by Donald West
Parapsychology has seen a revival of interest in near-death experiences. One of the first Presidents of the SPR, Sir William Barrett, studied death-bed visions of deceased family members welcoming the dying person into the afterlife. Present day concerns are more with people revived from near death who relate experiences of moving through a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and then being called back to life. A sense of time standing still and a review of past life passing through consciousness are also sometimes reported. Oddly, similar experiences may occur when someone is threatened with imminent death, fear-death experiences.
The topic has broken through into mainstream medical journals because of the apparent persistence of thought when, according to cardiac and electrographic recordings, the brains of patients under surgery are inactive. After surgery, some survivors, resuscitated after apparent brain quiescence, report having been conscious of events in the operating theatre that they had been able to view from a point overlooking their unconscious body. This is difficult to prove, since survivors may mistakenly attribute retrospectively experiences while recovering consciousness to the time they were brain-dead. However, if events are accurately described that occurred only during a carefully monitored brain dead period, as seems to be so in at least one well-documented case, the evidence for paranormality is strong. The possibility of consciousness persisting without the help of a functioning brain has obvious philosophical importance, but the need for precautions against self-deception or dishonesty are as relevant here as in other parapsychological investigations.
‘Out-of-the-body’ experiences (OBEs) may also occur when fatigued or following procedures analogous to the induction of hypnosis. On recovering normal consciousness after an OBE some people describe places they have ‘visited’. Under the label ‘astral travelling’, believers suppose the spirit leaves the body temporarily and experiences an independent conscious existence. One is reminded of Scrooge’s nocturnal adventures in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Sceptics, prominent among them the former parapsychologist Professor Susan Blackmore, assume the experiences to be dream-like constructs without objective foundation. However, in rare cases, percipients have apparently described correctly things they could not have known about normally.
Experimental psychologists have been more preoccupied with PK influences on machines and random event generators than on biological systems. However, there have been experiments testing the effect of mental concentration on the germination and growth of seedlings, the spread of bacteria in petri dishes and the speeding up of enzyme activity. The possibility that PK may be a factor in paranormal healing in humans is raised by recent applications of evidence-based treatment evaluations to cures by ’alternative’ medical procedures that have no known rational basis. Evaluative research has to take account of placebo effects by ensuring that neither the patient nor the person administering it knows whether the medicine or the ritual involved is genuine or an imitation used as a control. The effectiveness of prayer in altering the course of illness has been tested with similar techniques. Where the intervention takes the form of distant prayer of which the patient is unaware, evaluation is effectively a test of PK. So far results seem uncertain, but, unlike much experimental PK work, these approaches have obvious practical application.
The Global Consciousness Project is perhaps the most extraordinary parapsychological enterprise currently under way seeking to detect effects of collective consciousness on the material world. Researchers believe there have found detectable perturbations in the output of REGs across the world in synchrony with events producing great human perturbation, such as the 9/11 attacks on the US Trade Centre and Pentagon.
The phenomena that have attracted the heaviest scepticism, both within and without the parapsychological community, namely the physical effects produced by mediums – spirit photos, writing, raps, musical instrument playing, winds, temperature changes levitations, table turning, floating lights, materialisations – remain as difficult to substantiate as ever they were, notwithstanding the ease with which modern instrumentation could record and measure such events for posterity. The history of this type of investigation is littered with exposures of unsavoury frauds. With the exception of the Scole Report in 1999 (SPR Proc. 58, 150–452), to my knowledge there has been no published report of anything like credible testing of such phenomena in the last fifteen years. An insuperable difficulty is that mediums producing physical effects, and their supporters, dictate conditions – sometimes attributed to directions from spirits – that make proper testing impossible. The Scole report aroused controversy within the SPR and various criticisms, including my own, were included in the publication. My chief complaint was the Scole circle’s refusal to continue with a non-intrusive test of their claim to produce images on unused film placed within a secure locked box. They had apparently succeeded in doing this, but when the box was found to be demonstrably insecure, they declined to repeat the test. It is frustrating that incredibly strong testimony to phenomena in the distant past continues to be republished and endlessly discussed in the absence of any contemporary examples investigated using modern technology.
Claims for macro-PK are not limited to spiritualistic circles. The paranormal production of images on film was a speciality of Ted Serios. His procedure was to have the investigator, indoors in normal light, to point a loaded polaroid camera towards him and push the button to trip the shutter. Pictures would appear on the film when it was delivered that bore no relation to the scene where they were sitting. The phenomena continued over several years, but no explanation was ever found.
The fashion for paranormal metal bending, encouraged by the performer Uri Geller, for a time attracted many mischievous children. Matthew Manning was a serious exponent who convinced some parapsychologists. He produced both visible and micro effects, the latter being slight deformations detectable with electronic strain gauges cemented to the metal. The problems with such happenings are that they are linked to rare individuals whose activities do not continue indefinitely and do not lead to any information about the processes at work. Some of these individuals produce a mixture of phenomena. When a schoolboy in Cambridge, Manning was the focus of poltergeist disturbances in his parental home that included writings scrawled on the walls. I was introduced to his family and tried, unsuccessfully, to interest him in ESP tests. He was producing automatic writing at the time, ostensibly from spirits. I was shown a scrap in Arabic script that on translation read “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, something one might expect on a postage stamp. Matthew Manning has since become famous as a spiritual healer and has published his own account of the development of his powers.
Reports of poltergeist hauntings have been extraordinarily persistent over hundreds of years. They occur most often in households where an adolescent agent attracts mysterious rapping noises and spontaneous movements of objects. Many such occurrences have turned out to be hoaxes, but some are supported by seemingly incontrovertible eye-witness testimony from responsible and disinterested outside observers. However, repeated attempts, notably by the late Tony Cornell of the SPR, to record poltergeist events by leaving electronically triggered cameras and other instruments in areas affected, have yielded almost nothing.
An exception to the general rule that investigation of such phenomena produces no interesting information is a recently published report by Barrie Colvin (2010, SPR Journal, 73, 65–93). He submitted recordings of poltergeist raps to acoustic analysis and found them to be significantly different from noises produced by ordinary percussion. Many parapsychologists find sporadic reports of macro-PK above their boggle threshold. I prefer to suspend condemnatory judgement, while recognising that unless and until such gross effects can be produced, measured and analysed by engineering experts no progress will be made.
I have no regrets about lifetime involvement in parapsychology without reaching any final conclusions. The subject, disgracefully ignored by mainstream science, is extraordinarily challenging, with potentially re
volutionary philosophical and scientific implications.
Closure
Looking back, have I learned anything? There has been no resolution to the controversial issues I chose to study, namely the causes of homosexuality, the treatment of criminals or the reality of the paranormal. It has been rewarding being involved in these matters, all of them of social importance. As regards the human rights of homosexuals, it is pleasing to note the enormous change in official attitudes that has come about in the UK, once one of the most rigorously condemnatory of European nations. Not only can we live a minority sexual orientation openly, if we wish, but our partnerships can be legally recognised, and facilities for contacting each other via the internet and in other ways are easy to access. In London and some other large cities special interest clubs are well established, and some public services are directed to our specific needs.
Sadly, these once unimaginable changes are not universal. In some countries gays live secretly, sometimes in real fear for their lives. Even in parts of Europe severe social disapproval and discrimination persists. Religious prohibition is active throughout the Muslim world. In the most influential English-speaking nation, the USA, powerful and condemnatory religious ideologies remain active. Children in UK schools do not necessarily follow a politically correct stance towards gays. Liberation is fragile.
Notes to the Text
(click on the up-arrow (△) at the end of each entry to return to the relevant place in the main text)
1: Farrington, D.P. et al (2009) Develpmental and Life-Course Criminology. Monatsschift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform. 2/3 09. Carl Hymanns Verlag. △
2: West, D.J. and Nash, C.L. (1985) Sexual molestation of young girls. In West, D.J. (Ed) Sexual Victimisation. Aldershot: Gower.
West, D.J. and Woodhouse, D.P. (1990) Sexual encounters between boys and adults. In Li, C.K. et al (Eds) Children’s Sexual Encounters with Adults. London: Duckworth. △
3: West, D.J. (2000) Paedophilia: Plague or Panic. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 11, 511–531. △
4: Thomson Cooper, I. K. (2010) Child Welfare Professionals and Incest Families Aldershot: Ashgate. △