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.

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. Among his areas of focus are intensive neuroimaging studies of persons in various kinds of altered states of consciousness.

Career After completing his doctoral degree, Kelly spent more than 15 years working in the field of parapsychology, 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. 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). In June 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.

Publications 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, 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 published a third book in 2021, Consciousness Unbound, building on earlier works.