Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (Scribner Classics, 1997), 35–36 (story of her beginning work in death studies at Chicago hospital), 172–74 (story of farmer).

  Russell Friedman, “Broken Hearts,” Psychology Today (September 21, 2009), accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/broken-hearts/200909/no-stages-grief

  “The Myth of the Stages of Dying, Death, and Grief,” Skeptic 14, no. 2 (2008), accessed October 26, 2010, grief.net/Myth%20of%20Stages.pdf

  Author’s note: It may appear a contradiction that her five stages are often critiqued, yet ODAD remains required reading. In the end, academics now take a less dogmatic view of Kübler-Ross’s stages—seeing them less as gospel and more as a rough guide. But for a primer on just what’s happening inside one of those darkened hospital rooms, she remains tough to beat.

  Raymond Moody, Life after Life (HarperOne, 2001).

  Author’s note: The cadre of people gathered around Kübler-Ross’s memory act, in metaphorical terms, not altogether unlike soldiers manning a barricade. The people I interviewed for this story, particularly Dianne Gray, all say they encounter a wide variety of people who see Kübler-Ross in diametrically opposed ways—both positive and negative. That Kübler-Ross herself felt personally wounded by the criticism of her that mounted over the years is not surprising; that the people who knew her best are still dealing with and responding to that criticism seems something else entirely and speaks to our desire to build up or tear down people depending mostly on whether or not they seem to symbolize our own worldviews.

  Holcomb B. Noble, “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 78, Dies; Psychiatrist Revolutionized Care of the Terminally Ill,” New York Times, August 26, 2004.

  Ken Ross, Interviews, March, April, June, and August 2009.

  The following nine articles provide a strong overview of the role cognitive dissonance plays in the way we develop and defend our worldviews.

  Vincent van Veen, “Neural Activity Predicts Attitude Change in Cognitive Dissonance,” Nature Neuroscience 12, no. 11 (2009): 1469–74.

  C. S. Carter, “Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Conflict Detection: An Update of Theory and Data,” Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience 7, no. 4 (2007): 367–79.

  V. van Veen, “Conflict and Cognitive Control in the Brain,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2006): 237–40.

  Joshua Gowin, “Why It’s Hard to Stop Believing in Santa Claus,” Psychology Today, (November 17, 2009), accessed October 26, 2010. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/200911/why-it-s-hard-stop-believing-in-santa-claus

  Daniel Levine, “Cognitive Dissonance, Halo Effects, and the Self-Esteem Trap,” Psychline 2, no. 3 (1998): 25–26.

  Daniel Levine, “Negotiating Cognitive Dissonance,” Explorations in Common Sense and Common Nonsense, 123–50, accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.uta.edu/psychology/faculty/levine/EBOOK/

  Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Me (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

  J. A. Bargh et al., “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist 54, (1999): 462–79.

  Rose Winters, Interviews, January, February, March, and May 2009.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, The Wheel of Life (Touchstone, 1997): 22–25 (parents, early childhood), 35–36 (early inclination to act as protector of those weaker than herself), 41–42 (early history with religion), 47–48 (conflict with father over career), 110 (discriminated against for gender), 114–17 (Manhattan State Hospital), 129–34 (her first lecture on death and dying), 176–78 (Mrs. Schwartz), 188 (claims to interview 20,000 people), 201–8 (history with Barham, whom she refers to as “B”). Author’s note: Like ODAD, this book is referenced often. Required reading for anyone interested in Kübler-Ross.

  Mwalimu Imara, Interviews, October, November 2009, January, February 2010. Author’s note: Imara’s name when he first worked with Kübler-Ross was Renford Gaines. He subsequently changed his name to reflect his African heritage. For clarity’s sake, I refer to him by his current name throughout this book.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, The Tunnel and the Light (Marlowe, 1999): 86–87.

  Loudon Wainright, “A Profound Lesson for the Living,” Life, November 21, 1969: 36–43.

  Author’s note: One of the great, confusing aspects of Kübler-Ross’s career arises from her flair for exaggeration. She found skeptics such a drag that she sought to quell their objections by claiming to study twenty thousand people who had died and come back. The math alone suggests these figures were impossible. If she had, for instance, run across one person a day, every day of the week, with an NDE story, it would have taken her fifty-five years to reach twenty thousand. Imara puts this down to “Elisabeth’s way of saying she had accumulated plenty of evidence. This wasn’t a handful of stories.” His claim is that he and Kübler-Ross filled two deep filing cabinet drawers with such stories. In short, Kübler-Ross accumulated enough stories to qualify as “plenty,” but far less than twenty thousand.

  For the 20,000 reference, see Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “Living and Dying,” On Life After Death, (1991), chapter 2.

  American Heart Association, “History of CPR,” accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3012990

  G. R. S. Mead, The Vision of Aridaeus (Kessinger, 2010): 17–25.

  Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: 70, accessed October 21, 2010, www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/tdquincey/Opium-Eater.pdf

  Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come (Oxford Univ. Press, 1996): 70.

  Pim van Lommel, “Near Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–42.

  Sam Parnia et al., “A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of The Incidence, Features and Aetiology of Near Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors,” Resuscitation 48, no. 2 (February 2001): 149–56.

  Bruce Greyson, “Incidence and Correlates of Near-Death Experiences in a Cardiac Care Unit,” General Hospital Psychiatry 25, no. 4, (July–August 2003): 269–76.

  Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2010): 5–19.

  Alex Tsakiris, “Christian Theologian Claims Near Death Experience Not Communications with Divine,” Skeptiko, July 7, 2010, accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.skeptiko.com/christian-theologian-claims-near-death-experience-not-devine/

  Russel Noyes Jr., “Aftereffects of Pleasurable Western Adult Near Death Experiences,” Handbook of Near Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009): 41–62.

  Diane Corcoran, Interview, October 2009.

  Glen Brimer, Interview, October 2009.

  Mary Roach, Spook (Norton, 2006).

  Alex Tsakiris, “Dr. Jeffrey Long Takes on Critics of Evidence of the Afterlife”, Skeptiko, accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.skeptiko.com/jeffrey_long_takes_on_critics_of_evidence_of_the_afterlife/#more–649

  Sam Parnia, Interview, January 2010.

  D. Luke, “Lecture report: Inducing Near-Death States Through the Use of Chemicals—Dr. Ornella Corazza,” Paranormal Review 43 (2007): 28–29.

  Peter Fenwick, “Science and Spirituality: A Challenge for the 21st Century,” talk delivered at the Bruce Greyson Lecture from the International Association for Near-Death Studies 2004 Annual Conference, accessed October 26, 2010, www.larslanke.nl/download/Science%20and%20Spirituality.pdf

  Christopher C. French, “Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors,” S. Laureys, ed., Progress in Brain Research 150 (2005): 356–57.

  Karl Jansen, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2004): 134–35, 137–164.

  B. B. Collier, “Ketamine and the Conscious Mind,” Anaesthesia 27 (1972): 120–34.

  A. Bianchi, “Comments on ‘The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor,’ ” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16, no. 1 (1997): 71–78.

  D. K. Kim, “Ketamine Asso
ciated Psychedelic Effects and Dependence,” Singapore Medical Journal 44, no. 1 (2003): 31–34.

  R. E. Johnstone, “A Ketamine Trip,” Anesthesiology 39 (1973): 460–61.

  Rick Strassman, “Endogenous Ketamine-Like Compounds and the NDE,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 27–42.

  Gerald Woerlee, The Unholy Legacy of Abraham (booklocker.com, 2008): 136–138, 282–289. Accessed October 26, 2010, www.unholylegacy.woerlee.org/images/unholylegacy.pdf

  Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live, ebook (Prometheus Books, 1993): Loc. 87–89, 616–57, 736–38, 1217–20, 1309–57, 2536–80.

  Susan Blackmore, “Experiences of Anoxia: Do Reflex Anoxic Seizures Resemble NDEs?” Journal of Near-Death Studies 17 (1998): 111–120.

  Bruce Greyson et al., “Explanatory Models for Near Death Experiences,” Handbook of Near Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009): 219–20.

  Sam Parnia, What Happens When We Die? (Hay House, 2006): 21. Author’s note: I interviewed Parnia in February 2009.

  Alex Tsakiris, “EEG Expert Can’t Explain Near Death Experience Data,” accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.skeptiko.com/eeg-expert-on-near-death-experience/

  Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perceptions in Near-Death Experiences,” and “Explanatory Models for Near Death Experiences,” Handbook of Near Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009): 193–203, 30–231. Author’s note: In this latter reference, Sabom constructed a particularly interesting experiment, in which experienced cardiac arrest patients were asked to describe their resuscitations and failed, inexperienced subjects who underwent NDEs proved accurate.

  A quick quote from French:

  “Challenges facing those proposing purely organic theories include not only producing direct evidence in support of their accounts, but also satisfactorily accounting for those NDEs that are known to occur in the complete absence of physical threat, such as those that occur when individuals are not actually close to death but only think they are.”

  Further, for a strong skeptical take, I highly recommend: Keith Augistine, “Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences” (2003/Updated 2008) accessed October 21, 2010, at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html

  Erik Davis, “Terence McKenna’s Last Trip,” Wired (May 2000), accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/mckenna.html

  Author’s note: Susan Blackmore reveals herself rather fully in Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God, saying “The idea of life after death is daft.” So I guess Blackmore thinks she knows (Riverhead Books, 2009): 308.

  Willoughby Britton et al., “Near-Death Experiences and the Temporal Lobe,” Psychological Science 15, no. 4 (2004): 254–58.

  Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne, 2007): 68–76.

  Willoughby Britton, Interview, January 2009.

  Anahad O’Connor, “Following a Bright Light to a Calmer Tomorrow,” New York Times, April 13, 2004.

  Steven Kottler, “Extreme States,” Discover (July 2005), accessed October 26, 2010, http://discovermagazine.com/2005/jul/extreme-states

  David Paul Kuhn, “Both Parties Have Their Fanatics,” Real Clear Politics, August 3, 2009, accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/03/each_party_has_its_fanatics_97748.html

  Jim Geraghty, “55 Percent of Likely Voters Find ‘Socialist’ an Accurate Label of Obama,” National Review, July 9, 2010, accessed, October 21, 2010, http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/230874/55-percent-likely-voters-find-socialist-accurate-label-obama

  Nick Wing, “Poll: 35% of Republicans Want to Impeach Obama,” Huffington Post, December 10, 2009, accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/10/poll–35-of-republicans-wa_n_387093.html

  Z. Klemenc-Ketis, “The Effect of Carbon Dioxide on Near-Death Experiences in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Survivors,” Critical Care 14, no. 2 (2010), accessed October 21, 2010, http://ccforum.com/content/14/2/R56

  “Learn About Arterial Blood Gases,” Education for Nurses, accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.the-abg-site.com/about.htm

  John Lippman, “How Deep is TOO Deep?” Divers Alert Network, accessed October 21, 2010, at http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/medical/articles/article.asp?articleid=29

  Jeff Wise, “Go Toward the Light,” Psychology Today, April 16, 2010, Accessed on-line October 21, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201004/go-toward-the-light-thescience-near-death-experiences

  Alex Tsakiris, “Do Science Journalists Get It Wrong,” and Dr. Bruce Greyson, email to Alex Tsakaris, accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.skeptiko.com/near-death-experience-research-doscience-journalists-get-it-wrong/

  Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (HarperOne, 2010): 116–17.

  M. Morse, “Near Death Experiences: A Neurophysiological Explanatory Model,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 8, (1989): 45–53.

  Sam Parnia et al., “A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of the Incidence, Features and Aetiology of Near Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors,” Resuscitation 48, (2001): 149–56.

  Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death (HarperCollins, 1982): 178.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “Bio,” accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.ekrfoundation.org/honorary-degrees

  Facing Death: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, directed by Stefan Haupt, DVD (First Run Features, 2007).

  “Behavior: The Conversion of K,” Time, November 12, 1979, accessed on October 21, 2010, at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,946362–1,00.html

  Karen G. Jackovich, “Sex, Visitors from the Grave, Psychic Healing: Kübler-Ross Is a Public Storm Center Again,” People, October 29, 1979, accessed on October 21, 2010, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20074920,00.html

  Ron Rosenbaum, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead,” Harpers (September 1982). Also available in Rosenbaum’s book, The Secret Parts of Fortune (Perennial, 2000): 253–67.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, AIDS: The Ultimate Challenge (Scribner, 1997).

  CHAPTER 2: DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?

  Brian Josephson, “Physics and the Nobel Prizes,” Royal Mail special stamps booklet, October 2, 2001, accessed October 22, 2010, http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/stamps/text.html

  Robin McKie, “Royal Mail’s Nobel Guru in Telepathy Row,” Observer, September 30, 2001, accessed October 22, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/sep/30/robinmckie.theobserver

  Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987): 53–54.

  B. Josephson, “The Discovery of Tunnelling Supercurrents,” Review of Modern Physics 46, no. 2 (1974): 251–54.

  Edward Edelson, “Mammoth Magnets to Microchips from Superconductors,” Popular Science 152 (May 1981): 73–79.

  Robert McDermott et al., “Microtesla MRI with a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 21 (May 25, 2004): 7857–61.

  BBC Radio Interview, October 2, 2001, accessed on October 22, 2010, http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/BIG/bdj10/audio/stamps.mp3

  Danny Penman, “Is this Proof We’re all Psychic,” Daily Mail, January 28, 2008, accessed on October 22, 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article–510762/Could-proof-theory-ALL-psychic.html

  podblack, PodBlack Cat, blog, “Dr. Richard Wiseman on Remote Viewing in the Daily Mail—Clarification,” September 28, 2009, http://podblack.com/2009/09/dr-richard-wiseman-on-remote-viewing-in-the-dailymail-clarification/

  Christopher French, Interviews, January, February 2010.

  Parapsychological Association Convention, Thursday August 6, 2009–Sunday August 9, 2009. Material gathered at the conference is identified as such within the text.

  Paul H. Smith, Interview, August 2010.

  Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997): 13–24.

  psi definition, in physics, taken from an online collection of academic dictionaries: http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/238149

  Paul D. Al
lison, “Experimental Parapsychology as a Rejected Science,” On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. The Sociological Review Monograph, 27 (1979): 271–91.

  Author’s note: My own survey yielded a far lower response rate than Allison’s. His was 90 percent, mine was around 25 percent. I’ll make no scientific claims for the worthiness of my study, but my own experience at the parapsychology conference so closely mirrored Allison’s original findings, and my survey results were so similar to his, I feel extremely confident in the accuracy of what I’ve reported here. That said, readers should feel free to accept or reject my analysis purely on the basis of their own preconceived biases. (That last line is a joke.)

  James H. Lee, “Remote Viewing as Applied to Futures Studies,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 75, no. 1 (2008): 142.

  Ken Kress, “Parapsychology in Intelligence,” Journal of Scientific Explanation 13, no. 1, (1999): 68–85.

  Author’s note: Kress, a CIA analyst, evaluates the evidence for psi and takes a mixed view of Price. Though most skeptics might like to focus on the negative, the most important line is buried toward the end of Kress’s report: “There are observations, such as the original magnetic experiments at Stanford University, the OSI remote viewing, the OTS-coderoom experiments, and others done for the Department of Defense, that defy explanation. Coincidence is not likely, and fraud has not been discovered. The implication of these data cannot be determined until the assessment is done. If the above is true, how is it that the phenomenon remains controversial and receives so little official government support? … This state of affairs occurs because of the elementary understanding of parapsychology and because of the peculiarities of the intelligence and military organizations which have attempted the assessments. There is no fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of paranormal functioning, and the reproducibility remains poor.”

  Paul H. Smith, Reading the Enemy’s Mind (Forge, 2005): 128–29.

  Ray Hyman, “Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 10, no. 1 (1996): 31–58.