Carl Lynwood Sargent (11 December 1952 – 12 September 2018)[ You Are the Hero! (2014), Jonathan Green, page 164]
Early life and education
Sargent was schooled in South Wales and the West of England. He then attended Churchill College, Cambridge, majoring in the natural sciences, and graduated with honours in psychology in 1974. He received a PhD in 1979 for a work which bore on parapsychology, and went on to undertake post-doctoral research in parapsychology at the Psychological Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Sargent was the first parapsychologist to obtain a Cambridge doctorate.
He taught psychology at the same university. Many of his experiments were made using students from the science and geography departments opposite the Psychology department on the Downing Site, paying £2-3 per experiment; the main task would be to guess the colour or value of the next card to be chosen.
Parapsychology
Sargent held a PhD in
psychology (or experimental
parapsychology), which he earned in 1979. He performed numerous ganzfeld experiments, designed to draw out psi abilities, at the University of Cambridge. His published works in this field include
Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal, co-authored with
Hans Eysenck. The book received a positive review in the
New Scientist by
John Beloff who described it as "an introduction to parapsychology that one can put into the hands of an inquiring student without embarrassment."
In their book Sargent and Eysenck argued that the experiments of William Crookes with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home were evidence for supernatural powers.
Criticism
Sargent's ganzfeld experiments have been criticized for being open to error and fraud.
Susan Blackmore, who visited Sargent's laboratory in Cambridge, detected several errors and failures to follow the protocol during an experiment. Sargent would later leave the field of parapsychology altogether.
Writing for
Skeptical Inquirer Blackmore states that Sargent "deliberately violated his own protocols and in one trial had almost certainly cheated." Psychologists reading
Daryl Bem's review in
Psychological Bulletin would "not have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved" Sargent and Chuck Honortons. When Blackmore confronted Sargent, he told her "it wouldn't matter if some experiments were unreliable because, after all, we know that psi exists".
Parapsychology publications
Fantasy games
Sargent started playing
Dungeons & Dragons in 1978 through friends. TSR UK were based in Cambridge, and they met with Sargent after he had submitted an article to
Imagine magazine. The TSR UK crew later left to work for
Games Workshop.
Sargent authored various Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and novels for Games Workshop from 1988 to 1995, some under the pseudonym Keith Martin.
He later worked as a freelance designer, and was brought in by TSR to work on Greyhawk. Most of his role-playing works were published between 1987 and 1996. He has authored many products for the Dungeons & Dragons (particularly for the World of Greyhawk setting), Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Shadowrun roleplaying games.
Role-playing publications as Carl Sargent
Role-playing publications as Keith Martin
Further reading
External links
