Mediumship studies is the field of research that investigates mediumship – the claimed ability of certain individuals ("mediums") to relay information from, or communicate with, the dead or other discarnate entities. The field grew out of nineteenth-century psychical research and overlaps substantially with parapsychology. Researchers in this area attempt to test, under controlled conditions, whether mediums can obtain information that cannot be explained by ordinary means, and to characterise the psychological and physiological states associated with mediumistic activity. The scientific consensus is that there is no reliable evidence that mediums can communicate with the dead; reported successes are generally attributed to cold reading, the Barnum effect, selective reporting, sensory leakage or fraud. Proponents counter that a body of controlled studies, mostly published in specialist journals, reports above-chance results that they argue cannot be fully explained by these factors.
Definition and scope Mediumship studies is concerned both with mental mediumship – in which a medium reports impressions, names or messages said to come from the deceased – and with physical mediumship, in which physical effects such as raps, movement of objects, materialisations or ectoplasm are claimed to occur. Research questions have included whether the information a medium provides is accurate beyond chance, whether such accuracy can be obtained when ordinary sources of information are excluded, and what neurological or psychological correlates accompany the mediumistic state. The field is distinct from, but historically linked to, near-death studies and research into reincarnation, all of which form part of the broader investigation of claims bearing on the survival of consciousness after death.
History
Early psychical research (1850s–1930s) Systematic investigation of mediums began with the rise of Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century. The chemist and physicist William Crookes conducted sittings with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home and the materialisation medium Florence Cook, reporting in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874) that he had observed a "psychic force" he could not explain by known physics. His work was controversial and was later criticised for inadequate controls. After the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, investigation became more organised. The trance medium Leonora Piper was studied for decades by Richard Hodgson, the philosopher William James and others, whose reports appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The French physiologist and Nobel laureate Charles Richet, who coined the terms "metapsychics" and "ectoplasm", summarised early experimental work in his Traité de Métapsychique (1922). The German physician Albert von Schrenck-Notzing photographed alleged materialisations produced by the medium "Eva C." and published his observations in Phenomena of Materialisation (1920); several of these cases were later contested as fraudulent.
Cross-correspondences and trance mediumship Between roughly 1901 and 1932, SPR investigators studied the so-called cross-correspondences – fragmentary automatic writing scripts produced independently by several mediums that, taken together, were said to form coherent messages. Reports by Alice Johnson, J. G. Piddington and others appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and were interpreted by some researchers as evidence of a guiding discarnate intelligence, an interpretation disputed by critics.
Modern controlled studies From the late 1990s, several research groups attempted to apply blinded and quantitative protocols to mental mediumship.
The psychologist Gary Schwartz led the VERITAS Research Program at the University of Arizona. In a 2001 paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and in the popular book The Afterlife Experiments (2002), Schwartz reported above-chance accuracy by selected mediums. The studies were sharply criticised for inadequate controls against cold reading and sensory leakage. The Windbridge Institute (later Windbridge Research Center), founded by Julie Beischel, introduced a triple-blind protocol intended to address those criticisms. A 2007 study in Explore and a 2015 replication reported anomalous information reception by "research mediums" under conditions in which the medium, the sitter and the experimenter were all blinded. A 2021 meta-analysis by Tressoldi and colleagues pooled controlled mediumship experiments and reported a small but statistically significant effect, while noting heterogeneity and the possibility of publication bias.
Neuroimaging and psychiatric studies Other research has examined the mediumistic state itself rather than the accuracy of messages. In Brazil, the psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida compared Spiritist mediums with patients diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, reporting that the mediums were generally well-adjusted and socially functional. A 2012 SPECT study by Peres, Moreira-Almeida, Andrew Newberg and colleagues found altered activity in brain regions associated with attention and self-awareness in experienced psychography mediums during trance, compared with non-trance writing.
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