Dge Cience: The "Elephants" in The Lab

Edge Science
Number 10 March 2012
Current Research and Insights
The Elephants in the Lab:

The Experiment Effect by Rupert Sheldrake Consciousness Matters by Dean Radin The Lunar Effect by Arnold L. Lieber
A publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration
EdgeScience #10
March 2012
EdgeScience is a quarterly magazine. Print copies are available from edgescience.magcloud.com. For further information, see edgescience.org Email: edgescience@gmail.com Why EdgeScience? Because, contrary to public perception, scientific knowledge is still full of unknowns. What remains to be discovered what we dont know very likely dwarfs what we do know. And what we think we know may not be entirely correct or fully understood. Anomalies, which researchers tend to sweep under the rug, should be actively pursued as clues to potential breakthroughs and new directions in science. PuBLiShER: The Society for Scientific Exploration EDiToR: Patrick huyghe ASSociATE EDiToRS: Dick Blasband, P.D. Moncreif conTRiBuToRS: Michael Grosso, Jack hunter, Arnold L. Lieber, P. David Moncrief, Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin DESiGn: Smythtype Design The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is a professional organization of scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. The primary goal of the Society is to provide a professional forum for presentations, criticism, and debate concerning topics which are for various reasons ignored or studied inadequately within mainstream science. A secondary goal is to promote improved understanding of those factors that unnecessarily limit the scope of scientific inquiry, such as sociological constraints, restrictive world views, hidden theoretical assumptions, and the temptation to convert prevailing theory into prevailing dogma. Topics under investigation cover a wide spectrum. At one end are apparent anomalies in well established disciplines. At the other, we find paradoxical phenomena that belong to no established discipline and therefore may offer the greatest potential for scientific advance and the expansion of human knowledge. The SSE was founded in 1982 and has approximately 800 members in 45 countries worldwide. The Society also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration, and holds annual meetings in the u.S. and biennial meetings in Europe. Associate and student memberships are available to the public. To join the Society, or for more information, visit the website at scientificexploration.org. PRESiDEnT: William Bengston, St. Josephs college VicE-PRESiDEnT: Robert Jahn, Princeton university SEcRETARy: Mark urban-Lurain, Michigan State university TREASuRER: John Reed EuRoPEAn cooRDinAToR: Erling Strand, stfold college, norway
copyright 2012 Society for Scientific Exploration The authors retain copyright to their work.
CONTENTS
3 4 6
THE OBSERVATORY
The Lunar Effect in the Lab By Arnold L. Lieber
LETTERS:
More on Tunguska
FeatureS
The Experimenter Effect: Are Blind Methodologies Also Needed in the Physical and Biological Sciences?
By Rupert Sheldrake
Consciousness Matters: Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences

by Dean Radin
10 18 20
14
Anthropology and the Supernatural: From Spirits to Consciousness By Jack Hunter REFERENCE POINT
The Other Cost of War A review by Michael Grosso of Mai Lan Gustafssons War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam
Vritra and Geomythology by P. David Moncrief, Jr.
BACKSCATTER
cover image: Donovan van Staden/iStockphoto
EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012 / 3
THE OBSERVATORY
The lunar Effect in the lab

d
uring the 1970s, I studied the relationship between geophysical forces and quantifiable human behavior variables. The results of my research, combined with a working familiarity with the literature on biological rhythms, led me over time to an awareness that lunar rhythms probably co-exist with solar rhythms in the biological functioning of all terrestrial organisms, including humans. This implies that lunar time is an integral component of biological time. Failure to recognize and compensate for this in designing research methodology would ultimately lead to failed attempts to replicate most biological and behavioral experiments. I first published on this dilemma in 1978 (The Lunar Effect) and repeated my admonition in a revised edition of that work in 1996 (How the Moon Affects You). The scientific community ignored both treatises, while I busied myself practicing clinical psychopharmacology and doing research in biological psychiatry. It should be no surprise then that a front page article appearing in the December 2, 2011, issue of the Wall Street Journal, titled Scientists Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results, caught my attention. The journal Science was reporting a startling revelation: most research results, including those appearing in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, cannot be reproduced. A series of articles exploring possible contributing factors came up short. The authors and the editors could not figure out why most studies cant be replicated. Science had finally awakened to the reality that most research results simply are not replicable at our present level of understanding. This is essentially a confirmation of my 1978 prediction, so I dashed off a letter to the editor of Science summarizing my concerns. The letter was not accepted for publication. Mainstream science seems reluctant to contemplate material it deems tainted with myth, legend, or folklore. Since they currently have egg on their face, they should certainly be open to suggestions from any and all comers. There is a sizeable body of published research documenting the correlations between the lunar synodic cycle and growth, development, and metabolic function in plants, animals, and humans. For the latter there are an equal or greater number of studies purporting not to show such correlations. Apparently there is a subgroup of researchers with an axe to grind. A recently published book presents a cogent and well-balanced overview of this controversy (The Moon and Madness by Niall McCrae). I have long been a proponent of the gravitational hypothesis, details of which are discussed elsewhere. I believe there is a gravitational component to most biological rhythms, and that gravity also functions as a default synchronizer for all organisms including man. This is the basis of my contention that lunar time is part and parcel of biological time, and must be accounted for in the design of research methodologies. Lunar time is out of synch with solar or calendar time. Of the approximately 400 lunar cycles, only four are significant in terms of gravitational forces: the lunar transit cycle advances by 50 minutes daily across the 24-hour solar day; the synodic month equals 29.5 days; the anomalistic month (apogee-perigee cycle) equals 27.5 days; the ecliptic cycles, both solar and lunar, are about six months long. The difference between solar time and these four lunar time-periods must be accounted for in experimental data sampling and in data analysis. Take for example the daily lunar transit cycle vis--vis solar time: what happens at 9:00 a.m. Monday, will happen at 9:50 a.m. Tuesday, at 10:40 a.m. Wednesday, and so on through the month. In other words, so-called standard conditions for data sampling do not exist. We can either (1) accept this and abandon further replication efforts in biological and behavioral research, or (2) devise a mathematical construct to account for these predictable temporal discrepanciesa bi-temporal correlation coefficient as it were. This task should easily be within the purview of a competent mathematician. NOAA has developed a sol-lunar time-conversion schema, which has enabled a more accurate forecasting of worldwide precipitation levels, and tropical storm and hurricane formation. These weather variables are known to be influenced by lunar gravity. Incorporating this yet-to-be-developed mathematical timeconversion formula into the fabric of research studies should allow for accurate routine daily, weekly, and/or monthly data sampling and for replicable data analyses. Will researchers now follow through on this outline, which might lead to a partial solution of sciences roadblock? Based on past experience, I am not overly hopeful. Young investigators working in this intriguing field often become disillusioned and eventually switch paths. The chaos, controversy, antagonism, political incorrectness, and funding constraintsnot to mention the indifference of mainstream sciencecan lead to burnout. Meanwhile, a crisis in the palace may provide a potential opening for new inroads. The trick is to get a foot in the door. However, if no one on the inside will answer the doorbell, then we are stuck with the problem instead of striving for part of the solution. Arnold l. liEbEr, M.d., retired in 2005, after practicing psychiatry for 32 years in Miami and Miami Beach. During his career as a clinician and researcher, he held the following positions: chairman, Department of Psychiatry, St. Francis hospital in Miami Beach; chairman, Department of Psychiatry, Miami heart institute; Medical Director of the clinical neuroscience unit of Miami heart institute; clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, university of Miami School of Medicine; and President, American Academy of clinical Psychiatrists. his research received awards from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of clinical Psychiatrists. he has authored or co-authored 32 scientific publications, including two books.
Arnold l. lieber, Md
4 / EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012
LETTERS
More On Tunguska
The distinguished scientist and scholar Yervant Terzian asserts that it is pseudo-science to suggest that a UFO may have caused the Tunguska catastrophe. (EdgeScience #9) Since he remarks, concerning UFOs, we have no idea what they are, his suggestion is tantamount to ruling out anything we do not now know about. PAS has argued that any scientific investigation must allow for a complete set of hypotheses [1,2]. Concerning the Tunguska catastrophe, asteroid and comet do not comprise a complete set. One must allow for a something else, which can be left vague as long as at least one of the two specified hypotheses remains viable. However, if the evidence rules out both asteroid and comet, then one would need to get more explicit about the possible something else. VR has shown that we have much more information about Tunguska than simply that (in Terzians words) a catastrophic event happened at a certain place at a certain time [3, 4], pointing out that there are three big keys and five small ones to the Tunguska enigma. The three big keys comprise a gigantic zone of leveled forest; burn marks on trees apparently from a light flash; and the local geomagnetic storm that occurred six minutes after the explosion and was recorded by instruments of the Magnetographic and Meteorological Observatory at Irkutsk. The five small keys comprise unusual microscopic remains; anomalously fast restoration of the taiga; genetic mutations in plants and other living things; evidence of radioactive fallout in tree rings; and evidence of the influence of hard radiation on minerals and rocks. It is true that, as Terzian stated, No one human saw the impact who was able to describe it. But there were three groups of eyewitnesses, each of which saw an object. There is no evidence that there was an actual impact, and the one big key that one expects from a comet or asteroidsome remnant of the celestial bodyhas never been found. For any scientific analysis, a thorough evaluation of the options should take account of all of the evidence, evenespeciallyif it does not conform to any of ones instinctive and immediate hypotheses. Vladimir Rubtsov, Kharkov Extramural Polytechnic Institute Peter A. Sturrock, Stanford University
1. Sturrock, P.A., 1973, Evaluation of Astrophysical Hypotheses, Astrophysical Journal, 182, 569580. 2. Sturrock, P.A., 1994, Applied Scientific Inference, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 8, 491508. 3. Rubtsov, V., 2009, The Tunguska Mystery (Springer; Dordrecht, Holland). 4. Rubtsov, V., 2010, The Tunguska Event: Maybe It Wasnt What We Thought, EdgeScience, 5, 510.
William K. hartmann/Planetary Science institute
Another reader suggested other factors to consider: In the absence of physical debris from a bolide in the Tunguska event, we must look to other sources of extreme force. If youve ever been near an explosive electrical discharge, you might relate to what I am about to suggest. There are at least three key characteristics of the earth/ space environment that hint at electrical dynamics playing a role in that explosion: Earths atmosphere being a leaky capacitor, the occurrence of electromagnetic sub-storms in our planets tail, and the electromagnetic comet-like tail of Venus, which reaches out to tickle our planets plasma sphere (magnetosphere) during alignments. Solar activity, lunar influences, and our planets electrical potential also come into play in what is being suggested. We do not regularly see the full potential of electrical activity in our celestial neighborhood, but that was not always the case. Venus was once seen as the terrible goddess that brought destruction on the earth, and a comet with long flowing hair. That was many thousands of years ago, but the tail remains active, even though it is invisible to the eye. In recent times and with the discovery of sub-storms, the CLUSTER and THEMIS probes are seeing regular discharges in the Earths tail region, and we see some of that activity in the form of enhanced aurora displays. Earths electrical environment is very active and I would not be uncomfortable proposing that mans intrusion into the space environment has not gone unnoticed by the plasma environment that surrounds us. Electrical breakdown pathways are very opportunistic, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster revealed. As a leaky capacitor, the Earth must not be viewed in isolation from the space-plasma environment. Before space travel and other atmospheric encroachments, what was there to short circuit Earths electrical potential?
We also know that the Moon has an effect on aspects of the Earth; just watch the timing of terra-storms and its orbital relation, especially its passage in line with the solar current. We should not be surprised at the occurrence of electrical storms during those times. One of the most dramatic nighttime lightning storms Ive ever seen was when Earth was in direct line with Venus as the Moon approached our tail region. At the time of the Tunguska event, it was early morning in Siberia. Venus electromagnetic Birkeland Current tail was approaching Earth, while our Moon was in eclipse of the Sun. I wonder how this timing would affect Earths electrical equilibrium. Ive heard that for several days the sky remained quite bright throughout Eurasia: was this an auroral reaction? Sub-storms occur when the interior region of our tail collapses, causing a surge of electrical energy to travel toward Earths polar regions (Tunguska is a far north location). These details may not seem relevant until considered in relation to the plasma environment of space and the electric currents therein. So here we have our own sub-storm potential and we also have Venus electromagnetic tail invading our space
as the Moon passes upstream. I cannot help but wonder how Earths plasma sheath would be deformed by all these bodies upstream. Might this lead to a change in the solar flow around Earth and an electrical imbalance or fluctuation in the magnetosphere? We all know what happens when you ride in the burble of a moving vehicle: you get buffeted by strange airflow. The Suns solar current, a flow of charged particles, has many new surprises for us as we learn how to measure its behavior and how it affects the bodies that pass through its current flow. When Coronal Mass Ejections launch from the Sun, the Earths surface gives an indication of its passage in the form of ground currents. So the suggestion of an electric discharge from the Tunguska site at a time of unique conditions seems not far-fetched. The presence of Kimberlite pipes at that region offers one more detail that calls for an electrical explanation. Whether it was a discharge to a meteor or an earth/atmospheric/ionosphere super-discharge, we have some new details to consider in the Tunguska Mystery. (References and other details can be found at http://www.para-az.com/ boltfrombelow2.html.) Z. Dahlen Parker, Eloy, Arizona
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The Experimenter Effect: Are Blind Methodologies Also Needed in the Physical and Biological Sciences?
ost medical researchers are well aware that their beliefs and expectations can influence the results of their experiments, which is why many clinical trials are carried out double-blind: neither the researchers nor the patients know who has received which treatment. Experimenter effects are also well known in experimental psychology. This principle was illustrated in a classic experiment in which the experimenters trained a group of psychology graduate students to administer the Rorschach test, in which subjects were asked to identify patterns in inkblots. The experimenters told half of the students that experienced psychologists obtained more human than animal images from their subjects. They told the other half of the group the opposite. Sure enough, when they administered the test the second group found more animal images than the first. Even in experiments with animals, experimenters expectations can influence the results. In a classic experiment at Harvard, Robert Rosenthal and his colleagues instructed students to test rats in standard mazes. They asked them to compare two strains of rat produced by generations of selective breeding for good and poor performance in mazes. But they deliberately deceived their students. In fact, the rats came from a standard laboratory strain and were divided at random into two groups labeled maze-bright and maze-dull. Trusting what they had been told, the students expected the bright rats to do better than the dull ones and, sure enough, they found that the bright rats learned much faster than the dull ones. Since the rats were more or less identical, these dramatic differences must have resulted from the students expectations. Although experimenter-expectancy effects are widely recognized in psychology and medicine, in the hard sciences most scientists assume that they are irrelevant. They take it for granted that their own expectations have no influence on their experiments and on the recording of data. From 1996 to 1998, I carried out a survey of more than 1,500 papers in leading scientific journals to find out how often the researchers used blind methods. Caroline Watt and Marleen Nagtegaal later replicated this survey, using a different selection of journals.
rupert Sheldrake
research Field Physical Sciences Biological Sciences Animal Behavior Psychology Medical Sciences Parapsychology
Percent blind (1999) 0 0.8 2.8 7.0 24.2 85.2
Percent blind (2004) 0.5 2.4 9.3 22.5 36.8 79.1
A comparison of the percentage of papers reporting blind methodologies in different fields of science in two independent surveys: Sheldrake in 1999, and Watt and nagtegaal in 2004. Watt and Nagtegaal found a higher percentage of papers with blind methodologies in most areas than I did, and a slightly lower percentage in parapsychology, but in both our surveys, in the physical sciences almost no research involved blind methodologies, and in the biological sciences very little, less than 2.5 percent. Even in experimental psychology, animal behavior, and the medical sciences, where the effects of experimenters expectations are widely recognized, a minority of studies used blind methods. By far the highest percentage was in parapsychology. I also organized a telephone survey of senior researchers in 55 departments in 11 British universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Imperial College, London. My research assistant, Jane Turney, carried out the interviews by telephone. She asked the professors or other senior scientists if anyone in their department used blind methodologies, and also whether they taught students about such methods. Some of the scientists did not know what was meant by the phrase blind methodology. Most were aware of blind techniques, but said that they were necessary only in clinical research or psychology. They thought they were used to avoid biases introduced by human subjects. The commonest view among physical and biological scientists was that blind methodologies were unnecessary because Nature itself is blind, as
one researcher put it. A professor of chemistry added, Science is difficult enough as it is without making it even harder by not knowing what you are working on. Out of 23 physics and chemistry departments, only one used blind methods and taught the students about such methods. Out of 42 departments in the biological sciences, 12 (29 percent) sometimes used blind methods and taught about them. But only in exceptional cases were blind techniques used routinely. My survey revealed three examples, all of which involved industrial contracts that required the university scientists to evaluate coded samples without knowing their identity.
Experimental tests for experimenter effects
The assumption that blind techniques are unnecessary in most fields of science is so fundamental that it deserves to be tested. In all branches of experimental science we can ask: can the expectations of experimenters act like self-fulfilling prophecies, introducing a bias, conscious or unconscious, into the way the data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted? There is a simple way to find out by doing experiments on experiments. Take a typical experiment involving a test sample and a control; for example, the comparison of an inhibited enzyme with an uninhibited control enzyme in a biochemical experiment. Then carry out the experiment as usual, where the experimenter knows which sample is which. Also do the experiment under blind conditions with the samples labeled A and B. In a student practical class, for instance, half of the class
would do the experiment blind, while the other half would know which sample is which. If there were no significant differences between the results under blind and open conditions, this would show that blind techniques were unnecessary. Significant differences would reveal the existence of experimenter effects. Further research would then be needed to find out how these effects worked. This experiment costs nothing but simply involves labeling samples differently. It would be easy to do in laboratory classes in schools or universities. When I first proposed this simple experiment, I navely assumed that skeptics, who spend so much of their time insisting on the objectivity of science, would be particularly interested in this question. I therefore launched an appeal in the Skeptical Inquirer and in the Skeptic, asking people who worked in universities to collaborate in this research. There was no response. Richard Wiseman, himself a skeptic, together with Caroline Watt, launched another appeal in the Skeptical Inquirer with a similar lack of response. On one occasion I thought that it was going to be possible to do this test when a physics teacher at one of Britains leading schools agreed to try it with his final-year students. But he had to ask permission from the head of science, who asked me to meet him to explain what I had in mind. His response was illuminating. He said, Of course the students are going to be influenced by their expectations. Thats what science education is all about. Its obvious they will try to get the right results. This experiment will open up a can of worms, and I dont want it opened in my school.
Photo courtesy of cERn
If hundreds of highly qualified physicists expect to find an evanescent particle among the indeterminate events that occur in a particle accelerator, could their expectations affect these quantum events?
These remarks were helpful because of their directness and honesty. I realized that all professional scientists have spent years doing lab classes at school and at university being trained to get the expected results. Over a period of ten years at Cambridge University (in cell biology and biochemistry), and one year at Harvard (in Biology 101), I taught in laboratory classes in which students did standard experiments with outcomes that were well known in advance. But there were always some students who did not get the right results. Everyone assumed they had simply made mistakes. Some students were often bad at getting the standard results: I suppose they graduated with poor degrees, and were therefore unlikely to go on to a career in scientific research. Those who became professional scientists were people who showed a reliable ability to get the correct results over many years of practical education in laboratories. Although experimenter effects may often result from biases in the observation and recording of results, experimenters might affect the experimental system itself. This is easy to understand when experiments involve human subjects, who may well respond to the experimenters expectations and attitude. Rosenthals classic experiment with Harvard students testing rats shows that animals too can be influenced by the way they are treated. But there is a more radical possibility. In the uncertain circumstances of research, the experimenters expectations may directly affect the system under investigation through mind-over-matter effects or psychokinesis. For example, if hundreds of highly qualified physicists expect to find an evanescent particle among the indeterminate events that occur in a particle accelerator, could their expectations affect these quantum events? Could the hopes of scientists influence the outcomes of more mundane experiments too? These may seem far-fetched possibilities, and discussing them is normally prevented by the taboo against psychic phenomena. But I believe it is important to investigate rather than suppress this question. Many stories circulate in laboratories that suggest that some people bring about mysterious effects. Sometimes they are negative effects, or jinxes. One of the most famous examples is the so-called Pauli effect, named after the
Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58). He was reputed to cause the failure of laboratory equipment merely by his presence. For fear of this effect, his friend Otto Stern, an experimental physicist, banned Pauli from his laboratory in Hamburg. Pauli himself was convinced that the effect was real, and was worried that he might have contributed unwittingly to the burning of the cyclotron at Princeton University when he was nearby. Sometimes apparent mind-over-matter effects are positive. A professor of biochemistry from a major U.S. university told me that part of the secret of his success was that he could achieve better purifications of protein molecules than his colleagues. He said that when a sample of mixed proteins was being separated, he stayed with the apparatus in the cold room willing the system to give clearer separations, and saying, Separate! Was this a personal superstition, or did it have any effect? This question could be investigated experimentally. For example, two identical pieces of apparatus could be loaded with the same mixture of proteins. One, selected at random, would then be given to the professor to accompany during the separation process. The other would be put in a different cold room and left alone for the same period of time. The separations would then be compared to see if there was any difference. I tried to persuade this professor to do the experiment himself, but he was unwilling to try it. Although he was curious, he could not risk the potential damage to his credibility and career. The supposed objectivity of the hard sciences is an untested hypothesis. There is a conspiracy of science about experimenter expectancy effects in most branches of physics, chemistry, and biology. The assumption that they are confined to clinical research, human psychology, and animal behavior may well be untrue.
rEFErEncES
Enz, C. P. (2009). Rational and irrational features in Wolfgang Paulis life, in Of Matter and Spirit: Selected Essays by Charles P. Enz, Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific. Rosenthal, R. (1976). Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research. New York: John Wiley. Sheldrake, R. (1994). Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science. London: Fourth Estate. Sheldrake, R. (1998). Experimenter effects in scientific research: how widely are they neglected? Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12, 738. Sheldrake, R. (1998). Could experimenter effects occur in the physical and biological sciences? Skeptical Inquirer, 22, 578. Sheldrake, R. (1999). Blind belief, Skeptic, 12 (2), 78. Sheldrake, R. (1999). How widely is blind assessment used in scientific research? Alternative Therapies, 5, 8891. Watt, C., and Nagtegaal, M. (2004). Reporting of blind methods: an interdisciplinary survey, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 68, 10514. Wiseman, R., and Watt, C. (1999). Rupert Sheldrake and the objectivity of science, Skeptical Inquirer, 23 (5), 612.
RupeRt SheldRake My interest in science began when i was very young. As a child i kept many kinds of animals, ranging from caterpillars and tadpoles to pigeons, rabbits, tortoises, and a dog. My father, a herbalist, pharmacist, and microscopist, taught me about plants from my earliest years. he showed me a world of wonders through his microscope, including tiny creatures in drops of pond water, scales on butterflies wings, shells of diatoms, cross-sections of plant stems, and a sample of radium that glowed in the dark. i collected plants and read books on natural history. By the time i was twelve years old i wanted to become a biologist. i studied sciences at school and then at cambridge university, where i majored in biochemistry. i liked what i was doing, but found the focus very narrow, and wanted to see a bigger picture. i had a lifechanging opportunity to widen my perspective when i was awarded a Frank Knox fellowship in the graduate school at harvard, where i studied the history and philosophy of science. i returned to cambridge to do research on the development of plants. in the course of my PhD project, i made an original discovery: dying cells play a major part in the regulation of plant growth, releasing the plant hormone auxin as they break down in the process of programmed cell death. After receiving my PhD, i was elected to a research fellowship of clare college, cambridge, where i was director of studies in cell biology and biochemistry, teaching students in tutorials and lab classes. i was then appointed a research fellow of the Royal Society and continued my research at cambridge on plant hormones, studying the way in which auxin is transported from the shoots towards the root tips. With my colleague Philip Rubery, i worked out the molecular basis of polar auxin transport, providing a foundation on which much subsequent research on plant polarity has been built. Funded by the Royal Society, i spent a year at the university of Malaya, studying rainforest ferns, and at the Rubber Research institute of Malaya i discovered how the flow of latex in rubber trees is regulated genetically, and i shed new light on the development of latex vessels. When i returned to cambridge, i developed a new hypothesis of ageing in plants and animals, including humans. All cells age. When they stop growing, they eventually die. My hypothesis is about rejuvenation, and proposes that harmful waste products build up in all cells, causing them to age, but they can produce rejuvenated daughter cells by asymmetric cell divisions in which one cell receives most of these waste products and is doomed, while the other is wiped clean. My hypothesis was published in Nature in 1974. Programmed cell death, or apoptosis, has since become a major field of research, important for our understanding of diseases such as cancer and hiV, as well as
tissue regeneration through stem cells. Wanting to broaden my horizons and do practical research that could benefit some of the worlds poorest people, i left cambridge to join the international crops Research institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, near hyderabad, india, as Principal Plant Physiologist, working on chickpeas and pigeonpeas. We bred new high-yielding varieties of these crops, and developed multiple cropping systems that are now widely used by farmers in Asia and Africa, greatly increasing yields. A new phase in my scientific career began in 1981 with the publication of my book A New Science of Life, in which i suggested a hypothesis of form-shaping fields, called morphogenetic fields, that control the development of animal embryos and the growth of plants. i proposed that these fields have an inherent memory, given by a process called morphic resonance. This hypothesis gave rise to a range of experimental tests, summarised in the 2009 edition of that book. After my return to England from india, i continued to investigate plant development, and also started research with homing pigeons, which had intrigued me since i kept pigeons as a child. how do pigeons find their way home from hundreds of miles away, across unfamiliar terrain and even across the sea? i thought they might be linked to their home by a field that acted like an invisible elastic band, pulling them homewards. Even if they have a magnetic sense as well, they cannot find their home just by knowing compass directions. if you were parachuted into unknown territory with a compass, you would know where north was, but not where your home was. i came to realize that pigeon navigation was just one of many unexplained powers of animals. Another was the ability of some dogs to know when their owners are coming home, seemingly telepathically. in 1994 i published a book called Seven Experiments that Could Change the World in which i proposed low-cost tests that could change our ideas about the nature of reality. The results appeared in a new edition in 2002, as well as in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At. i have spent all my adult life as a scientist, and i strongly believe in the importance of the scientific approach. yet i have become increasingly convinced that the sciences have lost much of their vigour, vitality and curiosity. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity. With scientific colleagues, i have been struck over and over again by the contrast between public and private discussions. in public, scientists are very aware of the powerful taboos that restrict the range of permissible topics; in private they are often more adventurous. i believe that the sciences will be more exciting and engaging when they move beyond the dogmas that restrict free enquiry and imprison imaginations.
This article and profile are excerpted with permission from rupert Sheldrakes new book, entitled The Science Delusion in the UK, and Science Set Free: Dispelling Dogma in the US (Sept. 2012). The UK edition is currently available from The book depository (bookdepository.com).
Consciousness Matters: research at the institute of noetic Sciences

onsciousness mattersthats an assumption that guides research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). This is in contrast to prevailing beliefs in the neurosciences, where consciousness is viewed as a meaningless epiphenomenon of brain function. We do not expect that purely brain-centric, mechanistic models of consciousness will be adequate to explain the full range of human experience. At the same time, based on findings from perceptual and social psychology, we accept there are good reasons to expect that purely subjective, introspective, or faith-based understandings of reality are equally inadequate approaches. We thus aim to overcome the limitations of either purely objective or purely subjective approaches through the tools and techniques of science, but augmented by sensitivity to repeated human experiences, wisdom traditions, and ancient lore suggestive of the potentials of consciousness. One form of repeated experience of key interest to IONS is, not surprisingly, noetic experience.
dean radin
The word noetic in the Institutes name refers to the Greek word no etikos, meaning inner wisdom or direct knowing. Described in 1902 in more poetic terms by William James, noetic experiences are a key component of mystical experience, and defined as states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority. Noetic experience may manifest in the form of a full blown mystical unity, but it also appears in less dramatic form in everyday gut feelings, intuitions, insights, and psychic experiences. At IONS, we conduct high-risk, high-payoff studies designed to significantly push the envelope of scientific knowledge, and we also pursue best-bet studies that investigate the effects of consciousness-based practices resting on already wellgrounded theories. In addition, we look for social acupressure points that may help to catalyze new scientific domains by bringing selected groups together to brainstorm ideas of common interest. Besides the core assumption that consciousness matters, we feel that current scientific methods are not yet appropriate to comprehensively explore deeper aspects of consciousness. As witnessed in the fields of astronomy, genetics, and the neurosciences, some topics are so complex that it takes the development of new methods and instruments to stimulate significant advances. We thus aspire to develop these new approaches, and in doing so we rely on rational scientific rigor leavened with alternative ways of knowing, including the noetic. To help ground this approach and provide oversight, we collaborate with scholars from many domains, from philosophy and physics to the biological and medical sciences, and we pay close attention to the contributions of spiritual wisdom keepers and ancient lore relevant to the potential capacities of consciousness.
laboratory
In 2001, I joined the IONS research staff and helped build the IONS Consciousness Research Laboratory. The lab today is home to a broad array of psychophysiological monitoring systems, which includes equipment for measuring electrocardiogram, peripheral blood flow, skin conductance, electrogastrogram, respiration, blood flow, eye-gaze, pupil dilation, and brain activity. Our facilities allow for simultaneous
Photo credit: Kelly Durkin
measurement of autonomic and central nervous system activity in pairs of people isolated by about 40 meters in separate buildings. The infrastructure includes a web server that can stream data from lab instruments and live video over the internet to remote clients, for use in far-distant experiments. We also have a variety of physical detectors for mindmatter interaction studies, including several types of random event generators, an ultra-sensitive light reflection system, various optical interferometers, and magnetometers. Most of our lab studies are conducted inside a solid steel, double-walled, electromagnetically shielded room, built to exceed national security standards for attenuation of radio frequency interference. It sounds imposing, but the room is decorated to provide a comfortable space for studies requiring energetic and sensory isolation. Besides myself as lab director, the research staff includes several postdoctoral fellows and research assistants, a half-dozen student interns, and numerous universitybased collaborators. The combined expertise of the group includes psychophysiology, clinical and experimental psychology, mind-body medicine, cognitive science, neuroscience, statistics, computer science, molecular biology, physics, and anthropology.
research Projects
The IONS research program has basic and applied components. The basic research projects are concerned with fundamental questions about the role of consciousness in the physical world, and the applied projects focus on health and healing, and how consciousness transforms in beneficial ways as a result of noetic experiences. For several decades, the name of the basic research program was Extended Human Capacities. We are revising the name to the Science of Interconnectedness to reframe that work from the investigation of human abilities necessarily regarded as anomalous from a classical physics perspective, to the study of human experiences that may be expected from a more modern nonlocal view of reality as described by quantum theory. One currently active project uses a well-understood quantum optics system a double-slit interferometerto provide a sensitive measure of distant intentional effects on the behavior of light. This experiment was designed to investigate a psi effect within a context that is of continuing interest to mainstream physics, namely the quantum measurement problem (QMP). The QMP refers to a curious effect whereby quantum systems behave differently when observed than when unobserved. This is a problem because it violates the common sense doctrine of realism, which assumes that the world at large is completely objective and thus independent of observation. The double-slit experiment provides a way to explore the meaning of observation in the QMP, and in particular it may provide clues about the role that consciousness plays in the act of observation. It is important to gain a better understanding of this issue because quantum theory is the most successful physical theory yet devised, and yet its ontological implications are still a matter of intense debate. The experiment
is based on two assumptions: (a) If information is gained, by any means, about a photons path as it travels through two slits (this is called which-path information), then the interference pattern, which is a reflection of the quantum wavefunction, will collapse in proportion to the certainty of the knowledge gained. And (b) if we assume that some aspect of consciousness is a primordial, self-aware property of the fabric of reality, and that property is modulated by us through capacities we know as attention and intention, then focusing attention on a double-slit system with intention to gain which-path information may in turn affect the interference pattern. The first assumption is well established in physics. The second, based on the idea of panpsychism, is a respectable concept within the philosophy of mind, and it is also in alignment with the notion that consciousness matters. That is, if consciousness matters all the way down into the most microscopic domains of reality, then focusing ones attention towards a doubleslit system might influence the interference pattern. This experiment has been under way for about three years, and it is scheduled to continue for at least another two years with various technical refinements and new equipment. An article describing the results to date was accepted by the journal Physics Essays and is currently in press. An online version of this experiment is running now at www.ionsresearch.com. Because we find that meditation and other forms of focused attention training generally seem to produce better results in our experiments, in another study we decided to investigate reports of timelessness as described by advanced practitioners across many meditative traditions. In these experiences, common distinctionsbetween subject and object, or past, present and futureare said to diminish, and with sufficient practice all distinctions reportedly dissolve into an undifferentiated, nondual state of awareness. This is accompanied by an impression of timelessness, i.e., a vastly extended present moment. Conventional brain-based assumptions about consciousness consider such time distortion experiences to be completely illusory. Neuroscience research has attempted to link
So far, our research on mind-matter interactions strongly supports the idea that consciousness matters in ways that brain-centric models of consciousness cannot comfortably accommodate.
experiences of altered time to hiccups in brain processing, such as suppressed parietal lobe activity, enhanced theta-band activity, or increased insula activity. Likewise, most cognitive models of time perception assume the existence of an objective time that is tracked by clock-like mechanisms in the brain. The possibility that extended awareness experiences may reflect an ontological timeless reality is rarely considered, and if mentioned at all, it is dismissed as an hallucination. However, given our previous presentiment experiments indicating that the nervous system becomes activated seconds before exposure to unpredictable stimuli, we felt there were good reasons to carefully examine such exceptional reports, regardless of how challenging they may seem to prevailing neuroscience dogma. In addition, we have found that when contemporary experiences closely resemble historical accounts recorded thousands of years ago, then the experiences may be genuine phenomena, again regardless of how strange they may seem. For example, nondual awareness may be similar to the state called samyama in Patanjalis Yoga Sutras, a manuscript from the second century BC. Patanjali wrote that those who achieve stability in samyama would experience siddhis or extraordinary mental abilities, of which one was described as the ability to simultaneously perceive past, present, and future. To us, that sounded like how one might describe the experience of timelessness. The experimental question focused on the ontological status of this experience. Can awareness in fact extend through time? Awareness extending into the past is trivial; we understand that as memory. But extending into the futureprecognitionis quite another matter. To conduct this investigation, we used a 32-channel EEG to measure whether the brain electrical activity of advanced meditators responded before randomly selected stimuli displayed at unpredictable times. To help make the experiment more palatable to the neuroscience community, the study was explicitly designed to use the same tools, techniques, and statistics commonly employed by neuroscientists. We found that the meditators brains did indeed respond before the stimuli, whereas non-meditators brains did not. This suggests that some subjective reports of timelessness do indeed reflect an aspect of human awareness that transcends the everyday notion of a unidirectional flow of time. In earlier studies, we investigated similar awareness-through-time effects using measures such as skin conductance, pupil dilation, eyegaze direction, and blinking, and in all cases we obtained evidence consistent with what we observed in this EEG study. In other research, we investigated the effects of compassionate intention on human physiology at a distance, the effects of emotions on a distant persons gut feelings (measured via the electrophysiology of the gut), EEG correlations between pairs of isolated people, the sense of being stared at (via a closed-circuit video link in one study, and a webcam in another), and telepathy in the ganzfeld condition. In investigating mind-matter interaction phenomena, we have examined the effects of Johrei (similar to Reiki) on cell cultures in vitro, and the effects of individual intention and collective attention on random events, water crystallization, and the
mood-enhancing effects of chocolate. We have also tested psychokinetic vs. retrocausal models of psi effects in random event generators, developed and tested new forms of massively parallel random event generators, and developed on-line psi tests (www.psiarcade.com, and with Richard Shoup, www.gotpsi. org) that have collected hundreds of millions of trials from nearly a million users worldwide. Most of this work has been documented in journal articles, book chapters, and books; a few studies have not yet been published. (A selected list of our publications can be found on the IONS website: http://noetic. org/research/selected/.) So far, our research on mind-matter interactions strongly supports the idea that consciousness matters in ways that brain-centric models of consciousness cannot comfortably accommodate. If the evidence for quantum biology continues to advance into more complex living systems, which seems likely, then it is also likely that significant shifts will occur in mainstream assumptions about the relationships among brain, mind, and consciousness. Those shifts will begin to chip away at the woo-woo taboo that has constrained serious research on these topics, and at that point noetic experience will begin to yield to scientific inquiry, as have so many mysteries of the past.
dEAn rAdin, Phd, is Senior Scientist at the institute of noetic Sciences and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State university. his initial career track as a concert violinist shifted into science after earning an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the university of Massachusetts, Amherst, and then an MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology from the university of illinois, urbana-champaign. Prior to joining the ionS research staff in 2001, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton university, university of Edinburgh, and SRi international, where he was a scientist on the classified psi research program now known as StarGate. he is author or coauthor of over 200 technical and popular articles, a dozen book chapters, and several books including the bestselling The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds.
The first extraterrestrial mystical experience?

The institute of noetic Sciences (ionS) was borne out of a vision that arrived, quite literally, from out of this world. it was February, 1971. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell had successfully walked on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission and he was now on the return trip home. During a spare moment, Mitchell gazed through the space capsules window at a sight few people had ever seen the Earth floating in space, about the size of a marble. While contemplating the history and hopes of life on that tiny sphere a living blue planet alone in a vast blackness he began to feel a growing sense of compassion with all humanity, and then with all life on Earth. The feeling intensified until it became a profoundly enveloping sense of connectedness with the whole universe. More than an intellectual realization, this experience was a palpable certainty, a knowing. it was perhaps the first extraterrestrial mystical experience. Mitchells transformative experience caused him to seriously question assumptions commonly held within science, even though some of those very same assumptions had allowed him to successfully land on the moon and return home safely.
Jack hunter
Anthropology and the Supernatural:

Early Pioneers
Since its earliest incarnation in the nineteenth century, anthropology has expressly concerned itself with attempting to understand the supernatural and religious beliefs of human beings around the world. Edward Burnett Tylor, the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University, argued that religion could best be understood through an examination of the supernatural beliefs of primitive cultures, because in beliefs about spirits and supernatural powers could be found the seeds of the great world religions. These beliefs, Tylor thought, could be explained by assuming that so-called savages were irrational and, as a consequence, unable to make accurate inferences about their experiences of the world around them. He suggested, for example, that primitive man had great difficulty distinguishing real death from sleep and trance states, and so, from observations of such phenomena, erroneously posited the existence of a personal life-force, or spirit, that was able to both enter and leave the physical body under certain conditions. Progressing from the inference that human beings possessed an immaterial spirit, Tylor argued that it was not a huge leap to believing that other entities, such as animals, plants and rocks, also possessed spirits/souls, and thus the supernatural realm was born.
From Spirits to Consciousness

Andrew Lang, a contemporary of Tylors, criticized the emphasis on misinterpreted experience, arguing that savage man might not have been the irrational observer Tylor made him out to be. By drawing comparisons between ethnographic accounts of supernatural beliefs and contemporary reports of psychic phenomena, such as those investigated by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Lang demonstrated that the perceived cognitive gap between Europeans and non-Europeans was not quite as wide as had initially been thought. If modern, rational Europeans of high respectability, like the early members of the SPR, had experienced phenomena they considered to be supernormal in nature, then why should the experiences and beliefs recorded in the ethnographic literature not also be taken seriously? Lang suggested, in contrast to Tylors misinterpretation theory, that supernatural beliefs might have their foundations in genuine anomalous experiences. Indeed, in his book The Making of Religion, Lang went so far as to hypothesize that paranormal experiences might have been major contributing factors in the early development of religious ideas. In other words, Lang suggested that supernatural beliefs need not be considered irrational if they were founded upon genuine paranormal experiences. Of the two interpretations of psychical experience and belief proposed by Tylor and Lang, however, it was Tylors that became dominant within academic anthropology.
Social-Functionalism
Andrew Lang
Although Tylors interpretation became orthodox within anthropology, there still remained room for a theory that explained why apparently irrational beliefs in ghosts, witchcraft, magic, spirit possession, and the like were so persistent among human societies if they were nothing more than delusional. This theory came in the form of social-functionalism, that is the idea that supernatural beliefs persist only because they perform specific functions for a given society. This position developed from the writings of Emile Durkheim, the founding father of French sociology, who argued that religious beliefs and practices are essentially a form of social glue that help to ensure the cohesion and solidarity of social groups. Perhaps the best example of a social-functional approach is I.M. Lewis theory of peripheral spirit possession, which sees spirit possession as a means for repressed individuals, usually women, to protest against their conditions in a socially acceptable manner. Similar models have been applied to other systems of supernatural belief such as witchcraft, for example, which has been interpreted as a means by which incidences of misfortune can be understood and dealt with, and as a method for ensuring civility between group members for fear of
accusations of witchcraft. The social-functional perspective, then, combined with the Tylorean misinterpretation hypothesis, seemed to provide an all encompassing explanation for the persistence of apparently irrational supernatural beliefs. But the social-functional approach fundamentally ignored both the significance of subjective experience for believers and the possibility that genuine psi phenomena might exist, assuming from the outset that the objects of supernatural beliefs, in line with Tylors view, could possess no form of independent ontological reality. So, while social-functionalists were happy to accept that ritual practices engaging the world of the supernatural might perform an essential social function, they were unwilling to entertain the possibility that the supernatural realm was anything more than delusional fantasy or the product of outright fraud. It wasnt until the late 1960s and early 1970s that certain anthropologists began, like Andrew Lang over 60 years previously, to question whether the functionalist framework really was the optimum model for understanding supernatural belief.
For many it was the publication, in 1968, of Carlos Castanedas infamous book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge that rekindled the supernatural debate in anthropology. Castanedas book describes his experiences as a young anthropology graduate, learning the ways of the brujo (sorcerer/medicine-man/shaman) with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Native American in Mexico. The book documents the authors experiences while consuming sacred psychoactive plants, as well as other anomalous experiences alleged to be caused by rival sorcerers, and presents them in an autobiographical ethnographic account. There has been a great deal of debate as to whether the book represents a genuine ethnographic description of real events and experiences, or whether it is simply a work of imaginative fiction. Nevertheless, and regardless of its veracity, the influence of the book on subsequent anthropologists was enormous and inspired many to follow similar courses of ethnographic fieldwork in other societies. Once ethnographers began to participate, in an immersive manner, with the belief systems and ritual practices of their hosts, a whole new world of experience emerged as a valid field of ethnographic inquiry. Such an approach was to become known as the anthropology of experience, or the anthropology of consciousness.
castanedas influence
Ethnographers such as Joseph Long, Bruce Grindal, Paul Stoller, and Edith Turner composed detailed ethnographies in which they described not only the beliefs and practices of their hosts, but also their own anomalous experiences while immersed in different cultural systems. Joseph Long documented an unusual apparition in Jamaica in which a selfpropelled coffin was seen to move through a busy market square accompanied by vultures and a disembodied voice. Bruce Grindal vividly described the re-animation of a corpse during a traditional Sisala death divination in Ghana. What I saw in those moments, he wrote, was outside the realm of normal perception. From both the corpse and goka came flashes of light so fleeting that I cannot say exactly where they originated... A terrible and beautiful sight burst upon me. Stretching from the amazingly delicate fingers and mouths of the goka, strands of fibrous light played upon the head, fingers, and toes of the dead man. The corpse, shaken by spasms, then rose to its feet, spinning and dancing in a frenzy. Paul Stoller became a sorcerers apprentice amongst the Songhay in Niger, only to be forced to return home for fear of magical attacks from rival sorcerers. Suddenly I had the strong impression that something had entered the house, wrote Stoller. I felt its presence and I was frightened. Set to abandon the house to whatever hovered in the darkness, I started to roll off my mat. But my lower body did not budge... Paul Stoller My heart raced. I couldnt flee. What could I do to save myself? Like a sorko benya, I began to recite the genji how, for Adamu Jenitongo had told me that if I ever felt danger I should recite this incantation until I had conquered my fear... I began to feel a slight tingling in my hips... The presence had left the room. Edith Turner described her climactic experience of a spirit-form at the culmination of the ihamba healing ceremony of the Ndembu in Zambia. I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back, she wrote. This thing was a large gray blob about six inches across, a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere. I was amazeddelighted. I still laugh with glee at the realisation of havEdith Turner ing seen it, the ihamba, and so big! We were all just one in triumph. The gray thing was actually out there, visible, and you could see [the witchdoctors] hands working and scrabbling on the backand then the thing was there no more.
Anomalous Experiences in the Field
Transpersonal Anthropology and the Anthropology of consciousness

Charles Laughlin defines transpersonal experiences as those experiences that bring the cognized-self into question and transpersonal anthropology as the cross-cultural study of the psychological and sociocultural aspects of transpersonal experience. A transpersonal anthropologist is, therefore, one that is capable of participating in transpersonal experience; that is, capable of both attaining whatever extraordinary experiences and phases of consciousness that enrich the religious system, and relating these experiences to invariant patterns of symbolism, cognition and practice found in religions and cosmologies all over the planet. Through participating fully in the host culture, to the extent of accessing culturally relevant Zeljko Jokic experiences, the transpersonal anthropologist is able to gain a perspective on a particular culture that could not be attained through any normal means of objective observation. Writing on his experiences with the Yanomami of the Orinoco Valley, Zeljko Jokic, for example, describes how his own subjective experiences under the influence of the hallucinogenic snuff yopo represented a point of intersubjective entry into the Yanomamo life-world. In attaining such culturally significant experiences as, for example, witnessing the extraction of a malignant spirit from the back of an afflicted patient, the ethnographer is essentially, at least for the duration of the experience, becoming one with their informants. Following her experience during the ihamba ceremony, Edith Turner explained how, in order to fully understand a culture, William James anthropologists need training to see what the Natives see.
Fiona Bowie proposes a methodology, which she terms cognitive empathetic engagement, as a means to achieve this goal. Cognitive empathetic engagement is defined as a method by which the observer...approaches the people or topic studied in an open-minded and curious manner, without presuppositions, prepared to entertain the world view and rationale presented and to experience, as far as possible and practical, a different way of thinking and interpreting events. Patric Giesler has proposed a methodology more geared towards the verification of psi phenomena as objective events in an approach referred to as psi in process, which studies ostensible paranormal functioning in a natural cultural or subcultural context with the rigor of experimental control and statistical evaluation...without (or minimally) altering or disturbing the context. In a brief survey, Michael Winkelman suggests that there is no single, unified anthropology of consciousness, but rather that there are several anthropologies of consciousness dealing with different aspects of the interaction between consciousness and culture. Winkelman proposes a five-field approach including: paleontology (examining the evolution of consciousness); linguistics (examining the role of language in consciousness and experience); archaeology (examining different forms of consciousness in the past of modern humans); cultural anthropology (examining the interface between consciousness and culture); applied anthropology (using research into altered states of consciousness for real-world applications).
conclusions
No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded
Methodologies and Approaches
In order to see what the Natives see, and to make use of transpersonal experiences as ethnographic data in the anthropology of consciousness, it is necessary to immerse oneself fully in the culture under investigation.
Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, the philosopher and early pioneer of psychology, William James, summed up what I consider to be, potentially, the most important contribution of the anthropology of consciousness to our understanding of the universe as a whole when he wrote that no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. The unusual phenomena investigated by parapsychologists, and the range of altered states of consciousness and supernatural beliefs encountered during ethnographic fieldwork, are aspects of the world in which we live and the cultures that have developed in it, and as such should not be ignored by the social sciences. Although we are a long way from the acceptance of paranormal phenomena by anthropology, it is promising to see that both contemporary anthropologists and parapsychologists are coming to realize the mutual benefits each discipline can receive from the type of interdisciplinary collaboration suggested by Andrew Lang at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the disciplines development, anthropology has shifted its focus from attempting to explain away supernatural beliefs to an approach that accepts the significance of subjective anomalous experience in the development of such beliefs without applying a reductive interpretation. This is a positive step forward for our understanding of the ways in which consciousness and culture interact, and I look forward to further research in this direction.
rEFErEncES
Bowie, F. (2010). Methods for Studying the Paranormal (And Who Says What is Normal Anyway?) Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 46. Bowker, J. (1973). The Sense of God: Sociological, Anthropological and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Castaneda, C. (1976 [1968]). The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Castaneda, C. (1978 [1971]). A Separate Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1976). Witchcraft Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Giesler, P. (1984). Parapsychological Anthropology: I. MultiMethod Approaches to the Study of Psi in the Field Setting. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 78, No. 4, pp. 89330. Goulet, J. & Miller, B.G. (2007). Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. London: University of Nebraska Press. Grindal, B.T. (1983). Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination. Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 6080. James, W. (2004 [1902]). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Barnes & Noble. Jokic, Z. (2008). Yanomami Shamanic Initiation: The Meaning of Death and Postmortem Consciousness in Transition. Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 3359. Lang, A. (1900 [1898]). The Making of Religion. Lang, A. (1995 [1913]). Myth, Ritual and Religion Vol. I. London: Senate. Lang, A. (2010 [1894]). Cock-Lane and Common-Sense. Bibliobazaar, LLC. Laughlin, C. (1994). Transpersonal Anthropology, Then and Now. Transpersonal Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 710. Laughlin, C. (1997). The Cycle of Meaning: Some Methodological Implications of Biogenetic Structural Theory. In S. Glazier (ed.) Anthropology of Religion: Handbook of Theory and Method. Westport: Greenwood Press. Lewis, I.M. (1971). Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Long, J.K. (1974). Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology. London: Scarecrow Books. Luke, D. (2010). Anthropology and Parapsychology: Still Hostile Sisters in Science? Time and Mind The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 245266. Schroll, M.A. (2010). Castanedas Controversy and Methodological Influence. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 36. Schwartz, S.A. (2000). Boulders in the Stream: The Lineage and Founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. Available from: http://www.stephanaschwartz. com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Boulders-in-thestream-SA.pdf [Accessed 6th January 2012].
Stoller, P. & Olkes, C. (1989) In Sorcerys Shadow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, E. (1993). The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study? Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 912. Turner, E. (1998). Experiencing Ritual. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tylor, E.B. (1920 [1871]). Primitive Culture. London: John Murray. Tylor, E.B. (1930). Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization Vol. II. London: Watt & Co. Van de Castle, R.L. (1977). Anthropology and Psychic Research. Phoenix: New Directions in the Study of Man, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 2735. Wilson, L. (2011). The Anthropology of the Possible: The Ethnographer as Sceptical Enquirer. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormail, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 49. Winkelman, M. (2010). Introduction: Anthropologies of Consciousness. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 125134. Young, D.E. & Goulet, J. (1994). Being Changed by CrossCultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Ontario: Broadview Press. Young, D.E. (2011). Dreams and Telepathic Communication. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 1119.
JAcK hUnTEr is an M.Litt/PhD student in Social Anthropology at the university of Bristol, uK. his research looks at contemporary trance mediumship in Bristol, and focuses on themes of personhood, performance, altered states of consciousness, and anomalous experience. he is the founder and editor of the peer-reviewed journal Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal. in 2010 he received the Eileen J. Garrett scholarship from the Parapsychology Foundation, and in 2011 he received the Schmeidler award from the Parapsychological Association.
REFERENCE POINT
The Other Cost of War

T
his book is an anthropological the Confucian lithe rites, duties, study of spirit possession in postperformancesproper burial is absowar Vietnam. The author, Dr. Mai lutely essential to the well-being of the Lan Gustafsson, an anthropologist deceased. The rites are offerings, acts at Christopher Newport University, of respect, love, honor, and recogniknows that the notion of spirit postion directed toward the dead; when session is widely rejected by most done properly, the departed become modern scholars. She has, however, guardian spirits (lo tien), sources of chosen to record her observations guidance and well-being for the living from the viewpoint of her informants, family. The Confucian roots of this trying not to impose any reductive points to the fact that the family is the assumptions on her narrative. Her basic religious institution. The stabilobject is to describe a complex human ity of society seems here to depend on experience, not explain away any ritual rapport with the dead. Anything part of it that seems dubious accordthat prevents that ritual rapport must ing to mainstream bias. The big idea corrode basic social bonds. behind this book forces us to think This leads to the second premise about new dimensions of suffering essential for understanding. What caused by war, especially by modern in fact was deeply antithetical to trawar in which the physical obliteration ditional Vietnam burial customs? of victims is more likely, thanks to Answer: The Vietnam War. For more destructive technologies. proper ritual burial you have to have Gustafsson has collected 190 a body. Without an intact bodya case histories of people mainly from head or a limb wont dothe li canWar and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam Hanoi and nearby, individuals who not be performed. The Vietnamese by Mai Lan Gustafsson, Cornell University Press, have been possessed, assaulted, and believe that rite-deprived souls cannot 2009. haunted by angry ghosts (con ma). handle their fate on their own in the These are victims still living in the next world. Facing what is perceived vast psychic wake of a war that offias insurmountable frustration of their cially ended in 1975 and began with support, they become angry ghosts. the French colonialists returning to Saigon in 1946 after the But before we sketch a picture of the angry ghost and the kind Second World War. The encounter with these angry ghosts of havoc it is alleged to inflict on Gustafssons informants, we runs to epidemic proportions; so much so that the Communist need to comprehend the enormity of the wars cost, part of (spirit-disbelieving) government has been forced to acknowlwhich seems to have involved denizens of the other world as edge the devastating economic reality of the problem, prowell as living survivors. According to Gustafsson, the human nouncing it a public health menace, and moreover permits, cost of the war to the Vietnamese people was staggering: more despite ideological reluctance, the practice of spiritistic folk than 5 million dead; 300,000 missing; 300,000 orphans; medicine; for it is the local mediums, sensitives, and diviners 64,000 injured, and 40,000 killed by landmines and unexwho seem to know whats going on and, often at great finanploded ordnance, since the end of the war in 1975; nor should cial cost to the victim, can perform salutary rites and provide we omit the 250,000 boat people who died during attempts useful counsel for palliating the rage of the spirits. This may to escape nor the 10 million refugees, said to be a conserconsist of something as simple as putting a nice frame around vative number. The number of key importance to the angry a dead uncles photo. Something strange is undoubtedly hapghost question is the 300,000 missing but no-doubt-dead pening in the Vietnam that America tried famously to bomb bodies. According to the belief system, that means 300,000 back to the stone age. To understand what this is, at least two angry ghosts are out there wandering about looking for ways premises from the authors narrative must be underscored. to vent their fury. Suppose the invisible afterworld corridors The first has to do with the all-important Confucian eledo indeed swarm with such agents of ill willtruly horrifying ment in Vietnamese burial practices, and their significance is the belief that there is no hope of relief for them, no prosfor the psychic integrity of the entire community. The picpect of ever escaping from this anarchic psychic inferno. The ture one gets from Gustafssons account of these practices, author keeps hammering home this picture of hopelessness; which are taken very seriously, points to something probably its a hellishly narrow place to be trapped in, dependent on the pretty strange for most Western individualists. According to kindness and remembrance of the living, forever trying to be
book review by Michael Grosso
noticed, if necessary, by means of cruel and spiteful actions. The author provides an appendix, titled Table of Suffering, summarizing what she learned from her 190 victims of otherworldly aggression. They cover all types, genders, ages. Besides basic facts about the informants (both genders, all ages), we learn of their symptoms, their diagnoses, and their treatments. The book also covers individual cases in greater detail. The possession experience presents a roster of symptoms, which suggest the displacement of the normal personality and something else forcing its way in, and in no gentle or kindly manner. Some symptoms are mainly physical and may indicate the resistance and discomfort in being displaced; for example, pains, tremors, shaking, convulsions, skin disorders, listlessness, and unexplained illnesses. (The author repeatedly underscores the failure of physicians to account for most of these symptoms.) Other symptoms show the outline of the invading personality itself: voices, obsessive thoughts, inability to concentrate, amnesia, nightmares, violent behavior, sleepwalking, and the often-mentioned out-of-character behaviors. The third item is diagnosis. What to make of these unexplained symptoms and who provides the diagnosis? First of all, the diagnoses are intuitive, not definitive or rigorous in a quantitative way. The responses show a handful of popular sources of diagnosis, beginning with the victims own self-diagnosis. Besides oneself, mediums, fortune tellers, and family members may confirm that one is possessed and by whom: often family members (from great grandmothers to sons), friends, strangers, and lots of ghouls. (The only kind of ghoul that fits the role here is the Arabian Desert ghoul said to prey on travelers.) Finally, we are given information about the treatment in each case and its success or failure. For example, in one case, Symptoms stop after installing dead comrades memory in pagoda, becomes no problem after funeral service in Cambodia (per mediums advice). But then in another case, Symptoms persist, even after victim confesses to family that he stole offerings of food and money meant for these spirits. Generally, the symptoms stop or lessen when the possessed person follows the recommendations of the medium or other advisors. In the cases where the symptoms persist, despite the victim following instructions, the failure is attributed to lack of sincerity or responsibility. And then there are cases like the man diagnosed as possessed by his dead wife. Effects of the treatment were unclear: Victim must renounce sex with prostitutes, per mediums instructions: status of symptoms unknown. Often partly or with great difficulty, the angry ghosts can be laid to rest, or at least pacified. What does it take? These wretched spirits need to be recognized, remembered, memorialized, celebrated, and honored. In this thought-world, when the living adopt the right attitude and behavior toward the dead, the dead become gods, guides, guardians to the living. This is the basis of Confucian ancestor worship. When the living ungenerously isolate themselves from the dead, and fail for whatever reason to pay their respects, there is war between the living and the dead. By creating 300,000 possible angry ghosts, modern body-annihilating military technology vastly multiplies pain and suffering for possible afterlife survivors,
and certainly for the haunted victims. The war has made Hell Day a popular holiday in Vietnam when people go out of their festive way to honor and make offerings and hope to placate the swarms of angry ghosts out there. Are we afforded any evidence that there really are such conscious angry ghosts? Gustafsson abstains from making any explicit claims, and was not aiming to produce proof in the manner of a parapsychologist, but I felt she was quietly persuaded that the touted ghosts were objectively real. I first heard her on public radio describe the case of an American who upon returning to Vietnam for a visit had symptoms of possession; the American, normally very even-tempered, began to have nightmares and shouted in his sleep furious outbursts in perfectly grammatical Vietnamese. His girlfriend was witness to these displays, and vouched for their grammatic excellence. This story would pack a wallop if the American knew no Vietnamese; but he had moved to Vietnam and did have a working knowledge of the language. What was impressive to witnesses was the fluency and idiomatic style of his execrations. There is a broad argument meant to support, or at least suggest, the hypothesis that ghostly survival is the best explanation of the symptoms experienced by the authors informants. If the ritual recognition of the angry ghosts is effective, the symptoms do ease off or completely vanish; in short, it looks as if the ghosts are responding to the ritual treatment. The trouble is that the links in the chain of the argument are too fuzzy. We have at best a very sketchy medical knowledge of the symptoms. There is another crucial question. How did the angry ghost get identified as the culprit? Here again were in what looks like a cloudy realm to the outside observer. And finally, the doubter might think: Couldnt all the beneficial effects from the treatments be explained by a powerful placebo effect and a highly active and culturally primed imagination? Perhaps the angry ghosts are really the guilty unconscious of the survivors punishing themselves and trying to make amends. In short, counter explanations could be advanced to explain the angry ghost phenomenon, but theyre not likely to persuade victims. In my opinion, this very well-written and courageous book merits our attention for at least two reasons. First, it points to
By creating 300,000 possible angry ghosts, modern bodyannihilating military technology vastly multiplies pain and suffering for possible afterlife survivors and certainly for the haunted victims.
BACKSCATTER
by P. david Moncrief, Jr.
Vritra and Geomythology

n 1973, geologist Dorothy Vitaliano sought to establish a new discipline called geomythology. As the name implies, geomythology is the study of ancient myths and legends with the expectation that some of them may be more than merely imaginal stories but are actually records and attempted explanations of real geophysical events. The general idea was not new; Euhemerus (c. 300 BCE) had suggested as much long ago. This is the story of one such possible event. In 1993 Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss argued that a major geophysical event, a catastrophic drought lasting centuries, brought down the Akkadian Empire and caused declines of cultures over a wide geographic swath. He cited archaeological evidence indicating that numerous cities in northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria were abandoned for about 300 years. Also found was a short verse remnant called The Curse of Akkad that described a severe drying, fields turning to dust. This hypothesis was met with almost consensus opposition from scholars and researchers who dismissed the verse remnant as a metaphor for something else. Their cherished theories for the event varied, but all avoided the possibility of a major climatological event. Three years later Weiss pointed out that most scholars seemed to be unaware of events in cultures outside their narrow discipline. He pointed out that the declines, which ranged from the Indus to southwestern Europe, happened at the same time, about 4200 years before the present and the effects lasted until about 3900 BP. Since then cores drilled in the Gulf of Oman have shown that during the period in question there was a large increase in deposits of airborne dust indicative of drought. A 300-year Dust Bowl. The geomythological issue I wish to raise here is this: Did a story in the Vedas refer to this megadrought? It is generally
agreed (not uncontroversially) that the Vedas date from about 3500 BP. The Vedic Age lasted until about 2500 BP, when the oral traditions were committed to writing. Were folk stories prior to 3500 incorporated into this body of literature? One story may support this possibility. Joseph Campbell tells the Vedic story of Vritra, a wicked dragon or serpent, who sucked up all the water in the world. ...crouching on the mountainshaving hoarded to himself the waters of the world, so that the universe, deprived for centuries of all fluid whatsoever, had become a waste land. Fortunately, Indra finally Picked up his weapon, the fiery bolt and exploded the bloated Vritra, thus replenishing the world with water. If this is indeed a story to explain this particular climate catastrophe, it would have to date after 3900 BP (the replenishment with water) but not more than a few generations afterward while memories were fairly fresh. I leave it to scholars of the Vedas and the history of the ancient peoples of the region to examine this possibility.
rEFErEncES
Campbell, Joseph, 1962, Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Viking Press, p. 182. Vitaliano, Dorothy B., 1973, Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins, Indiana University Press. Weiss, Harvey, 1996, Desert Storm, The Sciences, MayJune. Weiss, Harvey, (in press), Altered Trajectories: The Intermediate Bronze Age in Syria and Lebanon 22001900 BCE , in A. Killebrew and M. Steiner, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
P. dAvid MoncriEF is the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
REFERENCE POINT, continued from page 19
an area of research that may be of interest to investigators of postmortem survival. As it turns out, much survival evidence is found to relate to violent situations and mortal crisis: most obviously, near-death experiences; also many reincarnation memories, behaviors, and bodily marks; and many hauntings that involve violent death and violent emotion. The hauntings and possessions of angry, aggressive ghosts reported by Gustafsson may be included here, exacerbated by body-vaporizing warfare, and the special problems that result from lack of proper burial. If there is a transition to a next world, the how of the transition must make a difference. The ideal Vietnamese death is peaceful and harmonious with the surviving family. The purpose of this harmonious death is to establish a link
with the invisible world and be led by the wisdom and virtual godlikeness of benevolent ancestors. On the other hand, being instantly blown to smithereens by a bomb might indeed, as the Vietnamese believe, transform a human soul into a permanent agent of festering ill will. The second valuable point is that War and Shadows enlarges our understanding of the scope of human suffering. On any interpretation of the material recounted, war is costly in ways most of us can barely conceive. In the undoubtedly profitable business of war, the profound hell of hatred and misery that we create, not just for survivors but for possible after-death victims, is something we need to reckon with as part of the collateral damage.

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Edge Science

Number 10 March 2012

Current Research and Insights

The Elephants in the Lab:

A publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration

Consciousness Matters: Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences

Vritra and Geomythology by P. David Moncrief, Jr.

cover image: Donovan van Staden/iStockphoto

EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012 / 3

The lunar Effect in the lab

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William K. hartmann/Planetary Science institute

EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012 / 5

Do you like EdgeScience? Do you have a serious interest in scientific anomalies?

Become a member today!

Society for Scientific Exploration

6 / EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012

Percent blind (1999) 0 0.8 2.8 7.0 24.2 85.2

Percent blind (2004) 0.5 2.4 9.3 22.5 36.8 79.1

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Experimental tests for experimenter effects

Photo courtesy of cERn

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10 / EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012

Consciousness Matters: research at the institute of noetic Sciences

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The first extraterrestrial mystical experience?

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Anthropology and the Supernatural:

From Spirits to Consciousness

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Anomalous Experiences in the Field

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Transpersonal Anthropology and the Anthropology of consciousness

Methodologies and Approaches

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The Other Cost of War

book review by Michael Grosso

EDGESCIENCE #10 MARCH 2012 / 19

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Vritra and Geomythology

REFERENCE POINT, continued from page 19

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