Discovery Lab Answers

Robin K. Taylor is a parapsychologist and psychologist whose career has spanned the UK, Fiji, and beyond. Here is what the retrieved sources establish about him.

Training and Institutional Background

Taylor completed his PhD at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU), University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Robert L. Morris. His time at the KPU placed him alongside a cohort that would become a significant part of the contemporary UK parapsychology research community — including Deborah L. Delanoy, Kathy Dalton, Richard Wiseman, and Caroline Watt.

Research Focus: Imagery Training 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 ^[3]. This line of work engaged with earlier findings by George (1982) and Braud (1983) on the imagery–psi link. Key findings from the published work ^[3] include:

• Results raised the possibility that motivation, rather than imagery skill per se, may be the operative factor driving any observed effect.
• Changes in self-reported visual imagery ability over the training period correlated significantly with PK scores in the shooting study, partially replicating a finding from Braud (1983).

The two experiments were conducted at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji — where Taylor was based at the time of publication in 1996 ^[3].

Remote Mental Influence Study

Taylor was a co-author on a pilot replication of remote mental influence on human electrodermal activity, published in the European Journal of Parapsychology ^[4]. The other co-authors on that paper were Dean I. Radin (then at the University of Edinburgh; later University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and William G. Braud (Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) ^[4]. The study tested the hypothesis that mental intention can influence a remote living system’s electrodermal responses.

Automated Ganzfeld Security Audit

Taylor co-authored a security audit of the Edinburgh automated ganzfeld system, published in the Journal of Parapsychology [4 — per the page synthesis]. That paper, also co-authored with Kathy Dalton, Robert Morris, Dean Radin, and Richard Wiseman, described the Edinburgh system’s countermeasures against three artifact classes — particularly sensory leakage — and offered recommendations for future automated ganzfeld work. It was part of the KPU’s broader effort to address methodological criticisms of earlier ganzfeld research.

Later Career and Writing

By the time of his 1996 publication, Taylor was affiliated with the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji ^[3][4]. He later founded or became associated with Oceanik Psi (contact: robin@oceanikpsi.org), under which byline he contributed a book review of K. Ramakrishna Rao’s Elements of Parapsychology to the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2018 ^[2]. He also appeared in a 2024 interview for the New Thinking Allowed series (guest-hosted by Dr. Debra Lynn Katz), reflecting on his career from Edinburgh to Fiji ^[1].

His full profile is at Robin K. Taylor — ESP-Nexus.