[Hans Berger, the inventor of EEG] was a big believer in psychic phenomena: namely telepathy. He believed that there was an underlying physical basis for mental phenomena, and that these mental processes—being physical in nature—could be transmitted between people. Thus, in order to show that psychic phenomena exist, Berger sought to show the nature of the underlying physical processes of thoughts and emotions.
See, if you’re hoping that the existence of telepathy, say, would imply that the mind cannot be reduced to the physical brain, you’re quite mistaken. The real ability to communicate with the dead would indeed imply that separability; but telepathy itself, and psychic phenomena in general, even if they existed, could just as well be purely physical phenomena.
The greatest hope for the idea of consciousness being separable from the physical brain is actually testimony like that of (gak) Ken Wilber, of being fully conscious while flatlining on an EEG, after years of deep meditation. (It would not surprise me at all if the Wilber-admiring Sam Harris got his “not at all sure that consciousness can be reduced to brain function” hope from exactly that phenomena.) But even there, the brain could still be producing EM waves, just at frequencies much higher than anybody has bothered to measure. (Valerie Hunt did studies of the aura utilizing a similar idea.) Or the witnessing, self-aware consciousness of each one of us could be the product of chemicals in the brain, thus not showing up on an EEG.
[Berger] initially studied blood flow and used it as an index to measure “P-energy” (psychic energy) associated with mentation and feelings. Of course, this being prior to the advent of neuroimaging, there was no way to actually measure cerebral blood flow from a person. So Berger made a leap. The brain receives so much blood from the heart (about 20% of the cardiac output), that the brain pulses with each heartbeat (you can check out a video of the human brain pulsing here). Parents with newborns might even be able to notice this phenomenon if they lightly touch the soft spot at the top of their baby’s head.
So the only reason Berger saw the EEG signal in the first place was because he was working with the same patients he was trying to record brain pulsations from. And the only reason he was interested in these brain pulsations was to try and tie cerebral activity (blood flow) to mental states to show that thoughts have a physical basis. And the main reason he cared about that was to provide a theoretical framework through which psychic phenomena could operate!
“Double energy blueprints” and subtle energies are exactly what clairvoyants (and yogis) have claimed to be able to see/sense for ages … and precisely failed to demonstrate, when proper controls are put on the testing of their abilities.
See also Emily Rosa’s testing of practitioners of Therapeutic Touch. (The pathetically muddle-minded attempts at offering competent “criticisms” of her study in that Wikipedia entry show just how solid the experiment actually was: If those are the worst faults anyone can find in her protocol, etc., she’s golden.)
Should any clairvoyant actually pass such competent testing as James Randi has long offered in his Million-Dollar Paranormal Challenge, I for one would be positively delighted to go back to accepting the existence of ethereal doubles and the like. Until then, the proper approach to all this is to recognize that, short of the ontological reality of witnessing consciousness, most paranormal claims—and certainly claims about perceptions of auras and subtle energies—are completely testable, even without the “personal experience” of higher levels of reality on the part of skeptics. That is, materialistic explanations come into play (and are fully appropriate) here, not from a lack of superconscious experiences per se on the part of skeptics, but rather because if these abilities and energies actually existed, someone would have passed the testing and claimed prizes like Randi’s by now.
This is all “boilerplate skepticism” which I for one have detailed many times before, and which anyone familiar with the details/process of how believers become skeptics will likely already know. None of that transition has anything to do with the presence or lack of “personal experience”; it’s rather a product of recognizing how very little one’s own easily misinterpreted and wrongly-elevated “personal experience” actually matters in determining the ontological reality of paranormal claims.
Update: There are plenty of other prizes also available in additional to Randi’s, which were included at the very same link I had previously posted, as indicated by the phrase “prizes like Randi’s.” Here is more direct link to the full list:
Randi has indeed been testing and debunking many of the “best” of the self-deluded crazies who think they have paranormal powers, and doing that left, right and center, for many decades; it is no mere claim. From the Million Dollar Challenge FAQ:
Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied [for his Challenge]. Between 1997 and February 15, 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications.
That’s more than 1,000 fools, frauds and quacks—a drop in the bucket, surely, of all the naked apes who imagine themselves to have paranormal powers, but hardly “a relatively small amount,” by any reasonable criterion for easy dismissal! And it ain’t his fault when applicants withdraw from consideration prior to even taking the preliminary test—I have read some of the back-and-forth he’s had to go through with those flakes, and you honestly couldn’t pay me to put up with the weaseling stupidity he faces from them. In fact, I would not hesitate to take each of those withdrawals, in practice, as a valid “data point” equivalent to his having tested the claims, with the claimant failing the test.
There are certainly “leading lights” in New Age blah-blah who haven’t even applied to be tested by Randi. People like Barbara Ann Brennan and Cynthia Larson. Not to mention Ken Wilber.
If you’ve done your research, even just to the point of reading my past postings on this site, you already know that Larsen is clinically synesthetic … and yet still considers the “auras” she sees (even in photos!) to be real phenomena. Brennan’s claims of how preliminary auras look are completely explicable in terms of basic wave-diffraction phenomena of physics; and her ideas about how pendulums interact with the human energy field are fully explicable in terms of the ideomotor effect. If you think that, when these “leading lights” get such simple things as that provably and ascientifically wrong, that they’re to have anything valuable to say about paranormal phenomena in areas that can’t be so easily tested, you’re royally fooling yourself.
Randi’s sheer quantity of evaluating and testing works out to nearly two applicants per month on average, over forty-five years. If you cannot consider that to be “very scientific” (i.e., to be enough), ponder for a moment how much less scientific is the attempt (which has no place on this rational website) to use the postulated (and hardly settled) existence of “dark matter” as a springboard for hypothesizing the existence of etheric doubles! Randi’s tireless work isn’t “scientific enough,” but “double energy body blueprints” are supposedly not “too much of a stretch” from science??!
Please. If you want to continue that line of thought, do it on Randi’s forums instead. I have no interest in it, much less do I have the time to waste on it.
(When foolish comments appear on my websites, just as back in the day when people would send me links to Ken Wilber’s latest idiocies, I have to take time out of my life to respond to them, otherwise it looks like I can’t respond to them—I have been very open about that problem elsewhere, in explaining why I have not opened my personal blog to comments. I did not allow comments here with the intention of providing a free forum for the support of indefensibly unscientific ideas, with me paying for the bandwidth. If you want to debate the possibility of woo-woo ideas being true, or take a stand about how much more debunking of paranormal claims needs to be done before you’ll accept its long-obvious and unavoidable conclusions, there are other places you can do that. This is not one of them. To refresh: This is my research blog for pulling together all the different strands for explaining how religion evolved from pre-shamanism into orthodox religion and “meditative spirituality.” I don’t want indefensible, Chopra-esque quack-scientific musings diluting and compromising the rational integrity of this site. You are free to pay unintentional homage to his evidence-free view of the world elsewhere.)
It’s certainly not easy to discern a physiological basis for claims about the spontaneous assumption of yoga postures (asanas, mudras), like this from Yogi Amrit Desai, in his “intuitive” discovery of Kripalu Yoga:
[D]uring my routine practice of hatha yoga postures I found my body moving spontaneously and effortlessly while at the same time I was being drawn into the deepest meditation I had ever experienced. The power and intelligence that guided me through this seemingly paradoxical experience of meditation and motion left me in awe and bliss. That morning my body moved of its own volition, without my direction, automatically performing an elaborate series of flowing motions. Many of these “postures” [i.e., asanas] I had never seen even in any yoga book before.
In describing the yips, golfers have used terms such as twitches, staggers, jitters and jerks….
The yips affects between one-quarter and one-half of all mature golfers. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that 33 percent to 48 percent of all serious golfers have experienced the yips. Golfers who have played for more than 25 years appear to be most prone to the condition….
Focal dystonia is mentioned as [a] possibility for the real cause of yips.
Focal dystonia is a neurological condition affecting a muscle or group of muscles in a part of the body causing an undesirable muscular contraction or twisting. For example, in focal hand dystonia, the fingers either curl into the palm or extend outward without control….
Hmm, that’s sort of like an extreme “involuntarily assumed mudra” or asana, isn’t it?
The misfiring of neurons in the sensorimotor cortex, a thin layer of neural tissue covering the brain is thought to cause contractions. The sensorimotor cortex contains “maps” of the human body. Under normal conditions, discrete body parts (such as the individual fingers) occupy their own distinct areas on these sensorimotor cortex maps. However in dystonia these maps cease to be so distinct.
Research showing this initially involved non-human primates that were over-trained on particular finger movements with the result that they developed focal hand dystonia. Examination of their primary somatosensory cortex showed that the representations of the fingers were grossly distorted with finger representations that were segregated in normal animals having become co-represented in the cortex of dystonic animals. Imaging studies on humans have confirmed this finding with individuals with focal hand dystonia having finger representations in their brains that are abnormal in showing fusion compared to those in normals.
The lack of cross-connectivity between areas that are normally segregated in sensory cortex may prevent normal sensorimotor feedback and so contribute to co-contractions of antagonist muscle groups, and inappropriately timed and sequenced movements that underlie the symptoms of focal dystonia of the hand.
I don’t have either of those books currently at hand, but I’m certain that the whole issue of involuntary body movements in spiritual “enlightenment” comes up in them, and that Bentov related that to the circulation of electric currents around the sensory homunculus.
Every physical movement begins as electricity in our brains, i.e., neurons firing in the sensorymotor cortex. There is no reason, in principle, why meditation could not “rewire” our brains to spontaneously produce movements or postures which we ordinarily produce voluntarily.
Indeed, visualization has neurologically real effects, e.g., studies have been done where people who merely visualized shooting a basketball into a hoop improved (nearly?) as much as others who did the actual practice. Could spending a lot of time visualizing things that were less connected to reality then potentially mess up one’s brain, at least to the point of creating spontaneous mudra-like muscle contractions, or putting us into asanas (via a series of such contractions)? Or could a comparable thing happen biochemically, or purely electrically? And then, could different combinations of those contractions (and hence postures) be cycled through as one’s state of consciousness (i.e., brainwaves) changed, e.g., in being “drawn into the deepest meditation”?
I dunno. But it’s a lot more likely than the idea that there’s anything paranormal or divinely inspired in Desai’s experiences, even if those happened exactly as he reported them, with no suggestibility or expectation effects (in prior knowledge of the postures) at all.
Also, if Desai spontaneously assumed a number of postures which really aren’t documented in any yoga books, anywhere (except, by now, in his own books), that argues at least as much for those being a product just of quirks in his own nervous system, as it does for there being any beyond-physiological reality to his experiences.
If you want to move a robot through a series of postures, there’s nothing magical or mysterious about it (unless you don’t understand the mechanisms involved): It’s just a series of “muscle/gear contractions” and relaxations. And wouldn’t it be just like our magical-thinking species to elevate the arbitrary configurations which those turning gears create to the status of something spiritual and mystical, just for not understanding where the (neurological) “vital force” that moves the motors comes from?
The NCAHF issued a position paper on acupuncture that asserts, “Research during the past twenty years has failed to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective against any disease” and that “the perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, operant conditioning, and other psychological mechanisms.” In short, most of the perceived beneficial effects of acupuncture are probably due to mood change, the placebo effect, and the regressive fallacy. Just because the pain went away after the acupuncture doesn’t mean the treatment was the cause. Much chronic pain comes and goes. An alternative treatment such as acupuncture is sought only when the pain is near its most severe level. Natural regression will lead to the pain becoming less once it has reached its maximum level of severity.
Once Bhaduri Mahasaya performed the Bhastrika ["Bellows"] Pranayama before me with such amazing force that it seemed an actual storm had arisen in the room! Then he extinguished the thundering breath and remained motionless in a high state of superconsciousness.
A reader of James Randi’s website writes, on the subject of qi:
1) “Qi” can be translated as “air,” “breath,” “spirit,” “energy,” or a number of other words, depending on its context and use. In fact, “qi” can be used in reference to objects that are entirely solid, and have no “air” aspect whatsoever.
2) The meridian lines that qi energy is supposed to follow bear little resemblance to the circulatory system in the body. Everything that I’ve seen regarding acupuncture indicates that a general theory of energy moving through the body came first, and that later observations about the circulatory and nervous system were used to support that original theory—not the other way around.
I think that the best way to describe “qi” in English is to go back a long time in Chinese history, to their early efforts to understand and classify the world around them. They saw everything as being made up of something they called “qi,” which in this context might best be described as “energy.” This “qi” could be divided into various fractions, or densities, so a cloud would have a much smaller “fraction” of qi than a rock would, but both would still be described and categorized using “qi.” You might consider “qi” as the fundamental unit of matter, but depending on its form and concentration, it could take on many different appearances, and have many different effects.
That was in response to an article in Skeptical Inquirer which Bob Park linked to:
America’s addiction to acupuncture began with New York Times correspondent James Reston’s 1971 trip to China, during which he was operated on for acute appendicitis. Contrary to widespread accounts, he was injected with a standard local anesthetic, not acupuncture. It was two days later that he experienced indigestion with only a traditional Chinese physician on duty. He was treated with moxibustion, a form of acupuncture, and needles were used to “get the qi flowing.” An Alka-Seltzer might have been better.
I already knew that “Traditional Chinese Medicine” was actually “a rag-bag of ideas put together under Chairman Mao to try to fill in the gaps left by a shortage of ‘the superior new medicine.’” But I had no idea that the standard presentation of Reston’s experiences was fabricated, too.
“Only goes to show….”
Because dissection of the human body was culturally discouraged, very little anatomical information was available [in ancient China]. The only opportunity for anatomy lessons came after battles (or executions, where beheading was the preferred method).
Professor Yuan Zhong of Beijing Union Medical University, a member of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, is a specialist in Chinese medical history focusing on medical philosophy. He explains that after the fall of the ax, blood quickly leaves the body and ancient observers assumed that this liquid came from the body cavity, not from the curious, seemingly empty tubes that they later were able to see after the blood had drained away. We now know that these other vessels are the carotid arteries and jugular veins, which transport blood. Ancient observers guessed that because these tubes appeared empty and deflated, that some form of air or special gas must inflate them, hence the name qi (air). They believed that our bodies were inflated and nourished by this special air and that the arteries and veins were simply part of the respiratory system. According to the ancient medical text Ling Shu Jing Shui, this is where the idea of qi began. Pulse diagnosis appeared in China during the early Warring States period (about 2,500 years ago). At that time, doctors believed that what they were feeling were pulses of air (qi), not blood. Later, when closer observations revealed residual blood inside veins (trapped there by the bicuspid valves), the theory of qi was modified to state that veins carried blood and arteries carried air. As early as the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) the famous anatomist Wang Qingren held to the mistaken belief that arteries carried air, not blood. (Donald Mainfort, The Roots of Qi)
[T]he figure of 35% refers to the cumulative effect of everything that is not treatment, which includes not just the actual placebo effect, but more importantly a large component deriving from the body’s natural (evolved, not mystical) ability to heal itself.
Indeed, a more recent study by Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche published in 2001 in the New England Journal of Medicine properly compared the improvement achieved with no treatment to the improvement due to the placebo effect, and found little measurable effect of the placebo….
Moreover, a rational person would conclude from the study of “real” and “fake” acupuncture that there is no such thing as real acupuncture! If pricking patients with toothpicks has the same effect as inserting needles, wouldn’t you surmise that the whole thing is in fact the result of placebo and natural healing, no acupuncture required thank you very much?