"THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS" > Page 1, 2
Answering the Skeptics
But is this proof of contact with consciousness that exists after death? Or are the mediums just good guessers? Similar experiments were conducted with students, who have no claim to psychic abilities, in the medium position, and they were able to achieve only 36 percent accuracy. So are the mediums just better at it, or are they experts at doing "cold readings," as the skeptics suggest, taking clues from the sitters' voice inflections and body language.
To eliminate this possibility, Schwartz and Russek's experiments became more and more stringent, to the point where the mediums were not allowed to see or even directly hear the sitters. All answers were relayed to the medium through Schwartz. Even with the tightest controls, the mediums' accuracy was above 90 percent. The book provides loads of data, complete with bar graphs and charts, that show that the mediums were highly accurate in conveying messages that were specifically meaningful to the sitter-deceased relationship.
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But what does it all mean? Does it conclusively prove that consciousness survives death? Although it seems clear from the text that Schwartz is fairly convinced that it does, as a scientist he stops short of saying that the data evidence leads absolutely to that conclusion. But it sure is compelling. And you really have to read the book to appreciate how compelling some of the mediums' hits are - information so specific and so unlikely to be guessed through cold reading that we have to consider that something extraordinary is taking place.
But what? Are the mediums reading the sitters' minds? (This might be discounted because the mediums were sometimes able to relay information that was unknown to the sitter at the time, but was later confirmed through research.) Are the mediums tapping into the collective unconscious? Or are they contacting the dead? Even the mediums say they don't know how it works. But Schwartz considers all of these questions and more, and provides carefully thought out responses.
Two of the most interesting chapters of the book are "Answering the Skeptics" and "Looking Forward and Outward." In the former, Schwartz states questions typically posed by skeptics and then answers them based on his findings from the experiments. In the latter, he takes 11 ways in which the mediums might seem to succeed - from fraud, cueing and lucky guesses to memory in the universe and actually talking to dead people - and then offers what skeptics speculate about them, what mediums say about them and what the experiments actually reveal. Regarding "talking to dead people," Schwartz says, "The data appear to be as valid, convincing and living as the mediums, sitters, skeptics, and scientists themselves."
Fascinating too is the chapter that examines the question of how our lives might change if it were conclusively proven that human souls live forever - how it would change our daily lives, how we interact with people, how it might affect our legal system, marriage vows and more. The effects would be profound and pervasive.
The Afterlife Experiments is an important book about some very important research - important because it's the first unbiased, controlled examination of the phenomenon of spiritualism. It's research that we hope will be continued by Schwartz and taken up by other research teams. It's a subject as important as - if not more important than - any other scientific field of study.
Taking It Further
In future experiments, there's a tactic I'd like to see tried: getting more information from the deceased. In the readings we see on "Crossing Over" and in Schwartz's experiments, the deceased reveal limited amounts of personal information - apparently, just enough to indicate that it is indeed them coming across. But why nothing more? Why no information about what the afterlife is like, what they do all day, how they are able to communicate with the living? The answer, thus far, is that the deceased, who presumably have a limited time to communicate with their living loved ones, are not going to talk about such things; they're going to communicate what may be most important to them in that limited time: that they have survived death, they are conscious of us, and that they can prove it with these intimate details.
So why not extend that limited time? Why not
have multiple sessions with the same sitter over many days, maybe many weeks?
Would the mediums be able to continually contact the same deceased people over
that time to get greater detailed information from them about their new lives?
Would the deceased be allowed to provide such information? It's worth
considering. 
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