The Science of Weird Shit | Chris French

This presentation will provide an overview of anomalistic psychology, focussing particularly on the work of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. If the wider scientific community is right to be skeptical regarding paranormal claims, why do so many people believe in the paranormal, including a sizeable minority that claim to have had direct personal experience of paranormal phenomena? Anomalistic psychology attempts to address this issue by proposing alternative non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences. Factors such as the unreliability of memory, hallucinatory experiences, and a range of cognitive biases are discussed.