The Mechanism of Mediumship

Over the last few days, Mark and I watched many of the speakers online from the Chopra Foundation's 2012 Symposium "Sages and Scientists: The Merging of a New Future." It was really interesting and sparked a lot of conversations in our living room!

Speakers included Stu Hameroff (who had the cajones to actually use the word "afterlife"), Candace Pert, Laura Liswood, Vandana Shiva (I can't even find the right words of awe to put in these parentheses!), Leonard Mlodinow, Henry Stapp, Elissa Epel (who really got me concerned about my telomeres), Rinaldo Brutoco, and the infamous Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.

While I expected only nonsense to come out of Shermer's mouth, he did make some logical points (that really almost anyone could have made): just because there is a word for a concept doesn't mean it exists in true reality (e.g., mind); saying we don't know how something works (e.g., local consciousness) doesn't prove an alternative explanation (e.g., nonlocal consciousness); and---the best and most obvious one---there is no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural; there are only the normal, the natural, and the things we can't explain yet.

And while he lauded speakers who openly reported not knowing the answers to certain questions, he made blanket statements with no objective support about the impossibility of an afterlife: "Where does Aunt Millie's mind go when her brain dies?  Nowhere!"

Now, I get it that if he changes his story, he will lose his job, his reputation, his income, and the drooling adoration of sheep-like followers everywhere, but it surprises me nonetheless when a grown, educated man gets up in front of a crowd and makes claims that clearly refute each other: (1) there are things we can't explain yet and (2) it is a fact that consciousness is created by the brain and cannot survive death.  He can make claim #2 only by ignoring the numerous phenomena demonstrating that responsible scientists need to at least entertain its opposite (e.g., terminal lucidity, out of body experiences, near-death experiences, mediumship, etc.).  I have other thoughts about his presentation, but I didn't transcribe it and I have a point I'd like to get to...

One of the main criticisms lobbed at mediumship, other psi phenomena, homeopathic remedies and the like (collectively called "X" here) is that because we can't define clear mechanisms for X, any laboratory demonstration of X must be the result of fraud, error, chance, statistical manipulation, etc. 

For example, in a debate about the afterlife between Michael Shermer and Deepak Chopra from a few years ago, Shermer stated, "If the data shows that there is such a phenomena as psi that needs explaining (and I am not convinced that it does), then we still need a causal mechanism."

This demand is based in faulty logic.  There are numerous "normal" Xs and we can't really explain how or why they happen but we all agree that they exist and are potentially worthy of study.

Some of these Xs are simple things we all have experience with like yawning, dreaming, and blushing and some are diseases and conditions we have at least heard of like multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson's disease, eczema, psoriasis, glaucoma, fibromyalgia, and any disease with "idiopathic" in its title.

Because I was trained as a pharmacologist, the Xs that come to my mind are the many drugs on the market that work through mechanisms we don't fully understand.  These include Botox and Fosamax; aspirin for most of its century of use (though now we know how it works); certain drugs that treat Parkinson's (pramipexole), cancer (procarbazine, targretin), tuberculosis (ethambutol), malaria (halofantrine); and epilepsy (levetiracetam); the antibiotics clofazimine and pentamidine; many psychotropic drugs (e.g., lithium); and the general anesthetics that keep patients unconscious during surgery.

So I guess if skeptics need to have surgery, they forego the general anesthesia since the doctors cannot define the precise mechanisms of action of those compounds and they are forced to conclude that any previous loss of consciousness demonstrated in other patients when exposed to these drugs was surely due to error, fraud, chance, or statistical manipulation.

Ouch!

At the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, we are primarily concerned with the applications of X ("applied" is right in our name!) regardless of the causal mechanisms.  The drugs listed above all work in treating their target conditions and our initial research shows that mediumship readings from credentialed mediums are helpful in the treatment of grief --- each irrespective of known mechanisms.

I think you can see the fallacy in claiming that the absence of an understood mechanism for X is reason to dismiss the possibility of X or the value in its investigation.

PS - For some other things science can't explain thus providing evidence that thinking we understand everything is pompous and ignorant, see:
http://www.virginmedia.com/digital/features/10-things-science-cant-explain.php
http://www.newscientist.com/special/ten-mysteries-of-you
http://www.cracked.com/article_17679_7-awesome-acts-nature-that-science-cant-explain.html
http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/science/strange-but-true/item/top_ten_science_cant_explain
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/5-natural-events-that-science-cant-explain/a-sense-of-myst

Science and the NFL

Mere hours after the Super Bowl, I already miss football.

In addition to the stress-relieving role that watching NFL games plays in my life, there are a surprising number of lessons and truths that come out of the games that I can apply to our research at the Windbridge Institute. Here are a few...

(1)
It usually takes well over three hours to do what on paper should take one. During planning, always overestimate the time it will take to, say, transcribe a reading or write a paper.

(2)
You can have a bad play but you can't have a bad day. I heard a commentator say that once and it really struck home. This same sentiment is conveyed in the football movie The Replacements (one of my guilty favorites) when Falco, the QB, talks about quicksand. The bottom line is accepting that setbacks will happen but knowing that letting them get to you, multiply, and bring you down is not an option.

(3) No matter how mad you are, unsportsmanlike conduct is never okay. I am dealt a lot of situations that feel like holding, tripping, clipping, and facemask yanks with no officials around to call the penalties and no automatic first downs to be found anywhere. During those times, a well-placed cleat to the throat seems appropriate, but keeping my cool and remembering I can't make advances in our understanding of consciousness ejected and from the locker room.

(4) Receivers shouldn't turn and run until they have secured the catch. Don't start a new line of inquiry or try a new methodology until the current one is complete and written up. This is often difficult to do in a field with limited resources and a perceived need to always be doing the next cool, new thing. Our mantra at the Windbridge Institute is "You can do it fast or you can do it right." This is why I haven't written a book yet. I have several studies currently in progress and only when the results of those in will we have a full picture of mediumship. The ball is at my fingertips but I still need to secure it before I can run it into the endzone.

(5) This one may be the most important one: People (let's face it: mostly if not exclusively men)---who don't really have any idea how the game works and all of the decisions that are carefully made prior to and during each game---will continually post comments online about how a game (or a season) should have been coached. This type of cowardly behavior used to get to me (so much so that my husband Mark kindly decreed that I was no longer allowed to read online comments). Then I realized that NFL coaches get slammed repeatedly (and usually ignorantly) and they don't let it upset them or affect the decisions that they make. They just do their jobs the best way they can and often succeed in spite of crabby, snotty public opinion. Remember mere weeks ago when hordes of people wanted World Champion Giants head coach Tom Coughlin's head on a platter? Good thing hordes don't run the show, eh? After opening participant recruitment for a specific study recently, we got a lot of flak from certain vocal keyboards making grand claims about how we were doing our research wrong WHEN THEY DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE STUDY'S HYPOTHESIS OR RESEARCH QUESTIONS WERE.

To those online detractors of the way I perform my research, I say (while trying to remember lesson #3) you are more than welcome to: get a PhD in a scientific field that trains you in methodological design; turn your back on a lucrative career in a mainstream science and attempt to pay your mortgage each month; start an independent research organization with no seed money; develop a screening and testing system that selects a team of the best mediums in the world; design and perform studies for several years that eliminate normal explanations for the results WHILE keeping in mind all that you have learned about how mediumship actually works; and repeatedly publish your results in a peer-reviewed journal. Go ahead. I'd welcome more qualified people doing this and similar research. But only then will what you have to say have any impact whatsoever on how I coach my team. Until then, you are but the buzzing of flies to Vigo.

And go Broncos (uh, next year).

PS - If you'd like to know what I was doing to keep me so busy that I haven't posted anything here in months and months (plus info on what I have planned in 2012), please see the Windbridge Institute New Year Note.

Wanted: Research Participants

Are you interested in
receiving a psychic reading
as a volunteer in a 

scientific research study?

The Windbridge Institute is currently seeking volunteers to act as psychic research reading recipients (PRRRs or "P triple Rs") who will receive and score psychic readings about themselves.

PRRRs must:

• be 18 years or older,
• reside in the US, and
• have NOT experienced the death of any family members, romantic interests, or close friends during their lives. Individuals who have not lost anyone close to them are being specifically recruited in order to attempt to prevent deceased "drop-ins" during psychic readings for living participants. 

Psychics are not being recruited for this study.

For more information about other required qualifications and potential responsibilities, time commitments, compensation, and costs and to complete a secure, on-line pre-screening questionnaire, please visit: http://www.windbridge.org/prrr.html

Please feel free to share this recruitment information with other interested parties.

Thank you.
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Book Review: The Truth About Grief

I recently finished a fascinating new book on the topic of grief, the focus of one of the main research programs at the Windbridge Institute.

The Truth About Grief: The Myth of its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss by Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a quick read that really opened my eyes to numerous aspects of this topic including: the bereavement and grief counseling "industries," grief memoirs, the grief culture, grief commercialism, how members of other cultures grieve, and grief related to the events of September 11th. The author states, "With this book I hope to offer you a means of escape from our habitual ways of thinking about grief" (p. 197).



Some interesting facts about grief covered in the book:

--Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) originated in 1969 with the publication of her book On Death and Dying and proposed that terminal patients facing their own deaths experience each stage in order.

--The stages were quickly adopted by the popular media, academia, and society in general and used to describe the experiences of people grieving the loss of a loved one (and later, the loss of just about anything). The pervasiveness of the five stages became readily apparent to me as I read this book when I independently ran across a 2D shooter video game called "Solace" that contains five levels of play, each based on one of the "Five Stages of Grief, as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross." The developers report that the theme arose "after one of our team members lost a brother during the game's development."

--Research has demonstrated that the stage model of grief does not reflect the reality of most people's experiences. Konigsberg states, "[I]t's more a grab bag of symptoms that come and go and, eventually, simply lift" (p.11).

--Most conventions regarding which types and manners of grieving are normal, healthy, or allowed are just social constructs and not based on research or even the majority of cases.

--A number of alternative stages (sometimes erroneously listed as Kübler-Ross') have been proposed by other authors and they, too, arose from anecdotes and personal experiences, not research.

--In reality, the grieving can go through many different emotions within any given day.

--The stage theories seem to have stuck around because: they attempt to make sense of something unthinkable, they "bring order to grief's contradictions" (p. 73), they provide reassurance that others have gotten through similar situations, and they allow "us to feel as if we are getting back some control" (p. 79).

--Extreme cases of grieving or those resulting from sudden, unexpected, or violent deaths are portrayed more often than milder, more common experiences in books, articles, movies, etc.  As a result, many people mistakenly believe those experiences represent the norm.

--Acute grief requiring counseling (i.e., prolonged, complicated, or traumatic grief) only affects 10-15% of the bereaved population. Research demonstrates that "…most people are resilient enough to get through loss and reach an acceptable level of adjustment on their own" (p. 198).

--A recent paper titled "The Effectiveness of Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Bereaved Persons: A Comprehensive Quantitative Review" (Currier, Neimeyer, & Berman, 2008) describes a meta-analysis of 61 outcome studies which demonstrates that all grieving participants improved regardless of whether or not they received grief treatments or interventions. A similar review published in 2004 made comparable conclusions.

--There are too many variables involved to categorize any one type of loss (e.g., child) as more difficult than another (e.g., spouse).

--Medicare hospice legislation passed by Congress in 1982 mandates grief support for a minimum of one year after the death of a loved one.

--According to researcher George Bonanno, the phenomenon of resilience---reaching an acceptable adjustment to a death within a relatively short time period---"is not rare but relatively common, does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions" (p. 156). Bonanno also determined that laughing, smiling, and repressing negative emotions are more helpful than anger and tears in adjusting to loss.

I highly recommend this book to those far and wide because even if it does not help you better understand your own grief experiences, it may at least help you in comforting the grieving people you may encounter in your life.
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PS - Please join us at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), June 9 - 11, 2011, in Boulder, Colorado, USA.  Windbridge Institute co-founder (and my husband) Mark Boccuzzi will be presenting: "Three methods for examining experimenter effects in investigations of psychokinesis" and I will be presenting "Anomalous information reception by research mediums under quintuple-blind conditions: Can the mind exist without the body?"  It's a new meeting format this year with a fantastic line-up.  The SSE meetings are really great (and really cheap considering all the experts that will be speaking).
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