Grant - Spooky Science: debunking the pseudoscience of the afterlife

It is not unlikely that more than ninety percent of paranormal literature is rubbish.

Sir Kelvin Spenser, Foreword to From Enigma to Science (1973) by George W. Meek

The history of scientific attempts to research the paranormal can be considered to have had two primary phases. The first began in 1882 with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which came about as a response to the craze for Spiritualism that had been going on ever since the Hydesville rappings case of 1848 (). While originally concerned with attempts to communicate with the dead, testing spirit mediums for fraudulence, and the like, the SPR eventually turned its attention to matters like telepathy and clairvoyance.

The second phase began in 1927, when the American parapsychologist J. B. Rhine set up his laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina. His focus was on bringing scientific experimentation to bear on those purported faculties of mind that the SPR had begun to explore. Effectively, that second phase is still underway, although the work of Rhine himself is held in far lower regard today than it once was. His methods of testing by card-guessing have largely fallen into disuse, but his notion that the paranormal should be investigated by science in the same way as any other phenomenon still holds sway.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously posited that science and religion were two non-overlapping magisteriaa fancy way of saying that both are different ways of explaining the world, and neither has very much of value to say about the other. A similar stance could be taken in the context of science and the supernatural. One operates according to rules of reason and logic; the other does not. Throughout much of human history, however, people have assumed that the supernatural is as real as tangible reality, and have tried to use the tools of rationalism to understand and tame it. On occasion these efforts have been successful, such as when people have discovered that something they thought was part of the supernaturals magisteriumlike comets or, for some TV presenters, the tideswas in fact perfectly explicable in terms of straightforward physics.

A prime example of a phenomenon that was once thought to be supernatural being demystified through the application of the scientific method is mesmerism. The tale of how this came about is by no means a simple one of sciences bright light banishing the shadows.

MESMERISM

Born in 1734 in Konstanz, in whats now Germany, Franz Anton Mesmer graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna. In his degree thesis he proposed that human health could be affected by the gravitational influences of the celestial bodies through the medium of the ether, a sort of undetectable fluid that Isaac Newton had suggested might fill the universe and facilitate transmission of light, heat, gravity, and magnetism. Around this time it was thought that magnets might have healing properties, and Mesmer saw how this seemed to dovetail with his own ideas about the effects of gravity on health; gravity and magnetism were, he reasoned, really just different forms of each other. He thus set about trying to cure people by rubbing strong magnets over them. (This practice still survives in the alternative technique known as magnetotherapy.)

In due course, primarily because others were complaining that hed stolen their ideas, Mesmer concluded that actual magnets werent required. Human beings possessed a hitherto unrecognized spiritual form of magnetism that he called animal magnetism (from anima, the soul). His new therapy involved waving his hands around close to, but not actually touching, the patients body. Like any quack, Mesmer reported sensational results. But in reality some of his results were good, and these occurred when his patients fell into a trance.

A contemporary wood engraving by H. Thiriat showing Franz Anton Mesmer and his assistant at work with a group of aristocratic patients.

In 1785 the French established two commissions to examine the phenomenon of animal magnetism, the more important of the two being that under the auspices of the Acadmie des Sciences, which numbered Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin among its members. It concluded forthrightly that there was no such thing as animal magnetism, and that any cures Mesmer was achieving were effected by the patients own minds. (Nowadays we might attribute this to the placebo effect.) The same went for the mesmeric trances into which some patients fell. The commissions conclusions came agonizingly close to identifying what was really going on, but backed off just before hitting upon the modern concept of suggestion.

In the United Kingdom, the idea of animal magnetism never really caught on; its light flickered briefly but was extinguished by the became enamored of animal magnetism. When the French mesmerist Jules Denis, Baron du Potet, visited London, Elliotson and he conducted experiments in animal magnetism in the public wards of University College Hospital. Since it would be hard to find more suggestible people than the impoverished occupants of nineteenth-century public wards, and since everyone could see how everyone else was reacting to the activities of the two physicians, its not surprising that these experiments were regarded by Elliotson as a resounding success, with lots of trances and (at least temporary) cures. It wasnt long before he was putting on public demonstrations at which point the University College authorities declared themselves no longer amused and fired him.