Let us look at some things that we should never expect to occur if the prevailing dogmas of neuroscientists were true, but which do actually occur.
Item # 1: Instant Memory Formation
The simple fact that humans can form complex new memories instantly is incompatible with the claim of neuroscientists that memories form by "synapse strengthening" or by the "alteration of neural connection patterns." If that were how humans formed memories, then the formation of a new memory would be a very sluggish affair, requiring many minutes or hours. "Synapse strengthening" or the "alteration of neural connection patterns" would require the synthesis of new proteins, which takes quite a few minutes or hours. But it is a very obvious fact of human experience that humans can form permanent new memories instantly. For example, you don't need to see a movie three or four times before being able to describe its plot exactly. You can tell someone the plot of a movie days after you have seen it the first time, even if you never thought of the movie during the days following your first viewing of it. And if someone fires a gun near your head, it won't take minutes for you to form a permanent new memory of this event; you'll get such a memory instantly.
The discrepancy between reality and neuroscience dogma is shown by the repeated occurrence of absurd lies in neuroscience literature in which it is claimed that forming a long-term memory requires "hours or days." For example, one recent neuroscience paper claims, "The initial process of long-term memory formation...occurs on a time-scale of hours to days." Nonsense; each of us can form permanent new memories instantly. New York City residents my age didn't need "hours or days" to form a permanent new memory of the fact that one of the World Trade Center towers had fallen. We got a permanent new memory of the fact the instant we heard it.
Item # 2: Instant Memory Recall
Let's consider a simple case. You hear the name of a movie star. You then instantly recall what that person looks like, and see a faint image of that person in your “mind's eye.” But how could this ever happen, if the memory of that person is stored in some particular part of your brain? In such a case, you would need to know or find the exact place in the brain where that memory was stored. But there would be no way for your brain to do such a thing. It would be like trying to find one particular needle in a skyscraper-sized stack of needles. Exactly the same problem arises in trying to explain how a person could recall a sentence of relevant information when given a one-word prompt, as in these cases:
John: Waterloo?
Jane: That was the final battle bought by the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, in which he was defeated.
John: Dickens?
Jane: Charles Dickens was a very popular 19th century British novelist who wrote classics such as "David Copperfield," "Oliver Twist," and "A Christmas Carol."
Such common cases of instant memory recall should be impossible if memory is being retrieved from the brain. Humans know from their experience with books and computers what things are needed to allow instant retrieval to occur from physical systems. They are things such as addressing, sorting and indexing. No such things exist in the brain. Neither brain cells nor synapses have any type of addressing or indexing that might make possible instant recall.
Item #3: Telepathy Outside of the Laboratory
The existence of telepathy outside of the laboratory is an extremely common human experience that would be recognized by many times more people were it not for the fact that materialist scientists have senselessly discouraged people from testing such an ability using their own families and friends. Researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here. I personally have had many dramatic experiences showing the reality of telepathy, which I describe in posts such as this post and this post. Every case of telepathy is utterly incompatible with the prevailing dogmas of neuroscientists. If your brain is what is making your mind (or the same thing as your mind), telepathy should be impossible. The utter incompatibility of such claims about the brain and reports of telepathy are why neuroscientists senselessly refuse to acknowledge nearly two hundred years of massive evidence for telepathy.
Item #4: Out-of-Body Experiences
Out-of-body experiences are a perfect example of an experience no one should ever have if prevailing neuroscientist dogmas were true. In an out-of-body experience someone reports being outside of his body. In a large fraction of all out-of-body experiences, a person reports observing his body from some position one meter or more away from his body. Such experiences simply should not occur if your brain is the same as your mind, or if your brain was creating your mind. Under such dogmas, a person should be permanently trapped in his body, and should never be able to observe his body from outside of his body. Instead of never occurring as predicted by prevailing neuroscience dogmas, out-of-body experiences are quite common. A scientific survey of a group of hospital patients found that 10% of patients with cardiac arrest had a near-death experience (NDE), with 19 of these 27 patients who reported an NDE reporting an out-of-body experience (OBE). A different study found that "Of the 30 interviewable survivors of cardiac arrest, 7 (23 percent) described experiences classified as NDEs by scoring 7 or more points on the NDE Scale." Of these reporting a near-death experience in this study (11), 90% reported out-of-body experiences. A Dutch study found 18% of cardiac arrest survivors reporting a near-death experience, but with only a minority of these reporting an out-of-body experience.
Item #5: The Recitation of Very Large Bodies of Memorized Information
A person familiar with common theatrical productions will know of some cases in which people memorize very large bodies of information. For example, to play the role of Hamlet, an actor must memorize 1,422 lines, and to play the role of Richard III, an actor must memorize 1,124 lines. Similar demands on memory are made by the Wagnerian singing roles of Tristan and Siegfried, the latter requiring a singer to sing for most of three solid hours. But such well-known feats of memory recall are dwarfed by various lesser-known examples. According to the site of the Guinness Book of World Records, Rajveer Meena memorized pi to 70,000 digits, reciting those 70,000 digits without any errors. Lu Chao memorized pi to 67,000 digits. Below is a quote from page 53 of the book The Mind and Beyond published by Time-Life Books:
"As reported in the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, in 1967, one Mehmed Ali Halici of Turkey recited from memory 6,666 verses of the Koran in six hours. And in 1989, Englishman Tony Power memorized in correct order a random sequence of thirteen packs of shuffled playing cards – 676 cards in all – after looking at them only once. But the world record for a single eidetic memory feat may be held by Bhandanta Vicitasara of Rangoon, Burma who in 1974 correctly recited from memory 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts."
All such feats should be impossible if memory recall occurred by retrieving information from brains. The brain is lacking in anything that can explain the recall of very large bodies of sequential information. Consider the arrangement of neurons. The average neuron has thousands of connections to other neurons. With such an arrangement, there should be no way for sequential memorization to occur. There is no physical ordering that would allow a progression from one neuron to the next neuron, with the progression always occurring the same way through the same series of thousands of neurons. For a particular neuron, there is no "next" neuron or "previous" neuron, but instead thousands of connected neurons. Such an organization should make sequential memory access impossible. The point is explained in my post "Why Brains Are Not Suitable for Storing Long Sequences Like Humans Remember."
Item #6: The Detailed Recall of Things People Experienced Decades Ago
My post "Why We Should Not Think the Human Brain Can Store Very Old Memories" explains why the simple fact of humans remembering things for decades is inexplicable under prevailing neuroscience dogmas. Neuroscientists lack any credible explanation for either memory storage or the persistence of memories for decades. Trying to make it sound a little like they have some idea of how memory physically works, neuroscientists use the deceptive term "long term potentiation" (LTP), which actually refers to a very short-term effect that typically lasts only days, and has never been proven to last for years. The prevailing dogma is that memories are stored in synapses, a ridiculous claim given the fact that the average lifetime of synapse proteins is known to be less than two weeks, a length of time 1000 times shorter than the maximum time humans can remember things (50 years or more).
Item #7: Clairvoyance
We have nearly two hundred years of written evidence for clairvoyance, much of it written by distinguished physicians and scientists. There are various types of clairvoyance. Spontaneous clairvoyance may occur when someone reports the approach of an unexpected unseen visitor who very soon arrives at her doorstep. Some examples can be found here. Nineteenth century literature on hypnotism contains many accounts of people under hypnosis who (when guided on a kind of mental journey by someone familiar with a place) could correctly list all kinds of details of places they had never physically seen. Some examples of this effect (called traveling clairvoyance) can be found here, here, and here. What can be called "X-Ray" Clairvoyance involves things such as the ability to correctly read through heavy blindfolds, or to correctly describe the contents of sealed letters and closed boxes, or to see within a human body. Some examples can be found here, here and here. As discussed here and here, research into remote viewing (a modern term for clairvoyance) was long funded by the US government, with many successes reported. The phenomenon of clairvoyance cannot at all be explained within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas.
Item #8: Hypnotic Insensitivity to Pain
See the "Phenomenon #2" section of this post for a discussion. The main relevant work on this is the book here by Dr. James Esdaile, who reported that hundreds of major operations occurred in India under his supervision, involving subjects who had no anesthesia but reported no pain during amputations or removals of large tumors, because they had been told to feel no pain while hypnotized. Another book documenting the same thing is the book "Numerous cases of surgical operations without pain in the mesmeric state" by John Elliotson MD, which can be read here. Such accounts are incompatible with the dogma that the mind is the product of the brain. If such a dogma were true, we would expect that severe pain could only be stopped by physical interventions (such as taking drugs or injections or ice-freezing a body spot were pains come from).
Item #9: Hypnosis at a Distance or Telepathic Knockouts
A phenomenon in which a hypnotist can induce a trance in an unseen person is reported here and here. On the page here we are told, "In 18 of 25 trials Janet and his colleague Gilbert were able to induce a trance in their hysterical subject Leonie at distances varying from 1/4 to 1 mile." The page here tells us the experiments of L. Vasiliev at the University of Leningrad were overwhelmingly successful in producing trances at a distance in subjects, with a 90% success rate, with most of the people trying to produce the trances being in different rooms, and the trance almost always occurring within a few minutes of the remote attempt to make the person entranced. No such phenomenon should be possible if brains are the cause of human minds.
Item #10: Anomalous Sensation Phenomena
It has been very frequently reported that a hypnotized person may instantly feel sensations felt by the person who hypnotized him. A set of experiments on this effect is reported in the "First Report of the Committee on Mesmerism" pages 225-229 of Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (April, 1883), a committee including the illustrious names of Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, George Wyld M.D. and the eventually knighted physicist W.F. Barrett. We read this on page 226: "Thus out of a total of 24 experiments in transference of pains, the exact spot was correctly indicated by the subject no less than 20 times." Similar results were obtained by Dr. Edmund Gurney and reported in his paper "An Account of Some Experiments in Mesmerism," published on page 201 of Volume II of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ( June 1884). As reported on page 205, a hypnotized subject identified with high accuracy tactile and taste sensations occurring in a hypnotizer sitting behind him.
Mirror touch synsethesia is a rare effect by which non-hypnotized people seem to feel tactile sensations of nearby people. The phenomenon is so well-documented that it is not even disputed by some who claim to be skeptical of all paranormal phenomena. A search for "phantom limb pain" will find many matches in mainstream sources, including assertions that most amputees experience such pain (mysteriously arising as if the amputed limb still existed). Such experiences should not occur if the mind is merely the product of the brain, but are compatible with ideas such as the idea that you have a soul that may have sensitivity protruding outside of your body, sensitivity that may be increased under hypnosis.
Item #11: The Production of Abstract Ideas
Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how a human could create any abstract idea. In my post "No One Understands How a Brain Could Generate Ideas," I review the miserably bad answers experts give on two expert answer sites when asked how a brain could generate an idea. Humans are capable of building machines that can retrieve information, by using some things that are unlike anything found in the brain: things such as addressing, sorting and indexing. But humans have never built any kind of machine or device capable of generating ideas. You can built a computer program that combines words, and call that an "idea generator," but the term would not be accurate. What the program would generate is merely word combinations, not ideas. Ideas would only arise when a human being read the word combinations. No one has idea of how a human-made device could ever generate ideas. Since ideas are immaterial things, the production of ideas from a material thing seems no more credible than the idea you might squeeze a rock and get it to pour forth blood.
Item #12: Near-Death Experiences, Particularly Veridical Ones
A veridical near-death out-of-body experience is when someone having a close encounter with death reports moving out of his body, and is able to recall observational details that are later verified, details that should have been impossible for the possible to have learned. Some compelling examples can be found here. Examples include patients who reported floating out of their bodies and reporting things on either the roof of the hospital or in floors above them, things they had no opportunity to discover with their ordinary senses. Near-death experiences of this type completely defeat attempts to explain near-death experiences as hallucinations. In general, there is no explanation for dramatic near-death experiences within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. Such experiences often are lengthy experiences occurring during cardiac arrest, and the brain very quickly flatlines within a few seconds after cardiac arrest, meaning no neural explanations of such events are credible.
Item #13: Apparition Sightings, Particularly Crisis Apparitions
Volume One of the massive two volume work Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore can be read online here, and Volume Two of the work can be read here. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person they did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day). I have described hundreds of such cases in the series of posts you can read below, which contain many other cases of such "crisis apparitions":
An Apparition Was Their Death Notice
25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Item #15: Terminal Lucidity
Terminal lucidity occurs when someone who had long suffered from dementia suddenly seems to return to a normal, lucid state of mind just before dying. An example can be read on this page and the next page. On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:
"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)."
No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages.
Item #16: Very High Mental Function Despite Very Heavy Brain Damage
The theory that your brain produces your mind predicts that mental function should be very sensitive to brain damage, with small damage producing very large damage to mental performance. As discussed in my post here, we have much evidence of cases when very large damage to brains had little effect on mental performance. Karl Lashley did countless experiments testing changes in performance after animals had part of their brain removed or damaged. He found relatively little effect. For example:
- 13 rats were trained to solve mazes, and we read here "only one animal did not show evidence of the maze habit after removal of the frontal portions of the brain."
- Monkeys were trained to unlatch latch boxes. After having their prefrontal cortex removed, there was “perfect retention of the manipulative habits.”
- Lashley said, “A number of experiments with rats have shown that habits of visual discrimination survive the destruction of any part of the cerebral cortex except the primary visual projection area.”
- Lashley noted that you could remove half of an animal's cortex without reducing its performance on simple mazes.
The paper here gives precise before and after IQ scores for more than 50 children who had half of their brains removed in a hemispherectomy operation in the United States. For one set of 31 patients, the IQ went down by an average of only 5 points. For another set of 15 patients, the IQ went down less than 1 point. For another set of 7 patients the IQ went up by 6 points.
The paper here (in Figure 4) describes IQ outcomes for 41 children who had half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations in Freiburg, Germany. For the vast majority of children, the IQ was about the same after the operation. The number of children who had increased IQs after the operation was greater than the number who had decreased IQs.
Item #17: The Acquisition of Multiple Languages by a Very Young Child
Linguists such as Noam Chomsky have long recognized a very severe explanatory problem: the fact that very young children seem to acquire language skills much more quickly than anyone can explain. By listening to his parents speak (and perhaps also siblings), a child will pick up a new language with great speed. But it seems that the amount of listening the child does is not nearly sufficient to explain the speed with which the child seems to master the use of complex grammatical rules. Chomsky called this problem the "poverty of the stimulus" problem, meaning that the stimulus of hearing family members seems utterly inadequate to explain the mastery of complex language rules that occurs. The problem is doubled in the case of young children. What happens is that very young children with small brains achieve a marvel of learning more impressive than anything that people with much larger brains achieve in college, contrary to what we would expect from prevailing neuroscientist dogmas.
Item #18: Deathbed Visions
Some examples of deathbed visions can be found here and here and here. A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person." A 1949 book states this:"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "
There is no credible explanation of this phenomenon within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. In the main scholarly work on the topic (At the Hour of Death, involving a well-funded multi-year study), the authors demonstrated that most such deathbed visions occur to people without organic brain disease, who were not on any drugs that might cause hallucinations.
Item #19: Very Fast and Accurate Complex Calculations by Anyone Not Using a Mechanical Device or a Writing Tool
Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash has been called the world's fastest calculator, and can do things such as multiply 869,463,853 times 73 correctly in only 26 seconds, giving an answer of 63,470,861,269. This is despite having a very serious head injury which required 86 stitches, and left him with a prominent scar on his forehead. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, "Scott Flansburg of Phoenix, Arizona, USA, correctly added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times in 15 seconds without the use of a calculator on 27 April 2000 on the set of Guinness World Records in Wembley, UK." There are countless recorded cases of such blazing fast "all in the mind" calculation involving math or dates, and the cases often involve people with defective brains. For example:
- A Dr. J. Langdon Down described a 12-year-old boy who could multiply any three numbers by any other three numbers, as quickly as Down could write the six numbers on paper.
- A Dr. Alfred F. Tredgold mentioned a person who could give the square root of any four digit number in an average of four seconds, and who could give the cube root of any six-digit number in about six seconds. He said that when the same person "was asked about how many grains of corn there be in any one of 64 boxes, with 1 in the first, 2 in the second, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, and so on, he gave answers for the fourtheenth (8,192), for the eighteenth (131,072), and the twenty-fourth (8,388,608) instantaneously, and he gave the answer for the forty-eighth box (140,737,488,355,328) in six seconds," and that he "also gave the total in all 64 boxes correctly (18,446,734,073,709,551,615) in forty-five seconds."
- A blind boy named Fleury was of such low intelligence he had to be institutionalized, but he could calculate 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) in only 40 seconds, and could calculate the cube root of 465,484,375 (which is 775) in 13 seconds.
- A pair of twins named George and Charles (born three months prematurely) could do calendar calculations with blazing speed. We read this: "Give them a date and they can give you day of the week over a span of 80,000 years, 40,000 backward or 40,000 forward." Also, we read that if you "ask them to name in which years in the next 200 (or any 200) Easter will fall on March 23," then they "will name those years with lightning rapidity, faster than a computer and just as accurately." This seems all the more impressive when you consider that the rules for when Easter will occur in a particular year are quite complicated.
No such cases are explicable under prevailing neuroscience dogmas such as the dogma that the brain makes the mind. The reality is that the brain has shortfalls that should prevent any such thing from happening. The first shortfall involves speed. The widely quoted figure of about 100 meters per second for brain signals is very misleading. That is the fastest that a signal can travel in any part of the brain, when signals pass through myelinated axons. But most axons in the cortex are not myelinated, and most of the tissue in the brain consists of relatively slow dendrites. According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons. Then there is the enormous slowing factor caused by the need for brain signals to cross across synapses, serious "speed bumps" that should slow down brain signals very much.
There is no reason to think that the average speed of signals in the brain should be much faster than the speed at which electrical signals travel around the brain during seizures. The paper here lists a speed of only about 1 millimeter per second for seizures in the human brain, saying, "Seizures propagate slowly to connected areas with speeds on the order of 1 mm/s." There is no reason to think that some hypothetical brain signals involved in thinking would occur much faster than seizures. The problem is that such a speed is way, way too slow to account for the blazing fast mental speed of the world's fastest calculators.
Another shortfall of the brain is reliability. It has been repeatedly stated in neuroscience literature that brain signals travel across chemical synapses with a reliability of only .5 or smaller, and almost all synapses in the brain are chemical synapses. In an interview, an expert on neuron noise states the following:
"There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission. This is something that an engineer would not normally build into a system. When one neuron is active, and a signal runs down the axon, that signal is not guaranteed to actually reach the next neuron. It makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less. This introduces a lot of noise into the system."
That unreliability should utterly prevent accurate signal transmission, preventing any such thing as people accurately performing very complex calculations in their minds by using their brains. For people to accurately perform very quickly very complex calculations using a brain, the brain would need to have both reliable transmission across synapses and very fast average signal speed. Your very noisy brain has neither of these things. The very high levels of multiple types of noise in the brain should prevent both accurate recall of long bodies of text and also accurate "all in the mind" calculation of complex mathematical problems.
Item #20: Precognitive Dreams
In the posts below I have given many examples of dreams, visions or eerie voices that seemed to foretell a death:
When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death
More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death
Item #21: Experimentally Reproducible Precognition
Cornell University emeritus professor Daryl Bem wrote a paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a paper that seemed to show experimental evidence for precognition. The widely discussed paper was entitled, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.” Skeptics were outraged by these results, claiming they would never be replicated. But they were replicated. The meta-analysis here ("Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events") discusses 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 different countries. The analysis reported an overall effect of p=1.2 X 10-10. Roughly speaking, this means the results had a probability of about 1 in 10 billion. This is a very impressive result, showing statistical significance millions of times stronger than what is shown in typical papers reported by mainstream media. A typical paper that gets covered by the press will have a statistical significance of only about p=.01 or p=.05. There is no credible explanation of such evidence within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas.
Item #22: Poltergeist Activity
There have been many well-documented cases of many objects inexplicably moving around in particular places. Twelve well-documented cases are discussed in my post here. Credible explanations of such cases involve ideas such as mind over matter, or activity by invisible spiritual forces. There are no credible explanations for such cases within the straightjacket of prevailing neurocience dogmas.
Item #23: Mind Over Matter
The mind-over-matter effect of table turning (also called table tipping) was reported with very great frequency by a host of distinguished observers in the nineteenth century. This phenomenon of table turning (and related anomalous phenomena) were scientifically investigated by a distinguished scientist, Harvard chemistry professor emeritus Robert Hare. Hare started out completely believing in Michael Faraday's idea that table turning was caused purely by muscular force. But his investigations led him to reject such an idea. In 1855 he published a long book reaching the conclusion that the phenomenon involved an inexplicable paranormal reality. For example, on page 46 he states, “I first saw a table continue in motion when every person had withdrawn to about the distance of a foot; so that no one touched it; and while thus agitated on our host saying, 'Move the table toward Dr. Hare,' it moved toward me and back again.” This is only one of countless paranormal incidents described in the book, which Hare mainly regarded as proof of some mysterious paranormal reality. He devised numerous scientific instruments to test paranormal effects, and frequently found them to give dramatic inexplicable results.
Item #24: Medium Activity Seeming to Show Unaccountable Knowledge of the Deceased
The case of Leonora Piper is one of the most astonishing cases in the annals of psychic phenomena. Witnesses who met with her repeatedly claimed that she seemed to have knowledge that could not have been acquired through any well-understood means. For many years Piper would fall into a trance, and then begin speaking in a different-sounding voice, often a voice of someone identifying himself as someone other than Piper. Such a mysterious "control" would often seem to know things that Leonora Piper could not possibly have known. In later years under such trances Piper would produce writings called automatic writings. The case of Leonora Piper was extremely well documented in the Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Using the link here takes you to my post linking to the original documents and the testimony of investigators. The original publication describing such observations can be read here.
On page 438 we read this: "Mr. Hodgson has been in the habit of bringing acquaintances of his own to Mrs. Piper, without giving their names; and many of these have heard from the trance-utterance facts about their dead relations, etc., which they feel sure that Mrs. Piper could not have known." On page 440 we read this introductory remark by Frederic Myers:
"On the whole, I believe that all observers, both in America and in England, who have seen enough of Mrs. Piper in both states to be able to form a judgment, will agree in affirming (1) that many of the facts given could not have been learnt even by a skilled detective ; (2) that to learn others of them, although possible, would have needed an expenditure of money as well as of time which it seems impossible to suppose that Mrs. Piper could have met ; and (3) that her conduct has never given any ground whatever for supposing her capable of fraud or trickery. Few persons have been so long and so carefully observed ; and she has left on all observers the impression of thorough uprightness, candour, and honesty."
This all occurred in the late nineteenth century, which excludes all explanations of technological trickery. Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, there is simply no explanation for a case such as this. So neuroscientists as a rule avoid mentioning it.
Item #25: Little or No Memory Loss After Hemispherectomy Operations
Two very well-documented cases of this phenomenon are discussed in my long post "When Minds Seem to Borrow Bodies." In both cases a living person claimed to be a person who had previously died, showing memories matching those of the deceased person. Such cases have no explanation within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas.
Item #27: Life-long Continuation of a Single Self in Someone With a Normal Brain
There is nothing rare in the life-long continuation of a single self in someone with a normal brain. Such a thing happens with almost everyone, except perhaps split personalities. But the simple fact of unvarying self-hood is inexplicable under prevailing neuroscience dogmas. The diverse regions of the brain produce billions of largely random electrical signals, which we should never expect to give rise to a single unified self. The brain consists of two identical hemispheres, and if such hemispheres were to give rise to any selves, we would expect that the result would be two selves, rather than one.
Item #28: Telepathy Verified Under Laboratory Conditions
Some very convincing examples of ESP under experimental conditions are discussed here, here and here. The table below (from the link here) summarizes the results of Professor Joseph Rhine's laboratory experiments with Hubert Pearce at Duke University. These are tests in which the expected success rate is 5 out of 25, or 1 in 5. There is no way to work in some hypothesis of cheating with the results reported here. The table shows that Pearce got the same super-dramatic results even in a series of 650 trials when he was looking away from the cards, and also in a series of 300 trials in which there was a screen separating the cards and Pearce.
Even more impressive was the result of a remote test, in which a Professor Riess performed thirty-seven experimental sessions in which a 26-year old woman in a different building was asked to guess which of 5 ESP cards had been randomly chosen by Professor Riess. The woman guessed an average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, achieving a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate (instead of the expected accuracy rate of 20%). This was the result in "Series A" of two series of tests with the young woman. The chance of getting such a result accidentally is far less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 (this link estimates the probability of getting these results by chance as 1 in 10 to the 700th power, which is smaller than the chance of you correctly guessing all of the social security numbers of a set of 70 strangers). Page 36 of Louisa Rhine's book ESP in Life and Lab tells us the story of the Riess remote ESP test described above. The Riess experiment is also discussed on page 167-168 of Rhine's book Extra-sensory Perception After Sixty Years ( see here or here). Another discussion of the experiment is here.
A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:
"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”
The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10-16 cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, all such results are inexplicable. Since the results are largely remote results produced by people separated by distance, they cannot be explained by any speculative theory that the brain can act as a radio transmitter and radio receiver (a theory not supported by any neuroscience studies).
Item #29: Continuation of a Single Self After Split-Brain Surgery
To stop very bad epileptic seizures, doctors sometimes sever the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. If prevailing neuroscience dogmas were true, such an operation should either produce a radically diminished mind, or two minds in the same body. No such thing happens, although sometimes we hear deceptive claims to the contrary.
A scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”
The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.” The article here in Psychology Today describes the bizarre experiment that was used to make the groundless claim that split-brain patients have two minds. It was some experiment based only on visual perception, using some strange experimental setup unlike anyone normally encounters. The article shreds to pieces claims that results from such an experiment show that split-brain patients have two minds:
"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.
This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.
Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"
Item #30: Dream Series Repeating Themes of Life After Death
In general neuroscientists have no credible explanations for why dreams should occur. Neuroscientist speculations about some memory function of dreaming are not well-supported by evidence, and are contradicted by the fact that most people's dreams seem to involve random content unrelated to anything recently learned.
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