to be relaxed and laid back - and that the book appeared to be a good choice for breakfast! I was intrigued to discover more about psi - that it was the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, and that it appeared in the Norse alphabet representing psychic protection. I read on, eager to find out about the author's own research (something which she promised me that she'd include in the introduction). I was pleased to discover that the book started right at the beginning - outlining what ESP and PK were, as well as mentioning JB Rhine's experiments. Because I was already familiar with all of this, I was more glad when Roney-Dougal put each of these under the terms of 'receptive psi' and 'active psi' - as I usually forget that PK is an example of 'active psi'. Then again, I'm more familiar with labelling PK as 'expressive psi'. So although I was familiar with all of this, I hoped that as I progressed through the book, I would read about stuff with which I wasn't already familiar.
Roney-Dougal also includes the ideas of quantum physics - one being that a particle can obtain information about another article over any distance. This was great - perhaps I would gain a new insight about psi ability and quantum physics that I didn't know. I only hoped that I wouldn't mix the ideas from this book with another book, The Field by Lynne McTaggart!
As I sluggishly moved off Chapter 1 and onto Chapter 2, I realised that I'd underestimated the extent to which parapsychology would be tied into magic. I'm not someone who's got a background is magic and mysticism, so I wasn't entirely sure what the author meant by magic, as it was not given a precise definition at the start. Still, the first chapter gave me a good flavour of what the whole book would be about (more-or-less) which was good.
I enjoyed reading Chapter 2, because it was focussed on parapsychology, with which I was more familiar. It was good to read about the key figures with whom I was familiar: Marilyn Schlitz, Rex Stanford, Charles Honorton, amongst others. This chapter I found especially thought-provoking, primarily due to the author's open-minded approach to possible applications to real-life situations, as well as interesting studies about which I hadn't come across so much. It was also particularly interesting because of learning about the various conditions that seem necessary for successful PK experiments - for example, factors such as a more informal relationship between experimenter and the participants, a more relaxed attitude that is focused on the goal (such as particular lights coming on in a specific direction), and a decrease in responsibility for a PK effect to happen on the part of participants. In some ways, this chapter concreted my prior parapsychological knowledge, whilst in other ways, adding to it. It seemed to me as if my knowledge of parapsychology was like a cake, and that Roney-Dougal's perspective added more of a flavour to that cake. Undoubtedly, my perspective has been helped - and made more flexible - thanks to Roney-Dougal.
The next few chapters I was looking forward to - their titles sounded intriguing and I was impatient about finally reading them. I wanted to read about quantum physics and wondered what new insights the author might offer me with it.
The following chapter certainly did not disappoint: all about the strange world of the quantum, it refreshed my memory concerning Shrodinger's cat metaphor that is often used to illustrate the 'collapse of the wave function' which occurs once the particles/waves are observed. It was also good to be informed of the complete logic behind the metaphor. In fact, I found the whole chapter on the quantum so intriguing - from Carl Jung's sychronicity, Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger's Cat Paradox to The Principle of Non-Locality and Bell's Theorem that I immediately placed the book down and went on a search in another bookcase for some books about these specific areas for future reading. Most importantly, the chapter did indeed deliver new insights concerning the application of this new-found knowledge, and I subsequently thought about all the possibilities for how I could make my life smoother. I'm not sure if my focusing on the ideal outcome that I want to happen would improve my Biology grades - perhaps this observer effect could only occur on things that were flexible and random, such as an RNG (in the case of PK). I wondered whether one could improve one's health in the same way, just through focusing on the outcome - something which for me had an uncanny "New Age" feel, as I'd heard it so often in such circles, but hardly from a scientific perspective.
When Roney-Dougal mentioned a piece of research by Pribram on memory and how it could work according to holographic principles, I was a little taken aback. After all, who said that memory was stored in the brain? No one. In my opinion, memories are stored in the A-field or morphic field, and are extracted when needed by us through certain parts of the brain. Those who have parts of the brain missing that are responsible for extracting particular types of memory have not lost those types of memories but just the ways in which they can obtain them. Pribram is quoted, on the other hand, as interpreting that in a different way: even though parts of the brain in some people after operations are missing, the memories stored "in" those parts are not lost. But this raises many questions: where are memories stored? Pribram seems to suggest that it is in the brain, but this then raises another question: what are memories? My theory at least sees memories as some type of energy imprinted on the zero-point field of quantum physics. In order for memories to be stored in the physical brain, they must have some sort of substance. Exactly how the "memories stored in the brain idea" may be investigated experimentally when no one knows what form memories may take when stored in the brain is not clear. There may be an aspect of holographic brain involved, but this does not mean that memories are stored in the brain. Rather, it raises more questions and, hopefully, more possible answers. I did, however, find it interesting to think of the brain as a hologram, and how each part of it contains information about the whole body - and in doing so, I thought of reflexology. After all, if each part of the brain is a hologram of the whole, could a part of my foot be a holographic representative of my eyes, amongst other organs? But if all of the cells of one's body are holograms of the whole body, why should it matter to rub one particular part of the foot in order to enhance the health of one particular organ? Surely every part of the foot represents every organ, with no particular part being specifically representative of a certain organ? I shoved my questions to one side and continued to read.
The remainder of the chapters also proved to be somewhat interesting for me. As someone who has mixed with New Agers and spiritualists, the pineal gland as the centre for psychic abilities - as well as its chakra, the Third Eye or Brow Chakra - was all too familiar a concept. I already knew all about it and so a lot of what Roney-Dougal said about it didn't quite take my interest so much. I was more interested in experiments concerning it than anything else. The areas that concerned psi, serotonnin and melatonnin I found the most interesting. And although I love the concept of elemental spirits - especially wood Elves - I wasn't so into the concept of fairies, either. Elementals just weren't an area that held much interest for me. The last two chapters again covered material that wasn't of so much interest, but once again these were tied in with psi and parapsychology. I think that what really made the most interesting reading were the areas concerning parapsychology and quantum mechanics, because they were areas that I was rather taken by and I obtained some good, interesting material to quote for my dissertation - so well worth reading! For those who are also interested in quantum mechanics/physics, I would advise that you read Lynne McTaggart's The Field first, before you undertake reading this book. Some areas seemed rather too deep, but The Field helped set the necessary foundations on which an understanding of the quantum world could be constructed.
Look out for next month's book review!
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