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THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS: BREAKTHROUGH SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH by Gary E. Schwartz with William L. Simon. New York: Atria Books, 2002. Pp. xxiv + 376. $13.00 (paperback). ISBN 0-7434-3659-8.
Gary Schwartz, author of The Afterlife Experiments, has an impressive set of academic credentials. After receiving his PhD in psychology from Harvard, he moved to Yale, where he served for 28 years as a professor of psychology and psychiatry, director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, and codirector of the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic. In 1988, he moved to the University of Arizona, where he is a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery. He has published more than 400 scientific papers.
In this book, Schwartz reports several experiments in which mediums attempt to provide "sitters" with information allegedly obtained from their deceased friends and relatives. He argues that the experiments provide compelling evidence for the "afterlife" hypothesis: that deceased persons can communicate with the living through human mediums. The studies have provoked strong methodological criticisms from Wiseman and O'Keeffe (2001) and from Hyman (2003). In turn, Schwartz has replied to those critiques (2003) and posted an expanded version of his rejoinder on his website (http://www.openmindsciences.com).
As in most research programs, the earlier experiments are less formal and less well controlled than subsequent ones in which earlier flaws are corrected and stricter safeguards are introduced. Accordingly, drawing the line between pilot experiments and formal experiments can be problematic. Schwartz himself does not draw such a line and argues for considering the cumulative results, including those obtained in experiments with serious flaws, as evidence for the afterlife hypothesis. In contrast, Hyman (2003) argues that because even the later experiments contain some methodological flaws, all the experiments should be regarded as preliminary and should not have been published at this point in the research program.
The book is cowritten with a professional writer and, as is often the case with books intended for a general audience, the tone is chatty and full of breathless excitement over the accuracy of the mediums. Much of the text is devoted to verbatim quotes of their statements, accompanied by the sitters' (and Schwartz's) subjective evaluations of how well the statements correspond to known facts about the deceased. These correspondences provide...