Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (8 page)

Clark walked outside the building and looked around, but couldn’t spot anything unusual. Then she went up to the rooms in the north wing of the building and looked out of the windows. Apparently this was easier said than done, with the narrow windows meaning that she had to press her face against the glass to see onto the ledges. After much face pushing Clark was amazed to see that there was indeed an old tennis shoe sitting on one of the ledges.
 

‘Fifteen-love’ to the believers.
 

      
As Clark reached out onto the ledge and retrieved the shoe she noticed that it was indeed well worn and that the laces were tucked under the heel.

      
‘Thirty-love’.

      
Moreover, Clark noticed that the position of the laces would only have been apparent to someone viewing the tennis shoe from outside the building.

      
‘Forty-love’.

Clark published Maria’s remarkable story in 1985 and since then the case has been cited in endless books, magazine articles and websites as watertight evidence that the spirit can leave the body.

In 1996 sceptic scientists Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry Beyerstein from Simon Fraser University in Canada decided to investigate the story
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Two of the trio visited Harborview Medical Centre, interviewed Clark and located the window ledge that Maria had apparently seen all of those years before. They placed one of their own running shoes on the ledge, closed the window and stood back. Contrary to Clark’s comments, they did not need to push their faces against the glass to see the shoe. In fact, the shoe was easily visible from within the room and could even have been spotted by a patient lying in a bed.
 

      
‘Forty-fifteen’.

      
Next, the sceptics wandered outside the building and noticed that their experimental running shoe was surprisingly easy to spot from the hospital grounds. In fact, when they returned to the hospital one week later the shoe had been removed, further undermining the notion that it was difficult to spot.

      
‘Forty-thirty’.

      
Ebbern, Mulligan and Beyerstein believe that Maria may have overheard a comment about the shoe while sedated or half-asleep during her three days in hospital, and then incorporated this information into her out-of-body experience. They also point out that Clark didn’t publish her description of the incident until seven years after it happened, and thus there was plenty of time for it to have become exaggerated in the telling and retelling. Given that key aspects of the story were highly questionable, the trio thought that there was little reason to believe other aspects of the case, such as Maria saying that the shoe was well-worn prior to its discovery, and the lace being trapped under its heel.
 

‘Deuce’.

      
Just a few hours at the hospital revealed that the report of Maria’s infamous experience was not all that it was cracked up to be. Despite this, the story has been endlessly repeated by writers who either couldn’t be bothered to check the facts, or were unwilling to present their readers with the more sceptical side of the story. Those who believed in the existence of the soul were going to have to come up with more compelling and water-tight evidence.
 

      
‘New balls please.’

 
BOX

A QUICK VISUALIZATION EXERCISE

It is time for a simple two-part exercise. Both parts will require you to write in this book. You might be somewhat reluctant to do this, but it is important for three reasons. First, you will need to refer to the numbers later in this chapter and so it is helpful to have a permanent record of them. Second, if you are in a bookshop you will be morally obliged to buy the book. Third, if you have already bought the book, the chances of getting a decent resale price on ebay will be greatly diminished. OK, let’s start. 
Part One

Take a look at your surroundings. Perhaps you are in your home, laying in the park or sitting on the bus. Wherever, just have a look around. Now imagine how your surroundings would look if you were floating out of your body, about six feet above where you actually are, and looking down on yourself. Hold that image in your mind’s eye. How clear is the image? If you had to assign it a number from one (where there is almost no image at all) to seven (a very clear and detailed image), what number would you give it? Now write down the number, in indelible blue or black ink, on the line below: 

Your rating: _____

Now look around and see where you actually are, and then again imagine floating high above your body. Next, switch back to your actual location and then back to seeing the world from above your head. Now rate the ease with which you could switch between the two locations by coming up with a number between one (‘Boy that was tricky’) to seven (‘Soooo easy’). Once again, write down the number below: 

Your rating: _____

Part Two

Please rate the degree to which the following statements describe you by assigning each a number between one (‘Absolutely not’) and five (‘Wow, it is like you have known me for years’)
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Assign each statement a rating between 1 (‘strongly disagree’) and 5 (‘strongly agree’)

1. While watching a film I feel as if I am taking part in it.
 

2. I can remember past events in my life with such clarity that it is like living them again.
 

3. I can get so absorbed in listening to music that I don't notice anything else.
 

4. I believe that stoats work too hard.
 

5. I like to look at the clouds and try to see shapes and faces in them.
 

6. I often become absorbed in a good book and lose track of time.

 
Many thanks for completing the exercises. More about them later.

END BOX

How to Feel Like a Desk

The infamous case of the tennis shoe on the ledge provides less than compelling evidence for the notion that people are able to float away from their bodies. Worse still, several researchers invested a considerable amount of time and effort conducting more rigorous tests of the notion and also drew a blank. For example, parapsychologist Karlis Osis tested over a hundred people who claimed that they could induce an OBE at will, asking each to leave their body, travel to a distant room and identify the randomly selected picture that had been placed there
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The vast majority of his participants were confident that they had made the trip but as a group they scored no better than chance. Similarly, researcher John Palmer and his colleagues from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville used a variety of relaxation-based techniques to train people to have OBEs and then asked them to use their new-found ability to discover the identity of a distant target
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In a series of studies involving over 150 participants, the experimenters failed to detect any reliable evidence of extrasensory perception.

In short, over a hundred years of scientific soul searching has ended in failure. Despite Baraduc’s attempts to photograph the spirits of his dead son and wife, MacDougall weighing the dying and Watters slaughtering several grasshoppers, the evidence didn’t stack up. As a result, the researchers changed tack and focused their attention on the information provided by those who claimed to have left their bodies. The best anecdotal cases studies turned out to be a tad unreliable, and experiments involving hundreds of OBEers attempting to identify thousands of hidden targets failed to yield convincing results.
 

After all of this, it might appear that out of the body experiences have nothing to offer the curious mind. However, subsequent work has adopted a very different approach to the problem and, in doing so, both solved the mystery and provided an important insight into the innermost workings of your brain.

There is an old joke about a man who is trying to track down a particular room in a University Philosophy Department. He becomes lost and eventually comes across a map of the building. On the map he sees a large red arrow pointing to a particular corridor, and on the arrow it says ‘Are you here?’ It’s not a bad gag. But more importantly it raises an important issue – how do you know where you are? Or, to put it in slightly more philosophical language – why do you think that you are inside your own body?
 

It many ways, it seems like an odd question. After all, we seem to be inside our bodies and that is that. However, the question has hidden depths. Perhaps the greatest insights have come from a ground-breaking experiment that you can recreate in your own home using just a table, a large coffee table book, a towel, a rubber hand and an open-minded friend
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Start by sitting at the table and placing both of your arms on the tabletop. Next, move your right arm about six inches to the right and place the rubber hand where your right hand used to be (this is assuming that the dummy hand is a right hand – if not, use your left hand during the demonstration).
 

I prepare for the first part of the dummy hand experiment.

Now stand the book vertically on the tabletop between your right arm and the rubber hand, ensuring that it prevents you from seeing your right arm. Then use the towel to cover the space between your right hand and the rubber hand (see photograph below).
 

The dummy hand experiment in action. You can appreciate the psychological impact of the experience by looking at my facial expression in the photograph.

Finally, ask your friend to sit opposite you, extend their first fingers and use them to stroke both your right hand and the rubber hand in the same place at the same time. After about a minute or so of stroking you will start to feel that the rubber hand is actually part of you. This feeling has interesting consequences for your real, but hidden, hand. Researchers have monitored the skin temperature of people’s hands during the study and discovered that when they believe that the rubber hand is part of them, their hidden hand becomes about half a degree colder – it is as if the brain is cutting off the blood supply to the unseen hand once it believes that it is no longer part of the body
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It is a powerful illusion. In a similar series of studies, conducted by Vilayanur Ramachandran and described in his book
Phantoms in the Brain
, people were asked to place their left hand below a table, and an experimenter then stroked the hidden hand and the tabletop simultaneously
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Once again, their sense of self shifted, with about 50 per cent of people feeling as if the wooden tabletop had become part of them.
 

To explain what’s going on here, let’s use a simple analogy. Imagine walking around in a new city and suddenly realizing that you are lost. The only way forward is to go hunting for a signpost. Similarly, when your brain is trying to decide where ‘you’ are it has to rely on the equivalent of signposts, namely, information from your senses.
 

Most of the time this works really well. Your brain might, for example, see your hand and feel pressure from your fingertip, and so correctly assume that ‘you’ are in your arm. However, in the same way that people sometimes mess around with signposts and point them in the wrong direction, so once in a while your brain will mess up. The rubber hand experiment is one of those situations. During the study, your brain ‘feels’ your left hand being stroked, ‘sees’ a dummy hand or wooden table being subjected to simultaneous stroking, concludes that ‘you’ must therefore be located in the dummy hand or table, and constructs a sense of self that is consistent with this idea. In short, the sense of where you are is not hard-wired into your brain. Instead, it is the result of your brain constantly using information from your senses to come up with a sensible guess. Because of this, the sense of ‘you’ being inside your body is subject to change at a moment’s notice.