The Afterlife Experiments

Survival research has been going on since the inception of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Much of it has relied on case histories to which a legal rather than scientific approach to evidence is more appropriate in view of the fact that the experiences are unique occurrences. So the investigator tries to establish the facts from reliable witnesses. My own 1984 book Survival necessarily relied on the results of such investigations and theoretical explanations advanced to explain them.

This new book by Gary Schwartz is a considerable step forward in a scientific sense. Gary teaches and researches at the University of Arizona where he is professor of an unusual range of disciplines – psychology, neurology, medicine, psychiatry and surgery. After some intriguing personal experiences with Laurie Campbell involving himself and his research partner Linda Russek (and, by all accounts, her deceased father), Gary decided to set up a series of experiments. In the first series, one sitter is given readings by five different mediums and the results are analysed and compared. The medium sits in front of the sitter but facing the same direction and with a screen between them. So no visual cues are possible. The most striking result of this first series is the consensus among the mediums about the death of the sitter's son – and one even identifies that he shot himself. Results showed that an average of 83% of the statements by all mediums were considered completely accurate – a startling figure. A control group making uneducated guesses about the status of various deceased people connected with the sitter could only come up with 36%.

The next phase tightens the protocol: ten sitters instead of two; the medium would not know which of the ten was the subject of the session; and during the first ten minutes of the sitting the sitter would remain completely silent. One of the sitters from the first series, Pat, had lost her husband in the interim. Would the mediums pick this up (none were told)? Not only did they pick it up, but additional material comes out about her own and Mike's premonitions of her death. Gary tested one of the sittings by having a professional magician view a video where only five questions are asked but 120 pieces of information are given, which prove 80% accurate. He could not find any evidence that the medium was using cold-reading tactics, nor could he think how he could get such a high score using his own techniques.

So on to the next protocol. The sitters write down the deceased people they hope will be contacted, and this information is placed in a sealed envelope until after the experiment. This time the medium would not only not see the sitter but would have no voice cues either. The sitters would then have to rate their own and four other readings. As expected, the overall percentage of hits was down – in fact halved to 40%; and each of the sitters and mediums rated their own readings higher than the control readings. Even these lower results, however, are above chance and guessing and contain some remarkable individual hits. It is also hard to see how the fraud hypothesis would work under such tightly controlled conditions. There is a scandalous postscript to the earlier series when a TV company goes in for deceiving the general public by giving the impression that one of the mediums was doing nothing more than cold readings and choosing not to screen the laboratory experiment where this was manifestly not the case – needless to say, the whole show was orchestrated by a professional skeptic, Michael Shermer, with his own agenda.

Two of the next chapters are devoted to a systematic response to skeptical claims, with a statement of the skeptical claim, what mediums say about it, and what the experiments actually reveal. This is very useful for careful assessment and for answering the question: could this all be explained by telepathy and clairvoyance? The final protocol is called the Campbell White Crow design after the phrase from William James that we only need one white crow to disprove the hypothesis that all crows are black. Here there is a half-hour period of 'pre-reading' before the sitter (at home) was even contacted. This was followed by a ten-minute silent period after telephone contact (the phone is on mute) with no responses from the sitter and where Laurie Campbell describes the impressions she is receiving. The most striking reading was with George Dalzell, another medium whom she had never met. She wrote correctly down the name of the sitter and the names of the deceased people whom George had 'invited'. Afterwards, George blindly scored his own reading against a control, he gave a zero rating to this script. For his own data he scored 60% accurate in the pre-reading period and 65% in the silent period. So here we have intriguing results from what is effectively a double-blind study that answers all possible skeptical claims.

The book ends with a consideration of what life would be like if we had certain knowledge of survival of consciousness, and contains extensive journal articles covering the material in a more technical form. It is undoubtedly a breakthrough in survival research, but one that needs more widespread replication. Gary is a keynote speaker at the Living Field conference in London in April and can be contacted on [email protected] by people interested in following up his work.