The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine
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Later in the session a Young Chinese woman, invited by the researcher and unbeknownst to Mr. B., brought in an exotic Asian dish known as a "thousand year-old egg." Said Miss K.: "It smells like ammonia ... it looks like something you'd find in a stagnant pond . . . like feces turned green with mold." Simultaneously, Mr. B. said: "A time green cashmere sweater. What a sickening color! I hate that color ... white cups with gold trim. This is silly, it looks like China. I don't know why China would be around here."
Another surprise occurred after the session while Mr. B. and his examiner were waiting for the other pair to return. Mr. B. "picked them up," "walking out into the bright sunlight," and saw "trees breaking up the light into patches," adding: "When you look back, you can see several stories of a building." This turned out to be essentially correct, as they were at an outdoor fountain on campus, next to a building several stories high (and it's always sunny outside in southern California).
The next session brought more of the same. Miss K. was asked to punch buttons on a scratched-up metal box, while electric shocks were delivered to her left wrist, which she described as going into her hand and fingers. Mr. B. simultaneously noted "a sharp pain in my right middle finger ... she was sitting and looking at a book or plaque ... a metal plate with a hole in it ... there are scratches on it ... my left finger hurts ... punching a button over and over...."
Miss K. was unable to attend the next session due to illness, and Mr. B. offered a substitute sender, another high-school girl with whom he claimed some rapport. She was shown slides, for variety, and asked to comment. Shown a slide of a man parachuting down into the ocean, she said "A feeling of motion, the parachute is open. And white space. The ocean is white." Meanwhile, back at the (remotely located) ranch, Mr. B. perceived "an ocean ... spray scene."
The control subject, on the other hand, was unable to "receive" anything that corresponded to the slides; his free associations showed "no recognizable correspondences," according to the authors. But then there was another surprise.
Neither of the experimental transmitters showed up For the next session. Rather than cancel, Mr. B. offered to function as transmitter, to see if' the control subject could tune in to his thoughts and impressions. The researchers, already there, decided to try this from a "nothing to lose" perspective. Slides were used again; and, unexpectedly, the control-this ordinary person who was previously unable to pick up anything-was able to receive when self'-proclaimed psychic Mr. B. viewed the slides. To wit: an image of' Marilyn Monroe celebrating with champagne and balloons in a 1940s party background, conceptualized by Mr. B. as a "New Year's Eve party of the Roaring Twenties. High, very gay," was reported remotely by the control as "... like a New Year's Eve party. People celebrating." Or a picture of'a dead Vietnamese soldier, riddled with bullets, was described by Mr. B. as a "Vietnam war casualty ... mutilated, face all bloody," while the control got "Vivid war casualties ... injured burned people ... Vietnam war." "these correspondences were as good as those obtained with the psychic as receiver, suggesting in a sense that his powers went both ways.
Mr. f3.'s abilities seemed to wane with additional sessions, although he consistently did better than the control subject. Miss K. had become increasingly hassled at having to show up regularly for these; the favorable rapport that Mr. B. felt he needed may have been lacking. Looking at the earlier sessions, the authors tabulated a 54 percent success rate, based on matching words and concepts, compared with a zero success rate for the control person.
Moss and Eveloff note that Mr. B. clearly outperformed the control, and conclude that there was no choice but to consider the pe.avhility that their subject had "some kind of extrasensory perception." lf' this seems a little wispy-washy, remember that these university-based investigators were using subjective data-comparing words instead of numbers-in a milieu where imprecision is frowned upon.
Our Psychic Spies
Now lets go to the Pentagon. The Wa.+hington Post broke a curious story on November 29, 1995: "Pentagon Has Spent Millions on Tips from a Trio of Psychics; CIA Wants to Shut Down Paranormal Study." Yes, this was actually in the Washington Post. It turns out that our government had funneled somewhere between eleven and twenty million dollars during the 1980s and '90s to support the efforts of three principal psychics working at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, whom they consulted over two hundred times! Why would the Defense Department employ psychics? For one thing, there were several prominent members of Congress who favored this endeavor. For another, it seemed, the Russians were using psychics to spy on us. Even Saddam Hussein would eventually get into the act. In a May 5, 2003 New Yorker article, a confidant told the reporter that Saddam had set up a secret facility for people with special powers.
What brought the Pentagon story into the news, however, was the transfer of responsibility for the program to the CIA, and the subsequent reevaluation of the results. The CIA concluded that the psychics' information "never substantially aided U.S. national security," and felt funds should no longer be committed.
Here are some examples of what we got from our military psychics. Asked about a Soviet submarine under construction, the psychics "saw" a "very large, new submarine with 18-20 missile launch tubes and a 'large flat area' at the aft end," to be ready for launch in a hundred days. What actually happened was the sighting, 120 days later, of two Soviet subs, one with 24 launch tubes, the other with 20 and a large flat aft deck. Another time, the psychics were asked about the whereabouts of a Marine hostage, Colonel William Higgins, held in Lebanon. They conjured up a specific (real) building in a specific town in South Lebanon (names not specified in the Poet story). This was probably correct, in that another, released hostage said that Higgins probably had been in that building at that time. In a third instance, asked about Libyan chemical weapons, the psychics predicted that a ship named Patwz or Potua would arrive in Tripoli to transport chemical weapons to an eastern Libyan port. In fact, a ship named Batato arrived in Tripoli, loaded undetermined cargo, and then freighted it to an eastern Libyan port.
I can see how this information might not be of significant military value, as it lacks the precision of, say, an aerial photo graph. (Although according to another recent Nei' Yorker article, "The Image Problem," aerial photography can be very misleading.) I also see striking similarities between the readings obtained by Mr. B. in the lab and those from the Pentagon's psychics-the images are not photo quality but are well in the ballpark, albeit dreamlike. Psychics are the first to point out that their skills can be ephemeral, with great variability on different occasions. I imagine a picture going in and out of focus, or a weak station on the car radio.
Why might this be? The psychics' mood and those of their subjects seem to be a factor. Mr. B. insisted that rapport was essential. As Miss K. became increasingly annoyed at having to show up, the accuracy diminished. A boy who could "see through walls" was brought, with his family, to Saddam's hideaway, whereupon his powers dried right up. (Could a child possibly have found Saddam Hussein scary?) And there are other factors. Robert 0. Becker, an orthopedist and discoverer of some of the body's electrical and magnetic means of functioning, found that magnetic storms (which emanate from the sun, hit the earth up to a few times a month, and affect things like satellites and radio transmissions) adversely affect psychics' abilities.
Brain Waves
Then there are the brain's own electrical waves. The electroencephalogram (EEG) records these, usually through four pairs of leads on the patient's scalp. The test is indispensable for evaluating epilepsy, and useful in a variety of other conditions, including brain tumors and sleep study. The discovery of brain waves has an interesting history. In the late 1800s, a young German student named Hans Berger fell off his horse, only narrowly escaping grave injury. To his astonishment, he received a telegram from his father that very evening, asking if he was all right, because his sister had had a "feeling" that he might not be. Berger was so amazed by this that he changed his major from astronomy to psychiat
ry and became obsessed with finding a relationship between brain electrical activity and human behavior. His electronic equipment was of course primitive by today's standards, but finally, in 1924, he succeeded in recording a brain signal via metal electrodes that he stuck to his own son's head. Thus was born an entire discipline of neurophysiology, because a girl somehow remotely viewed her brother's brush with danger.
What might brain-wave activity have to do with telepathy? Neuroscientist Michael A. Persinger has actually studied this. Persinger worked with an artist named Ingo Swann, well known (in appropriate circles) for his psychic prowess. While Persinger has a scientist's skepticism about many paranormal reports, he accepted that Mr. Swann could "reliably draw and describe randomly selected photographs sealed in envelopes in another room." In one experiment, published in 2002, the artist was exposed to an artificial, external magnetic field that might "alter his subjective experiences"-in other words, affect his psychic function. Subsequently, his accuracy in sketching or describing distant pictures or places was ascertained, and correlated with his EEG. Persinger concludes that "remote viewing may be enhanced by complex experimentally generated magnetic fields" and that a particular EEG pattern, a 7-per-second brain wave over the back of the artist's head, tended to indicate that the descriptions were accurate.
In an earlier study, Persinger had examined many telepathic experiences and found them more frequent when the earth's own magnetic field was relatively quiet. The earth's field (which makes compasses point north, among other things) is known as the geomagnetic field, and it undergoes frequent fluctuations, imperceptible to us. Since Swann was aware that he could not obtain good visualizations from areas that were magnetically tangled, such as a maze of train tracks converging on a station, Persinger decided to test the effects of computer-generated magnetic fields on Swann's abilities.
Working with colleague S. A. Koren, color pictures containing emotional themes were clipped out of old magazines and then sealed into brown paper envelopes. These envelopes were then "immersed" in different types of computer-generated fields, to see what effect this would have on attempts by the artist to view them remotely. It turned out that if these weak magnetic fields were generated on an IBM PC-type computer running only DOS, they didn't have much effect. But if the computer was running the Windows operating system, they did interfere. Persinger believes the complexity of the fields, rather than their intensity, was the key, and the Windows-induced patterns were more complicated. He believes there are intrinsic, weak magnetic fields associated with matter, and that "our normal perceptions only extract a small fraction of the information correlated with the existence of objects." This would explain why interference from magnetic storms might also affect psychics' perceptions.
Returning to the intrinsic electromagnetic fields of the brain, there are a few more EEG studies to mention, dealing with one person's brain being able to sense EEG patterns in another's. One of the earliest studies was published in the prestigious journal Science in 1965. Two of fifteen pairs of identical twins were able to "synchronize" an EEG pattern, the basic alpha rhythm of 8 to 13 cycles per second that happens when you close your eyes. A twin in one room closed his eyes, generating alpha waves, which then appeared in the EEG of the second, separated twin, despite the fact that his eyes were open!
Persinger, also feeling that a genetically related brain might be more tuned to respond, studied adult siblings. In one room, the "stimulus" sibling received weak magnetic fields, externally applied to the head; in another room, the "response" sibling had the EEG recorded. With some types of magnetic stimuli to the first sibling, an EEG response in the 5-6 cycle-per-second range was noted in the second, meaning that a magnetic signal applied to one brain could affect the activity of another, at a distance. This isn't exactly reading someone's mind-brain waves reflect whole-brain processes, not individual thoughtsbut it does suggest a potential interconnection, radio-style, among individuals.
Dean Radin, an electrical engineer and Ph.D. psychologist, published an interesting paper in April 2004, in the medlineindexed Journal of Alternative and Complementary Jfediei,re. He chose pairs of friends and simultaneously recorded their EEGs. One friend was within a steel-walled, electromagnetically and acoustically shielded room; the other was in a dimly lit room about sixty feet away. They were asked to think about each other. The latter was periodically shown live video of the former, to reinforce such thinking, while EEG activity of both was measured. Raclin found enough correlation to suggest "the presence of an unknown form of energetic or informational interaction."
In another study, in the same April 2004 issue, subjects' EEGs were tweaked by flickering lights. In five of sixty pairs, similar EEG changes could be detected in a distant person. While the percentage of successful pairs is small compared to the number of pairs tested, if this happens at all, it bears explanation. Raclin, pooling earlier studies, estimates that up to fifteen percent of' the pairs "show nonchance, positive EEG correlations."
So while psychics are found everywhere from the Bible to today's newspapers, it is only recently that scientific attempts are being made to electronically verify a mechanism, be it waveform or other signal, and to find what interferes with or enhances this phenomenon.
amour
Answered Prayers: Distant Healing and
Therapeutic Touch
In the last chapter, we saw the possibilities of sensing something at a distance-brain activity, emotions, or the way a particular scene looks. Let's go one step further. We are all familiar with the concept of a force acting at a distance: Gravity pulls down, even if you're not in contact with the earth's surface; a magnet attracts nearby metal, without any contact between the two being necessary. But can a human being somehow affect others from afar?
This was the question asked by John Astin, Ph.D., in a 2000 Anna!, of lirter,zal 4fedieiire paper, "The Efficacy of Distant Healing," in which he reviewed twenty-three published trials examining what happens when a conscious attempt is made to benefit another person's emotional or physical well-being without making physical contact. These twenty-three were culled out because they met strict, preset inclusion criteria for high-quality research. Interventions studied included prayer, noncontact therapeutic touch, and a variety of other noncontact practices. This chapter will look at some of these trials and their outcomes.
Pray for Me
Prayer is, in Western (and other) sociological terms, mainstream and normal. It is only recently that attempts have been made to quantify some of its effects on health. Systematic use of prayer as a healing modality is common in the practice of alternative and complementary medicine, although any measurable success might be still considered paranormal, at least by conventional medical standards.
One of the first studies that made news was done during the 1980s in the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital by cardiologist Randolph Byrd. Over ten months, almost four hundred patients were randomly split into a group that would be prayed for, and a group that would not. These CCU patients would not know if they were the objects of this intercessory prayer, which is a directed and purposeful praying for others. The groups were compared for twenty-six different parameters of their condition, including new problems and diagnoses and the need for medical intervention.
Three to seven intercessors, who had never met the patients, prayed for them nevertheless. They were given only their first names, diagnoses, and general condition. What's more, they prayed daily from out,tde the hospital, until the patients were discharged. The first problem with this study is the presence of what is known as a "confounder." This is something that can influence both groups in such a way as to confuse the results; in this case, it would be friends and relatives of the patients praying for them as well. As previously noted, when there is a genetic or emotional connection between persons, it may be easier to establish a "spiritual" or "energetic" connection as well. Theoretically, if there was any effect at all of praying, family/friends' prayers could ove
rride those of well-meaning strangers.
At any rate, six of the twenty-six variables-the rates of congestive heart failure and pneumonia, the need for diuretics, antibiotics, or a respirator, and cardiac arrestwere significantly improved in the prayed-for group. "Significant" in a medical study means statistically significant-not likely to have occurred by chance (specifically, a "chance" of one out of twenty or less may be considered non-accidental). It does not necessarily imply meaningfulness in a real-life sense. For the six conditions that showed improvement, the differences were five to seven percent over the non-prayedfor group. These differences are unlikely to be accidental, but are still slim.
The bigger problem is that the other twenty illness variables-including overall mortality-were the same for both groups. Some statisticians believe it's not statistically significant when only six out of a possible twenty-six indicators change. For instance, if you roll a pair of dice, boxcars (12) or snake eyes (2) each carries a I-in-36 chance of appearing. But twentysix rolls will more than likely produce at least one of these improbables.
Then in 1999, researcher William S. Harris led a team at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, in an attempt to test Byrd's hypothesis. Intercessors again prayed daily, from outside the hospital, for coronary care unit patients. Again, some patients were prayed for, and some, for comparison, were not. This time, those who did the praying were only given the patient's first name, with no clinical information. Harris used a six-point scoring system to assess illness severity in a quantifiable way. He found about a 10 percent improvement in the prayed-for group, relative to the control group, with a likelihood of I in 25 that this was found by chance-ergo, statistically significant. But when Byrd's evaluation system was used, there were no differences found.