Irwin, H(arvey) J(on) (1943-)

Australian parapsychologist, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of New England, Australia. Irwin was born on September 8, 1943. He studied at Sydney University (B.Sc., 1964; Dip.Ed., 1965), the University of New South Wales (B.A 1969), and the University of New England (Litt.B., 1972; Ph.D., psychology, 1978). His dissertation was entitled Visual Selective Attention and the Human Information Processing System: Structures, Processes, and Processing Interference in Visual Input Selection. After graduation he was a senior tutor at the University of New England. In 1985 joined the faculty in psychology as a lecturer, a position that allowed him some freedom to teach in the overlapping area between psychology and parapsychology.

His doctoral research concerned the nature of selective attention in vision and its interpretation within an information-processing framework. He has since explored the possibility of accounting for the experiential properties of paranormal phenomena in terms of information-processing theory. In recent years he has also investigated the nature of out-of-the-body experiences. He has published articles and several books on parapsychology and psychology.

Sources:

Irwin, H. J. Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985.

——. An Introduction to Parapsychology. 2d ed. Pittsburgh: R. A. McConnell, 1994.

——. Psi and the Mind: An Information Processing Approach. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979.