Discovery Lab Answers

Robin K. Taylor has made several documented contributions to the parapsychology research literature, spanning experimental psi research, methodology, and academic reviewing. His ESP-Nexus profile is at Robin K. Taylor.

Training, Imagery, and Psychokinesis

Taylor’s primary experimental work examined whether imagery training could improve psychokinesis (PK) performance, using athlete populations and sport-themed random number generator (RNG) tasks ^[2]. The rationale drew on earlier findings linking imagery ability to psi performance — notably work by George (1982) and Braud (1983). His two-experiment study found that changes in self-reported visual imagery ability over the training period correlated significantly with PK scores, partially replicating Braud (1983), while also raising the possibility that motivation, rather than imagery skill as such, drives the effect ^[2]. That interpretive ambiguity is an honest limitation the work itself surfaces.

DMILS Pilot Replication

Taylor was a co-author, alongside Dean Radin and William Braud, on a pilot replication of remote mental influence on human electrodermal activity (DMILS), published in the European Journal of Parapsychology ^[3]. The study tested whether a sender could influence a receiver’s electrodermal activity at a distance, and it represents Taylor’s contribution to one of the more methodologically active lines of psi research in the 1990s.

Ganzfeld Security Audit

During his time as a post-doctoral researcher at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU) at the University of Edinburgh — where he had completed his PhD under Robert Morris — Taylor was a co-author on a security audit of the Edinburgh automated ganzfeld system, published in the Journal of Parapsychology. That paper (Dalton, Morris, Delanoy, Radin, Taylor, and Wiseman, 1996) was part of the KPU’s systematic effort to address methodological criticisms of earlier ganzfeld research. He also contributed to generating new target materials for the automated ganzfeld system the KPU was developing during a period when Charles Honorton and Kathy Dalton had joined Edinburgh following the closure of Honorton’s program at Psychophysical Research Laboratories.

Book Review and Broader Engagement

Taylor has remained engaged with the field into more recent years, authoring a book review of K. Ramakrishna Rao’s Elements of Parapsychology in the Journal of Scientific Exploration ^[1], reflecting continued involvement in academic discourse about the field’s conceptual foundations.

Overall Assessment

Taylor’s contributions are methodologically focused and institutionally grounded in the KPU’s rigorous Edinburgh program. His most distinctive thread — using athlete populations to probe the imagery-psi link — addresses a specific theoretical question with a controlled design, and his co-authorship on the DMILS replication and the ganzfeld security audit places him within some of the field’s more carefully scrutinized experimental lines. The body of work is specialized rather than broad, but it engages substantive methodological questions rather than peripheral ones.