The Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU) is a research group within the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, established in 1985 to teach and conduct research into Parapsychology. It hosts the only endowed chair of parapsychology in the United Kingdom.
Founding
The unit was established through a bequest from writer Arthur Koestler and his wife, Cynthia, following their deaths in 1983. Koestler had a lifelong interest in the paranormal, explored in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence, and wished for the subject to receive serious academic attention. Their will left funds to endow a chair in parapsychology at a UK university; Edinburgh's Department of Psychology, which already had a background in the subject through lecturer John Beloff since the early 1960s, was selected to host it.
Robert Morris and the unit's early years
American parapsychologist Robert Morris was appointed the first Koestler Professor of Parapsychology in December 1985, having previously trained at J. B. Rhine's parapsychology laboratory at Duke University — the same lab behind Rhine's 1934 monograph and the wider tradition of Extrasensory Perception research. Working initially with limited resources, Morris built up a small team of researchers, often funded through external grants from bodies including the Society for Psychical Research and the Parapsychological Association. Over almost two decades as Koestler Professor, Morris supervised more than 100 undergraduate projects and over 30 postgraduate students — many of whom went on to establish parapsychology research and teaching elsewhere in the UK and abroad, including Caroline Watt and Richard Wiseman.
Ganzfeld research
In 1991, parapsychologist Charles Honorton — originator of the ganzfeld technique at Maimonides Medical Center in the 1970s — joined the KPU and began developing an automated ganzfeld laboratory there, continuing the free-response experimental tradition central to Telepathy research. Honorton was working on a manuscript with Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem describing the results of this work when he died shortly before its completion. Bem went on to publish his own widely disputed 2011 "Feeling the Future" studies into Precognition, a later chapter in the same free-response tradition Honorton had brought to Edinburgh.
Later history
Robert Morris remained Koestler Professor until his death in August 2004. His successor, Caroline Watt, a founding member of the unit and one of Morris's own doctoral students, continues to lead its work. The unit maintains its own dedicated library within the University's Psychology Building, covering parapsychology research, the psi hypothesis and its alternatives, and the broader history of the field — the same institutional lineage traced on The Vault back through the Boston and London societies, and forward through the Rhine Research Center, Rhine's own institutional successor in the United States.