Barry Beyerstein - Early Life

Early Life

According to friend James Alcock, Barry's father Hilliard Beyerstein had many occupations during Barry's life, magician, chiropractor, bank manager, writer of self-help books, owner of a cosmetics manufacturing business, real estate speculator and building contractor, Barry's mother was a school teacher. When his father would build a house, the family would live in it for a while, then move. "Barry... moved thirty times within his neighborhood while growing up". Raised on magazines Fate and Popular Science as well as many paranormal TV shows, Beyerstein felt that this “enchantment... inclined me toward an eventual career in the study of consciousness”. Intrigued throughout high school with séances, handwriting analysis, hypnosis and other paranormal beliefs, Beyerstein with the help of his friends, conducted many experiments. This was far before he learned about experimental controls, which explained the constant success of their tests.

Entering Simon Fraser University in 1965, Beyerstein declared his major in psychology with a minor in philosophy. “As I delved deeper into those subjects, I began to doubt the inevitability of an eventual happy marriage between science and the paranormal... after my first course in the philosophy of science... the fundamental assumptions and modus operandi of science were seriously at odds with most of what I knew of physical research.” By his junior year in college he was hooked on studying the brain. In 1968, Beyerstein moved to the San Francisco area to attend UC Berkeley, where “party chit-chat could accept a guest's description of his latest out-of-body experience or the need to have her chakras realigned as casually as one might receive the morning's weather forecast. I frequently found myself the odd man out... (they thought) I was a nice guy, but hopelessly 'linear' and 'left-brained', despite my de rigueur shoulder-length hair, tie-dye T-shirt, bell bottoms and cowboy boots.”