Description
SHOULD YOU BE walking down the street and have the misfortune to get your head in the way of a falling steel girder, you would have some reason to call the resulting pain 'mind-bending'. Even in normal circumstances, however, you might be forgiven for deriding the proposition that the reverse might be true: that mind might bend metal. Yet some of the most careful and controlled research in parapsychology in recent years has been directed to discovering whether the mind can, by some means as yet undefined, affect the material world in just this dramatic way.
No less effort, it should also be said, has been expended by sceptics in trying to refute the actuality of metal bending - and other forms of mind-over-matter, known as psychokinesis or PK for short. And more than that- a really dedicated sceptic will deny that even the possibility of such an event exists. The logic of this somewhat inflexible thinking is something we'll return to: first, let us take a look at the kind of evidence researchers in the field have been concerned to discover - and at the pitfalls that litter this kind of research. The 'original' metal bender was, of course, the Israeli Uri Geller (now settled in New York). Geller is worth discussing in detail because his case highlights the popular reaction to psychokinesis, the ways in which scientists approach the problems represented by psi, and the extremely strange people who attach themselves to the whole business of psychical research
ISBN:9780856139772
