
A medium practices psychography, or writing the words of the dead while in a trance. (Image credit: Julio Peres)
The supernatural experience of having the dead communicate through the living has now been analyzed with brain scans.
Their brain activity suggests those more expert at entering these otherworldly trances often experienced a drop in focus, self-awareness and consciousness, scientists said.
In the practice known as mediumship, people known as mediums claim to be in touch with or even under the control of the spirits of the dead. One form of mediumship, known as psychography, involves trances where the dead allegedly write using the hands of the living medium.
“Spiritual experiences affect cerebral activity, this is known. But the cerebral response to mediumship, the practice of supposedly being in communication with, or under the control of the spirit of a deceased person, has received little scientific attention,” said researcher Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
“This study grows out of a larger approach we have to try and understand religious and spiritual experiences and the human brain, and how they’re related to one another, a growing field we call ‘neurotheology,’” Newberg said. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt]
Trance writing
To learn more about psychography, scientists analyzed 10 Brazilian mediums — five who were experienced and five who were less expert. They were injected with a radioactive tracer that allowed researchers to study blood flow in their brains, seeing which regions were active and inactive during normal writing and psychography. For the trance writing, volunteers were asked to follow their usual methods for “contacting the dead” and writing while in this trance state, while during normal writing they were asked to write about a topic they often wrote on during psychography.
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