Parapsychology and Thanatology
Coly, L. & McMahon, J.D.S. (eds.): Parapsychology and Thanatology: Proceedings of an International Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts, November 6-7, 1993. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., 1995. Pp. xv + 261. Hardcover, ISBN 0-912328-46-0. $20.00.
Book Review – Alan Gauld
(From European Journal of Parapsychology, 1996;12:100-106, reproduced with permission)
The last few years have seen not a flood, indeed, but certainly a modest trickle of books about or related to the topic of survival (Almeder, 1992; Fenwick & Fenwick, 1995; Geis, 1995; Paterson, 1995; Kellehear, 1996). The present volume belongs in this series, and encapsulates some of its overall characteristics. Thus much more space is devoted to reworking and reflecting upon material already in print than to the presentation of new findings, and among the various categories of ostensible evidence for survival most attention is given to cases of near-death experiences (NDEs) and to cases suggestive of reincarnation.
Parapsychology and Thanatology (surely thanatology is an inappropriate word) contains eight papers. We can divide them into four very roughly demarcated groups. Two papers present new factual materials; two are largely prescriptive, in that their authors recommend ways of proceeding in the future; one is mainly defensive, in that its author is defending himself against a critic, and three are primarily theoretical.
The two factual papers are concerned with NDEs and related experiences. Both are admirably clear in presentation and cautious in interpretation. Madelaine Lawrence discusses the experiences of 111 patients who had been clinically unconscious. Between them these patients reported eleven NDEs, seven out-of-body experiences (OBEs) not associated with the approach of death, eight near-death visits from relatives or friends (mainly deceased), and two encounters with the Grim Reaper. Lawrence presents sample cases and some general remarks on the phenomenology of these experiences. She concludes that the medical profession, patients and patients' relatives would all benefit if information about such experiences, and their frequency, was more widely disseminated.
Justine Owens presents an analysis of ostensibly paranormal experiences unearthed during a survey of 200 NDEs, for about half of which medical records were available. She divides the reports into four categories: cases of apparent out-of-body perception during the NDE; claimed contact with deceased persons during the NDE; reports of telepathic communication or precognition during the NDE and/or an increase in the frequency of such abilities after it; and instances of unusual healing during the NDE and/or the development of the ability to heal after it. Many of these paranormal experiences clearly made a great impression on the patients themselves; but Owens thinks most of them can be accounted for in terms of such factors as general knowledge about the ‘medical emergency script,’ the unconscious processing of auditory information, and the enhanced vividness of imagery that seems characteristic of NDE situations. However she is not one of those who dismiss NDEs as ‘just’ mental fabrications. The reports describe rich and remarkable mental events, in need of serious study; and besides that Owens has in fact come across at least a couple of instances of apparent ESP during or linked to a NDE that seem to have struck her rather forcibly. Her conclusion with regard to the supposed paranormal element in NDEs is that ‘progress in this area may require either studying very large numbers of cases or providing appropriate targets in medical environments where NDEs are likely to occur’ (p. 166).
The first of the ‘prescriptive’ papers is by Michael Grosso. Grosso thinks that we have reached a stalemate over the question of survival, and offers five proposals that might help us to emerge from it. We should broaden our database; we should look at the question of survival of death in an evolutionary perspective; we should be prepared to settle for probabilities rather than certainties, for a ‘scientifically grounded myth’ of afterlife (by which I think he must mean a myth incorporating, however obscurely, some valid hints of the way things really are); we should actively pursue ‘those states of consciousness that might be associated with a post-mortem or extrasomatic state of being’; and we should try to ‘incorporate survival research and parapsychological research into a larger pursuit of human potential.’
It is the first proposal, broadening the database, to which Grosso gives the most extended consideration. He thinks that we would benefit from seriously studying such phenomena as the ‘hag’; mystical, visionary and shamanic experiences; UFOs, alien contacts and alien abductions; bigfoot and other cryptozoological phenomena; Marian visions; and the physical phenomena of mediums and mystics. Now some of these phenomena (e.g., shamanism, the physical phenomena of mediumship) are already an accepted part of parapsychology. But with regard to the others, whilst it would be going too far to deny that we should keep half an eye on them, it is hard to convince oneself that investigating them would result in any resolution of dilemmas over the evidence for survival or over parapsychology itself. The phenomena concerned are mostly as elusive and frustrating as parapsychological or survival-related ones, and probably more so, and the quality of the evidence is often not good. It is, of course, easy enough to speculate that paranormal human faculties, manifesting in, say, the construction of collective or recurrent hallucinations, may enter into imagined alien contacts or encounters with fabulous animals, but so far as I am aware the evidence for this is exceedingly slight, and not to be compared in quantity or quality with the evidence that psychical researchers have gathered for collectively perceived apparitions. Such speculations will resolve no dilemmas and may pointlessly burden parapsychology with some uncomfortable bedfellows. Oddly enough, the unequivocal discovery of an actual bigfoot, or of a crashed UFO with occupants, might well (though seriously denting the hallucination plus ESP theories) have interesting consequences for parapsychology. The arguments that have been used to dismiss the testimony in favour of these and related phenomena are very similar to those used against the testimony in favour of parapsychological phenomena, particularly spontaneous ones, and a conclusive practical demonstration that the arguments were at fault in the former cases might undermine them for the latter cases too.
The second prescriptive paper is by Eugene Taylor, who has a powerful, indeed emotive, message. At times I felt myself on the edge of grasping it, at other times not. However, certain themes stand out. A central one seems to be that parapsychological phenomena are most readily obtained not by pursuing them per se, but as by-products of exercises in self-development and self-realisation, these exercises being principally of kinds developed in the Orient ‘to effect an internal opening of the doors of perception’. The altered states of consciousness thereby induced may even teach us something of the experience of dying. Laboratory psychology and laboratory parapsychology have little or nothing to contribute to this endeavour. Such states of mind far transcend our descriptive and conceptual abilities, and attempts to articulate them will not be assisted by any amount of conventional scientific data-gathering. What remains unclear in all this is why Taylor thinks we should take at face value the claims of certain ascetics, practitioners of Zen, religious devotees, and so forth, to have achieved self-knowledge, self-realisation, enlightenment, or whatever it may be called. Why should we not suppose (as many would) that the enlightenment and self-knowledge are delusory, a neurochemically generated anodyne for the miseries and uncertainties of existence? Taylor does not even support his position (insofar as it would be supported) by a review of whatever evidence there may be that progress along the road to enlightenment is indeed accompanied by the development of paranormal powers.
The mainly defensive paper is Robert Almeder’s reply to criticism expressed by Beloff in a review of Almeder’s recent book on survival (Almeder, 1992), and is too variegated and ad hoc for useful summary or comment. This leaves us with the three mainly theoretical papers, by William Roll, John Palmer and Stephen Braude.
Roll’s paper moves at a highly abstract and figurative level, and is not always easy to follow. He holds that one's psyche or self enfolds or incorporates people and things to whom one is psychologically close, leading to the possibility of ESP and PK. It is embodied, both in one's own body and, because one's psyche incorporates other psyches, in other bodies too. This embodiment leads to extrasensory experiences of the crises of others. The psyche is also emplaced, in that the places where one is and has been become part of oneself, and one’s memories may in some obscure way become located there and accessible to those likewise emplaced. After one’s bodily death one’s psyche may in a sense survive, because it is multiply embodied and multiply emplaced. One’s small consciousness becomes absorbed in a larger consciousness. Roll confines himself largely to a statement of his position. He gives hardly any data or arguments in support of it. Apparently the interested reader must locate these for him- or herself in Roll’s previous publications.
John Palmer’s paper is the most ambitious in the book. It attempts the first outline of a ‘general theory of survival’. So much hard thought and so much ingenuity have gone into this theory that I almost regretted my inability to believe a word of it. The central concept is that of a ‘psiad’, and I shall outline first the concept of psiad per se, and then its attempted applications to parapsychological phenomena.
Each momentary brain-state of sufficient intensity generates a persisting entity that Palmer terms a psiad. Psiads are records or reflections of the brain-states, or of those aspects of them in virtue of which they constitute integrated preconsiou
thoughts, images, etc. Psiads are ‘embedded in’ consciousness, but are not themselves conscious.
What follows is to say the least obscure, and I am not sure that I have understood Palmer correctly, or that what he says is altogether coherent. He is prepared to allow that the brain (conceived on the analogy of a computer) can, without requiring consciousness, carry out such 'mental' functions as perception, sequential thought, memory, and initiation of behaviour. Consciousness, whatever its relationship to the brain, is not a brain function. However in Palmer's theory it seems in and of itself to be not the onwardly flowing and richly differentiated stream that we would normally understand by the term, but a sort of undifferentiated potential for moments of more specific awareness. It is through psiads, embedded as they are in consciousness, and suffused by it, that this potential is realised.
As soon as a psiad is formed, it immediately and reflexly applies a psychokinetic input to the brain location or circuitry or on-going pattern of activity that most closely resembles the pattern encoded in it. This will normally be the activated brain-circuitry that has just given rise to it. If conditions are right, the psiad is now (for no very clear reasons) able to ‘actualise itself as a conscious experience’. It then suffers a diminution in its ‘intensity coding’ and becomes less likely to be able to actualise itself in future both because of this diminution and because the brain state will have moved on. It will, however, continue to seek actualisation (this being the nature of psiads), and if it lights upon a brain-state with sufficient similarity to its own encoded pattern, the result will most probably be a spontaneous memory experience.
So far ‘psiad’ seems to be a metaphysical notion, kin to ‘eidolon’ or ‘monad’, rather than a scientific one. Psiads are purportedly among the furniture of the universe or of some universe, and yet there is nothing whatever that we can do to observe them or test for their presence. Even as a metaphysical notion the concept seems to lack elegance. Each psiad would have to encode a vastly complex pattern (one has only to look at a few PET scans to realise that half the brain or more may be activated during quite commonplace experiences) and every individual on the planet would generate hundreds of psiads every hour. This is multiplication of entities with a vengeance! And even so there are all sorts of lacunae. If two, or a dozen, or more, of these psiads successively actualise themselves in experience through interaction with a certain person's brain, what makes those experiences his experiences? It is psiads, not brains, that become conscious, indeed seek conscious actualisation, and ex hypothesi psiads do not directly interact with each other, much less combine into selves. And why should the psychokinetic influence exercised by a psiad on rain circuitry lead to consciousness for the psiad rather than for the brain?
One could go on and on; but it will be as well to turn to the area in which Palmer undoubtedly does think that the theory provides genuine explanations and predictions, the area, namely, of paranormal phenomena, including survival-related ones. It is here that Palmer is at his most ingenious. Telepathy occurs when recently generated psiads interact with brains other than their brain of origin, which they will tend to do in proportion as the generating brain-state, and hence the pattern encoded in the psiad, is (in some undefined way) similar to the target brain-state (Palmer seems to hold that the mental ‘space’ that psiads inhabit lacks spatial dimensions so the issue of spatial proximity does not arise). Telepathy should be particularly prevalent between individuals who are genetically close to each other, because their brain states are likely to be similar. Clairvoyance does not exist as a distinct form of psi, but precognition may be possible insofar as psiads may be independent of time as well as of space. Post-mortem psi is easily fitted in. Psiads, once generated, do not depend on the continued existence of the brain that generated them. Even after the death of that brain, they may be able to interact with the brain of a medium, which may for various reasons be specially labile to their influence, and since psiads contain the encoded body concepts of their originators, they may enable the medium to mimic the communicator's voice and mannerisms. In crisis apparitions, psiads from the agent, rendered especially intense by the crisis and incorporating the agent's body concept, interact with the percipient's brain to produce an hallucination of the agent. Haunting apparitions are brought about because the brains of percipients in certain locations become similar to the brains, and hence to the still existing psiads, of the deceased persons who once dwelt there. Collective percipience is the result of psiads interacting simultaneously or in quick succession with multiple percipients. Cases of ostensible reincarnation may be handled pretty much like cases of mental medium-ship, except that we need to throw in some reason (to do no doubt with similarity of brain structure) why the psiads from the past interact only with one particular still living brain. We can explain the further correct 'memories' that the present personality may come up with when brought to the previous personality's home and habitat by supposing that ‘the perceptions of the new environment bring his or her brain states into conformance with the brain states recorded in the previous personality's psiads’. The transfer of skills to the child may be explained in part by proposing that the psiads seek out children who possess strong innate aptitudes for the skill in question, another basis for brain state similarity’. And so on.
Do these examples show that the theory of psiads, contrary to what I said about it earlier, actually has genuine, testable applications to certain sorts of phenomena? On the whole I fear not. What we have here is in effect a theory of telepathy as an inductive phenomenon. According to such theories, telepathy consists of the induction in brain/mind B of a state similar to that which prevails (or has prevailed or even will prevail) in brain/mind A. All inductive theories of telepathy suffer from certain intractable problems, for example the obvious fact that many alleged examples of spontaneous telepathy do not involve B's mind-state being similar to A’s (as in crisis apparitions in which the presumed agent may be suffering his death agonies, while the percipient sees the externalised figure of the agent, something that the agent himself has never observed). However the immediate point is that the theory of psiads does not seem to differ significantly in its predictions from those that might, with a very little ingenuity and fine tuning, be derived from any other inductive theory (for instance Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance) or from a generic theory of the same kind. For example Palmer says that it is ‘an empirical prediction of the theory’ that persons with marked telepathic abilities should have very rich experiential lives (p. 13). This is because 'telepathic' brains will be ductile brains, open to the influence of psiads from other brains, and hence very receptive also to their own psiads. But a ductile brain would fit very happily into any inductive theory whatever. The metaphysical apparatus of psiads appears quite unnecessary to such a theory's (rather modest) explanatory power.
The third theoretical paper is an examination by Stephen Braude of the well-known case of Uttara-Sharada, which he treats as a candidate-case of reincarnation. He hopes to persuade us that we can best understand this case as an instance of 'dissociation + psi' or of ‘motivated psi’, and clearly thinks that his arguments will have wider applicability. Uttara, it will be remembered, is an Indian lady, living in Nagpur, who in her early 30s began to have phases in which she spoke and acted as Sharada, a young married woman from the West Bengal of the early nineteenth century (West Bengal is some 500 miles from Nagpur, and Uttara had never been there). She was fluent in (a somewhat archaic) Bengali, a language with which she had at best an exceedingly limited ordinary acquaintance, and showed considerable knowledge of people and places from the West Bengal of 1810-1830.
Braude does not directly tackle the question of the limits of psi (or ‘super-psi’). His arguments about the Uttara-Sharada case may be summarised as follows:
1. Previous accounts of the case have neglected ‘depth-psychological issues’. Uttara had in fact significant emotional problems and frustrations (of which, mercifully, Braude gives us a common-sense rather than a depth-psychological account). She exhibited various minor pathological symptoms, and showed a number of the characteristics of the ‘gifted fantasiser’.
2. All this makes it plausible to suppose that Uttara developed the Sharada personality as a way of coping with and expressing these problems and frustrations, in short as a ‘dissociative defence’ like the alters in more commonplace cases of multiple personality disorder.
3. Dissociation may facilitate latent capacities, including psychic ones. This may help account for the knowledge that Uttara (as Sharada) displayed of Sharada's Bengali background. There are also motivational influences on ESP performance, and the motivations that underlie the creation of dissociative defences may also promote the acquisition of extrasensory knowledge.
4. There is evidence to suggest that Uttara could have had more exposure to the Bengali language than was at first apparent. If we combine this fact with the possibilities that she may have enhanced her knowledge of it through ESP, or may covertly have been a kind of linguistic savant or prodigy, we may begin to understand her sudden emergence as a speaker of fluent Bengali.
There can be few greater admirers than I of Stephen Braude’s analytic gifts, and few persons more averse to the thought of reincarnation. But I must confess that I find these arguments more than a little baffling. There is nothing new about the dissociation + psi account of mediumistic and related phenomena. It was central to F.W.H. Myers’s thinking, and he held that the psi, though usually involving telepathy with the living, might occasionally involve telepathy with the discarnate. There is no need to engage in depth psychological analysis to demonstrate that Sharada is a dissociated phase of Uttara. If the hypothesis of possession be ruled out (and Braude does not even consider it), Sharada is that by definition – Braude’s definition (Braude, 1991, p.120), which seems to me the most satisfactory yet. Of course in terms of this definition (which emphasises phenomenological or amnesic or anaesthetic barriers between two occurrent or dispositional states or systems of states of the same individual person) all sorts of radically different states might qualify as ‘dissociated’ – e.g., alcoholic blackouts, states of REM sleep behavioural disorder, alter personalities in cases of multiple personality disorder, etc. But the only serious possibility in the present case (although the fit is far from perfect) is that Sharada is a secondary or alter personality of Uttara’s. Now this fact, if fact it be, has no special bearing on the question of whether the Sharada phase is an imaginative construct of Uttara’s, eked out, perhaps, with extrasensory information (the dissociation + psi hypothesis), or a remembering and reliving by Uttara of her previous incarnation as Sharada (which would be a sort of dissociation + cryptomnesia hypothesis). Presumably someone who is going to escape from the miseries of dissatisfactions of life by creating an alter personality may utilise any imaginatively interesting materials that happen to become accessible, including all sorts of buried memories, even those of past incarnations (if any).
In short it is not the dissociation part of the dissociation + psi hypothesis on which Braude should have concentrated, but the psi part. His approach to the case of Sharada will gain credibility insofar as he can show that dissociation in the form of a secondary personality, and the sorts of motivations that prompt such dissociations, are specially conducive to the exercise of extrasensory capacities; that knowledge of and facility in a foreign language may be assisted by ESP; and that Uttara can plausibly be supposed to have been, at least to an extent, a linguistic prodigy or savant. There is not a lot of evidence on any of these fronts, and none, I suspect, on some. Unless and until Braude can supply such evidence (he makes almost no attempt to do so), his dissociation + psi hypothesis is going to float in that uncomfortable limbo to which are consigned theories that no-one seriously believes, but nobody can actually dispose of.
Over a third of this book is devoted to verbatim transcripts of the discussions that followed each paper and of the four general discussions. Although there were some insightful and illuminating passages – Braude, for instance, seemed to me to raise about several papers exactly the points that needed to be raised, whilst Roll’s account on pp. 118-9 of one of his own OBEs is of some theoretical interest – I wondered whether the expense of printing these transcripts was really worthwhile, especially when they might have been replaced by another couple of papers. Few even of the most articulate can really enjoy seeing their off-the-cuff remarks served up before them in cold print several years later.
Looking back on this book, I realise somewhat guiltily that, setting aside the two largely factual papers, I have found very little in it that I could accept without qualification, and much with which I rather strongly disagree. To disagree with the contents of a book, however, is not necessarily to criticise the book itself. Agreement in this debatable area, is a rare luxury. One has more often to settle for the salutary, and just possibly profitable, discipline of trying to be clear about the grounds for one’s disagreements. A book lively enough to stimulate dissent has its own kind of value, a value that will probably be different for each dissenting reader.
Alan Gauld
Department of Psychology
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD
UK
References
Almeder, R. (1992). Death and Personal Survival: The Evidence for Life after Death. Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams.
Braude, S. (1991). First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge.
Fenwick, P. & Fenwick, E. (1995). The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of over 300 Near-Death Experiences. London: Headline.
Geis, R. (1995). Personal Existence after Death: Reductionist Circularities and the Evidence. London: Open Court.
Kellehear, A. (1996). Experiences near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paterson, R.W.K. (1995). Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death. New York St. Martin’s Press.
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