Rousseau, David, and Julie Rousseau. “The Spellchecker Case.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Forthcoming.
Runes, Dagobert D., ed. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968.
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. Williston, VT: Hart Brothers, 1982.
Watson, Thomas A. Exploring Life: The Autobiography of Thomas A. Watson. New York and London: D. Appleton, 1926.
Weightman, Gavin. Signor Marconi’s Magic Box. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Chapter 9: Inside the Haunt Box
Bruchard, J. F., D. H. Nguyen, and E. Block. “Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields on Nocturnal Melatonin Concentrations in Dairy Cows.” Journal of Dairy Science 81: 722–27 (1998).
MacDonald, Douglas, and Daniel Holland. “Spirituality and Complex Partial Epileptic-like Signs.” Psychological Reports 91: 785–92 (2002).
Persinger, Michael A. “Average Diurnal Changes in Melatonin Levels Are Associated with Hourly Incidence of Bereavement Apparitions: Support for the Hypothesis of Temporal (Limbic) Lobe Microseizing.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 76: 444-46 (1993).
——. “Increased Geomagnetic Activity and the Occurrence of Bereavement Hallucinations: Evidence for Melatonin-Mediated Microseizing in the Temporal Lobe?” Neuroscience Letters 88: 271–74 (1988).
——. “Experimental Facilitation of the Sensed Presence: Possible Intercalation between the Hemispheres Induced by Complex Magnetic Fields.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 190 (8): 533–41 (2002).
——, S. A. Koren, and R. P. O’Connor. “Geophysical Variables and Behavior: CIV. Power-Frequency Magnetic Field Transients (5 Microtesla) and Reports of Haunt Experiences Within an Electronically Dense House.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 92: 673–74 (2001).
——, S. G. Tiller, and S. A. Koren. “Experimental Simulation of a Haunt Experience and Elicitation of Paroxysmal Electroencephalographic Activity by Transcerebral Complex Magnetic Fields: Induction of a Synthetic ‘Ghost’?” Perceptual and Motor Skills 90: 659–74 (2000).
Randall, Walter, and Steffani Randall. “The Solar Wind and Hallucinations—A Possible Relation Due to Magnetic Disturbances.” Bioelectromagnetics 12: 67–70 (1991).
Chapter 10: Listening to Casper
Altmann, Jürgen. “Acoustic Weapons: A Prospective Assessment.” Science and Global Security 9: 165–234.
Davis, Laura. “Soundless Concert Stirs the Emotions.” Daily Post (Liverpool), 17 February 2003.
Muggenthaler, Elizabeth von. “Low Frequency and Infrasonic Vocalizations from Tigers.” Paper 3aABb1, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America/NOISE-CON, Newport Beach, CA, 2000.
Tandy, Vic, and T. R. Lawrence. “The Ghost in the Machine.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62: 360–64 (1998).
——. “Something in the Cellar.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 64 (3): 129–40 (July 2000).
Walsh, Edward J., et al. “Acoustic Communications in Panthera tigris: A Study of Tiger Vocalization and Auditory Receptivity.” Paper 4aAB3 presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Nashville, TN, May 2003.
Chapter 11: Chaffin v. the Dead Guy in the Overcoat
“Case of the Will of James L. Chaffin.” Editor’s report in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 36: 517–24 (1928).
Cornell, A. D. “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40 (701): 120–24.
——. “Further Experiments in Apparitional Observation.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40 (706): 409–18.
Davie County Enterprise Record. “Dead Man Returns in a Dream; An Estate in Davie is Redivided.” 4 January 1979, p. 5B.
Gurney, Edmund, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. Phantasms of the Living. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918.
Osborn, Albert S. Questioned Documents, 2d ed. Albany, NY: Boyd Printing, 1929.
Wall, James W. History of Davie County. Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Publishing, 1997.
Chapter 12: Six Feet Over
Atwater, P. M. H. “Is There a Hell? Surprising Observations About the Near-Death Experience.” Journal of Near-Death Studies 10 (5): 149–60.
Becker, Carl. “The Pure Land Revisited: Sino-Japanese Meditations and Near-Death Experiences of the Next World.” Anabiosis—The Journal for Near-Death 4 (1): 51–68 (Spring 1984).
Blackmore, Susan. “Near-Death Experiences: In or Out of the Body?” Skeptical Inquirer 16: 34–45 (Fall 1991).
Blanke, Olaf, et al. “Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions.” Nature 419: 269 (September 2002).
Cheek, David. “The Anesthetized Patient Can Hear and Can Remember.” American Journal of Proctology 13 (5): 287–89 (October 1962).
Clark, Kimberly. “Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiences.” In The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984.
Cook, Emily Williams, Bruce Greyson, and Ian Stevenson. “Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 12 (3): 377–406 (1998).
Greyson, Bruce, and Nancy Evans Bush. “Distressing Near-Death Experiences.” Psychiatry 55: 95–110.
Jansen, Karl. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Sarasota, FL: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2001.
Morris, Robert L., et al. “Studies of Communication During Out-of-Body Experiences.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72 (1): 1–21 (January 1978).
Osis, Karlis, and Donna McCormick. “Kinetic Effects at the Ostensible Location of an Out-of-Body Projection During Perceptual Testing.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 74 (3): 319–29 (July 1980).
Parnia, S., et al. “A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of the Incidence, Features, and Aetiology of Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors.” Resuscitation 48 (2): 149–56 (February 2001).
Ring, Kenneth. “Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences.” Journal of Near-Death Studies 11 (4): 223–29 (Summer 1993).
——, and Sharon Cooper. Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999.
Sabom, Michael. Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
——. “The Shadow of Death.” Parts 1 and 2. Christian Research Journal 26 (2): 14–21 and 26 (3): 45–51 (2003).
Schwender, D., et al. “Conscious Awareness During General Anesthesia: Patients’ Perceptions, Emotions, Cognition, and Reactions.” British Journal of Anesthesia 80: 133–39 (1998).
Van Lommel, W. “About the Continuity of Our Consciousness.” In Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Edited by C. Machado and D. A. Shewmon. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, 2004.
——, et al. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” Lancet 358: 2039–45 (2001).
Read on for Mary Roach’s introduction to her
groundbreaking new work Bonk: The Curious Coupling of
Sex and Science, published by Canongate in May 2008.
(£12.99; ISBN 978 1 84767 226 1)
Foreplay
A man sits in a room, manipulating his kneecaps. It is 1983, on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. The man, a study subject, has been told to do this for four minutes, stop, and then resume for a minute more. Then he can put his pants back on, collect his payment, and go home with an entertaining story to tell at suppertime. The study concerns human sexual response. Kneecap manipulation elicits no sexual response, on this planet anyway, and that is why the man is doing it: It’s the control activity. (Earlier, the man was told to manipulate the more usual suspect while the researc
hers measured whatever it was they were measuring.)
I came upon this study while procrastinating in a medical school library some years ago. It had never really occurred to me, before that moment, that sex has been studied in labs, just like sleep or digestion or exfoliation or any other pocket of human physiology. I guess I had known it; I’d just never given it much thought. I’d never thought about what it must be like, the hurdles and the hassles that the researchers faced – raised eyebrows, suspicious wives, gossiping colleagues. Imagine a janitor or a freshman or, best of all, the president of UCLA, opening the door on the kneecap scene without knocking. Requesting that a study subject twiddle his knees is not immoral or indecent, but it is very hard to explain. And even harder to fund. Who sponsors these studies, I wondered. Who volunteers for them?
It’s not surprising that the study of sexual physiology, with a few notable exceptions, did not get rolling in earnest until the 1970s. William Masters and Virginia Johnson said of their field in the late 1950s, “… science and scientists continue to be governed by fear – fear of public opinion … fear of religious intolerance, fear of political pressure, and, above all, fear of bigotry and prejudice – as much within as without the professional world.” (And then they said, “Oh, what the hell” and built a penis-camera.)
Even in the sixties, little was known and less was talked about. The retired British sex physiologist Roy Levin told me that the index of the first edition of Essential Medical Physiology, a popular textbook at that time, had no entry for penis, vagina, coitus, erection, or ejaculation. Physiology courses skipped orgasm and arousal, as though sex were a secret shame and not an everyday biological event.
One of Levin’s earliest sex projects was to profile the chemical properties of vaginal secretions, the only bodily fluid about which virtually nothing was known. The female moistnesses are the first thing sperm encounter upon touchdown, and so, from a fertility perspective alone, it was an important thing to know. This seemed obvious to him, but not to some of his colleagues in physiology. Levin can recall overhearing a pair of them sniping about him at the urinals during the conference where he presented his paper. The unspoken assumption was that he was somehow deriving an illicit thrill from calculating the ion concentrations of vaginal fluids. That people study sex because they are perverts.
Or, at the very least, because they harbor an unseemly interest in the matter. Which makes some people wary of sex researchers, and other people extremely interested. “People invariably draw all these conclusions about me, about why I’m studying this,” says University of Texas at Austin researcher Cindy Meston. That Meston is blonde and beautiful compounds the problem. If you are sitting next to Cindy Meston on a plane and you ask her what she does, she will either lie to you or she will say, “I do psychophysiological research.” She loses most of them there. “If they persist, I say something like, ‘Well, we use various visual and auditory stimuli to look at autonomic nervous system reactivity in various contexts.’ That usually does the trick.”
Even when a researcher carefully explains a sex-related project – its purpose and its value – people may still suspect he or she is a perv. Last year I was conversing by email with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.”* She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I told this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?
Early studies of sexual physiology came at it sideways, via studies of fertility, obstetrics and gynecology, and venereal disease. Even working in these areas tended to invite scorn and suspicion. Gynecologist James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association in 1850, after inviting medical students to observe a (consenting) woman in labor and delivery. His colleagues had been outraged over the impropriety of a male doctor looking at female genitalia.* In 1875, a gynecologist named Emo Nograth was booed while delivering a talk on venereal disease at the newly formed American Gynecological Society. The sex researcher and historian Vern Bullough, in the 1970s, landed on an FBI list of dangerous Americans, for his “subversive activities” (e.g., publishing scholarly papers about prostitution and working for the American Civil Liberties Union to decriminalize, among other things, oral sex and the wearing of dresses by men).
With a few notable exceptions, it wasn’t until the past half century that lab-based science embraced the pursuit of better, more satisfying sex. Sexual dysfunction had to be medicalized, and the pharmaceutical companies had to get interested. It’s still an uphill slog. The current conservative political climate has made funding scarce. Meston undertakes large studies on fertility – a subject that’s easy to fund but does not interest her – simply to help keep her lab afloat. Several researchers told me they keep the titles of their grant proposals intentionally vague, using the word physiological, for example, in place of sexual. Meston recalls a Republican senator who had spoken out against the use of federal funds for studies of female sexuality: “He actually said: ‘We already know everything about women’s sexuality.’”
This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.
People who write popular books about sex endure a milder if no less inevitable scrutiny. My first book was about human cadavers, and as a result, many people assumed that I’m obsessed with death. Now that I have written books about both sex and death, God only knows what the word on the street is.
I am obsessed with my research, not by nature but serially: book by book and regardless of topic. All good research – whether for science or for a book – is a form of obsession. And obsession can be awkward. It can be downright embarrassing. I have no doubt that I’m a running joke at the interlibrary loan department of the San Francisco Public Library, where I have requested, over the past two years, papers with titles like “On the Function of Groaning and Hyperventilation During Intercourse” and “An Anal Probe for Monitoring Vascular and Muscular Events During Sexual Response.” Last summer I was in the medical school library of the University of California, San Francisco, Xeroxing a journal article called “Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death”* when the paper jammed. I could not bring myself to ask the copy room attendant to help me, but quietly moved over to the adjacent machine and began again.
It’s not just library personnel. It’s friends and family, and casual acquaintances. It’s Frank, the manager of the building where I rent a small office. Frank is a kind and dear man whose build and seeming purity of heart call to mind that enraptured bear in the Charmin commercials. He had stopped by one afternoon to chat about this and that – the Coke machine vandal, odd odors from the beauty school down the hall. At one point in the conversation I crossed my legs, knocking over a copy of a large hardback that was propped against the side of my desk. The book slammed flat on the floor, face up. Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, yelled the cover in 90-point type. Frank looked down, and I looked down, and then we went back to talking about the Coke machine. But nothing has been quite the same since.
I like to think that I never completely disappear down the pike. I like to think that I had a lot of miles to go before I got to the point where I was as consumed by the topic as, say, William Masters was. Masters is dead, but I met a St. Louis social worker who used to work in the same building with him. This man told a story about a particularly troubling case he was working on. The father in the case had told him, that morning, that he wasn’t all that concerned about his wife gaining custody o
f their children, because if it happened, he would go and slit their throats. The case was being decided in court the following Monday. The social worker wanted to call the police, but worried that it would be a violation of confidentiality. Distraught, he consulted the only other professional he could find in the building that morning. (It happened to be Thanksgiving.) It was Dr. Masters.
Masters directed the social worker to take a seat on the other side of his enormous rosewood desk, and the man unrolled his dilemma. Masters listened intently, staring at the man from beneath a hedge of chaotic white eyebrows. When the social worker finished talking, there was a moment of quiet. At last Masters spoke: “Have you asked this man whether he has difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection?”
Years ago I wrote for a health magazine that tolerated the wanton use of first person among writers such as myself. One month they ran a first-person piece written by a young woman who was suffering from vaginismus. I was acquainted with this woman – I’ll call her Vicki – and her piece was tastefully and competently written. Nonetheless I could not read it without cringing. I did not want to know about Vicki and her boyfriend and their travails with Vicki’s clamping vagina.* I would be seeing her at the magazine’s holiday party in a few weeks, and now I’d be thinking clamping vagina, clamping vagina, clamping vagina as we dipped celery sticks and chatted about our work.
Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nittygritty. I would rather have disclosed to my own mother, in full detail and four-part harmony, the events of a certain summer spent sleeping my way through the backpacker hotels of South America, than to have heard her, at the age of 78, say to me, “Your father always had trouble keeping an erection.” I remember the moment clearly. I felt like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, where he’s standing on a Manhattan sidewalk talking to an elderly couple about how they manage to keep the spark in their marriage, and the old man leans over the microphone and says, “We use a large, vibrating egg.”