The spirits speak

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a post that appeared a couple of weeks ago over at the blog Future and Cosmos with the message, "I'm honestly curious to hear what you think of this."

The post had to do with a series of experiments done by a French researcher, Paul Joire, back in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  Joire is an interesting fellow; he was fascinated with claims of the paranormal, but much like the British-based Society for Psychical Research, did his level best to approach things from a scientific standpoint.  That's not to say he didn't have some significant missteps, though.  He invented a device he called a "sthenometer" which he said could detect the presence and configuration of the "nervous force" emitted by the human body, and suggested that it could potentially be used for diagnosis of illness -- but later experiments found that all it was picking up on was body heat.

Paul Joire, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

That said, Joire was at least trying to do things the right way.  He was obsessed with evidence of an afterlife, and investigated numerous claims of séances, table-rapping and table-turning, mediumship, automatic writing, and spirit photography, and (again like the SPR) found that the vast majority of them were outright hoaxes.

It's the remaining ones that are interesting.

The article at Future and Cosmos focuses on a series of experiments Joire did with a self-proclaimed medium and four other people as participants/witnesses, where "unseen agents" were questioned and asked for details of their lives and deaths.  The "agents" responded by rapping on the table to spell out in painstaking fashion words and sentences, which were then recorded by Joire.  The gist of the claim is that the information the ghosts were providing was unavailable to anyone at the table, and was only verified as correct after the fact (some were never verified, but never disproven; none, Joire said, was researched and proven false).  You should read the blog post in its entirety, and I don't want to steal the author's thunder, but here is just one of many examples:

Question. Bertolf must be a Christian name. Have you any other name ?
Answer. Bertolf de Ghistelles.
Q. Were you French ?
A. Flemish.
Q, Will you tell us the name of the locality where you lived ?
A, Dunkerque.
Q. Have you been a long time in the Beyond ?
A. Yes.
Q. In what year did you die ?
A. In 1081.
Q. What were you ?
A, Husband of a Saint.
Q. Do you mean that your wife is honoured as a saint, that she has been canonised ?
A, Yes.
Q. What was her name ?
A, Godeleine de Wierfroy.  Can she forgive me ?
Q, You did her harm ?
A. Yes.
Q. You killed her perhaps ?
A, I had her strangled...
Q, Have you found any members of her family ?
A, Heinfried and his wife Ogine, her father and mother.  They have forgiven me.
Q. Is the festival of your wife celebrated anywhere ?
A. Yes.
Q. On what date ?
A, July 6th....
Q, Did you die in a tragic manner ?
A, No, in a monastery.  I remained there nine years.

Joire was able to verify that there was a woman, later canonized, named Godeleine (or Godelive or Godelieve) of Ghistelles, who was murdered by her husband Berthold [sic] and her body thrown down a well; the remorseful Berthold later became a monk.

The author of Future and Cosmos has the following to say about Joire's experiments and conclusions:

[This would require] some extremely elaborate and very hard-to-prepare fraud in which a medium learned and meticulously memorized very many details about deceased figures (some not famous), and then orally recited those details, only pretending to be entranced...  The total number of raps needed to spell out the details above (with one rap per letter) would have been many hundreds, occurring spread out over a long time.  We can imagine no medium manually producing so many hundreds of raps at a table where five people were seated, without being detected by the investigators.

The only other "narrow possibility" we have of Joire's experiments not being actual evidence of spirit survival, we're told, is if the entire thing was fraudulent; i.e., that Joire himself fabricated it all.

Okay, so what do we make of this?

First, I'll agree with the author that if it's a fraud, it's a sophisticated one.  But the problem is in the last sentence; "We can imagine no medium [accomplishing this] without being detected."  Humans are notoriously easy to fool -- consider how readily we fall for the conjuring illusions of a professional stage magician -- especially when we have a vested interest in believing that the thing we're being fooled about is true.  After all, most of us, myself included, would love it if there were an afterlife.  For me, though, I'd prefer that it not be the harps, haloes, and fields of flowers variety.  I'd be thrilled with something like Valhalla, where you get to spend eternity whooping it up with your friends, participating in daily debauchery involving riotous parties, quaffing tankards of mead, and lots of sex.  So despite my general dubious attitude toward claims of spirit survival, I'm not honestly hostile to the idea, and no one would be happier than me if I turned out to  be wrong.

The thing that bothers me with Joire's experiments is the quality of the evidence.  Joire was able to verify the details in a great many of the cases (and there were a lot of cases; his book is apparently 635 pages long), which means that the details on these people's lives were out there somewhere prior to the experiments being run.  The author of Future and Cosmos says that after reading his accounts we'd be "unlikely to suspect so serious a scholar of that type of chicanery," but unfortunately, there is no human who is above suspicion.  A quick google search for "scientific fraud" will turn up hundreds of examples, some of which had people fooled for years and were debunked more or less by accident.  Scientists, sad to say, are no less prone to the temptations to cheat than the rest of us are.  Most people are honest, and do their best to play fair; but you can't start from the assumption that because a person is a scientist, (s)he is incapable of fraud.

What we can rely on, though, are the methods of science.  The rigor of the scientific approach is set up to exclude the drawing of false conclusions, whether because of innocent error or deliberate falsification, and I don't see how the evidence provided by Joire meets the minimum standard we'd require in order to agree with his conclusions (and those of the author of Future and Cosmos).  I recognize that this means his spirit-rapping question-and-answer sessions fall into a catch-22 -- if the actual accounts of the deceased subjects' lives were already out there, it opens up the possibility of foreknowledge and cheating; but if no such accounts existed, there'd be no way to verify that what the "spirits" said was true.  This, however, is an inherent flaw of the experimental design -- one that makes its results fail to achieve any kind of scientific rigor.

Note, though, that I'm not saying that Joire was a dupe or a fraud, or that he didn't communicate with the disembodied spirit of Bertolf de Ghistelles and other folks.  There is the possibility that Joire's accounts are nothing less than the unvarnished truth, and if you're going to keep an open mind, you have to admit that there's no positive evidence of fraud on the part of Joire or the medium.

But as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Unless you're starting by assuming your conclusion, you'd need more than this to buy what Joire is saying.  So as far as the possibility of a fun-filled Valhalla waiting for me, I'm going to have to temper my enthusiasm and wait for better data.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

All in the family

Coming from the Wishful Thinking department, today we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

I was sent the link to this story by a friend who knows my fascination with genealogy and my interest in goofy claims, and this certainly hits both pretty well.  In it, we read about Mary Beth Webb, who began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999 shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... one of his grandsons was named Hamilton Scott, and a great-grandson was Hamilton Grim.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

Fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner and a six-pack of cold beer, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider much of it to be true, especially the European bit.  (There are, however, apparently people in China who can with a fair degree of certainty trace their ancestry back to Confucius, who was born over 2,500 years ago.  So that's kind of impressive.)

People of European and Middle Eastern descent, however, don't have it so lucky.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age is seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

Sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, which was shagging any women who were willing.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone of that particular ethnicity alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Musical post-mortem

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in Skeptophilia about people who claim they're channeling the spirits of dead musicians, writers, and artists, so that we can get a chance to enjoy additional works by our favorite dead creative types.

So according to these folks, Beethoven is still composing, not just decomposing.

One of the folks I looked at in this post was Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a British housewife who (despite little in the way of musical training) said she was writing -- if you believe her, a better word would be transcribing -- new works by Bach, Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy.  Some people have been extremely impressed, even baffled, by her ability; pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

Not everyone, however, is as taken with her compositions.  André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, said, "If the newfound compositions are genuine, they would best have been left on the shelf."

Rosemary Brown in action

So this has been one of those enduring mysteries that the believers say is absolutely convincing and the scoffers say is a ridiculous false claim.  But until now, no one has tried to do any kind of rigorous analysis of her work (or, if you believe Brown's story, the very-posthumous works of Bach et al.).

Enter Carleton University Ph.D. student Érico Bomfim.  Bomfim has undertaken a detailed analysis of Brown's compositions, with the aim of finding out if there's enough commonality with known works by famous composers to be at all confident that there's something otherworldly happening here.

"She claimed to be in touch with the spirits of those composers," Bomfim said, in an interview with  CBC Radio's All In A Day.  "She claimed to be able to talk to them, and she said that they were dictating pieces to her...  It's certainly a possibility [that it's a hoax], and that's certainly what the skeptics think about it, but the thing is, she [wrote] one piece [in front] of the cameras when BBC was recording, and it's quite a complex piece."

Bomfim believes that Brown's lack of musical training supports the possibility that her claim was true.

"[S]he didn't seem to have a very deep musical knowledge," he explained. "She just had some piano lessons, she was not a trained composer.  So it's quite hard to believe that she would be able to write that kind of piece, especially if we keep in mind that it's close to Liszt's late style."

And she wasn't just able to mimic Liszt's style.  Bomfim said that her talent for writing in the styles of famous composers was uncanny.

"To reproduce so many styles [of classical music], that never happened... There's not any other case besides Rosemary Brown.  There are many musicians that are able to imitate styles, but mostly ... it's a humorous practice, playing Happy Birthday To You in Beethoven's style.  But those are trained musicians, and they didn't show themselves to be able to write lots of new musical pieces in lots of different styles...  Rosemary Brown's case is absolutely unique, and that's why I believe it really deserves close attention from musicology."

I definitely approve of Bomfim's general approach.  No claim should be rejected out of hand, although some of them can be rejected pretty quickly (as Christopher Hitchens put it, "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.").  Word-analysis software has become pretty good at figuring out who wrote passages of text using information such as word choice, word length distribution, and sentence structure; I know (much) less about any sort of musicological approach to the analogous question with compositions, but I would imagine the same sort of thing could be done there.

My intuition is that Rosemary Brown was a talented fake, or possibly simply delusional.  But intuition isn't evidence, and it'll be interesting to see what Bomfim comes up with.  And if it turns out that deceased composers are still writing music, no one will be happier than me.  For one thing, I hate that I've pretty much run out of new things to listen to by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vaughan Williams.  For another, it would mean that my writing career won't be over when I kick the bucket.  It might be harder to find a publisher after I'm dead, but at least I might be able to find a competent medium to talk into being my locum.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Brain waves in the afterlife

It's understandable how much we cling to the hope that there's life after death.  Ceasing to exist is certainly not a comforting prospect.  Heaven knows (pun intended) I'm not looking forward to death myself, although I have to say that I'm more worried about the potential for debility and pain leading up to it than I am to death itself.  Being an atheist, I'm figuring that afterwards, I won't experience much of anything at all, which isn't scary so much as it is inconceivable.

Of course, if the orthodox view of Christianity is correct, I'll have other things to worry about than simple oblivion.

It's this tendency toward wishful thinking that pushes us in the direction of confirmation bias on the subject of survival of the soul.  Take, for example, a paper that came out just this week in PubMed called "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death."  The paper was based upon studies of four patients who had died after being removed from life support, in which electroencephalogram (EEG) readings were taken as their life signs faded away.  In one case, a particular type of brain waveform -- delta waves, which are associated with deep sleep -- continued for five minutes after cardiac arrest and drop in arterial blood pressure to zero.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors were cautious not to over-conclude; they simply reported their findings without making any kind of inference about what the person was experiencing, much less saying that this had any implications about his/her immortal soul.  In fact, it is significant that only one of the four patients showed any sort of brain wave activity following cardiac arrest; if there really was some sort of spirit-related phenomenon going on here, you'd think all four would have shown it.

That hasn't stopped the life-after-death crowd from jumping on this as if it were unequivocal proof of soul survival.  "One more piece of scientific evidence for an afterlife," one person appended to a link to the article.  "This can't be explained by ordinary brain science," said another.

The whole thing reminds me of the furor that erupted when the paper "Electrocortical Activity Associated With Subjective Communication With the Deceased," by Arnaud Delorme et al., showed up in Frontiers in Psychology four years ago.  The paper had some serious issues -- confirmation bias among the researchers, all of whom were connected in one way or another to groups more or less desperate to prove an afterlife, being only one.  The gist is that the researchers did brain scans of alleged mediums while they were attempting to access information about the dead.

To call the results equivocal is a compliment.  There were brain scans done of six mediums; of them, three scored above what you'd expect by chance.  In other words, half scored above what chance would predict, and half below -- pretty much the spread you'd expect if chance was all that was involved.  The sample size is tiny, and if you look at the questions the mediums were asked about the deceased people, you find that they include questions such as:

• Was the discarnate more shy or more outgoing?
• Was the discarnate more serious or more playful?
• Was the discarnate more rational or more emotional?
• Did death occur quickly or slowly?

Not only are these either/or questions -- meaning that even someone who was guessing would have fifty-fifty odds at getting an answer correct -- they're pretty subjective.  I wonder, for example, whether people would say I was "more rational" or "more emotional."  Being a science teacher and skeptic blogger, people who didn't know me well would probably say "rational;" my closest friends know that I'm a highly emotional, anxious bundle of nerves who is simply adept at covering it up most of the time.

Then there's this sort of thing:

• Provide dates and times of year that were important to the discarnate.

Not to mention:

• Does the discarnate have any messages specifically for the sitter?

Which is impossible to verify one way or the other.

Add that to the small sample size, and you have a study that is (to put it mildly) somewhat suspect.  But that didn't stop the wishful thinkers from leaping on this as if it was airtight proof of an afterlife.

Like I said, it's not that I don't understand the desire to establish the survival of the spirit.  No one would be happier than me if it turned out to be true (as long as the aforementioned hellfire and damnation isn't what is awaiting me).  But as far as the 2013 paper that was setting out to demonstrate the existence of an afterlife, and this week's paper that some folks are (unfairly) using for the same purpose -- it's just not doing it for me.

Be that as it may, I still have an open mind about the whole thing.  When there's good hard evidence available -- I'm listening.  Unless it happens after I have personally kicked the bucket, at which point I'll know one way or the other regardless.

Medium test

Think you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?

Well, you now have a chance to prove it.

Norwegian Rolf Erik Eikerno was diagnosed a couple of years ago with a terminal disease.  But instead of simply bemoaning his fate, Eikerno saw his illness as an opportunity.  He teamed up with the producers of the television program Folkeopplysningen ("The Public Enlightenment") to set up a puzzle for any would-be mediums.

Eikerno wrote a message on a sheet of paper, sealed the paper in an envelope, and locked the envelope in a vault.  Only the show's producers have the combination to the lock.  No one but Eikerno knows what is written on the paper, nor even whether it was written in Norwegian or English, a language in which he was fluent.

Shortly before his death, Eikerno made a public statement that if he was approached by anyone in the afterlife, he'd be happy to give them detailed information about what was in the note.  The program's staff have put out the following all-call:

Can you make contact with him?  Do you know someone who may be able to do so? 

Fill out the form further down in the article if you think you know what Rolf Erik wrote before he died. 

IMPORTANT: It is possible to answer only once.  The deadline is September 25th.
This is an experiment conducted by the TV-program "Folkeopplysningen".  Will anyone make contact?  The answer will be revealed in the ultimate episode of this years season, broadcast on Wednesday October 5th.

If you think you might know what Eikerno wrote, you can provide your answer at the link I posted above.

What's interesting about all of this is that it's been tried before.  Harry Houdini left a message with his wife, who offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could contact Houdini's spirit and tell her what the message was.  She even held a séance every Halloween -- fittingly, the anniversary of Houdini's death -- for ten years, hoping for some contact from her husband's spirit.  Nothing happened, and no one came forward with the correct message, although several tried unsuccessfully.  After ten years, his widow withdrew the offer and stopped having séances, reasoning that ten years was an adequate time for a ghost to make arrangements to contact her.  If she hadn't heard from him by then, she figured, she wasn't going to.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, Folkeopplysningen is going about things the right way.  Here's their description of the program's goals:

Every day we are bombarded with information and claims about what is good for us, what we should be careful about, and what choices we should make to live healthy, good and safe lives. 

"Folkeopplysningen" is a TV-program that investigates such claims.  We pick up subjects where there is a discrepancy between what people think they know, what commercial providers claim, and what science is telling us.  While we in the two first seasons scrutinized different kinds of alternative treatments and health related issues, we have been given free hands this year to look at any possible subject. 

We investigate everything, from finance to dieting, motivation business, cannabis, genetically modified food, ecological food and death.

So sort of a Norwegian version of Mythbusters, without the explosions.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see what turns up, although I'm perhaps to be excused if I'm doubtful anyone will come up with the right answer.  I've always said that my mind is open about an afterlife -- I have no real evidence one way or the other, although I expect that like everyone I'll get some eventually.  On the other hand, the idea that if there's an afterlife, it leaves behind remnant spirits who then can interact with humans -- I'm afraid the evidence is very much against.  If there are any well documented cases of spirit survival that can't be explained either as hoaxes or human gullibility and wishful thinking, I haven't heard about them.

I also doubt if any of the well-known (and well-paid) mediums -- people like Theresa Caputo, John Edward, Sally Morgan, and Sylvia Browne -- will volunteer to try the test out.  They tend not to like those nasty things called "scientifically controlled conditions."  I wonder why that is?

But if you disagree with me, here's your chance to prove me wrong.  As always, evidence and logic are the watchwords around here.

Psychic health care fundraiser

I swear, sometimes humans are so weird that it leaves me not knowing what to think.

Take, for example, the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre, in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.  Like any good hospital, Red Deer is committed to excellence in patient care.  It's also like other hospitals in that there's never enough money to achieve everything they want to achieve, so they rely on volunteers, donations, and groups like the Friends of the Red Deer Regional Hospital to meet their goals.  The FRDRH says on their homepage that their vision is to "improve care and comfort to all patients and residents through selfless efforts of staff and volunteers," and their mission to "facilitate innovative fundraising programs for services and equipment to benefit patients and residents in our facilities."

Which all sounds fantastic.  So the FRDRH decided to hold a fundraiser to support their efforts, and as part of this fundraiser, hired...

... a psychic.

For a hundred dollars a pop, you can have a chat with medium Colette Baron-Reid, who bills herself as follows:

Colette Baron-Reid is an internationally acclaimed intuition expert and host of the TV show Messages From Spirit.  She’s also a bestselling inspirational author published in 27 languages, keynote speaker, recording artist, and entrepreneur. 

Vote into the Watkins List as one of the Top 100 Most Spiritually Influential People in 2013, her reputation as a noted contemporary thought leader was firmly established.  In person or on paper, Colette delivers her message of perspective and hope with her trademarked compassionate candor peppered with a pinch of infectious personality.

All righty, then.

So we have a fundraiser for promoting cutting-edge, evidence-based health care that involves paying lots of money to have a woman tell you she can get in touch with your dead relatives, and that Aunt Bertha is just having a jolly old time in heaven.

Which brings up a question I've always had.  When the mediums do their shtick, why do they never find that your dead relatives are in hell?  I know that given some of the people in my family, it seems pretty likely.  We always get told that Grandpa Albert is happy and wishes all of us people down here on Earth the best, but we never get messages like, "Grandpa Albert says to tell you, "DEAR GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE SATAN JUST SENT A CRAZED WEASEL TO CHEW OFF MY FEET."

Which, now that I think about it, could be kind of entertaining.  Maybe I should start my own business as a medium, specializing on getting in touch with people who are in hell.  It'd be fun to tell people, "Uncle Steve says the Lake of Eternal Fire is kind of toasty this time of year.  He also said to tell you, 'Satan said to say "see you next Thursday."'  Do you know what all that's about?"

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I can't argue with a charity event that raises money for a needy hospital, but for cryin' in the sink, why couldn't they have found a better way to do it?  Hire a magician.  At least with a magician, no one's pretending that what they do is real.

Anyhow, if you're in Red Deer, Alberta on April 9, and have $100 to throw away, you might want to consider attending.  I'm always curious about how these hucksters ply their trade, and would love to hear a report.  And at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that your money is going to a good cause, and not to the medium's downpayment on her next crystal ball.

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.

Contacting the spirits of the... living?

One of the most important, and least considered, questions about belief is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It is something we should always keep in the front of our brains, whenever considering a claim.  We all have biases; we all have preconceived notions.  These only become a problem when either (1) they are unexamined, or (2) we become so attached to them that nothing could persuade us to abandon them.

I'm very much afraid that for some people, belief in the power of psychics is one of those unexamined, immovable ideas.  I say this because of the response people have had to a catastrophic faceplant performed last week by Skeptophilia frequent flier "Psychic Sally" Morgan.

"Psychic Sally," you may remember, is the performance artist who has thousands of people convinced that she can communicate with the dead.  She bills herself as "Britain's favorite medium," and fills halls with people who have purchased expensive tickets to her shows.  This is despite the fact that in a previous show she was caught "communicating" with a fictional character, and was once accused by a journalist of receiving information from a helper through an earpiece.

None of this diminished her popularity.  The first incident was only revealed in a newspaper article after the fact, and in the second, the journalist was actually sued by Psychic Sally for libel -- and she won.  There was no proof, the judge ruled, that the Sally had cheated.  The journalist, and the newspaper he worked for, were forced to pay reparations.

But this time it is to be hoped that things are different, because Sally did her monumental kerflop right in public.  Here's how blogger Myles Power, who was there that night, describes it:

Sally came to Middlesbrough on Friday night and her show started off very well.  Even though she was getting the vast majority of what she was saying wrong the audience did not seem to mind and seemed to be having a good time.  The point at which the audience became disillusioned with the performance was quite specific.  One aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones, in the hope that Sally will select theirs, and give a psychic reading from it.  Sally pulled out of a box on stage one of these pictures.  She held the picture up to the camera and it was projected on the large screen behind her.  The picture was of a middle-aged woman and by the clothes she was wearing and the quality of the image, I guessed it was taken some time in the 1990s.  Sally immediately began to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby named Annabel……or was it Becky.  Noticing that no one in the audience was responding, Sally asked the person who submitted the photo to stand up.  A rather small chunky woman at the centre of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife.  She was informed that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture.  However the woman in the audience (who was now also projected behind Sally) disagreed and started to look increasingly confused as, presumably, nothing Sally was saying made any sense to her.  Sally then decided to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture had any children who passed and, when informed that that she hadn’t, responded by saying “I will leave that then.” 

Sally then became in direct contact with the woman in the photo who began to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death and that she felt it was very very quick.  She later went on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death and that she either died on a Wednesday or was taken ill that day.  As the woman in the audience was not responding to any thing Sally was saying, she decided to ask how the woman in the photo was related to her.  It turns out the woman in the audience got the whole concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong – and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself.

So there you have it.  "Psychic Sally" has now been caught not only summoning up the spirit of a fictional character, she has gotten into psychic communication with the ghost of a person who is still alive and sitting right there in the audience.

Apparently the hall erupted in laughter when it became evident what had happened, and Psychic Sally never really did recover.  A number of people walked out.  People wouldn't answer her leading questions.  The audience, for that night at least, was a lost cause.

But here's the problem: now we have people rising to her defense, and the defense of psychics as a whole.  Just because Sally got it wrong once, they say, doesn't mean all psychics are frauds.  Here's a sampling of comments:

I know many genuine psychics who are sincere and good people, there are bad plumbers, carpenters etc just as there are good.  I was talking to a person who makes a living by speaking to the dead every week, he was a VICAR if you don’t believe fine but do not decry those who do as you will find out the truth one day as we all do.  The Sally Morgans and tub-thumping stage acts do no service to the genuine ones who just help without rooking people, she was so bad one night according to a TV comedian that they were booing her the following night when he was on.

I get really pee’d off when all people want to do is bad mouth sally make her look like she is some sort of fraudulant [sic] psychic.  Why do people only ever mention that she get names wrong n [sic] so on.  Sally has been doing this since she was 5 yrs old, and she has done show after show how bout [sic] talking about all the messages she has got spot on?  because they would out rule all the messages she may/or may not have got right.  I think personally people forget that because she mentions a name to someoone [sic] & they dont [sic] know who she is talking about that name could relate to a friend who is sitting at home & where they dont [sic] know there friends [sic] extended family it could have been for them, so it’s not that sally gets it wrong its simply because the person who the message is for is not simply sat in the audience.  Also this is not something sally can take a wild guess at, she is being given information from the other side & some people find that hard to except [sic].  Sally time & time again gives actual names of the person she has in spirit & gives names of that persons [sic] family you tell me how sally could have known this or is making it up?

THERE WAS PLANTS IN THE AUDIENCE, CAST NEGATIVE ENERGY ONTO SALLY, THAT IS WHY THE PEOPLE DO NOT SEE THE TRUTH BECAUSE THEY DRINK WATER FROM THE TOWN TAPS WITH HAS FLURECENCE [sic] IN IT TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE AND MAKE THEM THING THINGS THAT ARE NOT TRUE. 

what no-one seems to have realised that psychics do not necessarily work with or communicate with spirit – all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums – there is a big difference!

Okay, that was terrifying.  Especially the part about "flurecence" in the water.

Really, people: if "Psychic Sally," one of the most sought-after mediums in the UK, fails this catastrophically, shouldn't that force you to revisit your assumptions vis-à-vis all psychic phenomena?  I mean, think about it; what if there was a televised launch of a rocket, and right there in the public eye, said rocket went up into space and ran smack into one of the "crystal spheres" that ancient astronomers thought made up the heavens?  Wouldn't that make you want to ask the astronomers a few trenchant questions?

But with Psychic Sally's analogous bellyflop, apparently the answer is "no."  With the exception of the few people who actually saw her epic fail, no one much seems to be convinced who wasn't convinced already.  My guess is that after a few weeks of laying-low, she'll dust herself off -- and her act will be right back out on stage, wowing gullible audiences and raking in the money.

All in the family

In the latest from the Wishful Thinking department, we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

Mary Beth Webb began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999, shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... two of his grandsons were named Hamilton Scott.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

But fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to also to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider any of it to be true.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age was seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

But, sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, if you catch my meaning.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

Curtain call for Harry Houdini

One thing you have to admire about woo-woos is their persistence.

The "spirit mediums," especially.  They just never seem to give up.  Now, of course, the ones who have the profit motive in mind have a good reason for keeping up the game; it's no wonder that people like Sylvia Browne, Theresa Caputo, and "Psychic Sally" Morgan still insist that their alleged powers are real.  Any sign of hesitancy about whether they really are getting in touch with dear departed Aunt Bertha, even in the face of accusations of fraud, would stop the paychecks from rolling in post-haste.

Still, that doesn't explain a good many of the others, who are really, earnestly trying to contact the other side, for no great gains financially, and despite failure after failure to do so.  To some extent, they're probably powered by wishful thinking, of course.  Who amongst us hasn't wanted to hear from some long-lost loved one, or just to obtain evidence that life goes on after death?

You'd think that year after year, decade after decade, of flimsy evidence at best, would convince even those die-hards.

But no.  Which probably explains why a group in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is meeting again this year on Halloween to try to summon the dead spirit of Harry Houdini.

Houdini died on Halloween 87 years ago, in 1926, and (according to the article) a séance has been held every year on the anniversary of his death to see if the famous magician will come back to have a few words with the living.  Leading this year's attempt is Alan Hatfield, a spirit medium from Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia.  "My specialty is EVP — electronic voice phenomena," Hatfield said.  "I've been to the Titanic site twice and recorded voices there and at Deadman's Island and other places through the years."

What is ironic about all of this is that Houdini himself was something of a skeptic.  He started out believing in the afterlife -- according to his biography, William Kalush and Larry Sloman's The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero, Houdini first launched into a quest for communication with the dead after he lost his mother, and (perhaps not coincidentally) shortly thereafter entered a correspondence with Arthur Conan Doyle.  Despite Conan Doyle's celebration of the power of logic and rationalism in the person of his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, he was something of a nut about spiritualism himself, and toward the end of his life got involved in a great deal of woo-woo silliness, most famously the Cottingley Fairies hoax.

So Houdini asked Conan Doyle for some recommendations for good mediums.  Conan Doyle, delighted, obliged.  But after visiting them -- giving them, in my view, their best shot at convincing him -- Houdini was unimpressed.  One of them, Mrs. Annie Brittain -- whom Conan Doyle considered the best of the lot -- was especially disappointing.  "Mrs. Brittain was not convincing," Houdini later wrote.  "Simply kept talking in general.  'Saw' things she heard about.  One spirit was supposed to bring me flowers on stage.  All this is ridiculous stuff."

In the end, Houdini had no honest choice but to become a debunker.  It's the fate of a lot of stage magicians; they know how easy it is to fool people, and are quick to catch charlatans at their game.  The New York Times later spoke about Houdini's "merciless exposure of miracle-mongers who claim to be endowed with mysterious powers," and nominated him for the Seybert Commission, an academic group who studied claims of the paranormal with a skeptical attitude.  He intended to coauthor a book called The Cancer of Superstition with none other than H. P. Lovecraft -- a project that had to be altered because of Houdini's death, with C. M. Eddy taking Houdini's place.

Interestingly, Houdini himself proposed a test of the claim that there was an afterlife.  He proposed to his wife that after his death, if he was able, he would transmit a message to her in code that said "Rosabelle, believe."  The code was known only to Houdini and his wife.  In 1936 -- ten years after his death -- his wife finally gave up, and put out the candle she'd kept burning next to his photograph.  "Ten years is enough for any man," she is reported to have said on the occasion.

Odd, then, that the spiritualists are still at it, 77 years later.  Like I said, they never give up.

Now, understand that I don't know there isn't an afterlife, and there are some claims of hauntings that I find interesting, at the very least.  And no one would be happier than me to find out that death wasn't the end.  (Depending, of course, on which version of the afterlife you go for.  My vote would be for Valhalla, which sounds awesome.)  But it does very much seem like however you look at it, 87 years with no results is a long time to wait before deciding that there's nothing there to see.

So thanks to my friend and fellow blogger, Andrew Butters of Potato Chip Math, for the lead on this story.  And if you're in Halifax on Halloween, see if you can get tickets to the live performance that evening.  I'd love to hear about it.  And who knows?  Maybe this will be the year something will happen.  Hope springs eternal, apparently, especially if you're a woo-woo.

Music from beyond the grave

What do you do if you get tired of those nasty old scientists insisting that your woo-woo claims pass the test of hard evidence?

You move your claims into the realm of the untestable.

That, at least, is the tactic employed by one Jennifer Whisper, an 83-year-old musician from San Diego, who says that she gets her music and lyrics from dead songwriters who have provided her with what they would have written, if they were still alive.

Whisper started out channeling music from the dead in the 1970s, and began at the top, with none other than George Gershwin, who introduced himself in a straightforward manner: "I heard a knock on the door and no one was there," Whisper said to a reporter from The Huffington Post.  "Then I heard a voice say, 'Hello Jenny! It's me, George Gershwin.'"

After recovering from her surprise, Gershwin dictated a song, "Love Is All There Is," to Whisper.  He's come back a bunch of times since then, she says, and she now has over a hundred posthumous compositions by Gershwin.

She also has channeled songs by Judy Garland, Johnny Mercer... and Jimi Hendrix.

Oh, and Whisper also says that she found out that Marilyn Monroe adopted JonBenet Ramsay after her death.  So that all ended happily enough.

The problem, of course, is that you can't exactly prove that she's not getting these songs from the dead.  This is a claim that is outside of what is even potentially testable.  If you're curious, though, Whisper has attracted the attention of musicians and musicologists -- and not in a good way.  One, Los Angeles-based studio musician Jim Briggs, has analyzed her alleged Gershwin composition "My Stars Above"and said that he's not buying her story.

It's amazing, Briggs said, that "My Stars Above" is way worse than you'd expect from a composer who's had 78 years to improve beyond where he was when he composed his masterpiece Porgy & Bess.   "If [Gershwin's] communicating musically from beyond the grave," Briggs said, "I can't believe that at no point did he suggest 'My Stars Above' be an instrumental."

It's also opened up some legal challenges for Whisper, but the ramifications of what she is doing are unprecedented -- and unclear.  She could potentially be violating the publicity rights of the people who hold the estates of the deceased composers, but even so, it's hard to know how a court would decide the case.  Joy Butler, an attorney specializing in copyright law, has said, "I've never run across a case like this.  But she'd have a hard time convincing a court."

So that's the latest from the world of the woo-woo, and yet another case of switching your tactics if the heat is on.  It's a shame, though, that Whisper hasn't gotten in touch with some older classical composers, because I'm passionately fond of J. S. Bach, and I'd love to know what he's doing these days.

Other than decomposing, that is.

Psychic disasters

It's been a month of mixed news in the psychic world.  First, we had news that the Texas psychic who said that there was a mass grave on property belonging to a couple in Liberty County (and "bones in the house and messages written on the wall in blood") had to pay the couple $6.8 million in damages for defamation.  But it doesn't always work out that way; only a few days later, we heard that "Britain's favorite medium," Psychic Sally Morgan, had won a $193,000 award in her lawsuit against The Daily Mail after a reporter claimed that she had tricked an Irish audience by getting information from an accomplice through an earpiece.

But neither of the judgments should have been a surprise to the psychics, right?  Of course right.

Be that as it may, the psychics may be feeling a little beleaguered, of late.  At least, that's the impression I get from Ron Bard, who calls himself "The King of Psychics," who has been trying desperately to save either Japan or his reputation, depending on which version of the story you go for.

Bard, who is US-born but who has lived in Japan for some years, recently made a prediction that the country was going to be struck by a major disaster "some time before the end of 2013."  He had a press conference about it, where he told a reporter that everyone had better listen to him, for death awaits, with big, nasty, pointy teeth.

And the overall reaction he got was:

*silence*

Well, naturally, you don't get to be the King of Psychics if you're willing to take something like that lying down.  So he naturally turned to the most convincing medium for disseminating vital information, used by everyone from the Pope on down: Twitter.

Here is the series of Tweets Bard wrote (translation courtesy of Yoko Fujimoto):

To everyone in Japan, once again, hello. I have some important messages to convey to you today in Japanese. 

Last night, I was able to see into the future of Japan. I’d like to share those visions with you.

In two or three months, Japan is going to experience a natural disaster.

My message is very important. Everyone, please retweet this so that many people in Japan will know. In particular, tell your family, friends and loved ones. Please tell as many people as possible to follow me on Twitter.

This is not a joke. If you are not going to believe this message, please go ahead and stop reading now.

But if you would like to keep your loved ones and many other safe, pass my message on to as many people as possible. Or have them follow me on Twitter.

For the next couple of months, please read my tweets carefully. As the day of the disaster gets closer, I will be able to say which parts of Japan are most at risk.

As you all know, I predicted the March 11 disaster. Around the summer of 2010, it began to become clear to me. That prediction was published in the Tokyo Sports Shimbun, but it appears few people took notice of it. That’s why I want to stress the importance of my message this time.

If you want to protect your family and friends and others around you, please take my tweets seriously. And encourage people to follow me on Twitter. In this way, many people’s lives might be saved.

When it has passed, two or three months feels like a twinkling of an eye, but when there are two or three months to go, it feels like an eternity. But time is of the essence. From this moment on, you must imagine yourself in a state of emergency, and it is important that you prepare yourself mentally, as well as stocking up necessary goods.

I was raised in Christianity and Judaism, but now I believe that Japan is the source of all the world’s religions. Everyone, please pray together with me for the safety of the people of Japan. If you pray with me, perhaps we will be able to save your family, friends and loved ones.

Well, that convinces me.  Especially since if you look carefully at his claim to have "predicted the March 11 disaster" (the day of the horrific earthquake and tsunami in 2011), his actual prediction on March 8 reads, and I quote, "Before Japan reaches a major turning point, it is going to experience a great difficulty."

I'm sorry, Mr. Bard, could you be a little more vague?  Because I almost felt like I had to take action, there.

So it's not like he's exactly known for giving details.  If on March 8, he had said, "The spirits have told me that it's time to shut down the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, because it's about to be hit by a bigass wave," I might pay a little more attention.

What's funniest about all of this is his last tweet, about how if we all pray together maybe the disaster won't happen after all.  So this makes his message sum up as follows:

1)  Please follow me on Twitter.

2)  A horrifying disaster will hit Japan in the next few months, so you need to be prepared.

3)  And follow me on Twitter.

4)  Except maybe the disaster won't happen if you pray a lot.

5)  And follow me on Twitter.

6)  So don't blame me if you don't listen and end up getting yourself killed.

7)  Which is what will happen if you don't follow me on Twitter.

Myself, I find the increasing desperation of the psychics, mediums, and other woo-woo con artists to be a good thing.  Maybe it means that finally, finally people aren't listening to them any more, and have realized that what they really excel at are two things: (1) on-stage drama; and (2) making shit up.  And I don't know about you, but I'm not paying good money for that kind of thing.  If I had my way, they'd be playing to empty rooms.

Nor will I even follow them on Twitter.

Neuroimaging the brains of psychics

A fascinating study has just been published by scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania.  The methodology and results are described in this article, released last Friday, entitled "Neuroimaging During Trance State: A Contribution to the Study of Dissociation," but the gist is that that the team involved, headed by Julio Fernando Peres, has done PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans of alleged mediums who claimed to be in touch with the spirits of the dead.

These particular mediums say that they can perform psychography, which is when the spirit of a deceased person is working through the medium's body, controlling his/her hand to produce written text.  Now, neuroscientists understand fairly well what is happening in the brain when a person speaks or writes; in particular, when someone writes complex text, several areas of the brain (including the left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus and right precentral gyrus) show higher levels of activity.  The researchers compared the mediums' levels of brain activity when producing text in the ordinary fashion (i.e., when they claimed they were not being guided by a spirit, and were fully conscious and fully themselves) and when they were in a trance state.  And when they were in a trance state, all of them showed consistently lowered activity in all of the brain areas that are typically higher during writing.  Peres et al. state, "The fact that subjects produced complex content in a trance dissociative state suggests they were not merely relaxed, and relaxation seems an unlikely explanation for the underactivation of brain areas specifically related to the cognitive processing being carried out.  This finding deserves further investigation both in terms of replication and explanatory hypotheses."

It's an interesting finding.  The response of psychics to this article thus far can be summed up as, "Ha.  We told you."  And indeed, this result is exactly what you'd suspect if what the mediums claim is true -- that their hand was no longer under the sole control of their own brains, that someone else had taken over and was guiding their motions.

I am, however, not convinced that this is the only explanation, and I was glad to see that the authors weren't quite so eager to jump on the bandwagon -- their final statement that "this finding deserves further investigation... in terms of... explanatory hypotheses" is precisely right.  We cannot rule out that there is control by a spirit; that hypothesis is consistent with the results.  But before saying that this constitutes proof of psychic mediumship, other possible explanations must be ruled out.

I have to say, though, that these folks are going about this research in exactly the right way.  If psychic phenomena of any kind exist, they should be testable, verifiable, and replicable under controlled conditions.  The fact that these alleged mediums are showing anomalous brain activity is certainly suggestive that something worth studying is going on here -- and I hope that Peres et al. or other researchers in the field will pick up this study and run with it.  If the results hold, we may be looking at the first step toward hard evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm, which would be an absolutely stunning result (although I have to say that if this proves to be the case, the number of retractions I'd have to write for scoffing statements in previous Skeptophilia posts would be equally stunning).  My overall reaction: while I'm still in the doubters camp regarding what this study means, at least we finally have some folks who are approaching the question scientifically.  And that is a step in the right direction.

Psychics and the right to comforting self-delusion

Today's post is a question with no answer provided: If an alleged psychic, or medium, or someone of that ilk brings healing and closure to a person who is grief-stricken from the loss of a loved one, has the psychic done good or harm?

I ask this because of a story called "I Only Want to Help: Psychic to Sceptics," that appeared in the New Zealand-based media outlet Stuff.  The article describes a visit to New Zealand by Australian psychic Deb Webber, where she will hold a free "private reading" this week for people who lost family members and friends in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and another next month for those who lost loved ones in the Pike River mining disaster in November 2010.

Skeptics, of course, are disdainful of the whole thing.  New Zealand Skeptics spokeperson Vicki Hyde said that Webber's "readings" were "another sick example" of exploitation by the psychic industry, using vulnerable, grieving families as "a marketing drive" for free publicity.  "It's as bad as any of those shonky finance companies putting up free investment evenings - and it's about as useful," she said.  "No doubt at some point she will also be selling her services, which are very highly priced."

Webber, of course, defends herself, saying that she can't understand why she and her practice are being criticized.  "People need healing," she said.  "I never want to cause anyone more grief."

As far as the money end goes, Webber will be doing a public show in Christchurch, at a venue that seats 150, for $70 a person.  She denies, however, that she's living high from what she makes.  Anyone who thinks she's rich, she says, should look at her bank account.  "I'm actually skint," she said.

 Okay.  We've considered in this blog before the question of whether or not psychics actually believe that they're doing something real, or if they're just hucksters who are well aware that they can't do what they claim.  So for now, let's assume that Webber is acting from all good intentions, and really thinks she's contacting people's dead relatives.  My question is: does it really matter if what she's doing is real, as long as it makes her clients feel good?

The people who come to her, who lost family members and friends in dreadful natural disasters, want only one thing; to have comfort for their grief.  They want to believe that the people they loved are in a better place, and are happily past all suffering and pain.  They want to be given closure.

Webber gives them that.  She assures her clients that their loved ones are still there, smiling down from the afterlife, watching over those they left behind.  And I've no doubt that the majority of the people who attend her readings leave feeling better.

So if I, in my hard-headed rationalism, tell her customers that they're being deluded, that Webber didn't really speak to Grandma Betty and Uncle Frank, that the whole thing is a scam, who is doing more harm -- Webber or me?

It's a hard question to answer.  I once had a student tell me, in some distress, that he was finding himself unable to believe what his minister was saying in church on Sunday, but he was resistant to leaving the faith.  "I just don't know if I can do it," he said.  "Religion tells me that there's a reason that everything happens, and that if I just believe, everything will turn out okay in the end.  I don't know how I can trade that for a belief in nothing, that tells me that bad things just happen because they do, and that when I die, I'm just... gone."

It's strange, isn't it?  We are (obviously) drawn to what gives us comfort -- but will even stay with that source of comfort when the rational parts of our brains are certain that what is comforting us isn't true.  But the dilemma really falls on the shoulders of those of us who have already chosen the rather bleak road of accepting that the rationalist view is correct.  What should we do when we see others falling for -- perhaps even paying good money for -- a comfort that we believe to be based in a falsehood?

I can't bring myself to do it.  Even being a fervent, at times rather militant, atheist, I couldn't bring myself to tell my student, "Be brave and face up to it.  You know you're right, now act on it."  I just told him to keep thinking, reading, and talking to people he trusted, and eventually he'd find an answer he could accept.  As far as the New Zealanders who are planning on attending Deb Webber's talks -- it wouldn't work for me, but if it helps them to move past their grief and loss, I can't argue with the outcome.  I guess there's times that my compassion for humanity's inevitable sorrows trumps my determination to broadcast the cause of rationality.

On the other hand, there's a niggling part of my brain that keeps quoting Carl Sagan:  "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."  And I can say that for myself, that is what I want -- but I would hesitate to make that decision for anyone else.