Along supernatural byways

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33579, 6 July 1974, Page 10

Along supernatural byways

Supernature: The Natural History ot the Supernatural. By Lyall Watson. Hodder and Stoughton. 347 pp. (Reviewed by R.A.M.G.) There is a current fashion for what some have called anti-science; telling the reader in the same breath that there are interesting and unusual facts which are proved to be so, but are inexplicable by modem science, and reminding us that science has its limitations. In this style, any catalogue of the unusual, presented by someone with the right academic qualifications, sells well.

Dr Watson is a biologist with a flair for marketing the offbeat, and takes us galloping but entertained through cosmos, matter, mind and time, including many terse summaries of the usual psychic topics such as palmistry, telepathy and clairvoyance, on the way. He performs a useful service by showing that even in the oddest byways there are often some established results which can be disentangled from much older superstitions, and then seems to mix them up again by invoking his air of mystery.

The whole exercise is impressive at a glance, and exasperating on closer examination. Dr Watson mixes, under some grandiose chapter headings, reports of behaviour in man and animals which is not inexplicable at all but merely unfamiliar to the lay reader, with other reports about human extrasensory powers which are not based on the same quality of corroborated evidence and which are not necessarily related pheno mena.

We are told from the. start that Dr Watson is going to be scientific and honest, and give us the documentation. He does, but the references vary from original source material to popular accounts which are themselves at least third-hand. In these twilight regions between the transient and elusive byways of human skills and sensitivities on the one hand, and plain folklore on the other, what the reader needs is not an unending series of references, but standards to sort out the rubbish from what might be worth pursuing.

There is a common feature to many of the stranger experiments

described by Dr Watson, which deserves comment and does not get it from him. The researchers are often people trained in the physical sciences and making excursions into the measurement of human sensation, perception and memory. They are rarely psychologists or physiologists, who today conduct by far the greater number of experiments on man and his sensory capacities. Because human psychology is not an easy area in which to experiment, there are many precautions to be taken when conducting experiments in order to get results which are replicable and are capable of being interpreted unequivocally. This detail makes for dull reading and for what looks like nit picking even if it is done well, but it is precisely what gets sacrificed in a racy effusion such as Dr Watson’s.

Let us take an example to show how the detail gets lost. Dr Watson starts by disarming the reader in his rationale, when he admits that evidence exists that Rosa Kuleshova, a Russian woman who can “read” colours blindfold by running her singer tips over the colours to be identified, had cheated. He

then points out, very properly, that it is unscientific to assert that because she once pecked under her blindfold, she must always have cheated It is indeed unscientific to assert this; just as unscientific as to assert that she had extrasensory powers beyond the usual senses. The point is that source material, showing that Rosa could read by heat conduction through her fingertips, exist. Dr Watson dors not cite this, just as he does not make it clear to the reader that man has more than five senses.

It is commonplace to study at least 11 senses in the psychological laboratory, without any reference to supemature. There are naturally huge variations in personal sensitivity in some of the senses, so that very sensitive people, like very tall people, do occur but are rare.

This does not make them supernatural, but only after we have come to terms with this fundamental inequality in our endowments can we put Dr Watson into perspective. He asks the reader to have a sense of wonder, but he is so cheerfully uncritical that we can only wonder about his sense.