Overview

Taylor’s work sits at the intersection of sports psychology and parapsychology. His central question was whether the mental skills athletes develop through imagery training — skills already shown to improve athletic performance — might also enhance their ability to influence random physical systems. This made his research unusual in the field: rather than recruiting volunteers from a psychology subject pool, he went to gymnastic halls and shooting ranges, set up portable computer equipment, and ran experiments during athletes’ normal training sessions.^[1]

His PhD, completed at the University of Edinburgh under Robert Morris, examined this question across two experiments. The results were modest and the statistical power was low by design — a deliberate trade-off Taylor made to work with committed, ecologically embedded participants rather than larger but less motivated samples. He regarded the studies as exploratory indicators rather than definitive tests.^[1][2]

Life and career

Taylor’s interest in parapsychology began in childhood, shaped by his mother’s curiosity about experiences that resisted conventional explanation. He started his undergraduate studies in zoology at Dundee University, where an interest in animal behaviour and comparative psychology developed alongside his parapsychological curiosity. Learning that a new parapsychology unit was being established at the University of Edinburgh, he contacted Robert Morris and joined the Koestler Parapsychology Unit as an intern before formally enrolling as a researcher.^[2]

At Edinburgh, Taylor was part of the same cohort as Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt, and overlapped with Julie Milton and Deborah Delanoy, who had recently completed their own PhDs. He describes the KPU’s early years as intellectually lively, shaped by Morris’s insistence that rigorous scepticism and openness to anomalous phenomena were compatible rather than opposed.^[2]

His PhD examined imagery training and PK performance with athlete populations. The external examiner for his viva was David Marks, a prominent imagery researcher and sceptic of parapsychology — a combination Morris apparently welcomed as a test of the work’s methodological robustness. Taylor completed the degree successfully.^[2]

Taylor moved to Fiji in 1994, taking up a lectureship at the University of the South Pacific — one of two regional universities serving multiple Pacific Island nations. He completed three three-year contracts there. The institution’s heavy teaching load and the strong Christian cultural context, in which parapsychology was sometimes viewed with suspicion, made sustained laboratory research difficult. He eventually left the university and shifted his professional focus to education, founding and working in a primary and secondary school. He has described his parapsychology research as paused rather than abandoned, and continues informal contact with researchers including Dean Radin, Rick Berger, Deborah Delanoy, Kathy Dalton, and Jessica Utts.^[2][3]

Research

Imagery training and psychokinesis

Taylor’s most substantial published experimental work asked whether training athletes in mental imagery — a technique already used in sports psychology to improve performance — would also improve their scores on RNG-based PK tasks. The logic drew on two theoretical frameworks: the “two-stage model” of psi, which proposes that conscious imagery mediates between unconscious psi processes and awareness, and Braud’s “lability hypothesis,” which suggests that a vivid, stable mental image of a desired outcome may interact with labile physical systems. Both frameworks predict that better imagery should produce better PK.^[1]

The results across both experiments pointed in the predicted direction but were not statistically significant at conventional thresholds. The group receiving more imagery training scored higher on PK tasks than the control group in both studies, though the effect was considerably larger in the gymnast study than in the shooting study. The most robust finding was a significant positive correlation between how often gymnasts completed their homework exercises and their overall PK scores — a pattern that replicated findings from earlier work by George (1982) and Braud (1983). Taylor noted that this correlation held even for the placebo (non-imagery) exercises, suggesting that motivation or general engagement with the training programme, rather than imagery skill specifically, may be the active ingredient.^[1]

Automated ganzfeld security and DMILS replication

As a post-doctoral researcher at the KPU, Taylor contributed to two collaborative projects that addressed methodological concerns in the field. The security audit of the Edinburgh automated ganzfeld system — published with Dalton, Morris, Delanoy, Radin, and Wiseman — documented the safeguards built into the KPU’s system to prevent sensory leakage and experimenter bias, responding to criticisms that had been levelled at earlier ganzfeld work. Separately, Taylor was a co-author on a pilot replication of remote mental influence on electrodermal activity, led by Dean Radin and including William Braud, published in the European Journal of Parapsychology.^[4][6][5]

Theoretical work on evolutionary models of psi

Taylor published a theoretical paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research reviewing and revising need-serving models of psychic functioning from an evolutionary standpoint. The paper extended the PMIR (psi-mediated instrumental response) framework developed by Rex Stanford, proposing a revised model grounded in evolutionary theory.^[5][7]

Key quantitative findings

A machine-readable summary of headline results from this researcher’s landmark papers, extracted from the source articles into ESP-Nexus’s structured study database. It reports what each study found; ESP-Nexus does not assess whether the effects are genuine.

Skeptical Critiques and Discussion

Influence and reception

Taylor’s 1996 European Journal of Parapsychology paper is cited in standard reference works in the field, including the fifth edition of An Introduction to Parapsychology and Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. His contribution to the Edinburgh automated ganzfeld security paper has been cited in multiple meta-analyses and handbook chapters as part of the methodological record of the KPU’s ganzfeld programme.^[4][5][6]

Taylor contributed a chapter on imagery in parapsychological experiences to the edited volume Parapsychology: Research on Exceptional Experiences (Henry, 2005), placing his work in the context of the broader literature on imagery and psi.^[3]

His career trajectory — from laboratory parapsychology to education and community work in the Pacific — is unusual in the field. In a 2024 interview for New Thinking Allowed, Taylor reflected on the importance of psychological environment in psi research, arguing that the KPU’s early ganzfeld work succeeded in part because of the care taken to prepare participants, and that subsequent researchers who rushed to accumulate trials without attending to that preparation saw weaker results. He has expressed the view that the field has not advanced as much as it might have in the decades since he was active, both in ganzfeld methodology and in sports psychology’s engagement with peak experience.^[2]