The Medium Tackles the Afterlife

1
The Medium Tackles the Afterlife

• According to Gary Schwartz, PhD, its possible
  that there are multiple discarnates (dead
  spirits) when a medium opens up the channels,
  also referred to as cross talk in official
  lingo
• It is up to the sitter to pick out what his meant
  for him and her, and to disregard the rest

2

• Sitters may also interpret the statements in a
  more loose manner, rather than being completely
  literal.
• Take for example what Allison Dubois said about
  author and researcher of Spook-Science Tackles
  the Afterlife, Mary Roachs mother
• This is what was true of Dubois reading
• Was an even mix of hits and misses
• The hits were things that would fit a sizable
  percentage of the population (e.g., a cat in the
  sunny window, family gatherings were important)

3

• The most striking thing about the reading was the
  difference between Roachs reactions and
  Schwartzs reactions
• For example
• Dubois at one point said she was getting the
  letter K as being connected to Roachs mother.
  Dubois said I dont know if she meant K as an
  initial, like Katherine or Kaye, but she is
  referencing K as connected to her. Roach had
  no idea what that meant. Her middle name was
  Catherine, but it appeared that the letter K
  was what was the discarnate was trying to get
  across. Later in the reading, Dubois came back to
  the letter K so finally Roach admitted that her
  middle name was Catherine, Schwartz then said
  about Roach, You are such a jerk! You expect it
  to be precise!

4

• At one point, Dubois reported that Roachs mother
  was making reference to the man that still has
  the ring on his finger for her. This meant
  nothing to Roach because her father had never
  worn a wedding ring, or any ring for that matter.
  

5
Telecommunicating with the Dead

• Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe that
  tape recorders can capture the voices of people
  whose vocal cords long ago decomposed
• These utterances are referred to as EVP or
  electronic voice phenomena
• One cannot hear voices while recording, rather
  they show up mysteriously when the tape is
  replayed

6

• If one does a web search for EVP, he or she will
  find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files
  of recordings.
• Though some sound like clearly articulated words
  or whispers, most sound garbled and echoey and
  mechanical sounding
• EVP movement began in 1959, when Swedish opera
  singer turned painter, Friedrich Jurgenson, set
  up a microphone on a windowsill in a country home
  outside of Stockholm

7

• Jurgensons intent was to tape record bird songs.
  However, according to Jurgenson, the bird songs
  were suddenly drowned out by a male voice who
  said something along the lines of bird songs at
  night. This man was then known as Volare.
• At first thought, Jurgenson thought he had picked
  up part of a radio broadcast, since tape
  recorders can act as receivers for snippets of
  radio, CB or walkie-talkie transmissions,
  especially if the transmitter is close by

8

• He concluded that this was unlikely, because soon
  the voices were talking to him by name and were
  also speaking to his dog, a poodle named Carino.
• Jurgenson then wrote a book which caught the eye
  of Latvian-speaking psychologist, Konstantin
  Raudive, who ran with the idea of EVP
• When Raudive had collected 72,000 voice-texts
  he published a book called Breakthrough An
  Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication
  with the Dead,
• With its publication, the popularity of EVP
  spread with the creation of EVP societies, many
  of which still exist today

9

• Raudive did not tape record air, rather he
  developed his own technique which consisted of
  taping radio static, the hissing between
  stations.
• Like Jurgenson, Raudive thought the voices were
  speaking directly to him because they called him
  by name
• David Ellis proposed to study EVP
• One of the first things he did was to get Raudive
  and his EVP kit into a room that was said to
  block radio transmissions

10

• Ellis did this, because on many occasions
  Raudives recorded voices were actually parts
  of radio broadcasts. What Raudive interpreted as
  I follow you tonight turned out to be a Radio
  Luxembourg announcer saying Its all for you
  tonight!
• Raudive agreed to enter the screened room only
  once. No voices were recorded on this occasion,
  however it is possible that no discarnate
  entities had passed through the vicinity

11

• Psychologists would nominate the verbal
  transformation effect (VTE) as being one possible
  explanation
• VTE is when listeners are exposed to a repeated
  sequence of brief vowel sounds and will
  experiences phonemic transformations and report
  hearing words and phrases that were absent in the
  original stimulus

12

• B.F. Skinner once played nonsense sequences of
  vowels to subjects and asked them to tell him
  when they heard something with meaning. Not only
  did they hear words with consonants, they were
  quite convinced that they were correct
• The mind is very good at turning nothing at all
  into intelligible sounds.
• C. Maxwell Cede, secretary of Londons Society
  for Psychical Research described an experiment
  for David Ellis

13

• This experiment involved having a group of people
  were handed a paper and pencil and asked to help
  transcribe what they were told was a faint,
  poor-quality recording of a lecture. The subjects
  offered dozens of phrases and even whole
  sentences regardless of the fact that the
  recording was of only white noise

14

• Are there other explanations for these voices?
• Telefunken, a German electronics giant,
  investigated EVP in the 1980s. Jurgen Graff,
  recently retired from the corporation, but was an
  engineer and a managing director. He describes
  something known as the ducting effect
• The ducting effect happens when strange goings-on
  in electronic layers of the ionosphere create
  small ducts that allow fragments of radio
  broadcasts or walkie-talkie communications to
  travel thousands of miles.

15

• For example, a taxi driver communication in New
  York could suddenly be heard for a couple of
  minutes in Europe
• From a classical engineering point of view, this
  should not be possible as the power of a taxi
  transmission is extremely small.
• Yet it happens. After a few minutes the ducts
  collapse and the phenomenon disappears. You can
  guess what is expressed about EVP from this!

16

• Graff shows that many of the seemingly paranormal
  goings-on could be explained by electronic
  broadcasting
• Sometimes a gap between two pieces of metal, or a
  piece of metal and the ground, can set up a
  sparking that serves to demodulate a radio signal
  if a transmission is especially powerful or the
  tower is close by.
• Graff recalls a hysterical East German woman
  whose roasting oven, she said would speak to her
  whenever she opened the door.

17

• Another man in the same neighborhood was being
  talked to nightly by his heating system
• Engineers dispatched to look into the reports
  identified the words as segments of the nightly
  Broadcasting in the American Sector broadcast and
  reassured the shaken citizens

18

• Graff also shed the truth on another urban myth,
  that dental fillings could really pick up radio
  transmissions.
• He explains that if two metals are used side by
  side, say an old amalgam, covered by a gold cap,
  or braces and a filling, a small gap between them
  can foster whats called a semi conductivity
  effect. A jumble of low tones could indeed be
  heard, though probably only as far as your inner
  ear.

19

• Graff told a tale of a farmer who owned the
  fields around the mighty Elmshorn transmitting
  station where Graff used to work, just north of
  Hamburg. Hed be walking the fields, checking
  the fences, when all of a sudden he came running
  to the station manager, deadly pale, saying Sir,
  I heard the Holy Ghost speaking to me! It came
  from a piece of wire sticking out of the ground!

20

• Graff and the manager followed the farmer out of
  to the wire, which was whispering and hissing
  when they arrived, and every now and again
  issuing an intelligible phrase. The manager
  leaned down and pulled the wire from the earth,
  silencing the Holy Ghost and leaving the farmer
  to more pedestrian concerns, like the effects of
  two-hundred-thousand-watt radio towers on farm
  animals

21

• You can see and hear your own Holy Ghost if you
  visit the grounds of an exceptionally robust
  transmitter, such as the ones operated by the
  Voice of America. Wander up to the metal fencing
  around the facility after dark, Graff says, and
  you might be able to see pale glimmering sparks
  here and there along the metal. Lean in close and
  you may hear the sparks singing- or talking,
  depending on whats being broadcast.

22
Can electromagnetic fields make you hallucinate?

• Located in Sudbury, Ontario, is the Consciousness
  Research Lab at Laurentian University
• Michael Persinger is a neuroscience professor who
  runs the lab and has a theory about ghosts
• This theory holds that certain patterns of
  electromagnetic field activity, both the earths
  natural kind and the man-made kind created by
  wiring and appliances and power lines can render
  the brain more prone to hallucinations (in
  particular the ones that involve an invisible,
  sensed presence)

23

• In his study published in 1988, Persinger
  compared seven years of dated Fate magazine
  haunting reports with geomagnetic activity for
  those dates.
• He found a nice correlation and wrote his
  findings in Neurosciences Letters
• Three years later at the University of Iowa,
  psychologists Walter and Steffani Randall
  examined monthly fluctuations in solar winds
  (which influence the earths geomagnetics) to see
  if they mirrored monthly ups and downs in
  humanoid hallucinations culled from old Society
  for Psychical Research records

24

• They found that both reports showed peaks in
  April and September with troughs in between
• Persinger then turned his attention to man-made
  electromagnetic fields (EMFs)
• In 1996, a Sudbury couple had contacted him about
  strange goings-on in their house. They heard
  breathing and whispering sounds and at one point
  felt someone touching their feet as they lay in
  bed

25

• The man saw an apparition of a woman who appeared
  to move through the couples bed.
• Persinger and two colleagues drove out to the
  house and set up equipment to monitor EMFs in the
  various rooms.
• True to his theory, the house was an
  electromagnetic free-for-all. Wires were poorly
  grounded and circuits overloaded with electronic
  equipment. Not only were the EMFs most intense in
  the places where the couple had experienced their
  ghosts but they showed the telltale
  irregularities that Persinger has come to see as
  the hallmarks of haunt-prompting fields

26

• Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field
  make one hear things or sense a presence?
• The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to
  electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels.
  Melatonin is an anticonvulsive if you have less
  of it in your system, your brain- in particular
  your right temporal lobe- will be more prone to
  tiny epileptic-esque micro seizures and subtle
  hallucinations these seizures can cause

27

• Persinger adds that the emotions of bereavement
  produce stress hormones that may serve to raise
  the likelihood of these micro seizures even
  further
• The results of Persingers lab work suggest that
  you can indeed evoke that haunted feeling in a
  lab using EMFs. Of the approximately one thousand
  people who have had Persingers signature
  electromagnetic bursts applied to their right
  temporal lobes, 80 have felt a presence

28

• In 2002, Persinger published a paper on
  lab-generated hauntings in the Journal of Nervous
  and Mental Disease. Forty-eight university
  students were exposed to complex one microTesla
  electromagnetic fields over the left temporal
  lobe or right, or both.
• A fourth group received sham pulsations.
• Those whose right brains were exposed were more
  likely to report feeling fear and sensing a
  presence than were left hemisphere or sham
  exposures. Disappointingly, no other researchers
  have replicated Persingers work.

29
A psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in
Englands haunted spots

• Vic Tandy believes that ghost experiences are the
  product of inaudible, low-frequency sound waves
  or infrasound which runs from zero to twenty
  hertz
• If the source is powerful enough, infrasound can,
  in addition to setting fencing foils aquiver,
  engender all manner of mysterious-seeming
  phenomenon

30

• Unbeknownst to audience members, infrasound
  pulses were sent out at certain points during a
  piano concert at Liverpools Metropolitan
  Cathedral in September 2002.
• It was these points that concertgoers
  reported-via a questionnaire distributed before
  the concert began- physical effects, such as
  tingling on the back of the neck, and strange
  feelings in the stomach as well as an
  intensification of their emotions

31

• Infrasound has also been reported to cause vision
  irregularities sometimes blurring, sometimes a
  vibrating visual field
• The eyeball has a resonant frequency of nineteen
  hertz
• In the presence of nineteen hertz infrasound
  wave, your eye would start to vibrate along with
  the waves
• Peripheral vision is extremely sensitive to
  movement, a helpful adaptation for dealing with
  predators that sneak up on you from the side
• If the eyeball is dithering it will register in
  the peripheral vision

32

• Infrasound would help to explain why reports of
  ghosts are often localized-why people sense a
  presence in just one part of the room. Infrasound
  tends to pool-it registers strongly in the
  spots where the peaks and troughs of sound waves
  overlap, and disappears where peak and trough
  cancel each other out
• Infrasound can activate the fight-or-flight
  response and part of that response is a
  curtailing of blood to the extremities. Hence the
  chills (and racing hear, and thus it stands to
  reason, the unease).

33

• Infrasound can, in a small percentage of the
  population, set off vibrations in the liquid
  inside the cochlea. These vibrations-which happen
  because of an uncommon anatomical weakness in the
  bone structure of the ear- could create a sudden,
  inexplicable feeling of motion
• Infrasound can be produced by
• A large church organ
• Tigers, who have large territories to defend are
  thought to use infrasound

34

• You can experience infrasound at home. Turn your
  speakers to full volume and go to
  www.acoustics.org/press/145th/Walsh2.htm , scroll
  down to the paragraph about roars and click on
  the speaker icon.
• Roach recalls often feeling ineffable queerness
  in her chest during Sunday mass, which she used
  to think was God inside her, knowing that she
  wasnt listen. Now shes beginning to think it
  was the organ music.

35
A computer stands by on an operating room
ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers

• At the University of Virginia Hospital, doctors
  are performing a defibrillator insertion
• The defibrillator will produce an electrical
  charge that will hit the heart at the crest of a
  specific EKG peak, derailing the beat and
  rendering the organ quivering (fibrillating) lump
  of tissue incapable of pumping blood

36

• With no oxygen being delivered to the brain, the
  body will be clinically dead within seconds. (As
  long as a heart begins beating again within about
  four minutes, no permanent brain damage occurs.)
• The defibrillator must jump-start the beat of the
  heart
• The patients of this operation are ideal for the
  study of near-death experiences

37

• In the hospital at the University of Virginia
  there is an open laptop computer placed near the
  ceiling
• The computer belongs to Professor Bruce Greyson,
  who works in the universitys Department of
  Psychiatric Medicine
• Greyson has been studying near-death experiences
  for 29 years.
• Privately funded by various sources

38

• In a study that began early in 2004, Greyson
  hopes to interview 80 defibrillator insertion
  patients just after they come out of anesthesia.
• If they mention a near-death experience that
  included an out-of-body experience he will ask
  them to describe everything they saw from up
  above
• Appearing on Greysons flat-open laptop during
  the operations is one of 12 images, in one of 5
  colors, randomly selected by a computer program

39

• The objects depicted are simple and familiar- a
  frog, a plane, a leaf, a doll.
• They are brightly colored and animated to help
  attract the patients eye (or whatever it is you
  use to see when youve left your visual cortex
  behind)
• Its an ingenious setup since the laptops
  screen faces the ceiling, the images cant be
  seen from below
• So far, none of the subjects interviewed has
  reported any type of near death experience

40
Greysons results

• Greysons study was wrapped up and published late
  in 2006 in the Journal of Near Death Studies.
• With approximately 50 subjects, no one reported
  any NDE experiences.
• One of the best NDE studies to date found no
  evidence for a NDE.
• Greysons position a survivalist, something
  survives after death.
• He says he is not a materialist, not a dualist
  either.

41

• Interestingly, cardiologists, not
  parapsychologists, have published the most widely
  read studies on near-death experiences.
• A notable example was the study by Dutch
  cardiologist Pim van Lommel, published in Lancet
  in 2001
• Van Lommel and his team interviewed 344 cardiac
  arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. All the
  patients had been clinically dead (defined by
  fibrillation on their EKG) and all interviews
  were done within a few days of resuscitation. 18
  reported at least one aspect of the typical near
  death experience

42

• Van Lommel found that his subjects medication
  was statistically unrelated to their likelihood
  of having near-death experiences (on the topic of
  anesthesia as an NDE inducer, Bruce Greyson makes
  the point that people under anesthesia but not
  close to death have far fewer NDEs than people
  who come close to death without being under
  anesthesia so, as he puts it, its hard to see
  how the drugs can be causing the NDE.)

43

• To avoid upsetting his subjects, Greyson was
  asked to remove the word death from the consent
  forms and study title
• The holy grail of NDE research, then, the best
  evidence that what seemed to be an extrasensory
  perception was indeed extrasensory, would be a
  deaf and blind patient someone who sees things
  during a near-death experience that are later
  verified and that couldnt have been inferred
  from something he or she saw or heard- because he
  or she cant see or hear

44

• Pam Reynolds, who in 1991, underwent brain
  surgery with her eyes taped shut, and molded,
  clicking inserts inside her ears. (Watching the
  brain stems responses to clicks is a way of
  monitoring function)
• Despite this, and despite the fact that her EEG
  was flat, meaning all brain activity had stopped
  (surgeons were repairing a massive aneurism and
  had drained the blood from her brain) she
  reported having seen the Midas Rex bone saw
  being used on her skull

45

• But why was Reynolds unable to describe any of
  the people in the room?
• Because of weapon focus phenomenon?
• Research has shown that victims of armed
  criminals are able to accurately recall the
  weapon used on them 91 of the time, and the guy
  holding the gun only 35 of the time
• Perhaps this is a problem with anecdotes

46

• Though there is no deaf-blind NDE study, there is
  a study of blind people who have had NDEs.
• Psychology professor and International
  Association for Near-Death Studies cofounder
  Kenneth Ring and then psychology Ph.D candidate
  Sharon Cooper contacted eleven organizations for
  the blind, explaining that they were looking for
  blind people who had had near-death or
  out-of-body experiences.

47

• They ended up with 31 subjects
• 24 of these subjects reported being able to see
  during their experiences
• Some saw their bodies lying below them some
  saw doctors or physical features of the room or
  building they were in others saw deceased
  relatives or religious figures
• Strangely, the subjects who reported seeing
  these things included people who had been blind
  from birth individuals who dreams almost never
  contain visual images, just sounds and tactile
  impressions

48

• If you wanted to prove that its possible for
  some version or vestige of the self to exist
  independent of the body and brain you could try
  to set up some sort of detector in a room far
  away from one of these purported free-floaters
  and instruct him or her to head on over
• In 1977, a group of parapsychologists undertook
  just such a project on the campus of Duke
  University
• The main author of this study was the late Robert
  Morris

49

• Morris and his colleagues worked with a single
  subject named Stuart Harary, who had participated
  in previous out-of-body experience projects at
  Duke
• Harary was instructed to leave his body and
  travel to one of two detection rooms, either
  fifty feet or a quarter of a mile away
• To determine whether he could actually do this,
  Morris stationed people in the detection room and
  had them try to sense Harary while he visited

50

• The results were no better than chance.
• There were about as many reports of detection
  during control periods as when Harary believed he
  was out of his body
• Surmising that animals might be more keenly
  attuned to extrasensory presences, Morris next
  did a series of trials using snakes, gerbils, and
  kittens as detectors
• Morris eventually settled on a kitten that had
  seemed to show an affinity for Harary

51

• The kitten was not caged but let loose in a
  corralled area with a grid taped out on the
  floor, in this case the behavioral measure was
  the number of squares entered per one hundred
  seconds and the animals vocalization rate
• Disappointingly, the kitten seemed to be reliably
  less active when Harary indicated he was there
  leading some of the researchers to wonder whether
  theyd gotten the protocol backward
• Perhaps Hararys presence wasnt stimulating the
  animal but calming it. Morris and his colleagues
  went through a half dozen methodological
  variations