Human Mind

Capacity to measure the mind and monitor changes in psychological attributes is an ancient and inherent component of classical Maori culture. Within a contemporary context, however, Maori have yet to fully realise the power and potential of psychometric paradigms.As a particular discipline, psychometrics provides methodologies for constructing measurement tools and frameworks for testing whether such tools achieve expected objectives. Psychometric theory provides the rationale for critical analysis and evaluation of assessment tools commonly used on Maori.The advancement of psychometric skills and expertise among present-day Maori will enable the establishment of world class tools thatmeet the needs and aspirations of Te Ao Maori.

The following discussion aims to raise awareness, generate debate and facilitate understanding of psychometric techniques, principles and issues that hold relevance for Maori engaged in the development and use of measurement tools. Capacity for conceptualisation and measurement of conscious and sub-conscious psychological qualities is evident in classical Maori tradition and culture. The universe itself, for example, is seen to be pure energy eternally engaged in a process of logical progression: i te kore, ki te po, ki te ao marama (Shirres, 1997). Maori pantheon and cosmology is premised upon concepts of ebb and flow between material, psychic and spiritual realms interwoven and influenced by knowledge of Te Kete Aronui, Te Kete Tuauri and Te Kete Tuatca (Marsden, 1975). In retelling of Te Wehenga, the ancient creation story painstakinglydescribes subtle differences in character, form, disposition and quality. For example, the concepts of te korekore, te korekore-te-rawea, te-korekore-te-whiwhia, te- korekore-te-tamaua and te po-i-tuturi, te-po-i-pepeke, te-po- uriuri, and te-po-tangotango, represent particular states with discernible purpose, intent and implication (Fitzgerald, 2002; Marsden, 1975). Within the unfolding of the universe there is establishment of hierarchy, relativity and conceptual frameworks for the measurement of difference over aeons.Evidence of the importance our tupuna rangatira placed on meticulous definition and classification is demonstrated in karakia and other genre. In Tenei Au, Ruawharo from Takitimu refers to Rangi- tu-haha and Tihi-o-manono, both archetypal constructs for distinguishing between multiple levels of vitality, existence, consciousness and enlightenment (Shirres, 1998). In hisor......

The aim of a revolutionary development in thought is to extend its influence. Axiomatically, the main concern of those who are committed to existing modes of thought is to resist the threat to their ways of thinking. A struggle inevitably ensues - a fight to the death of one or the other of the two contending ways of thinking.Nor dare we assume that just because a new idea deserves the label of Truth it will be welcomed upon its first application for admission to the fraternity of science. Can we yet say with assurance that parapsychology will succeed in winning acceptance on this try?Any revolutionist worth his salt must, it goes without saying, believe in his cause and in its ultimate success.If this book has in any degree served its purpose, it should at least have engendered the feeling that the author is deeply involved as a parapsychologist. But the foregoing series of close-ups of developments in the field, described by one who has participated in or witnessed many of these events, may not by itself form a finished, unified picture of the movement.

I feel an obligation, therefore, to attempt in a few final pages to tie together the threads of thought that the preceding chapters have in common. Parapsychology is here to stay. This is not to say that its job is finished. Indeed, it has only been well started! But the time of testing by ordeal in the fire of scientific scorn has passed. No longer need a research worker fear the kind of scathing denunciation that Sir William Crookes and Sir William Barrett encountered when they venturedto present papers on their psi investigations to meetings of British scientists a few years before the Society for Psychical Research was founded. I am not implying that papers on parapsychology are received with rejoicing by those in charge of the programs of scientific conventions or by the editors of the psychological journals. But there is today a momentum, a forward thrust to psi research. This may be seen in the developments within the field as well as in the reactions to psi by those outside of parapsychology. Especially is it apparent from the way the field has put down new roots in different parts of the world. Some of these developments have been surprising even to the research workers. A full account of the spread of the research and of the status that parapsychology has attained today as a world-wide branch of science is reserved (as I have said elsewhere)f......

On the wall of Professor Elizabeth Loftus third-floor UC Irvine office is a paper bull's-eye target, pockmarked with bullet holes. If it looks somewhat incongruous in the mostly sedate academic surroundings - bookshelves lined with psychology texts, a large desk with a black Dell computer and stylish flat screen, a mock Vanity Fair cover with Loftus’ face staring out from atop Demi Moore’s body (a humorous gift from students), and photocopies of Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger portraits — there’s good reason. Loftus — who, when she pulls her blue straw hat over her mussed shoulder-length brown hair and stands up in black-velvet pants and cotton blouse, looksstartlingly like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall — took up target practice in 1994 after receiving death threats following the publication of her book The Myth of Repressed Memory.

“We’re going to kill the bitch,” was one choice missive. The holes in the paper, Loftus says, laughing nervously as she recalls the events, were made on the firing range. Target practice aside, Loftus’ work veers into an X-Files-type reality where nothing is as it seems, where even the inner sanctum of an individual’s most personal memories is subject to manipulations and falsification. We think of that sanctum as a citadel invulnerable to outside pressures. Loftus tells us that, to the contrary, it is a marshland crisscrossed with paths, instantly imprinted by thefootprints of all those who traverse it.Beth Loftus grew up in a house on Santa Monica Boulevard. And while she has spent much of her adult life away from the place of her birth, she has always been drawn back to the city where things are not always what they seem, where humans — the storytelling species — have perfected the art of illusion. The allure is appropriate given that Loftus specializes in studying the malleability of, the fallibility of, human memory and given that she has spent a lifetime exploring the strange nether regions of the mind where fact and fantasy, reality and distortion, blend into new versions of “the truth.”Recently, three decades into her influential career as a research psychologist and memory expert in legal cases,Loftus, in. ...

The life of psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ was haunted by coincidences. In 1972 her father, physicist Russell Targ, cofounded the Stanford Research Institute to investigate psychic phenomena. Elisabeth participated in his ESP experiments, and he encouraged her to “remotely view” and predict her birthday presents before she opened them (and claims she was correct most of the time). Elisabeth Targ was an academic superstar. She graduated from high school at age 15, was fluent in Russian, German and French, and eventually graduated from Stanford Medical School In July of 1998, Targ and colleagues at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco published adouble-blind study in the Western Journal of Medicine that rocketed her to fame in the field of complementary and alternative medicine: Forty healers around the U.S.

were recruited to pray for the health of patients with advanced AIDS. The prayed-for group had significantly fewer opportunistic illnesses than the control group, and Targ instantly became the poster child for a fledgling new field exploring prayer and healing. “Elisabeth is our hero,” wrote Mitchell Krucoff, a Duke University Medical Center cardiologist who has pioneered complementary therapies in patients with heart disease. Targ’s research was impressive enough that in January of 2002 the National Institutes of Health gave her $1.5 million to carry out two more distant-prayerstudies, one on AIDS and another on glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive and almost inevitably fatal brain tumor. In Europe and the U.S. there are approximately two to three new cases per 100,000 people annually. “It is a particularly gnarly disease from which people rarely recover,” says her father, “and that’s why she wanted to study it.”Two months later, in March of 2002, Targ, who was 40, began fertility treatments: she and her fiancé, physicist Mark Comings, wanted a family. That spring, however, she began finding it difficult to pronounce words with the letter “b,” and one morning the left side of her face sagged. A high-resolution MRI revealed that she was suffering from a rapidly growing grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor. Word ofthe. ...