conversations with dead people

Did you know it's possible to subject your blog to a handy ratings system? We  were thrilled when we found out, and promptly submitted our humble blog for "review." Alas, it came back with a rating of... NC-17! Say what? Sure, we offer alcoholic drink recipes, but Jen-Luc Piquant swears she assiduously checks the IDs of any thirsty freeloading avatars that swing by to sample those libations. And we keep the cursing to a minimum. So why the NC-17 rating?

Well, in recent posts, there were six mentions of "corpse," five mentions of "death," three mentions of "hurt," two mentions of "hell" and one mention of "penis" (a dessicated, detached penis belonging to an ancient Egyptian mummy, but apparently that doesn't matter to the blogospheric ratings board). I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions regarding what this says about my psyche. It's all the more embarrassing because Cosmic Variance -- where Future Spouse hangs his blogging hat -- came in with a G rating. Disney meets David Lynch in our Los Angeles abode. Even more galling: PZ Myers at Pharyngula merited a PG rating (2 mentions of "abortion" and 1 mention of "screwing"). C'mon! The guy routinely posts graphic cephalod porn! That's gotta be worth an X rating, or at the very least, an R! At least the marvelous folks at the Shakesville blog  -- from whence I found the rating system -- also garnered an NC-17 rating.

The ratings board was accurate about one thing: we can't deny that we do have a rather morbid fascination with corpses, death, and various other gross-out factors. (I'm currently reading a novelization of the infamous Crippen murder -- you know, the guy who killed his wife, chopped her up, and buried the pieces in the basement. The head was never found.) And we're suckers for a gripping ghost story. Which is why I pounced on a May 14 story in Infoworld about "the ghost who sabotaged the mainframe." When I say "pounced," I mean, clipped and saved in my fodder file until I found an excuse to mention it. But better late than never.

It tells the sad tale of Ernie who, back in 1971, was head of data processing for unnamed nonprofit in New York City. Ernie had recently retired, having spent years setting up the department and writing all the programs for the mainframe. A week after retiring, he was killed in a car crash. And soon after that, all kinds of mysterious strange things started happening around the office. Nobody took much notice, until the door the computer room began opening and closing on its own. Even weirder, instead of the usual cold blast of air that met the workers when they opened the door, there was a warm gentle breeze. And then, the new director of data processing tried to replace the old mainframe computer. The Ghost of Ernie was having none of it, and the new system was beset with problems -- until the new director took a stand and got forceful, demanding that Ernie leave things alone. Apparently it worked, and once the new system was up and running, the old mainframe was sold as scrap. From then on the Ghost of Ernie was sensed no more.

There were some mocking comments around the Internets when this story first appeared, and even its author, Jill Terry, admits she used to be such a skeptic, before she found herself actually arguing with a perceived ghost, and realized that "lunacy is relative." And she's not alone: a 2005 Gallup poll found that more than a third of Americans believe that houses can be haunted, with 32% specifically professing to believe in ghosts. I'm firmly in the skeptic camp myself, but I'm disinclined to add to the ridicule, for reasons which shall soon become clear. Terry's story has some classic tropes of the genre: the warm gentle breeze, the prickling of the skin, the strange occurrences, and odd sounds. All that's missing is a visual: Ernie, apparently, was a shy sort of specter.

The notion of ghosts has been around for millennia, even making an appearance in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh. We're still fascinated by the subject today. Witness the popularity of TV shows like Medium, Jennifer Love Hewitt's Ghost Whisperer, or cable TV's documentary-style Ghost Hunters. It's all part of man's strong desire for some sort of "life" after physical death, because it's so difficult for us to imagine the prospect of simply "not being."

For all the public fascination, no respectable scientist ever took this stuff seriously -- at least not in public -- until the late 19th century, when a renowned  Harvard professor of psychiatry, William James, joined with a small group of other illustrious scientists to found the American Society for Psychical Research -- the US counterpart to the British Society for Psychical Research. Together, they sought solid, scientific proof of supposedly "inexplicable" phenomena: ESP, mediums (slate writing, table rapping, etc.), and ghostly visitations, specifically, "crisis apparitions": in which a loved one appears to a person at night, and said person finds out soon after that the loved one has died.

James and his cohorts form the basis for Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum's latest book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. It's a meticulously researched, engagingly written, and fascinating read, championing the courage of James and Co. in defying the scientific establishment by undertaking such a pursuit, without turning a blind eye to their failures and tortured humanity. The history is filled with colorful personalities and both amusing and moving anecdotes, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in this unusual period of scientific history. In case you're worried that Blum's book is some New Age-y defense of crass spiritualism: yes, the vast majority of the cases the SPR studied turned out to be fraudulent -- sometimes ingeniously so -- and this was understandably very disheartening to the researchers. But a tiny fraction -- 5% -- defied all attempts at scientific explanation, and gave them the will to go on. (Blum takes no strong stance on that remaining 5%, other than to say it warrants further research until (a) a scientific explanation is found, or (b) definitive proof that they are genuine evidence of an afterlife can be offered.)

I was surprised to learn that Michael Faraday was one of the outspoken skeptics, publishing a letter to The Times of London in 1853 explaining the "secret" behind table tilting, based on his own carefully designed experiment. "The experiment showed that table tilters were often unaware of their own actions," Blum writes. "As Faraday explained, the board was responding to unconscious muscular twitches, 'mere mechanical pressure exerted inadvertently by the turner.'" On the other side of the fence was Faraday's fellow physicist William Crookes, who was an SPR member, off and on, although Blum reports that the objectivity of his research suffered on account of his susceptibility to the more attractive female mediums he studied. Still, the man was hardly a scientific crackpot, even if he wasn't in a par with Faraday's gigantic stature.

The various SPR members - both US and British -- passed on to the Other Side without ever definitively proving any real psychic powers, the existence of ghosts, or the existence of an afterlife. Blum herself largely remains a skeptic, although she admits to being fascinated by the crisis apparition phenomenon. She also mourns the loss of an era when some of the Western world's best scientific minds were brought to bear on the problem. Because that 5% of unexplained events remains just that: unexplained.

That doesn't mean there aren't a few theories. There are still a handful of skeptics seeking more than the usual debunking and unmasking of fraud. They seek a valid scientific explanation for such apparitions, other than the obvious: people can hallucinate or mistake reflections, shadows and strange noises for ghostly activity. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire is one of them. He's collected anecdotes and measured a wide range of physical conditions at purported "haunted" sites -- light, humidity, sound, and magnetic fields -- and has reported some interesting findings.

For instance, some haunted locations have magnetic fields that are stronger than normal. It's possible that the stronger fields affect the brain in some way. It's already known that electrical stimulation of the angular gyrus will make you feel as if someone is behind you, mimicking your movements (although if you'd grown up with my older brother, that wouldn't have been a hallucination). A similar kind of stimulation might contribute to near-death experiences. Then there's temperature: people routinely report cold spots or sudden drops of temperature in specific areas, which they believe indicate a ghostly presence. More often than not, it's a draft coming from somewhere in the house, or the result of lower humidity. One of the sites Wiseman studied, Mary King's Close, showed lower humidity in those areas purported to be haunted.

The Close is a series of allegedly haunted streets and houses in Edinburgh. Wiseman's study of the area was carried out in 2005, part of an Einstein Year program sponsored by the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts. About 70% of the 200 members of the public who participated reported experiencing unusual phenomena, mostly mild (suddenly feeling cold, eg), although some felt they were being watched or touched, felt their clothes being tugged, or heard unexplained footsteps. The results indicate that these experiences are "real" in the sense that people actually feel those sensations. That doesn't mean they're attributable to ghosts. Wiseman was very clear on this point: "Although some people may view the results as evidence for ghosts, our findings suggest that participants' expectations, combined with subtle differences in the appearance and physical characteristics of the locations, may affect how anxious people feel when they enter the spaces, and this may create unusual sensations."

The biggest culprit when it comes to ghostly sounds and sightings might be infrasound, low-frequency sound waves below the range of human hearing, that can nevertheless have tangible effects: feelings of nervousness, for example, or hyperventilation, or even a sense of another presence in the room. There's even speculation that these sound waves vibrate at the resonant frequency of the human eyeball, causing visual hallucinations.

Vic Tandy was a strong proponent of the infrasonic theory, and even pegged the specific guilty frequency -- 18.9 Hz -- before his untimely death in 2005. Officially, he was affiliated with the school of international studies and law at Coventry University, but he was also the unofficial "chief ghost buster." (Perhaps Bill Murray will play him in the film version of his quest.) He wrote two papers for the journal of the Society of Psychical Research: one citing infrasound as the cause of a "haunting" in a laboratory in Warwick, and another citing infrasound as the source of a "ghost" in the cellar at Coventry Cathedral. Lots of otherwise sane people felt uneasy descending into the cellar, sensing some kind of presence, and occasionally -- as in the case of a visiting journalist -- seeing the face of a woman peering over their shoulder.

As for the Warwick laboratory, Tandy himself worked there, and could personally attest that the effects of infrasound feel very real indeed. He was working late one night, and suddenly felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. At the same time, he caught a glimpse of a gray apparition out of the corner of his eye, that disappeared when returned to face it. The culprit? A newly installed extractor fan. "When we finally switched it off, it was as if a huge weight was lifted," he told the Guardian in July 2000, and he suspected there may also be a connection between infrasound and "sick-building syndrome." I have a strong suspicion that Ernie the Ghost's spooky effects were at least partly due to something like infrasonic vibrations from that old mainframe -- because when Terry and her colleagues got rid of it, the "ghostly presence" disappeared. Regardless, Tandy died before he could complete his investigation into why some people are affected by infrasound and others, apparently, aren't.

On the whole, unless one is seeking to debunk ghoulies and ghosties and psychic powers, engaging in this type of thing won't exactly win the respect of one's scientific peers. Just ask Robert G. Jahn. For 30 years, Jahn ran the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR), which conducted highly controversial research on telekinesis and the ability of study participants to influence machines using just the power of thought (unaided any of those newfangled wireless implants that enable monkeys to move computer cursors with their thoughts). The experiments were essentially mechanized coin flips: people tried to influence the outcome of each "toss".

Ultimately, Jahn published more than 60 papers, mostly with the Society for Scientific Exploration, which devotes itself to research topics outside the mainstream, of the scientific community. His "evidence" wasn't exactly compelling: after accounting for statistical fluctuations, he concluded that only 2 or 3 out of 10,000 "flips" could be attributed to influence from the participants' thoughts. After three decades of research, I, for one, would require something a bit more tangible as evidence. Still, science is ideally about rigorous honest inquiry, and there shouldn't be taboos on what's allowed to be investigated -- if someone wants to look into kooky phenomena like ghosts and ESP, and they're adopting a scientific approach, why should they be subjected to ridicule and isolation? It's not like our tax dollars were paying for PEAR's research (it would never have passed peer review, anyway); Jahn relied on private donations.

That quest is now over for Jahn: PEAR closed its doors earlier this year, putting an end to a strange era in Princeton's history. The ever-irascible Bob Park -- author of Voodoo Science -- called PEAR "an embarrassment to science," but I'm more inclined to share the view of Princeton physics professor Will Happer (and I suspect Blum would, too): "I don't believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it."

Comments

[Kea]

Hah, fun! I am proud of my G rating.

[Blake Stacey, OM]

I'd be a heck of a lot more supportive of people's right to do weird things if they followed sensible methods, instead of effectively flipping coins, throwing out the results they didn't like, and proudly announcing the remainder as evidence of psychic activity! Oh, and why not "appropriate and pursue some established mathematical formalism", so that "the analytical results may retain some metaphoric relevance for the emergence of anomalous mind/matter manifestations."

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/07/pear_yet_again_the_theory_behi.php

http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/06/rebutting-pear-index.html

By the way, my weblog was rated G (one use of the word "dead"). Which just goes to show how unreliable that rating system is. . . .

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=129

[coturnix]

* sex (18x)
* death (13x)
* suicide (6x)
* hell (3x)
* dangerous (2x)
* penis (1x)

So, where is the XXX rating?

[Allen]

I am surprised that you did not mention the VERITAS Research Program at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona (http://veritas.arizona.edu) which is doing fascinating research into mediums in controlled laboratory settings.

On a related note, near-death experiences are another side of this topic offering compelling research. Check the website of the International Association for Near-Death Studies at http://www.iands.org. In particular, you might want to check under the Research tab for published papers outlining new findings from the most current research, particularly the two written by Dr. Peter Fenwick and Dr. Pim Van Lommel.

Near-death experiences have been the focus of many scientific studies at universities and medical centers throughout the U.S. and around the world for about 30 years. Many medical professionals who have seriously studied the research – and it is now extensive – no longer dismiss this phenomenon as hallucinations or caused by physiological, pharmacological or environmental factors.

The best analysis of the many physiological theories regarding NDEs is on a DVD that has a presentation by Dr. Bruce Greyson (from the University of Virginia Medical School) titled “T3-Explanatory Models of NDEs.” It can be obtained from the website above by clicking the link on the home page for DVDs from a 2006 conference at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Allen

[Erica Friedman]

If CPP rates NC-17, it doesn't take a scientist to realize that Okazu would garner an "X" rating. Last night's review mentioned "lesbian sex" at *least* twice. (Not to mention "crushing heads" and "gruesome violence".)

I think I'll pass. I like to pretend that my blog could pass for literature on the sheer brilliance of my writing, if you just ignore the fact that I review, erm, crap. LOL

Keep up the gory work!

Cheers,

Erica

Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com

[Ron Chusid]

The words we cannot use sure have become more restrictive on the internet. Imagine if George Carlin's famous skit was on based upon these ratings. It just wouldn't have become a classic if he tried to write about The Seven Words You Can Never Say On The Internet: Dick, Abortion, Hurt, Sex, Shoot, Death, and Corpse.

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=1734

[Quasar9]

Hi Jen Luc,
I thought you were adamant that according to the laws of physics as known 'ghosts' do not EXIST
That's right not even Casper the friendly ghost, though clearly he does exist in caroons & DVD.

But yeah talking about ghosts implies DEATH, even violent death - and or suicide ... et al forms of other parting from the body. Incidentally how is it that ghosts would seem to keep their body (flesh) and even get to wear clothes ... go figure - lol!

I guess ghost in a nudist camp would have to be NAKED, though not necessarily X-Rated.

But all that aside, when we die where do we go?
And are ghosts just those left behind, ie missed the intergallactic (or is it inter-universe) bus.

Guess if one can be in New York one day, in California the next, and wherever the next day
That would have sounded sort of 'spooky' even a hundred years ago. But really it seems to me in life, we are wherever our physical bodies are, though our mind can often be somewhere else.

But Astral Projection? well yeah, give me some!

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Quasar, read more carefully. :) I said I'm a skeptic who doesnt believe in ghosts. I just support a scientist's right to explore this type of phenomena in search of a rational explanation -- provided it's not taking public funds away from other more mainstream research, both fundamental and applied... Hope that clears things up.

[Quasar9]

lol Jennifer, Ghost Busters would probably claim they just haven't got a machine powerful enough to capture 'ghost plasma'
Physicists would claim they haven't built a machine powerful enough to detect ghost particles and/or gravitons (and microcstate blackholes?) - or have they (now) - avidly waiting for those results, though I shan't hold my breath.
Wishing you a mighty fine Sunday!

[Barbara With]

I have written a book called "Imagining Einstein: Essays on M-Theory, World Peace and the Science of Compassion" wherein my "imagined" Einstein gives a pretty plausible theory on the nature of afterlife, giving some conceivable concept of afterlife as a condition of our quantum selves. Check it out and let me know. Or better yet, I will send you a copy of the book, read it and let me know. Thanks, Barbara

[Michael Jones]

Can't much of the paranormal be influenced by a self-fulfilling prophesy? I was regaled of a tale of a couple who were in a "haunted karaoke" over the weekend and they simultaneously felt a chill. They knew the rumours of that particular karaoke being haunted, so perhaps that swayed them into believing their "chill" was nothing other than a blasting air conditioner or an off-key note by a neighbouring warbler. When one goes on a Walking Tour of London, you don't expect anything but if you go on a Ghost Tour, aren't you disappointed if you don't encounter the ethereal?
I got a PG based on using the term "crap" 4 times, referring to stuff in my apartment and "pooped", referring to over-tiredness. Their rating makes my blog sound like a foecophilia site!

[JoAnne]

So, can someone tell me how a transister radio can turn on when nobody is in the room? I can understand how the window suddenly shut, or the door opened or closed on its own, and there were drafts (obviously the house was not well built), but the transister radio has always begged for an explanation. That and the fact that the cat clawed through the box springs underneath my mattress and slept there.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Joanne---

Is there a universal remote in the house? Or next door? That's something that a pal of mine in NYC has trouble with all the time. She's always coming home to find the radio on, because one of her neighbors has a universal remote with a strong enough signal to affect my friend's electronics -- despite the wall separating the units....

[Quasar9]

lol Joanne, you got a cat sleeping under your bed?
As long as you are not hearing voices on the radio, that is voices not being sent by a transmitter, or the dial on the radio starts tuning into unearthly channels, you are safe - it's like Jennifer says, just your neighbour with a universal remote messing with your head - a pain when they do it with your garage doors, or mess about with swapping channels when you are trying to watch tv.

Me, I thought I'd give it all a rest for a while and go somewhere remote to plant some late (very late) tomatoes, and prune some rose bushes.

Never met any ghosts, but transmigation of souls? I'm up for it. And Friday nights I've seen many people seem positively possesed when they've been drinking 'spirits'

[JoAnne]

Hi Jennifer,

Well, this was back in 1968, way, way before the days of universal remotes or remotes of any kind, in fact. It was a portable transister radio that had a knob which had to be physically turned in order to turn on the radio. I am sure there is a rational explanation, but I've never been able to figure it out and it's always bugged me...

[Quasar9]

Interesting JoAnne
So you think you were being bugged as far back as 1968?

[Al Graham]

Hi Jennifer,

I would be very interested to get your and especially Future Husband's comments on the following (I wandered here from coturnix's posting above):

http://www.iands.org/research/important_studies/dr._pim_van_lommel_m.d._continuity_of_consciousness_7.html

The paper is a fascinating read; I am asking for a scientific comment on the statements about Quantum Mechanics and the Brain.

Cheers
Al

[Ghost Videos]

@Quasar. If you study enough, you'll start to find that a lot of things in Quantum Physics validate(or seem to) the existence paranormal activity. Time trave, dimensional travel, the interconnectedness of Past-Present-Future, etc..

-GhostMan