"Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2007) I have a good friend who earned his Ph.D in chemistry from Harvard. He’s a college dean and professor of oceanography at a name-brand U.S. university. He’s authored textbooks in his field of research. In short, he’s the very model of a modern, major-league scientist. He tolerates my membership in SSE, but has no interest himself in joining or reading my JSE. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, and scoffs at mediums who claim to contact the dead. He steadfastly refuses to look at any evidence offered to the contrary. To him, it’s all unscientific bunkum. He’s also a practicing Catholic. In church every Sunday, he fervently recites a creed that affirms his belief in scientifically impossible phenomena – a virgin birth, the magical changing of bulk table wine into real blood. More to the point, he believes all people rise from the dead (along with their actual physical bodies), and the existence of an invisible world populated with angels, devils and demons who share it with his deceased grandmother and assorted others. The contradiction eludes him, and frustrates me. He believes in an afterlife but won’t look for, or at, collected scientific evidence suggesting its reality. Compartmentalization is his solution to the triumph of science over traditional religion, a process that started with the Renaissance, accelerated in the Victorian age, and ended in dominance in the early 20th century. Reason rules unchallenged from Monday through Saturday, faith on Sunday. His disconnect epitomizes the uneasy accommodation existing today between faith and science. The two protagonists divide up territory like Mafiosi, and try to avoid interfering in each others’ business. Harvard professor William James, the father of American psychology, together with a small band of exceptional, Nobel-winning European scientists and thinkers hoped to avoid this separate-boxes solution. They made a valiant attempt at the turn of the last century to produce scientific proof for religion’s boldest assertion, which would allow faith and science to share a common, consensual reality. Their melancholy story is told with admirable skill by author and career science writer Deborah Blum in Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. Three years of serious research shine through these pages. A professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Blum read widely; worked with primary documents; focuses on the best evidence (mediums like Leonora Piper, Margaret Verrall and the controversial Eusapia Palladino, seminal publications like Phantasms of the Living); serves up historical context (1842-1910, the span of  James’ life, the early history of the SPR and ASPR, the unstoppable march of science); extensively footnotes her quotes and sources; and narrates her story with a scholarly grace approaching today’s gold standard in historical writing, David McCollough. This is a book my Harvard scientist friend should read – not that he will. The fact that he and James share old school ties, or that James was a recognized giant in his field, won’t be enough to entice them to spend a few hours together. Like too many scientists today, he lives and works in a confined mental cubbyhole, with little time to read anything outside his academic field, even if he were so inclined. If he did, what would he think of the evidence produced by James and his apostles of the afterlife? I am familiar with most of the evidence (fairly compelling), but came away with new facts, information and insights I might have uncovered in my own three years spent researching the best scientific evidence life after death, but never did. Example? Mark Twain’s personal run-in with the paranormal and his subsequent endorsement of “mental telegraphy” (telepathy) in the December 1891issue of Harper’s. Twain skewered organized religion repeatedly and acidly in his lesser-known writings, but his beef with religion didn’t close his mind. He remains a hero of mine. Blum came away changed in the way she thought. William James and his colleagues “questioned and explored possibilities so accurately that it was impossible not to reevaluate my assumption.” Along the way, “I read reports by psychical researchers that I couldn’t explain away. I thought all over again about the shape of the world, about the limits of reality and who sets them, illuminated by history, philosophy, theology as well as science. There were days when I could feel the hinges of my brain, almost literally, creaking apart to make room for new ideas.” She remains still grounded in the current, consensual definition of reality, but adds, “I’m just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness.” The melancholy part? James came away with a tenuous epiphany he tried but ultimately failed to share with his fellow scientists whose downright pigheaded prejudice and intellectual dishonesty allowed so few of them to look at – much less fairly judge – the intriguing evidence he uncovered. At the end of his career, his brilliance and towering achievements in the infant field of psychology forever tainted in the public eye and press by what they judged unwise dabbling in supernatural hokum, James felt betrayed and bitter towards many of his scoffing colleagues. “Let them perish in their ignorance and conceit,” he concluded. SSE members wishing to avoid being lumped in with that cursed lot should familiarize themselves with the rich, early history of serious scientific research on life after death, if they haven’t already. You can’t do better than Blum, and James’ ghost – should you subsequently decide it exists – will rest easier. _______ “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2006) Mary Roach is a funny writer. While reading Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, I often found myself laughing out loud. The book is chock full of zingers and hilarious, footnotes. Her sharp, witty, humor-column style of writing makes the complex scientific and philosophical debate regarding survival of consciousness both entertaining and enjoyable. That’s the good news. The bad news? She seems to have selected much of the material presented in her book for its humor potential rather than its ability to seriously address the question she promises to examine. She dedicates one chapter to early science’s misguided search for the soul in human cadavers, sperm and brains; a second full chapter to the history of various obsessed oddballs who attempted to weigh the soul; a third to long discredited but grin- provoking notions of soul-as-ether or capable of being captured on X-rays; and a fourth chapter describes her three-day stay at the Arthur Findlay College of mediumship, learning how to become a psychic.. Throughout the book, she plays it for laughs and they come fast and furious.  Like all good magazine writers, she’s also not about to let the reader get bored or lost in a complex argument. Instead of offering a careful, detailed (and potentially yawn-producing) analysis of one of Dr. Ian Stevenson’s strongest reincarnation cases,  she opts for a four-day travelogue trip to India to accompany a researcher investigating a random case that’s landed on his desk. She avoids any serious discussion of death bed visions, possession cases and several other intriguing phenomena which might have bearing on the survival question (though she does do a good job on the famous Chaffin ghost case).  The result is not so much “science tackles the afterlife,” but more accurately “Mary Roach tackles the afterlife.” Coincidentally, the day I received my review copy of Spook,  I was in the middle of plowing through David Fontana’s new –and infinitely drier – 500-page tome on the same subject, entitled Is There an Afterlife? Fontana is a professor of psychology and Chair of the Survival Research Committee for England’s venerable Society for Psychic Research (SPR). The contrast is stark. His knowledge of the field and his scholarship puts Spook to shame. Their different takes on two famous mediums illustrate the point. Roach’s short, 14-page dismissal of early 20th century mediums Margery (Mina) Crandon and Helen Duncan is one of the funniest pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book. Both women claimed to produce “ectoplasm” – a visible, semi-fluid substance that reportedly emanated from the medium’s body which took the shape of spirits or ghostly body parts – an irresistible subject for a satire writer as accomplished as Roach. Roach introduces the portly, 250-pound Duncan with a wink to the audience: “Her séances were high drama. She tended to swoon and fall off her chair and occasionally wet herself in a frenzy of spiritual possession. She once emerged from the séance cabinet naked under a floor-length ‘ectoplasmic veil.’ For those whose interest in spiritualism was purely voyeuristic, Helen Duncan was the hottest ticket in town.” Roach makes a visit to Cambridge University library where she examines from the archives a pound of stinky ectoplasm (cheesecloth?) reportedly extruded by Duncan. Roach cites arguments to support the theory that Helen Duncan was swallowing and regurgitating sizeable rolls of cheesecloth. ‘To demonstrate the convenient compactability of the fabric, (famous English psychic researcher Harry) Price once bought a six-foot by thirty-inch swath, rolled it up tight, and photographed his secretary Ethel with the fabric sticking from her mouth like a Mafia gag.” Roach also highlights some of the Groucho Marx moments surrounding the controversy over Crandon’s mediumship “The debate deteriorated into name-calling and threats…Margery threatens Houdini with a ‘good beating,’ Even the discarnate Walter joins the fray, calling Dr. Code ‘a boob.’” Fun done, Roach pronounces her verdicts. “Crandon managed to fool the best and the brightest.” As for Duncan, it was “more likely a case of masterful regurgitation.” Fontana’s take on both mediums isn’t half as funny. But  his serious, meticulous, 18-page examination of the two mediums (in eye-straining, ten-point type that would run twice as long if printed in Spook type) makes Roach’s scholarship look superficial and her conclusions premature. Fontana is not a wide-eyed believer. He titles the section, “The Question of Fraud in Physical Mediumship: Mina Crandon and Helen Duncan.” But he also covers the multiple scientific tests conducted on both mediums over several decades in significant enough detail to allow the reader to understand, examine and decide for himself what to accept or reject. Where appropriate, Fontana points out absurdities in skeptics arguments. Example: One scientist suggested that a piano stool moved about during a Crandon séance was accomplished by a string attached to the stool and threaded down a hot air conduit to an accomplice hidden on a floor below – quite a trick when the string in question was only eight inches long. He digs deeper, providing evidence Roach fails to find – or fails to report for space or style reasons.  Example: Roach tells us that the great magician Houdini, who sat in on some of Crandon’s séances, noticed the more constrained Crandon’s hands and feet were, the less likely she was to produce ectoplasm. So Houdini “…built a special cabinet-box for her, similar in appearance to those 1960s steam cabinets in which villains would lock James Bond and spin the temperature dial to max.” At this point, Roach leaves the story – and us laughing. The innuendo? Constrain Crandon and she can’t produce. It takes Fontana to inform us that “Mina apparently produced phenomena while enclosed in the special fraud-proof box designed by Houdini in which she sat for three other sittings, and which only left her head and hands free. Houdini remained silent about this…. He also remained silent about those séances with Mina when impressive phenomena had been produced and when, along with the other members of the Scientific American committee, he had signed a statement affirming that the controls were perfect.” Fontana’s take on Duncan is equally more balanced and informative than Roach’s. After looking carefully at the evidence, Fontana suggests both mediums may have resorted to trickery at times, but he concludes that genuine phenomena also took place. It’s not the neat, easy answer the lazy reader may want, but it’s what the evidence suggests. Fontana isn’t fishing for laughs; he’s fishing for the truth. In fairness, Roach isn’t competing with Fontana. Her book targets the average reader with a layman’s curiosity about the afterlife question, and she delivers a decidedly delightful evening’s read.  If you’re in the mood to skip the broccoli and proceed directly to dessert, Spook is a tasty treat. ________ "The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine" Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2008) In 1997 an English housewife heard a voice in her head one evening when she was quietly reading at home. “Please don’t be afraid,” the voice said politely. “I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this.” The voice explained that it was only trying to help, that the poor woman had a brain tumor and should immediately seek a CAT scan at a certain London hospital. The panicked lady called her psychiatrist who quickly diagnosed “functional hallucinatory psychosis” and loaded her up with anti-psychotic medication. But the voice persisted, the woman insisted on a scan, and you can guess the rest. Neurosurgeons spotted something suspicious, they opened her skull, and discovered a meningioma brain tumor the size of an egg. When she awoke from anesthesia, the voice spoke one last time. “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” Her experience is just one of many puzzling, health-related, paranormal experiences Dr. Robert Bobrow M.D. describes in his delightful, thought-provoking book The Witch in the Waiting Room. More surprising than her bizarre story is the fact that the respected, mainstream British Medical Journal published it. Bobrow offers skeptical colleagues sober reports describing a plethora of “paranormal” experiences patients share with their physicians and psychiatrists – voodoo spells, telepathic dreams, déjà vu, acupuncture and hypnosis cures, self-predicted deaths, energy medicine cures and faith healings, near death experiences – all drawn directly from refereed medical journals accessible through MEDLINE, an internet database and “our profession’s Gospel, from which all our knowledge derives, from which our textbooks are largely written.”  This cabinet of curiosities deserves exploring by the medical profession, he argues. Patients’ paranormal beliefs and experiences can directly affect their mental and physical health; and the anomalies themselves suggest new avenues of research which may advance medical science.   MEDLINE stubbornly refuses to index leading anomalies journals like the Journal of Scientific Exploration or the Journal of Parapsychology, depriving Bobrow and his readers of a wealth of additional evidence.  But the paradigm-changing work of a number of luminaries in anomalies research still manages to sneak into the medical community’s canonical literature – Ian Stevenson’s reports of childhood memories and birthmarks suggesting a past life, and Bruce Greyson’s near death experience scale (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease); Dean Radin’s psi studies using EEGs (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine); and Michael Persinger’s one-theory-fits-all attempt to use the earth’s magnetic properties to explain everything from poltergeists and UFOs  to sightings of the Virgin Mary (Perceptual and Motor Skills). Bobrow’s writing style is crisp, but his topic selection quirky. He devotes a chapter to lycanthropy, describing patients with “species identity disorder” who believe they’re wolves, cats, birds or gerbils. But he oddly fails to cover patients who claim alien abduction experiences, courageously investigated by the late Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack; or the landmark surveys of death bed visions conducted by Osis and Haraldsson. Surely physicians encounter these paranormal claims more frequently than werewolf confessions. And why no reference to Michael Murphy’s classic exploration of extraordinary human potential, The Future of the Body? Still, the author’s cauldron bubbles with a heady brew of odd, unsettling experiences worthy of more stirring and tasting by a Western medical establishment bewitched by hubris and scientific reductionism. _______ "The Parapsychology Revolution" Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2008) Author Dr. Robert Schoch, Yale-trained geologist and professor of natural sciences at Boston University, is famous for re-dating the construction of the Great Sphinx to 7000-5000 B.C. His well-researched conclusion, resting on the known physics of limestone weathering, enraged establishment Egyptologists who adamantly proclaim Pharaoh Khafre’s subjects carved the iconic human-beast around 2,500 B.C. Faced with physical evidence that challenged their more circumstantial evidence, they countered that Neolithic man was neither socially nor technically advanced enough to carve such a stupendous monument. Accepting the challenge, Schoch responded by embarking on an intellectual quest to examine ancient civilizations and monuments world-wide, slowly collecting evidence over two decades of globe-trotting which suggests that the currently accepted history of Holocene man needs rethinking. Civilization wasn’t one smooth, linear climb up from grunting cave men to skinny latte drinkers; instead, natural catastrophes both terrestrial and celestial occasionally destroyed relatively advanced societies and forced humans to relearn arts and skills. The Parapsychology Revolution is the latest step in Shoch’s intellectual journey to the edge of established science, sparked when his co-author shared her copy of Lynn McTaggert’s parapsychology best-seller, The Field. Experienced in researching potential paradigm-busters and unafraid of controversy, Schoch decided to examine the scientific evidence for psi phenomena as well. In this “concise anthology of paranormal and psychical research,” Schoch and Yonavjak present their take on the history, debates, achievements and shortcomings of a century-plus of research into ESP and PK. In an extended 57-page Introduction, they explain why people should take the paranormal seriously – because “there is solid evidence for at least some paranormal phenomena.” Then they serve up, with a side of uneven commentary, excepts from fourteen seminal papers/articles which collectively tell the story of parapsychology’ s frustratingly slow, two-steps forward, one-step-back march to academic respectability and grudging, partial acceptance by the scientific community.   The anthology opens with historical writings by the SPR’s Edmund Gurney (on crisis apparitions), the ASPR’s William James (on the mediumship of Mrs. Piper), and ESP pioneer J.B. Rhine (on pioneering ESP tests at Duke in the 1930s). It closes with contemporary writings by William Roll (on poltergeists, electromagnetism and consciousness), Marcello Truzzi (on unfair practices of skeptics), and Navy Commander L.R. Bremseth who reviews the history of the U.S. government’s Stargate remote viewing program and calls its termination a “missed opportunity” to more fully explore what he concludes was an effective spying technique. Robert Jahn, Larry Dossey, Jessica Utts, Nobel Laureate Charles Richet and others also contribute to this academic smorgasbord. Schoch originally approached maverick claims for an “older Sphinx” with considerable skepticism, but ended up convinced by the evidence, skeptics be damned. To his credit, he does the same here. That doesn’t mean he believes noisy spirits of the dead are producing PK, or Atlanteans or aliens carved the Sphinx. His conclusions, as usual, are circumscribed and modest but eminently defendable and persuasive. ________ "Outside the Gates of Science: Why It’s Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold" Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2008) Psychologists, physicists, astronauts, engineers, clergymen, medical doctors and magicians have all pontificated on psi, so why not a sci-fi writer? After all, who else spends as much time at the far edges of science with such a wide open mind? Author Damien Broderick is acclaimed for his science fiction (Godplayers, K-Machines, Schrödinger’s Dog) and futurist musings. Here, he tackles the paranormal, devoting the first half of his book to recapping the scientific evidence for ESP and PK. Dean Radin and Richard Broughton do a better job of it in my opinion, but Broderick reaches the same conclusion: the phenomena “point to some central failure in the way reality is represented by orthodox science.” He spends his remaining ink tramping through the thicket of some half-dozen theories – from fraud, to quantum physics, to Decision Augmentation Theory – which attempt to “knot together psi and the rest of physics.” Broderick raises but ignores the possibility of a spirit surviving physical death (e.g. is a poltergeist RSPK, or the dead at work?); ditto divine intervention. “Let us keep gods, demons and tricksters at bay as the hypothesis of last resort.” His musings are thus disappointingly drier than might be expected from a science fiction author, despite the occasional, delightful allusion to the Matrix, Akashic Records and H.G. Wells. _______ "Do You See What I See? Memoirs of a Blind Biker " Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2008) Author Russell Targ co-developed with Hal Puthoff the clairvoyant technique of remote viewing which spawned the    U.S. military’s secret, 20-year, $20-million “psychic spy” program called Star Gate (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Spring 1996). Targ’s impact on psi research rivals J.B. Rhine’s, but Targ’s personal life appears infinitely more colorful, based on this tell-all autobiography. It’s a grand goulash of Jewish family history, childhood memories, marriages, romances and affairs, travels, liberal political opinion and Eastern spiritual-philosophical musings, spiced up with some serious name-dropping (eccentric chess great Bobby Fischer was Targ’s brother-in-law; his publishing industry father William Targ discovered Mario Puzo, advancing him $5000 on the basis of the plot that became The Godfather; Russell and Russian-born novelist/libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand quarreled over Einstein’s theory of general relativity at her mid- Manhattan salon haunted by future Fed chairman Alan Greenspan; the young actor Alan Alda lived across the hall from their apartment, etc.) Targ’s pioneering  psi experiments receive second billing here; you’ll find them covered much better in scientific papers and other books he’s co-authored –Mind Reach, Miracles of Mind, Limitless Mind.  This book is instead an uneven but ultimately enjoyable celebration of a legally-blind, 74-year old former Cub Scout, magician, Columbia University drop-out, physicist, optical engineer, drug-experimenter, ESP researcher, lover, book publisher, biker, song-writer, treasure hunter and truth seeker who’s still seeking. May we all enjoy and accomplish so much in our own allotted time. _______ “The End of Suffering: Fearless Living in Troubled Times” Review by Michael Schmicker Journal of Scientific Exploration (2006) During the Vietnam War, I taught English at a Buddhist monastery school in Thailand as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I led a spartan but happy life, personally untouched by the immense suffering experienced by thousands of my peers and millions of Vietnamese just an a hour’s flight from Bangkok. I returned home three years later with a great appreciation for Buddhist meditation techniques and their ability to help me live in the present. But I skipped the opportunity to delve into the teachings of Buddha regarding suffering and how to overcome it. When you’re healthy and 21, you don’t need comforting. Author Dr. Russell Targ did. He personally suffered cancer and the untimely loss of his daughter, Dr. Elizabeth Targ. And he found comfort and answers in the teachings of a famous disciple of Buddha, Nagarjuna, who offers a therapy for people caught up in suffering. Personal happiness and how to achieve it is not a typical target for SSE investigation. But the nature of “reality” is, and this is where The End of Suffering and science intersect. Robert Jahn’s exploration of micro-PK and Dr. Larry Dossey’s investigations into mind-body medicine both raise profound questions about the model of reality and consciousness proposed by Western science. Buddhism offers up an Eastern model of reality that avoids the materialistic absolutism embedded in Descartian, either-or thinking and the psychological problems Targ associates with this Western view of reality. Targ and his co-author Dr. J.J. Hurtak point out the compatibility of this alternative model of reality with modern quantum physics’ view of reality (e.g.  light is neither a wave nor a particle but can be manifest as either). They’re not alone in exploring this linkage. B. Allan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, is a former Buddhist monk who earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford and has studied under the Dalai Lama. His new book, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, offers additional intriguing insights into the compatibility of Buddhism and science. The point?  It’s possible Buddhism has it right.  And if we can accept this non-Western model of reality, new ways emerge to view and overcome personal suffering. This in a nutshell is Targ’s and Hurtak’s argument. It’s not unreasonable. I don’t have the expertise to judge the authors’ claim that Nagarjuna “stands out in global history as an unprecedented teacher of the highest order.” It seems excessive. And the authors’ liberal use throughout the book of Hindu words/concepts (which requires a six-page glossary) makes it read at times more like a philosophy textbook than your typical nirvana-in-nine-minutes, self-help handbook. But chronic worriers, negative thinkers and fundamentally unhappy folk in slow psychological or spiritual melt-down with the time and willingness to walk East a few hundred steps may find the exit they’ve been seeking from their unhappiness.