Transplanted personalities. . .

Some fascinating anecdotes about personalities being transplanted along with donor organs. This is obviously compatible with field theories of memory like Sheldrake's morphic resonance and incompatible with reductionistic neuralism. . .

H/T Ulrich Mohrhoff

David Chalmers and John Horgan discuss consciousness

If you haven't yet, go watch this fascinating video of Chalmers and Horgan discussing the nature of consciousness.

Why do so many people resist science?

This self-congratulatory essay has been gathering a lot of commentary around the blogosphere. Basically authors Bloom and Weisberg are posing the question (and quite a pose it is) 'why are so many non-scientists so deluded about reality? (of course we scientists have it in the bag)'

From that fundamental misunderstanding of science as a position, not a method, Bloom and Weisberg go on to enumerate their prejudices:

Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions, the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences, the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies, and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination.

Bloom and Weisberg sneer at these beliefs as "unscientific". But of course what is unscientific is to make a dogmatic judgement for or against the reality of a phenomenon without evidence. Actually, most of their "roll of anti-scientific errors" are in fact supported by scientific research and anecdotal evidence of the highest quality. These two authors seem to feel that all belief systems should be discounted, except their own, which cannot be questioned or examined scientifically because it is a priori true.

The question must be asked, why do people like Bloom and Weisberg resist the scientific inquiry of their materialistic belief system?

Fashionable stupidity

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. - Carl Gustav Jung

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. - Jerry Fodor

H/T: Ulrich Mohrhoff

Great interview with Deborah Blum

Michael Tymn begins his interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum by recounting a brief history of the history of psychic research:

A century ago, roughly between 1885 and 1925, some distinguished scholars and scientists conducted some very thorough investigations of mediums. Their objective was to determine if spirits were really communicating through the mediums and, concomitantly, whether consciousness survives bodily death. Almost without exception, they came to the same conclusion: that spirit communication was real and that consciousness does survive physical death. The few exceptions accepted that certain mediums were not charlatans; they simply didn't know what to make of it and sat on the fence to protect themselves from ridicule by their closed-minded colleagues, who felt it was beneath their dignity to consider such foolishness.

When I see modern scholars and scientists aping those “closed-minded colleagues” of yesteryear and their ancient ancestors, I've got to believe that evolution has come full circle. Either that, or there are checks and balances in the evolutionary plan to make sure that we don't progress too rapidly. A recent example of what I am talking about is a comment in TIME Magazine by Steven Pinker, a Harvard University psychologists, that “attempts to contact the souls of the dead” by scientists of a century ago “turned up only cheap magic tricks.”

Having thoroughly studied the research done by those psychical researchers of a century ago, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could make such a statement, unless he or she hasn't really dug into the material and is simply suffering from the aping syndrome, the tendency to want to look bright and not foolish by smirking, scoffing, and sneering at things that are beyond the grasp of current science.

After introducing us to Blum's area of research, Tymn goes on to ask some good questions which Blum adroitly answers. Here's the first:

Tymn: What prompted you to write the book?

Blum: Curiosity. I had been researching the early history of psychology for another book and I kept finding references to William James losing his mind, going astray into the world of the weird. And I thought, ‘Well, that's strange because I thought James was considered an intellectual statesman.' So I got a book that Gardner Murphy had put together called ‘William James and Psychical Research.' And as soon as I read it, I saw the possibilities. First, James was far more adventurous and less stuffy than I'd always thought. His personality and that of his correspondents - Fred Myers, Edmund Gurney, Oliver Lodge - just shone in their writing. Second, I found myself agreeing with James perspective on the attitude of science toward psychical studies. More than 100 years ago, he wrote: ‘The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pink one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult.' And that is as true today as it was then. And finally, I realized that there were some wonderful inexplicable supernatural events, uncovered by this group that I wanted to recreate. One of them, I use as the opening of my book - it's called ‘The Woman on the Bridge'.

Now go read Tymn's interview, and check out the rest of his blog while you are at it!

(HT: Michael Prescott)

Suppression of ideas. . .

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, it has no place in the endeavour of science. - Carl Sagan

A cult?

The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pink one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult. - William James

When half a brain is better than a whole. . .

A fascinating article showing how the brain is able to heal and reroute functionality, even when half of it is removed. Here are a few excerpts:

The operation known as hemispherectomy—where half the brain is removed—sounds too radical to ever consider, much less perform. In the last century, however, surgeons have performed it hundreds of times for disorders uncontrollable in any other way. Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.

The first known hemispherectomy was performed on a dog in 1888 by German physiologist Friedrich Goltz. In humans, neurosurgeon Walter Dandy pioneered the operation at Johns Hopkins University in 1923 on a brain tumor patient. (That man lived for more than three years before ultimately succumbing to cancer.). . .

Nowadays, the surgery is performed on patients who suffer dozens of seizures every day that resist all medication, and which are due to conditions that mostly afflict one hemisphere. "These disorders are often progressive and damage the rest of the brain if not treated," University of California, Los Angeles, neurosurgeon Gary Mathern says. Freeman concurs: "Hemispherectomy is something that one only does when the alternatives are worse."

Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. A recent study found that 86 percent of the 111 children who underwent hemispherectomy at Hopkins between 1975 and 2001 are either seizure-free or have nondisabling seizures that do not require medication. The patients who still suffer seizures usually have congenital defects or developmental abnormalities, where brain damage is often not confined to just one hemisphere, Freeman explains.

Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. "One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely," Freeman says.

Of course, the operation has its downside: "You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost," Freeman says.

Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. If the left side of the brain is taken out, "most people have problems with their speech, but it used to be thought that if you took that side out after age two, you'd never talk again, and we've proven that untrue," Freeman says. "The younger a person is when they undergo hemispherectomy, the less disability you have in talking. Where on the right side of the brain speech is transferred to and what it displaces is something nobody has really worked out."

Don't set an impossible bar. . .

Here is the second minor quibble with Alex I mentioned in my last post.


Stephen Novella stated the following:

In the end we have the same goals, design research that is carried out in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you believe, that the results will be valid despite the belief of the researcher...

Alex cheered this comment multiple times in the podcast. However I am not sure how realistic this is. Even clinical research trials in medicine show strong lab and experimenter effects, and standard psychology experiments do as well. I don't see how anyone can expect and hope that parapsychology experiments will ever be conducted without experimenter effects, since no other human subject science is able to do so. Sheep / goat performance differences for experimenters are the rule in parapsychology as in other fields of human-subject experimental science. Additionally, if the psi hypothesis is correct, then psi influence can work both for believers and disbelievers in psi phenomena to reveal or obscure psi effects.

This does not mean that every experiment by a sheep will demonstrate results, nor that every experiment by a goat will point at the null hypothesis. But there is a definite tendency for this in psi research, as well as clinical trials, standard psychology experiments, animal experiments, and other experiments with probabalistic results.

I'd also suggest additionally that if one's goal is primarily to "prove" psi or spiritual reality and "defeat" materialism once and for all one might well find oneself walking down the path tread by Susan Blackmore and Louie Savva, and ending up in the same place as they did. Because that kind of motivation does not seem to be correlated with fostering psi phenomena.