Kenneth Ring & Sharon Cooper: Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. Palto Alto: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999, paper, $12.95. ISBN 0-9669630-0-8

Book Review – Adrian Parker
(From European Journal of Parapsychology, 2000;15:92-93, reproduced with permission)

I decided to review this book because I believe it just may become one of the most important publications in contemporary parapsychological research. If the findings presented in Mindsight have any validity, and if the book is well read, then it should lead to further work by mainstream researchers which may well bring about a major revision in theories of perception. Such a revision would ultimately result in a realignment in which cognitive psychology moves much closer to parapsychology. Obviously, the "ifs" in this proclamation are major ones.

Some years ago Susan Blackmore in her book Dying to Live (Blackmore, 1993) presented her well-known reductionistic theories of near-death and out-of body experiences (NDEs and OBEs) to the general public. In this book, as in many other publications, she dismissed all the claims of psi and veridical perceptions associated with these as being due to a mixture of false memories, inadequate documentation and faulty reporting. In the course of this review, Blackmore took up the claims she had come across for sight occurring in blind persons during their NDEs or OBEs. She maintained, however, that when she actually tried to trace any genuine cases of this happening, such cases, rather like the Bermuda triangle cases, proved to be quite simply, non-existent. Mindsight is a direct answer to Blackmore and claims to refute her argument by having found such cases.

The authors have been able to locate 31 blind persons who report having had NDEs or OBEs. About half of this group were composed of persons who apparently had been blind from birth. Overall, the number of persons who reported having some kind of visual experience during the NDE or OBE was 25 of the 31, or 80% of the sample. Amongst those who were congenitally blind, this figure became 9 out of 14, or 64%. The book is replete with case examples describing the apparent visual experiences of these persons. But before we revise all our theories of vision, can we take these findings seriously? A major dose of scepticism is clearly justified given that those adventitiously blind persons, who later in life recover their sight, do not see as we do. Seeing is a life long skill, hardly acquired during the course of a NDE or an OBE.

Certainly, what supports scepticism is that the book is marred by the very first illustrative case the authors chose to present which they freely admit is a fictive case. (This was thought up by another researcher who apparently had intended it to be a composite representative case). Unfortunately, the authors also inadvertently include as their last case, one which they, at the time of printing, were hastily forced to add a refraction to, since it was probably fabricated. The question is, are all the cases to be found lying in-between these two, equally suspect? The question is unanswerable at the moment (although to be fair this seems hardly likely) but the book can stand as challenge to those who are open-minded enough to look further into these claims.

Given this reservation, are the authors really claiming that the blind can see again? Partly because of the above-mentioned difficulty, they, like us, are also confronted by the limitations of what is psychophysiologically possible in acquired vision and their conclusion is both a yes and a no. This apparent contradiction is best illustrated by the comments of some of their respondents:

"It was like hearing words and not being able to understand them, but knowing they were words. And before you had never heard anything. But it was something new, something that you'd not been able to attach any meaning to." (p. 42) "It's like vision but it's not vision... because vision is really sharp." (p. 149) "I feel more comfortable with the word perceive than see." (p. 151)

The review of these and the many other case histories leads the authors to conclude that the type of perception involved here, can be described as a certainty of knowing, sometimes involving a detailed visual representation of a situation, and often being accompanied by multi-sensory or synesthetic elements. For this reason they prefer to call this "transcendental awareness" or "mindsight". Naturally, the authors attempt to relate their findings to the more established findings concerning "blindsight", a term in cognitive psychology used for the purpose of describing the ability of cortically blind persons to discriminate between objects. (The existence of blindsight is assumed to mean that parallel processing occurs in vision so that as well as cortical conscious representation, a duplicate visual processing occurs at a subcortical non-conscious level.). Finally, like the philosopher Henri Bergson (who I believe was the first to suggest this), they go on to speculate that the function of the sense organs may be one of screening out irrelevant impressions and focusing consciousness on the here and now.

The question however remains what evidence is there for anything of an extrasensory or a transcendental nature being involved in mindsight? Although the book is richly illustrated by case histories, which could be taken at face value to suggest this, the authors openly admit that this aspect was the weakest part of their study and it was often not possible to locate witnesses or relevant documentation. Obviously, critics such as Blackmore will readily seize upon this to dismiss the book, but I would favor taking this material seriously and using it like other qualitative data in psychology, to design further theories and research. Its findings can be interpreted as being consistent with the recent ones in parapsychology (Parker 2000). Indeed, it has recently been said that NDE-research has made little or no progress in the last 25 years (Cariglia, 2000). One reason is that the NDE- and OBE- research fields have become too separated from mainstream parapsychology and cognitive psychology. This book should encourage a re-integration.

It would be easy to end the review on this note but I want to make a harder suggestion: Show this book to your colleagues in cognitive psychology and handicap research, formulate some hypotheses, and apply together for funding!

Adrian Parker
Department of Psychology
Göteborg University
SE 405 30 Göteborg
Sweden

References

Cariglia, F. (2000). Twenty five years after the Moody cases. What is a NDE today? Proceedings of 4th International Congress on Borderline Experiences (pp. 9-15). San Marino.

Blackmore, S. (1993). Dying to Live. London: Harper Collins.

Parker, A. (2000). What can psychology and parapsychology tell us about near-death experiences? Journal of the Society for Psychical Research [submitted at the time of this review; the reference for the published paper is: Parker, A. (2001). What can Cognitive Psychology and Parapsychology tell us about Near-Death Experiences? Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 65:225-240]).

© 2000 European Journal of Parapsychology