WHISPERING a sentence over and over like a mantra, from a soundproof booth on the stage of the small concert hall in St George?s Hall, Liverpool, two artists will tonight perform a curious musical experiment.
Echoing the Davenport Brothers? sellout seances there in 1865, performed inside a cabinet, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard?s hour-long work, Silent Sound, will use strobe lights, and subliminal and very low frequency infrasound to try to implant that secret sentence in the minds of their audience.
Master of ceremonies and psychopomp, guider of souls, will be Dr Ciar?n O?Keeffe, a 35-year-old academic learned in the ways of the paranormal. A modest star in the media firmament ? he is resident sceptic on LIVINGtv?s Most Haunted ? O?Keeffe explores how infrasound may explain some of the paranormal.
The concert, with music by Jason Pierce, leader of the band Spiritualized, will test how subliminal information, embedded below conscious hearing levels, might be transmitted. Subtle but powerful forces will be at work and pregnant women or those with heart conditions have been warned not to attend.
Highly-charged situation
O?Keeffe will be in his element, part of an experiment into anomalous mental states, working with artists trying to push the boundaries of the way the mind works. As psychological consultant, he has helped the artists create what is promised will be ?a highly-charged situation?.
The Enquirer met up with him at a British Psychological Society conference at Lancaster University. He and his French wife Gaelle Villejoubert had jointly written, with two Liverpool academics, a paper on hindsight bias in shooting incidents such as the Harry Stanley case.
Harry Stanley was shot by police who mistook a table leg in a carrier bag for a shotgun. Such traumatic events sometimes provoke a sort of d?j? vu, with people feeling they knew all along the event would happen. Not paranormal perhaps, but a bit spooky.
Forensic psychology
O?Keeffe has a great appetite for crossover research topics like this. A psychology lecturer at Liverpool Hope for three years, he does forensic psychology, profiling for the police, and is active in Music Space, a North West charity using music therapy with Parkinson?s Disease patients at Broad Green Hospital in Liverpool.
But his abiding fascination, since he saw the film Ghostbusters as a youngster, is with the nature of the paranormal.
His official website, theparapsycholgist.com, offers a telling quote from the great scientist Henri Poincare about his approach to what might seem a wacky byway of academia.
Under the website banner ?Exposing the facts...letting you decide?, Poincare?s quote asserts that science is built of facts like a house is built of stones but cautions ?an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house?. That seems to be how O?Keeffe sees parapsychology.
Heap of stones
Parapsychology is a heap of stones in need of an architect, then?
His interest, he says, is investigating the idea that individuals can somehow perceive, process and respond to information ?that is acquired without the mediation of their known senses?. The night before he?d been doing just that.
In a medieval vault in Coventry he had been trying to establish if infrasound ? very low frequencies below 100 hertz ? could be related to the vibe in a ?haunted? place. It was an idea put forward by the late Vic Tandy, in a seminal paper entitled Something in the Cellar.
Tandy and others had picked up on research which suggests that infrasound may induce odd feelings and create images in peripheral vision. Like EMF, electromagnetic frequencies, such phenomena may give ghosthunters a scientific handle on subjective experiences, offering a rational, scientific explanation.
Dandyish
O?Keeffe?s enthusiasm for these exotic realms is obvious and infectious. Yet he?s down to earth, not in the least flamboyant or dandyish and there?s no hint of Mephistopheles in his manner. Genial and approachable, he sees his job as a field worker testing new theories in situ using rigorous empirical measurement. Not easy in a domain where emotion, feelings and beliefs too often determine the ?facts?.
He tends to avoid media interviews, knowing instinctively that tabloids can have a field day with florid accounts of hauntings and ghost hunters. Last year he got slightly burned when the Daily Mirror carried a story alleging he had ?exposed? a medium he has worked with as a ?fake?.
Born in Norwich to an Irish father and Swiss mother, O?Keeffe was raised in Somerset up to the age of 12 and then in High Wycombe. He had a Catholic education but lapsed in his mid-teens, Catholicism displaced by an increasing fascination with ghosts and the paranormal. He loved the Gothic, he says.
Ghost writers
HP Lovecraft, MR James, Clive Barker, all the horror and the ghost writers: he devoured the literature. ?I was the local ghost hunter aged 18, with ?stories in the local papers. It makes me cringe now,? he says wryly. But the die was cast and he even tried, prompted by Ghostbusters, to study parapsychology at Columbia.
After a gap year travelling the USA, he majored in music and psychology at America?s Washington College. Following three years? nursing psychogeriatrics, he did an MSc in investigative psychology at Liverpool University. His doctoral work focused on psychics and mediums and the advice they give.
On such topics an ingrained and proper scepticism soon emerges with no need for prompting. ?In my TV work I am an academic trying to put across a sceptical argument. Do I believe in the paranormal? In individual cases it?s not about belief, it?s about being open-minded about possibilities.
Paranormal explanation
?The difficulty for me is when people ask me ?Have you seen anything which would convince you?? There have been a few incidents in haunting investigations that have made me question what I am seeing but I haven?t given it a paranormal explanation yet.?
His caution is understandable. TV academics tread a tricky line between simplistic populism and being, he says, the man in the suit wheeled on at the end to give gravitas to a sensationalist show. Ethics is vital in the ghostbusting business, he says.
?One thing I?ve been doing is mop up on cases where if it hadn?t been for the unethical behaviour of the ghost hunting group or the medium, there just wouldn?t be a case. Some do operate unethically: they are not empathic or sympathetic to the mental states of people they deal with. And they charge.?
Paradox
Here we touch on the paradox at the heart of paranormal investigation. Many people, both subjects and investigators, have an investment in beliefs they want to be true. Some mediums and investigators will project those beliefs on to the cases they encounter. So is there something out there, behind the material veil, or not?
O?Keeffe is wary of glib answers to that. He assesses every case on its merits, he says, being as objective as possible. He cites the poster on Fox Mulder?s office in the X Files, ?I want to believe?, and re-phrases it as ?I want to know the truth?. Infrasound and EMF may be part of the truth, as may hypnogogic sleep states and many other possible physical explanations.
Yet it is early days in this line of research. There is some evidence that infrasound can trigger feelings of awe or otherness; that transient electrical fields can affect the temporal lobe and create visual hallucinations and the sense of an immaterial presence. But neither phenomena is unequivocally proven.
An impact
And there may still be irreducible paranormal events which remain beyond scientific explanation. ?If I found that infrasound or EMF were the cause, then I would be so happy that I had made an impact. But if I disprove all these theories and still people are having experiences and we can?t find an explanation for them...
?Then I?ll be in that camp, of those who say I am looking at something which is paranormal, something that science just cannot explain.? Yet he agrees that infrasound looks, provisionally at least, to be a good bet for defining some paranormal experiences as within the rational world.
But the boundary between the rationally explic-able and the paranormal is blurred, adds O?Keeffe. ?The field can go in either direction depending on what particular phenomena we are looking at. With one experience we might find it is infrasound. We might find it is EMF. Or a combination of both.
Telepathy
?With telepathy we have a phenomenon in the parapsychological domain. Paul Stephens at Edinburgh, with a physics background, has been looking at the idea of us creating electrical signals enabling a psychic to communicate with a client. This encapsulates telepathy as a tangible idea that we can test.?
In a way, he says, that makes it more fascinating, though it would no longer be paranormal. There?s a parallel, he agrees, with the historic shift from primitive magic to modern science, alchemy becoming chemistry. Television, pictures beamed through the ether, is magic until you understand how electromagnetism works.
http://www.nw-enquirer.co.uk/news/gener ... 41714.html
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