Американский парапсихолог: Деан Радин и исследования паранормальных явлений

American parapsychologist

Dean Radin ('/r//eɪ//d//ɪ//n/; born February 29, 1952) investigates phenomena in parapsychology. Following a bachelor and master's degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in educational psychology Radin worked at Bell Labs, as a researcher at Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He then became Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, USA, later becoming the president of the Parapsychological Association. He is also co editor in chief of the journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims. The review of Radin's first book, The Conscious Universe, that appeared in Nature charged that Radin ignored the known hoaxes in the field, made statistical errors and ignored plausible non paranormal explanations for parapsychological data.

Following a career in classical violin, Radin went on to earn an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as both a master's degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After his graduation, Radin worked at Bell Labs, and then conducted research at Princeton University, GTE Laboratories, University of Edinburgh, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Radin believes that parapsychology is as repeatable as any scientific discipline, but that it is also, as paraphrased by sociologist Erich Goode, "elusive, subtle and complex", a field of study that is "difficult to replicate" and that "our understanding of it is incomplete". Radin's paranormal claims have been rejected by those in the skeptical and mainstream scientific communities, some of whom have suggested that Radin's beliefs embrace pseudoscience and that he misunderstands the nature of science. The physicist Robert L. Park has written "No proof of psychic phenomena is ever found. In spite of all the tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin, and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the results are no more convincing today than when they began their experiments." Radin has claimed the results from parapsychological research are as consistent by the same standards as any other scientific discipline, but Ray Hyman has written that many parapsychologists disagree with this, openly admitting that the evidence for parapsychology is "inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet acceptable scientific standards". Radin and his colleagues have suggested that small scale studies have produced a "genuine psychokinetic effect", but critics have asserted that Radin has not shown evidence that the null hypothesis of such an effect could be confidently rejected. Further, psychologists David B. Wilson and William R. Shadish, writing in Psychological Bulletin, criticized claims made by Radin and his associates that human minds can psychically influence random number generators, saying that parapsychologists "need to go beyond statistics and explain how the mind might influence a computer, then test that prediction". Radin has written that not all people experience paranormal phenomena (or see ghosts) because they block such signals due to the process of latent inhibition.

A critical review of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997) was published by the British mathematician I. J. Good in Nature. Good wrote about flaws in Radin's method for evaluating the file drawer effect. He stated that the book avoided mentioning the evidence of fraud in parapsychology. In 2002, Victor J. Stenger gave a criticism of The Conscious Universe that aligned with Good's arguments that Radin did not perform the file drawer analysis correctly, made fundamental errors in his calculations, and ignored non paranormal explanations for the data.

Radin's book Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (2013), argues support for psychic phenomena, linking them to the siddhis from yoga related legends. Publishers Weekly has reviewed it, saying of the book, that it is "unfocused and opaque at times" but "nevertheless an admirable attempt to bridge the gap between the scientific and the spiritual realm".