JOHN A. PALMER, Ph.D.

John A. Palmer graduated from Duke University with an undergraduate degree in psychology and received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Texas. After spending two years on the psychology faculty at McGill University, he entered parapsychology on a full-time basis. In addition to heading the graduate program in parapsychology at John F. Kennedy University from 1977-1981, he has held research positions at the University of Virginia, University of California at Davis, and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Until last year he was Director of Research at the Rhine Research Center, where he also administered their Summer Study Program. He is currently Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Zürich in Switzerland. Dr. Palmer is editor of the Journal of Parapsychology and was President of the Parapsychological Association in 1977 and 1986.
He is author of over 100 scientific articles and book chapters, and is co-author of the book Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capability

Must You Have Psychic Experience to Have Psi?

It has traditionally been assumed that in laboratory tests of psychic functioning,the results are due to the person being tested consciously and intentionally using their psi ability in the task,suggesting that this is the only way psi can function. However, we know that in everyday life, people's ESP experiences, most often do not arise from their intention to have such an experience; the experience just happens. There is also a sub-class of psi events in everyday life where the person not only does not intend to have a psi experience, but has no conscious experience of psi at all and is unaware that psi is occurring.In recent years, such unintentional and unconscious psi events,
( “implicit psi"), have also been found in the laboratory, and some of this research will be reviewed in the presentation as well as the problem of "experimenter psi".