Science and the Paranormal

It is a particular pleasure to review this book because last year I helped to organise its publication launch at the Society for Psychical Research conference in Manchester. Arthur Ellison, who died in September 2000, played a pivotal role in both the Society for Psychical Research and the Scientific and Medical Network and thereby helped to forge a link between these organisations. Both the SPR and SMN may be regarded as bridging the gulf between science and spirituality and Arthur was very much part of that bridge. On the one hand, he was a distinguished scientist, eventually becoming Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the City University in London. On the other hand, he was widely read in theosophy, spiritualism and mysticism and an experienced meditator. He therefore brought a very broad perspective to psychical research and this breadth is much in evidence in "Science and the Paranormal". Arthur's underlying philosophy will be familiar to all who heard his talks in later years and is summarised in the opening chapter. One never has direct knowledge of the outside world because all information comes through the senses. Therefore the picture of reality provided by science is no more than a mental model and, as science progresses, so that model changes. Most scientists are conditioned by their training to reject anything "paranormal" because it does not conform to the consensual reality provided by the current scientific paradigm. However, that paradigm is always evolving and what is paranormal today may be normal tomorrow. Furthermore quantum theory and other developments in physics suggest that mind is a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the world, with consciousness being more than a mere excretion of the brain. Thus idealism (the view that mind is primary and matter secondary) makes more sense that realism. Although Arthur's view of science and the roots of its antagonism towards the paranormal is compelling, not everybody may agree with his neo-Berkeleyan perspective. One might argue that the distinction between inner/outer, subjective/objective, matter/mind is illusory, in which case the dispute between realists and idealists is ultimately irrelevant. But whatever one's philosophical stance, the book is a most valuable work and a lasting testimony to the author's remarkable contribution to the field. It covers a wide range of topics - near-death and out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, hypnagogic imagery, hypnosis, psychic healing, parapsychology, multiple personality disorder, mediumship - and so provides a very useful introduction for newcomers to the field. However, its main attraction for seasoned investigators is that it provides a highly personalised account of the subject, chronicling more than 50 years of the author's investigations into the paranormal. It therefore contains an intimacy and level of personal insight which a more pedagogical treatment would lack.

Several features characterised Arthur's approach to the paranormal. First, he appreciated the importance of experiencing psi for himself. Many psychical researchers tend to distance themselves from the object of their investigations, regarding the psychic as a guinea-pig in a cage and preferring not jump into the cage themselves! However, Arthur realised that the only way to understand psi properly is to experiment on oneself and the book is in part an account of his attempt to do this. Thus the chapters on each of the aforementioned topics don't merely describe them from a theoretical perspective, they also chronicle his own (usually successful) attempts to experience them at first hand. Of course, Arthur's professional background made him fully aware of the importance of experimental studies of the paranormal. Therefore a chapter is devoted to parapsychology, which is the attempt to study telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and precognition in the laboratory. In particular, he highlights the important work of Joseph Rhine, S.G.Soal, Chuck Honorton and Robert Jahn, all of whom he knew personally. However, he realised that laboratory work must be coupled with a study of the sort of spontaneous psi which occurs in everyday life and this is why he placed so much emphasis on psychic experience. His second characteristic was that he was always questioning and never prepared to take somebody else's word for something without checking it. He would either repeat an experiment for himself or travel thousand of miles to meet the people who had done it originally. Also he was not prepared to accept experiences - even his own - at face value. For example, in order to test whether the space in which one moves during an OBE is the same as physical space, he devised a clever experiment (only partially successful) to test whether OBEers could "read" numbers displayed in another room. And in order to confirm that this was not due to telepathy, he designed a machine to generate the numbers randomly and display them on a hidden screen, so that nobody else could see them. His meticulousness in authenticating data is illustrated by his fascinating chapter on multiple personality disorder. When he learnt of the intriguing claim that people with this disorder change their physical characteristics - including eye function, blood content and allergic responses - as different personalities take over, he didn't just accept this uncritically. He contacted the doctor involved and confirmed the records for himself. Although Arthur believed passionately in the reality of the paranormal, he was only too aware of the fallibility of human testimony and how normal phenomena can sometimes be misconstrued. He therefore devised many clever experiments to test psychic claims. Indeed his chapter on pseudo-science is one of the most instructive (and amusing) of the book. My favourite story was of how he once levitated a bowl of flowers on a table in a packed lecture hall and recorded the various reactions. A sceptical physics professor saw nothing at all, whereas a spiritualist saw a grey substance lifting the bowl and also the table itself. In fact, the levitation had been achieved entirely naturally through electromagnets and the audience had been urged to chant "om" - not (as suggested) to concentrate psychic energy - but to hide the noise of the dynamo! The chapter on paranormal healing contains many more examples of this kind of experimental ingenuity. When an old lady being treated by a spiritual healer for arthritis in her knee reported feeling warmth around that area, Arthur constructed instrumentation to monitor the temperature. He recorded no change at all and also found that she reported warmth when he placed an impressive-looking (but entirely non-operational) system of electrical wires around her knee. When some psychics claimed that they could see human auras, he tested this by asking them to report when a human behind a screen was close to the edge (so that the aura but not the body projected beyond it). Although the psychics were confident they knew, the results were only at chance level. Arthur's expertise in electrical engineering was also useful in casting doubt on Kirlian photography, radionics and the claim that people can effect the electrical resistance of leaves by directing harmful thoughts towards them. Arthur didn't conclude from this that paranormal phenomena are spurious, only that a crucial role is played - both in their interpretation and generation - by suggestion and belief. This point is also stressed in his chapter on hypnosis, which represents a state of heightened suggestibility. Indeed one of the quirks of laboratory studies is that even the beliefs of the experimenter seem to affect their outcome. This is the famous "sheep-goat" effect, whereby believers get positive results and disbelievers get negative results. The same phenomenon arises in the spontaneous field: Ken Batcheldor discovered that the best way to trigger physical phenomena in seances is to start off by producing them fraudulently because this tricks the sitters into having the right state of mind to generate the real phenomena. Indeed Arthur even suggests that, if precautions are so tight that the evidence for psi would be incontrovertible, then this may block it altogether! This may be unsettling but it is a natural consequence of the view that world is ultimately a thought-form. It therefore seems psychical researchers needs a delicate balance between their critical faculty and openness to new experience. Too much cogitation kills psi but too little leads to credulousness. Arthur spent many years visiting mediums and three chapters are devoted to this. One chapter focusses on seances, another on various well-known medums of the 19th century and a third on Eileen Garrett (one of the most influential and most investigated mediums of the 20th century). Although he witnessed many striking phenomena in these investigations, he was always aware of the ambiguities involved in their interpretation. Are the spirit communicators really to be identified with the dead or are they merely secondary personalities of the medium? It is clear that at least some of them are fictitious and the "Philip" experiment - in which a group in Toronto deliberately constructed an imaginary spirit - shows that even fictitious ones can produce real phenomena. Mrs Garrett herself doubted the individual existence of the personalities coming through her. The quality of the information coming through mediums is also variable - sometimes being no more than gobbledegook. On one occasion, Arthur met the spirit of Oliver Lodge, who as a fellow electrical engineer might have been expected to impart something useful, but instead just delivered platitudes. On the other hand, Arthur seems to have been highly impressed by the physical phenomena of the seance room - in particular, by those associated with D.D. Home and Eusapia Pallidino - and he witnessed many remarkable physical effects himself. His account of the materialisation of a rose in full light is one of the most dramatic examples and his reports of the strong odour of ectoplasm (resembling BO!) suggests that this could not simply be attributed to imagination. Particularly intriguing is his account of the Scole case, one of the most famous investigations of the last decade, the report of which he coauthored. Although the report prompted some controversy within the SPR, I accompanied Arthur on two visits to Scole and can attest to the authenticity of some the physical phenomena recorded. Several chapters discuss the evidence for life after death. Although Arthur clearly believed in survival, he appreciated that there is considerable uncertainty as to what form it might take. The spiritualist visions of "summerland" are clearly subject to cultural conditioning and the evidence suggests that the next world is very much a mental construct - what you expect is what you get! He was also ambivalent about the evidence for reincarnation - sceptical of hypnotic regression into past lives, because this yields just the sort of fantasy which the subconscious seems so adept at producing, but most impressed by work of Ian Stevenson on the past-life memories of children. However, the form of reincarnation also seems to depend on belief system - accounts suggest that it occurs immediately for the Druze because that is what they expect. Particular attention is paid to the difficulty of obtaining evidence for survival from mediumistic communications. There is no doubt that veridical information (i.e. accurate information not previously known to the medium) is sometimes obtained in seances. But does this derive from the dead or from the medium's use of ESP to extract information from the memory store of the sitters or, when even the sitters cannot provide the information, from some form of super-ESP? Arthur finally comes down on the side of the survival. He was clearly influenced in this conclusion by the important contribution of Frederic Myers, who was one of the founders of the SPR and whose classic work "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death" was published almost exactly a hundred years ago. Myers was also one of the alleged communicators behind the cross-correspondences, which attempted to eliminate the super-ESP hypothesis by having the messages come through many different mediums, so that they only made sense when put together like a jig-saw. Myers' own communications suggest that this process is not without difficulty. They describe his frustrations at trying to "dictate feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary" (the medium Mrs Holland) and at one point the spirit of Edmund Gurney (another founder of the SPR) implores psychic researchers to give Myers a break: "He gets no rest day or night ...there's not a place in England where they don't ask for him...For God's sake don't call him". The world-to-come clearly has many of the problems of this world and one can only hope that its incumbents are never accessible by E-mail! The book ends by bringing all the phenomena discussed together and showing how they fit into the author's idealistic perspective. There is also a nice exposition of Arthur's model of consciousness, which was clearly influenced by his theosophical bent and also Roberto Assagioli's "psychosynthesis" model. The book also contains a useful set of notes, a recommended reading list, and a charming preface by David Fontana, which provides some interesting biographical details and a useful summary of the history of psychical research.

Arthur will be remembered, not only for his own intellectual contributions to psychical research, but also for the way in which he inspired so many other people to get involved in the subject. He cared passionately about the topics described here and it is gratifying that some of that passion will live on through the legacy of this book. Over and above this, of course, he is missed as a dear friend to both SMN and SPR, whose wise counsel, patient understanding and kindness were appreciated by all who came in contact with him.