One of the lab’s major scientific projects was to have people sit in front of a computer that generated random numbers that produced either a one or a zero. A truly random sample would have 50% ones and 50% zeroes. Subjects were asked to use their minds to try to influence the machine to choose ones or zeroes.

Skepdic sums up the results

In 1987, Dean Radin and Nelson did a meta-analysis of all RNG experiments done between 1959 and 1987 and found that they produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (Radin 1997: 140). This sounds impressive, but as Radin says “in terms of a 50% hit rate, the overall experimental effect, calculated per study, was about 51 percent, where 50 percent would be expected by chance”. A couple of sentences later, Radin gives a more precise rendering of “about 51 percent” by noting that the overall effect was “just under 51 percent.”

In a similar experiment,

a person sat in front of an electric box that flashed numbers just above or below 100 and would be told to ‘think high’ or ‘think low’ as they watched the display. Researchers concluded that people could alter the results about two or three times out of 10,000.

Yeah, that small, but still interesting, nonetheless.

The lab will transfer to a nearby nonprofit, the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, which PEAR founded in the early 1990s.

1. Your brain searches through its memory logs to see if it can find the previous version of the scene or event
2. If it finds something, it identifies the scene or object as familiar

It is thought that when deja vu happens, this second process is triggered by mistake.

The researchers showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them and told them that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it. Green frames would make them think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.

The subjects were then taken out of hypnosis and presented with a series of words in frames of various colors. Some of the words were not in the original 24 list but still framed in either red or green.

Out of 18 people studied so far, 10 reported a peculiar sensation when they saw new words in red frames and five said it definitely felt like deja vu.

“This tells us that it is possible to experimentally dissociate these two processes, which is really important in establishing that they are indeed separate, says O’Connor

Source: New Scientist (7/22/06) “Why this might look familiar”

In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach gave a humorous summary of what happens to our bodies when we die. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife looks beyond the physical for proof that a part of us survives death.
Roach approaches the material as a skeptic who wants to believe but needs the proof. As she says in the opening pages

Simply put, this is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith.

In Spook, Roach isn’t afraid to tackle even the most bizarre phenomenon. She admits to knowing next to nothing about her subjects when she first starts, so anything is fair game – from traveling to India to see claims of reincarnation first hand to taking a seminar to learn to become a psychic, from talking with scientists studying near-death experiences to digging up props that were once spewed as ectoplasm by spiritualists.

No detail seems too small for Roach. When looking for the soul, for instance, she goes in search of the legendary luz of Jewish Midrash – a single indestructible bone in the spine from which a person is reconstructed after death; talks of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s observations of sperm under the microscope, which led to the erroneous notion of preformationism – the idea that tiny embryo live in the heads of sperm; and discusses Duncan Macdougall’s attempts to weigh the body at the time of death and who famously declared that the soul weighs 21 grams.

Roach writes with a clever, witty style reminiscent to Stiff. She takes a hands on approach, immersing herself in the material, talking with prominent scientists who are studying this phenomenon, and even venturing out into the fringes of paranormal studies to see what other explanations are available.

Unfortunately, that’s also the book’s downfall. Roach seems more concerned with writing witty, entertaining prose than separating the legitimate scientific studies from the pseudoscience. She’d prefer to throw it all out there and let the reader piece together the sound evidence rather than stick with the premise she started – to see what proof science has found for an afterlife.

Surprisingly, Roach also missed what I think is one of the strongest long-term studies out there supporting reincarnation. Ian Stevenson started collecting a database of over 2500 children who claim to remember past lives at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Jim Tucker has been continuing his research. Some of the stories these kids tell are incredible – from children who pick up the mannerisms and even scars and injuries from their previous personalities to those that remember specific experiences and personal details that would be virtually impossible for a child to know. Check out Tucker’s fascinating Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives for more information.

Spook is an incredibly entertaining read and difficult to put down but if you’re looking for concrete proof that there’s an afterlife, you won’t find it here. What you’ll get are lots of interesting trivia, entertaining stories, and bits and pieces of possible evidence.

Why would a photographer want to see this show?

From a photographic perspective, there are many images that prompt the photographer to think, “How did they DO that?” For example, the lightning between the woman’s fingertips.

But there are other images that cause one to one wonder who they were trying to kid. See for instance, the cutout fairies pasted onto the photo or the “levitating” chair featured in this article.

Was darkroom trickery invented the day after Daguerre made the first successful metal plate photo in 1839? Remembering that Photoshop was not extant, this begs the question: if it was okay to do this in the darkroom and have it perhaps considered art, why is digital photographic manipulation looked down upon by photographic purists? What were the purists saying about Man Ray at the height of his career? But I digress.

Why would others want to see this show?
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult was essentially a history how advocates of spiritualism in the late 1800s, early 1900s tried to use photography to provide proof of the otherworldly: spirits of the dead, dreams, auras, and thoughts. An interesting use of the technology, as the Met reminds us that a unique characteristic of photography has always been its ability to record the visible, material world with truth and accuracy.

What was the exhibit like?

The show consists of loads of double-exposure parlor tricks of 1850s ghost photographs and scores of photos from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibit focused primarily on the period from the 1860s to World War II, when occult and paranormal phenomena were most actively debated and both supporters and skeptics used photographs as evidence. The photos are exhibited on their own terms, without judgment or comment on their authenticity. Along with the groups of lame photos of hands “floating” from between two curtains, there were several scientific sections. One showed electromagnetic emanations (Kirlian photography) captured on film, and another, radiographs (x-rays). Think of the skeptics Willhelm Roentgen must have had when he told the world about his discovery of x-rays in 1895!

During the unveiling of the science of photography, no one quite knew its capabilities. Could it document spiritual presence during a seance? Roentgen knew only that x-rays (he called them this because of their unknown origin) could be used to photograph the inside (bones) of a human. Was it really that far-fetched to believe that some other form of photography could document our thoughts? I’d like to leave this discussion by telling you what I heard a young woman tell her four-year-old daughter at the show: “…this was from before we knew any better.” Everyone starts out as an opening act. If the ridiculed phrenologists didn’t come up with their theories in the early 1800s, our later understanding of the functions of various lobes of the brain might not have happened the way it did. (For a fascinating account of this, see Stanley Coren’s book, The Left-Hander Syndrome.)

Three Shockers
The naked spiritualist Eva C. -Juliette Alexandre-Bisson’s photographs of Eve C., the naked spiritualist introduces us to a great gimmick, if nothing else. Nothing up HER sleeve…! She’s featured on the cover of the book with the luminous apparition between her hands.

Ectoplasm – Sort of a milky or fabric-looking substance that allegedly exudes from the body of the medium and can be transformed into materialized limbs, faces and even the entire spirit bodies.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – There was a photograph showing Conan Doyle’s (author of the Sherlock Holmes stories) son Denis with his dead father’s likeness appearing above him. Conan Doyle was a true believer in spiritualism. The photo above, “Fairy Offering a Bouquet of Bluebells to Elsie,” was “authenticated” by Conan Doyle!

Parlor Tricks (My Favorite Photo!)

It was easy enough to create such an image on film with a box camera having a 10-second shutter speed-the “mortal” holds the pose and the “spirit” walks into the scene, pauses long enough to faintly materialize on film, then backs out. But think of how creative and difficult this must’ve been! Think of the outtake plates! As Georgia O’Keeffe (1977) said: “The cliffs over there, you look at it and it’s almost painted for you, you think until you try.”

Is the show worth seeing?
The 120 stunning and surprising works in this exhibition reflect an attempt to reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds. Much of the show as well as the book, deliver sometimes beautiful photographs of us – people – and what we sometimes believe. You really never experience anything without learning something new!

Photo References

Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing (Germany, May 17, 1912)
The medium Eva C., cover of book The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.
Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright (British, 1908-1986 and 1901-1988)
Fairy Offering a Bouquet of Bluebells to Elsie, 1920
Edouard Isidore Buguet (French, b. 1840)
Fluidic Effect, 1875
Eugene Thiebault (French, b. 1825)
Henri Robin and a Specter, 1863

After attending the exhibition, “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 2005, I realized I could never satisfy my curiosity for this work in a packed gallery. This was an entire subculture I knew nothing about! Luckily, the book was available.

The authors have extensive experience with occult photographs and consider it an important piece of the field’s history. (They are curators, also, of the exhibition.) While maintaining a strong non-judgmental position about the subject matter (spiritualism) in general, one of the authors, Sophie Schmit, is quoted as saying: “If I hadn’t considered at least the possibility of it existing,” she said, “I don’t think I would have ever been interested in doing the exhibit.” (Ref: strangeattractor.co.uk)

How is the book structured?
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult is a huge coffee table book, containing over 200 color and black and white photographic reproductions. It is laid out in the three sections:

• Photographs of Spirits
• Photographs of Fluids
• Photographs of Mediums

Every time they click their Kodak pics, they steal a little bit of soul

This line from the John Prine song “Picture Show” alludes to the Native American belief that that the white man’s camera stole a piece of the subject’s soul. If we’re tempted to laugh at this now, let us realize that in the late 1800s, many people were just coming to grips with technology. X-Rays were just discovered. They could be used to see through your shoes to see if they were a proper fit for your feet! Was it really that farfetched to think that maybe technology could be used to contact the spirits of the dead? Many Americans at the time were hanging onto the memory of loved ones lost in our Civil War. Could they see them one last time? And the people providing this “service,” were they scoundrels or sincere practitioners? Who was in charge of deciding the limits of physical science? Was it an example of entrepreneurialism at its best…or at its worst?

The book is an interesting window into a period of American and European history (1870s – 1930s) in which many people thought that cameras had more than just the ability to capture the visible world. But indeed, it is entertaining. From a photographer’s perspective, it is simply amazing. From a historian’s perspective-who knew that Mary Todd Lincoln was a believer in spiritualism, held seances in the White House, and attempted to contact her late husband?

Content
This is not just a picture book. The authors of “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” present an unbiased history of how advocates of spiritualism in the late 1800s to early 1900s tried to use photography to provide proof of the otherworldly: spirits of the dead, dreams, auras, and thoughts. It also holds fascinating accounts of the efforts of debunkers of the movement. Many luminaries were involved: P.T. Barnum, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the pioneering photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue. Were these people loons? Were they duped? Feel free to decide for yourself. Any way you look at it, sensationalism sells newspapers. Consider Weegee, the pioneering tabloid photographer, and the entire genre he spawned! Was he good? Bad? Right or wrong?

The book appears to be comprehensive, without ever being tedious. All subjects covered were new to me, so they held my interest. Sure, you could easily believe charlatans would make attempts to dupe little old ladies out of a buck by offering to contact their loved ones in the great beyond-and there are many photographs of such parlor tricks. But I’d no idea people used to believe “fluids” called “ectoplasm” could be emitted from various orifices of a medium, with the medium’s thoughts projected onto the fibrous ectoplasm! See photo below, which was made by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the distinguished psychologist in 1911:

In summary, the book is most engaging. It informs us of a past many of us would choose to disbelieve. In fact, when I was at the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw a woman in her late twenties kneeling next to her four-year-old daughter, saying: “…this was all from before we knew any better.” The authors’ goal is to present the past to us, without passing judgment. They are quite successful in doing this.

Does it leave you wanting more?
The chapter on “Thoughtography” left me with the urge to try this, or witness someone doing it. The idea is simple: Aim a Polaroid camera up against your head, project a thought into the camera, and snap the shutter. Your thought appears on film! Makes me wonder why you even need to snap the shutter…like when the scam “psychic” phones and asks for your credit card number-shouldn’t she already know it?

Do I recommend the book? Absolutely! It is of interest to people of varied purpose-photographers, spiritualists, debunkers of spiritualists, scientists, historians, sociologists, and the downright curious. All those with telekinetic powers…raise my hand!

Photo References
Mary Todd Lincoln with ghost of her dead husband
Taken by William H. Mumler, 1870-75
The medium Eva C. with the materialization of a woman’s face
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/warner.php