Spook

"I like Mary Roach as an author, she makes me laugh. What I like about Spook is that it’s a rather fun, light-hearted tour through all the weirdness that researchers have tried to examine. She talks about near-death experiences, seances, experiments where they weighed dying animals in order to weigh the soul as it left the body. All these strange experiences are the kind of quirky psychology which I love. The psychology of the field is quirky too. It is a deeply weird field populated by deeply weird people. That is where the movie title comes from. This was an American psychologist around the turn of the 20th century who put dogs onto scales, trying to weigh their souls leaving. He had some success with that, then tried the same with humans – putting very old people on the scales and waiting for them to die. But what he didn’t control for is sweating, moisture leaving the body. So 21 grams is probably much closer to the amount of moisture you lose when you die than your soul. A near-death experience is very similar to an out-of-body experience, which is where people think they’re floating away from their body, turned around seeing their body lying there. In a near-death experience, there is often a tunnel of light you go down towards meeting your maker. The gods you see depend very much on the culture you live in. Then the god turns you back, you return into your body and you wake up. As we know more about how the brain creates a sense of where it is, we know more about how these experiences can be created. Now there are experiments where we can create an out-of-body experience fairly rapidly. Other researchers – and Mary Roach talks about these – write target numbers or words on pieces of cardboard and place them on top of cabinets and wardrobes in hospital wards, in the hope that somebody having a near-death or out-of-body experience will look down and see them. To date they haven’t. Which again suggests that this is an illusion rather than a genuine experience. It’s a good question. I guess my answer is that it doesn’t, because by the time something is scientifically proven it’s no longer occult. There have been instances where something has been going on in the weird world of the paranormal, but by investigating it properly we’ve found out what that is. The most obvious example is homeopathic medicine, where there is a placebo effect. You’ve taken a substance and it does make you feel better. That’s what’s behind homeopathy and a lot of other alternative medicines. We could have just thrown the baby out with the bathwater and said this is all nonsense, we’re not even going to bother investigating it. But as we’re doing science properly we found out that there is such a thing as a placebo effect, that it can be harnessed for good and so on. I guess that is where we fly closest. I think placebo is the wrong word there. There is a large amount of evidence showing that meditation of all different types is good for you. And that would be a kind of meditation – where you are putting aside the normal contents of consciousness, as it were, and trying to quiet the body and quiet the mind. That seems to have a very positive, beneficial effect on a lot of people. Again it’s another area where it would be easier to say there’s nothing going on scientifically, but if you do the research properly you see there is something not magical but deeply psychological and potentially beneficial. Well, there are lots of ways of doing it. The easiest is to go to the toilet with the spoon and bend it backwards and forwards until you get a fracture line across it. Then you smuggle it back onto the table and introduce the idea of spoon bending. Pick it up, and a bit of wiggling on the end of that spoon will break it clean in half. So if you don’t want to spend years developing your psychic skills, that’s a quick way of doing it."