Survival of Memory
I suppose that for a medium to have a discussion with a spirit and get information, it must have retained it’s memories. If the spirit can therefore retain memories, how come people suffer memory loss with brain damage, old age or certain ailments, as surely these don’t damage the spirit itself.
I suppose that for a medium to have a discussion with a spirit and get information, it must have retained it’s memories. If the spirit can therefore retain memories, how come people suffer memory loss with brain damage, old age or certain ailments, as surely these don’t damage the spirit itself.
Memories could be external
I am wondering if extended secodary memory in fact resides outside the body. If memory were not resident within each of us but instead was the result of a communication between this external memory and ourselves, memories could survive. As to accidents and disease causing memory loss, this could simply be an impairment of the neural mechanisms which normally process this interdimensional information. The memories and so on are not lost, they simply becomce inaccessible.
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Anomalous Phenomena is Unexplained not Impossible
Psi is Subtle not Absolute
Anything is possible, it’s all a matter of Probability
Good idea
Good idea Phenominvestigator, but difficult to prove I suspect.
This reminds me actually of some friends of mine who have recently been to see Derek (of Most Haunted fame) doing his medium stage show. I got discussing exacty how accurate the comments mediums come out with are. If they are communicating with someone, instead of saying something along the lines of "I have a name here, his name begins with J, maybe John. He’s in a uniform"
Why don’t we get "I have John Butler here, he wants to speak to Judith Butler his neice sitting five rows back on seat 68G. He’s still in his RAF Flight Lt Uniform and he says he was stationed at ……serial number…..NI number……DOB etc". If the memories are there and they are accessible what is stopping this type of communication.
Does it all depend on the medium? How exactly do they communicate with the dead?
 Phenom has a point; it’s
Phenom has a point; it’s been generally assumed amongst psychologists that information in the long-term memory that is ‘lost’, say, when you’re old, it’s not due to decay, just a failure to retrieve the information from the store. Additionally there’s lots of types of memory, for example episodic (memories of your life events) and procedural (how to make a cup of tea/ ride a bike etc) to name but two. Moreover they tend to be located in different bits of the brain, so a very specific area can be responsible for very specific things.
In terms of "I have john butler etc" well, perhaps the spirit DOES remember, just the medium is on a crackly phone line, so to speak, which is the impression i get when talking to people with those sorts of skills. It’s not exactly a voice in the ear, but an intuition?
Another aspect…
Proving, in a quantitative sense, communications with the deceased is very difficult even in laboratory conditions. There are at least three alternative explanations, only one of which is After-Death Communications (ADC), putting aside fraud for the moment. What we have been able to prove in research parapsychology is "anomalous information transfer." Put simply, this is the notion that some people know things they simply should not. The research is now shifting from "proof oriented" to "process oriented", since this is the only way that there seems to be a chance of someday discovering how this process actually works. I believe we are generations away from ‘proving’ this in any way.
Based on mediumship research, I am finding that facts quickly fade while general information in the form of impressions seems to linger. So factual points are more difficult to recover. I suppose skeptics might claim that this is highly convenient, but what if this is indeed the case? Have we really established either position to the exclusion of the other?
As far as the "I have John… here" example, this illustrates a key point: not everything is recallable – this is even true in the physical example. Consider that there are many cases where elderly people recall memories long forgotten. Better said, perhaps put aside as other memories are more crucial in the interval. When these memories’ importance subsides, it appears as if the old memories can return intact in some cases. Perhaps a similar function is at work in the sensitive example. Were this true, we should not expect perfection by any means; and this is precisely what we observe.
Anomalous Phenomena is Unexplained not Impossible
Psi is Subtle not Absolute
Anything is possible, it’a all a matter of Probability
If you talk with someone who
If you talk with someone who loses their memory in old age what you find is that their main problem is the ability to convert short term to new long term memories. They know how to make a cup of tea but can’t remember where they left the teapot. They remember someone they knew as a child but not who the current prime minister is.
In addition, they will confabulate a lot. This involves inventing stories to explain what they can currently see. So, they may wake up in hospital and be convinced they came because of their leg, simply because it aches slightly. In fact, they may be in hospital for something quite different. Tell them the truth and they will accept it. Then the next day they wake up convinced they are in hospital for their leg!
The odd thing with mediumship is that alleged spirits often ‘remember’ things that they were not that concerned about in life while forgetting really significant stuff. I’ve always found this peculiar.
The lab research on ESP shows a very small overall bias in favour of its existence. Even if this is correct and it is disputed, this may be quite irrelevant to alleged contact with the dead.
Incidentally, what is "extended secodary memory"? It sounds more like a computer hardware term than neuroscience.
Re: Survival of Memory
[quote=Ian Topham]I suppose that for a medium to have a discussion with a spirit and get information, it must have retained it’s memories. If the spirit can therefore retain memories, how come people suffer memory loss with brain damage, old age or certain ailments, as surely these don’t damage the spirit itself.[/quote]
It the body that breaks down not the soul or spirit of the deceased person. The soul retains it memories but while for a time the soul/spirit is tied if you like to one body it does not get injured or sick the way the body does.
Brain injuries and conditions are connected to the body, the shell that contains the soul is what breaks down, The soul/spirit of the person is not damaged and therefore the memories of the life that it has as one person or another are intact.
Re: Another aspect…
I think the answer to this question is so simple everyone is completely overlooking the obvious, communication when you you break it down to its simplist function and how it came into being,
Basically it was a survival tool of our earlier ancesters thats over evolved into thousands of langauges and technologies, all the ways we are educated are based on this
As we have evolved we have slowly lost the use of certain abillities for an easier way of life as our eyes are open to new discoveries, i.e. our hunting these days is in the supermarkets.
But this abillity or gift or extra sense or forgotten abillity we can all see everyday if you just go and look it is a reality.
The test being:-
If i asked you to do something that whats really basic, you could not go out and do it with out thinking about it, well you might if you look at books, get other people involved, go and get tools from the hardware shop and may spend months or years learning the trade, or may go and get a qualification first.
But look at nature these life forms can do anything instantanously, almost immediately and on the first attempt, who exactly teaches a spider to build a multi angle geometric nightmare of a web and if it got broke could rebuild it again, with the same ease you switch channels on a remote control.
No Books, plans or study, so some how knowledge of whats learned is passed down and my way of proving this is, there has never ever been a spider who has ever failed or did a cow boy build of it, its exact, precise.
Or birds some of their nest weaving knowledge we couldnt do even with fingers, certain species navigation, all life forms are time based accurately theres so much that happens in the living world we just over look and put our trust in blind science for the answer.
Because we trust it to perform and we believe it has a test tube test for everything.
So there has got to be something in life that relates to us as a people too.
There is a cycle and pattern with everything but after we gone something of us must reside.
An alternative solution which may be the real answer may surfice but it is one of those things that the proof may never be ordained to us from a higher being maybe because maybe we dont deserve it or it might make the world a worse place than it is now.
Can you imagine the after death communications would be like after all those who deceased through wars, the dead would still be able to still pursue and torment.
The world is bad enough as it is with out the past dictators coming back to encourage their work to go on,
So maybe as we evolved from the stone age there was a reason perhaps to unlearn this abillity perhaps in our past we got frightened discovered its true cost or got wise when it caused concern and barriered it, from all the evidence about, with their rites and ceremonies, it is obvious they did have a really strong communication with the dead, the word barrow means to contain and seal in and there was no shortage of them.
Another thought if you look at the countries around the world red indians, africans there in the village there is usually only 1 person who is a witch doctor, shaman, choson one that run the ceremonies and specialises in other world activities.
Maybe it was the same with us europeans, that are specialists were the mediums clairvayants through the ages of our history, maybe it was safer and wiser to leave this task to just as few as people as possible.
Re: Survival of Memory
Dr. James Beichler has published on the work of Theo Kaluza in the early 20th century, before Einstein. Kaluza proposed a fourth spatial dimension. Einstein considered Kaluza’s proposal when he developed Relativity Theory. Einstein rejected the notion of a fourth spatial dimension only because he could not figure out how a spatial dimension could go undetected. Of course today, string theorists happily posit many extra so-called “curled up” dimensions without a second thought.
This fourth direction is actually suggested by James Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of the mid 19th century. Maxwell predicted an inconvenient truth – that there is a “magnetic vector potential”. Unfortunately, no one has ever found this potential. Kaluza, and Beichler after him, suggest the reason is because this potential actually exists in a fourth dimension of space.
But it gets even more interesting. It can be mathematically shown that this magnetic field potential is persistent, unlike its electrical counterpart which exists in our 3D space. The electrical potential vanishes as soon as the source stops emitting it. But the magnetic vector potential hypothetically persists for a very long time.
Our brains generate action potentials which are electromagnetic in nature. If this hypothesis is correct, we are literally leaving magnetic records of our thoughts in this fourth spatial dimension. This could explain the long-sought long term memory and if these fields were shareable, would explain virtually all psi cognitive phenomena and abilties, including mediumship.
For even though we might cease to exist in 3D material reality (i.e. we die) our memories would exist in 4D space and in this hypothesized magnetic vector. And if this is right suddenly telepathy, mediumship, remote viewing and perhaps even apparitional experiences are predicted. This means that psi is potentially considerably closer to scientific enquiry.
Anomalous Phenomena is Unexplained not Impossible
Psi is Subtle not Absolute
Anything is possible, it’a all a matter of Probability