Veridical apparitions: Sommer excerpt #9

Probably the first modern American psychiatrist to call for a more discerning use of the term ‘hallucination’ on the basis of experiences discussed above was Ian Stevenson, chair of the department of psychiatry and founder of DOPS at the University of Virginia, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Stevenson cited clinical and sociological studies which suggested that ‘hallucinations’ of deceased loved ones are remarkably common in the general population, and that therefore not all ostensible spirit visions were pathological.

Stevenson’s article didn’t provoke any responses from fellow psychiatrists, probably because it offended modern ‘enlightened’ sensibilities by placing emphasis on empirical evidence suggesting that many of such ‘hallucinations’ were not just purely subjective. Apparitions of the dead, Stevenson argued, have been reported to be perceived by more than one credible witness at a time, and are often veridical (‘truth-telling’): They are reported not just by grieving persons who are obviously well aware of a loved one’s death, but there is a wealth of well-corroborated cases indicating that often clear and vivid visions of dead or dying relatives, partners and friends are also seen by people who did not know that the ‘hallucinated’ person had in fact just died or suffered an accident around the moment of the vision. Stevenson cited two cases of veridical apparitions he had investigated himself, as well as classical early works produced by leading members of the SPR, including Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick.

Edmund Gurney

In the light of the historical contexts sketched above, it’s probably unsurprising that the SPR’s first major field research on ‘hallucinations’ – spearhead by Gurney in England – was the first major effort by secular thinkers to actually test Enlightenment assumptions that apparitions were self-evident figments of diseased imaginations. After Gurney’s death in 1888, this work was replicated on behalf of the International Congress of Psychology, with William James being in charge of the American census portion.  Published in 1894 by the SPR, the results of the international census, which drew on responses from over 17,000 participants, essentially confirmed the findings of Gurney’s original study: not only were ‘hallucinations’ in the sane surprisingly common, but they also often included veridical elements.

Skeptical activists cited on Wikipedia as the supposed ‘experts’ on these things have consistently portrayed this SPR material, along with later research by Stevenson and others, as little more than anecdotal ghost stories collected by self-deluded spiritualists. In fact, one of the most influential historical standard texts of the Skeptical genre, a biography of Gurney by amateur historian Trevor Hall, argued that Gurney had killed himself, following devastating scientific critiques and the discover that he had been hoodwinked. Unfortunately, Hall’s account continues to inform even professional historical works, whose authors have been unaware of refutations of Hall’s story, showing in detail that it is based on severe omissions, misrepresentations and other tricks deployed by Hall to make the past fit the orthodoxy of the present.

One of several scholars taken in by Hall was philosopher of science Ian Hacking. Still, on the basis of primary sources which Hacking did study for himself, he acknowledged in an article on the history of statistical randomization that it was in the work of the early SPR where we find the first applications of probabilistic inference. Before advancing into a methodological standard in fields like psychology, biology and medicine, Hacking argued, randomized trials were pioneered by psychical researchers like Gurney and Charles Richet with the specific aim to rule out chance coincidence as a counter explanation for telepathy and veridical hallucinations. Despite his evident antipathies, Hacking therefore admitted that “Throughout these discussions the highest standards of positivist scientific methodology were observed”.

Early psychical researchers applied additional measures to systematically rule out confirmation bias and other issues in their field research on ‘veridical hallucinations’. For example, collectors of the SPR’s census questionnaires were instructed to hammer home to participants the importance of Yeses and Noes in response to the question of whether they had experienced ‘hallucinations’. Also, data coming from spiritualists and other known believers in the paranormal were marked for higher scrutiny. Cases were not simply published on the basis of trust, but personal cross-examinations of claimants and their witnesses were carried out to assess their credibility, and only reports deemed sufficiently strong were printed, together with documents corroborating the veracity of claimed experiences.

And while Skeptics typically like to claim that psychical researchers had not the slightest clue of the pitfalls of eyewitness testimony, by far the most sophisticated and systematic discussion of these problems available at the time is to be found not in a text of conventional psychology, but throughout the two bulky volumes of Gurney’s first case collection of ‘veridical hallucinations’.

Not to be outdone, one year after Gurney’s pilot study, the first experimental study investigating pitfalls of eyewitness testimony was not conducted by a professional psychologist, but by Richard Hodgson of the SPR. Collaborating with a conjuror who fraudulently produced direct ‘spirit writings’ in sealed slates and other physical phenomena of spiritualism, Hodgson tested the reliability of observations of such phenomena in (usually dimly lit) séance rooms. By comparing written statements by observers with the actual events, Hodgson was able to demonstrate expectations and prior beliefs had indeed produced rather grave distortions in their perception and memories of the witnessed ‘phenomena’.

It was this rigor and quality of methods employed by Gurney, Myers, the Sidgwicks, Hodgson and others in the SPR which prompted William James’s decision to actively collaborate with them for the remainder of his life. James also often publicly protested against polemical attacks and misrepresentations of the methods of psychical research by several ‘enlightened’ fellow psychologists in Germany and the US, who actively manufactured what James called the “newspaper and drawing-room myth”, according to which “soft-headedness and idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy” in the SPR, “and general wonder sickness its dynamic principle”.

For example, in a review of Gurney’s study of ‘veridical hallucinations’, James stated in Science journal that it displayed a combination of qualities “assuredly not found in every bit of so-called scientific research that is published in our day”. A decade later, he took it up a notch:

were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level of critical consciousness.

And a critical but fair study of this early material, which is now freely available in digital format, certainly confirms James’s impressions.

Unsurprisingly, however, such public endorsements by James as the leader of the American psychological profession would only make other psychologists ramp up their efforts to demarcate their fledgling discipline from politically dangerous associations with the ‘occult’ A comparatively harmless example of such ‘boundary-work was the appropriation of Hodgson’s study of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony by Joseph Jastrow, an ‘enlightened’ psychologist on a life-long mission to eradicate paranormal belief at all cost. Jastrow, America’s first major popularizer of psychology, cited Hodgson’s findings to imply they demonstrated the wholesale fallibility of testimony for all psychic phenomena.

Jastrow here pioneered a basic strategy adopted by Skeptics and their champions in academic psychology up to the present day: The application of insights from the psychology of error without limits on a general, abstract level to explain away any belief in the paranormal, as an excuse to bypass systematic engagement with the best concrete evidence and cases.

However, psychical researchers were not just the first to systematically formulate and experimentally demonstrate the fallibility of perception and memory. The primary sources also show they went out of their way to apply the lessons learnt from these insights to systematically eliminate or limit errors – to ensure, one could say, the sifted, published evidence would stand in a court of law. In the case of research on apparitions, for example, it’s simply not true that psychical researchers were typically satisfied with cases of ambiguous impressions reported to be perceived in low light, at long range, fleetingly, or by uncritical people in a state of expectation or similar conditions known to be associated with pathological and non-pathological hallucinations. On the contrary, the bulk of published cases has focused on perceptions of vivid apparitions over the course of several minutes at close range and in bright light, and under such conditions they have also been reported to be perceived collectively, i.e., by more than one credible witness.

Moreover, while Skeptics typically assume that memories of anomalous experiences are embellished over time to inflate their significance, those who have actually tested this assumption by re-interviewing recipients found that experiences are usually remembered consistently, over the course of up to 20 years.

This is of course not to claim that psychical researchers were infallible and never made mistakes. But anybody who begins their research by studying the primary sources with a critical but open mind, instead of simply relying on Skeptical secondary accounts, will agree that on average considerable pains have been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. A standard move by Skeptics to dismiss all this material off-hand is of course to echo David Hume and simply ‘explain’ it on a general level by fraud. But as William James observed, anybody who suggests fraud as a scientific hypothesis should remember that

in science as much as in common life an hypothesis must receive some positive specification and determination before it can be profitably discussed; and a fraud which is no assigned kind of fraud, but simply ‘fraud’ at large, fraud in abstracto, can hardly be regarded as a specially scientific explanation of specific concrete facts.

In other words: unless a critic can provide specific evidence that concrete precautions taken by serious researchers against fraud have failed, general accusations of fraud are merely polemical and impede rather than advance actual scientific inquiry.

 

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.