Betray anything approaching a sceptical attitude to anyone who is still happy to talk to you and you will be answered with a great story of some very convincing demonstration of psychic healing or New Age therapy, or even the occasional ghost story. These are always stories of successes; one never hears of the healer that couldn’t find the problem, or the therapy that proved worthless. After all, why would such non- stories be told?
We are wonderfully, blissfully cocooned in our own worlds. We cast ourselves in the role of the most fascinating hero or heroine in the plays of our lives, and we interact with secondary roles, forgetting that we are ourselves only bit-parts in the sweeping, five-act Wagnerian epics of other people’s lives. Naturally and blamelessly we attribute far more importance to events that happen in our own lives, which
we can feel and represent to ourselves vividly, than those which happen to other people. Don’t we in most conversations follow another person’s story just waiting to come back with one of our own when they’ve finished? Can we listen to someone talking about his or her parents without relating their tale to our own? Our wealth of experience is all we have to make sense of what we hear and see. In fact, our ability to form rapid generalizations from our own one-off experiences is absolutely vital: we needed to touch only one or two hot-plates at home when we were gurgling babbies to learn that they hurt and therefore they probably all hurt in other people’s houses too. It’s vital we all relate things back to ourselves in this way.
Yet if we are anything other than the most arrogant adults, we learn to balance the impact of personal experience with an understanding of it might just be me. We have a terrible time in a hotel, but continually hear great reports of it from other people. It doesn’t mean we remember it any more fondly, but we realize we might have been unlucky. I loathed the film The Shawshank Redemption: I found it trite, cliché-ridden and in every way like the worst kind of predictable TV movie I would hesitate to make Robert Kilroy-Silk sit and watch. And any of you people out there who are now cheering and waving this thin volume above your heads with the giddy delight that comes from the surging feeling of long-awaited validation will realize that we stand few and far between. The film was hugely successful and seems to rank among the all-time favourites of people who don’t appear at first glance to be deaf- blind or simply retarded. So while I am more than happy to rant about its over-worn, insulting and otiose sentiment to anyone who mentions the film, I begrudgingly have to qualify my lividness with the reluctant caveat, ‘But everyone else seems to love it so maybe it’s just me.’
Phrases like ‘maybe it’s just me’, ‘maybe I just got lucky’, ‘it might have just been a coincidence’ and so on are rarely offered in defence alongside positive experiences. While similar qualifications are often given so that one doesn’t seem like a misery-guts when telling of a loathed film or a bad hotel, we understandably don’t want to detract from a fascinating or wonderful experience by admitting the same possibility, that it might have just been a one-off. But when it comes to making decisions about huge belief systems or cosmic forces, a dose of this modest and wider perspective is certainly a useful thing.
For example, a friend was telling me the other day that his mother had been attending a reiki course. He had gone to see her and had hurt his thumb the day before. He didn’t tell her about the thumb, but she passed her hands over him to do a reiki diagnosis. He told me that when she got to his thumb she was able to tell he had a problem there. This was clearly an impressive feat, and it left my friend rather convinced by the efficacy of the process. (She didn’t, however, manage to heal him, for the record.) He had a couple of similar stories, neither of which related to his mother but which were interesting and not dissimilar to others I had heard. While I would have no desire to detract from the personal enjoyment he’ll derive from such memories, such reports are worth deconstructing for the sake of our discussion here. The main problem is this: we only have a story, and therefore it will be subject to deletions, exaggerations, edits and wonky memories. Taking these on board, we can suggest a series of valid possibilities. While some of them may seem a little wearily dry, let’s not forget Hume’s lesson that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof:
1. His mum knows him well, and might very possibly have been able to tell if he had exhibited some tension around his bad thumb. This doesn’t seem unlikely at all. She could have picked up (consciously or unconsciously) on it at any point, either during the diagnosis or beforehand (in which case her expectation might have provided a ‘feeling’ which was then ‘confirmed’ during the passing of hands over him). In which case, all kudos to her for being perceptive.
2. She might have mentioned a few troublesome points here and there, or stopped at different places. Because of the all-too-human pattern finding and selective memory traps we’ve been discussing, my
friend remembers only the thumb. In this instance, his story is a much more simplified version of what actually happened.
3. Some other way via the relationship between son and mother, with the former unconsciously telegraphing his hurt thumb through tension, attention and movement, and the mother perceptively searching for such signals, and maybe with a bit of selective memory on his part they arrive at the diagnosis. Impressive and fascinating, but nothing to do with the theory behind reiki.
4. She got lucky.
5. Reiki is absolutely real, and there really is a cosmic energy flow the healer is able to channel. It absolutely works, and science simply refuses to accept that.
I don’t mean the last option to sound sarcastic. But perhaps there are fascinating and enlightening reasons contained in options one to four as to why the diagnosis was right in this instance, without having to believe in a special cosmic energy. The obvious fact is that there’s no way of telling. A True Believer in reiki would tell me just to accept the story as solid evidence; stop trying to clutch at the straws of reductionist, over-analytical western science. A genuinely open-minded person, on the other hand, would say, ‘Yes, it could be any one of those things, and they’re all worth looking into.’ And with an anecdote, there’s really no further to go. Should my friend reject the appealing sentiment of his experience with his mother? I don’t think so. But should he decide to believe in reiki based on that experience? Well, that’s up to him, but it would probably be sensible to put it in perspective. Let’s not forget that his mother didn’t heal the thumb; she just pointed out that there was something wrong with it. Had she just said, out of the blue over coffee, ‘Is there something wrong with your thumb?’, would he have found that as impressive? Short of having a series of people come to her with different ailments (which they themselves were unaware of so as not to unconsciously telegraph their conditions to her), and seeing how well she did overall, there is no way of telling which of the above options applies. What we can do, however, is look at evidence outside this one scenario and ask whether or not there is any real evidence for reiki.
I am reminded of a story told to me by another friend as evidence of psychic ability. A friend of his was a policeman, and he had attended a social event thrown by the force – a Policemen’s Ball, I suppose. Also attending was a psychic who had apparently been used by the police. (At this point I should add that many psychics make such claims all the time. Normally it’s a lie, or perhaps they have called the police offering help. It shouldn’t be taken as evidence that any more than a tiny number of policemen, if any, have taken psychics seriously.) She approached this friend-of-my-friend at the end of the event and shook his hand. As she did so, she closed her eyes and appeared to go into a trance. ‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘Henrietta’s getting cold.’ She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Who’s Henrietta?’ she asked.
Henrietta, it turned out, was the pet name the policeman had for his car, which was parked outside. It had started snowing, and sure enough, his car was getting cold. The story was told to me with an air of ‘explain that, then’, as the policeman in question had been hugely impressed. He had told it many times in the years after the event, and one person who had heard it was now telling me.
I don’t ever want to ‘explain that’ from any story, when a story is all I’m hearing. Here, I was listening to a story of a story. However, it made me think of the importance of presentation, which we discussed in relation to conjuring. In the same way that the reikipractising mother might have just asked about her son’s thumb and there would have been no story, so too this ‘psychic’ (who of course I’m happier to think was an out-and-out fake) might simply have said, ‘Apparently you call your car Henrietta.’ In that instance, the response would have been, ‘Right, who told you that?’, as undoubtedly a number of policemen attending would have been aware that he had a pet name for his car. A non-event. But because she rolled her eyes and appeared to go into a trance as she shook his hand, the same fact – that she knew the pet name of his car – suddenly appears inexplicable. And if she had just been told or had just overheard that he called his car by that name, note how much more effective it was to appear to know less than she did. To say ‘I
sense your car is called Henrietta – she’s getting cold’ might make the policeman suspicious that she had been told. The display of ignorance in asking ‘Who’s Henrietta?’, however, controls the policeman’s response (‘My car – how on earth . . .?’) and bypasses his suspicion. Regardless of what really happened, the way she said it could have been enough to turn a non-event into a lifelong memory of something impossible, even to cause a shift in his personal beliefs. What would have made the difference? Showmanship.
As for what really happened, who knows? It’s just an anecdote. And that is, I believe, the only way to respond to such stories. They are usually engaging and impressive tales when viewed from the perspective of the story-teller, in the same way that the lottery win is miraculous when viewed from the perspective of the winner. But anecdotes are not evidence of anything. One person’s experience says nothing about the reliability of the thing in question, and isn’t it all about reliability? Too much can get distorted in the remembering and telling of the story. These sorts of stories should be seen as raising interesting possibilities worth investigating; you shouldn’t just credulously believe them if you want to be taken seriously. You don’t have to be a scientist to think like that. Surely it’s just about intelligence and curiosity.
Another friend, deeply into the ways of the psychic, told me he put crystals in his plant pots to make them grow better. Now, anyone who is happy to say that sort of thing in public must be ready for a bit of ridicule outside his circle of fellow True Believers. So presumably he’d want to make sure he wasn’t talking nonsense. Assuming he would have been fully aware that there are plenty of other factors that contribute to a plant’s growth, would it not have been just simple curiosity to put a couple of pots with the same plant next to each other in the same window, water them at the same time, but put crystals in one and not in the other? He could privately do that to see whether the crystals made any difference. Am I really being so harsh to think that someone might just try that? Just to see? And if there was a big difference, then maybe do it a few times to see if it was repeatable? Isn’t that just curiosity? That’s much easier than home-testing a reiki-trained mother. But, of course, this just isn’t done. No-one from the New Age community wants to test these things.
Luckily, scientists don’t turn a blind eye to such things. They do want to see if these things work, as science is only about embracing what works, and moving on. So they do construct very fair tests to see if the New Age theory is what does the trick. They test with large numbers of people, and in a way that eliminates all bias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results show that the mystic elements – the oils, the crystals, the healing energy – are never what do the trick. But to many people anecdotes and personal experience are far more seductive than real-world evidence and fact. Proper evidence and fact are dismissed as irrelevant when dealing with ‘holistic’ subjects. Dismissed, that is, apart from when holistic practitioners happily supply anecdotal evidence in favour of their claims and misleading pseudo- scientific ‘factual’ models of energy. Science is dismissed both as ‘Western’ and irrelevant, yet also clung to when it can be taken out of context to lend any validity to New Age claims.
Scientific language does not make a science any more than anecdotes do, but it does allow the inquisitive listener to check on facts. For example, I once tried to get a sense of what the theory behind crystal power was from a practitioner. She told me that crystals have a particular atomic frequency that causes them to vibrate, or have an energy. This vibration then either sits in unison with the atomic vibration of another object (a plant, a person, or another crystal) to lend its power to that object, or it does not. Talk of atomic vibrations was, to me, a little easier to understand than talk of mystical energies, so I asked a scientist friend if her theory made any sense. The answer was a clear ‘no’. A misunderstanding of GCSE physics is no basis for making non-imaginary, real-world claims.