2. Marco teórico:
2.3 Diagnóstico y síntomas temprano de TEA:
acting reductionist or psycho-physical explanations of ECE. Yet that ploy founders on two counts: first, because of the very small number of cases used in evidence (in comparison with the thousands of ECE testimonies published overall), and second, because of the very lack of strict, independent third-party corroborations of the special information alleged to have been acquired. I emphasize that I am only concerned with the claims of the authors
24
Sabom 1982, 1 150; 1998, 11 73; Fenwick and Fenwick 1998, 5 196; Ring 1980, 39 103; Grey 1985, 30 91.
25 Moody 1977, 108ff; Ring 1980, 213 214; Grey 1985, 115 133. 26
Greyson 1983, 369.
who constitute my investigation. Grey,27 for example, offers three cases of supposed post-experience clairvoyance for which no solid evidence is at all given. The simultaneity of two telephone calls could hardly be taken as convincing evidence: that conclusively underpins her case. And it hardly seems a likely explanation that a loss of time/space is a precondition of future prophecy. As Grey herself states (178) in avoiding the obvious consequence: ‘there is no obligation to accept these apocalyptic pronouncements as being of any significance for future world conditions’. Following Ring, she quotes: ‘interpretations of prophetic visions need to be made with utmost caution because of their capacity if taken seriously to generate a. . . range . . . of . . . reactions based on fear, hysteria or simply passivity’.
But unfortunately, Ring’s basis upon which Grey so heavily relies is, itself, most uncertain. Let us critically examine Ring’s evidential base. His Case 25 suffered a hypotensive episode during childbirth, simultaneously foreseeing a child who would have a heart problem and be gifted. At first, Ring28‘did not have time to investigate this [him]self ’, so the event lacked any immediate, objective corroboration. Yet later in the same book (75) we are invited ‘to recall Case 25 which presents more striking data consistent with the assump- tion that ND experiences can sometimes disclose pre-cognitive information’ (my emphases here and below). Finally (126), the same case hardens into ‘a woman who, on nearly dying, received pre-cognition information about her newly delivered baby and felt she had to come back’. Other unconfirmed cases involved foresight of a future husband and children five years hence, which ‘only suggests pre-cognition knowledge [but] no convincing evidence of it’; of a young man possibly having a daughter with the girl to whom he had just become engaged, and of a man who, during his NDE, sensed his wife telling him of his brother’s death.
Much of this circumstantial, and poorly documented, material is akin to the celebrated OBE case of Maria who reported seeing, on a third-floor window sill at the other end of the hospital, a shoe having a worn patch over the little toe and a lace stuck under the heel. The Fenwicks29(thankfully) are right in dismissing this testimony ‘as hearsay rather than hard fact’. These same authors cite other supposed cases of prophetic foresight, but without convincing corroborative back-up. Clearly, the material offered by all authors is poorly researched and documented. Many cases could be due simply to chance or circumstance. What is needed is a stringent, prospective study between age/sex-matched controls and ECE subjects, in order to determine
27 Grey 1985, 115 116. 28 Ring 1980, 35 36. 29
the true basis of these alleged powers, thus to reveal if ECE of themselves are able to confer, or uncover, a latent predisposition for precognition or even prophecy, or not.
Because we are being given solicited, retrospective reports, they suffer, as with all other previous writers’ offerings, from a lack of critically acceptable and corroborative third-party evidence. That is particularly crucial to certain ‘key’ case reports of the Fenwicks regarding knowledge gained in the absence of presumed loss of sensory afference. It is beyond credibility that Mary30 physically ‘saw’ the nurse while simultaneously being unable to ‘feel’ the physical effects of her ministrations. Regarding the precognition of her head bandages (following neurosurgery), could she not have seen other similar patients in the ward during the pre-operative period? Furthermore, from their weight, extent and ‘feel’ (presumably she could move her arms during that three-day post-operative period, given that the operation was on her head), she could have deduced much information about how her dressings would have appeared. That is, the information gained by her is by no means watertight evidence for extra-sensory perception, as offered by the Fenwicks. Is this, we may ask, the type of information necessary to critically convince a sceptical public that precognition really occurs? For Jean it is unclear whether she was anaesthetized in preparation for a re-exploration of her abdominal incision, or whether the pack was simply reintroduced intra-vaginally. Scull would have seen his wife’s red suit and formed memories of it on many past occasions before his admission to hospital. Despite having sojourned in a ‘side ward with high windows’ for 48 hours, he still had to be taken to it in the first place. He would therefore have vicariously noted and memorized during the period of his admission some details about the ward, its layout and reception area, and, moreover, stored memories of it because of the gravity and urgency, as well as the novelty, of the occasion. It is not too difficult then to envisage a quasi-hynopompic dream-like reconstruction of events that just happened to coincide with real events.
In view of the absence of the much-required third-party independent corroboration, we are never told nor given tabulated data by any author how many OBE never coincide with reality. Non-coincidental events are, of course, far less newsworthy anecdotes. Conversely, striking coincidences in- variably acquire a significance that far outweighs their actual importance, but are more likely to be eclectically published, despite the triviality of events offered as evidence of precognition. Similar sentiments apply to the congeni- tally blind woman reported by the Fenwicks.31 The blind learn to use and
30 Fenwick and Fenwick 1998, 30 31. 31
Fenwick and Fenwick 1998, 85 86.
share the visually laden vocabulary of normally sighted people. This hearsay report, as it stood in the Fenwicks’ reporting, reveals no further insights about the issue of non-sensory acquisition of external data. Such reportings require incisive questioning in order to establish precisely what blind people are saying, and their meanings intended by the words employed in ordinary conversation. That stringent criterion has never seemingly been met in the ECE literature. The same criticism applies with some considerable force to the paper of Ring and Collins considered in Chapter 2, which failed completely, in my view, to establish that the blind ‘see’ during an ECE.
It is also necessary to be aware of the intrusive, and ever present, difficulties which frustrated Charles Tart in his attempts to provide accurate documen- tation of telepathic and other extra-sensory perceptions under stringent laboratory conditions. Despite his use of selected subjects able to render themselves out-of-body, their performances under laboratory test conditions for the tasks set up by him were by no means impressive.32The odd ‘hit’ is by no means convincing, and could always be due to chance. There has been, to my mind, an extraordinarily long-continued absence of persuasive, systematic evidence for the alleged occurrence of ‘psychical’ phenomena. We might also be concerned that for over one hundred years, there have been no major developments or insights deriving from this field of endeavour, despite our increasing technological resources. We need more data, derivative of a far larger corpus of credible events studied prospectively under even stricter, updated laboratory disciplines than attempted by Tart. Until those data are forthcoming, my inclination is to ignore the batch of exemplary ‘cases’ offered in the ECE literature by this handful of authors as of boringly trivial significance. The responsibility for providing that strict evidential base lies with those who continue to promote psychical competence as a true, demon- strably reliable, and acceptable outcome of ECE in particular, or of ‘mind’ in general.
As a corollary to the psychical outcomes of ECE, Sabom (1980) records no examples among his sample of 116 subjects. Yet, curiously, in his later book (1998) he states that visions and precognition were common in com- parison with non-ECE cardiac controls. However, there was no difference in frequency of these phenomena pre- and post-experience. The possibility of a predisposing cerebral origin for these alleged powers thus arises and requires further investigation by the appropriate, and strictly controlled, prospective studies.
32