I ran across a book that my late mother-in-law had: The
Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, published in 1956.
Bernstein was a businessman who became interested in hypnosis
and all of the many medical benefits it could potentially confer. But his
interests went beyond this. He was interested in age regression, in
which the person who is hypnotized not only remembers early childhood, but
relives it. The memories of early childhood, even infancy, are stored away in
the brain, some hypnotists claim, and can be unleashed.
If a subject is hypnotically regressed to infancy, he or she
may be able to describe sensations and memories from infancy, in words, even
though they could not talk during infancy. This brings up an interesting
question. How could one determine whether the subject is actually re-living
infancy? Bernstein said that, when a subject is regressed back into infancy,
their reflexes actually change. Infants and young children have the Babinski reflex,
but older children and adults do not. During age
regression, the hypnotist can get the subject to actually change from the
adult reflex to the infant reflex. This would be strong evidence of the
effectiveness of age regression. I do not know how good the evidence is, having
read about it only in this book.
But Bernstein wanted to take age regression back further—not
just back to infancy, but back before birth. Just keep going...back into
a previous lifetime. If hypnotized subjects had true memories of past
lifetimes, this would prove reincarnation. But how can the hypnotist know
whether the memories are true, and are of past lifetimes? This brings us to
some interesting points about the scientific method.
It is not enough just to dismiss spiritualist assertions on
the grounds of inherent absurdity. The most famous agnostic, the inventor of
the word agnostic, Thomas Henry Huxley, made this point. What Huxley did
was to give spiritualism a chance, after which he (along with E. Ray Lankester)
showed that at least the spiritualist seances that he attended were, in fact,
hoaxes. He concluded this, rather than assuming it. And he knew this did
not prove all spiritualist experiences were hoaxes.
First, consider bias. Bernstein tried very hard to
prove that he was not biased. He openly admits that he started off completely
agnostic about religious concepts. That is, he claims that his discoveries
convinced him despite, not because of, his initial bias. Further, he was rich
enough from his business, he did not need to pull a hoax to get rich. These two
preconditions are helpful, but do not eliminate the possibility of bias. Some
evangelical Christian apologists (most famously Josh McDowell, author of Evidence
that Demands a Verdict in which he claims to prove Christian doctrine) say
that they started off as atheists and were converted by the evidence that they
found. However, despite his lack of initial bias,
McDowell definitely developed a bias later. And even though
Bernstein was rich enough to not need a hoax, there are plenty of rich people
who cannot keep themselves from trying to get richer by unethical means. But at
least Bernstein made an effort to begin in an unbiased fashion.
One thing that greatly reduced the chance of bias is that
there were independent fact-checkers. This did not completely eliminate the
chance of error, however; journalists are looking for an exciting story (even
back then, if it bleeds, it leads) and would prefer the reincarnation
conclusion over fraud or delusion.
Second, consider how one can evaluate the quality of the
evidence of a past life obtained from a hypnotized person. Perhaps the
strongest evidence would be if the person provided details that the person
could not possibly know. (This is a condition that is nearly impossible to
satisfy today. Everyone has a world of information at their fingertips. Give me
a little time, and access to the internet, and I could make up a convincing fake
story that I am a reincarnated Viking. But in the pre-internet days, this
evidence was much harder to get and thus more meaningful.)
Bernstein hypnotized a woman he called Ruth Simmons (she was
actually Virginia Tighe), who was born in Iowa in the twentieth century. When
he regressed her back before her birth, she revealed that she had been an Irish
woman Bridey (Bridget) Murphy who was born in 1798 and died in 1864. She did,
indeed, reveal a lot of details that seemed convincing. She even started
talking with an Irish brogue during the hypnotic sessions, something she could
not do normally. Are you convinced yet? She said that she could dance the
“Morning Jig” when she was alive in Ireland. Bernstein gave her a post-hypnotic
suggestion: that, upon awakening, she should dance the jig for the observers.
And she did. Are you convinced yet? The woman also gave geographical details
that a twentieth-century American would almost certainly not know about Ireland
(actually, Northern Ireland), including the conflicts between Protestants and
Catholics in the nineteenth century. Are you convinced yet?
The Bridey Murphy story became a sensation after it was
published in a newspaper in 1954 and as a book in 1956. It seemed like everyone
was talking about it. People with a spiritual (but not fundamentalist
Christian) inclination were swept up into believing it. Materialistic people
subjected it to ridicule. Even Donald Duck’s uncle McScrooge made fun of it. In
her copy, my mother-in-law wrote down the address of the Bridey Murphy
Discussion Group of Peoria, which met in Marquette Heights in nearby Pekin,
Illinois.
The book was rushed into print with too little fact-checking
to even satisfy the author. But there was plenty of fact-checking afterward.
And here is where the scientific method gets interesting. During the intense
discussion, there were two competing hypotheses: that Ruth Simmons was
making it all up, either as fraud or delusion, vs. Ruth Simmons really was
remembering her past life as Bridey Murphy. (And she even had a vague memory,
it seems, of dying as a baby in New Amsterdam, which is today New York, over a
century earlier than Bridey Murphy.)
The people who wanted to prove Simmons was making it all up
pointed to supposed errors in the facts she recited. But her defenders showed,
in every case it seems, that the story was credible. The places she mentioned,
and the terms she used, the customs to which she referred, were not inaccurate
for the time and place, even when they could not be verified. In a few
instances, Bridey seemed to be exaggerating in order to make her husband seem
more prominent than he was. She claimed he was a barrister (the highest grade
of lawyer), but that he managed accounts for stores, something that only the
lowest grade of accountants did. But this may have enhanced the credibility of
her account: she was telling—and exaggerating—her life experience, not a mere
story.
Besides, someone pointed out, the Bridey Murphy story is, by
itself, too boring to be a fabrication. After all, everyone wants to be a
reincarnated king, not a serf or something. But Bridey was just a woman who got
married, never had kids, and died at age 66 after falling down the stairs. The
only interesting thing in her story was that she was in a mixed marriage (she
was Protestant, her husband Catholic).
Bernstein provided long transcripts of the tape-recorded
hypnosis sessions in the book. In session after session, he asked the same
questions, such as what her husband’s name was. One’s eyes start to glaze over.
But this repetition was actually quite valuable. They proved that the woman was
not just making it up as she went along. The information was deep inside her
brain, and came out the same way every time. Even a good liar would have a hard
time keeping a consistent story for six sessions of hypnotism. Also, for this
reason, it was clearly not a delusion.
In the competition between the fraud/delusion hypothesis and
the reincarnation hypothesis, the latter easily won.
This is where it really gets interesting. New evidence
emerged. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens? New facts can destroy a
nice story.) When Ruth Simmons was growing up in Chicago, an old Irish woman
lived across the street. Her name was Bridey Murphy Corkell. The hypothesis
that turned out to be true was a third hypothesis not previously considered:
that Ruth had learned the story very well from this woman, even learned her
accent, and even learned the jig, and then forgot where or even that she had
heard it. This is a now-well-established phenomenon known as cryptomnesia,
or hidden memory.
There have been other famous cases of possible cryptomnesia
from the world of creative arts. The difference between cryptomnesia and
plagiarism is whether the person knows that they are recycling the work of
another artist. George Harrison of Beatles fame may have plagiarized My
Sweet Lord from another musical group (this was the interpretation of the
court in the ensuing lawsuit), or he may genuinely have mistaken his memory of
the melody for his own creation. This apparently also happened to Umberto Eco,
author of Name of the Rose.
In a way, every creative person has a gnawing fear that he or
she will unwittingly steal ideas from someone else. I write books; how can I
possibly know if I stole an idea from a book that I read maybe forty years ago?
I would need a list of every book I have read since I graduated from high
school. What kind of nerd would keep a list like that? Me, that’s who. My
complete list now contains 1,411 titles, the last of which is The Search for
Bridey Murphy. I can always scan the list before sending a final fiction
manuscript to a publisher. This does not guarantee that I did not steal a plot
from a forgotten movie or an episode of Perry Mason. (In the latter
case, I have also kept a list of the Perry Mason episodes I have
watched. I used one for an endnote in my most recent book.
God, I am such a nerd.) I steal plots from the Bible all the time, but I am
aware of what I am doing.
It gets even more complicated. Someone may absorb an idea
from the surrounding culture and mistakenly think it is his or her own. This is
called a Zeitgeist (a German word for “time ghost”). Science writer
Loren Eiseley (Darwin’s Century) famously said that Charles Darwin got
the idea for natural selection from Edward Blyth, without realizing it, because
it was an idea already floating around in scholarly culture. Probably nobody
believes this anymore, since all of Darwin’s contemporaries seemed genuinely
surprised at Darwin’s creative hypothesis. Darwin thought of natural selection
a long time before Alfred Russel Wallace, but he worried himself sick that it
would look to the world as if he had stolen Wallace’s idea. Fortunately,
Wallace happily acknowledged Darwin’s priority.
None of this proves that reincarnation does not exist. It
just means that evidence, like that of Bridey Murphy, is not good enough.
The scientific way of thinking can help us understand almost
anything better than other ways of thinking. This even includes reincarnation.
