• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 486 0

X happens in your brain,’ when in fact that area could be lighting up when involved in all sorts of tasks. Take the right prefrontal cortex that lights up when you do almost any difficult task. One way to think about it is in terms of networks, not modules. When you are engaged in thinking about money, there’s a network of several different areas involved in communicating with each other in a particular way. So, the prefrontal cortex may be involved in a lot of different tasks. But in communication with specific other brain networks, it becomes active when engaged in one particular task, such as thinking about money.”

Chapter 7: Belief in the Afterlife

1. Eric Lax, On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy (New York: Charterhouse, 1975), 208.

2. Quoted in Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book (New York: Highbridge Co., 2001), 13.

3. “Harris Poll Reveals What People Do and Do Not Believe,” Harris 2009, http://www.harrisinteractive.com. These results confirm those of a 2007 Pew Forum survey showing that 74 percent of Americans believe in heaven with Mormons the largest cohort at 95 percent, black Protestant churchgoers at 91 percent, white Evangelicals at 86 percent, and Muslims (with or without seventy-two virgins) at 85 percent. On the other end of the belief spectrum, not counting atheists, agnostics, and secularists, only 51 percent of Hindus, 46 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 38 percent of Jews, and 36 percent of Buddhists believe that they will live on, not just in their apartments (pace Woody Allen), but in some ethereal place beyond their bodies. Tellingly, across the board only 59 percent believe in hell, demonstrating once again the power of wishful thinking. U.S. Religions Landscape Survey, “Summary of Key Findings,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf (N=35,000). The oddest finding in the Pew survey was that 12 percent of atheists and 18 percent of agnostics said that they believe in heaven and—consistent with the wishful thinking self-serving bias—there were lower percentages for belief in hell (10 percent for atheists, 12 percent for agnostics)! Hope springs eternal.

4. Helen L. Gallagher and Christopher D. Frith, “Functional Imaging of ‘Theory of Mind,’” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 2 (February 2003): 77.

5. Two recent books that use these lines of evidence are Deepak Chopra, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof (New York: Harmony Books, 2006); and Dinesh D’Souza, Life After Death: The Evidence (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2009).

6. Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1981); Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (New York: Harper Collins, 1988).

7. Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995).

8. Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (New York: Crown, 2003). See also Sheldrake’s Web page experimental protocol, http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/olt/start.html, and http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/staring/staring_experiment.html.

Sheldrake’s papers on this research, giving the results of thousands of trials published in several journals, are also available in full text versions at http://www.sheldrake.org.

9. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_staring_effect_an_artifact_of_pseudo_randomization/.

10. Richard Wiseman and Marilyn Schlitz, “Experimenter Effects and the Remote Detection of Staring,” Journal of Parapsychology 61 (1997): 197–207.

11. The following ratings were made by me from the Journal of Consciousness Studies 12, no. 6 (2005), an open peer commentary on “Sheldrake and His Critics: The Sense of Being Glared At.” Sheldrake provided two target articles on which fourteen peers commented. Sheldrake was then given the last word with a concluding article. Commentators, affiliations, and my ratings of