Book summary “The afterlife experiments”: summary

Introduction

You carry a profound fear of annihilation when you consider the finality of physical death. You wonder if your consciousness and the identities of your loved ones vanish forever into nothingness. Mainstream science insists that the brain generates mind, leaving no room for survival beyond the grave.

Gary E. Schwartz challenges this materialist assumption by applying strict university laboratory methods to the study of mediumship. You discover how rigorous protocols eliminate chance and fraud to test whether human consciousness persists.

The book leads you from initial investigations through double-blind mediumship experiments to profound biophysical implications. You explore answers to these central questions:

• Can mediums reliably communicate specific facts about deceased individuals?
• How do scientists separate genuine anomalous information from cold reading and fraud?
• What does the persistence of consciousness mean for your daily life and understanding of love?

1. The Journey Begins

Scientific investigations into the survival of consciousness originate from personal inquiries and build upon astrophysical principles of eternal information and energy.

You often need a personal catalyst to question standard scientific assumptions about death and consciousness. Gary Schwartz began his official inquiries through a chance encounter that tested his academic detachment.

The Living Soul Hypothesis

In the spring of 1993, Schwartz met clinical psychologist Dr. Linda Russek at a Psychosomatic Society conference. Following an intense car ride to the Fort Lauderdale airport at 4:00 AM, Linda asked Schwartz if he thought it was possible her late father, cardiologist Dr. Henry I. Russek, was still alive.

This conversation prompted Schwartz to share his unpublished hypothesis on living info-energy systems. That quiet exchange initiated a secret two-year collaboration involving twenty different experiments conducted quietly in medical offices and condominiums using 24-channel Lexicor brain wave machines. Linda served as a grieving relative and a departed hypothesized co-investigator who guided the work from beyond physical reality.

Foundations of Soul Science

You can apply standard scientific logic to invisible spiritual phenomena just as physicists study gravity. Schwartz realized during a sleepless night in Vancouver that photons from dead stars travel through space forever.

Contemporary astrophysics documents 12-plus-billion-year-old ancient photons originating from the Big Bang. Schwartz reasoned that if astrophysical info-energy packets persist eternally, human biological electromagnetic waves and personal info-energy packets should likewise be capable of eternal existence.

Science grants two primary gifts that make this inquiry possible:

• The First Gift: Science gives us the capacity to infer the existence of things we cannot see directly.
• The Second Gift: Science gives us the capacity to evaluate alternative interpretations.

2. Bringing Soul Science into the University

Few major universities have investigated paranormal phenomena. J.B. Rhine at Duke University became the pioneer of modern parapsychology. He coined the term parapsychology and conducted thirty-three precognition experiments involving nearly a million trials. Other institutions, such as the University of Virginia, Princeton University's Anomalies Laboratory, and the University of Edinburgh, also conducted research into related anomalous phenomena.

J.B. Rhine's experiments and replications produced a cumulative probability of 10 to the -24 power. This meant only one chance of error in a trillion trillion. You rarely find such massive statistical backing in standard behavioral disciplines.

Establishing university research facilities allows scientists to apply rigorous parapsychology protocols and energy cardiology to verify anomalous human interactions.

Schwartz and Russek analyzed data from the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study. This project followed 126 healthy male undergraduate students over decades. They discovered that men who rated both parents high in love and caring had drastically lower rates of diagnosed chronic disease decades later.

Thirty-five years later, about 25 percent of men who rated both parents high in love had a diagnosed physical disease. By comparison, 87 percent of those who rated both parents low had a diagnosed disease.

Energy Cardiology

Through an east-coast tour testing forty original Harvard subjects, Schwartz and Russek recorded simultaneous brain waves and heartbeats. Using custom software, they detected Linda Russek's electrocardiogram signals within the brain waves of the subjects sitting opposite her. Men who perceived their parents as more loving registered these cardiac info-energy signals more strongly.

Linda Russek sat across from subjects while wired to record brain waves and heartbeats. This setup proved that electromagnetic heart signals can be mutually received and processed.

The Susy Smith Project

The Susy Smith Project was established at the University of Arizona to bring systematic scientific research to bear on the hypothesis of the survival of consciousness after death. Prompted by journalist and author Susy Smith's lifelong work and her proposed afterlife codes experiment, Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek sought formal academic backing. Department head Lynn Nadel and college dean Holly Smith approved the project under the principles of academic freedom.

Schwartz published an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in May 1997 detailing Susy Smith's coded communication experiment before successfully creating the university project. Susy Smith had written 29 nonfiction books and offered a 10000 dollars reward for anyone who correctly decrypted her post-mortem secret code.

3. Designing Controls and Meeting the Research Mediums

Rigorous experimental designs eliminate fraud and cold reading by combining the Russek Protocol and the Campbell Procedure with skilled white crow mediums.

You need robust methods to test authentic mediumship. To protect against stage magic, cold reading, or prior collusion, researchers instituted strict controls. The sitter's identity remained secret from the mediums, and researchers insisted on a dual-sitter system.

Ronnie Nathanson, an appliance saleswoman found by chance while buying a washer and dryer, served as a strictly guarded research sitter. She matched the profile of having at least six deaths of closely related people within ten years.

Eliminating Cold Reading

The Russek Protocol was designed to scientifically eliminate fraud, cold reading, and nonverbal cuing during mediumship experiments. The protocol requires multiple anonymous sitters where the medium does not know who is being tested. During the first part of the reading, the sitter must remain entirely silent in a chair placed directly behind the medium, preventing any auditory or visual feedback.

• Select ten sitters varying in age, sex, and background.
• Keep the identity and presence of the active sitter unknown to the medium.
• Enforce a silent-sitter period where the sitter gives no responses or sounds.
• Follow the silent period with a controlled yes/no response phase.

During the Miraval experiment with ten sitters, mediums attempted readings during a strict silent period before any yes/no dialogue was permitted.

Combining a pre-reading meditation period with a silent sitter period on a muted phone completely eliminates cold reading and fraud. The author developed the Campbell Procedure combined with the Russek Procedure, where the medium meditates in seclusion prior to the call and writes down impressions. During the call, the phone is muted for a ten-minute silent period so neither medium nor sitter can hear each other, removing all visible, auditory, and olfactory cues.

• Meditate in seclusion and silence for fifteen minutes to half an hour before a scheduled reading.
• Write down all impressions received during this meditation period.
• Establish telephone contact with the sitter and place the phone on mute.
• Hold the phone turned away from the ear during the ten-minute silent-sitter period while describing impressions out loud.
• Take the phone off mute to introduce the normal dialogue and review pre-reading notes item by item.

In Tucson on December 20, 2000, Laurie Campbell participated in a controlled experiment using three distant sitters where she conducted pre-readings in total seclusion before speaking to the sitters.

The White Crow Principle

To test the existence of authentic mediumship, researchers expanded beyond single case studies to find multiple talented mediums, applying William James's white crow principle. Having identified Laurie and Susy as significant white crows demonstrating genuine anomalous phenomena, the researchers realized that if two existed, others must exist as well. They sought to recruit mediums with high integrity for rigorous university laboratory testing.

Professor Schwartz and Linda partnered with television producer Lisa Jackson from Lucky Duck Productions, started by Linda Ellerbee, to bring prominent mediums to the University of Arizona for a controlled scientific experiment filmed for an HBO documentary.

Schwartz prepared twelve index cards containing names of six living and six deceased individuals, keeping them secret. He focused his thoughts on a randomly drawn name while Laurie attempted to determine the sex, age category, and living status of the person with absolute accuracy, followed by mediumistic communications.

• Create a list of twelve names consisting of six deceased and six living individuals on index cards.
• Randomly pick one card and secretly look at the name while keeping it hidden from the medium.
• Imagine and focus thoughts on the chosen person for a few minutes.
• Ask the medium to report whether the imagined person is male or female, young or old, and living or dead.
• Silently invite the person to attempt communication and record all received impressions.

When Schwartz focused on Linda's father, Laurie successfully transmitted familial closeness and was even corrected by the communicator stating he was Linda's father rather than Gary's.

Rigorous scoring of over six hundred transcript items from the HBO experiment revealed that mediums achieved an average of 83 percent completely accurate hits for sitter Patricia Price. The transcripts were classified into categories including initials, names, historical facts, personal descriptions, temperaments, and opinions. Sitter Patricia Price assigned conservative hit-or-miss ratings from -3 to +3, resulting in medium accuracy scores ranging from 77 to 95 percent.

• Classify each transcript item into one of six categories: Initials, Names, Historical facts, Personal descriptions, Temperaments, or Opinions.
• Assign a rating on a hit-or-miss scale ranging from -3 to +3, where minus represents a miss and plus represents a hit.
• Assign no rating if uncertain, and choose conservative values to avoid unintentionally improving results.
• Justify the answer and state whether information other than opinion can be verified by another living person.

Patricia Price spent ten hours scoring over six hundred items from the stenographic transcripts, rating statements on a scale from minus three to plus three.

4. Laboratory Results and Controlled Readings

Under strict double-blind laboratory controls and silent-sitter conditions, mediums consistently retrieve highly specific and verifiable personal information.

Five internationally known mediums were brought to the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona. The primary sitter was unknown to the mediums, separated by a visual screen, and restricted to simple yes or no answers. Transcripts were scored item-by-item by the sitter using a numeric scale from -3 to +3. While 68 undergraduate control subjects averaged 36 percent accuracy on a representative questionnaire, the mediums achieved an average accuracy of 83 percent for the first sitter and 77 percent for a second sitter, a difference evaluated at p less than one in ten million.

Medium 1 generated over 130 specific pieces of information while asking only 5 questions, 80 percent of which were answered yes, receiving 83 percent definitive +3 ratings.

The HBO Experiments

To rule out the possibility of cold reading or subtle verbal cueing, subsequent experiments at Miraval and Canyon Ranch introduced a strict silent condition. Three mediums sat behind a floor-to-ceiling screen with their backs to the room, facing video and audio recorders. For the first ten minutes, they spoke aloud information received about deceased loved ones without asking any questions, while sitters remained completely silent behind a screen. Sitters later scored the transcripts on a scale from -3 to +3, revealing that sitters scored their own readings significantly higher than control readings.

In the Miraval replication, when the sitter's husband died just before testing, both mediums independently received accurate information about his sudden passing during the blinded sessions.

The Canyon Ranch Experiment

Advanced scientific testing of mediumship requires eliminating all visual and auditory contact between the medium and the sitter. The Canyon Ranch experiment used doubled white sheets from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, required sitters to remain entirely silent, and used experimenters to call out yes or no responses based on silent nods to prevent sensory cues.

• Attach two sets of doubled white sheets wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the testing rooms.
• Position the medium on one side of the screen with their back to it, facing a video camera.
• Escort the sitter through a door on the opposite side of the screen to eliminate visual contact.
• Conduct the first ten minutes as a silent period with zero speaking from the sitter.
• Use an experimenter to watch for the sitter's silent nod or shake of the head during the yes/no period.
• Have the experimenter call out yes or no to the medium so the medium never hears the sitter's voice.

In the Canyon Ranch experiment, mediums sat facing video cameras with their backs to a double-sheeted screen while experimenters communicated answers.

5. Answering the Skeptics and Fraud

Advanced statistical analyses and control group comparisons prove that conventional explanations like cold reading, chance guessing, and skeptimania fail to account for the data.

Mainstream television media and professional skeptics often misrepresent scientific research by selectively editing footage and utilizing pick-up magicians instead of authentic data. When a Fox television show hosted by Michael Shermer examined medium Suzane Northrop, producers ignored unedited laboratory footage showing high accuracy with minimal questioning. Instead, they filmed phone readings separately and paired them with a psychic magician using cold reading generalizations to create a false impression of trickery.

Fox producers bypassed complete laboratory footage where Suzane Northrop spoke nonstop for over ten minutes asking only 5 questions and producing over 120 specific facts with over 80 percent accuracy, choosing instead to air a pick-up magician who used generic tactics.

Addressing Fraud and Media Distortion

To test whether specific mediumistic disclosures are mere generalities, Schwartz asked a college class of seventy students to guess the brand and hidden characteristics of a cigarette carton mentioned in a reading by John Edward. None of the students guessed the correct brand or the hidden secret.

Schwartz asked approximately 70 students to guess what kind of cigarettes Patricia's mother smoked and what was hidden inside, referencing a John Edward reading. Zero percent guessed Parliament cigarettes or that marijuana had been illegally hidden inside to ease cancer pain.

You can replicate this educational test yourself:

• Pretend to be a medium and write down on a piece of paper what brand of cigarettes Patricia's mother smoked.
• Write down what was unusual about the cigarettes.

Skeptimania and Occam's Razor

Extreme and devout skepticism can manifest as a psychological bias that borders on pathology, preventing individuals from evaluating empirical data objectively. Schwartz defines 'skeptimania' as a state where a person concludes that an event must be due to fraud regardless of how strong the data are. He equates the cultural and childhood conditioning against spiritual concepts to a form of post-educational stress disorder (PESD), which triggers automatic negative emotional rejections of paranormal findings.

Prominent academic skeptic Professor Ray Hyman admitted to Schwartz that he has no control over his beliefs and that repeated disappointments with past frauds prevent him from accepting genuine science today.

Occam's razor dictates that the simplest hypothesis accounting for all accumulated mediumship data is that consciousness continues after death. While skeptics must invoke an improbable series of extraordinary assumptions—such as super cheating, super sitter bias, super guessing, super subtle cue reading, and super telepathy—to dismiss the data, the survival hypothesis offers an elegant and straightforward explanation.

Historical paradigm shifts like replacing the complex earth-centered astronomical model with the simpler sun-centered model parallel the choice between complex skeptical excuses and the survival hypothesis.

The authors systematically evaluated experiments across eleven categories—including fraud, cueing, selective memory, vague information, lucky guesses, experimenter bias, and telepathy—and found that controls successfully eliminated these artifacts.

In Miraval and Canyon Ranch experiments where mediums were deaf and blind to sitters behind screens, accuracy remained high at 40 to 80 percent, ruling out visual and verbal cueing.

6. Biophysics and the Energy of Love

Human biological systems generate persistent electromagnetic and biophoton signals that store systemic memory and reflect the universal organizing force of love.

Cardiac Bio-radiation

Because the human body contains 70 to 80 percent water filled with electrolytes, it conducts electricity very well. The heart acts as the body's largest generator of electromagnetic signals. These cardiac biophotons continuously radiate past the skin into the vacuum of space at approximately 186,000 miles per second, much like light emitted by ancient stars.

Studies at the laboratory indicate that human tissues—particularly the heart and hand regions—interact with invisible high-frequency signals. When you intentionally send energy or love to a loved one, tests detect an increased absorption or scattering of gamma rays alongside a measurable increase in the emission of high-frequency X-ray biophotons.

Gravity and Unconditional Love

Gravity acts as an invisible force that cannot be measured directly but is known through its effects on objects, binding the universe into an interconnected feedback system. Beyond being a mathematician, Isaac Newton was a mystic who considered the universal and non-prejudicial force of gravity to be an illustration of the loving heart of God maintaining the cosmos.

The author regularly conducts a simple personal experiment by dropping objects like his dog Sammy's bone, noting that they fall predictably every time due to gravity.

• Drop an unbroken object like keys, an eraser, or a dog bone to physically observe and reflect on the invisible, predictable pull of gravity.

7. How Our Lives Might Change

Scientific proof of the living soul transforms daily habits, medical practice, education, ethics, and spiritual frameworks across human society.

Proving that consciousness survives death removes the artificial pressure to achieve all personal potential within a single lifetime. Knowing life continues allows you to slow down, prioritize meaningful relationships, and give the earth a respite from constant resource exploitation.

While at Yale, the author realized his busy schedule made it impossible to fulfill his potential or parental dreams, prompting him to stop trying to race through life.

Awareness that deceased loved ones bear witness to living actions in real time creates a powerful deterrent against human deceit. If relationships continue with info-energy systems after physical death, you can no longer escape the emotional consequences of hurting or deceiving others. This fosters a culture of honesty and integrity love.

Spirit-Assisted Medicine

Medical practice and psychotherapy must evolve to account for the presence of departed souls and medical guides. Healthcare providers should consider that patients and therapists are accompanied by deceased individuals, leading to spirit-assisted medicine, or SAM. Mental health professionals must also learn to differentiate genuine spiritual perceptions from psychotic hallucinations.

Dr. Russek made exceptionally accurate cardiac diagnoses that went beyond available data, supported by his personal openness to prayer and spiritual reality. Medical intuition plays a vital role here.

Integrative Spiritual Frameworks

Scientific proof of the living soul will unite disparate religious traditions into an integrative spiritual framework. Just as medicine is moving toward integrative frameworks combining conventional and alternative practices, verified survival of consciousness suggests that major spiritual leaders across all faiths are interconnected and ready to assist humankind.

Children's natural openness to seeing ghosts and invisible entities should be cultivated as an eighth category of intelligence rather than dismissed as delusion. Educators can incorporate psychic and spiritual capacities into childhood development models. However, educators must also address risks such as 30,000 people a year taking their own lives in the United States if young people misunderstand the nature of crossing over.

Suzane Northrop's book The Seance notes that individuals who commit suicide often express regret in mediumship readings for cutting their natural life path short.

• Encourage young people to cultivate latent psychic experiences rather than discrediting them as make-believe.
• Teach children at an early age to appreciate the profound adventure and unique gifts of physical life.

10 Key Ideas

1. Gary E. Schwartz challenges materialist assumptions about death by applying strict university laboratory methods to test whether human biological electromagnetic waves and personal info-energy packets persist eternally like ancient photons.
2. The Susy Smith Project was established at the University of Arizona to bring systematic scientific research to bear on the hypothesis of the survival of consciousness after death under the principles of academic freedom.
3. The Russek Protocol and the Campbell Procedure combine a pre-reading meditation period with a silent sitter period on a muted phone to scientifically eliminate fraud, cold reading, and nonverbal cuing during mediumship experiments.
4. Applying William James's white crow principle, researchers recruited mediums of high integrity for rigorous university laboratory testing that revealed high accuracy scores ranging from 77 to 95 percent.
5. Under strict double-blind laboratory controls and silent-sitter conditions with mediums positioned behind a floor-to-ceiling screen, mediums consistently retrieve highly specific and verifiable personal information.
6. Advanced statistical analyses and control group comparisons prove that conventional explanations like cold reading, chance guessing, and skeptimania fail to account for the data.
7. Occam's razor dictates that the simplest hypothesis accounting for all accumulated mediumship data is that consciousness continues after death.
8. The human heart acts as the body's largest generator of electromagnetic signals that continuously radiate past the skin into the vacuum of space, interacting with invisible high-frequency signals when sending energy or love.
9. Proving that consciousness survives death removes the artificial pressure to achieve all personal potential within a single lifetime and creates a powerful deterrent against human deceit.
10. Medical practice, psychotherapy, and education must evolve to integrate spiritual frameworks by accounting for departed souls, medical guides, and children's natural openness to seeing invisible entities.