Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question touch on Shari Cohn Simmen (also published as Shari A. Cohn-Simmen) in a few distinct contexts. The ESP-Nexus profile page exists at Shari Cohn Simmen but is currently a placeholder pending a full content pass, so what follows draws on the numbered sources rather than that page.

Research focus: second sight in the Scottish Highlands

The clearest picture of her experimental and fieldwork program comes from ^[2] and ^[4].

Her core research, conducted through the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh, involved interviewing family groups within Scottish Highland communities to investigate whether “second sight” experiences show distinctive cultural or genetic patterns within family units ^[2]. Robert Morris (1990) described three interlocking aims of this work ^[2]:

• Sociological/anthropological framing — understanding the function of second sight experiences within those cultural systems, rather than treating them as anomalies to be debunked or confirmed in isolation.
• Genetic and family-unit patterning — looking for clustering within family lines, which would bear on whether the ability has a heritable component.
• Methodological rigor — a major portion of the work involved interviewing informants in depth and then reducing the transcript data into theoretically usable form, so that it could be linked to broader models ^[2]. Morris flagged this data-reduction work explicitly as a contribution to parapsychological methodology.

In the edited volume on parapsychology ^[4], Cohn-Simmen contributed Chapter 6: “Second Sight”, described as covering a special psychic ability believed to be an inborn natural faculty of mind — for some understood as a spiritual gift. The chapter is listed under “Paranormal cognition” ^[4], placing the work within the broader ESP research tradition rather than as purely folkloric study.

Nature of the evidence base

The work Morris describes ^[2] is qualitative and interview-based rather than laboratory experimental. It sits closer to the survey/phenomenological end of parapsychology research — collecting first-person accounts, coding them from transcripts, and analyzing patterns across family lines and within a specific cultural tradition. The retrieved sources do not contain quantitative trial data (hit rates, effect sizes, p-values) from controlled forced-choice or free-response experiments attributed to her.

The reference in ^[3] to a “Shari C’s experience” in an out-of-body experience database is a coincidence of first name only and does not refer to the researcher.

Contributor role in the broader literature

Cohn-Simmen is listed as a named contributor — alongside figures such as Susan Blackmore, Stanley Krippner, Alan Gauld, and others — to the Jane Henry-edited parapsychology volume ^[4], specifically as author of the second sight chapter. This places her as a subject-matter specialist on that phenomenon within the academic parapsychology literature of the 1990s.

What the retrieved sources do not cover

The excerpts available do not include:

• Any quantitative experimental results from her fieldwork (sample sizes, coding reliability statistics, or distributional findings from the family-group interviews).
• Any published follow-up studies or replication work building on the Highland second sight project.
• Details of her later career or institutional affiliations beyond the Edinburgh connection implied by the Morris (1990) context.

If those figures exist in the underlying papers, they are not present in the retrieved excerpts — the source documents themselves would need to be consulted for the primary data.

Skeptical critiques

^[2] raises a standing methodological concern relevant to qualitative fieldwork of this kind: the question of whether non-parapsychologists encounter psi-relevant results in their own work, and why positive evidence does not appear more broadly outside parapsychology labs. Morris frames this as a challenge the field must address rather than evidence against psi per se. Specifically for interview-based second sight research, the challenge is that cultural transmission, expectation, and selective memory of experiences could account for clustering within family units without requiring a heritable psychic faculty — a confound that quantitative coding from transcripts helps address but does not fully resolve. The retrieved sources do not contain a published critic’s specific reanalysis of Cohn-Simmen’s data; the methodological concern is raised in general terms by Morris ^[2].

For fuller coverage once the page is complete, the Shari Cohn Simmen page at ESP-Nexus is the place to check.