Mental Mediumship: From Boston to the Lab

Mental Mediumship: From Boston to the Lab May 17, 2014 21:43:27 GMT -5

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Post by salexanderhardison on May 17, 2014 21:43:27 GMT -5

Bostonian Leonora Piper, perhaps the most well-known (and studied) trance medium of all time, once described her mindset on entering the trance condition as if something "passed over" her brain, as if she had been "etherized" -other mediumistic claimants have made similar statements about their experiences (speaking specifically of the trance kind). Piper held a prominent role in the history of psychical research as the first really enigmatic medium whom the SPR and the ASPR investigated; many important researchers, ranging from William James to the ever-skeptical Frank Podmore, became convinced of her access to supernormal information in her trance state; even further, brilliant researchers like Richard Hodgson and James H. Hyslop became convinced that she really spoke to the dead. Without entering into a long analysis of the Piper case, it suffices to mention her as the first really significant mental medium that either Society (either in America or Britain) investigated.

Other mediums came and went, including Mrs. Rosalind Thompson, the woman that convinced Frederic Myers that his long-dead love, Annie Marshall, had not only survived death, but was reaching out to him from beyond that great divide of life and death. Also, it pays to mention the automatists ("mediums" is a bit question-begging, really) involved in the cross correspondences: "Mrs. Willett", Mrs. Margaret Verrall and her daughter, Helen, "Mrs. Holland", "Mrs. King" and the Mac family immediately spring to mind -Mrs. Piper was also involved in them. The correspondences were allegedly designed by FWH Myers and other deceased SPR members from "the afterlife" to provide convincing evidence for survival beyond the physical. To summarize the idea of the C-Cs using as few words as possible, different automatists from all over the world started apparently getting communications from a "Myers control"; when correspondences were being attempted, the automatists would seem to acquire fragmented pieces of a coherent message and the "bits" made no sense until they were compiled together and/or a "key" was provided by what could be described as the Script Intelligence.

The SPR's Proceedings and its journal are full of material relating to the C-Cs, particularly in the publications from the early 1900s to the 1930s. Publications relating to the C-Cs died down after an approximately 30 year period of continuity; then, after the death of "Mrs. Willett", who was revealed to be Mrs. Winifred Coombe-Tennant (a prominent woman in British politics and the first female delegate to the League of Nations), The Palm Sunday Case was published in 1960 by Jean Balfour. This revealed the first part of material hidden away in the SPR archives that seemed to demonstrate a story of undying love from beyond the grave, relating to Arthur Balfour, the former British Prime Minister. Soon after that, Salter's The Rose of Sharon, which dealt with a case originating from the automatism of Margaret Verrall and a Scottish family who were trying their hand at automatic writing, appeared.

A few objections have been made against the C-Cs as providing conclusive evidence of survival, but the most problematic are the possibilities of chance coincidence and over-eager interpretation on the part of the investigators who were trying to interpret the scripts (because of the obtuse and apparently "cryptic" nature of the automatic material). The possibility of chance as an explanation for the material has been explored in the past, primarily with negative results; but, in a 2003 article by Christopher Moreman from the JSPR, "meaning" was found amid randomly selected material with a group suggesting that this could have factored into (and might largely explain) the original C-C material. This isn't yet demonstrated and Keen and Roy raised criticisms of the study in their reviews; they held that the pseudo-scripts didn't capture the essence of the C-Cs and that Moreman was using several explanations, including psi from the living, to explain away more specific references in the scripts. Whatever the ultimate solution may be to the problems they raise, we now leave the correspondences.

Gladys Osborne Leonard, a medium often considered nearly as significant as Mrs. Piper, because of her SPR work (and the use of proxy sittings and book tests with her), left me with a sour taste in my mouth; I am far less impressed by her than I am with the Piper cases, the material from "Mrs. Willett" and even the C-Cs. The best examples of her "mediumistic displays" strike me as wanting when compared to the likes of Piper and, even in the proxy cases, I think that confirmation bias would probably be a good explanation for a lot of her "successes" with sitters. That's at least from my reading of the material she produced.

I could list many more examples of famous trance/automatic mediums, which would include luminaries like Eileen Garrett and perhaps even Hyslop's "Mrs. Chenoweth" (Minnie Meserve Soule), but that suffices to give the history of mental mediumship research some context. I'll not be providing an extensive reference list for the information here, since it's simply a forum post; I will include some simple references at the end, which are all online, for one who would like to read on and perhaps extend their education relating to these areas.

All of that research, which was historical, leads into modern attempts at bringing the study of mediumship into the lab; there was an early 1930s study conducted by J.G. Pratt (with Garrett) that acquired highly significant results and, to my knowledge, it was the first study that attempted to control for confirmation bias and exclude sensory leakage (there were actually two studies done and one can purchase monographs from the Parapsychology Foundation's "Psi Mart"). In many respects, it strikes me as being more well-controlled than most of the contemporary attempts at bringing mediumship into the lab and, indeed, the results were very positively in favor of anomalous cognition on the part of Garrett; but, it could be that the less-than-exciting results in modern mediumship research are expected -after all, a lot of the ordinary, non-trance mediums of today will claim that in the trance state more specific information will "come through". And, as I've shown above, nearly all of the "mediums" thoroughly studied in the historical literature were trance mediums or automatists of some kind.

Focusing specifically on modern mediumship research, we find the very questionable (flawed; presumptuous) work of Dr. Gary Schwartz, whose book The Afterlife Experiments brought him both a lot of attention and criticism. Avoiding James Randi's more or less rhetorical "critique", Ray Hyman's and Daryl Bem's were more on point. But Schwartz came back later (in the scheme of things) and published the results of a triple-blind study that was surprisingly well-conducted (possibly because of the contributions of Julie Beischel, then not as well-known for her work with mediums). The problem here, of course, is that the sample-size in the study was very low.

After Schwartz's initial work came the work of Tricia Robertson and Professor Archie Roy, both members of the Scottish SPR; particularly, their work was criticized on statistical grounds and on the grounds that a "stacking effect" might have possibly accounted for the data (which were positive; "stacking" may have occurred, since the sitters were not blinded to each other and could have influenced their ratings, thereby greatly exaggerating or diminishing the effect -if it were even present).

We have the Wiseman and O'Keefe study, which resulted in non-significant results, and then the later Kelly-Archangel studies; the latter had nothing to "write home about" in the first published study, with the second being positive. While the studies should be appreciated on ground of the effort expended into them, the second study (the one which found significance) introduced a few methodological flaws (that the authors actually wrote about in the publication, though they felt the effect on the results was minimal).

Finally, we are met with the interesting (and thus-far significant) work done at the Windbridge Institute. The controls imposed seem to be fairly close to "ideal", if there can be such a thing -clearly a lot of work has been put into their research and both Julie Beischel (and her husband, Mark) should be rightly commended for their efforts. But, the results have not yet been replicated by other researchers and I strongly incline toward thinking that their assumption of "anomalous cognition" being present in the studies is a bit presumptuous, especially taking that into light (and the, again, less than ideal significance levels in their own studies). For further reading on lab mediumship, see the references at the end of the post.

All of this (which took over an hour or so to type, I'd estimate) leads to the question: Where do you, the reader, think and feel that mediumship research should go in the next few years? Are you happy with the current state of things? To me, personally, I'd like to see a return to the roots of mediumistic research -studying the extremes of alleged mediumistic expression, like motor-automatisms and trance phenomena. The most promising (and important) research thus far done was certainly a product of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's up to us where we take our inquiries from this point on and any progress will certainly rely on devotion and an Everest of effort.

Post by salexanderhardison on May 17, 2014 21:43:27 GMT -5

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