Back to A Different Lens

Experimental Psychology, the controlled laboratory study of mental processes founded when Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory at Leipzig in 1879, is named by this atlas as the discipline four open questions still wait on: a sleep laboratory protocol, a decades-old testing method, a single controversial meta-analysis, and a piece of neuroscience equipment the press named after God.

A Protocol Nobody Repeated, and a Standard Both Sides Signed

The Maimonides dream telepathy studies, run at a Brooklyn sleep laboratory that could wake a subject reliably during dreaming sleep and collect a dream report minutes later rather than recalled over breakfast, reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance. No other laboratory reproduced the effect at a comparable scale, and the original series was never repeated at that scale either; the judging problem at the centre of it, pairing a long, associative dream report against a rich art print, is looser than counting hits on a card, and it remains unresolved. The ganzfeld effect has a rarer document behind its own dispute: Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would need to look like, in a widely cited 1986 communique. Honorton's subsequent automated autoganzfeld series met those standards and the effect did not disappear, but later independent large-scale replications have not settled the matter either way, and two meta-analyses reading differently defined study pools, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions.

A Meta-Analysis and a Helmet, Both Still Disputed

Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem, whose mainstream reputation rests on self-perception theory, published Feeling the Future in 2011, nine experiments reporting that well established psychological effects appeared to run backwards in time; independent laboratories failed to reproduce the results, and the episode fed directly into the replication reforms that followed in psychology generally. Bem answered with a 2015 meta-analysis of ninety such experiments arguing the small positive effect it found survives correction for publication bias; critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, and the dispute over the adequacy of the statistical tools is live in the wider methodology literature, not only in this corner of it. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University proposed that religious and mystical experience is an artefact of temporal lobe function, and tested it with an apparatus the press named the God helmet, applying weak complex magnetic fields to volunteers who then reported a sensed presence. A double-blind replication at Uppsala in 2005 found that reported experience tracked a participant's own measured suggestibility rather than the field itself; Persinger disputed the replication's protocol, no further trial under a protocol both sides would accept has been run, and the God helmet is still cited in popular accounts of the neuroscience of religion as though the matter were settled in one direction or the other.

Where To Read More

• Experimental PsychologySocial ScienceThe discipline itself, four open questions
• The Maimonides Dream Telepathy StudiesThe Brooklyn sleep laboratory studies; the judging problem remains unresolved
• Has the Maimonides dream telepathy protocol ever been repeated at a comparable scale using modern sleep laboratory methods?The open question itself, confirmed public
• The Ganzfeld ProtocolExtrasensory PerceptionThe ganzfeld protocol, the specific method the modern ESP debate is organised around
• The Ganzfeld Meta-Analyses and the 1986 Joint CommuniqueThe 1986 joint communique, cited by both sides of the ganzfeld dispute as supporting them
• Does the ganzfeld effect survive a pre-registered multi-laboratory replication meeting the standard set in the 1986 Hyman-Honorton communique?The open question itself, confirmed public
• Daryl BemParapsychology & Psychical ResearchFeeling the Future, 2011, fed directly into psychology's own replication reforms
• Is the small positive effect reported in the 2015 meta-analysis of ninety retroactive-influence experiments explicable entirely by publication bias and analytic flexibility?The open question itself, confirmed public
• Michael PersingerParapsychology & Psychical ResearchBuilt and tested the apparatus the press named the God helmet
• The Granqvist Replication of the God HelmetThe 2005 Uppsala replication finding suggestibility, not the field, drove the effect
• Does exposure to weak complex magnetic fields over the temporal lobes produce a sensed presence independently of the suggestibility of the person exposed?The open question itself, confirmed public