Edward Francis Kelly

Edward Francis Kelly is an American neuroscientist and parapsychologist. He is a Research Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.^[1][2]

Kelly's research interests include cognitive neuroscience and mind–body dualism, with a focus on phenomena (for example, from parapsychology and the paranormal) that challenge the current neuroscientific view of mind.^[2][3] Among his interests are intensive neuroimaging studies of persons in various kinds of altered states of consciousness.^[1]

Kelly has published peer-reviewed works in which he argues for a break from the dominant physicalist view of human mind and nature for a strong dualistic account of mind-brain problem which argues for post mortem survival of consciousness, drawing upon evidence from psychical research such as mystical experience, near-death experience and stigmata. He served as the lead author for the two books Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism.^[4]

After completing his doctoral degree, Kelly spent more than fifteen years working in parapsychology nearly full time, first at J. B. Rhine’s Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina, then (for ten years) through the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke University, and finally through the Spring Creek Institute, a nonprofit research institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.^[5] During this time he published various papers on experimental, methodological, and theoretical topics in parapsychology, as well as a book, Computer Recognition of English Word Senses (with P. J. Stone).^[5] From 1988 to 2002 he worked with a large neuroscience group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducting EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli.^[5] In 2002 he once again took up full-time psychical research.^[5] By 2018 he had returned to his central long-term research interest—the application of modern functional neuroimaging methods to detailed psychophysiological studies of altered states of consciousness and psi in exceptional subjects.^[5] He served for several years as the co-director of the Westphal Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of Virginia.^[5][6] In June of 2024 Jim B. Tucker, director of the University's Division of Perceptual Studies, announced that in July Kelly and his colleague Ross Dunseath would step down as co-directors of the laboratory, which they had been instrumental in founding, in favor of a successor, though they would continue to actively participate in the Division's research.^[7]

In 2007, Kelly, along with his wife, Emily Williams Kelly, and Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson, published a book titled Irreducible Mind, in which they attempt to bridge contemporary cognitive psychology and mainstream neuroscience with "rogue phenomena", which the authors argue exist in near-death experiences, psychophysiological influence, automatism, memory, genius, and mystical states. They argue for a dualist interpretation of the mind-brain relation in which the brain only acts as a "filter" or "transmitter" of consciousness, which survives death of the body.

In 2015, Kelly, Adam Crabtree, and Paul Marshall published a more theoretical sequel to Irreducible Mind, titled Beyond Physicalism, in which they seek to understand how the world must be constituted so that the empirical phenomena catalogued in Irreducible Mind would be possible.

Kelly and Marshall and colleagues have also published a third book, Consciousness Unbound, building on earlier works.^[8]

• Edward Francis Kelly at University of Virginia School of Medicine