Fringe-ology (2 page)

My mother and father once sat and told me about what they called “the ghost.” I was in my mid-twenties, recently graduated from college. I had instigated the conversation by telling them I wanted the definitive account. The tale they told me was sensational, complete with a spellbinding ending that seemed traumatic to them all those years later. While I'll save the details until chapter 5, my parents' reaction to the telling of them gripped me. They held hands across the kitchen table. They looked sick to their stomachs. They were more than twenty years removed from the events they recounted, yet still frightened.

Of course, this should not be. As a child of the Enlightenment, I should believe in a rational, materialistic explanation for everything that happens. So should they. By this logic, my parents would either be liars or fools for believing there might have been a ghost in our house. That assessment may sound harsh. But Western science doesn't yield easily to the paranormal. We live in an age when the turf wars between mystics and rationalists are growing considerably hotter. These days, in fact, atheists advocate for their point of view with the passion of priests looking for penitents. And what gets lost in all this controversy is a whole world of phenomena ripe for psychological and scientific exploration. What also gets lost is the essential human drama of it all, the husband and wife sitting at the table, white faced, after twenty years in the wake of an event they cannot explain.

This book seeks to demonstrate that the paranormal can be covered in the same way as any other story—and that, in fact, these subjects are among the most important we
could
cover, yielding fascinating narratives that speak to the most fundamental concerns humanity has faced. So, where possible, I assess the veracity of the strange tales people tell. And what I'll find is that some paranormal claims are far more possible than the skeptics like to admit. But my focus remains on the experience most accessible to journalism: the experience of confronting a mystery.

People who undergo paranormal experiences risk falling into a special, unofficial subclass of U.S. citizens—a subclass I call “Embarrassed Americans.” For my chapter on UFO sightings (chapter 4), in fact, I make a trip to a town filled with the chagrined: Stephenville, Texas—dairy cow country. In January 2008, residents all over the county saw strange lights in the sky. But fewer than a dozen ever went public with their stories. The opportunity was there: swarms of national media descended upon the town. But many residents claimed they were embarrassed for themselves and their community. And all they had done for their trouble was see something in the sky that they couldn't explain.

The central problem, I think, is that as a species we
seem
to lack humility. One of the strangest books of recent times,
The End of Science
, was penned by John Horgan—who in spite of so much evidence to the contrary argues that science will not produce any more truly revolutionary findings. Of course, potential revolutions still abound: dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up roughly 95 percent of the universe, yet direct evidence of their existence eludes us. (Does that make 95 percent of the universe paranormal?) Temple University recently produced a book that identifies thirteen competing theories of quantum mechanics and explores their implications for how we understand the very nature of existence. Some highly esteemed scientists, including Karl Pribram and quantum mechanics mastermind David Bohm, advanced the idea that the human mind and the entire universe are like a hologram—a three-dimensional projection from some other, more fundamental reality.

If the universe doesn't seem quite weird enough for you yet, consider the matter of time, a particularly sticky wicket: Einstein himself called time a “stubbornly persistent illusion” because, from the perspective of a physicist, there seems to be no obvious explanation for why we experience time in the linear fashion that we do. To explore the subject, physicists Yakir Aharonov and Jeff Tollaksen devised an incredible experiment, in which the act of measuring a particle at, say, 3:00
P.M.
, predictably changes the value of the same particle at, um, 2:30
P.M.
—a half-hour earlier. Numerous labs around the world have been successfully conducting and replicating the experiment, which seems to indicate something awfully wild about reality: an action taken in the future can affect what happens in the present, at least at a subatomic level.

Aharonov and Tollaksen aren't sure precisely what to make of their own findings. But this is precisely the spot at which we can use a real, scientific mystery to understand something about ourselves and how we react to the paranormal. Most likely, you rebelled, internally, during this last paragraph. You balked at the idea that what we do at 3:00
P.M.
can effect what happened at 2:30
P.M
. But without belaboring the nature of time, there is a part of your brain that probably sent you a tremulous message to watch out when I wrote something that seems so nonsensical. Maybe you furrowed your eyebrows, your pulse quickened, you momentarily held your breath or even felt angry or dismissive, as if what I had written must be false and I must be stupid or even craven to write it. But here's the thing: that wasn't you, or at least not the rational, reasonable you. That was your brain talking—most dramatically, your amygdala, a necessary but frustrating part of the brain that we'll meet throughout this book. The amygdala is the spot in the brain I accuse of making us seem to lack humility—the part of our brain that can cause us to haughtily dismiss information we find threatening or don't understand.

When our place on the food chain was not so secure, and we had to deal with predator cats on a regular basis, the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped structures near the base of our temporal lobes—did great work. Our brain processed visual images of a shadow moving in the grass, and our amygdala shouted, “Danger!” In response, we froze. Our more logical information-processing centers kicked in, quickly trying to determine: Is this shadow a crouching tiger or a hidden rabbit? If the shadow was big enough, our logical frontal lobes responded,
Close enough to a tiger for me
, our amygdala sent a stronger signal of abject fear in return, and we ran.

Millions of years later,
Homo sapiens
is here—and we brought our amygdalas with us. Some of us, like kids in the inner city, or soldiers in the battlefield, still need them a lot. These are people who worry on a daily basis about potent threats to their health—about a lump in a stranger's pocket that might mean he is carrying a handgun; about a mound of dirt on the side of the road which might cover a bomb. But for most of us, the amygdala (along with other parts of the brain responsible for mediating emotion and processing conflicting information) is responding to far less grave mysteries and instead sending us messages of anxiety and fear whenever necessary and much of the time besides, including when the boss says something harsh to us at work, a coworker cuts us a nasty look, or when we hear an idea that conflicts with our worldview.

This has profound implications for all of us, and our conversations about the paranormal, and means oftentimes our first reaction, even if it is about an intellectual subject, is an emotional one: We react to the ideas we hear not only with our rational frontal lobes but with this primitive part of our brain. And when we feel emotionally committed to a position, that is precisely the time we're in the greatest danger of reacting—not from our frontal lobes, like enlightened human beings, but from our amygdalas, like angry or frightened monkeys. Believers sometimes consider those of no or different faith downright unholy. Nonbelievers, of late, take great delight in openly deriding believers as irrational and childlike. And too often the rest of us wind up listening to people letting their amygdalas inspire far too much of the talking.

There is intriguing research that backs this up, including not just brain scan technology but terror management theory. It seems that both religious and irreligious people see death and threats to their worldviews as of a piece; in other words, he who threatens my life and he who threatens my way of looking at the world are, on a psychological level, related. That is a dangerous way of thinking, but it seems we're built for it—machines constructed to fight.

As we'll see late in this book, mystics have come up with some great ways of taming the more unruly, emotional centers of our brain, including the amygdala. And of course science helps in particularly dramatic fashion. If anxiety is our response to mystery, then discovering the truth and eliminating the mystery not only gives us more information about the world, it helps to soothe us.
Calm down there, amygdala. And trust in science.
The problem is that we often lack real answers. At that point, our own psychology can't help but get in the way. The anxiety we feel at confronting a real mystery encourages us to supplant the unknown with an answer that fits our preexisting worldview. For mystics, that means injecting God or some similar force into all the explanatory gaps; for materialists, it means maintaining faith that some prosaic explanation, far from mysticism, will ultimately emerge.

Science is often typified as a perfect, self-correcting system that compensates for our faulty wetware by gathering and totaling up evidence. Mystics, with their reliance on subjective experience, can't make the same claim. I find this standard analysis to be devastatingly accurate—to a point. My critique is that while we might look over the long haul and see a “perfect,” self-correcting system, we aren't looking at today from the perspective of a decade, a generation, or a century from now. This means we might be looking at a completely laughable model of reality and calling it the most likely one—just because this is the time we live in and this is the best information our science has yielded to date.

Modern neuroscience provides a fantastic example of this: scientists are examining brain function at the level of the neuron to try to explain how consciousness is produced. Yet no one has figured out why neuronal firing and the interactions of neurochemicals produce thought, your feelings of being you, with your specific set of wishes and wants and fears, who feels a particular sensation upon perceiving the color red or enjoying the flavor of a good steak. There is a whole level of activity going on below the level of the neuron—a level we can't investigate so well because we don't yet have the instruments to do the job properly. And so, modern neuroscientists, for all their advancements, could prove to be just like the drunk looking for his misplaced car keys under the lamppost.

Where,
we ask the drunk,
did you last see your keys?

About three blocks away,
he replies, a little man on his hands and knees.

Then, why are you looking here?

Because,
he replies,
this is where the light is.

In short, I'm not so much critiquing science as calling for more of it, particularly in areas derided as paranormal. The placebo effect was entirely disregarded for decades, a blip in the system, until the past ten or fifteen years. Now we know the placebo effect seems to depend on everything from the bedside manner of the doctor to the color of the pill. We're learning to manage belief so it works for us. But for years, the idea that what people believed could affect their health was just too far outside mainstream scientific thinking to be embraced as a field of study. Why would this be so? Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
remains a kind of bible for those who would seek to understand science not just in its idealized form, but as it's actually practiced. The act of rigorously gathering and methodically analyzing data isn't carried out by idealized beings, after all, but people. And these people get invested in their findings and the theories they've signed their names to, and they protect the dominant way of looking at things—the current worldview science has built. So, at times, we not only have to wait for technology to catch up, but literally, for fallible scien
tists
to accept all the data that sci
ence
has amassed.

Science will eventually yield up all kinds of delicious truth—over the decades and centuries. The thing is, we're alive right now—not millennia from now—and so we have, as we've always had, a science that is doing the best it can with today's knowledge and technology base. The perfect aspect of science is its method, not the given set of information it's yielded to date. That store of information will change, and if history is any guide, it will continue to change dramatically—in ways we haven't even dreamt of. Look at the way science has dealt with quantum mechanics. By now, most people are familiar with the basic weirdness of the quantum universe, where particles regularly perform impossible feats: appearing in two places at once; communicating information across distances; blinking out of existence in one spot and reappearing suddenly in another.

Those strange subatomic operations underpin our every day reality, mainstream physicists long maintained, but do not manifest themselves
up here
at the macro-scale. In fact, in the realm of the paranormal, skeptics have long laughed at the way believers resort to quantum explanations for everything from the afterlife to consciousness and telepathy:
Quantum phenomena are so small and require such cold and stable environments,
they chortled,
that they could never persist long enough to be of any real importance in the operations of warm, wet biological systems.
But just in the past five years biologists have been discovering possible interactions between the micro- and macro-scales—interactions thought impossible till we found them. I discuss a few of these in chapter 3, but I am arguing that, given this state of affairs, we should be alert for and wary of dogmatism of any kind—be it religious or scientific. And I am further arguing that, before the evidence is in, many of us presuppose the answer that will best fit our worldviews—and soothe our overheated amygdalas.