Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold

Outside the Gates of Science is an intellectual odyssey of sorts, paralleling the journey Damien Broderick thinks it is time his subject matter, ESP, itself undertakes. It is almost as if he has been persuaded against his will, kicking and screaming, to come in out of the cold -- to realize that there really is something of substance to these wild claims he has resisted so long of exceptional human abilities. The book reads like a tug of war with himself. He verges on indignation that ESP (or psi for the more general term) continues to be suppressed by mainstream science and its skeptic guard dogs. Yet his prose shows a grudging reluctance to let go of previous doubts -- a reluctance to just bust loose and embrace the wildness. But that in itself is the charm and the value of the book. If someone this resistant to the idea that there just might be something real going on with psi has found himself being dragged by the mounting evidence to the point where he must admit, even if through clenched teeth, that it is time that science took the whole subject seriously, then by golly the scientists had better listen. But the most skeptical among them will undoubtedly run headlong away instead. If Damien Broderick has become a convert, they themselves could easily be next.

This is an exceptionally well-conceived, thoughtful and important book. It's one of those rare books that I would recommend to basically everyone I know -- if I were a rich man, I'd buy them a copy. Let me explain why I'm so excited by Broderick's work. Having grown up on SF, and being a generally open-minded person but also a mathematician/scientist with a strong rationalist and empiricist bent , I've never quite known what to make of psi. (Following Broderick, I'm using "psi" as an umbrella term for ESP, precognition, psychokinesis, and the familiar array of suspects...). Broderick's book is the first I've read that rationally, scientifically, even-handedly and maturely, reviews what it makes sense to think about psi given the available evidence. (A quick word on my science background: I have a math PhD and although my main research areas are AI and cognitive science, I've also spent a lot of time working on empirical biological science as a data analyst. I was a professor for a 8 years but have been doing research in the software industry for the last decade.) My basic attitude on psi has always been curious but ambivalent. One way to summarize it would be via the following three points.... First: Psi is NOT wildly scientifically implausible after the fashion of, say, perpetual motion machines built out of wheels and pulleys and spinning chambers filled with ball bearings. Science, at this point, understands the world only very approximately, and there is plenty of room in our current understanding of the physical universe for psi. Quantum theory's notions of nonlocality and resonance are (as many have observed) conceptually somewhat harmonious with some aspects of psi, but that's not the main point. The main point is that science does not rule out psi, in the sense that it rules out various sorts of obvious crackpottery. Second: Anecdotal evidence for psi is so strong and so prevalent that it's hard to ignore. Yes, people can lie, and they can also be very good at fooling themselves. But the number of serious, self-reflective intelligent people to report various sorts of psi experiences is not something that should be glibly ignored. Third: There is by now a long history of empirical laboratory work on psi, with results that are complex, perplexing, but in many ways so strongly statistically significant as to indicate that SOMETHING important is almost surely going on in these psi experiments... Broderick, also being an open-minded rationalist/empiricist, seems to have started out his investigation of psi, as reported in his book, with the same basic intuition as I've described in the above three points. And he covers all three of these points in the book, but the main service he provides is to very carefully address my third point above: the scientific evidence. His discussion of possible physical mechanisms of psi is competent but not all that complete or imaginative; and he wisely shies away from an extensive treatmen

Broderick fills a niche ignored by most writers on psi -- that of the (mostly) objective observer. Psi literature falls into one of the two camps: the believers and the skeptics. Neither side will admit defeat and they're long past contributing to the dialogue. It's high time to stop adding to the noise. This book is a welcome relief and a hell of a fun read, too. Broderick has a spritely, humorous style, apropos to the material and his own scientific skepticism comes under self-effacing fire from the research he unearths. What he discovers, and what it's high time to discuss (as opposed to the endless fighting between authors' cognitive worldviews which are unlikely to change), is the remarkable data that already exists and the pitfalls and perils of studying psi. That's a real place to start.

Damien Broderick is one of those rare individuals in science who, when faced with something about which he is very skeptical, instead of spewing attitude and opinion actually does the heavy lifting of finding out what the data says. I speak from authority here because I am one of the people mentioned in his book, and I know that everything he has written about me -- you have no idea how rare this is -- is actually factually correct. Damien is an excellent writer, and he has a probing mind that does not settle for the superficial. He has produced what I believe is the best skeptical book ever written by an "outsider" concerning the controversial field of consciousness research. This book deserves to be in your library.

I enjoyed this book because very few skeptics have been willing to suspend their disbelief long enough to do their homework and tackle a controversy as intense, persistent, and at times as confusing as psi. With a healthy skepticism firmly anchoring his opinions, and with much intellectual struggle, Broderick concludes that something interesting is going on. What that something may be is not likely to be understood any time soon if it is forced to stand outside the gates. Hence the book's subtitle. If you want to read a good "outsider's" review of the history and findings of psi research, one that is about as accurate as any necessarily selective history can be, then this is the book to read. I found Broderick's musings on the implications of psi the most interesting part, perhaps because he is also an accomplished science fiction writer and used to projecting into imagined futures. - Dean Radin, author Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality