When People Speak in Languages They Never Learned

In the recent scientific paper "Lost in Another Language: A Case Report," we read a remarkable account of a 17-year-old Dutch boy who woke up from an operation speaking and understanding only English, a language he had used only in school.  The syndrome persisted for about 24 hours, and then faded away, with the boy returning to his language habits of understanding Dutch and using Dutch. It seems this was an example of a rare syndrome called foreign language syndrome in which similar events happen.  As remarkable as such a case is, it seems that even more remarkable language anomaly cases have been recorded: those in which a person seemed to use a language he had never learned.

In Volume 2 of the 1855 work Spiritualism by Judge John W. Edmonds (who served as Chief Justice of the New York State Supreme Court), we have a remarkable account of a psychic who is not named. Edmonds says he will give "a brief account of one medium whose whole progress I have witnessed with intense interest." 

First we are told the woman developed powers of clairvoyance. We hear a reference to the sea disaster in which more than 300 people on the SS Arctic died in 1854:

"Since then this faculty of knowing things at a distance has greatly improved. She saw the wreck of the Arctic when it was occurring. She saw and detailed with great accuracy, as subsequent accounts showed, the recent collision on the Canada Railroad, and that a few moments after it happened, and while the dead and wounded were being lifted out of the ruins. She has seen and described the state of things at Sebastopol and its vicinity, and she has frequently described scenes and conversations going on at the moment, at the distance of several hundred miles from her ; and all this, not when she was in a trance, but in a state of mental consciousness to all around her."

The account gets even stranger when we are told that the woman could speak in languages she never learned:

"She next became developed to speak different languages. She knows no language but her own, and a little smattering of boarding-school French. Yet she has spoken in nine or ten different tongues, sometimes for an hour at a time, with the ease and fluency of a native. It is not unfrequent that foreigners converse with their spirit-friends through her in their own language. A recent instance occurred where a Greek gentleman had several interviews, and for several hours at a time carried on the conversation on his part in Greek, and received his answers sometimes in that language and sometimes in English ; yet until then she had never heard a word of modern Greek spoken. About the same time her musical powers became developed. She has repeatedly sang in foreign languages, such as Italian, In- dian, German, and Polish."

On the same page we get this remarkable claim:

"Her next advance was to see spirits and spiritual scenes, and now scarcely a day passes that she does not describe the spirits who are present, entire strangers to her, yet very readily recognized and identified by their inquiring friends. This has of late been witnessed by very many persons, and many an, unbeliever in spiritual intercourse has been overwhelmed with the evidence of identity which thus by sight and by communion has been presented."

On this page of a book by another author, we read that this woman was a  daughter of Judge Edmonds, Laura Edmonds:

"Miss  Laura  Edmonds,  a  daughter  of  the  Judge,  also  pursued  her researches  in  the  same  direction,  and  became  developed  as  an  excellent medium  for  trance  speaking,  the  discerning  of  spirits,  the  gift  of  tongues, including  several  dead  and  living  languages  utterly  unknown  to  herself,  the ability  to  travel  clairvoyantly  to  distant  places,  and  communicate  with  absent friends  by  the  mental  telegraph."

A much later case of someone seeming to speak in a language he never learned occurs here. It involves statements of a "drop-in communicator" speaking though the lips of the medium Indridi Indridason. In a seance with Indridason held in Reykjavik, Iceland on November 24, 1905, this seemingly paranormal "drop-in communicator" identified himself as Mr. Jensen, and stated that a fire had started in a factory in Copenhagen, Denmark (more than 1300 miles away) on that evening (November 24, 1905) about midnight, and that the fire was quickly brought under control. It was soon found out that exactly such a thing had happened. A newspaper reported that in Copenhagen on November 24, 1905, a factory fire had started about midnight, and was soon brought under control. There were no telephones in Reykjavik until the next year, and no telegraphs until 1918, so there is no way in which electrical communication could have made such a thing known to Indridasson or anyone else at the seance.  Not many days later the same "drop in communicator" more specifically identified himself as Emil Jensen. 

No one present knew whether such an Emil Jensen had ever lived. But it was found out many years later through the investigation of Erlendur Haraldsson that an Emil Jensen had lived and died in Copenhagen, Denmark, very near to the place where the Copenhagen fire had occurred.  The "Emil Jensen" in the seances identified himself as a manufacturer who was a bachelor, and the actual Emil Jensen was such a person. 

Very remarkably, this "drop-in communicator" at the seance (speaking through the lips of the medium Indridi Indridason) had spoken in Danish, a language which Indridason did not even know. On page 222 of the document we are told that the Icelandic medium Indridason had minimal education and "learned how to write and read but no Danish."  We read this on  page 221:

"At many sittings Jensen was seen by sitters appearing in a 'luminous, beautiful light-pillar', usually very briefly but several times during the same séance and at various locations in the hall. This 'pillar of light' would first appear in the darkness, and after that Jensen would appear in it. The 'pillar of light' was larger than Jensen and emitted light in such a way that Jensen and Indridi could sometimes be seen side by side at the same time (Gissurarson & Haraldsson, 1989, pp.82–85). Both of Indridi’s hands were at the same time being held by a witness to exclude the possibility of fraud."  

Swarnlata Mishra was born in Shahpur, in northern India in 1948. When she was three, her father took on a trip to another city, and Swarnlata made odd statements rather suggesting a previous life in the city. Then two years later she (according to this account) "began performing dances, first for her mother and then for others, while also singing in a foreign language she had never had the opportunity to learn."

Iris Farczády was a young Hungarian medium who in trances might seem to be taken over by the spirit of some deceased person, as sometimes seems to occur during seances.  We read the following:

"In 1933 she was taken over by a spirit who identified herself as a 41-year-old Spanish charwoman named Lucía Altarez de Salvio. Lucía did not leave Iris, as earlier communicators had done. She spoke Spanish, understood no Hungarian, and only gradually learned German, the language spoken by Iris’s family. She said that she had died three months before in Madrid, leaving a husband and numerous children. After the transformation, Iris found a new talent in cooking and enjoyed singing Spanish songs and flamenco dancing....Iris was nearly eighty at the time of the last interviews, but still identified herself as Lucía."

The case is also described here, where it explicitly states that Iris had never learned Spanish, but spoke it well. We are told "Lucía’s mastery of Spanish in the Madrilene dialect was precise." The case resembles the astonishing case of Mary Lurancy Vennum described here. But in that case Mary Lurancy Vennum for only three months claimed to be someone else (Mary Roff, who had died a year after Mary Lurancy Vennum was born).  In the case of Iris Farczády, we have someone who apparently claimed to be a different person (Lucía Altarez de Salvio) for more than sixty years. 

Another similar case is the case of Uttara Huddar, an Indian woman described below by an entry in the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research:

"This is a 1970s Indian case of an educated woman, Uttara Huddar, whose personality and memories abruptly changed at the age of 32 to those of a rural villager, Sharada, who had lived and died a century and a half earlier. The transformation proved temporary, but the Sharada personality continued to appear intermittently throughout Uttara’s life. A striking feature of this case is the linguistic element: as ‘Sharada’, Uttara was unable to speak Marathi, her native language, only Bengali, which she previously knew only a little, but could now speak fluently, and in an archaic dialect."

You can read about this fascinating case here.

The article on xeonglossy at www.encyclopedia.com states the following: 

"According to the book Modern American Spiritualism, by Emma Hardinge Britten (1870), in addition to Laura Edmonds, the gift was demonstrated at an early period by Jenny Keyes, who sang in trance in Italian and Spanish, and by a Mrs. Shepherd, Mrs. Gilbert Sweet, a Miss Inman, a Mrs. Tucker, Susan Hoyt, A. D. Ruggles, and several others whose names she was not permitted to make public. They frequently spoke in Spanish, Danish, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Malay, Chinese, and Indian....In The Two Worlds (March 31, 1933), F. H. Wood wrote of the medium Rosemary and 'Lady Nona,' her ancient Egyptian control: 'The fact is now established beyond disproof that over 140 Egyptian word-phrases which were in common use when the great Temple of Luxor in Egypt was built, have been spoken fluently through an English girl who normally knows nothing about the ancient tongue.' " 

Luxor Temple in Egypt

The long book Man and His Relations by Samuel Byron Brittan MD is a little-known gem of psychology and parapsychology. In a chapter that includes some fascinating accounts of people performing extremely complex tasks while sleepwalking, on page 373 we have some fascinating accounts of people who could speak in languages they had never learned (references to "magnetic sleep" referred to hypnotized subjects): 

"Fernel  reports  the  facts  respecting  a boy  who  could  speak Greek  and  Latin  when  in  the  magnetic  sleep.  Lorry  also mentions  the  case  of  a girl  of  ten  years  that  would  make long  speeches  when  her  mother  placed  one  hand  on  her head.  When  the  hand  was  removed  the  flow  of  words  and ideas  was  immediately  interrupted.  Professor  Agardh,  of Lund,  Sweden,  furnishes  another  interesting  example.  He met  with  a magnetic  sleeper  in  the  person  of  a boy  who could  speak  Latin  with  greater  fluency  than  his  native tongue.  He  could  also  converse  in  French.  On  one  occasion, when  a person  educated  in  the  English  language  had expressed  doubts  of  his  ability  to  speak  languages  he  had never  learned,  the  boy  immediately  commenced  a conversation in  English,  and  the  skeptic  was  obliged  to  acknowledge that  he  spoke  the  language  as  freely  and  correctly  as  an  educated Englishman.  At  the  same  time  the  teacher  affirmed that  his  pupil  had  never  learned — by  the  ordinary  process of  scholastic  training — a word  that  he  had  uttered."

In another equally long and equally fascinating book on paranormal phenomena ("Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, Their Observation and Experimentation" by Dr. Paul Joire), we read of a paranormal "twofer": a levitation combined with a speaking in a language unknown to the speaker. In the middle of several pages (pages 451-454) documenting levitations of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino we read this quote from a Dr. Ochorowicz:

"Another  most  surprising  and  very  rare  fact  (also obtained  at  the  Congress  at  Milan)  was  the  complete levitation  of  the  very  person  of  the  medium,  who,  held throughout  by  the  hands  and  feet,  was  raised  from  the ground  and  carried  in  a  cataleptic  condition  along  with her  chair  on  to  the  table. 'I  will  raise  my  medium  in  the  air,'  Eusapia  said  in very  correct  French  (a  language  she  does  not  know  in  her normal  condition),  and  she  was  actually  raised.  Such was  at  least  my  impression  during  several  seconds.  By passing  my  hand  under  her  boots  I  am  able  to  testify  that there  was  a  space  of  from  four  to  five  inches  between  them and  the table. On  another  occasion  the  medium  was  suddenly  raised from  the  floor.     She  was  standing,  and  Mme.  Ochorowicz had  time  to  pass  her  hand  between  Eusapia's  feet  and  the floor."

In his book The Voices (which can be read here) the writer William Usborne Moore (formerly a Vice-Admiral) discusses his experiences with the medium Etta Wriedt.  The excellent scholarly work Psychics, Sensitives and Somnambules by Rodger I. Anderson says this on page 186 about Wriedt:

"Wriedt's voices regularly carried on intelligent conversations in Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Spanish....Wriedt's communicators were often very successful in identifying themselves to the sitters, providing correct names and personal histories, referrring to facts and circumstances that were unknown to the sitter at the time but subsequently verified as correct....Wriedt was investigated scores of times by multiple researchers, all finding in her favor." 

Moore's long 400-page book (published in 1913) gives very many accounts corroborating such claims. He describes seances  occurring mainly in 1912, in a room without any audio equipment, at a time when all voice transmission technology was bulky and primitive. The loudspeaker was not really invented until four years later, judging from this quote:  "When Bell Labs introduced the first electronic vacuum tube amplifier in 1916, the true loudspeaker became possible." (Another source dates 1915 as the date when the first "practical dynamic audio speakers" were invented.)

Postscript: On page 9 of the document here, we have this account of xenoglossy (the reference to a guide seems to refer to a spirit guide):

"ADELA ALBERTELLI, Argentine, of Italian parentage, normally speaks only Spanish, and was educated merely at a primary school. _ Yet, in trance, when she gives also clairvoyance and clairaudience, she speaks and writes in English, German, Italian, French, Dutch and Portuguese. With the help of her guide, she has written in Latin about the life of Jesus. Names and places unknown to her have been correctly spelt, and she uses signs that are not employed in Spanish. There is a poem in English, and a love-letter in German, signed, apparently, by Byron, dated August 25, 1819, headed 'Bologna,' and addressed to Teresa Guiccioli, a 16-year-old girl. Another poem is written in a language which has not vet been identified. Sometimes she uses her own handwriting; but usually, especially when foreign languages are involved, the writing changes. 'Two Worlds,' which reports this case, prints a photograph showing five distinct styles of writing."

Things Biologists Should Study But Fail to Study

Nowadays the person who studies to get a PhD in evolutionary biology is given a very narrow field of study topics, and is basically trained to be someone who can grind out papers that will be pleasing to other evolutionary biologists. Similarly, the person who studies to get a PhD in neuroscience is given a very narrow field of study topics, and is basically trained to be someone who can grind out papers that will be pleasing to other neuroscientists. The program of study of such scientists is very narrow compared to a far wider program of study that might cause them to reach different conclusions.

Below are several things that we might require biologists to study and ponder before giving them PhD's in evolutionary biology or neuroscience, but which are not at all part of the current required studies for such persons.

Omitted field of study #1: Anomalous neuroscience cases

There is no proper study of the brain without studying anomalous cases in neuroscience. These include very many cases in which human intelligence and memory is only slightly weakened by large damage to the brain. A thorough study of such cases would include all the cases mentioned in this post, this post and this post. The cases would include cases such as these:

1. Physician John Lorber's cases of many people who had above-average intelligence despite having lost most of their brains due to hydrocephalus.
2. Many cases of people who experienced very little loss of mental ability or memory, even though half of their brains were removed in the operation known as hemispherectomy, to treat bad epileptic seizures.
3. Karl's Lashley's cases, in which animals trained to perform some task could perform the task well after various fractions of their brains were removed. 
4. Cases of people (sometimes called savants) who displayed far-above-normal mental powers of some type or some extraordinary mental skill despite having some severe physical shortfall of the brain. 

If it were to be required that every person who gets a biology degree study such cases, then perhaps our biologists would not be so dogmatic in asserting that the human brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories, a dogma that is contradicted by many of these cases.

Omitted field of study #2: physical limitations of the body and the brain that seem to defy prevailing dogmas about brains, bodies and the origin of minds and bodies

It would be great if every person getting a PhD in evolutionary biology or neuroscience were required to take a course entitled "Limiting Factors in the Human Body."  The course would be entirely devoted to discussing discoveries that have been made about physical limitations of the human body. 

The students would learn the very important fact that in the human cortex signals only travel across chemical synapses with a probability of 50% or less.  They would also learn about brain cells are constantly bombarded by very severe noise of many different types.  They would learn about the extremely short lifetimes of the protein molecules that make up synapses (only about two weeks or less), and they would learn about the constant random restructuring that occurs in tiny brain units such as synapses and dendritic spines.  The students would also learn about the physical limitations of DNA, and about how the only code it contains is one allowing it to only represent very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  The course would discuss how DNA molecules contain nothing like information specifying anatomy, and how DNA molecules fail to even to even specify the structure of even cells or the organelles that make up cells. 

Omitted field of study #3: The universe's fine-tuned laws and fundamental constants

The modern evolutionary biologist is a person who admits that our planet is filled with organisms that have features that look like products of design,  but he claims that this appearance is all a big illusion. Similarly, if a man stands on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, and watches what seems to be a giant leisure cruise ship pass by, he may claim that the ship is not at all what it appears to be. “Those swimming pools and sunbathers in bikinis are just to fool us,” the person may say, and may tell us, “The ship isn't really a leisure cruise ship – it's a military ship designed for amphibious attack.”

We should not be extremely impressed by the opinion of anyone dismissing as an illusion some huge case of apparent design in nature unless that person has studied all the cases of apparent design in nature. Fine-tuned organisms are only one such case. An equally weighty matter is the fact that the physical laws of the universe and the fundamental constants of the universe seem extremely fine-tuned to allow the existence of life. An adequate study of such things is a very complicated manner requiring at least 3 semester hours of study in a university course or equivalent independent study. 

The need for the study of such things may be made clear by the following hypothetical conversation between Mary and an evolutionary biologist named John:

Mary: The biology of organisms is so fine-tuned. It must not be the result of chance, but of purpose.

John: No, take it from me, that's all just an illusion. It's all just chance.

Mary: But what about the universe's fundamental constants and laws of nature? They seem as fine-tuned as the organisms on our planet. And no one has any theory as to how that could have happened by chance.

John: Well, I don't know anything about THAT. But take it from me, the apparent fine-tuning in biology is just chance, not purpose or design.

In this conversation, John seems like a poorly-prepared thinker who has made a conclusion based on less than half a consideration of the evidence. Given three gigantic cases of what looks like fine-tuning in nature (the universe's fundamental constants, the universe's laws, and the universe's biology), John seems to have drawn a conclusion based on only one of these things, which doesn't seem like anything resembling intellectual thoroughness.

Omitted field of study #4: paranormal phenomena

There is a huge amount of evidence that paranormal phenomena exist, and that humans can have experiences that cannot be explained through conventional theories of biology. If paranormal phenomena exist, they are of the highest relevance to the claims of biologists.

For example, let us consider the claims of typical evolutionary biologists. Such persons claim that all human abilities have an evolutionary explanation. Even without considering paranormal phenomena, this claim has seemed utterly implausible to many. The problem is that humans seem to have many mental characteristics and capabilities that cannot at all be explained as being the result of natural selection: things like philosophical reasoning ability, scientific reasoning, advanced mathematical reasoning, artistic creativity, spirituality, and altruism. Such things would not have increased a human's likelihood of surviving in the wild, and cannot be explained as the product of natural selection. This was admitted by the co-founder of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, who wrote a long essay explaining carefully why natural selection cannot explain the more advanced human mental capabilities.

In the case of paranormal phenomena, we have another group of things that cannot be explained by natural selection or any evolutionary theory. For example, if you have some soul that goes out of your body during a near-death experience, or that may be seen by another as an apparition sighting, then humans have some great aspect that cannot at all explained by evolutionary concepts. And if humans have extrasensory perception or remote viewing capabilities, that's some other big human reality that cannot be explained by natural selection. Also, if such things exist, they cast very great doubt on all claims by neuroscientists that the human mind is merely created by the brain (or an aspect of the brain).

So biologists should be studying evidence for paranormal phenomena, because such evidence seems to indicate that biology dogmas are wrong. Just as a physicist arguing for some theory (such as dark matter) should be making a thorough examination of all evidence that seems to contradict that theory (along with the evidence seeming to favor it), a biologist should be making a thorough examination of all evidence seeming to contradict any theory he advances about the origin of humans or the nature of the mind (along with any evidence seeming to support such a theory). A biologist or physicist who only looks at evidence for his theory (and not evidence against it) is only doing half of his job.

Omitted field of study #5: engineering

Darwinism can accurately be described as an engineering opinion. Darwinism is the opinion that biological engineering effects more complex and intricate than any produced by human engineers can be produced by purely mindless natural processes. Those engineering effects are things like the human reproductive system, the human vision system, each of the cell types in our body, and so forth. But there is the problem that the people who advance the engineering opinion known as Darwinism are almost all people who know nothing about engineering, for they've never done any actual engineering. Remarkably we are sometimes asked to base our entire world view on the engineering opinion of biology professors who can be correctly described as "engineering know-nothings," because they lack any knowledge or experience with engineering. 

A general course in engineering should be mandatory for anyone getting a degree in evolutionary biology. Such a course could include a thorough study of software engineering. Students would learn about how engineering products are never produced by the process of accumulation that evolutionary biologists claim causes magnificent biological engineering effects. They would learn that great examples of engineering such as bridges and complex computer programs result not from some “piling up” process of accumulation, but from the extremely coordinated efforts of teams of intelligent workers and designers directed to achieve particular engineering ends. They would learn that while software engineers have played around with evolutionary algorithms for decades, such algorithms are not significantly used in the production of commercial software, because they are not effective in producing impressive engineering results. 

Omitted field of study #6: computer information systems

Neuroscientists often maintain that the brain is like a computer in your head. A neuroscientist may maintain that your brain retrieves memories kind of like the way a computer retrieves data stored on it. The people who make such claims usually know very little about the internal workings of computers, the intellectual limits of computers, and how computers store and retrieve information.

Before someone gets a PhD in neuroscience, he should be required to pass a course explaining the details of computer information systems, with an emphasis on exactly how they store and retrieve information. In such a course the PhD student would learn facts such as these:

1. There is no computer that has any real understanding of anything, and computers have no actual mental experiences such as humans have.
2. Computers are able to store information reliably because they have physical components such as hard drives and zip drives where information can exist in a stable unchanging state for years. In this sense, they are entirely different from what we find in human synapses, where the average lifetime of protein molecules is only a few weeks or less, meaning synapses have none of the stability that computer information storage components have.
3. Computers are able to transmit information very reliably by using very low-noise electrical circuits completely different from the very high-noise neurons and synapses in the brain, which seem to be incapable of transmitting information very reliably.
4. Computers are able to retrieve information very quickly because they use a variety of things (such as indexing and a storage positioning system) unlike anything that exists in the human brain. Your computer knows how to retrieve something from some very exact coordinate on a hard drive, but the brain has no coordinate system allowing retrieval from very exact positions.
5. A computer is able to retrieve information quickly and write information quickly because it has exact hardware for doing both of those things (what is called a read-write head), and that component is unlike anything that exists in the brain, where no one has found either a mechanism for writing memories or a mechanism for reading them.
6. A computer is able to store information because it makes use of sophisticated encoding protocols carefully worked out by designers, things such as the ASCII code, and the algorithm for converting ASCII to binary. No such encoding protocols have ever been discovered in the brain, with the exception of the genetic code that can only represent amino acids rather than learned memories.
7. A computer is able to perform tasks such as information storage and retrieval because it has a whole very elaborate software infrastructure (such as an operating system) unlike anything known to exist in the human brain or in DNA.

After studying all the very many things that computers have that brains do not have, our neuroscientists might begin to see some powerful reasons for rejecting the claims that the human brain stores memories and that the human brain is the cause of human thinking (30 of which are listed here).

Omitted field of study #7: cosmology 

Our biologists would probably not benefit from studying cosmology by reading the typical triumphal accounts of the topic.  But they might benefit from reading critical accounts of cosmology that tell us about how cosmology is a field of study dominated by scientists and science journalists describing as facts things for which there is no direct observational evidence: things such as dark matter, dark energy and primordial "cosmic inflation" (not to be confused with the Big Bang).  A good starting point might be this recent article and the much older papers  here ("Sociology of Modern Cosmology" by Martin Lopez-Corredoira) and here ("Non-standard Models and the Sociology of Cosmology" by the same author).  After studying how a major branch of science can become dominated by unproven dogmas and very great overconfidence,  our biologists might become more likely to consider whether the same thing has happened in their own field of study. 

Omitted field of study #8: undisputed cases of anomalously exceptional human mind performance

There are many cases of exceptional human mind performance that are not referred to as paranormal, but which involve the most astonishing display of wondrous human abilities.  A study of such cases should be made by every person studying to be an evolutionary biologist or neuroscientist. 

Below are some examples:

• Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 
• Mathematician and computer scientist Herman Goldstine wrote this about the legendary mathematician John von Neumann: "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation."
• According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 
• According to one book, "John Fuller, a land agent, of the county of Norfolk, could correctly write out a sermon or lecture after hearing it once; and one, Robert Dillon, could, in the morning, repeat six columns of a newspaper which he had read the preceding evening. More wonderful still was George Watson, who... could tell the date of every day since his childhood and how he had occupied himself on that day."
• The mathematician Leonhard Euler could recite the entire Aeneid from beginning to end, a work of 9896 lines. 
• Mezzofanti could speak very well thirty different languages. 
• A four-year-old girl demonstrated on TV her ability to speak seven different languages. 
• Numerous Muslim scholars have memorized all 6000+ lines of their holy book, and some did this as early as age 10. 
• According to a book, "The great thinker, Pascal, is said never to have forgotten anything he had ever known or read, and the same is told of Hugo, Grotius, Liebnitz, and Euler. All knew the whole of Virgil's 'Aeneid' by heart." 
• The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting very successfully despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas. 
• According to a book, a waiter in San Francisco could recall exactly what any customer had previously ordered, even if the customer had not visited the restaurant in years. 
• The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 
• G. C. Leland says: " It is recorded of a Slavonian Oriental Sect called the Bogomiles, which spread over Europe during the middle ages, that its members were required to memorize the Bible verbatim. Their latest historian, Dragomanoff, declares that there were none of them who did not memorize the New Testament at least; one of their bishops publicly proclaimed that, in his own diocese of four thousand communicants, there was not one unable to repeat the entire scriptures without an error."
• Akira Haraguchi was able to recite correctly from memory 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours, in a filmed public exhibition.
• The fascinating 47-minute video here "The Boy Who Can't Forget" documents cases of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also called hyperthymesia.  According to the article here a scientist named McGaugh "is adamant that the super memory demonstrated by the small number of people he and others have identified represents a genuine phenomenon." People with such a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (including Jill Price and Aureilien Hayman) can recall what happened to them every day in the past ten years. 
• A book tells us this: "The geographer Maretus, narrates an instance of memory probably  unequalled. He actually witnessed the feat, and had it attested by four Venetian nobles. He met in Padua, a young Corsican who had so powerful a memory that he could repeat as many as 36,000 words read over to him only once. Maretus, desiring to test this extraordinary youth, in the presence of his friends, read over to him an almost interminable list of words strung together anyhow in every language, and some mere gibberish. The audience was exhausted before the list, which had been written down for the sake of accuracy, and at the end of it the young Corsican smilingly began and repeated the entire list without a break and without a mistake. Then to show his remarkable power, he went over it backward, then every alternate word, first and fifth, and so on until his hearers were thoroughly exhausted, and had no hesitation in certifying that the memory of this individual was without a rival in the world, ancient or modern."
• Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay.
• Wikipedia.org states this about Daniel Tammet: "One of his most notable achievements was being able to recite Pi to 22,514 decimal places, taking him over five hours."
• According to an article on bbc.com, "Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work."
• Derek Paravicini was born 25 weeks early, with severe brain damage, but he has reliably demonstrated countless times the ability to very accurately play back on a keyboard any song that is played to him, note for note, even if he has never heard the song before. 
• A nineteenth century work describes a similar ability in a prodigy known as Blind Tom: "The doctor then called for some one of the audience to come and play a piece of music for the first  time in Tom's hearing, promising a very faithful imitation ; Miss Jones was persuaded to play a piece of her own composition, and hence unknown to Tom and the audience....When the lady was through and escorted from the stage, Tom sat down and played it through perfectly. " The next page states, "Tom executes some of the most difficult pieces of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bach, Gottschalk, Thalberg and others, and these he learnt by hearing them played."

After studying such cases,  our evolutionary biologists should ask themselves: is it really conceivable that such mind-boggling abilities would appear in organisms merely because of some effect acting to equip them as hunter-gatherers? And after studying such cases, our neuroscientists should ask themselves: is it really conceivable that such abilities could be produced by a brain, with its very many severe low-level limiting factors such as very heavy noise, unreliable synaptic transmission, an abundance of chemical synapses causing slow signal transmission in the cortex, and also very rapid molecular turnover in synapses?

Omitted field of study #9: sociology and social psychology

A belief community is any tight-knit community that shares common beliefs that involve assuming the truth of things that are not simple observational facts. Belief communities do not exist solely in religion.  There are also political belief communities and academia belief communities. 

Sociologists and social psychologists study the common characteristics of belief communities. Typical characteristics of a belief community include the following:

(1) A tendency to adhere to some core belief system commonly professed by members of the belief community. 

(2)  A tendency to idolize or lionize one or more revered authority figures, who tend to be "put on pedestals."

(3) A tendency to denigrate or slight certain groups of people who are outside of the belief community, particularly those who advance opposing belief systems. 

(4) A tendency to encourage a particular set of norms, taboos, legends, behavior patterns and speech customs that tend to be followed by members of the belief community. 

(5) A hierarchical system of authority with multiple tiers of authority, examples being the many-tiered authority system in the Catholic Church and the very similar many-tiered authority system in academia. 

A modern biologist is very much a member of a belief community.  The dogma that the fantastically complex hierarchical organization of biological systems all arose by chance biological processes is very much an unproven article of faith, a dogma taught by a belief community a biologist belongs to.  The dogma that the wonders of the human mind (such as instant memory recall and the good preservation of fifty-year-old memories) are all merely produced by the brain is very much an unproven article of faith, a dogma taught by a belief community a biologist belongs to (and also a dogma inconsistent with many low-level facts discovered by neuroscientists).   But sadly our biologists typically fail to perceive that they are members of a belief community.  They tend to think that everything they believe is "biological science," just as the members of the Marxist belief community believed that all of their beliefs were "economic science" or "historical fact," and just as  fundamentalists often think that all of the miracle narratives in their  scriptures are "recorded history." Were our biologists to make a good thorough study of sociology and social psychology, they might gain some insight as to the social dynamics and cultural conformity factors that help to explain their speech customs, and they might be less dogmatic in pushing unproven claims. 

Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences Long Before 1975

Near-death experiences first started to become well-known around 1975, with the popularity of Raymond Moody's book on the concept (entitled Life After Life). But we have very good reason to believe that such experiences have been a fact of human experience long before Moody's book.  The 1973 book Glimpses of the Beyond: The Extraordinary Experiences of People Who Crossed the Brinks of Death and Returned by Jean-Baptiste Delacour preceded by several years the much more famous Life After Life book by Raymond Moody.  You can read some of the Delacour book's many accounts of near-death experiences by reading my post "The Evidence for Out-of-Body Experiences," which also cites many accounts of out-of-body experiences collected by Robert Crookall in the 1960's (such accounts typically containing one of the main elements of near-death experiences).  In my previous post "Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century," I described four near-death experiences that had been written before the year 1900. In the post here I describe two other near-death experiences of the nineteenth century. Page 476 of the nineteenth century work "Man and His Relations" by Dr. Paul Joire gives another account of a near-death experience. 

The pages here and here describe out-of-body experiences of the nineteenth century. The page here lists a nineteenth century near-death experience involving the "life review" so often reported in near-death experiences. On page 385 of the long and very interesting paper here, we read of a gravely ill man who was "conscious of something like a fleecy ball releasing itself from his physical form," with the man reporting he "distinctly saw my dead body lying upon the bed."  On page 386 we read this:

"While waiting for the return of his companions, Mr. Bertrand apparently began to freeze to death, such that he was unable to rouse himself. After a brief moment of acute pain, he suddenly found himself  'a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string and going up and always up. How strange! I see better than ever, and I am dead.... Looking down, I was astounded to recognise my own envelope.' "

The passage below was narrated in 1927 and quoted in the 1954 book The Personality of Man by G.N.M. Tyrrell:

"By ten o'clock I had developed all the symptoms of very acute poisoning; intense gastrointestinal pain, diarrhea; pulse and respirations became quite impossible to count, I wanted to ring for assistance, but found I could not, and so quite placidly gave up the attempt...I realised that I could see, not only my body and the bed in which it was, but everything in the whole house and garden, and then I realised that I was seeing, not only 'things' at home but in London and in Scotland, in fact wherever my attention was directed, it seemed to me; and the explanation which I received, from what source I do not know, but which I found myself calling to myself my mentor, was that I was free in a time-dimension of space, wherein 'now' was in some way equivalent to 'here' in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life....I saw 'A' enter my bedroom; I realised she got a terrible shock and I saw her hurry to the telephone. I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly, and heard him say, or saw him think, 'He is nearly gone.' I heard him quite clearly speaking to me on the bed, but I was not in touch with my body and could not answer him. I was really cross when he took a syringe and rapidly injected my body with something which I afterwards learned was camphor. As the heart began to beat more strongly, I was drawn back, and I was intensely annoyed, because I was so interested and just beginning to understand where I was and what I was 'seeing.' I came back into the body really angry at being pulled back, and once I was back, all the clarity of vision of anything and everything disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain." 

We have here some of the main elements typically found in near-death experiences, including (1) an out-of-body experience including seeing the body from above; (2) a sense of heightened cognition and perception;  and (3) disappointment at being brought back into the body.  The account was taken down in shorthand by a secretary soon after the event. 

Another near-death experience of the first half of the twentieth century is found in the interesting book The Imprisoned Splendour.  We read the account of a man who was thrown twenty feet after his armored scout car got struck by a German anti-tank shell in 1944. We read this:

"I was conscious of being two persons -- one, lying on the ground in a field where I had fallen from the blast, my clothes, etc., on fire ...The other 'me' was floating up in the air, about twenty feet from my body, from which position I could see not only my other self on the ground, but also the hedge, the road, and the car, which was surrounded by smoke and burning fiercely."

The person reported telling himself to roll to put out the fire, and then once he did,  his perception returned to normal. The account originally appeared on page 207 of the March-April 1948 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which can be read here. 

Andrew Jackson Davis was a famous American visionary and prodigy whose experiences are told in his long 1867 autobiography The Magic Staff. On page 133 of his book Harmonial Philosophy,  Davis gives a description of a person's soul or astral body becoming visible at the time of someone's death. A footnote tells us the account is based on observations Davis had of dying people. He states this:

"A human being lies on the bed of death, and is indeed actually dying. It is to be a rapid death. The physical body grows negative and cold, in proportion as the elements of the spiritual body become warm and positive. The feet become cold first. The clairvoyant sees right over the head what may be called a magnetic halo — an ethereal emanation, golden in appearance and throbbing as though conscious. Now the body is cold up to the knees and elbows. The legs are then cold to the hips and the arms to the shoulders. The emanation is more expanded, though it has not risen higher in the room. The death-coldness steals over the breast and around on either side. The emanation has attained a position nearer the ceiling. The person has ceased to breathe, the pulse is still. The emanation is elongated and fashioned in the outline of the human form. It is connected beneath with the brain. The head of the person throbs internally — a slow, deep throb, not painful, but like the beat of the sea. The thinking faculties are rational, while nearly every part of the person is dead. The golden emanation is connected with the brain by a very fine life-thread. On the body of the emanation there appears something white and shining, like a human head ; next comes a faint outline of the face divine ; the fair neck and beautiful shoulders manifest, and then in rapid succession all parts of the new body down to the feet — a bright shining image, somewhat smaller than the physical but a perfect prototype in all except disfigurements. The fine life-thread continues attached to the old brain. The next thing is the withdrawal of this electrical principle. When the thread snaps the spiritual body is free and is prepared to accompany its guardians to the Summer Land."

Andrew Jackson Davis

On page 41 of Muldoon's The Case for Astral Projection, he cites testimony by a Dr. Riblet Brisbane Hout in which he claims to have seen the astral bodies of patients under anesthesia undergoing surgery.  He reports seeing spirit bodies of the patients hovering near their physical bodies, connected to the bodies by a silvery shaft of light. 

On the next page Muldoon states this:

"In this connection I might mention at this juncture that only a few weeks ago an orthodox Methodist minister of irreproachable character, who has been well known in my neighborhood for years, confided in me that while at the bedside of a dying friend, early this spring, he saw a cloudlike light rise up out of the body of his friend just as the latter expired. The light, he stated, floated up into the air and disappeared."

On page 49 we hear an account by a Dr. Ostby who in 1904 reported finding himself out of his body, looking down on his body in bed. He thought he was dead, but willed himself back into his body. 

On page 65 we read this:

"M. Hymans states that his next experience took place in a London hotel. He was suffering with heart-weakness when he awoke in the morning. In a short time he fainted and says: 'To my great surprise I found myself high up in the room from where, to my terror, I saw my body in the bed, eyes closed. I tried to re-enter my body, but without success and concluded that I was dead. I could not leave the room and felt chained to it, immobilized in the corner where I found myself.' "

On page 67 we read of a New Jersey woman who reported an out-of-body experience during an operation. She recalls meeting a deceased grandmother who took her on a little flying tour that ended with the woman returning to her body. 

On page 75 Muldoon tells us of an account he received from a woman who reported being out of her body viewing it from above during an operation.  On pages 77-78 Muldoon quotes various accounts of out-of-body experiences of the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. 

On page 93 we read an account by  Caroline D. Larsen:

"Next thing I knew was that I, I myself, was standing on the floor beside my bed looking down attentively at my own physical body lying in it. I recognized every line in the familiar face, pale and still as in death, the features drawn, the eyes tightly closed and the mouth partly open. The arms and hands rested limp and lifeless beside the body. I gazed at that material form of mine for a few minutes while mingled feelings passed over me. Strangely enough, they were not feelings of great surprise. I experienced no shock at finding myself in this peculiar position. It was chiefly curiosity that possessed my mind. I was perfectly calm and composed as I viewed that mortal form I had just previously inhabited."

On page 95 we read this account by Cromwell Anderson:

"One night I awoke to find myself floating over my body, a few feet from the ceiling and could see my physical body on the bed beneath me. I appeared to be in an utterly cataleptic state, yet my consciousness was greatly intensified.  This was not my first projection as I had several times been observed by others, in the astral body, many miles away; but this time I awakened while yet over my body. Panic seized me as I realized what had occurred and I wondered how to get back before anyone discovered my ‘corpse’ and this fear instantly made me recoil into my form with a great shock."

On page 103 we read of a novelist named William Gerhardi who had an out-of-body experience, one in which he seemed to experience the "silver cord" often reported in out-of-body experiences:

"At the back of me was a coil of light, like a luminous garden hose resembling the strong broad ray of dusty light at the back of a dark cinema projecting on the screen in front. To my utter astonishment, that broad cable of light at the back of me illuminated the very face on the pillows I recognized as my own, as if attached to the brow of the sleeper. It was myself, not dead, but breathing peacefully, my mouth slightly open."

On pages 116-117 Muldoon describes his first out-of-body experience:

"Slowly ...I was moving toward the ceiling, all the while lying horizontal and powerless. Naturally I believed that this was my physical body as I had always known it, but that it had mysteriously begun to defy gravity...Involuntarily, at about six feet above the bed, as if the movement had been conducted by an invisible intelligent force, present in the very air, I was uprighted from the horizontal position, to the perpendicular, and placed standing upon the floor of the room... where I remained for two or three minutes, still unable to move of my own accord... I managed to turn around. There were two of me! In the name of common sense — there were two of me! There was another 'me' lying quietly upon the bed. It was difficult to conceive of this being real — but there I was, fully conscious, fully able to reason and know what I saw was actual. The next thing which caught my eye, explained the curious sensation in the back of my head — for my two identical bodies were joined by means of an elastic-like cord, one end of which was fastened to the medulla oblongata region of my phantom counterpart, while the other end centered between the eyes of my physical counterpart. This cord extended across the space of probably six feet which separated us."

We have here a description of an observer existing horizontally above his own body. In one of his works on out-of-body experiences, Robert Crookall noted quite a few observers who reported this:

"A number described their newly released 'doubles' as occupying a remarkable position, namely horizontal, just above the vacated body. They were J. McCormack (who noted 'this rather odd position'), Miss Bazett (about three feet above), Mrs. C. H. Smith (about a foot above), Mulvey (about three feet above), Dennis, Mr. 'H,' Mrs. Boorman, Dr. Gilbert, Mrs. Hibberd, Miss Douglas, Nurse Normanby, Mrs. 'Horam,' Miss Dean, G. Lester, and Mrs. Folson ( when she was a child of five or six years). More than a score of others, who did not describe the horizontal position, did note that their 'doubles' were above their bodies."

On page 138 of the Muldoon book, we read of an Arthur J. Wills who reported to Muldoon in 1929 an out-of-the-body experience:

"Then I saw that it was not my physical body in which I was consciously propped up (by my right arm) ; for, looking downward, I saw my body still sleeping on the seat! For a few moments I enjoyed and admired this new and beautiful body (the astral), which was rosy pink, glowing like a luminous pearl. Something which looked like an ‘arm’ seemed to run down and merge into the brain of the physical body. In a short time I was back in my physical body again."

In the 1907 book The Psychic Riddle by Isaac Kaufmann Funk (the same Funk of the famous Funk and Wagnall's dictionary) the author relays an account given him by a man who he says was well-known and very successful:

"I became conscious of being in a room and looking down on a body propt up in bed, which I recognized as my own. I can not tell what strange feelings came over me. This body, to all intents and purposes, looked to be dead. There was no indication of life about it, and yet here I was apart from the body, with my mind thoroughly clear and alert, and the consciousness of another body to which matter of any kind offered no resistance."

The medium Daniel Dunglas Home was the most noted of all physical mediums, and was successfully tested by the leading scientist Sir William Crookes, who documented many an astounding paranormal event related to Home. In his 1864 biography Incidents in My Life, Daniel Dunglas Home related an out-of-body experience. After hearing a mysterious voice that seemed to be that of his late wife, he had an experience he described below:

"I was at this instant brought to a consciousness of light, by seeing the whole of my nervous system, as it were, composed of thousands of electrical scintillations, which here and there, as in the created nerve, took the form of currents, darting their rayons over the whole body in a manner most marvellous ; still this was but a cold electrical light and besides, it was external. Gradually, however, I saw that the extremities were less luminous, and the finer membranes' surrounding the brain became as it were glowing, and I felt that thought and action were no longer connected with the earthly tenement, but that they were in a spirit-body in every respect similar to the body which I knew to have been mine, and which I now saw lying motionless before me on the bed. The only link which held the two forms together seemed to be a silvery-like light, which proceeded from the brain ; and, as if it were a response to my earlier waking thoughts, the same voice, only that it was now more musical than before, said,  'Death is but a second birth, corresponding in every respect to the natural birth, and should the uniting link now be severed, you could never again enter the body.' "

Again, we have what is reported often in accounts of out-of-body experiences, the idea of a "silver cord" connecting a physical body and a kind of spirit body. In a 1918 book we read an account of just such a thing, and then a female named Beryl Hinton tells of an out-body-experience:

"Years ago, when only seventeen, I was, in Calcutta, put under chloroform to have a number of teeth out. I presently felt I, myself, was in space above my body, round which were the doctors, dentists, and my mother, and I remember wondering why I was not being judged, since I was obviously dead. I had been brought up as a strict Roman Catholic and taught that individual judgment followed death. I had never read any psychical books or experiences. I was afterwards told that my condition caused alarm, as I would not come back to consciousness."

At the end of his book More Astral Projections, Robert Crookall has some interesting summary statistics regarding how often such accounts had recurring characteristics. He used the term "the double" for a kind of spirit body that was a double of the human body. For what he called "single-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "The fact that, the newly-released ‘double’, often took up a horizontal position (usually not far above its physical counterpart), was noted in 50 natural and 7 enforced cases (i.e. 23.3 per cent and 18.9 per cent respectively)."
• The percentage of people reporting a "silver cord" or "shining cord" connecting the human body and a spirit body (or something like that) was "43 (20.0 per cent) natural cases, 6 (16.2 per cent) enforced cases." 

The similarities in out-of-body experiences are far too great to be explained by any hypothesis of hallucination.  We find in accounts of out-of-body experiences:

(1) A huge number of observers reporting observing their body from above, with very many reporting being near the ceiling.

(2) Many observers (at least 57) reporting they were floating in a horizontal position above their bodies.

(3) Many observers (at least 49) reporting that there was a kind of cord or thread  or string or arm connecting the physical body and a kind of spiritual or astral body (sometimes called "the double"), with this cord often being described as having a silvery or glowing appearance, and often reported as being elastic, and often reported as being attached to the head or brain. 

(4) Very many observers reporting that after viewing their body from above, they had some type of enhanced cognition, and could then perceive scenes in other rooms, other homes, or some place (perhaps heavenly or spiritual) that seemed to be not an earthly location.  

The probability of random hallucinations producing so many accounts so similar seems as small as the probability that many people all over the world in many different countries would all report (purely because of coincidentally similar random hallucinations) that they all saw a pink elephant smoking a cigar. In general, hallucinations are not a credible explanation for any very specific and distinctive observational report repeated with great similarity by many witnesses in different places. For example, if many people in different places reported seeing a large green glowing streak in the sky one night, then in all probability they were not hallucinating: because hallucinations (having infinite possible forms) would never produce content so similar to so many people.