Michael Prescott's Blog

The duke of URL

Here's a cost-free way to contribute to cutting-edge research into mediumship. Use this URL as your portal to Amazon.com :

http://www.amazon.com/?tag=windbridge-20

If you bookmark this URL for Amazon (replacing any Amazon bookmark you may already have), and use it whenever you start shopping there, a percentage of your purchases will be directed to the Windbridge Institute in Arizona—one of the very few scientific facilities that take a serious interest in after-death communication.

It doesn't cost you anything, and the more people who do it, the more funds will be generated for the institute. (Click here and scroll about halfway down the linked page for examples of studies already carried out by Windbridge.)

Ripping it up, part three

It appears that the much-ballyhooed DNA match that identified a Ripper victim's blood on a 19th-centruy shawl has now turned out to be much less significant than originally claimed. The online Ripperologists who looked critically at this claim seem to have been vindicated.

The Independent, a British paper, reports:

[T]he scientist who carried out the DNA analysis has apparently made a fundamental error that fatally undermines his case against Kosminski – and once again throws open the debate over who the identity of the Ripper.

The scientist, Jari Louhelainen, is said to have made an "error of nomenclature" when using a DNA database to calculate the chances of a genetic match. If true, it would mean his calculations were wrong and that virtually anyone could have left the DNA that he insisted came from the Ripper's victim.

The apparent error, first noticed by crime enthusiasts in Australia blogging on the casebook.org website, has been highlighted by four experts with intimate knowledge of DNA analysis – including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting – who found that Dr Louhelainen made a basic mistake in analysing the DNA extracted from a shawl supposedly found near the badly disfigured body of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes. They say the error means no DNA connection can be made between Kosminski and Eddowes ...

[E]xperts with detailed knowledge of the GMI's mtDNA database claimed that Dr Louhelainen made an "error of nomenclature" because the mutation in question should be written as "315.1C" and not "314.1C". Had Dr Louhelainen done this, and followed standard forensic practice, he would have discovered the mutation was not rare at all but shared by more than 99 per cent of people of European descent.

This potential problem was discussed in more detail in an earlier post about the Ripper story. Given the authority of the scientists who are now weighing in, and the continuing silence from Dr. Louhelainen, I'd say the DNA claim has been decisively debunked.

In terms of the usual subject matter of this blog, the take-away is that even experts can make rather obvious mistakes when they get caught up in the excitement of the chase. This can apply both to parapsychologists and their critics. We need to look critically at all claims, whether pro- or anti-paranormal, and keep emotion out of it as much as possible.

Admittedly, easier said than done ...

Decline and fall

The American Society for Psychical Research is but a shadow of its former self. So says Guy Lyon Playfair in a recent overview of the ASPR's history published in the Fortean Times (not available online as far as I know).

The Society, founded in 1885 as a companion organization to England's previously established Society for Psychical Research, has had a storied history marked by the contributions of many leading figures in the field, including William James, James Hyslop, Walter Franklin Pierce, Gardner Murphy, and Karlis Osis. In 1972 membership peaked at 2,554.

These days, Playfair argues, it's all gone downhill.

With the retirement of Osis in 1983, in-house activity slowed down and soon ground to a near-halt, or so it appears. For the past 20 years or so, information on the Society’s current activities has been hard to come by. My own request for it was not answered or acknowledged. There have been no Journal or Proceedings since 2004, although the ASPR website remains, inviting those with personal experiences to report to send them to William Roll (although he died in January 2012). Veteran parapsychologist George Hansen estimated in 2007 after a trawl through the society’s tax returns, that membership had fallen from 591 in 1988 to just 23 in 2005. He also noted that its current executive director still enjoys a six-figure salary. His tersely understated conclusion: “It is unclear what services the ASPR actually provides.”

Author Stacy Horn is quoted as saying that her repeated requests to access the ASPR’s archive were rebuffed. “For a year and a half they put me off and I finally accepted that they just didn’t want me to see anything. They wouldn’t even tell me what they had. I’ve since learned that I am just one in a long line of people who had similar experiences with the ASPR.”

It's too bad. With the growth of paranormal websites and TV shows, there's a real opportunity for a revival of the ASPR. Sadly, Playfair's account makes that rosy scenario seem unlikely.

Flatliners

The first detailed write-up of the AWARE study is out, and it makes for interesting reading. It appears in the journal Resuscitation, and is signed by Sam Parnia and many co-authors, including longtime NDE researchers Peter Fenwick and Bruce Greyson.

The basic facts are these. Fifteen hospitals in the US, the UK, and Australia participated in the first large-scale prospective study of near-death experiences. The study took place between July 2008 and December 2012, during which time 2,060 cardiac arrests were recorded. Only 16% of the patients (330) survived. 140 of these consented to be interviewed. Of those interviewed, 61% (95) had no memory of any awareness during their cardiac episode. The other 39% (55) did report memories of some form of awareness. Of these, 46 patients described memories said to be "incompatible with a NDE," while the remaining nine had NDEs. Only two of the nine reported "visual awareness" of events in the hospital room during their cardiac arrest. One of them was interviewed on a preliminary basis, but could not give a more detailed interview because of poor health. The other went into some detail, and his observations seem to have been verified by hospital personnel.

The most publicized aspect of the study, at least prior to the release of the results, was that special visual targets had been concealed in many hospital rooms near the ceiling. The hope was that NDErs, who often report that they hovered near the ceiling and observed events transpiring below, would see these targets. But the two patients who reported visual observations were in rooms without targets.

The article quotes one NDEr who had a fairly typical otherworldly experience, involving travel through a tunnel toward a bright light, a "beautiful crystal city" and beautiful people "without faces" bathing in a "crystal clear" river, "beautiful singing," and strong emotion ("I was moved to tears").

The detailed veridical observation includes the patient's memory of an automated voice saying, "Shock the patient," and a "chunky fella" with a bald head who was part of the resuscitation team (and whom the patient recognized the next day). These details were later verified.

The less detailed veridical observation, which could not be followed up, involved seeing a nurse the patient did not know, but whom he recognized later, and seeing his blood pressure being taken, the intubation procedure, "a nurse pumping on my chest ... blood gases and blood sugar levels being taken."

I find some of the "non-NDE cognitive themes" interesting. From the brief quotes provided, it's hard to be sure, but many of them sound as if they could be compatible with NDEs, albeit perhaps of a negative or "hellish" variety. Examples:

"Being dragged through deep water with a big ring and I hate swimming - it was horrid."

"I felt scared."

"The whole event seemed full of violence ..."

"I had to go through a ceremony and ... the ceremony was to get burned. There were four men with me, whichever lied would die ... I saw men in coffins being buried upright."

And there are these:

"The sun was shining."

"Recalled seeing a golden flash of light."

"All plants, no flowers."

"Saw lions and tigers."

The first set of "non-NDE" reports are not necessarily dissimilar from hellish or nightmarish NDEs. The second set, though vague, suggest elements often found in NDEs - bright golden light, plants, animals.

But in general these excerpts are too brief to allow any real assessment.

The article stresses the likelihood that the detailed veridical NDE took place while the patient was in full cardiac arrest (not before or after), and that it appeared to occur beyond the point at which even residual brain activity should have ceased. Though the article doesn't go into detail, Sam Parnia's comments in an interview with the Telegraph provide more information:

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

The timing of the beeps seems to be the basis for the study's conclusion that awareness was present after three minutes or more.

The paper speculates that relatively few NDEs are recalled because post-resuscitation inflammation of the brain and/or post-resuscitation sedatives erase these memories. The "surge" theory is briefly addressed, with the article asserting that "in contrast to anesthesia typically there is no measurable brain function within seconds after cardiac arrest." Moreover, the flatlined EEG continues throughout conventional CPR since there is greatly reduced blood flow to the brain. It is also noted that reductions in cerebral blood flow would be expected to lead to delirium and coma, not "an accurate and lucid mental state."

So what can we make of all this? As I said, the study is interesting, and it has added one or two cases to the list of "veridical" NDEs. But since only two veridical accounts were obtained, and since neither patient was in a room with a visual target, the results are, to me, somewhat less than jaw-dropping. Even the more detailed veridical NDE is open to skeptical dismissal. The patient's reported sighting of the bald hospital worker could possibly be explained as his having seen the man previously, or as a false memory created when he saw the man the next day. Inasmuch as the sense of hearing is the last to go when entering unconsciousness, it is arguable that the patient heard the automated voice by normal means. Hearing a second beep seems, in itself, to be a slender reed on which to hang any conclusion.

Of course the whole study is already being trashed by skeptics - as in this online organ of "critical thinking," which declares that the study found "no evidence of NDE." It would be more correct to say that the study found some evidence, but not conclusive evidence. But drawing that distinction would require, well, critical thinking.

What the study mainly shows is just how difficult it is to study NDEs prospectively. Over a four-year period at 15 hospitals, only 2 veridical cases were obtained. I'm sure the study's organizers hoped for a larger number. As it is, we'll have to hope for future studies, perhaps on an even larger scale - and for a dash of luck.

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A couple of commenters feel I'm downplaying the study too much. They make good points, so I'm reproducing edited versions of their comments below.

GregL wrote,

The study, to me anyway, does indeed have significance. They have good evidence of a functioning consciousness three minutes after heart stoppage. I don’t think that I have seen this documented before, and I see no reason to begin to doubt the veracity of the patient’s remarks. The main skeptical argument against the NDE has been that the events are occurring either during the early recovery period or during the very early stage of heart stoppage. This study, as Parnia’s own comments suggest, refutes this. The material brain should just not be producing lucid consciousness this long after heart stoppage.

Duck soup wrote,

The [veridical] case is remarkable, though the sceptics of course are creatively posing mundane explanations as is their business. I'm not a doctor but I've read up on the physiological state of the brain in cardiac arrest and what the sceptics are saying about the brain still having some activity enabling the ears to work is nonsense. And I do mean nonsense.

When the heart stops as in VF the brain stem goes down very quickly and with that all the global reflexes of the brain follow rapidly so that the whole caboodle is off line. You can't hear, see, feel or experience anything after 10-20 seconds, that is why you can stick a tube down the patients throat and they don't gag etc etc.

This man was definitely in cardiac arrest VF, the machine (which cannot make a mistake) tells us that ... so when the patient heard the first shock he would already have been "out" for two minutes before it had completed its analysis and advised a shock. There followed a prescriptive round of CPR for two minutes until the machine was used to analyse his heart rhythm again ... no pump action, brain still down (because CPR cannot force sufficient blood into the brain to enable consciousness) and the patient was shocked again.

Now he heard these two automated instructions to shock the patient, not only that, he remembered them which he should not have been able to do. That is impossible according to medical science and don't let the sceptics tell you otherwise because if they do they are being dishonest. So he had cognition and memory working actively when his brain could not have been. Also worth bearing in mind is that if the the patient had been conscious in a normal way during the shock treatment, he would have felt the pain of the shocks which is variously described as like being kicked by a mule or having your insides torn out, furthermore, CPR is very painful and bruises the patients chest sometimes breaking ribs. He reported no pain or discomfort and that is very significant.

As I say, good points. Though we might have hoped for more, the study is still an important contribution to the growing evidence for the NDE as a non-hallucinatory state.

Besides, I don't want to be too much of a Debbie Downer ...

But ... how?

My post on Michael Shermer's anomalous experience has prompted the question: how can "the other side" possibly coordinate such episodes? What is the method?

I don't pretend to have any kind of definitive answer to this question. But I can hazard a couple of guesses, at least in regard to an experience of my own.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I was talking to myself out loud – a habit of mine – and I said (paraphrasing from memory), "I think life after death can be proven by the standards of civil court, even if not by the standards of criminal court. In other words, it can be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, even if not beyond reasonable doubt."

A couple of hours later, I had to change the batteries in my TV's remote control. To see if the new batteries worked, I used the remote to turn on the TV. I had no idea what channel would come on or what programming might be scheduled for that time of day. The show that appeared was a soap opera, and the first words I heard were those of an actor portraying an attorney. He was telling his client that there's a difference between the standards of evidence in civil and criminal cases. In civil cases, you need to prove your case only by a preponderance of the evidence, while in criminal court, you must prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt …

Although this could, of course, be dismissed as a chance coincidence, I found it very meaningful. Other anomalous events occurred during the same period.

But how could it possibly work? Are we supposed to believe that the "spirits" arranged for the television show to feature that particular dialogue exchange at precisely that moment?

Well, here are two notions about how it might have happened. The first does not involve "spirits" at all. It's simply a matter of psi – in this case, premonition. If I had a subconscious premonition that I was going to see that dialogue exchange in a couple of hours, it might have filtered through my subconscious and emerged as a thought about life after death, a subject that was very much on my mind anyway.

The second possible explanation is similar, but it involves "the other side." Here we have to assume that those who have crossed over can see at least a little bit into the future. Personally, I think that our whole idea of the "present moment" needs to be revised somewhat. It appears that most people have at least a subliminal impression of events that will happen one or two seconds in the future. What we think of as "the present" may be a somewhat elastic bubble of time encompassing the immediate past and the immediate future – perhaps a total of two or three seconds in all. Though we are consciously aware only of this immediate split second, on an unconscious or subliminal level we seem to be aware of more than that.

Conceivably, those who have crossed over have an expanded bubble of time and can see an hour or two into the future. I doubt they can see much further; long-term projections made by those on the other side seem to be generally inaccurate. But shorter term predictions may be more reliable. After all, there is no shortage of people who say that they received a supernatural nudge or warning that saved them from danger a few seconds, a few minutes, or even a couple of hours later. As just one example, the writer Dean Koontz has said* that he received a mysterious phone call the day before his mentally ill father attacked him with a kitchen knife. The phone call consisted of the warning "Be careful of your father," and the voice on the line sounded like that of his dead mother.

If we assume that those on the other side can see a little bit into the future, then we might imagine that somebody knew I was going to overhear those particular lines of dialogue on the soap opera later that day. Then it would be, perhaps, not an impossible task to subtly inject the same line of thought into my subconscious and prod it in the direction of conscious awareness.

Notice that in neither of these cases would it be necessary to actually affect the content of the television show itself. It's a matter of anticipating that I would happen to see that part of the show, and then using this random event as the basis for a synchronicity.

I realize that this conjecture does not answer the question of how Michael Shermer's radio could have suddenly started playing when it was apparently completely inoperable. Truthfully, I have no idea. I do recall reading an account of an EVP researcher who disabled a radio for a public demonstration and then received apparent communications over it, even though the device should have been rendered useless. But I haven't been able to track down the story online. And even if I could find it, it wouldn't explain the mechanism that was used. Conceivably, some kind of ability to directly influence the electromagnetic spectrum (as may have been the case in Koontz's phone call and other "phone calls from the dead") could be involved.

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* The relevant comments by Koontz are found in the fourth-to-last paragraph of the linked article.