New Twin Study Clashes With "Brains Make Minds" Claim

 A recent press release has a title of "Major IQ differences in identical twins linked to schooling, challenging decades of research." We read of a scientific paper with results shocking to those who assumed that intelligence is a product of the brain. 

Two scientists compiled a dataset involving 87 twin pairs. The dataset included IQ scores and data on the educational experience of the twins. 52 pairs of twins with similar schooling had an average IQ difference of about 6 points. 25 pairs of twins with "somewhat similar" schooling had an average IQ difference of about 12 points. For the ten pairs of twins with "very dissimilar" schooling, the average IQ difference was 15 points. This is similar to the average IQ difference between two randomly selected people, which is about 17 points. 

Fifteen points is a big difference on an IQ score. A graph showing IQ scores as found in a human population will look like the graph below, with the most common numbers being found in the middle. 

We may presume that twins have identical brains. So we see a big average difference (about 15 points) between the intelligence levels of twins with identical brains, when such twins have very different educations. This is a result that clashes with claims that the brain is the source of someone's mind.  It would seem that if such claims are true, twins with identical brains should tend to have IQ scores almost identical. 

A recent article in The Atlantic by psychology professor Erik Turkheimer is entitled "Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are." We read this:

"We do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others. The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded....If anything, we are further away now than in 2018 in knowing 'basically what's going on' with genetic influences on intelligence....All of the most direct methods of searching for IQ genes were unsuccessful."

Whenever people make statements like this, we should tend to regard them as confessions which undermine or cast doubt on one of the underlying assumptions of the confessor. When someone confesses that he does not know how we will be able to do something, we should regard that as a strong reason for doubting that he will be able to do that thing. When a prosecutor confesses that he does not know how a murder defendant committed a claimed murder, we should doubt that such a person committed such a murder. And when some expert confesses that we do not know how Factor X causes Result Y, we should regard this as being a reason for doubting that Factor X causes Result Y.  So when we hear people confess things such as "we do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others," we should then doubt very much that there are "genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others." 

Men Have Faster-Shrinking Brains, But Women Get an Alzheimer's Diagnosis About Twice as Often as Men

 In the October 13, 2025 online edition of the journal Nature, we have an article with a headline of "Men's brains shrink faster than women's; what that means for Alzheimer's."  Alzheimer's is a disease involving a decline in mental function, and for older people the term is basically equivalent to dementia. 

Now, under the hypothesis that the brain makes the mind and that brains store memories, if men's brains shrink faster than women's as people age, there should be a higher rate of Alzheimer's disease in men. But the article tells us that the opposite is true. The article says, "Nearly twice as many women are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease as men." 

The article tells us that the conclusion that men's brains shrink faster than women's is based on a large study involving 12,500 MRI scans from 4,726 people who had at least two scans per person, taken an average of three years apart. We are given an example of the shrinkage rate: the claim that the postcentral cortex in men shrinks by 2% per year for men, versus 1.2% per year for women. 

The article's findings are contrary to claims that dementia or Alzheimer's disease is proportional to brain tissue loss. It is therefore very misleading for the article to include a visual like the visual it has. The visual shows a normal brain and a shrunken brain, with a caption of "A healthy brain and a brain affected by Alzheimer's disease." This is an old propaganda technique long used by those trying to suggest that brains are the source of minds and that brains are the storage place of memories. The technique involves showing photos of a normal brain and a shrunken brain, with a caption saying that the shrunken brain is the brain of the person with Alzheimer's. 

Contrary to the impression created by such a photo pair, a book on dementia says on page 35 that "there are many reports of people carefully diagnosed...as clearly having the clinical symptoms of dementia and yet showing no evidence of brain pathology."  On the same page the book gives this quote from a neuroscientist named Robert Terry:

"Over the years, investigators have sought assiduously for lesions or tissue alterations in the Alzheimer's brain which...might at least correlate with clinical determinants of the disease severity....Despite 30 years of such efforts, clinico-pathologic correlations have been so weak or entirely lacking that determination of the proximate, let alone the ultimate, cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has not been possible."

I may note that studies on the relation between dementia and brain volume are often guilty of various flaws. One flaw sometimes occurring is when the brains of people diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's are compared to the brains of healthy controls. If such a diagnosis was made after brains scans of subjects were done, the state of the brain may have influenced what type of diagnosis a person got, making the diagnosis a poor way of independently comparing brain states and mental states. A better technique is to judge dementia or Alzheimer's purely on the basis of performance on mental tests such as the MMSE, and to compare performance on such tests with brain states. The MMSE is the Mini-Mental State Examination, and is the most common test for cognitive impairment. 

The paper here shows graphs comparing MMSE scores and gray matter volumes, and shows no strong correlation between the two. We have in Figure 2 a scatter plot showing dots, each of which represents a correlation between gray matter in some region of the brain, and the corresponding MMSE scores. None of the correlations are strong, with none being higher than .5. Almost all of the correlations are weak, being well under .5; and the average correlation is only about .25.  A strong correlation is one such as .8 or .9. 

We do not have in the paper a graph showing negative correlations between regions of the brain and the corresponding MMSE scores. If such a graph had been given, we would probably have seen just as many or almost as many negative correlations (between brain volumes in different regions and MMSE scores) as positive correlations. Using the phrase "gray matter atrophy" to refer to brain shrinkage, the paper states, "The associations between gray matter atrophy, hypoperfusion, and cognitive impairment in AD [Alzheimer's disease] are still unknown, especially the causal pathways between them." The Nature article discussed in this post makes it all the more clear that there is no clear causal relation between brain shrinkage and dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Below is interesting data from Table 1 of the paper here. We have data on six elderly female subjects called "super-agers." The MMSE number is the score on the Mini-Mental State Examination, a test of cognitive ability including short-term recall and also long-term semantic memory.  The maximum score on the test is 30. Notice the lack of correlation between brain weight and IQ, and the lack of correlation between brain weight and the MMSE score. The  MMSE scores for the 1st and 2nd subjects are identical, with the 2nd subject being very slightly smarter, even though the second subject has a brain weight 25% smaller. That same 2nd subject has an IQ of 135 -- in the 99th percentile for humans -- despite her  brain being very far below the average female brain size of about 1200 grams. The 4th subject has a brain much smaller than the fifth subject, but has the same perfect MMSE score, and an IQ score 10% higher. These results are consistent with the idea that your brain is not the source of your mind, and not the explanation of your memory powers. 

NAME	AGE	MMSE (MAX=30)	IQ	BRAIN WEIGHT (GRAMS)
SA1	87	29	133	1240
SA2	90	29	135	990
SA3	99	25	112	1020
SA4	87	30	119	1090
SA5	81	30	107	1269
SA6	90	29	111	1100

A similar table with data for 50 subjects can be found in the year 2021 paper "Is there a correlation between the number of brain cells and IQ?" We read this summary of the results:

"In our sample of 50 male brains, IQ scores did not correlate significantly with the total number of neurons (Fig. 1A), oligodendrocytes (Fig. 1B), astrocytes (Fig. 1C) or microglia (Fig. 1D) in the neocortex, nor with the cortical volume (Fig. 2A), surface area (Fig. 2B) and thickness (Fig. 2C). This also applied to estimates of the four separate lobes (frontal-, temporal-, parietal-, and occipital cortices; see Supplementary Material). Neither did IQ score correlate significantly with the volumes of white matter (Fig. 2D), central gray matter (Fig. 2E) or lateral ventricles (Fig. 2F), nor with the brain weight (Fig. 3A), or body height (Fig. 3B). All of these correlation coefficients were less than 0.2." 

Can we imagine a more complete research failure of the "brains make minds" hypothesis?

Appendix: In the scientific paper entitled, “A guide to appropriate use of Correlation coefficient in medical research,” we read the following: “A correlation coefficient of 0.2 is considered to be negligible correlation while a correlation coefficient of 0.3 is considered as low positive correlation.” Below is Table 1 from that paper, which has the heading of "Rule of Thumb for Interpreting the Size of a Correlation Coefficient."

Size of Correlation	Interpretation
.90 to 1.00 (−.90 to −1.00)	Very high positive (negative) correlation
.70 to .90 (−.70 to −.90)	High positive (negative) correlation
.50 to .70 (−.50 to −.70)	Moderate positive (negative) correlation
.30 to .50 (−.30 to −.50)	Low positive (negative) correlation
.00 to .30 (.00 to −.30)	negligible correlation

If you do a Google image search for "correlation coefficient interpretation," you will find several tables or guidelines that list all correlation coefficients of 0.2 or less as either "negligible," "very poor," or "very weak," and some of them (like the table above) actually list all correlation coefficients of .3 or less as "negligible.

Every "Grade A" Report of an Out-of-Body Experience Cripples the Credibility of "Brains Make Minds" Claims

 Very many people are familiar with how people in recent decades have reported moving out of their bodies during near-death experiences.  But many people are not aware that the evidence for such out-of-body experiences goes way back before the publication of Raymond Moody's famous 1976 book Life After Life. 

An early account for an out-of-body experience can be found on page 447 of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, dating from 1889. A  Mrs. N. J. Crans wrote the following to the distinguished researcher Richard Hodgson, telling of an out-of-body experience that seemed to have details corroborated by another person:

"After lying down to rest, I remember of feeling a drifting sensation, of seeming almost as if I was going out of the body. My eyes were closed ; soon I realized that I was, or seemed to be, going fast somewhere. All seemed dark to me ; suddenly I realized that I was in a room, then I saw Charley lying in a bed asleep; then I took a look at the furniture of the room, and distinctly saw every article of furniture in the room, even to a chair at the head of the bed, which had one of the pieces broken in the back ; and Charley's clothes lay on that chair, across the bottom of chair."

The full account includes a "veridical verification" element, as Charley later writes back to Mrs. Crans to say that the room looked exactly as described, and that he also saw someone named Allie at the time Mrs. Crans reported seeing her during the out-of-body experience. 

A few years later there was published an account you can read at the link here, which takes you to page 180 of Volume 8 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, published in 1892. I have summarized this account of an out-of-body experience at the post here. 

A long account of out-of-body experiences was given in the 1929 book The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan J. Muldoon, which you can read here. Muldoon claims to have had many out-of-body experiences, but gives little in the way of corroborating evidence to back up his tales. 

In the 1960's and 1970's the scholar Robert Crookall PhD collected many accounts of out-of-body experiences.  His works on the topic include these:

• The Supreme Adventure (1961), which you can read here. 
• The Techniques of Astral Projection (1964), which you can read here.
• More Astral Projections (1964), which you can read here. 
• Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1970), which you can read here.

The More Astral Projections book gives about 160 cases of out-of-body experiences. Below are some examples, none of which involved people under anesthetics:

• Case #161. A Mrs. J. Douglas Newton reported this: "My son, then 8 years of age, who had never heard of any¬ thing of this sort, had gone to bed one night and was lying reading. Suddenly he called rather urgently for me. I found him sitting up, rather scared. He said, 'Such a funny thing has happened. I was just lying reading when I felt I was rising into the air. I seemed to go up,near the ceiling. Then I looked down and could see myself lying in bed. I came slowly down.' "
• Case #162. A B. Barrett reported this: "I was in perfect health when one night I found myself looking down at my earthly body and could not make out why it was not lying there dead as I thought."
• Case #164. A Florence Roberts reported this: "I have had many out- of-the-body experiences when a child. ... I found myself above my physical body on the bed. "
• Case 165. A Mrs. Lambert reported this: "Suddenly I shot out of my body. I lay about six feet up, looking down at myself."
• Case 170. A Peter Urquhart stated this: "I went outside and found myself out of the body again. This time the sensation was like being in a balloon, attached by a cord somewhere in the region of the navel, like the umbilical cord."
• Case 172. A Mrs. Argles reported this: "I found myself standing on the top of the steps, looking down on my body, lying on the floor. There was a cord connecting me to the body on the floor."
• Case 173. Vera Oates stated this: "in the early hours of the morning I was suddenly wide awake, but, to my amazement, I was hovering between the railing and the bed. I looked down and saw myself on the bed."
• Case 174. A Mrs. G. Teakel stated, "I have many times been outside my body and found it a lovely experience. It happens mostly around 3 a.m."
• Case 175. A Mrs. Harris stated this: "I have left my body many times, walking round the room and looking at my body which is joined by a cord." Reports of such a cord connecting body to soul are not very rare.
• Case 176. A Mr. Jebb stated, "I walked round the room twice when out of my body."
• Case 183. A Mrs. M. F. Hemeon stated this: "Suddenly I felt myself  ‘swimming’ up out of my body...I was very startled, and by an effort of will... returned to my body."
• Case 194. A woman states, " Suddenly I was floating with my nose almost touching the ceiling—I saw all the little imperfections in the distemper."
• Case 201: An R. J. Carlson states, " I suddenly found myself out of and above myself—and yet I could either sense or see my body in bed."
• Case 204: A Rebecca Schreiber stated "I suddenly felt I had left my body and was flying over the ocean until I came to the ship" (the Queen Mary) that her daughter was on. After asking her daughter what was wrong, and being told she was sea-sick, she told her daughter she would soon feel better. Her daughter later said she had an experience matching this visitation account, while on the ship, at about the same time. 
• Case 236. Oscar Mockler stated, "The next thing I was aware of was standing on the floor of the cabin and looking down at my body lying asleep in the bunk."
• Case 241.  Mrs. N. Matile stated this: "I found myself floating above my bed (about three feet above). I then quickly passed out of the window to the middle of the Mews where we were living. It was a starry night and it was a lovely feeling, floating in the air. "
• Case 243. An M.E. Fearn stated this: "I felt myself arise and float off the bed and ... was at the foot of our bed, looking at myself asleep, facing my husband’s back. Then I floated towards the window."
• Case 246.  A Mrs. Eyres stated, "I had a feeling that the real Me came out of my body through the head and I had the sensation of flying.” She claimed to have visited other countries in out-of-body experiences. 
• Case 247. A Mrs. Watkin claimed to be visited by two figures who took on a visit to some spirit world. She states this: "I was brought back to my bedroom and there the three of us again stood looking at my lifeless-looking body. Suddenly I slipped easily and swiftly into it."   
• Case 259. A Miss Douglas stated this: "“One night I awoke from sleep to find that I was in a horizontal position and suspended in mid-air. In this position I travelled at moderate speed through the bedroom windows out into the night. It was moonlight and I could see the houses very clearly. I felt thrilled as I travelled along ...It was so real. I drifted across the roof-tops and identified the neighbours’ gardens. ... On the return journey I seemed to be losing height but not speed. ... Finally, I arrived in the garden at home, still remaining in a horizontal position and suspended in mid-air."
• Case 267. A Mr. Hall stated this: "Presently a most strange sensation passed through my body. Next I floated out through the winidow and across the town. I seemed to be several hundred feet above the ground."
• Case 268. A C. H. Normanby stated, "About the age of 15 years I experienced passing out of my body on two occasions."
• Case 269. A Mrs. Flint stated, "One afternoon, while resting on my bed, I felt myself floating, or rather suspended in the air, and I was actually looking down at my body on the bed."
• Case 285. A Mrs. Mansergh stated this: "In February, 1939, my husband and I retired to bed as usual and I awoke to find myself standing by the side of the bed looking down on the sleeping forms of my husband and myself. I moved away from the bed to the window. As I moved, I noticed a glistening cord trailing from me." 
• Case 309. A G. Bradley stated this: " I awoke about 7 a.m., and had the sensation of leaving the body. All I could see was the frame of myself left in the bed. I was floating around the room feeling peaceful. Suddenly I had the urge to get back into the shell of my body. What a struggle I had to do it!"
• Case 310. A Mrs. Shakespeare stated this: "During the night I seemed to float down the ward and then returned and hovered over my bed, looking down at myself. I felt calm and peaceful.”
• Case 313: A Mrs. Fyal stated this:  "Suddenly I felt myself leaving my body and looking around my bedroom... I saw my own body...Suddenly I found myself wandering again and floated to my body where, in the morning, I was astounded that I was in it."
• Case 314: A Mrs. Langridge stated this: "I was outside my body, suspended in air, and looking down upon my body. Three or four people were reviving me. I was in a pleasant state of freedom and thought, ‘I wish these people would leave me alone!' "
• Case 327. Dr G. B. Kirkland stated this: "To my surprise, I found myself looking at myself lying on the bed. The thought; just flashed through me that I didn't think much of me —in fact, I didn’t approve of me at all. Then I was hurried off at great speed. Have you ever looked through a very long tunnel and seen the tiny speck of light at the far end ? It seems an incredible distance off. Well, I found myself with others vaguely discernible hurrying along just such a tunnel or passage—smoky or cloudy, colourless, grey and very cold."
• Case 329:  A Mrs. Florence Phillips stated this: " Suddenly I began to float away from my body and entered a grand garden. ... I seemed to float through the trees into a mist. Suddenly it seemed as if a gun went off  and I was back in bed."
• Case 336: An F. W. Talbot stated this: "The next  moment I was suspended in mid-air, horizontal, and looking down at my body on the bed. I could see myself lying in bed quite clearly. I watched an attendant go to my body, lift my arm and plunge in a needle. This was extremely interesting; I was suspended over his head and my feeling was that of detached curiosity."
• Case 337: A Mrs Rowbotham stated, "I remember being on the ceiling of the room looking down at the two doctors and two nurses—just floating and watching."
• Case 339: A Kathleen Snowdon stated this: "Suddenly I realized a feeling of great excitement, wonder and delight surpassing anything I had ever experienced as I felt my body [‘double’] completely weightless and floating upwards in a golden glow towards a wonderful light around hazy welcoming figures and the whole air was filled with beautiful singing. I floated joyfully towards the light and then I heard my mother’s voice calling me. My whole being revolted against going back."
• Case 343: An S. H. Kelly stated this: "As I lost consciousness, certain things in my life came in front of me. This was followed by a queer sound of music and the next thing I was suspended in mid-air and looking at them bringing my body out of the water and trying artificial respiration. I was very happy and free and wondered why they were doing that when I was here! At that moment I was transported to my mother’s room. I stood beside her as she was by the fire in an easy chair, trying to tell her I was all right and happy. Afterwards, I was back, looking at my body, when a brilliant light shone around me and a voice said, ‘It is not your time yet—you must go back. You have work to do!' "
• Case 346:  A Mrs. Maries stated this: "Meanwhile I  had left my body and felt myself floating in what seemed like a dark tunnel (with a glimpse, at the end, of a lovely countryside). I had no pain, only a wonderful feeling of happiness. I felt I had somebody with me, but saw nobody. Only I heard a voice which said, ‘You must go back! That child needs you!’ I returned to my body and heard the doctor say, ‘No, by Jove, I can still feel her heart!’ "

At the end of his book More Astral Projections, Robert Crookall has some interesting summary statistics regarding how often such accounts had recurring characteristics. He used the term "the double" for a kind of spirit body that was a double of the human body. For what he called "single-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "The fact that the ‘double’ left the body chiefly via the head was noted in 29 natural and two enforced cases (i.e. 13.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively)."
• "The fact that, the newly-released ‘double’, often took up a horizontal position (usually not far above its physical counterpart), was noted in 50 natural and 7 enforced cases (i.e. 23.3 per cent and 18.9 per cent respectively)."
• The percentage of people reporting a "silver cord" or "shining cord" connecting the human body and a spirit body (or something like that) was "43 (20.0 per cent) natural cases, 6 (16.2 per cent) enforced cases." 

For what Crookall called "double-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "People who saw the ‘dead’ (including ‘deliverers) comprised 57 natural and 6 enforced cases (26.6 per cent and 16.2 per cent respectively)."
• "‘Level’ of consciousness: (a) ‘super-normal’ (with clairvoyance, telepathy, foreknowledge, etc.)—41 (19.0 per cent) natural cases and 2 (5.4 per cent) enforced cases; (b) normal—6 (2.8 per cent) natural cases and 1 (2.7 per cent) enforced case; (c) ‘sub-normal’—3 (1.4 per cent) natural and no enforced case." In the book people often report having a sharper or faster or clearer mind during an out-of-body experience. Such cases are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is not the source of human thinking, but a kind of valve that restricts the human mind, allowing a mind to focus on mundane little tasks such as food gathering and wealth accumulation. 

We surely would not expect anything like such percentages if mere hallucination was involved.  In random hallucinations, you would expect matching specific details in fewer than 1 in 1000 cases, there being innumerable thousands or millions of ways in which a random hallucination might unfold. 

A typical observer position in out-of-body experiences

The source here discusses a variety of surveys taken to try to determine how common out-of-body experiences are.  It gives  numbers which suggest that out-of-body experiences occur to significant fractions of the human population, something like between 10% and 20%.

The 1973 book Glimpses of the Beyond: The Extraordinary Experiences of People Who Crossed the Brinks of Death and Returned by Jean-Baptiste Delacour preceded the much more famous Life After Life book by Raymond Moody. (Reading the book may require setting up a login with archive.org and doing an online "borrow" of the book.) Some of the accounts in Delacour's book sound like the well-known type of near-death experiences Moody described. For example, on page 14 Daniel Gelin (a well-known French actor) states that when being treated in a hospital "suddenly, I found myself floating through the room." On the next page, Gelin describes encountering his deceased mother and father, who led him to a "rose-colored world, a sort of fairy garden" where he encountered his deceased son. But then an "inexorable force" caused him to return to the hospital room.  

On page 20 of the same book, we hear the account of Betty Patterson, who said this:

"At first I felt as if my spirit, my self, was separating from 

the bulk of my body and floating up to the ceiling of the room.

From up there I could look down at my body on the operating table. Then this scene vanished from my field of view, and

suddenly I was surrounded by gentle light and soft music. 

I was overcome by a feeling of deep content that I had

never felt in life. This sensation overpowered me in such a 

way that I no longer felt any desire for earhly life. I tried

to move in the direction the sounds were coming from, 

but something forcibly prevented me. Apparently, the time had not come for the final separation from the body."

On page 20 of the book, we also read of a James Lorne who was clinically dead for five minutes after suffering a heart attack. Lorne states this:

"I felt myself floating in the air and could clearly see my body lying down there. I landed in a long corridor filled with soft twilight. At the end a bright light was shining.  I could also hear voices coming from there." 

Lorne describes encountering some "splendid garden" with people in it, but when he tried to move closer, the scene always receded. 

On page 37 we read of a Mrs. Francis Leslie who had her heart revived after it had stopped for quite a while, for so long that she was declared dead. She said that she found herself mysteriously "floating in a long shaft" that she also described as a "tunnel." She heard a voice calling from far away in the tunnel, which she identified as someone who had died.  She then felt herself back in the hospital. After describing her experience, she died about 12 hours later. 

On page 40 a doctor says that heart patients "again and again have the sensation of being disembodied" and that "in a sense they feel they are floating above themselves," and that they see their body "lying below them on the ground." 

What is interesting about the accounts I just gave from the 1973 Delacour book is that at the time it was published, almost no one except scholars of the paranormal had heard about out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences, so such accounts cannot be dismissed as some kind of conformity to a widely-known pattern. Several years after Delacour's book (after the publication of Moody's Life After Life) a host of people began reporting out-of-body experiences, and such reports have continued at a constant pace. 

In a book by Colin Wilson, we read the following:

"In the 1960s the psychologist Charles Tart studied a borderline schizophrenic girl whom he called Miss Z., who told him that she had been leaving her body ever since childhood. To test whether these experiences were dreams Tart told her to try an experiment: she was to write the numbers one to ten on several slips of paper, scramble them up, then choose one at random when her light was out and place it on the bedside table. If she had an out-of- the-body experience in the night she had to try to read the number (she claimed to be able to see in the dark during her OBEs). She tried this several times and found she always got the number right. So Tart decided to test her himself. The girl was wired up to machines in his laboratory and asked to try and read a five-digit number which Tart had placed on a high shelf in the room next door. Miss Z. reported correcdy that the number was 25132."

Wilson tells us the following: 

"Many thousands of examples of out-of-the-body experiences have been reported in the literature of the paranormal: one eminent researcher, Robert Crookall, devoted nine volumes to such cases. Another, the South African investigator J. C. Poynton, collected 122 cases as a result of a single questionnaire published in a newspaper. A similar appeal by the English researcher Celia Green brought 326 cases. One survey even produced the incredible statistic that one in ten persons have had an out-of-the-body experience."

Out-of-body experiences are very powerful evidence against the central dogmas of modern neuroscientists, the dogma that the brain is the cause of human mental phenomena such as consciousness, self-hood and thinking,  and the dogma that the brain is the storage place of memories.  There are a host of good reasons for rejecting such claims, such as the fact that brains are too slow and noisy to account for instant very accurate human recall, the fact that many people think very well and remember very well after half or most of their brain has been destroyed by disease or surgery (as discussed here and here), the fact that the brain has nothing like what it would need to have to instantly store and instantly retrieve memories, and the fact that the proteins that make up brains have average lifetimes of less than two weeks (1000 times shorter than the longest length of time humans can remember things).  Out-of-body experiences are just exactly what we would expect to have happening if mind and memory are not brain effects, but something like soul effects.  Nature never did anything to tell humans that brains make minds and that brains store memories. Neuroscientists merely jumped to such conclusions without any adequate warrant, ignoring many a reason for rejecting such conclusions. 

Attempts to explain away such very common out-of-body experiences as hallucinations make no sense at all. A hallucination is by definition when you see something that is not really there. Someone reporting seeing his body from about two meters above it is not having a hallucination, because what he sees (his body) is actually there. 

Moreover, such experiences show strongly repeating very distinctive features (as discussed above), which we would not see in hallucinations (which would merely have random content).  There are a billion-and-one things someone might hallucinate about, so given so many possibilities for hallucination content and the rarity of visual hallucinations, we would expect that only once in a blue moon would any person on Earth have a hallucination about floating above his body.  Instead, a significant fraction of the human population seems to report out-of-body experiences (about 10% to 20% according to the surveys listed here).  There are many veridical out-of-body-experiences in which someone reports seeing something he should not have been able to see if he was hallucinating.  Such experiences powerfully refute claims that out-of-body experiences are mere hallucinations.  For example, in the case described here, #41, a person (S. H. Beard) tried to deliberately produce an out-of-body experience targeting the location of a second person unaware of such an attempt, and the second person reported seeing an apparition of that person at the same time, with a third person living with the second person also reporting the sight of such an apparition at that time. 

In the paper The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences by Bruce Greyson and Ian Stevenson, which examined in depth 78 near-death experiences, we have this very interesting quote (which may corroborate some of what Crookall suggests about a "second body" linked to the normal body by something perhaps cord-like):

"The impression of having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body was reported by 58% of our respondents (77% of those reporting out-of-the-body experiences). The nonphysical body was most commonly described as lighter in weight than the respondent’s physical body (74%) but the same size (68%) and the same age (84%). The nonphysical body was described as showing some indication of 'life'(e.g., pulse, breath) by 67% of those reporting a non-physical body and as ‘linked’ ‘to the physical body insome way by 28%. Twenty percent of those reporting a nonphysical body claimed that sensonimotor or structural defects present in their physical body (e.g.,partial deafness, missing limbs) were absent in the nonphysical body; 3% reported such defects to be present in the nonphysical body." 

Published reports of out-of-body experiences vary in quality.  If a report is merely a recollection of what someone saw very long ago, and no earlier report was published, that does not qualify as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience. If someone writes what he claims was told him by someone else,  without quoting word-for-word exactly what the person said, that does not qualify as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.   If someone reports something he saw after using hallucinatory drugs, that is  not a "Grade A"  report of an out-of-body experience.  If someone merely reports a kind of "up in the clouds" feeling or "floating sky-high" feeling without observing his body from outside of the body, that is  not a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.  Accounts that quote from an unnamed witness do not qualify as a "Grade A" report  unless they are quotes taken verbatim from that witness  by a named reliable source. 

On the page here we have some accounts of out-of-body experiences published in the New York Times. They are only "Grade B" accounts because the witnesses are recalling what happened very long ago. Jeff Sears says that decades ago during surgery, "I found myself hovering above myself on the hospital table."  Marion Novack says that decades ago "I was floating above my body in the emergency room, watching the physicians and staff trying to save me."

A "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience occurs when a normal credible person without a psychiatric diagnosis describes in writing (or in taped speech) what he saw very recently, while describing viewing his body while totally apart from his body. There are many such reports in the literature. There are also many reports that we can classify as "Grade A+" reports. The "Grade A+" reports are those which meet the requirements of a "Grade A" report, but also involve a person reporting seeing something that he should have been unable to see if he was still in his body, with such an observation being later verified as correct.  Many such "Grade A+" reports are discussed in my post here. 

 Each and every such Grade A or Grade A+ report of an out-of-body experience is enough to cripple the credibility of claims that the brain is the source  of the human mind. No such reports should ever occur if your mind is produced by your brain.  

A system for rating the reliability of unexpected paranormal reports is discussed in my post here. I proposed a system in which up to six stars could be awarded: 

• Add 1 star if we have first-hand testimony or testimony exactly quoting what a witness said he saw.
• Add 1 star if we have a named and reliable witness.
• Add 1 star if a written dated eyewitness report was made very soon after the observation occurred, with the report being quoted, or the account being such a report.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was published very soon after the observation occurred.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was made by multiple witnesses who agree with each other.
• Add 1 star if the observation report is backed up by physical evidence such as a photo or video.

For an out-of-body experience, the last two items in the bullet list above are inapplicable. For an out-of-body experiences we might adapt the system to be like this:

• Add 1 star if we have first-hand testimony or testimony exactly quoting what a witness said he saw, in which he or she reports being outside of his body.
• Add 1 star if we have a named and reliable witness.
• Add 1 star if a written dated eyewitness report was made very soon after the observation occurred, with the report being quoted, or the account being such a report.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was published very soon after the observation occurred.
• Add 1 star if we have clear evidence the witness underwent a life-threatening experience, of a type (such as cardiac arrest) that is often associated with out-of-body experiences. 
• Add 1 star if there is verification of something the witness claimed to have seen while out of the body, something he should have been unable to observe by regular means.

We might classify testimony scoring 5 or 6 stars under such a system as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.

If the topic of this post interested you, check out my free 160-page book "Near-Death Experiences and Out-of-Body Experiences," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  which you can get by clicking the [] icon at the bottom of the file viewer, you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. 

How We Got Misinformed About "Grandmother Cells"

Each neuron fires between about 1 and 200 times per second, with the firing rate being unpredictable. So neurons are a noisy, unpredictable signal source; and that kind of source provides opportunities for noise mining and pareidolia, the occasional finding of some desired pattern by people scanning noisy, variable data looking for such a pattern. Similarly, at a restaurant that makes 200 pieces of toast every day using different types of bread, there is an opportunity for noise mining, in which someone checking each piece of toast may eventually claim to see the face of Jesus in a slice of toast. 

Let us look at the history of claims of "grandmother cells." The term refer to some neuron that might allegedly respond only when a person sees some particular type of visual, such as a picture of the person's grandmother. The 2002 article "Genealogy of the 'Grandmother Cell'" by the late Charles G. Gross gives us some background on how the idea of such a cell got started. Gross tells us this:

"The term originated in a parable Jerry Lettvin told in 1967. A similar concept had been systematically developed a few years earlier by Jerzy Konorski who called such cells 'gnostic' units."

So according to Gross, the concept of a "grandmother cell" arose independently of observations, without any empirical warrant.  But then Gross starts telling an unwarranted self-serving tale that evidence was found supportive of such an idea. He claims, "In the early 1970s, my colleagues and I working at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported visual neurons in the inferior temporal cortex of the monkey that fired selectively to hands and faces (Gross and others 1969, 1972; Gross 1998a)." Gross is here engaging in self-citation. Let us look at the papers Gross refers to, and see whether they actually gave any evidence to back up such a claim. 

• The 1969 paper "Visual Receptive Fields of Neurons in Inferotemporal Cortex of the Monkey" by Gross and others which you can read here. We have no specific data backing up any claim that anything had been found like a neuron that only responds to some particular image. We merely have this vague statement: "There were several units that responded most strongly to more complicated figures. For example, one unit that responded to dark rectangles responded much more strongly to a cutout of a monkey hand, and the more the stimulus looked like a hand, the more strongly the unit responded to it." The paper gives no data backing up such a claim. 
• The 1972 paper by Gross is the paper "Visual properties of neurons in inferotemporal cortex of the macaque." Only the first page of the paper is publicly available here. That page makes no claim backing up claims of anything like a grandmother cell. 
• The "Gross 1998a" citation is a citation of the book "Brain, Vision, Memory" by Gross, which you can read here.  On page 198 Gross claims that "he did not publish a full account of a face-selective neuron until 1982," which shows that the previous two citations were inappropriate. On the same page Gross misspoke by claiming that "soon thereafter, a flood of papers on such cells appeared." No such flood occurred. He mentions a 1982 paper by Perrett, Rolls and Cann ("Visual Neurones Responsive to Faces in the Monkey Temporal Cortex"), which you can read here. 

Nothing that is in any of these citations supports the claim that anything like a face-selective cell or a hand-selective cell was discovered. If we look at the 1982 paper by Perrett, Rolls and Cann ("Visual Neurones Responsive to Faces in the Monkey Temporal Cortex"), which you can read here, we also find nothing impressive. The paper claims that "Of the 497 cells recorded in the STS region there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested." There is no claim that these cells fired only when other faces were shown, and Figure 3 (cherry-picked as the strongest evidence of a "face responsive cell") shows the cell firing many times when things other than faces were shown. The graphs in the diagram are examples of cherry-picking, showing results from a few cells that seemed to fire the most when the subject was shown faces. 

Some mathematical analysis will show how unimpressive the result discussed above. In the study there were five types of sensory stimuli: faces, gratings/geometric stimuli, complex 3D stimuli, somatosensory stimuli, and auditory stimuli. Let us imagine that we are recording how 497 cells respond when a subject is exposed to one of a small number of categories of stimulus, such as five.  Given a high random variability in how the cells respond, with the firing rates varying randomly between 1 and 200 times per second, and given a relatively small number of trials, and only a small number of types of stimulus (such as only five), we would expect that by chance there would be about 10% of these cells that would fire twice as often or more when a subject is exposed to one of the five types of stimulus. So the reported result that "there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested" is not something unexpected, assuming purely chance results, and no actual "face sensitivity" or "face selectivity" going on in the cells. 

The claim by Gross to have discovered neurons that "fired selectively to faces and hands" was false. Neither he nor anyone else discovered any such thing. All that was going on was noise-mining.  Monkeys were being shown different visual stimuli, including faces and things that were not faces. The firing of hundreds of neurons were recorded, and researchers were drawing attention to the cells that happened to have the highest firing rate when faces were shown. No evidence was being presented of more neuron firing during face observation than we would expect to see from a random set of randomly firing cells that fired with a high variability. 

Later in the 2002 article "Genealogy of the 'Grandmother Cell'" by Charles G. Gross, Gross makes this claim: "Starting 10 years later, these finding were replicated and extended in a number of laboratories (e.g., Perrett and others 1982; Rolls 1984; Yamane and others 1988) and were often viewed as evidence for grandmother cells." The references do not actually refer to any papers providing evidence for grandmother cells. The 1982 Perrett paper is discussed above, and did not find any such evidence, but merely claimed "Of the 497 cells recorded in the STS region there was a sub-population of at least 48 cells which gave responses to the sight of faces that were two to ten times as large as the responses to other stimuli tested."  The Rolls 1984 paper is the paper "Neurons in the cortex of the temporal lobe and in the amygdala of the monkey with responses selective for faces."  It is merely another paper picking out some cells out of hundreds that fired more often when faces were shown, while also firing when things other than faces were shown. 

None of the papers that Gross has cited could intelligently be interpreted as evidence for grandmother cells, so Gross misleads us badly by claiming that such papers "were often viewed as evidence for grandmother cells." Later Gross confesses, "However, most of the reported face-selective cells do not really fit a very strict criteria of grandmother/ gnostic cells in representing a specific percept, that is, a cell narrowly selective for one face and only one face across transformations of size, orientation, and color (Desimone 1991; Gross 1992)." At the end of the paper, Gross deceives us by trying to make it sound like these alleged "face selective" cells may be something like "grandmother cells." But no evidence he has presented or cited has given any evidence for such "grandmother cells." 

The next big development on this topic occurred when scientists started reading the firings of neurons in individual humans. This is something that cannot be done by simply having a person wear an EEG cap on his head. The reading of firings of individual neurons in humans requires the implanting of electrodes into the brain.  Some people with drug-resistant epilepsy have electrodes implanted in their brains so that doctors can figure out where is the best place to do surgery to help cure their epilepsy. Neuroscientists have tried to leverage the implanting of such electrodes, to study the firing of individual neurons in the human brain. 

This has often been a morally objectionable type of activity by neuroscientists. The type of electrodes implanted in a brain to evaluate a patient for epilepsy are called macroelectrodes.  The type of electrodes implanted to record the firing of individual neurons are called microelectrodes. There is never any medical justification for implanting microelectrodes in addition to macroelectrodes. A scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." In other words, there is no medical justification for implanting microelectrodes in the brains of epilepsy patients. Here is a quote from a scientific paper:

"The effects of penetrating microelectrode implantation on brain tissues according to the literature data...  are as follows:

1. Disruption of the blood–brain barrier (BBB);
2. Tissue deformation;
3. Scarring of the brain tissue around the implant, i.e., gliosis 
4. Chronic inflammation after microelectrode implantation;
5. Neuronal cells loss."

What is going on with attempts to find something like grandmother cells in humans is typically a morally objectionable affair in which very sick people are being put to unnecessary risks for the sake of scientists seeking fame and glory. Such affairs are so morally dubious that we should have a natural tendency to distrust the statements of scientists doing such research, just as we should have a natural tendency to distrust the statements of any person engaged in a reckless or shady activity. 

Similar to claims of a "grandmother cell" are claims of a "Jennifer Aniston neuron" that was activated only when a epileptic subject was shown a picture of Jennifer Aniston. The claim is unfounded, and does not match the data in the original paper. For a discussion of the shady business that went when claims like this were made, see the last seven  paragraphs of my post here. 

At the link here, a vision scientist describes some of what is going in studies like the studies mentioned above:

"Neuroscience, as it is practiced today, is a pseudoscience, largely because it relies on post hoc correlation-fishing....As previously detailed, practitioners simply record some neural activity within a particular time frame; describe some events going on in the lab during the same time frame; then fish around for correlations between the events and the 'data' collected. Correlations, of course, will always be found. Even if, instead of neural recordings and 'stimuli' or 'tasks' we simply used two sets of random numbers, we would find correlations, simply due to chance. What’s more, the bigger the dataset, the more chance correlations we’ll turn out (Calude & Longo (2016)). So this type of exercise will always yield 'results;' and since all we’re called on to do is count and correlate, there’s no way we can fail. Maybe some of our correlations are 'true,' i.e. represent reliable associations; but we have no way of knowing; and in the case of complex systems, it’s extremely unlikely. It’s akin to flipping a coin a number of times, recording the results, and making fancy algorithms linking e.g. the third throw with the sixth, and hundredth, or describing some involved pattern between odd and even throws, etc. The possible constructs, or 'models' we could concoct are endless. But if you repeat the flips, your results will certainly be different, and your algorithms invalid...As Konrad Kording has admitted, practitioners get around the non-replication problem simply by avoiding doing replications.” 

Later in the same scientist's blog, we read this year 2023 comment: "Articles published during the past decade bemoaning the inability of mainstream neuroscience to generate replicable or even reproducible outcomes are too many to count."  In the same post the scientist states this:

"If we weren't living it, it would be hard to imagine how a research culture could have strayed so far from the path of rationality as has the culture of neuroscience. Fundamental problems in theory and method have long been flagged (e.g. Teller, 1984; Jonas & Kording, 2018; Brette, 2019), but critiques have left barely a trace on the hard-beaten track of routine, mainstream practice."

Professors Acting Spooky-Stupid Outnumber Professors Acting Spooky-Smart

"Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected.”

― Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The average person may occasionally read about the paranormal, and may get the impression that it is some extremely rare thing, based on how infrequently it is reported. But there are reasons for thinking that what you read about the paranormal is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Instead of being a “blue moon” type of thing, the paranormal may be extremely common.

In Arcangel's study of 827 people, 596 (72%)  responded that they had had an "afterlife encounter." We read, "69% of respondents listed some form of visual encounter (Question 4), 19% were Visual only, 13% were a combination of Visual/Auditory, 8% Visual/Sense of Presence and 8% Visual/Auditory/Sense of Presence."

Erlendur Haraldsson surveyed 902 people in Iceland in 1974, finding that 31% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person.  He did another survey in Iceland  in 2007 with a similar sample size, finding that 42% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person, with 21% reporting a "visual experience of a dead person,"  along with 21% reporting an out-of-body experience. 

According to the paper "Psychic Experiences in the Multinational Human Values Study: Who Reports Them?" here: "Three items on personal psychic experiences (telepathy, clairvoyance, contact with the dead) were included in a survey of human values that was conducted on large representative samples in 13 countries in Europe and in the U.S. (N = 18,607). In Europe, the percentage of persons reporting telepathy was 34%; clairvoyance was reported by 21%; and 25% reported contact with the dead. Percentages for the U.S. were considerably higher: 54%, 25% and 30% respectively.".  

A 1973 survey of 434 persons in Los Angeles, USA ("Phenomenological Reality and Post-Death  Contact" by Richard Kalish and David Reynolds) found that 44% reported encounters with the deceased, and that 25% of those 44% (in other words, 11% of the 434) said that a dead person "actually visited or was seen at a seance."

As reported in the 1894 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume X, Part XXVI), an 1890's "Census of Hallucinations" conducted by the Society for Psychical Research asked, "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  As reported in Table 1 here (page 39), the number answering "Yes" was about 10%.  Because the question did not specifically refer to the dead, ghosts or apparitions, the wording of the question may have greatly reduced the number of "yes" answers from people experiencing what seemed to be an apparition of the dead or a sense of the presence of the dead. 

In the March-April 1948 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, page 187, there appeared the result of a survey asking the same question asked in 1894: "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  According to page 191, 217 out of 1519 answered "Yes." This was a 14% "yes" rate higher than the rate of about 10% reported in 1894. 

A 1980 telephone survey of 368 participants found that 29% reported "post-death communication." 

The British Medical Journal published in 1971 a study by Rees that involved almost 300 subjects, one entitled "The Hallucinations of Widowhood."  Rees reported that 39% in his survey reported a sense of presence from a deceased person and 14% reported seeing the deceased, along with 13% hearing the deceased.

A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 18% of Americans said they've seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and that 29% said that they've felt in touch with someone who died. 

A survey of 1510 Germans found (page 12) that 15.8 reported experience with an apparition, and more than 36% reported experience with ESP. 

A Groupon survey of 2000 people found that more than 60% claim to have seen a ghost.

A 1976 survey of 1467 people in the US asked people if they had ever "felt as though you were really in touch with someone who had died?" 27% answered "Yes."  

On page 123 of the 1954 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (Volume 48), which you can read here, we read of a poll done of 42 students who were asked: "Have you ever actually seen your physical body from a viewpoint completely outside that body, like standing beside the bed and looking at yourself lying in the bed, or like floating in the air near your body?” 33% answered "Yes." 

 A  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. 

In a survey of 300 students and 700 non-student adults in  Charlottesville, Virginia  (not at all a hotbed of New Age thinking), the result was more than half of the respondents claimed an extraordinary ESP experience. 

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 paper  "Out-of-Body Experiences" by Carlos S. Alvarado tells us that according to 5 surveys of the general population, 10% of the population report out-of-body experiences. A larger number of surveys of students show they report out-of-body experiences at a rate of about 25%.   

A study on after-death communication (ADC) states, "Results indicated that, regarding prevalence, 30-35% of people report at least one ADC sometime in their lives and, regarding incidence, 70-80% of bereaved people report one or more ADC experiences within months of a loved one's physical death."

A survey about near-death experiences in Australia said that nearly 9$ of Australians reported them.  

We read the following on a page of the Psi Encyclopedia: "In 2017, Una MacConville carried out a study with Irish health care professionals. The carers reported that 45% of their patients spoke of visions of deceased relatives, often joyful experiences that bring a sense of peace and comfort." 

 

Various factors may have caused you to think of the paranormal as being something extremely uncommon, when it actually may be very common. Let's look at what some of these factors may be. One factor is that probably the overwhelming majority of people who have paranormal experiences do not publicly report them. There are several reasons why someone having a paranormal experience may not report it publicly. He may fear being ridiculed, or he may fear that if he reports a paranormal experience he may be thought of as weird or flaky or a liar, and that this may hurt his job prospects. Or someone may not report a paranormal experience simply because there was not any physical evidence he can present to show the incident occurred. 

Of the people who do publicly report their paranormal experiences, probably the great majority simply make some social media entry that you are very unlikely to ever hear about. My guess is that 99% of all paranormal experiences are not reported in a way that would be likely to end up in a news story that you might ever read. Corporations are masters of milking the media for news coverage, but what is the chance that some person having a paranormal experience will then spam the news media (or issue a press release) in the right way to get good news coverage? Almost zero.

Another reason why the paranormal may be vastly more common than you might imagine is that your college or university probably failed to teach you anything about it. Modern colleges and universities are bastions of materialist thinking that like to exclude and denigrate the paranormal. When you took that psychology course in college, you should have learned all about the years of very substantial and methodical observational reports on the paranormal, particularly ESP, clairvoyance, medium activity and apparition sightings. But you probably learned very little or nothing on the topic, leaving you with the impression that there isn't much there.

The problem lies with our science professors. Science professors are often members of a conformist belief community in which there are hallowed belief dogmas and very strong taboos.  We fail to realize how often science professors are members of tradition-driven church-like belief communities, because so many of the dubious belief tenets of such professor communities are successfully sold as "science," even when such tenets are speculative or conflict with observations. Fairly discussing reports of the paranormal is a taboo for science professors, who are typically men whose speech and behavior is dominated by moldy old customs and creaky old taboos.  There are many other socially constructed taboos such as the taboo that forbids saying something in nature might be a product of design, no matter how immensely improbable its accidental occurrence might be. The main reason why science professors shun reports of the paranormal is that such reports tend to conflict with cherished assumptions or explanatory boasts of such professors. Also, reports of the paranormal clash with the attempts of vainglorious science professors to portray themselves as kind of Grand Lords of Explanation with keen insight into the fundamental nature of reality. 

One of the rules of today's typical science professor is: shun the spooky. So when people report seeing things that scientists cannot explain, the rule of today's scientists is: pay no attention, or if you mention it, try to denigrate the observational report, often by shaming, stigmatizing or slandering the observer. Following the "shun the spooky" rule, science professors typically fail to read hundreds of books they should have read to help clarify the nature of human beings and physical reality, books discussing hard-to-explain observations by humans.  

Our colleges and universities train professors to be spooky-stupid rather than spooky-smart. Here are the characteristics of spooky-stupid professors:

• When they hear about reports of some type of spooky phenomena, they say or think something such as "that can't be right" or "that's impossible" or "that must have just been a hallucination," and they don't do anything to seriously study the report or similar reports. 
• They don't bother collecting reports of spooky phenomena. When they hear about such reports, they make no effort to add the report to some collection of reports of the unexplained. 
• They don't bother to seriously study the literature documenting the paranormal.  
• When they write about the types of things that humans experience, and the types of events that occur, they ignore reports of the spooky. 
• Very stupidly, they throw away what may be some of the most important clues about reality ever reported. 

 Here are some characteristics of spooky-smart professors:

• When they hear about reports of some type of spooky phenomena, they do their best to preserve such reports, and investigate them further. 
• They do in-depth study trying to discover whether anyone else made similar reports of such a phenomenon. 
• They do their best to classify, quality-check and analyze such reports. 
• They do in-depth study reading about all reports of phenomena that cannot be explained. 
• They act according to the rule of "don't throw away clues, if there's a chance in a thousand they might be important."

It is a gigantic mistake to assume that when a science professor speaks against the paranormal, he is stating an educated opinion.  Based on their writings, it seems that 99% of today's science professors have never bothered to seriously study the paranormal.  A physics professor denigrating the paranormal no more states an educated opinion than a taxi driver offering an opinion on quantum chromodynamics. The fact that a person has studied one deep subject requiring the reading of hundreds of long volumes for a fairly good knowledge of the subject is no reason for thinking that the same person has studied some other deep subject (such as paranormal phenomena) requiring the reading of hundreds of long volumes for a fairly good knowledge of the subject, particularly when studying such a subject seriously is a taboo for that type of person. Serious scholars of paranormal phenomena can tell when someone speaking or writing on a topic has never studied it in depth, and low-scholarship indications are typically dropped in abundance when science professors write about the paranormal (things such as a failure to reference or quote the most relevant original source materials).   

The spooky-stupid scientist following a "shun the spooky" rule is rather like Sherlock Holmes wearing handcuffs behind his back. Sherlock Holmes was the most famous fictional detective in literary history. In a series of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes would attempt to uncover the truth behind a crime, using every tool he could muster. Like Sherlock Holmes, a scientist attempts to uncover the truth, using a variety of tools and methods. But imagine if Sherlock Holmes tried to solve crimes wearing handcuffs that prevented him from using his hands.  He would probably fail to solve many of his harder crime cases, and would often come up with wrong answers. 

The scientist following a "shun the spooky" rule is like a man wearing handcuffs that prevents him from using his hands. A large fraction of the most important clues that nature offers are things that appear to us as spooky things, because we cannot understand them.  A scientist refusing to examine such clues will be likely to reach wrong conclusions about some of the most important issues a scientist can study. 

A professor acting spooky-stupid

It is a great mistake to think that a scientist following a "shun the spooky" rule will merely end up getting wrong ideas about paranormal topics. Following such a rule, the scientist will tend to also end up with wrong ideas about important topics that are not normally thought of as paranormal. The person who fails to study the paranormal will tend to end up with wrong ideas on topics such as the relation between the brain and the mind and the origin of man.  Similarly, he who fails to properly study mathematics may end up with wrong ideas on topics outside of mathematics, such as physics and biology; and he who fails to study history may end up with bad ideas about politics, current affairs and public policy.

The "shun the spooky" rule causes neglect of all kinds of important things beyond what is considered paranormal. So, for example, scientists may avoid studying John Lorber's cases that included cases of above-average intelligence and only a thin sheet of brain tissue, finding such results too spooky. Such results are "wrong way" signs nature is putting up, telling neuroscientists some of their chief  assumptions are wrong. The "shun the spooky" rule may lead to wasted billions and bad medical practices. Doctors and scientists may focus on ineffective treatments stemming from incorrect assumptions, while neglecting effective treatments because the results are too spooky for them.    

Another professor acting spooky-stupid

When I was a small child, younger than 10, I would read in a children's magazine a series of educational cartoons that were called the Goofus and Gallant series. The Goofus and Gallant series of cartoons would try to teach small children good principles of behavior, by showing bad behavior by Goofus and good behavior by Gallant. I can use the Goofus and Gallant approach to illustrate some of the differences between spooky-stupid behavior and spooky-smart behavior. Here is one attempt:

Here is another such attempt:

Here is one more such attempt:

And here is the last such attempt:

Very sadly, the science departments of our universities are all stuffed with spooky-stupid guys like Professor Goofus. To these self-shackled Sherlocks, I say: ditch your shackles, and start studying all of the evidence relevant to the claims you make, including the things discussed in my hundreds of posts here and the list of books given at the beginning of the post here.