Overview
At a recent Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) conference in Buffalo, psychologist and science writer Richard Wiseman made a case for an idea that often sits uneasily with mainstream research: science, he argued, should not automatically dismiss strange or fringe experiences. Instead, he suggested, unusual claims and anomalous observations can sometimes act as catalysts for serious inquiry, pushing researchers toward discoveries that might otherwise never have emerged. The talk, which came alongside a conversation with science writer Mary Roach, framed “weird” phenomena not as endpoints for belief, but as starting points for investigation.
Wiseman’s core point was that scientific progress has repeatedly been shaped by people who took unusual experiences seriously enough to study them systematically. In his view, the history of research shows that curiosity about the odd, the paranormal, and the unexplained can lead to tools and insights that benefit medicine, psychology, and the broader scientific enterprise. Rather than treating fringe ideas as inherently worthless, he argued, scientists should ask what can be learned by examining them carefully.
The Mind Machine
One of Wiseman’s examples was Hans Berger, the German scientist best known for inventing the electroencephalogram, or EEG. Berger’s path to that breakthrough began with an experience that sounded, at least at first, like telepathy. After Berger was thrown from his horse and nearly trampled during military service, his sister—miles away—reportedly felt a sudden and overwhelming sense that he was in danger. Berger became convinced that some kind of mental transmission had occurred, and he spent more than two decades trying to build a machine that could detect thoughts leaving the brain.
Although Berger never proved telepathy, his effort produced something far more enduring: the first EEG machine. That invention transformed neuroscience and medicine by giving researchers a way to measure brain activity in real time. Wiseman’s point was not that Berger validated paranormal claims, but that an apparent mystery motivated a line of work with extraordinary scientific value. In this case, a speculative idea became the foundation for one of the most important diagnostic tools in modern brain research.
The Haunted Wine Glass
Wiseman also pointed to Solomon Asch, whose landmark studies on conformity revealed how strongly people can be influenced by group pressure. Asch is famous for showing that participants would often give the wrong answer to an obvious question if others in the room did the same. What is less widely known is that he later described a childhood experience that helped shape his thinking. During a religious ceremony, adults told him that spirits would reveal themselves by drinking from a glass of wine. As a child, staring at the glass under intense suggestion, he believed he saw the liquid level drop.
For Wiseman, that kind of experience is relevant because it illustrates how perception can be shaped by expectation, authority, and social context—the very forces Asch later studied in the laboratory. The lesson is not that the paranormal was proven, but that strange experiences can inspire researchers to ask better questions about human behavior, belief, and perception. In that sense, the “haunted wine glass” became a doorway to one of psychology’s most influential research programs.
Why the Strange Matters
The broader argument extends beyond these historical examples. Wiseman said science should be more willing to examine phenomena that appear anomalous, strange, or even ridiculous at first glance. That perspective aligns with a wider tradition in which careful study of unusual reports has helped sharpen scientific methods rather than weaken them. It also echoes the view of novelist Robert Moss, who has written about dreams that seem to spill into waking reality—an idea that, whether interpreted literally or psychologically, reflects the enduring human impulse to search for meaning in unusual experience.
In the end, Wiseman’s message was a measured one: skepticism and openness are not opposites. Science advances, he suggested, when it resists both gullibility and dismissal. The strange may not always be true, but it can still be useful—if it inspires better questions, sharper experiments, and discoveries that reach far beyond the mystery that started it all.
