Overcoming scientific taboos: Cook excerpt #2

 John Archibald Wheeler            

Nick Cook writes: For many people, the pain of ridicule – and, worse, ostracism – whether they are media, academics, or any other career-professional, outweighs the pleasure that can come from the pursuit of knowledge. “In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it,” said John Archibald Wheeler, the theoretical physicist (a man, ironically, ill-disposed to parapsychology). Long before I had heard this aphorism, I realised I had been unwittingly applying it in my journalism – not always to my long-term career advantage.

And I learned, second-hand, about its effect on material science. Parallel to my journalism, I had embarked on a career as a writer, initially of fiction, later of non- fiction. In between times, I ‘ghost-wrote’ – that is, I would occasionally write the autobiographical books of people who were either too busy, too famous or perhaps unqualified to write their stories themselves.

One such (he was too busy) was an eminent psychiatrist, from whom I learned a great deal about the physical workings of the human mind.

Something that came to interest him greatly was the out-of-body experience (OBE), which had begun to crop up increasingly in his clinical work. This, for him, was an anomaly that needed to be explored. He was led to the work of Susan Blackmore, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England, who had written extensively about near-death experiences (NDEs) as a formidably rigorous sceptic – her belief being that the NDE was an essentially physiological event brought on by lack of oxygen, the structure of the brain’s visual cortex and other factors.

Her explanation sat comfortably with my psychiatrist’s own training. Informally amongst his trauma patients - especially a small group of them who had made little to no progress towards a cure - he began asking them one-by-one if ‘anything odd’ had happened when they had been exposed to their trauma – anything ‘beyond their understanding’. Not altogether to his surprise - but very much to theirs (that they were even being asked the question) – all of them revealed that they had gone ‘out- of-body’ during the life-threatening event that had triggered their PTSD. When the psychiatrist decided to share this statistical eureka moment with a group of psychotherapists at a professional seminar soon afterwards, he was greeted with silence, accompanied by numerous strange looks. Nobody wanted to know, he said, because, in his world, he had just brought up a taboo – even though he subscribed heavily to the Blackmore view that what his patients had experienced had been nothing spookier than a hallucination. And this was as recently as the late 1990s.

By coincidence, at the time that he told me this, the world of science was beginning to come to terms with what may turn out to be the biggest scientific anomaly of our times: the riddle posed by observations that the universe isn’t expanding at the constant rate predicted by the ‘Big Bang’ and general relativity – that, instead, its expansion is accelerating. This led science to introduce us to a form of energy – ‘dark energy’ – that explains how an accelerating, expanding universe might be accounted for.

Ninety-five per cent of the total mass-energy content of the cosmos is composed of dark energy and an analogue hypothetical form of matter known as ‘dark matter’. As is clear from the millions of words that have been written about these subjects in scientific papers and journals ever since their ‘discovery’, science has exhibited no awkwardness at all during its discussion of these terms – this, despite the corollary to the whole conundrum: that it – we - can account only for five per cent of existence.

What this tells us about science’s attitude to the so-called paranormal – for this, of course, is what we are really referring to in our discussion of the anomalous phenomena associated with the permanent survival of consciousness post-death – is that we’re not just talking about a science problem here, but one of communication. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.