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llynn66's review
3.0
Summer 2018 flew by with the speed of light. Yes. I read this summer! No. I did not keep up with reviews. I finished the Afterlife Experiments a few months ago when the promise of summer was new. Generally, I save my 'woo woo' books for autumn and winter when the whispers and perceived foot treads of spirits are all the more tempting to indulge during our long, dark and frigid North Coast nights. In an ironic pairing, I am currently writing this review while I am midway through a smart and witty book titled Fantasyland which debunks much of what I find delightful about 'woo woo'. I am an agnostic in most ways and I neither advocate for the theories and experiments put forward in The Afterlife Experiments, nor debase them. I both 'want to believe' and respect the care in which I need to enter such a yen to believe. I would suggest reading books such as this with an open but not overly credulous mind.
So yes, love reading books about ghosts, reincarnation, various versions of the afterlife, ESP and most 'supernatural' phenomenon. This mainly stems from a childhood spent in the 1970s when these topics were everywhere in books, film and television. I do not quite feel like the addled pervert sitting in the park reading a porn magazine when I sit with my 'New Age' material. But, kind of...
Our society is neatly bifurcated when it comes to the suspension of disbelief. If you purport to believe in supernatural occurrences as part of your recognizable religion, then anything goes and you can be unapologetic, not only in your strongly held beliefs about phenomena you cannot prove but in your attempts to convince others to join you in your belief system. If you purport to show even the slightest interest in supernatural phenomena outside of a religious context, you are considered a 'flake', 'evil' or 'crazy' and very much discouraged from talking to others about your beliefs. As an educated person and one who spent formative years in a more 'rational' age, I will likely never get past that somewhat embarrassed feeling that comes over me when I admit (merely to myself) that I like thinking that some of these 'unexplained mysteries' could be 'real'.
Thus, when a person who has a background in science or academic research indulges in their own supernatural speculations, I am only too happy to see what they have to say. It is rather like sliding a banal dust jacket over that smut you are reading on the park bench.
Gary E. Schwartz has an academic background and a Harvard degree. He taught at Yale before taking a job at the University of Arizona. While attending a conference, in the mid 1990s, he met a clinical psychologist, Linda Russek, who had recently lost her beloved father. Schwartz and Russek struck up a relationship and Schwartz agreed to help Russek test the theory of consciousness after physical death. The stage was then set for the experiments discussed in this book.
Schwartz used mediums (a few well known and others not at all high profile) in laboratory experiments to try to determine, statistically, what their success rates would be in imparting information that could not be known to them. (Think family nick names which were given to the subjects as very young children and never used again outside the family....or the name of a childhood pet that died 45 years ago, etc.) To summarize in a brief manner, the rates of success were above predicted levels, some subjects were somewhat floored by the 'messages' the mediums had for them and the data was interesting and even somewhat tantalizing.
Although there is not, at this point, any definite proof that our dear departed still have a sense of what is going on in our lives and still have the capacity to react and the desire to communicate with us, books like The Afterlife Experiments make us feel a little better about our need to believe.
Obviously skeptics have weighed in and have offered critiques of the research and statistical methods Schwartz employed. He tended to use subjects who were more prone to believe in the possibility of mediumship and communication with the dead. Some scholars have noted that his methodology is not the standard. A topic this mind blowing will always earn a lot of skeptical analysis and push back (as well it should.)
At this point, readers who are intrigued with the unexplained might want to use The Afterlife Experiments as description of an interesting set of exercises involving people who are portrayed as normal and reasonable but who experience a few out of the ordinary communiques.
As I read, I was not completely taken with the 'evidence'. Typically, many 'medium messages' were vague. Some interpretation was needed by the subjects in unpacking messages. On the other hand, it seemed extremely unlikely to me that any of the mediums involved would have been able to establish any contact with (or background research on) the subjects they were attempting to put in touch with departed loved ones. In other words, the unexplained remains unexplained, but I was not given any reason to deny my interest in respectable attempts to analyze the possibility of communication with personalities in spirit form.
So yes, love reading books about ghosts, reincarnation, various versions of the afterlife, ESP and most 'supernatural' phenomenon. This mainly stems from a childhood spent in the 1970s when these topics were everywhere in books, film and television. I do not quite feel like the addled pervert sitting in the park reading a porn magazine when I sit with my 'New Age' material. But, kind of...
Our society is neatly bifurcated when it comes to the suspension of disbelief. If you purport to believe in supernatural occurrences as part of your recognizable religion, then anything goes and you can be unapologetic, not only in your strongly held beliefs about phenomena you cannot prove but in your attempts to convince others to join you in your belief system. If you purport to show even the slightest interest in supernatural phenomena outside of a religious context, you are considered a 'flake', 'evil' or 'crazy' and very much discouraged from talking to others about your beliefs. As an educated person and one who spent formative years in a more 'rational' age, I will likely never get past that somewhat embarrassed feeling that comes over me when I admit (merely to myself) that I like thinking that some of these 'unexplained mysteries' could be 'real'.
Thus, when a person who has a background in science or academic research indulges in their own supernatural speculations, I am only too happy to see what they have to say. It is rather like sliding a banal dust jacket over that smut you are reading on the park bench.
Gary E. Schwartz has an academic background and a Harvard degree. He taught at Yale before taking a job at the University of Arizona. While attending a conference, in the mid 1990s, he met a clinical psychologist, Linda Russek, who had recently lost her beloved father. Schwartz and Russek struck up a relationship and Schwartz agreed to help Russek test the theory of consciousness after physical death. The stage was then set for the experiments discussed in this book.
Schwartz used mediums (a few well known and others not at all high profile) in laboratory experiments to try to determine, statistically, what their success rates would be in imparting information that could not be known to them. (Think family nick names which were given to the subjects as very young children and never used again outside the family....or the name of a childhood pet that died 45 years ago, etc.) To summarize in a brief manner, the rates of success were above predicted levels, some subjects were somewhat floored by the 'messages' the mediums had for them and the data was interesting and even somewhat tantalizing.
Although there is not, at this point, any definite proof that our dear departed still have a sense of what is going on in our lives and still have the capacity to react and the desire to communicate with us, books like The Afterlife Experiments make us feel a little better about our need to believe.
Obviously skeptics have weighed in and have offered critiques of the research and statistical methods Schwartz employed. He tended to use subjects who were more prone to believe in the possibility of mediumship and communication with the dead. Some scholars have noted that his methodology is not the standard. A topic this mind blowing will always earn a lot of skeptical analysis and push back (as well it should.)
At this point, readers who are intrigued with the unexplained might want to use The Afterlife Experiments as description of an interesting set of exercises involving people who are portrayed as normal and reasonable but who experience a few out of the ordinary communiques.
As I read, I was not completely taken with the 'evidence'. Typically, many 'medium messages' were vague. Some interpretation was needed by the subjects in unpacking messages. On the other hand, it seemed extremely unlikely to me that any of the mediums involved would have been able to establish any contact with (or background research on) the subjects they were attempting to put in touch with departed loved ones. In other words, the unexplained remains unexplained, but I was not given any reason to deny my interest in respectable attempts to analyze the possibility of communication with personalities in spirit form.
mynameischrista's review
4.0
The author of this book is actually my professor and I'm taking a class on it. It's been very interesting in deed and has open me up to a lot of possibilities. I found this book very interesting and a good read. I recommend it to all people who are open to this kind of thing.
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