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Have you ever had an out-of-body experience? I’m not speaking metaphorically, like that time you farted in front of your workplace crush, or something. I’m talking about the feeling of your “mind” or “spirit” floating outside of your body and experiencing the world without physical senses.
It’s actually surprisingly common: various drugs can make you feel that way, and there’s a psychiatric disorder called depersonalization-derealization disorder, in which some people feel that they’re moving through the world with a third person view.
And then, of course, there’s the current mini-trend of wearing a VR headset while watching a drone video of yourself. I guess it’s even more confusing than it looks.
That last example is the closest one to what many people think of as a “real” out of body experience: not just the sensation that you aren’t in your body, but the actual ability to see your body from afar, and thus presumably the ability to float around and see other stuff. Secret stuff. Nuclear launch codes. Your friends talking about you behind your comatose body. Penises.
That’s the kind of “out of body experience” that interests people who are into the idea of psychic powers and other supernatural claims: when someone says, for instance, that they died on a surgical table and saw the doctors working on them from above and seeing things that they couldn’t possibly have seen, did that really happen?
I’m talking about this today NOT because I wanted to show that video of the guy eating shit while trying to run with a VR headset on. Well, not just because of that. No, I wanted to talk about it because of this incredibly stupid press release I saw last week: “Trial Testing Out-of-Body Experiences Produces Unexpected Twist,” from the public relations office at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
“A test to determine if people who report out-of-body experiences could identify objects in another room produced results no better than chance.”
Oh. Well, that settles that. Okay, goodbye everyone!
Oh wait, sorry, the sentence goes on: “A test to determine if people who report out-of-body experiences could identify objects in another room produced results no better than chance, BUT afterward something strange happened: Two participants described, unprompted, researchers’ locations and activities behind closed doors.”
Wow, fascinating. Let’s read on:
“The participants’ unexpected observations were not part of the trial’s predefined outcome measures and therefore can’t be considered evidence for out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, UVA Health investigators say.”
Oh, well then, that wraps that up oh wait there’s more, again: “BUT the unexplained results may help researchers design better, more effective ways to evaluate the potential validity of a phenomenon that has been reported for decades.”
Sigh.
So, this “study,” published in the latest edition of a journal called “EXPLORE,” involved 21 subjects who were asked to induce an out-of-body experience and float to a different room and observe an unknown object pictured on a laptop screen in that room.
Now, you may already have a few questions and I will try to address each of them in due time. First of all, you may wonder where they found 21 people who were asked to do this and who did not immediately just gather their things and walk out of the room, because what the fuck. They found them at the International Institute of Projectiology and Conscientiology, a gathering place in Brazil for people who think they can astrally project their souls into other rooms to look at computers.
You may also be wondering if I misspoke when I said that the press release for this study came from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, a prestigious institution that was literally founded by Thomas Jefferson. I did not, in fact, misspeak. We’ll get back to it.
But first, the “study:” ten of the 21 subjects said they induced an out of body experience and saw the image on the screen in the other room. Another three said they did NOT have an out of body experience, but they did have a mental projection and were confident they knew what the image was.
As mentioned, they didn’t do well. You’d think it would be easy, like it’s a picture of an banana and if the person says “banana” they get it right, but the language in the study makes it sound like the researchers gave the subjects plenty of chances to get it through vague keywords. And yet still, they didn’t do better than chance, so the study found in favor of the null hypothesis: there is no evidence that a person can project their mind into another room.
But that’s no fun, so they pushed that aside to point out that two out of the 21 subjects “reported accurate details about experimenters’ locations and activities in an adjacent room.” What were the experimenters doing? Juggling fire? Bare knuckle boxing? Karaoke? No. They were sitting there taking notes. Truly impressive stuff, for two subjects to magically know that somehow.
This is a great example of why a good study lays down in advance what, exactly, will be studied. Because if you don’t do that, and stick to it, then a desperate researcher can grab ahold of any random blip and point to that as the real result. It’s not. Not only was “What are the researchers doing and where are they sitting” NOT the question, but anyone who could project into that room and see that should have had no trouble seeing what was on the computer. If they couldn’t detect 2D objects for some reason, then a real astral projector would say that–not guess at what was on the screen and get it wrong.
This is obvious to anyone who does not have a vested interest in supernatural powers existing, but unfortunately that is clearly not how one could describe these researchers. The lead researcher even went on a local news program to be completely anti-science in an interview.
Nope. No, it does not “open up the pathway to more research.” This is garbage. Humans do not have supernatural powers, and your study is one more piece of evidence on the mountain of evidence we have proving this. But I have no doubt that this team is already spending more grant money on a new trial to see if humans can astrally project themselves into another room to tell which armchair someone is in.
So, why is the University of Virginia spending money on this completely pointless exercise? The answer is that the second wife of the guy who invented the Xerox machine thought she was a psychic and convinced him to give a shit ton of money to the University of Virginia for the express purpose of giving an endowed chair to a quack who believed he could prove that reincarnation is real and that people can remember past lives. When the Xerox guy died, he left an additional million dollars to UVA for the continuation of what became known as the “Division of Perceptual Studies” at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
The quack, Ian Stevenson, compiled extensive case studies in which (according to his former assistant) he would ask leading questions of children from families that believed in reincarnation, writing down every time they said anything that resembled a true fact about someone who had previously died and conveniently ignoring all the nonsense they said. Whenever anyone tried to fact check these case studies, they were found to be complete bullshit. For instance, a man named Edward Ryall claimed to be the reincarnation of a man named John Fletcher who had died in Somerset, England, in 1685, and Stevenson’s research confirmed that everything Ryall claimed was accurate. When other, slightly more careful researchers pointed out that John Fletcher never existed, Stevenson conceded that he can’t believe EVERYTHING Ryall said but he was still sure that he used supernatural powers to describe aspects of living in 17th-century Somerset.
Stevenson became obsessed with a type of test of proving some afterlife existed, by having people set a combination lock using a series of letters or numbers that were very important to them during life and promising to pass this information on to loved ones after they died. As part of his work at UVA, he collected these locks and encouraged people to get in touch if they received any kind of message with the correct code. No one has ever opened any of them. When Stevenson himself died in 2007, he left behind his own lock. It remains locked to this day.
Despite this lifetime of being wrong, Stevenson’s legacy remains in the complete waste of money that results in a bunch of people standing around a computer screen with a picture of a banana on it while people in another room try and fail to say “banana.” The good news is that as of this recording, it appears that no one other than local news has picked up on the juicy story that two people randomly said that they knew someone in another room was taking notes during a scientific experiment.
The other good news is that if you live in Brazil, you have the opportunity to have a go at your own Alpha Project, the legendary hoax in which James Randi helped two young magicians repeatedly fool researchers who thought they could find evidence for supernatural powers back in the 1980s. For more on that, check out the excellent podcast World’s Greatest Con, and pick up a few pointers before you apply to become the world’s next great psychic. Clearly the bar here is very, very low, so I know you can do it. Boa sorte!
