Stuff: True believers.

The PopSci site has a short interview with author Stacy Horn, details the history of the Duke University's parapsychology department in her new book Unbelievable (review here, on this very web log).

The interviewer's questions are fluff-piece work, but Horn gamely works with what she's got. On the subject of whether or not she grew scared researching ghost stories and possession phenomenon:

PopSci.com: Wow! So was it spooky reading about the cases?

Horn: Everybody asks me that. No, it really wasn’t to me. It was exciting! The possibility that the things they were studying were real was exciting. I just thought that it was more fun. The only time I became scared was when I was reading about a study of letters about people’s ghost experiences. The Duke lab compiled hundreds of letters people sent them about experiences with ghosts. After going thorough all of them, they found if people were having experiences with ghosts, they were hearing them more than seeing them. It’s known as EVP, electronic voice phenomena, and I started researching this stuff. I started Googling EVP and I found there are people who record the noises they hear and actually do put this stuff on the web. I started listening to the noises and even though I did not believe I was listening to the dead or ghosts from beyond, I got scared. I was at my computer and I looked up at the ceiling in my apartment and said, “Please don’t speak to me.” If there are ghosts or spirits in my apartment, I didn’t want to hear from them. That was the only time I was scared.

Horn, at greater length in her book, defends the scientific validity of the department's work:

PopSci.com: Most people do not think of studying unseen phenomena and ESP the work of scientists. What did Rhine and his colleagues do to make their work considered scientific?

Horn: They identified an effect, like psychokinesis, and went through the process of studying it. They went about coming up with calculable experiments, just like any other experiment in science. They specifically designed experiments to study the different things like psychokinesis. The most famous of the experiments that I think most people are familiar with were the tests with ESP cards. They used the experiment in the movie Ghostbusters. They would test mostly Duke University students and would see if the students could recall the shapes and symbols on the cards. And it turns out they could. It was all statistics and probability and they tested it over and over again. By the end, they were testing double blind, the researchers and students did not know the symbols on the cards, and they found the students could still recall the images. And that is science, establishing an experiment, refining controls and using statistical methods to analyze the results.

PopSci.com: Were you a believer in the paranormal and life after death before you began your research?

Horn: No, and I would not say I am necessarily a believer now. I researched this to the best of my ability and found no reason to not believe the work done by Rhine and the lab. Over the years scientists tried to say the experiments were not controlled, but that is simply not the case. I think they made a case for telepathy and to me it is exciting. It implies there is another way to get data out there in the world and some people seem to have access to it. I don’t know if telepathy is necessarily the answer but some people seem to have access to another realm.

From Unbelievable to the unlikely, what to make of Ghostbusters alum Dan Aykroyd's new paranormally inspired vodka, which comes in a skull-shape bottle meant to evoke the 13 Crystal Heads? From Mr. Aykroyd's site:

Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today. Their workmanship is perfect: they contain no tool marks and have been cut against the natural axis of the crystal, defying the laws of physics. Some say they are artifacts from the lost civilization of Atlantis, some say they date back to the Mayans, still others say they were created by a higher intelligence.

Brought together, the Crystal Heads are said to contain vast knowledge and enlightenment capable of unlocking our most enigmatic ancient mysteries. Alone, each is believed to house radiant psychic energy, which has magical powers and healing properties.

They also house vodka. Go figure.

Books: They want to believe.

When I first saw Poltergeist, I don't remember thinking it odd that the family in the haunted home would have no problem finding a parapsychology department ready to launch an investigation into the events at their home. Colleges and universities were big places full of smart people who spent all there time proving things and the like, so it made sense that you could just go to your nearest institution of higher learning and say, "Hey, anybody wanna see a ghost?"

Seeing The Haunting and Hell House and others did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that ghost hunting was a relatively typical scholarly pursuit for the academic set. In fact, because I rarely saw representatives from the considerably more common but less cinema-friendly specializations, it's probably fair to say that you would have had a harder time convincing me that somebody was a film studies scholar ("You watch movies? But everybody watches movies. You're pulling my leg.") than you would have had convincing me that somebody studied demonic possessions.

The most important illusion shattered by Stacy Horn's Unbelievable, a new fusion of J. B. Rhine bio and discursive history of American parapsychology from the early Twentieth Century to now, is the belief that a small army of dedicated paranormal researchers waits ready to set up shop in your crib at the slightest sign of supernatural shenanigans. The problem isn't that there are no paranormal researchers out there, but rather that they can afford to be picky. In a chapter dedicated to reproducing letters written to Rhine's Department of Parapsychology at Duke University, Horn drives home the fact that there is never any shortage of Americans who believe that the are the witnesses or victims of some force from beyond the purview of traditional science. Hauntings, people with ESP, aliens, prophetic dreamers, near death experiences, infants that make noises like barnyard animals – the oddest thing about people with unusual stories is how incredibly common such people seem to be. A virtual army of haunted and troubled souls kept Rhine, as well as his confederates and rivals in the field of parapsychology, busy for nearly 80 years.

There are two main threads to Horn's book. The first focuses on the life and times of Joseph Banks Rhine, the essential man of American parapsychology. A doctorate in botany, Rhine was put on the path to becoming the America's foremost expert on weirdness when he enrolled for a one-year psychology course in Harvard. Thrilled by the possibility of extra sensory perception, Rhine became famous for his work with Zener cards – those "cirle, square, bunch of wavy lines" cards you see in movies like Ghostbusters. Rhine became the George Washington of psychic research with the 1934 publication of Extra Sensory Perception, a stats heavy presentation of the results of several thousand ESP tests. Rhine and his team would become the face of psychic research well into the 1970s. The odd stories of Rhine's life, including efforts by the United States government and companies like IBM to harness Rhine's research, makes for interesting, if occasionally disheartening reading; but Rhine himself, as presented by Horn, is a draw in his own right. Pugnacious and stubborn, Rhine was determined to prove the existence of psychic phenomenon, a drive that could blind him to his own assumptions and biases. At the same time, however, he was capable of extreme skepticism and innately cautious about the possibility of such phenomenon. In fact, Rhine's increasing isolation from a loony fringe that he was largely responsible for creating plays out like an odd cautionary tale with Frankenstein-esque undertones.

The second thread, woven through Rhine's story, is a meandering overview of parapsychology as a whole, including stops at some of America's most famous, or infamous, "paranormal" events. We get séances with William James (this book would make an excellent bookend to Deborah Blum's The Ghost Hunters), spiritualist-busting crusade of Houdini, the story of the demonic possession the inspired The Exorcist, the Amity haunting, and a dozen other cases. Some of the stories are perplexing, others are hilarious, but they are all entertaining. Horn introduces readers to true believers and cranks, diligent researchers and frauds, and while she's a true believer herself, she doesn't hesitate to point out when a mystery has a readily available, non-supernatural explanation at hand. Still, Horn's arguments for the existence ESP and other features of the supernatural world might be so objectionable to some that the pleasures of this tour will be lost on them. This need not be the case. I didn't come away from the book believing in ESP, past lives, ghosts, or what have you, and I still thoroughly enjoyed Horn's wonderfully writing.

Which brings us to the second, and more important, illusion shattered in Unbelievable. This illusion involves the limits of scientific knowledge. Not the old chestnut that there are "more things on heaven and earth," but rather about the glamour of legitimacy the trappings of science can cast over even the most doomed intellectual endeavors. Unintentionally, Horn's written a strange sort of intellectual tragedy about bright people who are convinced that science is on their side, even when they again and again run into unrepeatable results, lack of evidence, strong counter evidence, and other factors that are science's way of telling the researcher that they are wrong. Again and again, researchers evoke metaphorical arguments (because Thing X reminds one of so-called "spooky action from a distance," which is proven, then Thing X must be true too), arguments based on authority (much is made of the fact that Einstein was open to the possibility of psychic phenomena, though he never studied the issue and the topic fell well outside his area of expertise), or demand special consideration for their evidence. The worst example of this last form of pseudo-scientific thinking is when, confronted with data they cannot reproduce, theorists of ESP or whatever other phenomena advance theories about why reproducibility doesn't apply to the phenomena being examined Such is the case with ESP researchers who theorized that emotional states – too mercurial and finely grained to ever be perfectly reproducible – have a profound effect on psychic ability. As innocuous as that claim may be, it is an attempt bow out of the obligations of reproducibility and places the studied phenomenon on the same level as miracles. "It happened, but you'll have to take my word for it." The quixotic efforts of these researchers haven't brought anybody any closer to understanding these alleged psychic phenomena. They've only demonstrated how smart, even brilliant, people can prove unequal to the task of subjecting desires, prejudices, ambitions, and emotional needs to the rigors of scientific investigation. And it's that tragic lack of self-knowledge that, perhaps even more than the self-limiting nature of scientific inquiry, marks the bound of scientific knowledge.