The medium is the
message.
Or at least the
medium acts as a conduit for messages that the disincarnate (a.k.a. dead)
communicate to the living.
In the first
chapter of Spook, the indefatigable
Mary Roach examined the evidence for reincarnation (described in my previous blog post). In the middle third of Spook,
she takes on communication with the dead. But some folks might be more
‘sensitive’ to crossing the veil between the living and the dead, or so they
claim. For lack of a better word for such a mediator, we call them mediums.
Roach is looking
for scientific evidence for the
ability of mediums to communicate with the disincarnate. (I learned the word disincarnate from her book. I think its
apt, because it distinguishes ‘dead’ from ‘dead as an incommunicado doornail’.)
In the early twentieth century, the favored evidence was ectoplasm. Not the
gooey ghostbusters kind. More like gauze. In fact, using gauze-like
materials, enabled one to easily mimic historical photographs purporting to
depict ectoplasm. There is even an ectoplasm sample (of dubious origin) at
Cambridge University, the august institution having acquired the archives of
the Society for Psychical Research. The sample had a foul odor, for reasons I
won’t go into, but that Roach discusses in detail. (Ectoplasm has to emanate
from somewhere in the body.)
But Roach isn’t
satisfied with looking through dusty archives, she is determined to experience
the real thing. Under scientific conditions of course! What better place to do
this then at the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona
where professor Gary Schwartz takes on the famous medium Allison DuBois. I
assume DuBois is famous because she is the real-life inspiration for the
popular television series Medium.
(Not having personally watched the popular series, I was previously unaware of
this claim to fame.)
The experiment is
called the Asking Questions Study. (Who comes up with these research project
names anyway?) A list of 32 questions are posed to several mediums about two
disincarnates. Questions include “Do you eat?”, “What type of ‘body’ do you
have?”, “Is there music?”, and “Do you engage in sexual behavior?” If you’re
curious about some of the answers, I recommend reading chapter 6 of Spook. Let’s get to the results. After a
series of studies and controls, Schwartz reported “no evidence of anomalous
information transfer” after the statistics are appropriately crunched. There
are, in the lingo, dazzle-shots –
where a medium seems eerily on target. But there are also many, many misses.
And yet, after all
this, belief in medium efficacy still persists. Why? There’s the possibility,
according to Schwartz, that “multiple disincarnates come through when a medium
opens up the channels.” This is apparently called crosstalk in the lingo. Roach thinks it should be called fudge factor, and I’m inclined to agree
with her. Roach has her own personal sitting
with DuBois. She’s less impressed with DuBois’ ability (while Schwartz the
official scientist seems open), even though she experiences the dazzle-shot moment. In any case, Roach
wonders if she might be more receptive if she learned more about what
transpires in the mind of the medium. And so she signs up for a three-day
“Fundamentals of Mediumship” course at Arthur Findlay College in England.
Here’s the paragraph where she describes her experience.
I’ve been very curious to find out how
someone teaches a skill as ineffable and seemingly unteachable as spirit
communication. Out tutor speaks to us for about fifteen minutes, but actual
take-home instructions are thus far few. They amount more or less to this:
Expand your energy. “Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.” It
seems to be soething you just try to do. I try, I really do, but I have no idea
where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice
I’m moving my ears.
After a while, the
class divides up into pairs for individual practice. Sounds like Divination
class at Hogwarts. Her practice partner doesn’t seem to get anything from her
aura, so it is Roach’s turn. She guesses a boat, because her partner looks like
a sailor friend of hers. No connection. Then she imagines “brown green striped
wallpaper and a big homey sofa” because that’s her image of what the home of a
working-class Englishman might look like. No on the wallpaper but the sofa is a
dazzle-shot for her partner. He’s
impressed, but she’s not. In a Herminone-ish approach, Roach analyzes her own
behavior; she thinks that she’s taking visual cues from her partner (something
Sherlock Holmes might do) and making guesses. But there’s also a desire to
‘succeed’ in the process. Here’s her analysis.
We’re learning, but what are we learning?
Our tutor never said to us: Stick with the everyday. Try to be general because
there’s a better likelihood you’ll be right. But we’re picking it up anyway, or
I am, at least. You want to get things right, because it’s no fun not to do so.
So you find yourself gravitating toward common, nonspecific attributes, things
that apply to most folks… No one is getting, say, the word “trilobite” or
Jefferson Monument on a winter day, or the name Xavier P. Pennypacker. Because
that would be a terrific long shot, and no one wants to set oneself up to be
wrong. It’s exciting to be right. Maybe you’re psychic, you find yourself
thinking, maybe you’ve made contact in spite of yourself. The little successes
are their own reward.
Roach concludes
from her experience that some (perhaps many) mediums are not trying to deceive,
but honestly think they are engaging in paranormal communication. (There are
likely other mediums who are trying to make more than a buck off you.) In
addition, those who visit mediums tend to be open to suggestion, and happily
eat up anything that is relevant to the dearly departed, discounting the
misses. After all, there’s crosstalk, isn’t there?
But what if you’re
not a medium, you’re just a regular person, you’re not thinking of the dearly
departed, and you hear voices! Welcome to the phenomenon that is EVP
(Electronic Voice Phenomena). While many of these are garbled whispers, some
are clearly articulated words. Not one to miss out, Roach books herself on a
tour with International Ghost Hunters Society (IGHS). Thanks to Ghostbusters and its reboot, these tours
are likely to continue in popularity. The idea is to catch EVP on a recording
device (tape or digital). Roach also contacts bona fide scientists who’ve
looked into EVP. Electronic broadcasting could be a culprit. Roach learns that
“sometimes a gap between two pieces of metal, or a piece of metal and the
ground, can set up a sparking that serves to demodulate a radio signal”. For
your own personal experience, “wander up to the metal fencing around the
facility [Voice of America] after dark… lean in close and you may hear the
[glimmering] sparks singing or talking, depending on what’s being broadcast.”
For some reason,
present day ghostbusters think that the disincarnate communicate “via the far
extremes of the visual and auditory spectrums: light waves we can’t see and
sound waves we can’t hear.” How inconvenient. Or perhaps convenient for
purveyors of devices that can detect ultraviolet/infrared or infrasound. Bat
detectors are apparently popular, and in Roach’s IGHS tour, “nearly everyone in
our group has brought along an ELF [extremely low frequency] meter or an EMF
(for measuring electromagnetic fields).” But could the modern ghost hunter be
standing on the shoulders of scientific giants? Edison, Tesla, and the
telephone duo of Bell and Watson. Roach writes that “the inventors viewed the
etheric and the electric with the same set of awe-fogged eyes.” In Chapter 8
(“Can You Hear Me Now?”), Roach captures this key insight.
What you need to know is that the heyday of
spiritualism – with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the
ether – coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so
readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to
accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and
telephonic communications – disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through
space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant… Viewed in this
context, the one unfathomable phenomenon must have seemed no more unbelievable
than the other.
Perhaps my
suggestion that electromagnetic (EM) impulses might be a conduit for magic in
Harry Potter’s world is not too different from present-day speculations
that EM provides the conduit to the spirit world. But maybe it’s all just in
our head? Sure enough, Roach proceeds to test this on herself at the
Consciousness Research Lab, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. The theory
is that EM impulses of a certain complexity can potentially induce
hallucinations and other seemingly paranormal hankerings. After being tested,
while hooked up to an EEG, Roach learns that the temporal lobes of her brain
structure aren’t wired for susceptibility. At least statistically speaking.
Neither is she any good at picking up infrasound at 19 Hz. Tigers, whales and
elephants on the other hand do. Roach speculates that perhaps the small
fraction of the population that can sense infrasound indicate a vestigial
evolutionary ability to detect a crouching, hidden tiger. Interestingly, organ
music is a great source of infrasound. Could this be why the presence of God
can be particularly felt in churches with organs?
After all this
research, there remains one nagging problem. Roach wants to know: “Is it
possible that – rather than prompting hallucinations – certain EM [impulse]
patterns enhance people’s ability to sense some sort of genuine paranormal
impulse or entity?” There’s no good way to tease out the difference. You have
an observation. You make an inference. That’s the way science proceeds. How do
you distinguish between competing inferences? Possibly by setting up another
experiment. But the (philosophical) observation-inference gap will always
remain. And spookiness will always remain alive in the hearts and minds of the
believers. Spookiness is in the eye of the beholder.
Can we test the
spookiness of an out-of-body near-death-experience in the operating theater?
You’ll have to read the final chapter in Mary Roach’s humorous book to find
out. I’ll just say that the experimental setup is clever.
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