Paranormalia

When Great Men Die

At the time of writing Nelson Mandela is clinging to life, as they say. Or perhaps trying to divest himself of it. South Africans are said to be praying for him.

It’s the cruel fate of some great national leaders to be kept alive as long as medical technology permits. When I went to Spain in October 1975 to begin my career as a journalist, I arrived just as Franco was at his last gasp. This was excellent timing for me, as it meant there would be big political changes to report. It was also joyous news for his many enemies. But it was seen by his supporters to be a catastrophe (correctly from their point of view, as his dictatorship started to crumble within months).

So the hospital doctors made heroic efforts to keep Franco alive for as long as possible. When I arrived in Madrid he had just suffered a third heart-attack, and was clearly being held together with string. Completely pointless of course - but there was a feeling that if they could keep the old geezer going for another month or two they could postpone the future. His last words were said to be, ‘I never knew it could be so hard to die’.

I wonder if something like that is happening to Mandela, who has been in and out of hospital quite a lot in recent months. The thought has occurred to some people. Andrew Mlangeni, a fellow prisoner in Robben Island, thinks it’s too much. When Mandela’s daughter came out with the usual platitudes – that her father is recovering, ‘he’s a fighter’ - Mlangeni was widely quoted as encouraging his family to ‘release’ him ‘so that God may have his own way’.

Some reports talk of Mlangeni having broken a ‘national taboo’, and of course it will be hard for South Africans to lose this source of great inspiration. But the taboo can affect any family, that make strenuous efforts to keep elderly loved ones alive against their will because they can’t deal with the emotional wrench of losing them - with the acquiescence of medical staff who, left to themselves, would prefer to let nature take its course. The case of a young stroke victim, who might conceivably be nursed to recovery, is one thing; the case of a chronically sick 94-year old something rather different.

How would this drama play out in the brave new world that atheists would like to live in, where humans are purged of nonsensical notions of living on after death? Perhaps we would hear less about release, and more about praise for being a 'fighter', for ‘raging against the dying of the light’, of squeezing the last drop out of a life that, once extinguished, has gone forever.

I don’t at all mean that atheists and agnostics can’t take an equally sensitive view of the matter as believers - of course they do. But if all humans knew – in the sense that science knows and wants all educated people to know – that survival of death is a fairytale, the merciful act of letting loved ones go might be harder to achieve.

Ghosts in Iceland

Here’s a book which I think a lot of readers might be interested in, if they don’t already know it. It’s The Departed Among the Living, a collection of apparition reports by Erlendur Haraldsson, a veteran Icelandic psychic researcher.

Haraldsson and a colleague carried out a survey in Iceland in the 1970s, asking ‘Have you ever been aware of the presence of a deceased person?’ In a representative national sample of 902 people, 31 percent answered ‘yes’. During the following years they carried out interviews, getting people to describe the experiences, and asking detailed questions. The anecdotes form the basis of the book – there are perhaps around three hundred, a substantial number – and they are usefully grouped into categories: visual, auditory, smells and scents, sensing a presence, accidents and violent deaths, hauntings, warnings, animals, and so on.

It's the fullest book of such experiences that I’ve seen, at least in recent times, comparable with Gurney, Myers and Podmore's Phantasms of the Living. There is a depth and variety to at least some of the accounts, and also some useful commentary and stats. This being Iceland, a great deal of it has to do with accidents at sea, and the apparitions are often seen on large boats. Considering the country has a population of 300,000 (barely more than the London borough I live in) I’m left thinking that they must be an unusually psychic lot. Then again, perhaps they're just more accepting than the norm about anomalous experiences, and willing to talk about them.

There's an interesting selection on healers and cures, where people sense – and sometimes see – themselves being worked on by people who don't actually exist. This story concerns a crewman who had to take to his bed with back pain.

I must have been sleeping, although I felt quite awake and saw all that happened. There entered my cabin white dressed doctors who said they had been requested to examine me. I told them that no such request had been made. I remember this as I wrote it down immediately afterwards when I realised what had happened. They turned me around and examined my back where the pain was. Then they said: ‘We are going to operate on you’. I had never heard that this problem was operated upon. They said firmly it did not matter at all. I told them I had the shift at 4 o’clock in the night and it was impossible for me to be bedridden for a longer time. They said I would not be bedridden, could work the next day but should be careful and not lift heavy objects. Then I would be fine for a long time. As they said this I saw them and felt their hands on my back but felt no pain. They said the operation was over and they wished me well as I saw them disappear out of the door. I jumped out of bed and opened the door but saw only darkness outside. I shouted, ‘Where are the men?’ Then I heard the man on duty call back, ‘There have been no men here, you must have been dreaming’. I insisted there were two men dressed in white, doctors . . .

I had seen them so clearly as fully awake and always believed I had been awake all through this experience, although I was definitely asleep before. As I jumped out of bed, hardly able to move before, I felt no discomfort anywhere, completely healthy and have had no problem since, although I had had this problem for fifteen years and was often bedridden.

There are also a number that offer guidance or warnings: a voice that tells a factory worker sharply to ‘move away’, which he does, and escapes being crushed by dislodged piece of timber; a voice that tells a man to hurry home, where he discovers his elderly mother in a perilous condition; an apparition that forces a driver to swerve off the road, saving him from an accident; and so on.

Quite a few reports talk of some kind of communication between visitor and percipient:

A friend of mine appeared to me more than once. Five to ten days after he passed away he appeared in my room and I could feel him saying: “You knew it.” And I could feel myself thinking to him: “It’s going to happen to all of us.” I felt he was telling me that I had been right about the afterlife . . .

Reading this sort of account I often wonder how real these apparitions seem at the time. I get the sense that they are mostly seen as real people, as if they were physically there. They behave normally; they are often described as coming and going through doors, moving from one part of the house – or just as often, the vessel – to another. In other cases they might be visible only from the waist up. Sometimes they abruptly disappear, other times they slowly dissolve, as if in a grey mist.

On the other hand many are perceived as a ‘presence’, which is hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it (for me, anyway). This account by a 30-year old woman talks about it explicitly:

I was not the only person to become aware of this. It was very obviously a deceased man. I saw how he looked, but not like one sees a living person in day-to-day life, but rather as if one somehow feels and accepts that someone is there, without actually seeing them. There were two families in the house and the children were also aware of this. They often talked about the man who was there beside them. We saw him practically every day and we could almost make a joke out of it. It was as if he had become one of the family. He almost always appeared in the same place in the room; just stood there. We made it a custom to avoid that area . . . I knew that his hair was dark and wavy, and that he was a handsome man with broad shoulders, but I cannot describe how I saw him. I thought he could have been about 35, in the prime of life . . .

As in many of the cases in Phantasms, the percipient doesn’t recognise the apparition, but other people later identify it from the description as a deceased acquaintance or relative. Some apparitions are collectively perceived: Haraldsson says there were 89 cases in which the percipient was accompanied by one or more people who should have seen the same thing, and in 41 of these cases they did so. In 29 of these cases a witness was found who could corroborate the account.

It so happened that three couples, including us, were invited to visit a house in Isafjord. When we went in, I saw a woman sitting in a chair in the living room. I must have looked away from her for when I turned to greet her she was gone. It turned out that four of us had seen the woman, and we mentioned this to the couple who lived in the house. They replied that there had been no one in the house except the two of them. When we compared our experiences and found that our accounts of what the woman looked like tallied we realised who she was. She was the grandmother of the woman who lived there, and the sister of one of the two men who had also seen her.

I'd love to quote more examples, but that’s probably as much as I can get away with. If you’re interested in such things, this book is definitely one to get.

A European Reincarnation-type Case

The new issue of Journal of the Society for Psychical Research contains an interesting case of the reincarnation type. It’s from Germany, which is unusual as there are relatively few such cases from Europe. Evidentially it’s not particularly strong, but it’s intriguing in some respects, and also rather dramatic.

The case concerns a psychotherapist from the town of Erlangen near Nuremberg, named here as ‘Mrs Wolf’, and her third child ‘Rolf’, aged 14 at the time of writing. This is a brief outline:

Mrs Wolf was involved in a late-night accident on the motorway, in which the car in front of her hit a pedestrian, a young man, who had apparently strayed in front of the traffic. She stopped and pulled him off the road. He seemed to be aware of her, but then lost consciousness.

He began bleeding from the mouth and nose, but not very much. The lower part of his right leg was at an unnatural angle. Mrs Wolf took him in her arms and felt his pulse, which was becoming progressively weaker. Fearing he was about to die she said to him: ‘Don’t be afraid. Go into the light and accept the facts as they are.’

When she finally managed to get to sleep later that night, she dreamed that the young man in the accident came to her. He seemed to have formed an attachment to her, to the extent that he wanted to adopt her as his mother. The same happened on the following two nights. In the dreams she understood that he wanted to reincarnate into her family, and she vehemently resisted the idea.

On the third occasion she was surprised to see him, in her dream, standing by a picturesque lake near a cemetery where a funeral was taking place. He explained it was his birthplace in Italy, and the funeral was his own. This surprised her as he had been fair-haired and blue-eyed, and not typically Italian in his looks. He was still insistent about being born to her, and by this time she had softened somewhat. In the back of her mind she reassured herself that she was not in a relationship with anyone, and even if she did have an unplanned liaison she would use contraceptives, so there was little chance of her becoming pregnant.

Shortly afterwards she contacted the boy’s mother, having discovered the contact details from a published press article. The mother explained that his name was Mario, and he was aged 18. The parents, one German, the other Italian, lived in Erlangen where they ran a shop, but spent part of the year in Italy near a lake where Mario was buried. On the night of his death, it appeared, Mario had been driving his mother’s car which he had crashed near a slip road to the motorway; it was uncertain whether he had wandered onto it in a state of confusion, or whether he planned to kill himself.

Nine months later Mrs Wolf accidentally became pregnant and in due course gave birth to a fair-haired blue-eyed boy whom she named Rolf. By this time she had forgotten about the previous incident, and had had no further contact with Mario’s mother. But one day, when the boy was three or four years old, he said spontaneously to her: ‘I have lived before. I died in a traffic accident, but it was not so terrible. I was bleeding a little bit on my head and my leg was hurting.’

That’s it as far as the sequence of events goes. Mrs Wolf’s belief that Rolf was – or at least might be – the reincarnated Mario, came to the attention of a paranormal investigator, Dieter Hassler. He interviewed the two of them, also Mario’s parents, who were divorced. As it turned out, Rolf had no memories of a previous life (which was to be expected, as he was now long past the age when these memories typically start to fade), and was unable to recognise Mario’s parents’ shop, or any of Mario’s possessions that were shown to him. Mario’s father did not have much to say; however his mother, who like Mrs Wolf believes in the possibility of rebirth, was quite forthcoming.

Much of the interest of this case lies in the startling match between the two boys’ personalities. Rolf is quite effeminate: his mother describes him as very fashion-conscious; trendy clothes are very important to him, particularly American ones. He is vain about his appearance, uses perfumes, and spends hours doing his hair. He has a mincing gait aimed at getting people’s attention; and so on. His mother also says he is ‘very helpful’, ‘adored by girls’; and ‘charming - knows to twist everyone round his little finger’.

When Hassler interviewed Mario’s mother, a similar picture emerged. Mario was mad about clothes, particularly American ones. He was very meticulous about his hair, used perfumes, walked with a feminine gait, and was popular with girls (whose advances he rejected). Hassler also lists other similarities: both boys are good at drawing and painting; have practical abilities; show an interest in religion - all of which are general enough to be purely fortuitous, however. There is also one major difference: Mario was good at languages, which Rolf is not.

Investigation yielded a certain logic to his death. Mario was bullied by his father and sister (which one supposes was because of his obvious sexual orientation, which he realised when he was 13). He had a strong relationship with his mother; however shortly before his accident he learned that they had decided to divorce, which apparently would have meant he would have more contact with his father and sister, and less with her. That evidently depressed him, possibly to the point of wishing to kill himself. Whether it was suicide or an accident, there is perhaps a motivation on his part, being now deceased, to try again in a different family.

Mario’s mother described some rather striking psychokinetic events following Mario’s death:

She said she was in the habit of listening to soft music on CDs when driving her car. When Mario was with her he would protest at this, and switch it to radio-mode and a station transmitting pop music. Three weeks after Mario’s death, when his mother was driving along a road they had taken regularly together, she was thinking about Mario, when the radio spontaneously switched from CD-mode to radio-mode without her intervention and started playing pop music. She interpreted this as having been initiated by Mario. Nevertheless, she asked a garage technician whether the radio could switch on automatically and was told that it was impossible.

Some weeks later all the lights went out in her shop and the surrounding area. The utility services were not aware of a power failure but promised to send a technician.

Having already had the experience with her car-radio she suspected that Mario could be involved, so she said aloud: ‘Mario, stop that nonsense. You cannot switch off all the lights with customers present.’

The immediate result was the return of power and the lights coming back on. She phoned the utility services a second time, but they could not give any explanation.

As Hassler himself notes, the case is not particularly evidential. He points out that there are very few solved European cases that are not ‘in-family’, which are inevitably weaker than those that involve different families, particularly those separated by some distance. Although this is potentially one such (since the two families are separate), with the original contact between the mother and the previous personality, and later with his mother, and the announcing dream, that advantage is lost.

There were no witnesses who could corroborate Mrs Wolf’s dream experiences following the accident, or Rolf’s single statement about a previous life. There was only a single informant on the side of the previous personality. One could argue that the fact of Mario being gay, and Rolf quite likely to be (although this was not known at the time of writing), is not a very surprising coincidence. In theory Mrs Wolf could be fantasising, and although Hassler thinks she is genuine, being apparently truthful and having nothing to gain from a hoax, in purely formal terms that’s just his opinion. Parts of the story, as told by him, read like a synopsis for a television drama.

That doesn’t mean it lacks value, however. If rebirth occurs, we naturally want to know, what are the drivers for it? Here one gets the sense of a person who loves his life, but who is being obstructed in the living of it, and having, whether by accident or design, brought it to an end, wants to resume it on the same terms, but this time under the protection of someone he instinctively trusts.

To me, this is one of those many instances which are too weak to justify belief in an anomalous phenomenon on their own, but which – assuming that belief is justified by much stronger evidence – potentially deepen our understanding of it.

Some Precognitive Dreams

Thanks to Lawrence Brennan for this post about some recent precognitive dreams.

I am not psychic. I take that word to imply believing oneself to have a controllable or even vaguely useful power of some kind. However I've experienced enough odd things to be convinced that psi is real. Recently precognitive dreams (PDs) have been to the fore. I can't add much to the sum of knowledge on the subject, but can maybe make a few useful observations.

In my case, at least, the idea that PDs are movie-style visions of exactly what is going to happen is completely untrue. Likewise the idea that they are warnings of disaster is a popular fantasy. They are, by and large, completely trivial. I can't of course assume that the limits of my experiences are a rule that must apply to everyone else. But my suspicion is that the headline grabbing cases of foreseeing assassinations are distinguishable from the trivia only by virtue of their box office value...and no divine forewarning is intended.

In a 2011 Guardian article Richard Wiseman relies heavily on the idea of a Law of Large Numbers to explain away seeming PDs . . . putting a "once-in-a-lifetime" coincidence in the context of millions of dreams. This would only be a persuasive argument if they were remotely as rare as he imagines.

I found my dreams were precognitive, sometimes, when I started recording them into a bedside dictaphone, whenever I stirred in the night. Listening back to my sleepy mutterings after a day or two, some of the dreams I was reporting matched incidents which had subsequently occurred. This happened too often to dismiss.

On one recording I described a low flying aerial view of a city which I decided was Berlin, as the attention was drawn to a specific point below, which my dream self identified as the spot where Hitler was born. I would have no conscious memory of this dream if it were not on the recording. Four or five nights later a new TV documentary about Hitler is broadcast and begins with low flying aerial footage of an Austrian town, seeming to hone in on a particular building, as the narrator points out this was where Hitler was born. You can imagine how startled I was.

Last Monday night, 6 May: I dreamt of the Queen at a Commonwealth gathering and the (genuine) plot of a movie in which a missing girl had been abducted and kept alive below ground.

In the morning I noted down the dreams, then checked the news. Stories included Amanda Berry, the kidnapped woman who escaped from her captor's basement and the Queen to miss the Commonwealth Conference for the first time.

You'll see that my report of both dreams appear to be direct hits. And I consider them so. But it's worth pointing out that your agreement - if I have it - was partly won by my summarising the tale and referring only to the matching imagery itself. If I included more detail of the dream - it was the Queen at a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony . . . not a dream about her not attending a heads of government meeting; and in the other dream I carefully chose to say "kept alive under ground" instead of "buried alive" to draw out the comparisons with Amanda Berry - then you might be drawn to the differences and denounce my observation of a link as tenuous. This in fact is what Wiseman does in his article. And this fallacy strikes me as important to correct.

It is the imagery in the dream, not its plot, which appears precognitive. Though one might use the Law of Large Numbers here to acknowledge that, by chance alone, sometimes for some people the sleeping brain's dream factory must re-assemble the images that go into it in very close to the "correct" order.

This point was evidenced on Thursday night, 9th May. I thought my recording attempts were a complete washout, as the second I tried recalling each dream it vanished. So the first 3 or 4 recordings consisted of no more than random images, without the accompanying plot details.

Exact transcript of the first recording, 2-3am, Friday morning:

There was . . . oh god I can't remember it's so . . . I'm going to say some words to try and remind myself . . . Linda Bellingham . . . cameras . . . Ian? Not 'that' Ian . . . I'll get back to you in a second . . . no hold on . . . mmm . . . will get back to you in a minute.

Lunchtime 12.30pm, I switch on the television show Loose Women (for the first time in 3 weeks):

Today's guests are Linda Bellingham and Ian Kelsey.

Deprived of its actual plot, the dream - whatever it was, for I've no idea - appears undeniably precognitive.

In Wiseman's article he composes a hypothetical dream sequence (about a fictional rock star in a car crash) and suggests there is something silly in connecting it to certain equally hypothetical "real" events, given the numerous differences between them. This is a convincing sounding yet irrational argument. He is - in the proper sense of the phrase - begging the question. That is, his conclusion - that dreaming the future is not possible - can only be reached by starting with the premise that perceiving the future is not possible!

How so?

Well consider if you had a dream in which Peter O'Toole turned up as your window cleaner. Afterwards you scratch your head as to why on earth it should be him of all people. Then you recall that in the day preceding the dream you'd caught a glimpse of Lawrence of Arabia while flicking between television channels. Aha! But following Wiseman's logic your "explanation" would be tenuous and faintly laughable because, after all, O'Toole did not play your window cleaner in Lawrence of Arabia! Such an argument for a 'no connection', where one is so self-evident, would doubtless be considered bizarre.

But if it is, it must also be bizarre to make this "tenuous connection" argument if O'Toole were seen not before the dream, but rather on the day after, perhaps being interviewed on a magazine programme which also later features an item on streak free window cleaning. You can only reasonably treat the logic of the "tenuous connection" argument applying in one case but not the other as rational if you start from the point of view that of course one cannot ever perceive the future!

Record your dreams. You'll be surprised how often one can.

Dean Radin's Psi Research List

I'm very glad to see this list of psi research articles compiled by parapsychologist Dean Radin. The articles are all downloadable, and cover a range of topics - exactly what's needed.

By way of introduction Radin says:

In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of classes of experiments. I will continue to add to this page and flesh it out, including links to recent or to especially useful ebooks. This page may eventually become annotated, then multithreaded and hyperlinked, and then morph into a Wiki.

I hope to go through the full list in the months to come, and will recommend it to visitors. In the meantime, I have commented on one of the papers in a separate post, below.

How To Make Psi Disappear

Dean Radin's new list of psi articles includes one which he referenced on his blog some time ago, and which I mentioned here quite recently. It's one of those richly comical moments that bubble up in sceptic discourse from time to time, so I thought I'd add a bit more detail.

The paper was published in The Humanistic Psychologist in 2005, by psychologists Edward A. Delgado-Romero and George S. Howard. Their general drift is that experimental findings in psychology are much less reliable than is realised, due to little acknowledged factors such as the file drawer problem. Here they propose to investigate the case of parapsychology. They take as their starting point the Wiseman-Milton meta-analysis, which concludes that the accumulated results of methodologically sound ganzfeld experiments is non-significant. To confirm this then carry out their own experiments, but worryingly, after doing eight studies they have an overall hit-rate of 32%. Not only does this match the positive meta-analyses, when added to the Wiseman-Milton study it brings it, as they say, 'precariously close to demonstrating humans do have psychic powers', a conclusion which they admit makes them feel 'very uncomfortable'.

What to do? A thought strikes them.

In the ganzfeld procedure, participants are run in pairs. According to psychic theory, if one member of the pair is psychic (P) but the other is not (n) there will be no transmission of information. Only PP pairs can successfully send and receive messages. What exactly does this imply?

It implies, they believe, that the statistical approach in the ganzfeld methodology is fatally flawed. If the research literature is recalculated to accord with this idea, the significance in the database practically vanishes. To confirm their hunch, they do one last study, pairing up people whose psi-hitting in their previous studies indicates that they have psychic powers. As they suspect the result is now not significant.

These are enormously disappointing data for individuals who believe humans possess psychic powers- especially because the sample had undergone a selection procedure to increase the percentage of Ps in the sample. Due to this last data set, we do not believe that humans possess telepathic powers.

That said, they admit to remaining 'perplexed' by the 32% figure obtained in an enormous number of other psi studies. Perhaps, they suggest, it's

comparable to Meehl's (1978) "crud factor," which suggests that everything is correlated with everything else to a small degree. Meehl cited this as evidence that a null hypothesis is never literally true. Or, perhaps it simply reflects our enduring preference for significant results over studies that obtain nonsignificant findings.

I'm used to critics tearing published psi experiments to ribbons, with caustic remarks about potential security flaws, alleged failure to randomise properly, and so on. But when disbelieving psychologists do their own experiments they sometimes seem to lose touch with reality altogether. They wander onto a field about which they know almost nothing, and casually reorganise matters to suit themselves, without the slightest reference to anybody or anything.

Until now I'd never heard of anything called 'psychic theory', or the notion that transmission of information depends on both receiver and sender being psychic. The authors give no reference for it; it seems to have just popped into their heads. No serious parapsychologist, as far as I'm aware, talks about people having 'psychic powers'. The prevailing paradigm is that it's a property of consciousness, a form of knowing that is potentially available to anyone, but which in practice is favoured by certain conditions and characteristics. And no parapsychologist would dare declare, on the basis of a single study, that the existence of psi has been proved, so it seems reckless, to say the least, for critics to declare, on the basis of a single study, that it does not exist - never mind crowing about how devastating this must be to its advocates.

The problems are discussed by Radin in a tart rejoinder to the journal. If the authors had done some homework, he suggests, they would have realised that there is no file drawer problem in parapsychology, for the simple reason that it's such a small discipline that pretty much every extant study can be tracked down. Intriguingly, while discussing the Wiseman-Milton study the psychologists point out in a footnote that its sampling method represents a serious departure from the norm. If this is corrected, they concede, it greatly increases the effect size. Yet, as Radin says, although they profess to be puzzled by this, it doesn't stop them using the study as an authority. (An analysis based on a 'theory of crud' is hardly persuasive, Radin adds.)

I wondered how a paper so deficient in an understanding of established parapsychological principles could ever have made it in to print. My guess is that it's a symptom of the way that parapsychology is marginalised, and the views of its experts distrusted. Since from a certain point of view telepathy is a fiction, there must be something wrong with the way parapsychologists do their experiments. So it's something that anyone can have a go at, even complete beginners. The worst that could happen is that they get positive results, but then they can use the opportunity to figure out the mistake, and in so doing make a real contribution to science. In their own minds, they're at no more of a disadvantage than the veterans who have been doing it for forty years.

But perhaps that's just my attempt to make sense of something that is actually incoherent. The feeling I'm left with is of otherwise intelligent people having temporarily gone mad. It's the Enchanted Boundary phenomenon described by Walter Prince: confronted by something that seems to imply a complete breakdown of logic, they engage in wild mental contortions that they hope will restore order. It's not science so much as the effect on the academic mind of cognitive dissonance - a fascinating phenomenon in its own right, and it's good to see it sometimes illustrated so graphically.

Things Children Say

A reader sent me a link to a Reddit thread which I hadn't seen before, about the odd stuff that very young children sometimes come out with. I thought I'd pull out some of the more interesting ones.

There are actually two threads, this recent one, and another from a year ago. Each paragraph is a separate story. I won't add any comments - sometimes it's good just to listen.

When my little sister was younger she used to walk around the house with a picture frame with a picture of my great grandpa in her hands crying and saying "I miss you Harvey." Harvey had died before even I was born. Other than this common occurrence my mom told me that she would constantly say things that my great grandma Lucy would say.

While changing my daughter in front of the open closet door. She kept looking around me and laughing. I asked her what was so funny. She said, "the man." To which I replied, "what man?" She then pointed at the closet and said, "the man with the snake neck." I turn around and nothing was there. I'm afraid to look into the history of my house to see if anyone hung themselves in the closet. At least she wasn't scared.

Why are you crying? "Bad man." What bad man? "There." Points behind me at a dark corner of the room. Lamp on bookshelf next to said darkened corner falls off as soon as I turn to look. She slept in our bed that night.

Getting my two and a half year old daughter out of the bath one night, my wife and I were briefing her on how important it was she kept her privates clean. She casually replied "Oh, nobody 'scroofs' me there. They tried one night. They kicked the door in and tried but I fought back. I died and now I'm here." She said this like it was nothing.

My 3 year old nephew was at my cottage. He's asked me numerous times about the "girl over there" while pointing at one of the back bedrooms. The place is small, and there is definitely nobody there so I just dismiss it as a really active imagination (he has lots of imaginary friends) . . . Then some friends are visiting and they have a daughter around the same age. She has never met my nephew. Twice in the one day she asked about the "pretty girl" while pointing at the exact same room. Definitely caught me out and I didn't know what to think . . . Then at Christmas my family was over at my place and my nephew points at a picture of my wife and asks if she is coming to visit us here or does she just stay at the cottage. My wife died ten years ago. Personally I don't really believe in paranormal stuff so it's probably just my logical brain putting together a bunch of kids ramblings but it definitely got my attention.

When I was about 4, I would remember talking to "Mr.Peterson" whenever I was at my grandmothers house. He looked like a hobo from the great depression and had a guitar and sang me old timey blues, he told me that he died when he fell of a train he was riding whist drunk on moonshine. I stopped seeing him when I was about 6. Anyway, 6 months ago I found my dads old acoustic guitar and started playing, and my little cousin told me "Mr.Peterson is proud of you!" And left.

When my daughter was around 4 or 5, we lived in a house that had been converted into three separate apartments. We lived in the basement portion. Because of the way they converted the house there was a small recessed area under one of the stairways that formed a small closet/storage space in her room. One night while she was getting ready for bed I overheard her talking to someone in her room. I poked my head in and asked if she was calling for me. Her words - "No. I was talking to the little boy who lives in my closet... He's dead."

A good friend of mine and her husband bought what is considered an 'old' house around here. (Western Canada...not many houses over 100 years old). They were renovating the basement one day while I was visiting. I was down there alone with their son, who was barely 2 at the time, and could not yet speak in full sentences. He took my hand and led me over to a brick chimney-like thing thing, with a rusty metal door on it. He looked up and said 'That's where the dead babies go.' . . . I was horrified. Firstly, because, like I said, the kid could barely talk, let alone say something like that. I doubt he even knew what 'dead' meant. I'm positive that no one would have told him that, and there were no older kids around that would have said that as a joke. Still creeps me out to this day.

My wife was getting my 2yr old son up one morning. He was standing in his bed/crib. As she said good morning and walked over to him he picked up her shirt a little and crooked his head to the side. She asked him what he was doing and he said, "looking for my baby sister in your tummy." She laughed it off as a weird kid imagination thing. We found out later that at the time she was 2 weeks pregnant and it was, in fact, a girl. We are due in September. We had never really had the talk about where babies come from nor did we talk about having another child at all around him. So spooky.

When my little sister first started talking she used to say some really disturbing things. She used to tell us about how her old family would put things inside of her and would make her cry but her Daddy eventually burned her so much that she was able to find us, her new family. She spoke about things like that from the ages of almost two to four, she was much too young to have ever been exposed to any content where children, or anyone else could be sodomized, so my family has always thought she held memories of a prior life.

Between the ages of two and six my son would tell me the same story of how he picked me to be his mother. He said something about being with a man in a suit and picking a mother that would help him accomplish his souls mission (I'm atheist, so we didn't discuss spirituality at that point, nor was he raised in any sort of religious environment). The way he described it was that it was similar to grocery shopping, that he was in a bright room with people who were lined up like dolls, and that he picked me. The man in the suit asked him if he was sure, he replied that he was, and then he was born . . . My son also had an early fascination with WWII era planes. He could identify them, their parts, what region they were used in and the like. I still have no idea where he got that information. I'm a science gal, his dad is a math guy . . . We have always called him "Grandpa" because of his peaceful and gingerly demeanor. This kid seriously has an old soul.

My nephew when he first began really talking in sentences told my sister and her husband that he was "so happy he picked them". And then went on to say that before he was a baby he was in a bright room and saw lots of people and he "picked his Mom because she had a nice face".

When I was young, like maybe two years old, my grandma was in the hospital, dying of cancer. Obviously i had no idea what was going on, but apparently one day when my mother and aunt were watching me, I suddenly looked at them and said "Only one Grandma." . . . They kept trying to convince me otherwise, that no, I had two grandmas, but I kept repeating that line over and over . . . Then the phone rang. It was my uncle calling to tell my mother that my grandma had passed a few minutes ago . . .

My brother had a similar experience as a child. We had gone to visit my grandparents earlier in the day and everything was fine. When it was time to go to bed my brother, he was about 5 at the time, started crying and saying he wanted to "talk to Papa because he's sick". My mom and dad kept assuring him that he was fine as we were just over there earlier in the day. My brother wouldn't stop screaming so my mom called my grandparents. My grandma was awake and said my grandpa was asleep but she decided to take the phone into his room so he could talk to my grandpa. When she went in to the room my grandpa was unresponsive and had just had a heart attack. Fortunately for him my psycho brother knew somehow and he was able to survive. That was 23 years ago and my grandpa just passed 2 years ago . . .

My mum's dad died 10 years before I was born. I was about 6 or 7 when my parents divorced. The day before my mum told me they were divorcing apparently I was at the kitchen table drawing or something while my mum cooked tea. She says I stopped instantly and looked toward the front door as if I'd heard it open. I stared for a long time, then giggled, turned toward my mum and said "Grand-dad says don't worry, everything will be okay and he won't let anything bad happen." I then began humming and went back to my drawing. My mum says it's the single creepiest thing that's ever happened to her, and I have no memory of it happening.

According to my mom when I was younger I would tell her about how I had died in a fire a long time ago. I don't remeber that but one of my biggest fears is my house burning down or Just being around open fire scares me.

While changing my daughter in front of the open closet door. She kept looking around me and laughing. I asked her what was so funny. She said, "the man." To which I replied, "what man?" She then pointed at the closet and said, "the man with the snake neck." I turn around and nothing was there. I'm afraid to look into the history of my house to see if anyone hung themselves in the closet. At least she wasn't scared.

When my sister was little (like three or four), she explained about how she used to be black until the soldiers came to raid her village and how she died when they shot her family and set fire to the hut . . . I'm still not sure if she somehow encountered the concept of Africa on the radio, or what. And she doesn't remember it anymore.

The most detailed one I ever heard was actually delivered second-hand through my friend's mother. Apparently beginning around the time my friend could form sentences until he was little more than 2, he would go on and on about how he was a Native American named Conchon and that after his wife and son got sick and died, he moved to a mountain to live by himself with his horse. He died of a broken neck when he fell into a ravine.

As someone who frequently gave details of a past life, I can confirm I have absolutely no recollection of the life I supposedly lived before this one, but I do remember one time when I was about five giving a detailed story of being a viking executing someone. I used to always give very detailed stories of when I 'was a viking on the ship' and they always went together. I said that I was part of the same family and what not. Later found out that my family actually was vikings hundreds of years ago, and the names I gave were real people. Again, I have absolutely no memories of the viking days, just the one time I told the story.

I had one of those when I was young, we were walking along and there was a plane flying over head and I pointed at it and said "I can't wait to get a new one" my dad was obviously kind of confused and asked what happened to my old one and I said "it crashed so I came here", also strange side note, I have a line of birthmarks on my left shoulder that perfectly follow the curve of my shoulder and I have frequent dreams about being attack by a shark, what happens is I am floating in the water with a lot of fire everywhere and a shark grabs me by my left shoulder and drags me down. (See here for a picture of the birthmark.)

My mother told me this story once that a woman she worked with told her, about how her son used to speak French in his sleep, even though he couldn't speak French while awake. It turned out he had been having a series of dreams where he was a French fur trader in colonial era America (or pre-colonial?).

According to my father, when I was a toddler I had a nightmare and woke up screaming, and told him about how I was stuck in a burning building with a bunch of people jumping out windows. Keep in mind, we lived in an incredibly rural town in Portugal at the time and had no television or internet, so there was no way the concept or image of a burning highrise could have gotten into my head. My father thought it was weird, and wondered if that could have been how I died in a past life or something.

Savant Syndrome and Psi

There's been quite a bit of interest in the nine-year-old girl Nandana, who is said to have a telepathic connection with her mother. The child is severely autistic, but the mother started to notice that she seemed to know exactly what she was going to be given to eat, or the details of a trip the family was about to make, before being told about them.

In a test, a poem was given to the mother to read to herself and Nandana was then able to type it in a laptop without any prompt. She also identified a six digit number, a nine-digit number, and simple words and phrases. It's said she didn't look at her mother while typing. However I didn't see any measures being taken to control for cueing by either of the parents, so the testing probably won't carry much weight.

Even so, the affair has aroused the usual sort of anxieties among sceptics, who to reassure themselves want the parents apply for James Randi's million dollars. The couple seem to be sensible, so I'm sure they won't. The idea of them co-operating with Randi's people only - inevitably - to be told that their daughter failed, then finding themselves being denounced across the Internet as heartless publicity-seekers, is upsetting to even think about. Events like this remind us that this is psi's natural habitat, in the home, in relationships and domestic situations, and often where there is some stress or maladjustment, which doesn't therefore lend itself very well to verification.

In a sane world we should be able to treat these things as part of life, without accusations of fraud or the exploitation of children. Which, oddly enough, is exactly what we do with Savant Syndrome, to which Nandana's ability clearly belongs, even though in many respects that's as challenging to science as psi itself.

Khaleej Times, in which the feature article about Nandana first appeared, later interviewed Darold Treffert , an expert in Savant Syndrome. Treffert was consulted in the making of the film Rain Man, which he credits with doing more than anything to educate the public about the phenomenon. He thinks that around 10% of autistic children exhibit savant abilities, usually in one of five categories (in order of frequency): calendar calculating (such as naming which of the next thirty years February 9 will fall on a Friday); music, art, mathematics and mechanical/spatial abilities (such as model making and assembling complex machinery). By contrast, reports of ESP are rare: in one sample of 561 savant children, it was reported by the parents of just four.

We marvel at savants, and yet we don't on the whole question their abilities. Obviously they can demonstrate their skills easily enough, but it's not the whole story. We accept it readily because it reinforces what we already think about brain/mind, that it has almost limitless powers. Savant Syndrome is just part of the much larger mystery that neuroscience has started to unravel.

To me that seems a bit complacent. Treffert cites severely cognitively disabled youngsters who know every detail of city transport systems, can assemble jigsaw puzzles without any picture to guide them, and recite Gibbon's Decline and Fall forwards and backwards. There's one who played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert No 1 having heard it only once, and another whose understanding of numbers enables him to fiddle at casinos: police raids on his house and bank account have seized $700,000, but prosecutions fail because the courts recognise he is severely mentally retarded and doesn't understand that what he has done is wrong. All this makes Nandana's ability to identify simple phrases in her mum's mind look almost pedestrian.

It's easy to think of savant abilities as something that some autistic children are gifted with, as if to recompense them for the inconvenience of being severely retarded. The bits of their brain that deal with the day-to-day stuff are seriously defective, but that somehow frees up other bits, the source of creative genius and memory, which in other people lie dormant. But there are reasons to doubt this. In his recent book Islands of Genius Treffert gives examples of perfectly normal people who acquired savant abilities as a result of a brain injury or disease.

A 54 year old construction worker recovers from a stroke and, having previously shown not the slightest interest in such things, becomes an accomplished poet, artist and sculptor.

Twelve elderly persons with dementia demonstrate an ability for art and music, sometimes prodigiously so, as the disease progresses. No such talent was observed before they became ill.

A 54-year old surgeon recovers from being struck by lightning. He becomes obsessively interested in classical music, in particular with a tune that keeps repeating in his head. He eventually transcribes it as a sonata and becomes a professional musician, while retaining his surgical skills.

A 40-year old motivational speaker recovers from a major concussion to discover that he can play guitar and piano. He now makes his living as a composer of movie sound-tracks.

The literature of the near-death experience contains similar examples, such as Tom Sawyer, the young blue-collar worker who after recovering from a road accident became obsessively interested in quantum mechanics.

This is all quite provocative. The unchallenged materialist assumption has been that savantism will one day be accommodated by physicalist theory, such as the computational and modular 'bottom-up' processes popular with AI and Darwinist proponents. It will be revealed as some kind of malfunction of the mechanisms that underlie normal memory, motor skills, emotions and everything else. I doubt that. My reading is far from comprehensive, but I'm not aware of any serious attempt to include this kind of phenomena in such models, and it's hard to see how that could be done.

This phenomenon of 'acquired' savantism forces us to think about the matter in a different way. We can't just attribute it to autism, that highly mysterious entity which we may assume has some curious property all of its own. This is about the effects of damage to brain tissue, pure and simple. It's as if I was to take a hammer to my six-year-old laptop, and instead of instantly expiring it suddenly blossomed into the latest supercomputer performing a thousand times faster.

The overwhelming implication in this surely is to reinforce the filter or valve theory of consciousness, that the function of the brain is to focus attention in this reality, and when that function is compromised, another reality breaks through. It's the same effect that may be had by ingesting hallucinogens, by fasting, mediation and various religious practices, and of course the near-death experience. As Edward Kelly writes in Irreducible Mind:

What psychedelics have in common with all other means of producing mystical states may consist not in the engagement of any highly specific final common neurophysiological pathways, mechanisms, or modules, but rather in some sort of more global disruption or "loosening" of the normal mind-brain connection, which in turn enables fuller expression of an objectively real transpersonal component of human personality.

Treffert himself is especially intrigued by the 'acquired' version of savant skills, and speculates that such abilities may be available to all of us, if we could only learn how to tap them. I'm not convinced about that. It's one thing for a poet or musician or artist to feel occasionally that they are in touch with some greater reality, but it might diminish the act of creation if they felt all the time that they were just taking dictation.

But Treffert is spot on when he says:

No model of brain function, including memory, will be complete until it can fully incorporate and explain this jarring contradiction of extraordinary ability and sometimes permeating disability in the same person. Until we can fully explain the savant, we cannot fully explain ourselves.

Science as Propaganda

In the comments to a recent post a sceptic tried, in the usual way, to convince us to abandon our delusions. He cited various references, including a fMRI study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2008, which claims to have demonstrated that psi does not exist.

Again, as is often the case, the study says more about the urgent disbelief of debunking psychologists than it says about psi. It's shortcomings were widely noted at the time, but since sceptics take it so completely at face value I thought I'd give it another look.

The experiment was carried out by Samuel Moulton, a Harvard psychology graduate, and his mentor Stephen Kosslyn, who is well-regarded for his brain studies on mental imagery and visual perception. The authors consider that the evidence for psi so far is highly dubious. Anecdotal experiences can be attributed to cognitive illusions, while the outcome of ESP experiments is ambiguous. By contrast, they think that brain scanning technology is sufficiently reliable to settle the matter. If psi exists then, ergo, it ought to show up in fMRI scans.

Accordingly they recruited 19 bonded pairs of people - twins, couples, friends - which they whittled down to 16, one acting as sender and the other placed in the scanner as receiver. The receiver was shown two pictures, one being 'sent' by the sender and the other a control, and asked to guess which by pressing a button. The results came out at 50%, as expected if chance alone was operating, nor did anything unusual show up on the scans.

They conclude:

Analyses of group data revealed no evidence whatsoever of psi. Psi and non-psi stimuli evoked widespread but indistinguishable neuronal responses . . . The results support the null hypothesis that psi does not exist.

The study shows an impressive attention to detail, and in its technical aspects looks extremely solid, eg:

Functional series were analyzed using FMRIB's Improved Linear Model (FILM; Woolrich, Ripley, Brady, & Smith, 2001), which removes nonparametrically estimated temporal autocorrelation in each voxel's time series before applying the general linear model (GLM). For each series we modeled neural responses to the psi stimulus, non-psi stimulus, and feedback stimulus, as well as their temporal derivatives by convolving the basic waveforms (based on onset time and duration) of these variables with a double-gamma canonical hemodynamic response function (Glover, 1999). The same temporal filtering that was applied to the data was also applied to the model. For every functional volume, the following linear contrasts were employed to create statistical parametric maps (SPMs): non-psi > psi, and psi > non-psi.

So these guys know their stuff. Or do they?

Moulton and Kosslyn talk as if they're pioneering a new method which will settle the psi controversy once and for all. But they make no mention at all of any of the successful previous psi research using scanners, which even by this time was quite significant. Critics gave them such a hard time about this, they eventually went to Dean Radin to ask him what they'd missed (see a description here) - something they might have usefully done at the outset.

Then there's their method of producing ESP, which I did not at all recognise. If it wasn't tried and tested, it's not surprising that it was unsuccessful here. The more so, considering that the receiver is in a noisy machine and being asked to perform tasks in quick succession - hardly conducive to the relaxed state of semi-disassociation that is known to be ideal for generating psi.

And interestingly, despite their insistence that their methodology beats 'behavioural' research, it still centred on a cognitive process, of conscious knowing. At least one of the earlier fMRI studies bypassed this by looking to see if a light flash stimulus on the sender provoked the same response in the receiver's brain as in the sender's - it did.

In the earlier studies, moreover, efforts had been made to find participants that really could have produced psi. These authors knew enough to understand that bonded pairs are more likely to produce psi interactions than those that are not. But they seemed to think that alone would guarantee it. Earlier successful fMRI experiments selected people who had demonstrated psi abilities, for instance having worked as healers or taken part in a successful previous study.

There are other possible explanations for the negative results. Perhaps the ESP activity was there, but masked by the activity relating to visual perception. Or the signal might have simply been too weak to pick out from the noise. It's not clear why the experimenters were impressed by the absence of activity in the brain relating to psi if there was no psi in the first place - unless they saw the sender's intention as a material entity that was bound to register visibly among the receiver's neurons.

What really catches the eye is that one of the receivers actually did show potential evidence of psi - in the form of a relative absence of brain activity that correlated positively with the psi stimulus. The authors concede this would count as a positive result, but devote the best part of two pages trying to explain it away as an 'uninteresting artefact'. Having discussed and rejected two hypotheses, they eventually decide that the anomaly reflects the participant's 'idiosyncratic reactions to perceptual, conceptual, or affective differences between the psi and non-psi stimuli'.

Their reasoning is highly technical and difficult to appraise. But it begs a number of questions. If a single positive result can be neutralised in this way, could not similar arguments be applied in the event that other participants showed positive effects? Is there any guarantee that any of the three people whose data was rejected did not also show positive results? And what is the point of looking for evidence in the first place if it can be so easily dismissed? Surely this weakens the authors' insistence on the power of fMRI scanning to settle matters once and for all.

This is one of the more curious features of debunking studies. The sceptics embark on a process in the expectation of getting null results, are embarrassed to get positive results after all, but save the day with post hoc reasoning such as, 'yes but it wouldn't have happened if we'd done the randomisation differently'. (Radin references a wonderful study published in the The Humanistic Psychologist in 2006 by two psychologists, who carried out eight ganzfeld experiments and were shocked to get the usual 32% significance rate. To deal with this they redesigned the experiment to their own specification, and got a null result, which they then used to explain away all the rest.)

Someone who is not an out-and-out sceptic might spot the authors' hostility towards the idea of psi and wonder what effect this might have on their reasoning. To those of us who know about psi research, it stands out a mile. Their preamble makes it abundantly clear. They go to the trouble of quoting in full a rather good example of a crisis ESP episode - a woman waking one night experiencing powerful symptoms of choking and blood falling down her head, and learning two days later that her son was shot in the head at this time - but wave such testimony away on the grounds that it's probably all caused by confirmation bias, clustering illusions, etc. Even if ESP was proved, they say, it would just be an unexplained anomaly. They admit that claiming a single null result to be proof of non-existence is problematic, but consider that their results are so clear-cut it's fair to make an exception.

As an exploratory experiment it has value, and arguably forms an interesting addition to the parapsychological database. But their ambition is manifestly not to add to the database but to discredit it, backed by the big guns of contemporary neuroscience. The real story here is one of individuals setting out to rid themselves of their uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Hence the triumphant press release that one can guess generated headlines around the world: 'ESP does not exist, Harvard scientists prove.'

The result is a curious illusion - an apparently careful, well-designed and thoroughly scientific study which is in fact only superficially so, and whose real effect is to reinforce materialist prejudices. Science as propaganda, one might say.

A Crowdfunding Appeal

Crowdfunding is a big deal these days, to judge from the number of start-ups using it to fund innovative new devices. It seems to work and I've been wondering if and when psi research would start using it.

Now someone has. The Windbridge Institute is appealing for help to fund an investigation of the healing effects on the bereaved of readings by mediums.

Director Julie Beischel comments:

For those of you who have already experienced the healing effects of a mediumship reading, putting effort into studying this may seem like a waste of time. I assure you that it is not. In our culture, science serves as an authority and only by using the tools of science can we truly affect change and potentially make this a treatment option available to everyone suffering from a loss.

Any scientific research on mediums is worth doing, so I hope this bears fruit. Michael Prescott has published Julie's email in full, and you can sign up here.