On this date, Gary S presented a review of the book Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD. Hit Read More below to see Gary's review of her book. The group was able to provide some discussion on this topic. Many attendants applied their knowledge of mindfulness practice, meditation, compassion, loving kindness, and other elements of spiritual tradition to the elements in this book. As is often the case with a presentation by Gary, this was one of the more intellectual of our spiritual quests.
Dr. Mayer, as a psychoanalyst, asserts her analytic and scientific approach to the world. She goes on to tell a story about her daughter’s harp. This is a small, lap harp that apparently is quite expensive. Her daughter has lost the harp, and Dr. Mayer exhausts all efforts to find it. Eventually, a friend asserts that, since she has exhausted all reasonable avenues, it might be worthwhile to pursue an alternative. She recommends Dr. Mayer contact a dowser. Dr. Mayer is quite skeptical. She delays her decision but eventually contacts the dowser, who lives in Arkansas, while she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She explains her problem. The dowser takes a couple of days, but, upon subsequent contact, tells her exactly where the harp can be found. And, indeed, the harp is where he says it is. This is the first, but most significant, event that starts her on her road to explore anomalous knowing.
She goes on to discuss the notion that personal experience is difficult to measure scientifically. Thus, we sometimes don’t trust our own experience. The people she comes in contact with describe a sense of knowing without knowing. It is ineffable. When attempts are made to consciously replicate it, they fail. Essentially, what is necessary is to go with the flow.
In fact, we do this all the time without giving it a second thought. Examples include peak moments and being in the zone when playing sports. We all use our intuition without thinking about it. It is a kind of knowing beyond the intellect. On the one hand, this is expectable because we all experience this on a daily basis. On the other hand, however, this is extraordinary and unbelievable because it challenges our view of the world. Essentially, we have to live with the paradox, deny it or live with an epistemic crisis. The notion of intuitive intelligence, or emotional intelligence, has been advanced by some.
In a book entitled ”Brain Science and the Biology of Belief: Why God Won’t Go Away,” the authors, Newberg and D’Aquili, pursue brain imaging studies while people are meditating or praying. Their results reveal that the posterior superior parietal lobe is quieter in experienced meditators, as opposed to inexperienced meditators. This is the part of the brain that orients us to the physical world. It is the part of the brain that makes associations between our senses. It essentially tells us our boundaries, what is us and not–us. These boundaries are essentially less active during meditation. Being in the zone or peak moments are essentially times when we are part of something. There is no subject or object, but rather an interconnectedness.
She then goes on to discuss the history of parapsychology in the West. Healers and psychics have been with us a long time. Charlatans have too, throwing doubt on these phenomena. Ideas, like, phrenology and mesmerism, were not helpful to the cause. William James subsequently founded the American Society for Psychical Research, in an attempt to scientifically investigate spiritualism and lend an air of credibility to the issue. This was followed by the development of Freud’s theory of the unconscious.
Interestingly, the CIA, in the 60s and 70s, developed an interest in remote viewing. This essentially involves being asked to see and describe something from a distance. It started with a man named Hal Puthoff. At some point, a fellow named Pat Price was given some coordinates and went on to describe a Soviet missile silo in great detail. The CIA seemed to have some success with this. However, it was disavowed when it went public. This kind of phenomenon challenges our notion of time and space, as well as our notion of individuality. This becomes frightening for the individual and for the scientific community. Paradigm shifts in science don’t occur by accommodation or by accretion of data, according to Thomas Kuhn. Revolutionary ideas have to gain enough force to topple the old momentum. It is not a smooth process, but tumultuous.
Gestalt psychology has been of some help in understanding anomalous knowing. What we see depends on what is foreground and background. We see one or the other but not both at the same time. We can become adept at moving between the two. It is difficult to leave the rational view we grow up with. For example, it is difficult for us to envision the Atlantic Ocean without the landmasses that surround it, but not vice versa. We need a recognizable shape to recognize the foreground. This is really about how we set boundaries. We are used to setting our foreground individually and separately, not in a connected fashion.
She goes on to talk about the history of attempted studies of the paranormal. An initial study involved prayer and intention for in vitro fertilization. It was found that there was double the success rate in women who were prayed for versus the women who weren’t. It was easy to observe who was pregnant and who wasn’t. However, a major problem with these early studies was that they were taken to infer the reality of God, rather than to attend to the mechanism involved. She calls this a category error, while noting that faith may essentially remove the mind’s resistance to the effects of anomalous thinking. If not God, what? A flow, wholeness, Tao, or a oneness, or connectedness, that people believe.
Anomalous cognitive processes involve gaining access to the mind’s quiet. It is here that we may begin to understand how the mind interacts with the physical world, how the body, emotions and ideas merge. Is it possible that we have had some awareness, or some knowing, all along? She goes on to talk about the notion of Freud’s unconscious. (However, she never deals with the issue of the dynamic unconscious, which is established by defense mechanisms that are utilized to protect the ego from conflict.) Rather, she focuses on what neuroscience and the newer field of neuropsychoanalysis, have come to learn about unconscious memory.
Unconscious memory is implicit, and there are two kinds. The first is procedural. It involves the how-to’s of life, like playing a piano. If you think too much about it, you mess it up. It is ineffable. The other form of unconscious memory is called associative memory. It is best exemplified by priming experiments that result in a reduced response time. These can be done subliminally and involve things like déjà vu. This may help us to find rational explanations for behaviors we can’t otherwise explain, like knowing something about a loved one whom is thousands of miles away.
One way of tapping the unconscious is to explore the phenomenon of dreams. “Get to know your dreams and you get to know your unconscious.” Here she does talk about the difference between the dynamic unconscious and unconscious memory. She notes,” Might dreams harbor not just suppressed sexual and aggressive urges but suppressed anomalous content as well? Might capacities for anomalous cognition be assiduously masked in waking life because they disrupt accepted cultural norms and conscious mental activity just as much as sex and aggression? Finally, might permitting anomalous capacities into consciousness prove as liberating for the human psyche as acknowledging forbidden sexual and aggressive impulses have been?”
Theoretically, unconscious mental activity becomes perceptible because sleep tunes down the activity of waking life. Krippner wondered if a dreamer could serve as a receiver in telepathy. This essentially involved a person, some distance away, focusing on a picture and attempting to send the thought of that picture to someone sleeping, who was then awakened, when the EEG indicated the end of REM sleep, and asked to report his dream. The dream was written down and compared to the content of the picture from the sender by independent raters. Over six years of studies and 450 separate trials, the judges were able to choose the correct target with overall odds that were less than one in 75 million.
The results of these kinds of studies led to some interesting theorizing. It was questioned whether science and psychoanalysis had significantly underestimated the evolutionary and functional utility of dreams. It was suggested that when people disengaged from the mental processes associated with waking life, a vital capacity to transfer information from one person to another was freed to express itself in dreams. It was felt this reflected a powerful social cohesiveness indicating how each individual’s life was interwoven with others.
A subsequent group of studies attempted to take dreams out of the equation by trying to tune down the noise of waking life and examining whether telepathy was just as effective. This led to use of the ganzfield technique. The idea of this technique was to deprive subjects of as much outside sensory stimulation as possible. Ping-pong balls were taped over eyes while a red floodlight was directed toward the eyes to produce an undifferentiated visual field. Headphones were placed over the ears and white noise was played through the headphones, creating an undifferentiated auditory field. Each person underwent a series of progressive relaxation exercises to help mute bodily sensations and mental chatter prior to the start of each trial. It was hoped that in the absence of new input, the nervous system could gradually become responsive to faint perceptions that were otherwise overwhelmed by the constant stimulation of perpetually shifting perceptual environments. Again, a sender attempted to communicate the content of pictures to a receiver. After 10 experimenters from all over the world published the results of 42 separate ganzfield telepathy experiments, a meta-analysis was done and the odds of the results being due to chance computed to 10,000,000,000 to 1. WOW! Here is another suggestion that connectivity matters.
Other ways to explore the unconscious reception of anomalous knowledge were pursued. A subsequent study done by Silverman focused on priming and the notion of subliminal messages. The idea that “mommy and I are one” was introduced to the subject subliminally. This resulted in an increased sense of well being, self-esteem, self assertion and contentment in the subjects. Again, the notion of a subjective sense of oneness is promoted. There have been many elaborations using the basic priming methodology and all essentially demonstrate the power of unconscious associative networks.
The next group of tests involved examining signal anxiety, an unconscious mental function that operates as a kind of early warning system, according to Freud. In addition, subjective reports were replaced with physiological responses, the Galvanic skin response (GSR) and EEG. The essential experiment involved showing a light to a viewer who then pressed a lever to shock a subject some distance away. After a time of entrainment, whereby the shocker and shockee each came to know the other and develop a social bond, they were separated. What are called “mirror neurons” allowed for bonding and resonant experiences between the two. Indeed, in some instances, the shocked subject was found to anticipate the shock, when the viewer was shown the light. Essentially, the subject’s GSR and EEG reflected this anticipation. The separation is not an issue physiologically and unconsciously, as opposed to self-reports that require conscious reporting that could skew the results. A single conscious thought could change everything.
The well-known theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, in a review of a 2004 book attempting to debunk the paranormal, went on to state,” I claim that paranormal phenomena may really exist….The hypothesis that paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by a great mass of evidence….I find it plausible that a world of mental phenomena should exist, too fluid and evanescent to be grasped with the cumbersome tools of science….One fact that emerges clearly from the stories (of witnesses of paranormal events) is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion. This fact would immediately explain why paranormal phenomena are not observable under the conditions of a well-controlled scientific experiment. Strong emotion and stress are inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures.… I am suggesting that paranormal mental abilities and scientific method may be complementary. The word ‘complementary’ is a technical term introduced into physics by Niels Bohr. It means that two descriptions of nature may both be valid but cannot be observed simultaneously (like background and foreground)…… The extension of the idea of complementarity to mental phenomena is pure speculation but I find it plausible….”
Dr. Mayer then goes on to discuss her investigation of studies conducted by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory. To sum this up, their experimental work fell into two main categories: investigation of mind-machine interactions and remote perception. When a meta-analysis of their experiments was done, the likelihood of the results being due to chance ranged from about one part in 1 billion, for the mind–machine experiments, to 1/100,000,000,000, for the remote perception experiments. The PEAR lab drew the following conclusion: “(H)uman consciousness is able to extract information from physical aspects of its environment, by some anomalous means that is independent of space and time.”
At about this time, Dr. Mayer was beginning to collaborate with a couple of physicists. A model grew out of this collaboration that involved four quadrants. A vertical line would divide the world of the mind from that of matter. A horizontal line would divide the world we see and can quantify from a world that can’t be quantified. (See handout) The half of the diagram made up of the mind would be divided into the conscious dynamics on top, unconscious dynamics on the bottom. The half of the diagram involving matter would involve Newtonian dynamics that are tangible on the top and quantum dynamics that are intangible, on the bottom. Thus, the quadrant of the unconscious lies next to the quadrant of quantum dynamics, both are intangible, while the quadrant of the conscious lies next to the Newtonian quadrant and both are tangible. This model was expanded to reflect the normal interchange between the conscious and unconscious dynamics, the normal interchange between the conscious dynamics and the tangible Newtonian dynamics of matter and the normal interchange of Newtonian dynamics with the intangible dynamics of the quantum.
And finally, what is left is the interface between the unconscious dynamics on the mental side of the vertical axis and the intangible physical dynamics of the quantum on the matter side. It was suggested that” this is where we might locate channels through which something like information passes that could eventually manifest above the horizontal axis (in the tangible half) as anomalous. In the logic of conscious or tangible dynamics, these manifestations make no sense. In the logic that lives below the horizontal axis, they might make sense, but not the sense of normal science as we know it.” Essentially, we consciously hold certain rules inviolable because they are observed and fit our brain’s way of organizing data. But, these rules won’t apply to any unconscious and quantum worlds. This might leave room for the anomalous, whereby things can appear in the upper two quadrants that make no sense if we limit ourselves to understanding them in terms of how the upper two interact. They will make sense, however, when we understand how the upper, conscious quadrant on the mind side interfaces with the peculiar, nonlinear irrational logic of unconscious mentation. The model was eventually called” A Modular Model of Mind/Matter Manifestations (M5).” This is a model of the world where the barrier between mind and matter might be permeable.
I will close by quoting much of the final two paragraphs of the epilogue.” Can minds touch each other in ways that transcend time and space, as we understand them? Can our notion of connectedness extend to contain all the anomalous possibilities suggested in this book? Can we work to develop these capabilities? What if, for example, the perceptions we now label extrasensory––transcending boundaries of time and space––could be reliably trained to deepen people’s ordinary knowing of each other, extending our capacities for empathy and compassion? What if we could learn to reliably employ the apparently anomalous effects exerted by certain healers in ordinary medicine? What if we could approach solving our ordinary problems with access to the full spectrum of intuitive intelligence, routinely gaining information located at the apparently anomalous end of that spectrum? What if we took possibilities like that seriously–seriously enough to subject them to our best scientific scrutiny?.… If there is anything real in anomalous mental capacities, the door has to stay open to these questions. If we don’t investigate them seriously, a portion of our experience will remain walled off, never pushed to real consequence, never assessed in the ongoing context of life. To pursue the questions behind extraordinary knowing is to pursue a complete and free articulation of what it is to be human.”
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