Brian Millar

Brian Millar

Millar was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947. He studied at Edinburgh University and in due course obtained B.Sc.(hons) and doctorate (Ph.D.) in chemistry. Millar was awarded the Perrott-Warwick studentship of Trinity College, Cambridge which enabled him to undertake pp research under the tutelage of Beloff in Edinburgh. This was followed by a stint at the University of Utrecht, Holland. During this time Millar published more than 50 papers in major pp journals such as EJP, RIP, JASPR and JSPR, as well as a scattering of less technical pieces elsewhere.

Milllar's extensive experimental work was uniformly barren of evidence of the paranormal and he adopted an agnostic position with respect to the reality of Psi. This contrasts rather strongly with the extreme polarization into mutually antagonistic camps of believers and skeptics which besets the field. Millar profiles his position as "the only neutral molecule in the plasma". Furthermore, he insists that without a theory the very concept of psi is impotent and without theory there is no hope of resolving any question whatever. His primary interest is in physical theory and Millar pioneered in introducing the Observational Theories (OT's) to parapsychology workers [1]. The OTs imply that the actual source of Psi in an experiment may as well be the experimenter as the so-called subjects. Millar collected considerable material [2] which suggests that the experimenter is (usually) the senior psi-partner in Rhine-type experiments. This Experimenter-centric paradigm yields a revolutionarily different view of the field than the almost universally accepted Subject-centric paradigm of Rhine.

Millar's consuming interest is the development of rigorous (forensic) methodology to determine the source of Psi in successful experiments.

References

1. The observational theories: A primer

B. Millar - European Journal of Parapsychology, 1978

2. The distribution of psi

B. Millar - European Journal of Parapsychology, 1979