Mapping the psychic mind

Over the past week or so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it might mean to be psychic in any sense of the word. Aside from the odd anomalous experience, I can’t really say that I know what it feels like. I’ve seen the odd psychic here and there, as well as a couple famous mediums in action. As a consequence I can say that I’m still open to the possibility despite not having had any direct personal experiences. Thinking about psychics and psi raised a lot of questions for me. Is everyone psychic to some extent or are only certain people? Can a person learn to be psychic? How could someone learn and how would they practice?


While there may be no satisfactorily objective answers to the above questions, another one occurred to me. From the standpoint of neuroscience and neurochemistry, what does the psychic brain look like and more to the point, where in the brain does psychic activity occur?

Empirical studies measuring psi activity are in remarkably short supply in the main body of medical literature. While some of this is likely because of the perceived fringe nature of this field, another possibility is the challenge imposed by knowing what and how to measure psi-related processes in the brain. After a reasonably stringent search for publications on the National Library of Medicine’s database, PubMed, I came up with a pair of recent articles using 2 different techniques with 2 very different results.

The first of these was “Using Neuroimaging to Resolve the Psi Debate” by Samuel T. Molton and Stephen M. Kosslyn.1 These researchers utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to search for activity in the brains of pairs of biologically or emotionally related participants. The participants were shown emotional stimuli while in separate rooms with one participant acting as a “sender” and another playing the role of “receiver” while monitored by fMRI. According to Moulton and Kosslyn, “psi stimuli and non-psi stimuli evoked indistinguishable neuronal responses – although differences in stimulus arousal values of the same stimuli had the expected effects on patterns of brain activation.” In other words, the investigators found no evidence in support of psi using this method.

The second paper was “The Transliminal Brain at Rest: Baseline EEG, Unusual Experiences, and Access to Unconscious Mental Activity” by Jessica I. Fleck and colleagues. In order to understand this one better, I needed to look up the definition of transliminality which is, “a reflection of individual differences in the threshold at which unconscious processes or external stimuli enter into consciousness.” Among the characteristics reported for people high in transliminality are 1) belief in the paranormal and 2) reported occurrences of mystic experiences. While not examining psychic functioning directly, the investigators used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the resting brain activity of individuals reportedly high or low in transliminality. The study revealed significant differences in 3 areas: the left posterior association cortex, the right superior temporal region, and the frontal-midline region. Aside from the similarities to schizotypy, this study demonstrates some fundamental functional/processing differences in the brains of individuals more open to the idea of the paranormal.

Of course neither of the above papers is an end result in and of itself with respect to the question of whether psi exists and where in the human brain it can be found. What they do serve to illustrate is the pronounced challenges and complexities inherent in investigating these phenomena. The methods and the choices of subjects for each study leave some questions unanswered. Were any of the participants in either study self-professed psychics? Why fMRI as opposed to diffusion weighted or diffusion tensor imaging? Would a 3-tesla magnet or an EEG monitor be expected to interfere with psi activity or reception? Would magnetoencephalography (MEG) provide better resolution that EEG?

Questions notwithstanding, these studies represent an encouraging effort in legitimate scientific research into psi. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about these 2 fascinating studies to obtain copies of the papers and have a read. Enjoy!



References

1. Molton ST, Kosslyn SM. Using neuroimaging to resolve the psi debate. J Cognitive Neurosci. 2008;20:182–192.

2. Fleck JI, Green DL, Stevenson JL, et al. The transliminal brain at rest: Baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity. Cortex. 2008;44:1353–1363.