Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The same type of process may take place even when people are not under hypnosis. When asked to relax and “imagine” themselves in some past life, they begin to make up a story set in the appropriate time and place. Some fantasy-prone individuals may have difficulty separating reality from fantasy, and the self-generated past-life story may take on so much reality that they believe it to be a real past-life memory.

Proponents of reincarnation sometimes claim that individuals can speak languages they have not learned in their present lives. This is said to occur especially under age-regression hypnosis. Thomason (1984), a linguist, has investigated three such cases. As far as I know, these are the only three such cases to have been investigated by a qualified linguist. In the first of the three cases, a hypnotist claimed that one of his patients was speaking Bulgarian while hypnotized. The hypnotist himself did not know any Bulgarian and apparently made the judgment based on the general “sound” of the patient’s utterances. In fact, the “language” was not only not Bulgarian, but wasn’t any language at all. It was merely run-together sets of syllables that had a Slavic sound. The second case was similar. A patient claimed to be speaking Gaelic and to be a fourteenth-century Frenchman. Analysis of his speech showed that it combined modern French and Latin in a hodge-podge. Further undermining this patient’s claim to regression to a past life are the facts that Gaelic was never spoken in France and the patient made many historically incorrect statements about fourteenth-century France while under hypnosis. The third case was of a woman who claimed to have been an Apache in a previous life. Her speech was almost all Hollywood-style pidgin English, for example: “He ride ponies for white man. I no care. He [white man] spoil my Dwaytskem [her husband]. I no like. He scout for white man. I go to happy hunting ground” (p. 347).

Thomason (1984, 1986–87) also comments on an earlier analysis by Ian Stevenson (1974) of a woman known as “TE” who was supposed to be able to speak Swedish, learned in a past life. Thomason (1984) comments that “Stevenson is… unsophisticated about language, and TE’s ‘Swedish’ is as unconvincing as” the Bulgarian, Gaelic, and Apache in the other cases she examined (p. 347).

Descriptions of other impressive-sounding evidence for reincarnation that disappeared upon close examination can be found in Harris (1986) and Wilson (1996). Edwards (1986) comments on Wilson’s (1982) book, saying that in it “all the most famous reincarnation cases are minutely examined and on the basis of meticulous research all of them are found wanting” (p. 34). For more philosophical criticisms of reincarnation theory, the reader is referred to Edwards (1996).

A discussion of the evidence for life after death would not be complete without some mention of the belief that the voices of the dead can be heard on tape recorders. This turns out to be a surprisingly common belief, although it is unclear how seriously it is taken by many of those who talk about it. In any event, the usual claim is that if one takes a tape recorder out to a graveyard, one can record the voices of the dead. How? Put the machine in the “record” mode with a blank tape and turn the volume all the way up. Then, when you play the tape back, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the voices of the dead. They’re not very clear, to be sure, but if you listen long and carefully, you can begin to make them out. It should be obvious what is happening here. The tape recorder, while it is recording, is picking up stray sounds from the environment and, especially, the sound of the breeze or wind passing over the microphone. When played back, these noises do sound strange and, at least to me, rather peaceful. If one expects to hear voices, constructive perception will produce voices. The voices, not surprisingly, are usually described as speaking in hoarse whispers. The Indians used to believe that the dead spoke as the wind swirled through the trees. The tape recorder has simply brought this illusion into a technological age.

According to the New Age movement, humankind is just on the threshold of a so-called new age of psychic enlightenment in which all psychic powers will be verified as real; all humans will possess such powers; people will all love one another; war, disease, and hunger will be forever banished from the earth; and, in short, the earth will be transformed into a near-paradise. A particularly bizarre element of the New Age vision is the claim that just such a world is seen when people are hypnotically sent into the future (“progressed” as opposed to “regressed”). Another claim is that people who have near-death experiences report being told of such a world by “others” during the experience. Unfortunately, as Edwards (1986) notes, those who have “progressed” have been sent far into the future, between 2100 and about 2600—too far ahead, of course, to enable one who is “progressed” to bring back specific information with which to test the claim that she really stepped into the future.

Parapsychology is the study of extrasensory perception (ESP), precognition or clairvoyance (the ability to see into the future), and psychokinesis (the ability to move or influence objects with psychic powers). Collectively, these are often referred to as psi or psi phenomena . The experimental literature in parapsychology is vast. Hyman (1985a) estimated that it consists of approximately three thousand experiments. These experiments have been largely carried out by competent, honest, rational investigators who are convinced that the data support the existence of psi phenomena. Nonetheless, the experimental work conducted to date has left the great majority of scientists unconvinced, to say the least, that ESP or any other such phenomenon has been demonstrated.

It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to review the entire corpus of experimental work in parapsychology, so the chapter will focus on the categories of experiments that are considered by proponents to show the best evidence for the reality of psi phenomena. Proponents might object to this approach on the grounds that it fails to consider certain specific experiments that proponents believe clearly establish the reality of ESP and related phenomena. Several points made earlier answer this type of objection. It will be recalled that in the cases of N rays, polywater, and cold fusion it was not necessary for skeptics to explain away every experimental result that seemed to support the existence of these phenomena. What convinced everyone (with the exception of Blondlot himself in regard to N rays) that these phenomena were spurious was their failure to replicate, combined with a powerful common factor that would explain, in general, the seemingly supportive results. In the case of N rays, this factor was the use of highly subjective measures of N-ray effects. In the polywater case, it was the inadequate examination of the “polywater” for impurities.

Further, the demand that every experiment in parapsychology must be considered and explained away in detail before one can reject the existence of psi phenomena is identical to the position of UFO proponents that skeptics must be able to attribute every UFO report to some known object before the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFOs can be rejected. As will be seen in chapters 7 and 8, there will always be some “irreducible minimum” number of unexplained UFO sightings. This in no way proves the claim that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft; it simply means that investigators will never have all the information needed to find the known objects that caused each sighting.

Applying this logic to the parapsychological literature, the present chapter will focus on the failure of parapsychological studies to replicate, and the multiple and general procedural errors that have led to results seemingly supportive of psi phenomena. The reasons why many parpasychologists remain convinced of the reality of such phenomena, in spite of extremely poor evidence, will also be discussed.