Psi Phenomena: Some Recent Evidence
Useful resources for parapsychology beginners!
My book What Lies Beyond is partly an introduction to and discussion of the evidence for psi or ‘psychic’ phenomena (See chapters 4 and 5 especially). One aim of my book was to persuade interested members of the public, and maybe scientists, that parapsychology was more than just ‘woowoo’ or ‘pseudoscience’. However, for obvious practical reasons, the discussion of well over a century of research and controversy had to be fairly brief.
So I thought that it might be beneficial to provide a list of resources for people who want to take a ‘deeper dive’ into the evidence for psi. Here, I’m focussing on lab evidence and papers from the last decade or so.
One thing that I would say first is that it’s crucial to take the counter-arguments of informed skeptics seriously. I would especially recommend the works of Chris French, whom I interviewed earlier this year. He has himself performed psi experiments (and mostly got null results). His book The Science of Weird Sh*t is an important statement from the skeptical perspective. His exchange with Chris Roe at the British Psychological Society is also well worth reading. This exchange demonstrates two contrasting views on the current status of evidence for psi.
The skeptical ‘trump card’ is the failure of experimental replication. This is essentially where one set of scientists gets positive results but others don’t. French himself underlines the failures of replication for one particular experimental paradigm, the ‘feeling the future’ precognitive priming experiments. And this has been conceded by researchers in parapsychology. Etzel Cardeña in his 2025 paper discussing the latest evidence for psi admits that “The only paradigm that seems to have had mostly lack of or at best mixed recent replications is that of precognitive priming” (Cardeña, 2025; paper linked below).
However, Cardeña also says that “overall experimental work across time and research paradigms has continued to support the reality of psi phenomena”. (Cardeña, 2025).
RESOURCES
I’ll start the resource list with some books:
Colborn, M.L.C. (2025). What Lies Beyond: Consciousness, Science, the Paranormal, and the Post-Material Future. Essentia Books
Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I :-)?!
Chapter 4 looks at the significance of psychic experience, and chapter 5 discusses some of the lab evidence.
Watt, C. (2016). Parapsychology: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides). Oneworld Publications.
A good, critical summary for beginners of work in parapsychology and anomalistic psychology.
Cardeña, E., Palmer, J. & Marcusson-Clavertz, D. (Eds). (2015). Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. McFarland & Co.
This is a mammoth work with contributions from many leading researchers in the field.
Vernon, D. (2020). Dark Cognition: Evidence for Psi and its Implications for Consciousness. Routledge.
Written as a textbook, with study questions at the end of each chapter. A useful, more or less up to date summary and discussion of work in parapsychology.
In what follows, I’m going to present an annotated list of papers that summarise the evidence for psi phenomena.
The Papers: Overall Evidence & Controversies
Cardeña, E. (2018). The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. American Psychologist, 73(5), 663–677. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000236
This 2018 paper in a leading US psychology journal summarises cumulative lab evidence for psi. This was via a technique called meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is an examination of data from a number of independent studies of the same subject, in order to determine overall trends.
Cardeña’s modest conclusion was that that effect sizes were replicated across a number of experimental studies. He said that “The positive case for psi…should not be overstated because our knowledge of it is far from satisfactory and scientific conclusions are tentative”. (Cardeña, 2018, p. 673).
However, even this was fiercely contested by skeptics. The following is a response paper written by Arthur Reber and James Alcock:
Reber, A. S., & Alcock, J. E. (2020). Searching for the impossible: Parapsychology’s elusive quest. American Psychologist, 75(3), 391–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000486
Reber & Alcock’s paper, and others, were discussed in the December 2019 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. This includes a rebuttal by Cardena:
Cardeña, E. (2019). “The Data Are Irrelevant”: Response to Reber and Alcock (2019). Journal of Scientific Exploration 33(4), 593–598.
Cardeña provides an updated (2025) summary of the experimental evidence for psi in the following paper:
Cardeña, E. (2025). What psi research can – and cannot – say about “mind beyond the brain.” International Review of Psychiatry, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2025.2466485
Other Recent Meta-Analyses
The researcher Patrizio Tressoldi and colleagues has produced a number of important meta-analyses that summarise the evidence for various experimental psi paradigms. Here is a link to his research papers on ‘nonlocal perception’. I’ll highlight a couple.
Tressoldi PE and Storm L. (2024). Stage 2 Registered Report: Anomalous perception in a Ganzfeld condition - A meta-analysis of more than 40 years of investigation [version 4; peer review: 2 approved, 1 not approved]. F1000Research 2024, 10:234 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.51746.4)
Important summary of a ‘flagship’ paradigm of parapsychology: the Ganzfeld. Cardeña (2018, p. 668) stated that “Research on ganzfeld has been meta-analyzed repeatedly and is the most consistently supportive database for psi of the last few decades”. The 2024 paper by Tressoldi & Storm confirmed replication and found that “selected participants’ effect size was almost three-times that obtained by non-selected participants”. (Tressoldi & Storm, 2024). This shows the importance of working with ‘talented’ individuals when testing for psi.
Tressoldi, P. & Katz, L. (2023). Remote Viewing: A 1974-2022 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Scientific Exploration 37(3), 467-489.
This paper summarises the evidence for the other consistent experimental psi paradigm: Remote Viewing. Their conclusion: “After more than 50 years of investigation into extrasensory perception, remote-viewing experimental protocols appear to be the most efficient for both experimental and practical applications”. Tressoldi & Katz, p 467).
This should be more than enough to get you started! But work in parapsychology is ongoing, like any other science. Anyone who wishes to take this further should consider joining the Society for Psychical Research in the UK which has an online Psi Encyclopedia or the Parapsychological Association in the US. The Society for Scientific Exploration’s Journal also provides an important platform for psi research, and lively discussion of controversies in parapsychology. Also check out the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Dean Radin’s pdf library of recommended references on psi. Finally, Patrizio Tressoldi’s website has a page listing the best updated empirical and theoretical evidence for psi.