The chairman of the BIAL Foundation, Luís Portela, was interviewed by Helané Wahbeh, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, regarding the launch of his book “The Science of Spirit” in the United States and the scarce international funding attributed to research in the area of parapsychology, considered a “frontier science”.
In the interview, published in August in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Luís Portela presents the reasons that, in his perspective, explain the reduced investment in support for scientific research in this area. “Parapsychology and consciousness have not been trending. The huge scientific investments and the enormous scientific and technological success of the 20th century created a perspective very focused on on materiality, possession and consumption. The aspects more connect to being, universal values, spirituality and parapsychology were left behind”, he states.
The chairman of the BIAL Foundation also recalls that, during the first half of the 20th century, “some people discredited the field of parapsychology by fabricating or falsifying results and fraud”. This is, in his opinion, “a field hard to study due to the fact that many of the phenomena are spontaneous and sometimes unconscious, making them difficult to reproduce in a laboratory”.
So what has changed in the last few decades? “Researchers from North American and European universities conducting serious and profound work indicates that conditions are being created for some development of the field (Tucker, 2008). As such, various institutions giving financial support to the field have been arising as well”, says Portela.
Since 1994, the BIAL Foundation, a reference institution in supporting international research in neuroscience and parapsychology, has supported 775 projects, involving 1624 researchers from 29 countries. About half of these projects are in the field of parapsychology.
To allow for a strong and, if possible, rapid development in this area, Luís Portela would like to see a significant increase in funding. However, he considers that funding “should not be indiscriminate, but rather directed towards the development of quality projects”.
Read the interview in full here.
