Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

1992).

A phenomenological point is often raised to argue that OBEs really are due to something leaving the body: People reporting OBEs almost always report seeing their own body from a vantage point somewhere above it. If the OBE were nothing more than a hallucination combined with bits and pieces of memories acquired during the event, wouldn’t one expect the result to be seen from the perspective of the physical body— for example, with the doctors looking down on the patient? In fact, there is nothing at all unusual about the vantage point seen in OBEs. Remember the last time you went to the beach? Or the dinner you had last night? Try to form a visual image of some such occasion. The overwhelming majority of people see the scene from a vantage point above where they actually were. They, and presumably you, “see” themselves in the scene. This is in spite of the fact that all the information used to construct the image comes from memory. As far as I know, no one has ever used this fact about mental imagery to argue that whenever we form a mental image of something that happened to us in the past, we are actually projecting our astral body back in time. But such a claim would make as much sense as the claim that because the person is looking down on his body in the OBE, the OBE must be truly paranormal in nature.

In her book-length review of the OBE literature, parapsychologist Susan Blackmore (1992) concluded that the OBE experience, while extremely interesting from a psychological point of view, provides no evidence for any type of paranormal event. Irwin (1985) reaches the same conclusion. Both Blackmore and Irwin focus on psychological differences between those who have and have not experienced OBEs (OBE-ers and non-OBE-ers). Blackmore hypothesized that OBE-ers would be better than non-OBE-ers at forming visual images and that OBE-ers would be poorer at distinguishing reality from fantasy than non-OBE-ers. Recent research on the psychological differences between OBE-ers and non-OBE-ers has strongly confirmed Blackmore’s hypotheses. OBE-ers are more likely to remember dreams from a bird’s-eye perspective and are better at forming visual images from that perspective than are non-OBE-ERS (Blackmore, 1986a). It is this bird’s-eye perspective that is so common in OBEs and is one of the aspects of the experience that OBE-ers find so compelling. People who have experienced OBEs are also more susceptible to hypnosis than are non-OBE-ers (see Irwin 1985, for a brief review). OBE-ers also show greater suggestibility and become more deeply absorbed more easily than non-OBE-ers (Irwin 1985). Individuals who can be hypnotized are more likely to experience imagined or suggested events as real, even when not hypnotized (Irwin 1985). Thus, the individual who has become convinced that some nonphysical aspect of her personality has left her physical body differs from the individual who has not had such an experience in that she is less able to distinguish reality from fantasy.

In a fascinating article Blanke et al. (2002) report the case of a forty-three-year-old epileptic woman who, for diagnostic reasons, had a grid of electrodes placed on the surface of her brain. With these electrodes it was possible not only to record the electrical activity of the brain but, more importantly, to stimulate different parts of the cortex (outer surface) of the brain. Stimulation of one area of the right hemisphere, the angular gyrus, reliably caused an out-of-body experience. It was noted above that part of the out-of-body experience is a feeling of floating outside and above one’s body. This is likely due to a disturbance of the vestibular sensory system, the system that tells us where in space our body is located at a particular time. As would be expected, angular gyrus stimulation in the case reported by Blanke et al. resulted in “Whole body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somato sensory and vestibular information” (p. 269). The major components of spontaneous out-of-body experiences can thus be generated by artificial stimulation of the brain. This strongly suggests that the spontaneous cases are due to temporary, minor brain malfunctions, not by the person’s spirit (or whatever) actually leaving the body.

REINCARNATION

Arguments that reincarnation is a real phenomenon are based on reports of people who, either spontaneously or under hypnosis, remember past lives and details of those lives that they would have, supposedly, no other way of knowing. Cases allegedly proving reincarnation are numerous, and it has proved impossible to conduct detailed investigations of all of them. However, when the most dramatic cases are investigated carefully, evidence for the reality of reincarnation evaporates. The investigation of alleged cases of reincarnation reveals the normal sources of the information that the individuals supposedly could have obtained only in a previous life. But proponents of reincarnation often conduct very poor investigations and hence miss the true explanations.

The most famous alleged case of reincarnation is that of Bridey Murphy. In 1952 a woman named Virginia Tighe was hypnotized. She reported details of a previous life in Cork, Ireland, as “Bridey Murphy.” While hypnotized, she spoke in a distinct Irish accent that she did not have normally and described her life in Cork in great detail. Her case was reported as proof of reincarnation in Bernstein’s (1956) best-selling book, The Search for Bridey Murphy.

The case was thoroughly investigated several years later. It was discovered that, as a child, Mrs. Tighe had had a neighbor across the street who had grown up in Ireland and used to tell her stories about life there. The woman’s maiden name? You guessed it—Bridey Murphy. Further, it was revealed that Mrs. Tighe had been involved in theater in high school and had “learned several Irish monologues, which she had delivered in what her former teacher referred to as a heavy Irish brogue” (Alcock 1978–79, p. 38; see also Gardner 1957, for more on the debunking of the Bridey Murphy case).

Iverson (1977) reported the case of Jane Evans, among others, in a book claiming to prove the existence of reincarnation. Evans was a housewife living in Wales who, under hypnosis, gave details of six past lives. The great amount of historically accurate detail in Evans’s accounts led Iverson to argue that her case was excellent proof of reincarnation. For example, in one of her past lives she was a maid of Jacques Coeur, an extremely wealthy and powerful merchant in fifteenth-century France. Evans “was able to fully describe the exteriors and interiors of Coeur’s magnificent house—she even gave details of the carvings over the fire-place in his main banquet hall” (Harris 1986, p. 21). Impressive stuff, to be sure, until it is realized that Coeur’s house is “one of the most photographed houses in all of France” (p. 22), interior and exterior.

Evans’s account of her life in Coeur’s house contains one most puzzling, and significant, error. She says he was not married and had no children. But he was married and had five children—not the sort of thing the maid would be likely to overlook. This omission on Evans’s part is most illuminating. The Moneyman, a novel based on Coeur’s life by Thomas B. Costain contains great detail about Coeur’s life, but makes no mention of his wife or children. Harris (1986, p. 22), who has investigated Iverson’s (1977) cases, states that “there is overwhelmingly strong evidence” that this book provided the basis for Evans’s “memories” of her life in fifteenth-century France.

Evans’s tales of her other lives contained similar errors and historical inconsistencies. She also reported a life as a Jew in the twelfth century in York, England. In that life she remembered being forced to wear a badge of yellow circles denoting that she was Jewish. However, badges for Jews were not used in England until the thirteenth century and then were not made of yellow circles, but white stripes (Harris, 1986).

In yet another life, Evans was a woman living in the time of the Roman occupation of England. Her knowledge of that period was quite detailed. It was this detail that allowed Harris (1986) to trace the origin of her information. It came from a best-selling novel set in that time period titled The Living Wood (de Wohl 1947). Harris notes that “every single piece of information given by Jane Evans can be traced to de Wohl’s fictional account. She uses his fictional sequences in exactly the same order and even speaks of his fictional characters, such as Curio and Valerius, as if they were real people” (p. 23).

Are cases like those of Bridey Murphy and Jane Evans hoaxes? Not in the usual sense that a conscious attempt was made to deceive. Tighe and Evans (and the hundreds of others who report past-life memories) presumably really believe that these memories come from a past life. In just the same way, people who see a strange light at night often come to believe passionately that they have seen a flying saucer, complete with all the details one would expect on such a craft. Such belief can be extremely convincing to others, even though the belief is wrong.

Ian Stevenson, a parapsychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, is a leading proponent of reincarnation. In his writings on the subject (Stevenson 1975, 1977), he presents case studies of people who have what he considers memories of past lives that they could not have obtained in any normal way. In one report