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Nicola Holt
You鈥檙e sitting back with your eyes covered, blocking out the red light that illuminates the room. The white noise hissing in your ears further dulls your already deprived senses. Now your mind is open and ready to receive the telepathic message your friend is sending you from the next room.
This doesn鈥檛 sound like a typical scientific experiment, but Nicola Holt isn鈥檛 an ordinary scientist. She specialises in parapsychology, anomalous experiences and the role of altered states of consciousness in creativity. The above experiment was part of a post-doc research project, the results of which showed that people could pick out the message their friend was trying to send, out of four options available, significantly more often than would occur by chance.
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鈥淚鈥檝e always been quite sceptical, but at the same time I鈥檝e always been interested in the idea that there are other modes of cognition than we typically experience in everyday life,鈥� says Nicola. 鈥淭his result wasn鈥檛 enough to convince me that telepathy is a real phenomenon, but it was enough for me to think that this warranted more research.鈥�
So just what is an anomalous experience? 鈥淭his can include meditative states, mystical experiences, paranormal experiences where someone might feel a telepathic connection with someone else, or lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences 鈥� anything out of the ordinary,鈥� Nicola explains. 鈥淢y job is to design experiments to explore the mechanisms behind such experiences and their implications for how our brain works.鈥�
It鈥檚 not easy working on the outer fringes of human consciousness, and since Nicola left the cosy bubble of her PhD department she has noticed that people in other psychology departments respond differently to what she does.
鈥淚t鈥檚 usually regarded either with scepticism or curiosity,鈥� she says. Nicola鈥檚 work is far from hocus pocus, however. From a clinical point of view, there is an interest in anomalous experiences as they could be symptomatic of an underlying disorder, such as schizophrenia.