The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 14:45 (5763 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GPJ: NDEs and OBEs are experiences that happen and have natural explanations adequately explained by existing science. It is only where they are associated with a few paranormal claims that they are questionable. For instance the patient who claimed to see a shoe on the outside ledge of the hospital building while having an "Out of Body experience" (as reported in chapter 6 of David Turell's book). A proper scientific examination of this case would establish where the shoe came from, how and when it got there, whose it was, whether the patient was ever in a position to have seen it before, or knew the owner of the shoe, whether she was aware of the investigator's interest in paranormal occurrences and therefore likely to make up a story to please him, and so on. - George: It is impossible to do a double-blind study (or its equivalent) in this area of scientific interest. The story is reported by Kimberly Clark Sharp (now married), a hospital social worker at the time the event happened. Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist, knows Sharp and trusts her tale about Maria, the patient, who came to the hospital with a heart attack. Maria could know nothing about the hospital with her personal background. Most of what you object to cannot be corroborated, and obviously you should know that. This excerpt is from Greyson's review of Sharp's book: "After the Light". - > Significantly, Sharp starts her book not with her own NDE, but with that of Maria and her now-famous tennis shoe on the ledge. Maria was a migrant worker admitted to Harborview Medical Center's cardiac care unit (CCU), where Sharp was working as a social worker. While her body was undergoing a cardiac arrest, Maria floated out of the hospital and saw, on a third-story window ledge on the side of the hospital farthest from the CCU, "a man's dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed on the left side where the little toe would go. The shoelace was caught under the heel" (p. 11). Despite Sharp's having had an NDE herself, her professional training led her to doubt Maria's story until she finally located the shoe by going from room to room, pressing her face against the windows--although the scuffed toe could only be seen from a perspective outside and above the window. Sharp first published this account in my 1984 NDE anthology (Clark, 1984), and it has been repeated several times, most recently by Susan Blackmore (1995); but the detailed account here is the definitive "Maria's tennis shoe" story. - Many of these 'stories' are anecdotal. Van Lommel's patient was part of a prospective study. The Lancet article is very impressive, especially the significantly different rate of mortality in those patients with the 'deepest' NDE. - I agree this is a 'where's there is smoke there must be a fire' approach to science. Do these 'stories' exist becasue people want them to exist? Of course. Death frightens people. But when doctors at the bedside in hospices learn from patients events the patients could not have known about, that is corroboration of 'something'. I'd love to be able to order a definitve EEG after an NDE and 'scientifically' prove the point. In human psychology one cannot. Most psychological papers are inferences, with no scientific machine or lab support. As I noted in my book, why do so many people have the same NDE's in pattern? Why do they always communicate with the dead? And why should we ignore third-party corroboration because it is anecdotal and not part of a planned study, which actually now has been started because of all the anecdotes?