Readers are advised to disregard entirely the… Appendix, in which a case of a blind woman who purported to have an NDE is described…. We discovered, to our chagrin, that this case has fraudulent aspects. Dr. McGill, who offered this account to us in good faith, now believes she was deceived by the woman in question.
That’s why I like the computer-near-the-ceiling project. It’s a study, not an anecdote. Unfortunately, it’s a slow-moving study. Because of limitations imposed by the human subjects committee, Greyson has interviewed fewer than thirty subjects to date.
Is there any other experimental avenue for proving that a mind (soul, personality, consciousness, whatever) can travel independent of its body? There is, though it’s not an avenue along which mainstream researchers would be willing to stroll. It involves people who claim to be able to will them-selves to have out-of-body experiences—simply pull their consciousness out of the garage and take it for a ride.[46]
If you wanted to prove that it’s possible for some version or vestige of the self to exist independent of body and brain, you could try to set up some sort of detector in a room far away from one of these purported free-floaters, and instruct him or her to head on over. It’s a jump to further conclude that this is what we do when we die, but it would make it easier—for me, anyway—to accept that NDEs are something other than a neurological/psychological phenomenon.
In 1977, a group of parapsychologists undertook just such a project, on the campus of Duke University. I was pleased to see that the main author on this study was the late Robert Morris, of the University of Edinburgh. I’d written an article on Morris’s telepathy work years ago; I liked the fact that he had cooperated with the skeptics group CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in designing the experimental protocol.
Morris and his colleagues worked with a single subject named Stuart Harary, who had participated in previous out-of-body experience projects at Duke. Harary was instructed to leave his body and travel to one of two detection rooms, either fifty feet or a quarter mile away. To determine whether he could actually do this, Morris stationed people in the detection room and had them try to sense Harary while he “visited.” The results were no better than chance. There were about as many reports of detection during control periods as when Harary believed he was out of his body.
Surmising that animals might be more keenly attuned to extrasensory presences, Morris next did a series of trials using snakes, gerbils, and kittens as detectors. The cages were set up on top of an activity platform that registered movements on a polygraph, whose readout could then be compared to the timing of Harary’s “visits.” As anyone who’s been to a herpetarium could have predicted, the snakes did not work out. They didn’t move around when Harary was visiting the room, and they didn’t move around when he wasn’t. The gerbils proved similarly apathetic. “The rodents spent most of their time either chewing on the cage bars or resting quietly,” wrote Morris.
Morris eventually settled on a kitten that had seemed to show an affinity for Harary. The kitten was not caged but let loose in a corralled area with a grid taped out on the floor; in this case the behavioral measure was the number of squares entered per one hundred seconds and the animal’s vocalization rate. Disappointingly, the kitten seemed to be reliably less active when Harary indicated he was “there,” leading some of the researchers to wonder whether they’d gotten the protocol backward. Perhaps Harary’s presence wasn’t stimulating the animal but calming it. Morris and his colleagues went through a half dozen methodological variations, including one in which the kitten was sequestered under an inverted box until Harary “arrived,” whereupon the box, which was hooked to a pulley, would slowly and dramatically rise like a stage curtain. It is around this point that I like to insert the image of a group of white-haired Duke alumni wandering into the building on a homecoming tour.
The experiment dragged on so long that around page 11, Morris begins referring to the kitten as a cat, noting that it had by then grown to maturity. He reported a number of anecdotal occurrences—frustratingly, a couple of casual bystanders proved better at sensing Harary than the official “human detectors”—that would seem to indicate something was up, but overall there was little to suggest that Harary had been anywhere but inside Harary’s head. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time, and scientific literature is the richer for the introduction of the measurement unit “meows per second.”
A few years later, a team of non-university-affiliated paranormal researchers tried a similar experiment, with strain gauges in place of kittens and gerbils. Here our out-of-body traveler was an amateur parapsychologist from Maine named Alex Tanous. For clarity, Mr. Tanous referred to his out-ofbody self as Alex 2, and his stay-at-home self as Alex 1, and so I will, too. Alex 2’s mission was to travel six rooms distant, enter a suspended (to keep floor vibrations from setting off the strain gauges) eighteen-inch cube, and view one of five randomly generated images, which would appear in one of four colors and four quadrants. Meanwhile, Alex 1 would tell the researchers what he sees. A tape was kept running, so that the researchers could see if the strain gauges were registering force specifically when Alex 2 was correctly reporting what he “saw,” as this would suggest that he had actually been inside the cube—rather than knowing the target remotely, via some more ordinary, garden-variety ESP.
Head researcher Karlis Osis, who died in 1997, reported that Tanous had 144 hits and 83 misses. Does this mean that Tanous got all three aspects (color, quadrant, image) of the target correct sixty-three percent of the time? When chance would dictate a correct guess only once in eighty tries? Why hasn’t this guy been on the news? Why hasn’t he turned the world upside down? Osis further claimed that when Alex 2 was seeing the targets correctly, the mean activation level of the gauges inside the chamber was significantly greater than when he wasn’t seeing the target correctly. “Therefore,” concludes the paper, “it is our opinion that the [strain gauge] results can most likely be attributed to the subject’s out-of-body presence in the shielded chamber.”
Though I suspected that a conversation with Tanous would leave me chewing on my cage bars, I decided to try to call him. I did not succeed, because in 1990, Alex 2 had, like Osis, made the big one-way trip out of his body. So we are left to conclude that either Tanous was some sort of bizarre on-call living ghost, or Osis was a deluded or sloppy researcher.
SO LET’S SAY, just for a moment, that people who have near-death experiences are actually leaving their bodies. That they are making some sort of transcendent journey into a different dimension. And that one of the off-ramps in this dimension leads to the afterlife. This means that near-death experiences could—just possibly—provide us with a sneak preview of our own impending eternity. If only someone had kept a list of near-death experiencers’ descriptions of this place.
Someone did. Michael Sabom’s book includes an appendix of all twenty-eight “transcendental environments” glimpsed or “visited” during subjects’ near-death experiences. There seem to be two basic versions: the weather report and the farm report. Fully half the environments consisted of nothing but sky. Heaven appears to have a similar weather system as earth; there were approximately the same number of reports of blue sky and sunshine as there were of clouds and mist. One or two meteorologically inclined individuals included both in their report (e.g., “blue sky with an occasional cloud”).
46
There is, of course, disagreement as to whether they are actually traveling somewhere or simply experiencing a vivid hallucination; a good discussion of this can be found in the