Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Life After Death: Medium Version


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.

For my previous review of Roach’s book, here are Gulp and Stiff.

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