The Parapsychology Foundation is pleased to announce the 2007 recipient of the PF’s post-doctoral fellowship which was named for our co-founder, Frances P. Bolton. The recipient of the Frances P. Bolton Fellowship for the year 2007 is Dr. Lance Storm. Dr. Storm received the Laurence T. Schneider Prize in Art History and Theories from the University of Adelaide in Australia in 1995, his B.A. with honors in psychology from the same university in 1998, and his Ph.D., also from Adelaide, in 2002. His dissertation is called “A Parapsychological Investigation of the Theory of Psychopraxia: Experimental and Theoretical Researches into an Alternative Theory Explaining Normal and Paranormal Phenomena.” He has published dozens of articles in such prestigious journals as Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Parapsychology, Journal of Scientific Exploration, and the Jungian journal Quadrant since 1999. A full member of the Parapsychological Association, and the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, Inc. (AIPR), he is also the current editor of and a frequent contributor to the AIPR’s journal, the Australian Journal of Parapsychology. He is co-recipient with Dr. Michael A. Thalbourne, of the D. Scott Rogo Award for Literature for 2002, and in 2003, he was awarded the Gertrude R. Schmeidler Student of the Year Award from the Parapsychological Association. As a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Dr. Storm regularly conducts parapsychological research at the School of Psychology where he assisted his colleague Dr. Thalbourne in establishing an Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. In 2006, Storm launched two online courses in parapsychology for the AIPR’s website. Besides his parapsychological career interests, his other academic interests include the psychology of motivation, emotion, perception, and personality. Storm is also interested in Jung’s concept of synchronicity, and is currently preparing an anthology of articles on synchronicity dating back to 1969, which will be published in 2008. Storm’s other interests include writing, reading, film studies, bushwalking and travel. As a keen traveller, he has seen much of Australia, and he has spent time in the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Bali, Hong Kong, Singapore, Portugal, and Ukraine. He has also written a nonfiction novel, Ukrainian Nights, edited two anthologies with Dr. Thalbourne, Parapsychology in the Twenty-First Century published in 2005 and The Survival of Human Consciousness published in 2006, and has a book in press, The Enigma of Numbers. For his dissertation, Dr. Storm conducted a series of four experiments to test Michael A. Thalbourne’s theory of psychopraxia, which is an attempt to unify both normal and paranormal psychology, and motor action and cognition, so that the conceptual distinction between (i) ESP and PK, and (ii) normal information-acquisition and normal motor control might be eliminated. The theory states that psi is effected once various conditions are met, including a pro attitude for an effect, plus various necessary conditions, that bring about a psi goal. The I Ching was used as a means of eliciting psi that could either be induced through ESP or PK. Forced-choice tasks were conducted to see if pro attitudes could change and/or were affected by contradictory pro attitudes. A free-response study was conducted to see whether psychic ability compensated for vision-impairment in keeping with the theory that normal and paranormal effects were not distinct phenomena. Significant psi effects were found in all four experiments, thus supporting psychopraxia theory to some degree. As part of his continued research to be funded by the Bolton Fellowship, Dr. Storm will follow a step-wise methodology designed to elicit stronger paranormal effects within subgroups taken from various samples used in the above experiments. Sheep-goat data from three experients will be analysed from an unorthodox and usually ignored perspective that recognizes not two types of participant in psi experimentation (i.e., sheep and goats), but three types, resulting from what Tony Lawrence calls a three-way split (the third group, indecisives, are hypothesized to be even more successful at psi hitting than sheep). Storm will also re-analyze data from his gambling experiment to determine if intuition and belief in good luck interact and predict psi. Finally, a qualitative analysis will be conducted on the transcripts of the mentations given by participants in the vision-impaired experiment. The content of the mentations, originally used merely as guidelines for participants to help with the rating of four concealed pictures, will be qualitatively analysed using the NVivo program to see if the text contains indications (patterns, imagery, themes, etc.) that might suggest a reason for the scoring differential between various sub-groups: (i) hitters and missers, and (ii) vision-impaired and sighted participants. Over 18,000 words of transcript text will be analyzed. Results from these studies will be submitted for publication to the International Journal of Parapsychology once completed. Congratulations to Dr. Storm from the Foundation!

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