I think that it was Carl Sagan who said, "You want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out." This marvelous book shows that open-mindedness is entirely compatible with scientific rigor.
For the last century, the vast majority psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have believed that thoughts, emotions and consciousness are the product of physical processes in the brain. Just recently the editor of popular psychology magazine expressed the opinion that the whole of human behavior could be reduced to reflexes.
This book provides comprehensive and detailed empirical proof that this reductive, materialistic belief is not just incomplete but false. Sagan also said that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and this book is full of it. But far from being a catalogue, each piece of evidence and every idea is examined critically.
The book is broken into nine sections followed by an introductory bibliography of psychical research and exactly one hundred pages of references.
Chapter 1: A View from the Mainstream: Contemporary Cognitive Neuroscience and the Consciousness Debates
Chapter 2: F. W. H. Myers and the Empirical Study of the Mind-Body Problem
Chapter 3: Psychophysiological Influence
Chapter 4: Memory
Chapter 5: Automatism and Secondary Centers of Consciousness: - Chapter 6: Unusual Experiences Near Death and Related Phenomena
Chapter 7: Genius
Chapter 8: Mystical Experience
Chapter 9: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century
It begins with a short history of 20th-century psychology from behaviorism to present-day cognitive neuroscience. This section emphasizes the inability of these theories to account for many important aspects of mind and consciousness.
We then move to an introduction to the work of Frederick Myers the 19th-century English psychologist whose work supported the view -echoed throughout this book - that the mind is not generated by the brain but is instead limited and constrained by it.
The next sections present critical reviews of a number of highly reproducible and familiar phenomena including the placebo response, stigmata and hypnotic suggestion. Though well known they demonstrate the influence of mental states on the body. We then move into some less familiar phenomena including some of those produced by yogis and distant influences on living systems. This step-by-step approach is very appealing and leads us to the inescapable conclusion that many of these phenomena are simply inexplicable using a reductionist, materialist approach to the mind and the brain.
The book presents a strong critique of the notion that memories are ONLY potentiated pathways in the brain. Later sections discuss such disparate topics as memories that survive physical death, near death experiences, automatic writing and out-of-body experiences, apparitions and deathbed visions. I have only a minor quibble about the inclusion of multiple personality disorder, which is controversial and the evidence for it not strong.
There are some very strong sections on super-normal states and a good critique of some recent attempts to reduce altered states of consciousness - including experiences induced by prayer and meditation - to brain processes. The authors rightly point out many of the limitations of the approach.
This is an astonishing book that I hope will be widely read despite weighing in at around 800 pages.
I put it in the same class as Michael Murphy's The Future of the Body, Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology and Spirituality and the less well-known Nature of Consciousness by Jerry Wheatley.
Very highly recommended.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the "mind-body" or more precisely, "mind-brain" problem. It is quite an undertaking at close to 700 pages of writing but in my opinion it was well worth the effort. The authors did well in providing a contextual history and background for those not familiar with the field of psychology and its history.
The main premise is that mainstream psychology has not yet provided a satisfactory theory of mind. Particularly, the relation of mind to brain has been largely ignored because it has been dominated by a purely materialistic view of the brain which posits that consciousness is generated by processes occurring purely in the brain. The objective of the book is to "provide justification for revisiting the broader and deeper framework of psychology" and the authors use the contributions of F.W.H. Myers, in particular his book Human Personality (1903), as a guide. The first chapter of the book provides relevant background in modern cognitive science. The next chapter summarizes the contributions of Myers to empirical investigation of the mind-body relation which provides the framework for the rest of the book.
The authors state that much of the available empirical evidence (such as that of psi phenomena) is ignored because it is assumed a priori impossible and caution that scientists must look at all the relevant facts, not just those compatible with current mainstream theory. They argue that it is precisely the valid scientific evidence that seems to conflict with current theory that should "commend the most urgent attention." The authors state that, "...in order to get an adequate scientific account of the mind we must be prepared to take seriously all relevant data and to modify as necessary even our most fundamental theoretical ideas." A variety of specific empirical phenomena and aspects of mental life that have not been able to be understood in the current "physicalist conceptual framework" are identified and discussed in detail and make up the bulk of the book. These include: psychophysiological influences, memory, automatism, near death experiences and related phenomenon, genius, and mystical experiences. I must admit that I was one of those scientists who criticized the data supporting so called `anomalous experiences' (e.g., NDEs, OBEs, psi phenomenon, psychophysiological influences, etc.) a priori without actually researching the available scientific evidence. After reading the extensive summaries of empirical evidence provided in this book my viewpoint has certainly changed. It is obvious that there is a wide variety of evidence supporting these various phenomena and this is certainly an area of research that has been greatly neglected by modern day scientists.
In the final chapter, "Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century", the authors re-assess Myer's theory of human personality and provide a summary of implications of the evidence provided in this book for future research and psychological theory. They urge that psychology should return to the central problem of mind and utilize technological and methodological advances to further study in this field. They point out that most of Myer's theoretical ideas and the empirical phenomena used to support them are still valid today and have not been "disproven but simply displaced." The authors also point out some of the weaknesses in Myer's approach and provide discussions regarding opportunities for further investigation. It is pointed out that the relevance of quantum-theoretic considerations to brain research has not been recognized and research in this area should be pursued and a short discussion on how contemporary quantum physics and neuroscience could support a new theory of the mind is provided. They also briefly describe the theoretical directions in which they believe psychology should go in order to develop a more comprehensive theory of mind-brain interaction that incorporates all the relevant aspect of present-day science.
For those intrigued by the empirical evidence presented in the book and eager to read more, the authors includes a great Appendix listing serious literature sources with respect to psychical research. A perusal of the "Reference" section also leads to many great sources of information that are available for further reading.
This is a serious science book and hopefully it will inform young scientists that there is much yet to be learned about the mind and that there are vast areas of research, that have largely been ignored, that should be pursued if we are ever going to be able to develop a proper theory of the mind. As the authors state, scientists should not a priori ignore such empirical evidence because it does not fit within their current theoretical model. Hopefully, this book will encourage scientists to look more closely at the available evidence and promote future research into these much neglected areas.
As an advanced graduate student in cognitive psychology, and one very much interested in expanding academic psychology's rather limited approach to the mind (yes, irony), I find this book to be, well, quite amazing. I've read a number of other books on similar topics, but nowhere have I found such an even-handed, fair, and thorough commitment to the truth.
Chapters 3 and 5-8 are wonderful for truly fascinating phenomena, though that is not to say the other chapters are uninteresting. The whole book is exceptional.
There is a consistent emphasis on supporting F.W.H. Myer's views--the book is a tribute to his work, and modeled after Myers's Human Personality--which at times might seem a little much, but shouldn't. Myers is indeed a neglected genius, and deserves to be far more well-known than he is. Re-establishing him is an important task and aspect of the book.
It should definitely be required reading for anyone in or near psychology. For those not in academia, I think it's still worth reading, though is certainly not paced like a popular science book. But this is because it is far more rich and densely rewarding than most popular science books.
I belong to both the American Psychological Association (APA)and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). When the more scientifically oriented psychologists abandoned APA and established APS, I considered going with them but was too busy with my work to have time to be active with either association so I just stayed put. After I retired (from administering both clinical and research programs for many years),I joined APS out of curiosity and found that I admire and despair over aspects of each organization, and maybe should have belonged to both for the whole 20 years in which both have existed.
In 1958 when a couple of my psychology professors at UCLA mentioned this book's deep! mentor ... FWH Myers, and they quickly tossed him aside as way too far out ... I thought he sounded ver-ry interesting. But, as a sensible grad student, I bought whatever they told me and went on without a word of protest. Probably a good idea because I got a couple of really good jobs later on that I might not have been offered if I'd been on record as admitting I liked that dead guy who'd started the Psychic Research Society in England!
All along I've been a non-theist who finds only "esoteric" religions interesting or useful because they are predominantly psychological and view Gods as simply personifications of natural, not supernatural, energy/matter/informational systems. Now the entire range of unusual, often "paranormal" phenomena analyzed in this book ... an amazing documentation of more than a century of philosophical speculations and respectable investigations ... has shown me that its six authors outrank the rest of us in their care, skill, precision, and ability to avoid slipping into personal belief preferences when they analyze phenomena most others want to cling to or deny. It's not just religious persons who want to deny ideas that don't match ancient notions in their scriptures and cling to their programmed-in beliefs. A number of scientists and philosophers are equally desperate to deny non-materialist possibilities and cling to modern science's "as-if working assumptions" which they have come to misconstrue as FACTS.
I HOPE that every member of APA and APS will read this book and join the people leading our field to enhanced ability to clarify the mechanisms by which we can learn HOW brains and minds learn and remember and retrieve information and take actions based upon it. We may eventually reclaim our honor rather as Lamarck did when the new field of epigenetics was suddenly recognized as being based on his century-old claim that acquired characteristics can be passed on to progeny. He wasn't the idiot everyone thought he was [although Darwin never agreed with that; he alone respected him!] Maybe a century from now the humbuggers who believe in mind functions that are now laughed away will have a new field that recognizes they were right, they just didn't know HOW the unusual things happened.
I'm going to approach this book from a slightly different perspective. In the past year, I've had both a precognition (beyond any doubt) and a mystical experience (meeting all seven criteria for an introverted mystical experience set forth by W.T. Stace, and summarized in Chapter 8 in Irreducible Mind).
Up till December 21st, 2014, I had many things happen to me that I could not explain. They seemed to converge on psi abilities, or any of the related phenomena. I talked to a lot of people, read a lot of books. I was leaning towards belief, but as a raging introvert I needed irrefutable proof to believe any of it. For me, that proof was an out of body experience, so I spent a good bit of time meditating and trying to induce an OBE. No go.
And then December 21st, 2014. Alone at night, driving home from a friend's house, on a two lane road in the country, I come upon a curve at 55 MPH. Suddenly, to my upper left, as if superimposed on a screen overlaying my windshield and roof, I see a deer. It is lit flatly, sort of a dull beige. It is facing left, with its head down. Deer, my brain says. I slow from 55 to 10, for no good reason other than "deer". Five seconds later, as I round the blind corner (it is in the woods, and the sides of the road are banked) I see the EXACT DEER in front of me: lit precisely like my vision, facing the same direction as my vision. The exact same in every single detail as my vision. The deer lifts its head, looks at me, and saunters off the road to my right. I immediately called my wife. You'll never guess what happened to me. She does of course, because she thinks this happens to me all of the time. I am more of a skeptic though. But this time, I can't dodge it. It happened, and I can't explain it away. It happened, and it was precognition.
My mystical event happened on March 25th, 2015. It was in a dream, but it wasn't a dream, I don't think. I could copy and paste the entry from my dream journal, but it would utterly fail to convey the experience. It remains the singular most astounding thing I've ever encountered in my 43 years of (this) existence.
I picked up Irreducible Mind about four years ago in an attempt to explain some things that were happening to me. It was a form of solace, knowing that perhaps you aren't crazy, and that reputable scientists and researchers also believe similar things, and that others have experienced the very same things you have. I was still doubtful four years ago (I could explain most things as coincidence, or find a rational explanation) but the book gave me a bit of courage to keep exploring and researching.
Now, on the "other side", Irreducible Mind has given me validation. I believe. I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that F.W.H Myers was completely on the ball. Psi phenomena are real. Trust me, I've been there. Hell, I am there. I'm a fairly smart guy. I refuse to be duped. It took my own personal experiences to convince me. BUT. I just read the chapter on mystical experiences last night, and I cried when I found my experience mapped neatly to Stace's features of introspective mystical experience. (Four years ago, I thought this chapter was a bit far-fetched.) Validation is a beautiful thing. Not being alone is a beautiful thing.
Anyway. Well. I'm not here to convince you one way or another about the reality of psi phenomena. I will say, if you are curious, on the fence, or going through something you can't explain, pick this book up. It can help.
Well, after a couple of months I finally got through "Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Perhaps two of the authors, Edward Kelly and Michael Grosso, sum up the entire book in their chapter titled "Genius" where on page 479, discussing Carl Jung, they say "...and his writing has a tendency to dissolve into depths of obscurity which we like many others sometimes find impenetrable. Nevertheless, we feel there is much of value in his work...." And, I agree. There is much of value in this book and I think that serious students of the human condition, especially the human mind/brain dilemma, should at least have a copy in their library for reference. It's a ponderous tome of academic verbal tonnage written by a committee of erudite professorial psychologists, psychiatrists and philosophers who really should have tried to communicate to their readers rather than lecture to them. This is the kind of book that causes college students to groan when it is assigned reading and some probably skim through it or don't read it at all. It can be overwhelming.
Well I did read it all the way through and of course found some parts better than others. The first two chapters of the book were weighty and, for me, boring. Chapter 3, "Psychophysiological Influence" written by Emily Williams Kelly, was better, actually, probably the best chapter in the book in my opinion. Chapter 5, "Automatism and Secondary Centers of Consciousness" by Adam Crabtree was good too. As I continued through the rest of the book there was an ebb and flow of interesting sections. But I don't think that any of them equaled Emily Kelly's chapter.
This book needs to be read slowly and carefully so it takes a lot of time to get through it. Even though I think I have at least a 10th grade reading level as recommended by one of the other reviewers, I found that, in some sections, I had to read and reread sentences over and over to maintain some continuity of thought. It helped if I had a dictionary nearby to define many of the words for me. It is difficult for one person to equal the combined vocabulary of 6 very erudite (and verbose) college professors.
Sometimes readers have a tendency to skip introductions to books, perhaps, but with this book I suggest that it should be read carefully. It is nicely written, providing an overall summary or outline of the book and the intent of the authors which is to ask current behaviorist psychologists, I suppose, to go back a hundred plus years and reconsider the thoughts of Frederic William Henry Myers and William James regarding consciousness and the subliminal and supraliminal mind. One may perhaps learn as much from the introduction as from reading the entire book. The introduction also provides a link to an electronic version of F.W.H. Myers' book "Human Personality" available at the Esalen website.
I found Myers' `Human Personality" a somewhat easier read than "Irreducible Mind" and I thought that the Esalen on-line version was well done with easily accessible translations of the sections written in French. The paragraphs are numbered and referenced in Myers' outline of the book and it is very easy to jump to chapters and sections of interest.
Overall, not an easy book to read but one worth having as a reference in one's library.
I was refeered to this book by a very interesting comment by Diane Hennacy Powell, MD, publised on June 1, 2007 in Shift Magazine, as follows:
“The authors of this book emphatically do not believe in ‘miracles,’ conceived as breaches of natural law . . . these seemingly anomalous phenomena occur not in contradiction to nature itself, but only in contradiction to what is presently known to us of nature . . . they not only invite, but should command the attention of anyone seriously interested in the mind.” The authors’ statement summarizes the major intent behind this book.
Although any complete theory needs to be able to account for all associated phenomena, twentieth-century academic psychology developed its paradigm while ignoring anomalous phenomena: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psi phenomena, visions of deceased relatives, mystical experiences, automatic writing, stigmata, and cases suggestive of reincarnation. Instead, psychology teamed up with the nascent fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence to derive a Computational Theory of the Mind (CTM) in which the mind was reduced to being the byproduct of a highly sophisticated, biological computer—the brain.
Irreducible Mind skillfully argues that CTM is empirically false and provides detailed documentation of what CTM cannot explain. For example, CTM never addresses how consciousness could arise from the brain, and anomalous experiences suggest otherwise. CTM can’t even account for some of our everyday experiences, such as volition, or free will. CTM is a theory that reflects its origins rather than the richness of human experience.
This 800-page tome is the result of a collaborative effort of six authors whose qualifications enable them to provide an authoritative and comprehensive review and analysis of the relevant literature. Principal authors Edward Kelly and Emily Kelly are both in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia. Edward Kelly has a background as an experimental parapsychologist and as a neuroscientist using high-resolution EEG and functional MRI. Emily Kelly worked with the recently deceased Ian Stevenson on cases of “the reincarnation type,” near-death experiences, apparitions, and mediumship.
A CD of F.W. H. Myers’s hard-to-find, two-volume classic, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), is included with the book. The authors describe Myers as the “neglected genius of scientific psychology” whose work influenced them, as well as the Harvard psychologist William James. Myers’s contributions are discussed throughout the book and continue to be of tremendous relevance today.
Both Myers and James regarded the brain as something that limited our experience of consciousness rather than something that generated it. Some of this perspective came from studying anomalous phenomena, but it also came from the study of clinical phenomena such as hysterical symptoms: for example, blindness, anesthesia and/or paralysis that had no anatomical cause and were curable by suggestion or hypnosis.“This apparent ability of the hysteric’s subliminal consciousness to initiate and control, at some level, physiological processes that are normally beyond conscious control seemed to Myers to be a gain rather than a loss of function and to have important implications for an understanding of the relationship of mind and body.”
Myers also looked at genius, which he believed to involve access to deeper subliminal or "unconscious” levels. To Myers, the subliminal was something that was restrained and could be released in all of us as a result of adjustments in the permeability of whatever it was that regulated its expression. More than one hundred years old, his theory is entirely in keeping with recent research on autistic savants.
The book’s title refers to the need for psychology to recognize that the mind cannot be understood by reductionistic, materialistic science. It is written primarily for advanced undergraduate and young graduate students in fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, who have sufficient backgrounds to understand its arguments yet are new enough to the field to still have an open mind. The book will also be a valuable addition to the library of all serious students of consciousness, particularly if they are interested in understanding the mysteries of the mind".
In my opinion, this book should be on par with Principals of Psychology by William James. It lays out 800 densely packed pages discussing the inadequacies of our current mind-brain paradigm. The book SHOULD be a game-changer, however, because of it's limited audience (late undergrad-masters-doctorate level individuals) and the reluctance for scientist to examine evidence that conflicts with widely accepted belief, it hasn't been nearly as popular as it should be. However, I highly recommend that it is read by ANY psychology student, social science student or anyone with a thirst for knowledge.
One of the main 'critiques' of this book is that it contains some stuff that would be considered 'fringe' and is thus the book is ENTIRELY disregarded. This is ignorant of two levels. First, the vast, vast majority of the evidence they present is not fringe at all, but rather well-established psychological phenomenon (placebo effect, MPD, and chapters on memory, genius and creativity). Second, what little 'fringe' material they do use as evidence is followed up with a lengthy annex consisting of many experiments and case studies presenting reasons to accept these phenomenon. Any reasonable and unbiased individual who examines many of the sources in the annex will likely come to accept at least SOME validity to these phenomenon, much like the authors of this book.
All things equal, this is a must read. No way around it. Unless you wish to remain blissfully ignorant, buy this book and read it, you will not regret it.
In their massive (800 page, very small type) 2007 book, "Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century" Edward Kelly and five coauthors argue for a framework for psychology, originally articulated by F.W.H. Meyers and William James in the waning years of the 19th century. In this framework the mind (nearly identical to the "soul" to those in a different intellectual tradition) as the seat of conscious behavior, exists outside of the body (brain) and the brain only partially recovers its contents for a particular human being. They posit that this framework is the only one compatible with the growing body of experimental evidence concerning phenomena like hypnosis, multiple personalities, genius, stigmata, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, a variety of mystical experiences, psychics, remote viewing and the like. This is an academic research book with the attributes of scholarly writings: extensive references, careful attention to historical detail for the purpose of allocating credit, and an extensive bibliography, reference list and index.
The book begins with two chapters reviewing contemporary cognitive neuroscience and the empirical study of the mind-body problem by F.W.H. Meyers in the late 19th century. This idea is not new to readers of several other books featured on Amazon,com. E.g., in "The Holographic Universe" Michael Talbot constructs a narrative that the mind is outside the body, distinct from the brain, in frequency space (think radio waves and optical frequency light) accessed by tuning into the right frequency, analogous to accessing the right URL on the internet. The next chapter reviews the literature on the mind's influence on physical bodies: both ones own and those of others. The following chapter considers the problem of memory. E.g., what does it mean to "remember" past lives or the interstices between lives as reported in the works of Michael Newton (e.g., "Journey of Souls") and Brian Weiss (e.g., "Same Soul, Many Bodies"). The next explores the experimental evidence for alternative states of consciousness than our normal waking state (as observed e.g., in individuals with multiple personality disorders or under hypnosis). A major issue explored in this chapter is "what is thought?". Some thoughts cause actions directly (e.g., raise your arm), others are concentrated efforts to learn (e.g., to play a musical instrument), still others are reveries. The traditional medical view is that your thoughts are created by electrical impulses in your brain and affect only yourself, but the experimental evidence to the contrary is compelling (e.g., Agnes Sanford's healing ministry as described in her autobiography "Sealed Orders"). Experimental evidence is that thought accompanies and under appropriate circumstances creates physical action, like Jesus' feeding the multitudes with loaves and fishes or his healing of the sick and raising of the dead. The following chapter reviews the evidence for and implications of out-of-body and near-death experiences, familiar topics from "The Holographic Universe" and "Fingerprints of God" by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. The next chapter deals with "genius": the intuitive and almost unconscious ability of certain individuals to compose great works of art or paradigm shifts in science (e.g., Charles Darwin). Next is a chapter on the literature on mystical experiences. The book concludes with a synopsis of what must be explained by a satisfactory psychology "for the 21st century".
In conclusion I offer three observations of potential relevance to frequent users of Amazon.com. First, this work is an academic tome, poorly suited for a general audience. The authors assert that it could serve as a suitable text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate text in psychology. If you want far more readable descriptions of the phenomena discussed in this offering, consult the books cited above by Michael Talbot, Michael Newton, Brian Weiss, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, and Agnes Sanford, all readily available on Amazon.com. The second is that this reviewer finds it astonishing that in the waning years of the 19th century F.W.H. Meyers published ideas along the lines of these modern popular works that support the notion that the mind (soul) is distinct from the body and persists independent of the body. This is a little publicized fact, suggesting that Dr. Meyers' contributions rival those of the greatest intellects of all time. Finally, this book reveals that the psychology profession is finally awakening to the use of documented experimental data rather than the speculations of academics to create a comprehensive view of human nature and its place in the universe. This is a wonderful book for serious students of the mind(soul)/body problem. Otherwise, seek insight else where.
This detailed tome is a much needed scholastic review of the current state of research of the psychology of the mind. The writers have scoured the resources way back to main developments of the current paradigm which includes complex reviews of long deceased writers. Their goal is to provide a base for much needed research into that complexity we call the mind. They are imaginative and bold going where too few serious writers venture. This text is dense and requires great tenacity to complete but very much worth the time. Keep your dictionary handy.