Discovery Lab Answers

Chris A. Roe, PhD is a professor of psychology at the University of Northampton and director of the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes (CSAPP). The sources retrieved for this question cover several distinct lines of work: ganzfeld-enhanced remote viewing, after-death communication (ADC) phenomenology, survival of consciousness, and personality correlates of psi. The sections below work through each dimension in turn.

Experiments

Precognitive remote viewing with and without ganzfeld stimulation. The most directly experimental line in the retrieved sources is a series of three controlled studies testing whether ganzfeld sensory attenuation improves performance on a precognitive remote viewing (RV) task ^[6]. Collaborators named in that paper include Callum E. Cooper, Laura Hickinbotham, Andrew Hodrien, Laurrie Kirkwood, and Hannah Martin, all at the University of Northampton. The series built from an earlier exploratory pilot (Roe & Flint, 2007, cited in ^[6]) that had suggested novice participants could describe a randomly selected target location in a ganzfeld context, but without a direct comparison condition. The three published experiments provided that comparison through a counterbalanced repeated-measures design.

After-death communication (ADC) phenomenology. Roe co-led a large multinational survey study examining spontaneous ADC experiences — perceived encounters with deceased individuals — collecting data across English, French, and Spanish in European, Latin American, and US populations ^[1][4]. Collaborators included Evelyn Elsaesser, Callum E. Cooper, David Lorimer, and Marjorie Woollacott. A German-language paper reporting findings from the same project appeared in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik ^[3]. A focused analysis of sensory modalities associated with ADC experiences (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory) was published in EXPLORE ^[4].

Survival of consciousness review. Roe, Cooper, Lorimer, and Elsaesser co-authored a critical evaluation of the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death, submitted to the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies ^[5]. This work reviewed mediumship, near-death experiences, ADC, and related phenomena, and included a model of “cold reading” developed by Roe and Roxburgh to benchmark against genuine mediumship effects.

Terminal lucidity. Roe was a co-author on a brief clinical report examining terminal lucidity — unexpectedly enhanced mental clarity shortly before death — in a pediatric oncology setting ^[2]. The paper proposed systematic investigation protocols and noted the potential for neurobiological data collection in that setting.

Personality and individual differences. The retrieved ESP-Nexus pages describe a separate research program examining how traits such as extraversion, openness to experience, anxiety, lability, and schizotypy relate to psi performance and paranormal belief, spanning approximately two decades of psychometric work. The numbered sources retrieved for this question do not contain the primary papers from that program, so figures from it are not reported here.

Methodology

The three-experiment remote viewing series ^[6] used a counterbalanced repeated-measures design in which each participant completed a precognitive remote viewing task under both ganzfeld stimulation and standard waking conditions, allowing within-subject comparison. The primary outcome measure was the rank assigned to the actual target location by an independent judge, who ranked all possible target locations (target plus decoys) against each participant’s mentation without knowing which was correct. Effect size was calculated as z/√n. Hypotheses regarding individual differences (creativity, practice, dissociative tendencies) were pre-specified and all analyses were set as two-tailed. The design was explicitly constructed to produce effect size estimates suitable for cumulative synthesis across the three experiments.

The ADC survey ^[1][4] was a self-report questionnaire study, not a controlled laboratory experiment. Data were collected online between February 2018 and January 2020. The study design and data collection were carried out by Elsaesser, Roe, and Cooper at the University of Northampton, with Lorimer as advisor ^[4]. The instrument captured phenomenological details (sensory modality, perceived location of experience, information transfer) and before/after measures of spirituality and religiosity. A chi-square methodology was used to test whether self-reported spirituality and religiosity changed following ADC experiences, using pre-ADC responses as expected values and post-ADC responses as observed.

The survival review ^[5] was a critical synthesis rather than an original empirical study, evaluating existing evidence across multiple anomalous experience domains. It included an explicit analytical framework distinguishing “true cold reading” from “warm reading” as an alternative explanation for apparent mediumship effects.

Data

Precognitive remote viewing, ganzfeld vs. waking condition ^[6]. Across the three experiments combined, 110 participants completed the task. In the ganzfeld stimulation condition, participants achieved 43 hits (39%), producing a highly significant positive deviation from chance (sum of ranks = 225, p = .000012). In the waking remote viewing condition, they achieved 30 hits (27.5%), which was marginally above chance expectation (sum of ranks = 253, p = .034). The difference in z-scores between the two conditions approached but did not reach conventional significance thresholds. When the direct hit rate (first-place rank for the target) is examined, the ganzfeld condition produced 35% (binomial p = .10) and the waking condition produced 30% (binomial p = .29) — neither deviated significantly from mean chance expectation of 25% on that particular metric. This metric-level distinction is important: the primary rank-sum analysis showed a significant ganzfeld effect; the direct hit rate analysis did not.

ADC phenomenology ^[4]. The sensory analysis found that among participants reporting visual ADC experiences, 44% reported auditory experiences, 48% reported tactile experiences, and 28% reported olfactory experiences, with 34% reporting a sense of presence without conventional sensory input. In response to a question about information transfer, 24% of respondents (236 persons) reported receiving information previously unknown to them.

Spirituality and religiosity following ADC ^[1]. Using the chi-square methodology described above, spirituality changed significantly following ADC experiences [χ²(4, N = 70) = 32.55, p < .001], while religiosity did not [χ²(4, N = 70) = 14.78, p = .080].

The retrieved sources do not contain quantitative outcomes from the personality and individual differences program, the terminal lucidity report ^[2], or the survival review ^[5] in a form that allows full tabulation here; readers should consult those sources directly.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. The survival review ^[5] itself engages the “super-psi” hypothesis as an alternative to survival — the position that apparent evidence for post-mortem communication could reflect living-agent psi of unusual scope rather than continued existence of a deceased consciousness. The paper also presents the cold-reading model developed by Roe and Roxburgh as a benchmark alternative explanation for mediumship results, distinguishing “true cold reading” from “warm reading” based on specialist pseudo-psychic literature ^[5]. These are structural critiques of the entire survival evidence base rather than critiques directed at Roe’s specific studies.

What the experimental data show. On the remote viewing series, the data show a significant effect on the primary rank-sum measure in the ganzfeld condition but no significant effect on the direct hit rate measure in either condition ^[6]. The difference between ganzfeld and waking conditions approached but did not reach significance, meaning the evidence for ganzfeld as a specific enhancer — rather than a general facilitative context — is not definitively established by the three-experiment series alone. The ADC survey was self-report and non-experimental; the paper explicitly acknowledges that it cannot test the veracity of participants’ stated experiences ^[4].

Analysis. The remote viewing series was designed to provide cumulative effect size estimates across three experiments, and the primary measure produced a significant result, but the discrepancy between the rank-sum outcome and the direct hit rate outcome leaves open the question of which metric best captures the hypothesized effect. Independent replication of the three-experiment series outside the University of Northampton group has not been documented in the sources retrieved for this question. The ADC survey’s self-report design is acknowledged by the authors themselves as limiting causal inference, and the 24% figure for previously-unknown information transfer rests on participant self-assessment without independent verification ^[4].

For a fuller view of Roe’s research program, the Chris A. Roe, PhD scientist hub and the spoke page on ganzfeld and remote viewing protocols carry the site’s curated synthesis across his full body of work.