Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

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.

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 (Stevenson 1975) he described Indian children with alleged past-life memories. Barker (1979b), a colleague of Stevenson, has investigated similar Indian cases. In one he considered the “most authentic, evidential and thoroughly investigated” (p. 269), he concluded that the child had acquired through normal means the information that others could take as evidence or reincarnation.

Stevenson’s work has been widely criticized, even in parapsychological circles (see Edwards 1996, for a fuller discussion). The major problem with Stevenson’s work is that the methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation are inadequate to rule out simple, imaginative storytelling on the part of the children claiming to be reincarnations of dead individuals. In the seemingly most impressive cases Stevenson (1975, 1977) has reported, the children claiming to be reincarnated knew friends and relatives of the dead individual. The children’s knowledge of facts about these individuals is, then, somewhat less than conclusive evidence for reincarnation.

Many proponents of reincarnation use hypnosis to elicit past-life memories. This technique produces totally unreliable reports, because hypnotized individuals will readily agree to leading questions, make up stories, fantasize, and thus report nonexistent past lives in detail. They may often truly believe that their “memories” are evidence for past lives, but, as has been seen, the strength of a belief is a very poor guide to its truth. Even claims that hypnosis can regress an individual back to his own childhood are unfounded (Nash 1987).