Paranormalia

Book Review: Kelly & Kelly et al, Irreducible Mind

I've been hogging the SPR library's copy of Irreducible Mind, having been too cheap to shell out the fifty-odd quid for it, and now they want it back. Woe. (Sorry if you're one of the people waiting for it.) I can't imagine being without it for long, though, so will doubtless end up buying it, and be glad to have it in my shelves. No question, this is one of the most important publishing events in its field for a long time.

Not, of course, that this will be instantly recognised by the people it is mainly aimed at - mainstream psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers. The book's uncompromising rejection of the reductionist models they take for granted will probably just baffle them, at least at first. I'd be curious to know what sort of reaction they have been giving it in their publications, but I guess it will be a slow burn. No matter; the case it makes is so complete and compelling it must surely sink in eventually.   

The main authors are Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly, with contributions by Alan Gauld, Adam Crabtree, Bruce Greyson and Michael Grosso. The book has been out for a while so has had quite a bit of attention (Michael Prescott had a good look at the chapter on NDEs a while ago). But if you're not aware of it yet, it's an update of the ideas of Frederic Myers, one of the SPR's main founders, the first and arguably still the greatest theorist produced by psychical research.

Myers looked closely at unusual mental phenomena - automatic writing, hysteria, mediumship, dreams, hypnotism, genius and mystical experience, and the like - as well as the ostensibly paranormal phenomena collected by the SPR.  He came to a view of the unconscious that contains different centres of consciousness, complete in themselves, but of which we are not aware, and which we often draw on, for instance as a source of creative inspiration.  His big idea was the Subliminal Self, an ultimate 'I' that has roots in a transcendental environment of some sort, with which the conscious part of ourselves is reunited following the death of the body.

Myers's approach was in harmony with the thought of William James, who however did not long survive him. The field was then free for Freud and others to promote a quite different, pathologized view of the unconscious, as a sort of garbage dump of repressed anxieties, a source of tension and potentially of illness and disease. Subsequently the emergence of behaviourism effectively led to consciousness being abolished altogether as a topic for scientific consideration. Essentially Irreducible Mind builds on Myers's and James's pioneering ideas, reinforcing them with new evidence that has accumulated in the past century.

I'm used to thinking of psi as making the current physicalist paradigm untenable. What I hadn't properly appreciated is that there are many other kinds of mental phenomena that do the job just as well, without involving claims of 'spooky action at a distance' which many people find hard even to consider. In fact the book actually contains rather little from the paranormal canon, and it's interesting to see how the argument for an enlarged view of the mind-brain relationship can be largely made without it.

I was especially interested by Emily Williams Kelly's chapter on psychophysiological influence. This assembles data that shows mental ideas, images and conceptions having tangible effects on the organism. Numerous studies show that a person has an increased chance of dying shortly after suffering bereavement, for instance. There are also well documented cases of people being convinced for one reason or another they would die at a certain time, and then doing so, despite being in perfect health. Kelly also cites cases of people's hair going suddenly white from shock, of stigmata and marks on bodies corresponding to suggestion, of yogis buried underground whose hearts flatlined for days and came back to life shortly before being recovered.

The placebo gets attention too, with the growing recognition that mental states somehow trigger a healing mechanism. Kelly cites an extraordinary 1957 study, in which a patient close to death badgered his doctor to be included in a trial of a new medicine.  Within three days his tumours were half their original size and after ten days he was discharged, continuing in good health for two months. But he became ill again after reading press reports that the drug might not be effective after all. His doctor, sensing what was going on, then persuaded him to try a 'new improved version of the drug', which in fact did not exist - he injected him with water. The patient recovered again, with results even more dramatic than before. But after two months he learned from the media that further studies had shown the drug to be quite worthless, and within days he was dead. (p.145).

Interestingly, the science and medical community sometimes resists such claims as fiercely as it does telepathy and psychokinesis. Take hypnosis: this was briefly used in the nineteenth century before the discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic, and it worked. In one case it was used in an operation to remove a massive face tumour, which involved ripping open the patient's face and yanking the tumour through the eye until it burst - through all this, according to the surgeon the patient 'never moved, nor showed any signs of life, except an occasional indistinct moan' (p.189). Yet one doubter absurdly preferred to think that in such cases the patient, having formed a bond with the doctor, 'wants to please him, so bravely tries to inhibit signs of pain.'

Kelly points out that such resistance tends to disappear the moment scientists think they can explain it. Putting something into scientific language - hypothesizing a chain of events among various neural centres, for instance - provides a physicalist framework which superficially makes the claim less threatening. However she also points out that the explanations really don't amount to very much.

The essential problem we are left with is that such phenomena imply a causal direction hard to account for in mechanist terms. It's one thing to conceive of brain chemistry bringing about ideas and images in the mind. But it's something else again if mere ideas or images can set in train vastly complex chains of events within the body. How does a belief that one will overcome one's illness, or an instruction to make this happen, translate into the hugely specific biological steps required to bring that about?

It would be hard to exaggerate either the quality of this book or its importance. I'm struck by the lucidity of the text - as a layman I hardly ever found myself floundering - and an enormous amount of data and argument is deftly handled. Some of it was completely new to me: I had no idea that patients suffering from advanced dementia sometimes become quite lucid in the moments before dying, as is apparently often reported by hospital nurses, and I look forward to seeing published data about this, as it obviously carries important implications.

As well as being astonishingly erudite - the extent of the scientific literature it surveys is truly impressive - it's also a very bold book. It's encouraging to find such a serious and well-supported defence of non-physicalist positions that, baldly stated, inevitably invite derision from the mainstream, but with so much supporting evidence must surely start to be taken seriously.  There's a lot here about the 'filter' theory of the brain proposed by James and Myers - and later also backed by, among others, C.D. Broad, Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley - which is irresistibly suggested by the action of psychedelics. And I can't recall ever in a science book, and certainly not a recent one, encountering such a clear and forthright argument in support of an essentially dualist view of mind-brain - again, if psychologists want to dismiss it out of hand it has to be asked, what is their explanation for all the evidence marshalled here to support it?

All of this will be immensely valuable to people like me who try to interest people in the claims of parapsychology. Evidence of telepathy and precognition, not to mention the more bizarre paranormal claims from mediumship, poltergeists and the like, are toxic to the conventional view of mind, but they are also hard to accept if you are not used to them. It will be a big help to be able to refer to a similarly enormous body of evidence that does not immediately require such a major emotional adjustment, but which at the end of the day points pretty much in the same direction.

Rational Mysticism ?

Greg at the Daily Grail has an interesting piece relating to sceptics and mysticism (The Mystical Skeptic? May 9). I was going to add a comment, but got a bit carried away, so am posting here instead.

Picking up on Susan Blackmore's recent descriptions on her LSD experiences, Greg points out that other sceptics/atheists have also expressed an interest in mystical experience.  Sam Harris, author of the polemic The End of Faith talks positively about 'rational mysticism', for instance (which in a way is not surprising, as he seemed open-minded in that book about parapsychology, although without going into any detail). He also mentions a book on the subject by John Horgan called Rational Mysticism, and cites Horgan's comment about Blackmore:

Blackmore has had flashes of the mystical self-transcendence referred to in Zen as kensho. In fact, she includes her out-of-body experience back at Oxford among them. She views that experience as a hallucination, but a profoundly meaningful one. She has taken to heart the lesson imparted to her toward the end of her journey, that no matter how much we learn and grow, there is "always something more". As a result of that lesson, she views mystical experiences not as ends in themselves but as way stations on a never-ending journey.

I agree with Greg in wondering whether the term 'rational mysticism' is not an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Eastern religion was one of the reasons I got interested in parapsychology: not having ever had any kind of mystical experience myself, I wondered about the idea that humans can temporarily achieve a state of knowing which utterly convinces them of the existence of God and a reality beyond this one, and the sense that they will continue to be a part of that reality when they are 'dead'. How much importance should one attach to it?

This insight seems to arise from meditative practices or, as described in the Rig Veda, from the effects of soma. So it's clearly related to changes in brain chemistry. Does that make it spurious? In the modern world we can approach these altered states from a secular perspective, as Blackmore clearly does. But if the experience can be subverted by a rational perspective after the event, how powerful could it have been in the first place? We would have to suppose that if all these mystics, meditators and initiates throughout history had read Dennett and Dawkins then they would have come out of their trance and decided that these ineffable and transcendental intimations were simply illusory, even if valuable or beneficial on some lower level (but what exactly ?)

I don't really buy any of this. If you read about mystical experiences of ordinary people - in Raynor Johnson's Watcher on the Hills, or Alister Hardy's The Spiritual Nature of Man, for instance - over and over you get this hugely powerful sense of what one can only term 'enlightenment'. People talk constantly about having had a glimpse of the true nature of reality, that we are all one, that love is the only true universal constant, and so on. They almost all say that they now understand what is meant by the term 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. What you tend not to find is people saying, 'yeah, while it was going on I thought I saw God and heaven, and it was really cool, but now I realise it was just stuff going on in my head, no biggie.'

I suppose a sceptic could argue that researchers and writers select, and that in fact there are grades of experience, from which they choose only the most outstanding or the ones that further their own religious agendas. I haven't actually seen that argument, but that's probably just because sceptics aren't normally at all interested in mystical experience. Yet the overwhelming impression, and one that incidentally is supported by the research on NDEs, which is pretty thorough, is that this is a quite distinct class of psychological event. You either have a transcendental, transformative life-changing experience - or you don't. 

So how is it possible to blur this boundary? I suspect that what's going on here is that semantic confusion which lies at the heart of sceptical discourse, the tendency to elevate weak experiences to the level of the real thing. It's an inability - or unwillingness - to distinguish between different types or levels of experience. I always think that Michael Persinger's work is an example of this: he claims that a lot of mystical and paranormal experiences, including elements of the NDE itself, can be induced by his magnetic helmet, but he doesn't really provide any evidence that they are the same things. The suspicion is that he's comparing apples with pears.

Blackmore's 'out-of-body' incident is another small but relevant example. My sense is that this experience, which occurred in her early twenties after smoking a joint, is pretty central to the subsequent development of her thought. The crux of it was her realization that the details of what she saw while roaming around Oxford 'out of her body' were actually inaccurate. For instance a particular roof, which she had observed as having chimneys and red tiles, did exist, but not as she had perceived it: it was actually green and had no chimneys.  She concluded that she had experienced a psychological construct, an illusion generated by the brain. The implication - and again this is absolutely central to sceptical thought - is that there really are two alternatives to choose from, and a critical, probing intelligence will understand the truth that escapes those who are less discerning.

There really is an issue here, and in fact even OBE adepts have recognised the illusory nature of some of their perceptions. (Interestingly, James Randi describes a rather similar incident in his own experience). Blackmore built on it to develop her psychological theory in Beyond the Body (1982). But while it adds a perplexing layer of complexity to the puzzling business of OBE perception it ought not to invite simplistic either-or interpretations. By the time Blackmore gets round to the near-death experience in Dying to Live ten years later it's become a central dogma - her chapter explaining away the accurate veridical perception reported by some hospital patients is as wonderful a piece of bluff and obfuscation as you will find anywhere.

What's really interesting is that Blackmore seems to be conflating her own hash experience with the full NDE. At the end of the book she says that many people who have had NDEs have come back from their experiences convinced that they have seen the spirit world, that they have grasped their 'higher self' and that they will live after they die. But she has experienced it too, she responds, and come to a different conclusion (p. 259). I found this rather shocking. As far as I can discover what she experienced differs quite markedly from the classic NDE described by Moody, Ring et al - she says nothing about tunnels, deceased relatives, life reviews, beings of light and so on - and it is quite misleading to suggest otherwise.

Finally, it strikes me that Horgan's comment about Blackmore's interest in meditation and mysticism hints at the rather incomplete nature of her experiences. The idea that there is 'always something more', and that mystical experiences are not ends in themselves but 'way stations on a never-ending journey' is an important insight in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. But has she really arrived at it herself? Or is it something that she is repeating, and that accords with the rather limited nature of her own experience, because she hasn't actually felt that overwhelming transcendence that other people sometimes report?

I don't want to push this too far, because in lots of ways I respect Blackmore's work. We have a common interest in vitally important issues that ought to engage the attention of thinking people far more widely than they do. Also, it's hard to know exactly where she's at without quizzing her directly - who knows, she may really be onto something. But without a good deal more clarity from her I shall be pretty sceptical that she really does have anything original to say about mystical experience, or indeed, more generally, that the idea of rational mysticism means anything at all.

The Illusionists

Thanks to Greg at The Daily Grail for drawing attention to Richard Wiseman's article on magicians and the paranormal, which I'd missed.  Some magicians - Randi, Penn and Teller, Paul Daniels, etc - are so obnoxiously loud about their disbelief in psychic phenomena, it creates the impression that they all think the same way. Not so, according to Wiseman, himself a former professional magician, who polled professional and semi-professional conjurors around the world. A quarter of his sample of more than 400, he says, believe in the reality of telepathy, precognition or psychokinesis

In fact there have been, and continue to be, conjurors who have experienced psychical incidents they can't explain, and are quite happy to go on record about it. The famous nineteenth-century French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin was famously gobsmacked by the psychic Alexis Didier - a fact that Harry Houdini apparently didn't know when he named himself after him, and he was disgusted when he later found out. There's also a rather little known fact about JN Maskelyne, the Randi of the nineteenth century séance era as he is portrayed in debunking books. The sceptics describe, as historical fact, that the phenomenon of table-turning was explained away by the scientist Michael Faraday, although it plainly wasn't, as even a glance at the documented reports would confirm. Another fact, but one I think you will never learn from the sceptics' books, is that Maskelyne himself tried it out, got a result, and publicly avowed it to be a genuine psychic phenomenon, and not at all accounted for by Faraday's suggested mechanism.

Wiseman himself draws attention to the fact that magicians earn their bread by making things disappear. His point is simply that they will be far less likely to believe paranormal claims, because they understand how tricks can be done. Of course, but what's less well understood is that one of the things they make disappear is any evidence of paranormal phenomena. That's the illusion they create.  It's comical to see scientists like Richard Dawkins elevating practitioners like Randi to the status of experts, when all they are doing is selectively reviewing data to make their audience think what it suits them to believe - a classic case of distraction and misdirection.

The literature is simply stuffed with examples of this process in action - sceptics lapping up pretty much anything these self-appointed experts feed them, without any real attempt at critical thinking, all the while imagining that they are being heroically clever. It's an absolute mirror image of the 'devious charlatan duping gullible believer' scenario.

It's true of almost any episode that conjuror-sceptics have been involved in, but one that comes instantly to mind is Randi's debunking article of the Columbus, Ohio poltergeist, the case of Tina Resch. When this started getting international publicity Randi was asked to check it out by Paul Kurtz who had just founded the CSICOP. He hastened to the scene, only to find that the family would not let him in. No matter - he got some negative gossip from jaded reporters, who hadn't managed to see the spook in action, and cobbled together a debunking article. This is printed in Kendrick Frazier's anthology Science Confronts the Paranormal, and is one of very few sources that sceptics cite. The piece centres on a forensic dissection of a news photograph supposedly showing the spook in action. What sceptics don't really understand it that that's pretty much all it does - Randi didn't see anything at first hand, or interview anyone who had. Yet they typically consider his article utterly damning, not just of this case but of the whole category.

Wiseman has none of Randi's aggressiveness thankfully, but he's not above this sort of misdirection himself. He used to be involved with the Society for Psychical Research, and years ago sparked a furious controversy about the Italian séance medium Eusapia Palladino. His argument, laid out in the SPR journal with a good deal of brio, was that the report of the SPR's Naples investigation in 1908 - as complete an endorsement of séance phenomena as can be imagined - was actually riddled with holes. He proposed that Palladino had an accomplice, probably her husband, who had previously contrived to create a movable panel in the wall, through which he clambered at an opportune moment, and then managed to create much of the 'phenomena' behind a curtain. Wiseman's point is that the report does not provide the explicit detail to rule this out. You'd have to know a bit about the circumstances to grasp how utterly implausible this is - it would not have worked for five minutes. But if you don't, it's easy to be taken in by Wiseman's assurance and self-belief.

Actually I don't think there's any real harm done in this particular case - the claims regarding Palladino are hardly affected. On the other hand Wiseman's intervention in the case of Rupert Sheldrake's psychic dog Jaytee is surely as dubious a piece of chicanery as anything that Randi has carried out. On the basis of four rather poorly thought-out experiments he claimed to have debunked media claims that the dog always knows exactly when its owner is coming home. This wasn't hard to do, but he failed to acknowledge that Sheldrake himself had never claimed this, and was instead pointing to a suggestive statistical correlation established in 117 experiments (they showed the dog spending only an average of 4% of the time waiting by the window during the main period of his owner's absence and 78% while she was returning). Close scrutiny, if sceptics were capable of such a thing, would show that Wiseman has utterly misrepresented this episode - but of course they are happy to take his word for it. (See Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics for a summary).

A few days ago I questioned Susan Blackmore's slightly contradictory attitudes, and in the same way, I'm not always sure where Wiseman really stands. He's a charming fellow, and not obviously fired by hostility to the paranormal - he once told me he finds it good fun, and course he's done quite well out of it. Unlike Randi he is capable of nuanced thinking, and seems impressed by some of the ganzfeld work for instance.

Nor is there really any point in complaining about what sceptics do. They are addressing their audience and meeting its expectations.  As stage magicians always say, some people really like being deceived. It's up to those of who us who think that this is more than just a game to expose the tricks for what they really are.

Trip Down Memory Lane

You'd have to be of a certain age to make sense of some of the stuff being written about Albert Hoffman after his passing last week. LSD, which he invented - or accidentally stumbled upon, better said - was a big part of youth culture in the 1960s and early 70s. It has hardly been available for the past thirty years, so I suspect most people wonder what all the fuss was about. But those of us who experimented with it are taking the opportunity to dust down some of our wilder memories.

One is Susan Blackmore, a contemporary of mine at Oxford University in the early 1970s (although I had no interest in parapsychology then, and our paths never crossed). Blackmore has always been very open about her use of cannabis, and it didn't surprise me to find her writing a paean to Hoffman in the Guardian at the weekend. Like many regular users, she says, she used to take acid once or twice a year in her mid twenties - 'quite often enough for a drug that last 8 to 12 hours, has extraordinarily mind-bending effects, and can leave you exhausted and full of amazing lessons that you need time to digest.' That was exactly my view of it - it always astonished me that other people could drop acid as casually as they would roll a joint. I remember one poor soul did it two or three times a week, and got seriously raddled as a result.

Blackmore adds that Hoffman had already had mystical experiences long before he took LSD, and was therefore 'well placed to appreciate the deeper significance of its mind-altering effects'. I wonder what she means by 'deeper significance'. It's always interested me that Blackmore combines an interest in Buddhism - she meditates and follows the practice of mindfulness - with an aggressively materialist view of consciousness that owes more to Richard Dawkins than Stanislaf Grof. As I understand it she belongs naturally to the school of thought that sees in the neurological correlate, that is the fact of altered brain chemistry engendering transcendent experiences, the 'final nail in the coffin of religion' - in fact I seem to remember coming across that dread cliché somewhere in her writings recently. Certainly, she's at pains in Dying to Live to account for the near-death experience in reductive terms, and her attempt there to explain away veridical out-of-body perception is so forced that I have to wonder if deep down she really believes in what she is doing.

If you've never tried acid it's perhaps natural to follow the scientific and secular logic. But my impression is that most people who experience the awesome power of psychedelics really are fundamentally changed by it. They have the insight famously expressed by William James after dosing himself with nitrous oxide that there are other realities, other forms of consciousness besides our daily experience which are potentially at least as significant. That has been my experience: it's a long time since I took acid, and I only ever did it a few times. But ever since, it has provided me with perspectives on life, on consciousness and on reported mystical experience which I'm not sure I could have gained in any other way.

It's tempting to wonder how our society might have developed if it had embraced psychedelics instead of running away from them. Would sceptics be so aggressively dismissive of reported psychic experiences? Could a book like The God Delusion ever have been written if the writer had any direct appreciation of mystical states of mind?  Would thinkers and researchers in consciousness be so totally wedded to the computational theory of mind and brain if they had actually experienced altered states?  The alternative that LSD experience naturally promotes is the 'filter' theory - the idea that the brain acts as a barrier to undifferentiated reality, and can be subverted by certain chemical modifications to allow full contact with it - which Aldous Huxley picked up from Henri Bergson and popularised. As far as I'm aware, it's not seriously discussed in scientific circles, for obvious reasons, but if scientists dropped acid now and then it might at least get an airing.

You might think that Blackmore's example stands in contradiction to such ideas. Here is an open-minded, curious and imaginative thinker, someone willing to experiment with altered states of consciousness that in other people typically encourage a non-materialist interpretation, yet who resists that with the dull, dogmatic inflexibility that characterizes far less adventurous spirits. There may be a good reason for this, and perhaps, to be fair, she explains it somewhere that I have yet to come across. Yet it seems paradoxical, and it leads me to wonder, as I often have before, whether with her strident scepticism it is really herself she is trying to convince.

Psi and the Law

Psychics in the UK are getting hot and bothered about the change of legislation governing what they do. The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 is being scrapped, and they will in future come under the new Consumer Protection Regulations.  Like any other scam artist they can be prosecuted for knowingly selling someone a duff service, and if convicted face heavy fines or two years in prison.

Will it make any difference? To judge by all the hand wringing some people seem to think so. The Spiritual Workers Association complains that it  is 'turning spiritualism the religion into a consumer product, which it is not,' and that mediums will be more vulnerable to prosecution.

It's a bit hard to tell from the press reports just what the legal implications are. The law wasn't drafted with psychics in mind, so it's unclear how it will affect them. Their worry is that while the old rules obliged prosecutors to prove bad intent, the burden is now on them to prove they did not deliberately intend to mislead. To be on the safe side, mediums in spiritualist churches have taken to prefacing their readings with little disclaimers that this is 'not science, just an experiment'.

On the other hand the College of Psychic Studies, where mediums offer paid services, thinks that tightening standards is a good idea. The Office of Fair Trading itself says that individual psychics or mediums are not in the firing line - the aim is more to deal with foreign mass mailshot fraudsters extracting large sums of money. It says more than 170,000 consumers fall victim to clairvoyant scams every year, losing around £40 million. One psychic scammer sent messages demanding money saying 'you have to trust me ....BECAUSE YOUR FUTURE AND YOUR HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT'. Another told people that 'there is, in your home, in the very place where you are living, a zone which has been booby trapped by negative waves' and again demanded cash to sort the problem.

If the law can discriminate between the 'bogus' and the 'genuine' then it's got to be a good idea. It's astonishing how brazen the scammers can be, trying to frighten people by claiming that have psychically seen a person is suffering an illness, and claiming to cure it. Then there are the 'psychic hotlines'. When a bunch of press reporters tried out Cilla Black's new pysychic hotline (£1.50 per minute) they said they were given costly advice on a series of non-existent worries, and at great length to keep them on the line.

But how does the law discriminate between good and bad, when science says they are both equally bogus? And will someone make the effort to find out? Sceptics are full of righteous fury at 'cold readers', and it's not impossible that some up-and-coming Randi could try to make a name for him or herself by pushing for a prosecution. It wouldn't be for some obvious fraudster, which would hardly count as a victory, but with a high-profile medium with a reputation to protect, like Colin Fry or Derek Acorah.

A test case would require institutional backing. Any takers? The British Humanist Association is excited at the prospect of 'real changes' to the current situation where psychics are able to make 'completely unsubstantiated claims' and take money for it. Logically, I suppose, that means they hope that anyone who works as a psychic will soon be liable to prosecution. As Richard Wiseman commented for a BBC report: "Anecdotal evidence on their abilities is impressive, but if you put it under more scientific conditions, their claims tend to crumble. [Now] they will need to be able to justify the claims they are making."

This is just Wiseman in rent-a-quote mode - I don't think he has a specific agenda. But of course the threat is implicit. How do mediums justify the claim that they can speak to the dead, if science does not accept that such a thing is remotely possible? If you go to a medium and she says, 'I've got your dead mum here', and you think, 'oh no you haven't', can you call the police and get her arrested? Who judges the quality of the 'evidence' in legal terms, and by what criteria?

The law does occasionally get involved in psychic and spiritualist controversies, and it's not a pretty sight. One of the earliest cases was when Henry Slade, the nineteenth century medium was taken to court by a sceptical sitter. He conducted a stout defence, but was probably done for from the outset, since the judge considered his claimed feats contracted the 'well-known course of nature', and he had to flee abroad to avoid jail (this tragi-comic tale gets an airing in Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics). Another famous court case was the materialising medium Helen Duncan, whose claims were so fantastic she never stood a chance - she actually did do time in prison.

The logical conclusion of a prosecution against a medium is that the claims for psychism and survival of death would themselves be on trial. If there was another Slade or Duncan court case, it would test modern attitudes to these things. Perhaps the defence would call an array of expert witnesses to describe just how much evidence there is, and the prosecution would line up Wiseman, Blackmore, Hyman et al to pick holes in it. We'd then see m'learned friends getting to grips with what is usually considered a philosophical, academic or scientific question. And why not? - this is pretty much what happened with the 2005 Kansas court case over the claims of intelligent design.

I'm intrigued by the idea of this sort of contest, having always thought that evidence for psychism and survival involves matters of logic and is best examined in open debate rather than in purely scientific terms, where all sorts of untested assumptions get in the way. Will it ever happen?  Probably not - a law intended to stop people being obviously ripped off could surely not be used to investigate the profoundest metaphysical mysteries.  But you never know.

Book Review: Damien Broderick, Outside the Gates of Science

Have just finished Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold, by Damien Broderick, an award-winning sci-fi writer. It left me enthused and intrigued (and also, as often happens, a bit bewildered, but I'll come back to that). Parapsychology is not especially blessed with good writers, so it's good to come across someone who, as well as having a good knowledge of aspects of it, has ideas of his own and can put together an entertaining read.

Broderick's curiosity seems to have been stimulated by a psi episode reported by his wife. While gardening one day, she experienced a sudden jolting image of a bloody body, and was convinced something terrible must have happened to her daughter. She found the girl was OK, but an hour later a police officer arrived to tell her a close relative had just been killed in a car accident.  Subsequently Broderick spent quite a bit of time boning up on the experimental research and talking to key figures in the field.

He starts by discussing the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne. But what really gets his attention is the remote viewing work begun by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff working with Ingo Swann at the SRI, which evolved into the CIA-funded Stargate programme. He traces the ins and outs of this at some length, and is clearly impressed by the work of Joe McMoneagle and other stars in the field. He also describes the work of Stephan A Schwartz, a friend and former research director for the Rhine Research Center, who in November 2003 gave a class of remote viewing students the task of identifying the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. Their consensus was that the ousted dictator would be found crouching in a subterranean room or cave reached by a tunnel, beneath an ordinary looking house on the outskirts of a small village near Tikrit, and looking like a homeless person, with dirty rough clothing and long ratty hair - these and other details proved to be spot on.

Broderick make it clear that he believes psi to be genuine, without identifying himself too obviously as a full-on believer.  From time to time he mentions the views of critics like Hyman and Alcock, but then quietly ignores them. He does seem to be shocked by some of the sceptics' behaviour, though.  For instance he describes the conversation in which hardline sceptic Peter Atkins rubbished Rupert Sheldrake's work to his face, and then, under Sheldrake's gentle pressure, conceded that he hadn't read any of it. He also describes at some length the National Geographic TV film in which McMoneagle and Edwin May unequivocally succeeded in passing a remote viewing test on camera, only to hear it dismissed by the programme makers as 'coincidence'.

If there is so much experimental evidence in favour of psi, why don't scientists take it seriously? Broderick thinks a main reason is that there is no theory that could explain it. Accordingly he spends much of the second half of the book discussing what can be said about this, much of it in terms of quantum theory. He praises Evan Harris Walker's attempt to blend psi and quantum physics as a landmark effort, and is similarly respectful of Dean Radin's belief that quantum nonlocality and entanglement are more than metaphors, and provide deep insights into the nature of psi. Personally he is cautious, siding more with May, who as a former nuclear physicist is somewhat dismissive of such approaches. At the same time he feels that the mere fact that psi can plausibly be discussed in these terms counters the sceptics' claim that it is outlawed by the laws of physics.

I was especially interested in Broderick's speculations about the possible evolutionary development of psi, which is something I've often felt is rather neglected. He starts with an idea put forward by lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, that psi is a primordial or 'first' sense, an intuitive or visceral knowing 'based upon a complex form of quantum correlation that was certainly present in nature long before the species evolved to their current stage, and even before the planetary environment evolved to produce the normal five senses.' Picking up some ideas of James Carpenter and Rupert Sheldrake, he sees the function of psi to

get us ready for what's coming at us, like a social guide muttering discreetly in our ear, tipping us off to the names and status of those we are about to meet, directing us to the correct dinner utensil or appropriate garment for the occasion. It anticipates our needs, provides a sort of anticipatory Google search on current and upcoming experiences, and usually brings the results to us in the form of "inadvertencies", apparently irrelevant events and experiences that nevertheless "implicitly express the action of the orienting activity". Jung would have called them synchronicities. Psychotherapists like to weasel them out as clues to what's going on in the unconscious of a client.

Broderick concludes it is extremely likely that psi is an evolved function of the human species, playing its contributory part in our survival and thriving. He is sceptical of the idea that it necessarily implies the existence of a non-material spooky source of consciousness, citing Ockham's razor. Mystical ideas of a Source, favoured by Jahn and Dunne for instance, he sees as quasi-religious flights of fancy. As for afterlife belief, he favours the notion that this is based on the 'real, confusing experience of half-remembered dreams'.

Unless mediums and parapsychologists can demonstrate unequivocally that such a domain is real and attainable, its adherents will regard afterlife as something to be hoped for in private faith, rather than by watertight public evidence, and that posture is antithetical to the spirit of science, even paranormal science.

Some readers will find this problematic.  Certainly my assumption has always been that that psi essentially contradicts physicalist explanations of consciousness and points instead to Cartesian or 'radical' dualism. It's hard to conceive of telepathic interactions over a large distance in terms of brains that evolved from single cells. At what point in evolutionary history did these lumps of jelly enclosed in skulls acquire the potential ability to be in telepathic contact with other similar lumps a couple of continents away? I don't contest that psi abilities may be subject to evolution, indeed I think we should follow this reasoning as far as it goes. But there's something a bit unsatisfactory about treating psi purely as a materialist phenomenon. 

The impression I get is that Broderick thinks that precisely because psi can be discussed in a scientific framework that materialist assumptions remain untouched. Admirably undogmatic, he allows a faint possibility that paranormal phenomena will 'remake our scientific models and certainties', offering a gateway to some spiritual truth surpassing scientific knowledge. But he clearly doubts it.

For me this is makes the book so fascinating, the way it illustrates a certain approach to the problem of how we relate to psi. Broderick is comfortable talking about it in a scientific milieu. The experimental evidence is persuasive: we should acknowledge that, and expect it to be accommodated within a larger scientific paradigm, perhaps 50 years hence.  But apart from the episode of his wife's he is not at all interested in its daily manifestations  - in, for instance, mediumistic communication, poltergeist episodes, apparitional incidents, and so on, or indeed phenomena such as near-death experiences and children's memories of a previous life - which can hardly be excluded from any serious discussion of its larger relevance, particularly with regard to postmortem survival of consciousness. 

Demanding watertight proof, if afterlife belief is to be anything more than faith, is surely just to establish his own boundaries, just as, in their muddled way, the makers of the National Geographic film revealed theirs when they first devised a stringent test of psi, and, when confronted with a successful fulfilment of it, still refused to believe it. I can't help feeling that it indicates a need for the doubting mind to be so entirely overwhelmed that no further resistance is possible. The fact is, there is an abundance of evidence suggestive of survival which is capable of various interpretations, and this needs to be sifted, examined and subjected to just the kind of nuanced discussion that Broderick gives the experimental research.

Having said all that, Broderick has shown how the debate is going to develop. If parapsychology is to win a wider audience it will be precisely in this way, by open-minded, scientifically literate observers being willing to acknowledge that there is something important going on and taking the trouble to inform themselves about it. Such people will be reluctant to stick their necks out it means having to change their fundamental worldview and start believing in afterlife, ghosts, God and whatever else.  So cultivating this space is perhaps what will ultimately help psi to become more accepted within the scientific and secular community.

The South Shields Poltergeist

I've always thought that the Enfield Poltergeist was one of the best attested. It's often discussed, being relatively recent and the subject of a full length book This House is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse. But here's a very recent case that is its equal in terms of persistent and extreme phenomena. It's described by paranormal investigators Mike Hallowell and Darren Ritson in their new book The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family's Fight Against an Invisible Intruder.

The case occurred over several months in a terraced house in South Shields, a coastal town in north east England.  It started in December 2005 with anomalous movements of furniture and objects, and the following June came to the attention of Hallowell and Ritson, who staged an investigation over a period of several months. The victims were a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and their three-year old son Robert.

Some typical incidents logged by the couple early on include the following:

21.4pm: We ... found two chairs had been stacked on top of one another on top of the table in the bedroom.

12.40pm: Bed, box and drawers were heard moving in [Robert's] bedroom] upstairs.

5.00pm. The chest of drawers [from Robert's room] was pulled out onto the landing on the top of the stairs and the large box full of stuff was moved from one bedroom to another.

5.10pm. While in the bedroom two toys were thrown at Marianne and Marc.

5.20pm: the door leading into the kitchen opened three times on its own..

Often investigators arrive after the disturbances have lost much of their force and don't see much happening. But that's not the case here. The authors were present during many of the disturbances, and photographed and filmed many of them. One particularly convincing incident was a plastic water bottle which one of them saw and photographed balancing diagonally on the table, a quite unnatural position.

Repressed emotion in living individuals is quite often thought to be responsible in cases of this kind, but the investigators soon rejected this. They had a strong sense of an independent entity wanting to stir up trouble.  In fact it soon became obvious that the poltergeist was trying to frighten the couple. Once they found their child's rocking horse hanging by one its reins from the loft hatch in the ceiling. In another particular sinister incident, a large toy bunny was found in a chair placed at the top of the stairs, holding a box cutter blade in one of its paws. The poltergeist also took to writing threatening messages on a doodle-board in the child's bedroom, and in the later stages sent text messages to Marianne's mobile phone, such as 'get you bitch' and 'You're Dead'.

As time wore on the phenomena intensified. Big red weals appeared suddenly on Marc's torso and vanished equally mysteriously, in front of several witnesses. The investigators watched cupboard doors swinging open, light-shades swinging, the quilt on the bed moving. The couple were seriously frightened when the child himself was moved. On the first occasion they found him lying on the floor tightly wrapped in his bed quilt, with a plastic table on top of him. The child himself seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were wide open, as if he was in a trance. Another time the child appeared to have vanished altogether, and was eventually found in a closet, tightly cocooned in a blanket.

In fact no real harm seems to have ever been done, but the couple were terrified, and the authors speculate the poltergeist was trying to create fear in order to generate emotion that it could feed from. They compare the case with the Amherst Incident of 1878 in Nova Scotia, where death threats to the occupants were found scratched on the walls.

What to make of it all? The case fits a classic pattern in many ways, and reads like a very detailed account of what we are long familiar with from other accounts. The investigators quickly eliminated any possibility of Marianne staging a hoax - she was obviously frightened, and in any case was not involved in phenomena they themselves witnessed. They were at first less sure about Marc, largely because he didn't seem to react very much to the incidents, and was the type who might have enjoyed playing pranks. But they were certain he could not have been responsible for incidents they witnessed themselves, and by the end of the investigation had totally abandoned any idea of fraud.

I'm certain this book will soon become a classic of its kind, a very full and detailed description of eye-witness testimony, that will be compared with the Enfield case (Playfair provides a short foreword) and the Columbus, Ohio case described by William Roll in Unleashed.  I'm not sure how much it will resonate with people who are not already convinced that such things do happen. I  would personally like to have seen more independent corroboration of the kind that one often gets in other cases - from reporters, police officers, social workers etc. It's true there are 15 or so statements from other eyewitnesses, but most of these are from paranormal investigators who the authors invited to the house, and only witnessed one set of phenomena. The quantity and quality of eyewitness testimony can count for as much as of the phenomena itself.

On the other hand it might not have been in the couple's best interests to involve other people. And it's good to see such a rich episode being written up so fully and so readably. As a recent in-depth description of a puzzling phenomenon the book has few rivals, and will be an important addition to the literature.

Book Review: Chris Carter, Parapsychology and the Skeptics

I've always thought that if the existence of psi becomes generally recognised, the sceptics would indirectly have a lot to do with it. As the scientific case for it gradually builds, the angry agit-prop of old guard types like Martin Gardner and James Randi seems ever more irrelevant. Generalisations that parapsychology is a pseudo-science, there is no evidence, Hume's argument against miracles, etc, still have some force. But critics like Ray Hyman, Susan Blackmore and Richard Wiseman are also having to come up with specific objections to psi experiments, and  in a few cases doing experiments themselves.

So the time is ripe for giving these counter-arguments some close scrutiny. In fact I'm surprised it is not done more often, as many of them are so obviously specious. Of course researchers such as Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake have focused on this to some extent - Radin has a useful chapter on it in The Conscious Universe - but it's far from being their main focus. I think this has been a weakness for parapsychology as a whole, that the sceptics have managed to get away with too much for too long.

Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP is arguably the first major attempt to place the sceptics' arguments in their proper context.  It's an important book, and should be on everyone's reading list who is serious about understanding the issues.

A brief look at some nineteenth century work with mediums sets the scene, with the examples of investigations of Henry Slade leading into more modern controversies. A description of CSICOP follows, and the disagreements over its early activities.  Carter goes on to discuss J B Rhine's work at Duke, PK experimentation, the Ganzfeld debate, and Sheldrake's research of a telepathic dog. Many notorious episodes are here, for instance the attempt by sceptical members of a National Research Council committee to stop a fellow member presenting evidence supporting the ganzfeld claims, and the failed attempt to get parapsychologists chucked out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Also other dishonest shenanigans, like Randi pretending he had debunked doggy telepathy, when by his later admission he had nothing of the sort.

The book is chock full of quotes both from the sceptics and sympathetic scientists, which brings us closer to the debate, and often leaves one gasping with disbelief (the statement that there is nothing to argue about as there is 'no evidence of anything paranormal', here voiced by psychologist Nicolas Humphrey, is a particular head-scratcher).

I was expecting rather more space to be given to analysis of individual experiments: there is only a brief mention of the Stargate remote viewing programme, ditto on Sheldrake's highly suggestive work on the sense of being stared at and other of his research, the PK work by Jahn and Dunne at Yale, and so on. But I think Carter is right not to try to be comprehensive, and to leave plenty of space for dealing with the more general aspects of the critics' arguments.

For me this is actually where Carter is best, demolishing the scientific and philosophical objections to psi. As he points out, sceptics such as Blackmore like to say that it is incompatible with 'our scientific worldview', but this begs the question, which scientific worldview, the old one based on Newtonian mechanics and behaviourist psychology, or the emerging one based on quantum mechanics and cognitive psychology. Quantum non-locality and the view that consciousness, not measurement, is implicated in the collapse of the state vector both support the existence of psi and might even lead to predictions of it.  The conclusion, Carter argues, is that the term 'paranormal' is an anachronism and should be dropped, as psi does not operate outside nature.

I was particularly interested in his nuanced discussion of Benjamin Libet's finding that brain activity precedes a conscious decision, which is routinely presented by sceptics, in their dull way, as 'another nail in the coffin for dualism' (Blackmore, Dying to Live, p. 237), and which of course is open to contrary interpretations, as Libet himself pointed out. Wilder Penfield's experimental findings on the neurological basis of memory is also used by sceptics in an anti-dualist sense which Penfield himself did not endorse.

No book is perfect, and I did have a slight quibble with the way it was structured - it seemed to jump around a lot between historical periods, types of experiments, supporters and critics, and so on. Having said this, I know from my own experience of trying to write about parapsychology how  challenging it is to organise so much material. Nor does it detract from the book's value.  Carter explains that he originally tackled the subject in its entirety, but the result was so massive it had to be broken down into three parts: the next instalment will be on survival evidence and the sceptical objections. 

I suspect that in taking the debate directly to the sceptics Carter is first onto what may soon be a well-populated field. The enthusiasm for psi research in the 1960s and 70s led to a backlash over the next two decades with the founding of CSICOP, but there are signs that the sceptics may be running out of steam - the imminent suspension of Randi's prize being just one example. We may soon start to see the pendulum shifting the other way, and this time it is the nay-sayers who will be on the defensive.

Mouni Sadhu

I've always been one for trying to learn new skills, wholeheartedly believing the fiction sold by self-help gurus: "You can do anything you set your mind to ... Realize your dreams" ... etc.  Alas, I've learned by experience that actually I can't. I can think and write, and that's about it. Whenever I try to pick up a skill - playing the piano, speaking German, running a business, playing chess, juggling - I may achieve a certain shaky competence before finally grasping, what family and friends beg me to realise, that I'm crap at it, and should give up (actually that was mainly the piano).

One of the things I've tried to learn is meditation, and again, it's not something I got very far with. But in this case it's not because meditating is inherently difficult - I guess just about anyone can do it - but because I was never committed enough to take it the point where there would be tangible results. In fact over the years I forgot why I was doing it, or that it could lead to tangible results at all.

Recently I was clearing out an old bookshelf and I came across a little book called simply Concentration, by Mouni Sadhu (1959). I remember reading it twenty years ago, and that memory stayed with me ever since, together with a slightly guilty feeling of an aspiration never fully realised. I pulled it out recently and re-read it right through. Twice. It's a gem, and it left me feeling inspired.

The book is essentially a graded series of exercises aimed at gaining complete total mastery of the mind. They are meditation techniques, some of which I have seen elsewhere: for instance breathing 'colours' or focusing on the tip of the second hand of a watch, or clock, or the head of a pin. Each exercise is expected to take weeks or months, so this is something that would not expect to take less than, I guess, three years or more.

What I recognised, having remembered from reading the book the first time, was the slightly fierce tone. Sadhu leaves you in no doubt that he wants you to work. He's full of stern exhortations not to waste time pursuing 'egoistic and material aims', and instructions such as 'The beginner is strongly advised Not to Read in Advance any of chapters beyond which he is working' (I disregarded that one, sorry).

This is quite unfashionable now. TM, the system I'm most familiar with, insists that thoughts should not be blocked but simply observed and then allowed to depart. In Sadhu's approach the will is more strongly engaged: we are exhorted to show the mind who's boss. It's the teaching ethic of an earlier age, one that I'm old enough to have experienced and which I confess to being rather nostalgic for. Much of what I learned as a young child was from teachers who insisted I pay attention. 

There's also something rather appealing about the idea that full self-realization can be largely achieved through a handful of rather mundane seeming exercises, pursued with dedication and will. It's not of course the only thing: one has to pursue a spiritual path, but Sadhu rather takes that for granted.  I also like the plain speaking and the refreshing lack of Sanskrit terms and jargon. Sadhu was actually a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi, but points out that achieving the power of concentration is as much a part of western religious training as the eastern ones.

At the summit, he says:

You already know of many things which before were for you, as Himalayan peaks would be for an untrained climber from the plains. You can concentrate your attention on anything, under any conditions, without being disturbed, as formerly, by the onslaught of uncontrolled thoughts and emotions. You are really not interested in anything which lies beyond the magic circle of your attention and visualization created by your own will and no longer by something outside yourself.

This doesn't mean 'mental dullness', he insists.

Quite the contrary! The wise man possesses intelligence comparable to that of average people; but he only uses it when needed, and not as an untrained layman does, who thinks ceaselessly all his life and despite possible fame and fortunes, still amounts to nothing at his death. For a spiritually advanced man, thinking becomes something like the trivial functions of the average person such as eating or walking, etc. No reasonable man would fill his life solely with these functions and forget everything else.

A trained person, he goes on, can exclude all thoughts, ideas, words and images from the mind, and can choose or abandon emotions at will. If the exercises work, he says, a question will arise in the mind. (If it does not, the mind has not been properly stilled - go back and repeat the exercises for a few more months/years.) Addressing the question will lead to the summit of Samadhi, resurrection into a new state of consciousness, a precursor to full enlightenment.

I wondered, what sort of person it would be who could reach this peak of awareness, of mental and moral strength. What are the effects? Did Sadhu himself achieve Samadhi? Or was he just talking about it in an aspirational sense?

Perhaps the answer lies in the book itself. Despite, or perhaps because of it's apparently awkward and direct style, it has a curiously seductive power. There is an attractive, passionate urgency in it, utterly missing from modern manuals. I think he must indeed have reached his goal, but rather than rhapsodising about it, he provides a glimpse of its power through his writing. He left me feeling that it is something that even I could reach out for, if I was able to summon the necessary will, and that it would be really something worth having.

As for Sadhu himself, what kind of person was he? I pictured some grizzled Gurdjieff-type figure, but as you can see from the photo he looks like an average guy. He was a Pole, born Mieczyslaw Sudowski, and an electrical mechanic by trade. He fought for the Germans in World War One, lost his wife when the Nazis bombed Warsaw during the 1939 invasion, fought the Germans, was captured and spent time in POW camps in Germany and then Russia before going to live in Brazil, where presumably he started writing. A tough life, and one that must have fuelled a determination to rise above the traumas and tragedies of existence.

I don't know whether I will put Sadhu's exercises into effect or whether I will go back to my TM training. But for sure, meditation is something I'm not going to let slip again, and I thank him for that.

Click on this link for a sample of his writing.

Get Well Soon, Rupert

Had been planning to write today, but news of Rupert Sheldrake's 'mishap' has made it hard to concentrate. The general feeling seems to be that he's had a lucky escape, and that it could have been much worse, but it's still bad enough. I hear from a friend of his that the knife narrowly missed a main artery, that his leg swelled right up and an operation was needed to remove a large blood-clot - doctors say it may be a year before he can walk properly again.

I do feel a sense of relief that he is going to be OK, though. There aren't many good researchers in parapsychology, and we can't afford to lose one with his flair, imagination and courage. I wish him a speedy recovery.