Monday 26th May 2025 at 8pm: The healing project with the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre - Prof. Chris Roe

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REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT WILL CLOSE TWO HOURS BEFORE THE TALK IS DUE TO START. Join us for an enlightening talk on The healing project with the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre. From the speaker: There is a growing interest in complementary and alternative approaches to fostering health and well-being. These often draw on holistic, psycho-socio-spiritual models of health. Evidence from clinical trials suggests that some of these healing approaches can be effective, and there is growing interest in biofield understandings of wellness. However, this work does not yet reflect the central role of healing in Spiritualism; indeed, it tends to give a distorted view of what Spiritualism entails. Much of the work conducted to date is qualitative and observational, and there have been only a small number of formal experiments. The project described in this presentation is intended to address this omission and involves a randomised controlled trial that tests for noncontact healing effects. Healers who have completed the rigorous training offered by the Healing Trust have been recruited. Participants are in general good health and are required to continue with traditional medical treatments where appropriate. Participants have been recruited in collaboration with the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, Edinburgh. Two iterations are complete (N = 63) and a third will be completed in February 2025. In this presentation, I will reflect on the approaches taken by parapsychology to the scientific study of ‘paranormal’ claims, and speculate on how best to account for the observed findings in terms of an expanded worldview.

 Chris Roe holds a Chair in Psychology at the University of Northampton, UK. He is the International Affiliate for England of the Parapsychology Foundation and is a Vice-President of the Society for Psychical Research. Chris served as the Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher (2015-2021), Chair of the British Psychological Society Transpersonal Psychology Section (2015-2018), President of the Parapsychological Association (2015-2017), and President of the SPR (2018-2021). He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Parapsychology and is on the editorial board for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. His research interests are around understanding the nature of anomalous experiences and include research on the phenomenology of paranormal experience, particularly as it affects well-being, as well as experimental approaches to test claims for extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, particularly where they involve psychological factors. Recent research has been concerned with the relationship between altered states of consciousness and psychic experience, and phenomena associated with survival of bodily death, including near-death experiences, terminal lucidity episodes, after-death communications, and mediumship. He has published over 140 journal papers and book chapters and given over 250 talks and conference presentations. He received the Parapsychological Association’s Outstanding Contribution Award in 2014, an Outstanding Mentor Award in 2022, and the 2020 University of Northampton Diamond Research Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision. In 2024 he won the Linda G. O'Bryant Noetic Sciences Research Prize for a co-authored essay that evaluated theories of nonlocal consciousness. 

When
26th May, 2025 from  8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Contact
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