I don't often do this, but today I'm turning over my blog to Stacy Horn, author of the newly released book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.
Stacy maintains her own blog. Check it out.
And now … heeeeeere's Stacy!
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A New Experiment for Telepathy?
I spent a few years researching the work of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, the most famous of which were the ESP cards experiments. The scientists at the lab developed a deck of cards with pictures of a circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and a star. Then they conducted experiments to see if people could tell them what symbols were on the cards without seeing them. The scientists found that they could. I investigated all the various claims that have been made to dismiss their experiments and found that the claims were not valid. I summed up my findings with this:
“In the end, parapsychology’s critics couldn’t come up with convincing evidence to reject the Lab’s work and neither could I. But I did take away two ideas: There might be an unidentified source of information out there, along with unknown methods of transmission and processing. Also, we have a lot more to learn about consciousness.”
I’m open to telepathy as an explanation for the results of the Lab’s experiments, but I’m also open to other explanations. I now keep my eye out for any recent scientific findings which might also account for the lab’s results. If nothing else, my research into parapsychology has greatly amplified my interest in science.
I’d read a brief mention about the recent Alex Tsakiris/Skeptiko interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, a neuroscience researcher and professor at Canada’s Laurentian University. Persinger is probably best know for what the media dubbed the “god helmet.” He developed a helmet that generates very weak magnetic fields that are similar in intensity to those that he measured in areas said to be haunted. When people put the helmet on in experiments they see things. Subjects said things like, “I see shadows along my left side … there is someone touching my left side … I see a visual … it’s an apparition.” One woman who felt a presence said, “I started to cry when I felt it slowly fade away.”
There are two quotes from the Skeptiko interview which give a good sense of where Persinger is coming from:
“Our research starts on the basic premise that all experience is generated by brain activity. Now, the critical thing is that all experience means your experience of love, or memories, or having a mystical experience, must be associated with specific patterns of brain activity. That brain activity in large part is determined by the brain structure.”
“The ultimate measure is going to be 1) can you reproduce it in the laboratory and 2) can you actually product the same phenomena by experimental techniques?”
I read the Skeptiko interview with interest because in it Persinger claims to have conducted an experiment which provides evidence of telepathy. From the interview:
“What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”
I looked around and wasn’t surprised to see people immediately denouncing his experiment. Here’s the thing—until he publishes and someone attempts to replicate this experiment, there is nothing really yet to either accept or condemn. And I’m pretty sure Persinger would agree. Get ready to pounce if you must, but any declarations at this point are premature.
I should amend that to “carefully replicates” this experiment. Persinger’s helmet experiment has been dismissed too, because someone tried to replicate it and couldn’t. But Persinger pointed out how the researcher hadn’t actually replicated the experiment and listed which parameters weren’t followed. I was surprised the results of the claimed replication were published at all. It was like someone saying, “Hey, I lowered the temperature of the water to 42 degrees and nothing happened. I don’t believe in ice!”
Because of my research into the Duke Parapsychology Lab, I’m now accustomed to this rush to condemn. But it makes me wonder what else is out there that’s been dismissed or not even examined or explored due to not just a healthy skepticism, but this outright hostility. I was at a lecture a few months ago and I learned that outside of psychology the science of emotion was not even a valid area of study until recently, but apparent now it’s all the rage. (Which is great.) I’ve written many times that had the scientists of Dr. Louisa Rhine’s day paid attention to her papers the recent “discoveries” being made in the area of audio hallucinations—that people hear voices more than we knew, and that it isn’t necessarily a sign of mental illness—would have begun fifty years ago and we would be that much further along in understanding what is happening and why. (Louisa Rhine was the wife of the director of the Parapsychology Lab and a researcher herself.)
Persinger addresses this same point in the Skeptiko interview:
“Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.
“The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that – and indeed, altered states in general – is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.”
I wanted to end with two more quotes from the Skeptiko interview.
“ … we’re trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. And of course, consciousness is probably more like an over-inclusive term. It’s probably not consciousness but a variety of complicated processes and we just slam this word on it that are involved with individuals have these unique skills, like the Shawn Haribands and the Ingo Swanns who seem to have access to information that others do not have. So we’re trying to understand the neurophysical basis to it and to try to integrate it in terms of the known energies around us so that someday we can also replicate it. That really is the real test of a hypothesis or an idea. Can you replicate it with an experiment?”
“… the brain, of course, is a source of all experiences … it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns … And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else. That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.”
I said that there might be an unidentified source of information out there, along with unknown methods of transmission and processing. Persinger seems to be saying we may be able access information from a distance via some mechanism of the brain. If this is true, I like it because while it may not be the explanation Rhine went with for their results, it allows that their results could have been real, valid, and not the product of fraud or sloppy experimental controls.
Or, it could be that Persinger’s experiments shed light on a different effect entirely. There might also be valid objections to Persinger’s explanation for his results as well, but the evidence, whatever the final explanation, is intriguing and worth investigating.
I emailed Dr. Persinger and asked if he was going to publish the results of the experiment he talked about in the Skeptiko interview and he answered, “Our revisions are being reviewed by Neuroscience Letters.”