Tyrrell was born in
Frome,
Somerset to Nugent and Margery Tyrrell. His father was a civil engineer, and his grandfather,
George Nugent Tyrrell, was the first "Superintendent of the Line" for the
Great Western Railway. Tyrrell was a student of
Guglielmo Marconi and a pioneer in the development of radio. In 1908 he joined the
Society for Psychical Research. He conducted numerous experiments in
telepathy and was interested in
apparitional experiences. He attempted to explain
ghosts by a psychological theory. Tyrrell proposed that ghosts are a
hallucination of the subconscious mind of a person, to explain collective hallucinations for more than one person, he proposed it as a telepathic mechanism. Tyrrell was the president of the Society for Psychical Research 1945-1946. Tyrrell created the term
out-of-body experience in his book
Apparitions. A review in
Nature for
Science and Psychical Phenomena praised Tyrrell for his "obvious sincerity" but suggested the book was "full of flaws" which aroused suspicion of Tyrrell's critical faculties. ==Published works==