"Are Scientists Afraid of Ghosts?"

[sherbetbizarre]

Despite a spike in curiosity of the supernatural, science has abandoned any meaningful experiments.

By Deborah Blum, DEBORAH BLUM is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof Search for Life After Death."

September 24, 2006

A HUNDRED years ago, one of the most ambitious of research projects was launched, a study that linked scholars and mediums on three continents. Its purpose was to discover whether living humans could talk to dead ones.

Newspapers described the work as "remarkable experiments testing the reality of life after death." The scholars involved included William James, the famed American psychologist and philosopher, and Oliver Lodge, the British physicist and radio pioneer. They saw evidence for the supernatural — in this world and perhaps the next.

In one instance they made a request to an American medium while she was in a trance. The request was in Latin, a language the medium did not speak. The instructions included a proposal that she "send" a symbol to a British medium. During her next trance session, the American began asking about whether an "arrow" had been received. Later, comparing notes, the researchers discovered that during the American's first trance, the English psychic had suddenly begun scribbling arrows. It was only after a series of similar, equally unexpected results that the researchers published their findings.

Could any study produce results more provocative, more worth pursuing — more forgotten — a century later? For many, the dismissal of such Victorian research represents a triumph of modern science over superstition. But — and I admit that this is an unusual position for a mainstream science writer — I believe that it may instead represent a missed opportunity, a lost chance to better understand ourselves and our world.

Curiosity about the supernatural has not diminished over the last century. The last few years have, in fact, seen a surge in occult-themed TV, including such popular dramas as "Medium," parodies such as "Psych" and reality-themed shows featuring professional mediums or paranormal investigators. On the radio, "Coast to Coast AM with George Noory" focuses on supernatural issues and boasts 2.5 million listeners. Paranormal organizations, schools for mediums and practicing psychics flourish.

What has diminished is the interest of academic researchers on a par with James and his colleagues — and, correspondingly, the quality of the science. Yes, there are paranormal investigators using modern technology to hunt for the heat signature (in the infrared) of ghosts or the energy of a spectral communication (electronic voice phenomena). There are even a few accomplished university scientists exploring the supernatural, although often on the side and covertly. But there's nothing as sophisticated, at least in design, as the Victorians' work.

In addition to the ambitious "cross-correspondence" study cited earlier, the Victorian scholars ran an international survey of reported ghost sightings, particularly those tied to the death of a relative or friend. Tens of thousands of people in multiple countries were interviewed; hundreds of volunteers sifted through the reports, rejecting those that lacked independent witnesses or documentation. They concluded that "death visitants" occurred more than 400 times above chance.

By comparison, a telepathy study, presented this month at an annual meeting of the British Assn. for the Advancement of Science, involved 63 people asked to say in advance which of four friends or relatives was calling on the telephone. The answers were 45% correct, which, the researchers pointed out, was considerably above the 25% expected through chance.

I confess that this a rather silly and unconvincing experiment — too small and too poorly controlled to prove anything. But I've seen plenty of orthodox research studies that made claims based on even sketchier experiments. So it doesn't convince me, as it did a host of angry British scientists, that telepathy is merely "a charlatan's fancy." It convinces me that we need smarter science on all levels.

Why do so many people report visions, voices or sensations of friends or relatives at the moment of the other's death? Is it wishful thinking, hallucination, undiagnosed mental illness, a human tendency to stamp meaning onto events, a remarkable pattern of liars, genuine telepathy, a visiting ghost? All those possibilities have been raised, and none have been adequately researched.

"Either I or the scientist is a fool with our opposing views of probability," James wrote. The risk of appearing foolish, he believed, was the least of the dangers. There was also the risk of failing to investigate the world in all its dimensions, or making it appear smaller and less interesting than it really is. He worried about a time when people would become "indifferent to science because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences." He worried that a close-minded community of science could become a kind of cult itself, devoted to its own beliefs and no more.

And, as should be obvious here, I have come to agree with him.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printed...m24sep24,1,5000588.story?coll=la-news-comment

 

[Cavynaut]

I think scientists are more afraid of the lack of research grants and the ridicule from their peers than they are of ghosts.

 

[decipheringscars]

Maybe a good place to start would be in the neurosciences, since they're already looking at beliefs generally, including religious beliefs. Have they been looking at psychics as well? I guess it would be hard to do a scientifically controlled study where you scanned people's brains as they saw ghosts.

 

[colpepper1]

If we adopt the sometimes heard figure of one in ten people claiming to have seen a ghost, that makes millions of witnesses. For science to claim every one is deluded, an attention seeker, mentally ill or mistaken is as unscientific as claiming every apparition is a returning dead person. Frankly, few scientists do their homework on the subject because it would take them into interdisciplinary studies and away from the lab and funding sources. The myth of the agenda-free scientist is exactly that.

The illusive nature of spooks, their varying shelf life and poor time keeping do not lend themselves to conventional scientific study. I agree that the neurosciences will be where breakthroughs are made, if any.

 

[Scunnerlugzz]

Well I'm a scientist, and I'll give you a scientist's answer...depends what you mean by the term "ghost".

Do you mean the spirits of the dead return to walk among us?
Do you mean apparitions from another reality impinging into our own?
Do you mean recordings of events that have happened somehow being replayed in our time?
Etc, etc, etc.

Firstly define what a ghost is.
Then I'll see if I'm scared of it

 

[GNC]

Well I'm a scientist, and I'll give you a scientist's answer...depends what you mean by the term "ghost".

Do you mean the spirits of the dead return to walk among us?
Do you mean apparitions from another reality impinging into our own?
Do you mean recordings of events that have happened somehow being replayed in our time?
Etc, etc, etc.

Firstly define what a ghost is.
Then I'll see if I'm scared of it

I'd be scared by all those things. What if they all apply?

 

[_Lizard23_]

Well I'm a scientist, and I'll give you a scientist's answer...depends what you mean by the term "ghost".

Do you mean the spirits of the dead return to walk among us?
Do you mean apparitions from another reality impinging into our own?
Do you mean recordings of events that have happened somehow being replayed in our time?
Etc, etc, etc.

Firstly define what a ghost is.

I like to think of the word 'ghost' as being very similar to 'UFO' .... when you say 'UFO' a lot of people think you actually mean 'alien space ship', but really of course it just means 'thing in the sky that people see and I don't know what it is'.

So I wouldn't say 'ghost' means any of those things, it means something like 'thing like a person (or an animal) that is seen, felt or seems to interact with the environment but does not appear to be an actual person (or animal) and I don't know what it is'.

Which, as previously mentioned, a lot of people claim to have experienced and so is quite probably worthy of investigation of some description, but as I can't off the top of my head think of any way that the study of ghosts could yield and new drugs, power sources, weapons etc i.e. make any moolah or improve anyone's quality of life I can see that getting the funding to do it is a bit of a non-starter.

 

[gazzo10]

for a scientific approach to the paranormal try readhttp://www.parascience.org.uk/inves ... /laird.htm I found this a very interesting website, I have also talked to Steve parsons on the phone , he is a very interesting and intelligent bloke committed to a scientific approach to the paranormal

 

[Analogue Boy]

Even if ghosts are just like pictures without the telly, it has to be worth looking into.
As was mentioned in the FT, the problem is they can't be reliably measured, tested and reproduced so science stays away from them as that is the sort of thing they like.

Leave it to Yvie and Degsy...they know what they're doing...
Although I do see an entertainment element creeping in.
'If you are there, could you touch one of us, make a noise, move the chair? Howabout the chorus of Ra-ra-Rasputin or a little dance while you're at it?

Ghost talent shows. You KNOW that's how it'll end up.

 

[RealPaZZa]

I wonder if anyone ever created a "ghost" under laboratory conditions?

By "ghost" i mean something that can pass as one, and I dont mean a man in a sheet!

 

[suburban wolf]

"Spengler, are you serious about catching a ghost?&quot

I would have to agree with an earlier poster who mentioned the lack of research grants and peer ridicule. It would be easy to draw a parallel with the early days of the SETI program. The reaction would have been something like "do you believe in little green men, little boy?".

However, SETI has some clearly defined goals and recognisable apparatus. It's looking for radio signals in a certain wavelength using a radio telescope. If a signal is detected, it must be steady and repeatedly "locked on" to, so it is subject to peer review and scientific rigour.

Given we can't agree what a "Ghost" it is -real, imagined, trick of light, spirit of deceased being, it may be sometime before we have a totally scientific study.

BTW - No bonus points available if you recognise the quote...

 

[colpepper1]

One scientist I cross swords with, an arch rationalist, admitted that while there is a remote possiblity of a psychic phenomenon existing, good minds should apply themselves to something more practical. That attitude is common I suspect.
If a ghost won't offer itself up to lab conditions, we're in the realm of anecdote and multiple anecdotes don't equal data, as we're endlessly reminded. The alternative is the chase and boffins much prefer the phenomenon to come-to-daddy in the lab than tedious fieldwork.
It must be clear by now from the disparity between sighting numbers and laboratory evidence that an academic institutuion is not the place to validate such experiences.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

For science to claim every one is deluded, an attention seeker, mentally ill or mistaken is as unscientific as claiming every apparition is a returning dead person.

Science doesn't do this but far too many individual "scientists" do.

When occasional "scientists"' pontificate with some permutation of "Since I KNOW that the Paranormal not only does not exist but CANNOT exist, if you tell me that you've experienced it, it automatically follows that you MUST be a fool or a crazy person or a liar," it's only fair to ask them how their definition of "scientist" differs from "HIGH PRIEST" - if it does at all.

Frankly, few scientists do their homework on the subject ....

When I've gotten into informal debates with the more materialist scienstists on such matters, it soon becomes evident that I've studied not five or 10 times more but HUNDREDS of times more pertinent materials than they have. Reading one or two old articles by Harry Houdini plus watching a bunch of B 1930s mystery films featuring fake seance mediums does NOT make anybody a psychical researcher.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Maybe a good place to start would be in the neurosciences, since they're already looking at beliefs generally, including religious beliefs.

Why not quantum physics, which seems to be 80 percent of the way there already?

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Do you mean the spirits of the dead return to walk among us?

I "believe" in ghosts, but I question return as much as I do walk.

"Return" presupposes a previous "going away," which has itself not been definitely established.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I wonder if anyone ever created a "ghost" under laboratory conditions?

Yes. Ghostly visions as well as intense feelings of "presences" have been temporarily induced by magnetic fields, subsonics, vibrations and so on.

But do these experiements disprove the actual existence of ghosts, as some skeptics claim, or simply give us a greater scientific understanding of Paranormal trigger-mechanisms?

I vote for the latter.

 

[Kazza34]

Aren't we supposed to be making progress re understanding 'ghosts' through quantum mechanics and the string theory hypothesis?

 

[criticalthinker]

I don't think scientist ARE afraid of ghosts specifically or the paranormal in general - one only has to read the magazine this forum was created for to realise that there is loads of research being carried out around the world.

 

[Semyaz]

I wonder if anyone ever created a "ghost" under laboratory conditions?

I'm not sure of the details, but I think there was an instance in the 70s when a group of people were able to "produce" a 'ghost', which they named Philip. They apparently were able to do this by agreeing on a series of factors eg personality traits and physical desriptions, and all concerntrated on this "creation" and eventually it took an actual form...

...or though what that form actual was is debatable... :?

The "experiment" was instigated by psychical researcher ARG Owens, although wether it was a laboratory setting Im not sure... :?

 

[tonyghidorah]

'The illusive nature of spooks, their varying shelf life and poor time keeping'
Will Storr again! He wrote about that, bringing to my attention for the first time this thing about the 'two slit trick', in which scientists filmed atoms being fired through these two slits in metal, and finding that they reacted differently when watched to how they did when they were filmed, every time. The conclusion implied that atoms didn't like to be seen to be reacting to something in a 'mysterious way'.
I think we can create ghosts in the same way we can make dolls out of bits and pieces of other dolls, or bits of material. And i think they can be real, fully fledged ghosts. I think the energy we give them can have a degree of consciousness and act like a sort of psychic plasticene. Really really.

 

[lupinwick]

Back to quantum stuff.

His 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos. Using the Sanskrit and Vedic term for "space", Akasha, he calls this information field the "Akashic field" or "A-field". He posits that the "quantum vacuum" (see Vacuum state) is the fundamental energy and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present (collectively, the "Metaverse"). László describes how such an informational field can explain why our universe is so improbably fine-tuned as to form galaxies and conscious lifeforms; and why evolution is an informed, not random, process. He believes that the hypothesis solves several problems that emerge from quantum physics, especially nonlocality and quantum entanglement. He also sees his hypothesis as solving the perennial disputes between science and religion.

Wiki entry for Ervin Laszol

I read the Will Storr immediately after a couple of Laszlos. Quite a creepy bit of serendipity.