Paranormalia

Just Coincidence

To the SPR yesterday for a talk by Dr Penny Sartori, a nurse who carried out a five-year study of NDEs at the intensive care unit at Swansea hospital between 1998 and 2003. Seven of 39 patients who suffered a cardiac arrest during this period reported an NDE. She described how, before the study began, she placed symbols on the top of monitors above the beds, where they could not be seen from the ground. The idea was that if any patient saw one during an out-of-body episode it would help to verify that it was real, and not imagined.

Sadly, none of the patients saw the images, and in most cases their reports were hard to verify. On the other hand, when compared with a control group, their reports showed much greater accuracy, suggesting the presence of an unknown process. 

Some of the best evidence of this is still that provided in the 1980s study by cardiologist Michael Sabom, which may have had an advantage over the Swansea study in that it involved surgical operations rather than intensive care situations. Sabom's patients made quite detailed comments on the operations, for instance remarking on the curious shape of the heart, as the surgeon pulled it out and worked on it, or the depth of the spine from which a damaged disc was removed. Members of a control group who were asked to describe the operation were much less specific and made major errors.

Sabom's control was criticised for using patients who merely had similar medical backgrounds. Sartori improved on it by recruiting individuals who had experienced resuscitation. But as it turned out, these people were no better able than Sabom's group to say what might have happened during their period of unconsciousness - some did not know, and others simply extemporised from TV hospital dramas.

This area has always interested me, because out of body vision carries such a powerful impact. It convinces individuals, almost uniformly I think - and certainly those who experience it during an NDE - that their mind is not their body, and that their consciousness will survive death. It's not an unreasonable inference, and one that's obviously important for sceptics to try to counter. Handily, Chris French was at the talk, and ready to provide his take.

Sartori pointed to a clear distinction between individuals who suffered hallucinations, which were random and confused, and the NDErs, whose experiences were lucid and involved the same imagery.  French disputed this by analogously referring to abduction experiences, where there is evidence that even people who think they are real are clearly hallucinating.  There may be a point there, although I didn't follow it completely, and I wasn't sure how useful it is to compare the two quite different situations.

Sartori then countered that the information some patients came up with, apparently while they were unconscious, did seem to have been acquired paranormally. One reported that he had met his deceased grand-daughter and that she told him to tell her mother not to believe everything that mediums told her. This meant nothing to him, but his daughter later confessed she had been regularly consulting mediums without his knowledge. In another case, staff in the unit watched a dying man sitting up and gesturing at the wall for half an hour - he later said his sister and come to visit, although she had died the previous week, a fact which his family had decided not to reveal to him.

Wanting the last word, French retorted that 'a sceptic would probably still say it could all have been a coincidence'. Interesting that he slipped into the third person there. I wondered whether he did this because he would personally be embarrassed to identify with such a strategy, in which case, one would have to ask why he continues to think the way he does. I suppose he has too much invested. When things get tough, just fudge and prevaricate. It must be difficult being a committed sceptic sometimes.

I've mentioned once or twice Blackmore's heroic resistance in Dying to Live on the same subject. Briefly, her approach is that when people say they saw what family and hospital staff were doing around their unconscious body they are just exaggerating or making stuff up. In her brisk, no-nonsense way, she deals with a seemingly unanswerable bit of evidence by blaming the percipient for making such a big thing out of it. Surely, she argues, that can only mean one thing: that the percipient is not really confident it happened the way she said it did. As I say, it must feel demeaning for a serious scientist to have to talk in this way.

This is taken to extremes by psychiatrists Glen Gabbard and Stuart Twemlow in their 1984 book With the Eyes of the Mind. They are particularly bothered by Sabom's claims about out-of-body perception in his heart patients. They manage to postpone the subject until the last few pages, at which point they seem to realise they are going somehow to have to tackle it. The results are comical: they haven't got a clue. They enlist the help of Terence Hines, whose debunking textbook they happen to have handy, and who doesn't really know either, but has a lot to say about Uri Geller and fraudulent psychics. Having perused this stuff for a while they conclude that claims of out of body perception can be put down to fraud, but without really making clear whether they think it's the doctor or his patients who are lying.

You can't blame sceptics for behaving like this - their entire worldview rests on it. But it would be interesting if more people who essentially share that worldview understood the dubious shifts that can be required to keep it in business.

(Incidentally, Sartori has just published a book based on the study, and other research carried out for her doctoral thesis. At a cool £85 I can't imagine that we are all going to rush out and buy it, but I'll try to get hold of a copy and review it at some point). 

Cross-Fertilisation

I mentioned recently that I attended a talk by Chris French, a UK telly sceptic, at the Society for Psychical Research. French argued that there are 'normal' explanations for most paranormal-seeming phenomena, and that they are probably spurious as a source of religious belief. He acknowledged this would not go down terribly well with an audience that by-and-large assumes the paranormal is a genuine category, but he carried on cheerfully, perhaps hoping that some of us might change our minds.

A sort of mirror image of this set-up occurred when NDE researcher Peter Fenwick was invited to talk about death-bed visions to the Anomalous Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in South London, which French runs. I fidgeted a bit during French's lecture, so I couldn't help wondering how his lot managed to sit through Fenwick's. I don't suppose the students have to swear a sceptics' oath or anything, but it would be surprising if many of them did not think like French does: weird stuff happens, but let's just call it anomalous, OK, nothing actually paranormal about it.

In principle I'm all for sheeps and goats coming out of their pens and talking to each other. Who knows, we all might learn something. Alas, I have to say, with respect to French, who is one of the more approachable sceptics, that what I got was to be reminded how thin and one-dimensional the sceptic's view of parapsychology is. I found myself revisiting that eureka moment I experienced about two years after I first started researching the subject, when I broke through to that hinterland of responsible research that sceptics hardly ever visit. A personal flashpoint for me is poltergeists: when French put up a slide mentioning Amityville and the Fox sisters, and talked briefly about problems with the Enfield case, I wanted to stand up and heckle - what about Miami, Rosenheim, Andover, South Shields? Really, how can children learn to do all these extraordinary things by trickery? Have you read any of the research?

Conversely, it must make sceptics uncomfortable to have to listen to paranormal claims being put forward without some kind of qualification. I wasn't at Fenwick's talk, but I have heard him speak before - he's probably the best-known scientific researcher on the topic in the UK - and there's a report of it in the new SPR Paranormal Review. He described a study he ran based on a television appeal for cases, which pulled in nearly a thousand reports of what he calls ELEs or 'end of life experiences, the best of which were followed up with interviews with carers in hospices and nursing homes.

A common theme was reports of the dying having sudden experiences of joy and love, and of visions just before death - in 40% of cases the dying acted as though someone had come to take them away, most often parents (24%) or other relatives (14%).  On very rare occasions living relatives shared the visions, which is something I'd like to hear more about. Some people, including GPs, said they witnessed 'white mist' or a 'heat haze' or 'smoke-like disturbances' leaving the body. There were also instances of mechanical like clocks stopping at the time of death, and apparitional deathbed coincidences. (There was no mention of last-minute lucidity in cases of Alzheimer's, which I mentioned in the review of Irreducible Mind recently, (May 19, and see comments), but perhaps such instances were not caught by the survey question).

Sceptics must have been wishing Fenwick would get to the bit where he explains it all away on various grounds: drugs, expectation and belief factors, etc. In fact he did run through these and other possible causes, but dismissed them on various grounds. The writer of the review states mildly that he thought Fenwick accepted at face value much of what had been reported, and hoped that further research would be a bit more detached. Actually I think this is often an issue with research of this kind: for instance I had forgotten, looking at some of Ian Stevenson's work recently, how completely he seems to identify with the reincarnational hypothesis.  On the other hand, in these sorts of contexts, it's hard to appear scientifically neutral if you think the available 'normal' alternatives as implausible, and by rejecting them appear to endorse the reality of survival of death.

So in the end, what is gained? Of course lots of people believe in paranormal stuff uncritically, and they really do need to know that at least some of it can be explained in normal terms. Perhaps some of those people turn up at SPR talks, in which case, who knows, French made some converts. But what really matters, it seems to me, is that sceptics - or at least people who are uncommitted, and are being pressed by their elders and betters to reject these things as spurious -  are exposed to real research about these extraordinary and neglected areas of human experience from time to time. My guess is that, of the two speakers, it was Fenwick who really gave his audience something to think about.

Music Strikes

With Damian Thompson's comment about near-death experiences still rattling round my head (see Counterknowledge, Feb 10), I came across a curious specimen of the genre reprinted in the new issue of The Week magazine (the American, not the British version). To recap briefly, Thompson classes near-death experiences along with conspiracy theories (for instance that the CIA caused the September 11 attacks, and revisionist history (that the Holocaust never happened). It's a 'countercultural belief... a passport to a thrilling alternative universe...' - in other words a lot of baloney.

This particular example is described by Oliver Sacks in his latest book Musicophilia. Sacks is a New York-based neurologist who writes about brain malfunctions that give rise to curious mental aberrations, not in an academic way, but from the perspective of the people struggling to cope with them. Here he writes about Tony Cicoria, a 42-year-old orthopaedic surgeon who was struck by lightning while talking on an outdoor payphone. Cicoria saw his body on the ground, floated upwards, and found himself surrounded by a bluish-white light. He felt 'an enormous feeling of well-being and peace', and saw the highest and lowest points of his life racing past him.  Then suddenly he was back, feeling intense pain. It turned out he was not badly hurt, and after a couple of weeks returned to work, suffering only minor memory problems which soon disappeared.

So far, it's fits the well-known pattern. It's what happened next that makes this case so unusual. Several weeks later Cicoria suddenly started to feel an insatiable desire to listen to piano music, something he had previously had no interest in.  He went out and bought recordings, got himself a piano and taught himself to play Chopin. Then he started hearing music in his head: the first time this happened in a dream, where he was playing one of his own compositions on stage, and when he woke up it was still in his head, so he tried to write it down.

Now he found that if was trying to play Chopin, his own music would intrude and overwhelm him. That continues to this day. He plays publicly, and is apparently a competent as well as a passionate performer. His music comes from deep within him, like an inspiration, he explains.  'It never runs dry... if anything, I have to turn it off'. 

Cicoria says that as a medical man he is at a loss to explain these events and had come to think of them in spiritual terms. This isn't good enough for Sacks, who points out that they must have at least some physical basis. He talks about evidence that the sense of being out of the body is related to disturbed function in the cerebral cortex, specifically at the junctional region between the temporal and parietal lobes. Regarding the other aspects - the light, the life panorama, the transcendental sense of significance - he speculates in terms of a surge of neurotransmitters, the involvement of the emotional parts of the brain - the amygdala and brainstem nuclei.

Debunkers tend to think that you only have to start talking like this for the subject to lose its mystery. It's somehow been tamed. This doesn't seem to be Sacks's view: he is genuinely curious. He may not subscribe to a spiritualist interpretation, but he has talked to at least one person who has been through it, and is anyway far too sensitive to his patients' experiences to dismiss it as a meaningless neurological disturbance. The fact that something like this can lead to such puzzling and richly positive impulses surely emphasises how little is yet known about consciousness and about how the brain works.

Cicoria isn't the only person to have found a new calling after having his brain rearranged. His story reminds me of the case of Tom Sawyer, described by Kenneth Ring in Heading Toward Omega. Sawyer, a labourer with a basic education, was crushed underneath a truck he was working on, and following loss of consciousness went through a very full near-death experience. After his recovery he found himself obsessed with words like 'quantum' and 'Max Planck', and mathematical symbols used in equations, none of which at the time made any sense to him. Eventually he started spending a lot of time in libraries, avidly reading books on physics and maths, which he seemed to understand intuitively.

It just seems so odd that human experiences of this kind should be treated by scientists and sceptics as marginal and insignificant . To call them 'hallucinatory wishful thinking experiences', as Michael Shermer does (Why People Believe Weird Things, p. 78), doesn't do it for me.  Even from a materialist perspective I would have thought they could help shed light on how the brain works. Perhaps one day more neurologists like Sacks will start to see their relevance to the wider problem of consciousness, and then scientists in other disciplines too may recognise that there is something important going on here.