First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life

FIRST SIGHT: ESP AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE by James C. Carpenter. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Pp. xii + 487. $39.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4422-1390-6. The progression of ideas in every scientific field is periodically stimulated by a seminal book or article that propels the field forward in important ways. Some such work takes stock of where the field stands at the present time by reviewing and integrating its core knowledge and pointing the way toward new questions and unresolved issues. Other seminal contributions offer novel theoretical perspectives that shift the ways in which researchers conceptualize and explain key phenomena. Still other work influences the field by demonstrating interdisciplinary connections with theory and research from other areas of investigation. First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life does all of these and, in doing so, is destined to emerge as a centrally important contribution to parapsychology. The book is undergirded by two assumptions that differ from the way in which psi has typically been viewed by both parapsychologists and the public. The first is that, rather than being an anomalous phenomenon that is experienced at particular times by only certain people with special abilities, psi involves universal, ongoing processes that are always active. The name that Carpenter gives his theoretical perspective--"first sight"--is intended to highlight the fundamental, ongoing nature of psi and to stand in contrast to the folk characterization of psychic experience as "second sight." Rather than being an occasional occurrence that supplements ordinary conscious experience, Carpenter argues that psi operates continuously. The second assumption is that psi shares many similarities with the nonconscious processes that have drawn considerable attention from cognitive and social psychologists over the last decade. Carpenter proposes that, like nonconscious processes that detect and process the ongoing stream of stimuli that lie below the limits of conscious awareness, psi processes similarly scan the environment for information of which people are not consciously aware. In his view, human consciousness extends beyond the physical body so that information that is distant in space and time can be detected, producing the array of phenomena that fall under the umbrella of parapsychology. Once detected, such information may influence people's feelings, motives, inferences, preferences, and thoughts, just as nonconscious processes do. And, like the effects of nonconscious processes, psi does not usually manifest in the form of coherent conscious thoughts but rather as fleeting feelings, urges, images, and other isolated pieces of information. After describing his conceptualization of psi, Carpenter offers detailed explanations regarding how he believes the processes operate. The exposition of the First Sight perspective and its corollaries is purposefully formal and detailed in chapter 2. As a result, the reader confronts 17 pages of relatively dense material that may initially lead some to wonder whether the remainder of the book will be equally slow-going. (At this point, I thumbed forward to see whether the readability improved later, which it did.) I pondered whether Carpenter could have presented this core theoretical material in a more accessible and reader-friendly fashion but decided that he could not. A formal theory--whether of psi or any other phenomenon--must necessarily be complete, explicit, and clear, and Carpenter should be commended for the care and precision with which he laid out the theory's core principles. In any case, readers should not be deterred. Once they get through chapter 2, the rest is smooth sailing. Throughout the rest of the book, Carpenter guides us through the terrain of parapsychology by examining its connections with memory, creativity, fear, personality and attitude variables of various kinds, experimenter effects, and real-life psychic experience. …