Sometimes, blog posts write themselves. Others are written by dead doctors with the help of a medium.
Allow me -- and no, I'm not dead, nor am I a medium, although I am an MD -- to introduce you to Chico Xavier, a Brazilian medium who, according to a new paper, "produced a wide range of mediumistic phenomena and is considered one of the most prolific and influential mediums of the 20th century." More than 50 million copies of his books were sold, the authors wrote -- although Xavier donated all of the proceeds to charity.
Xavier, you see, lived from 1910 until 2002, which means that really introducing you to him would require ... a medium. But according to , a medium who claimed to be in contact with Xavier might be telling the truth.
Here's how Xavier worked, wrote Alexandre Caroli Rocha, of the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and colleagues:
"A few hundred people would attend Xavier's public mediumistic meetings at his spiritist center. The attendance to these meetings was free. Every Friday afternoon, people would gather in a queue for the opportunity to talk for a few minutes with Xavier.[19] Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., Xavier would exchange a few words with each of the attendees in the queue. After 6 p.m., Xavier would go to a small room at the back of the spiritist center with two assistants."
There was "medicine" involved, and dead doctors played a role:
"He would stay there until approximately 12 midnight writing homeopathic prescriptions along with brief spiritual advice, which were then handed to the attendees. These prescriptions and messages were allegedly authored by the spirits of physicians who communicated via Xavier's 'psychography'. After Xavier finished the 'psychography' of these medical prescriptions, he would go to the main hall where the attendees would have been waiting, accommodated in chairs or stools. Xavier would sit at a large table in front of the audience and he would produce 'psychographed' letters uninterruptedly for about 3 hours. When Xavier finished the letters, around 3 a.m., he would read them aloud for the audience. He psychographed an average of six letters per night, each letter allegedly written by a different deceased person.[19]"
If you have access to the paywalled paper in the peer-reviewed Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, you'll learn more about Xavier, as well as about the science -- and no, that isn't "seance" -- of "." For example, Rocha and colleagues used the "Arizona Mediumship-Process Scoring System (AMPSS)" and other methods to examine 13 of Xavier's letters allegedly written by one J.P., whose father had visited Rocha after his son's tragic death by drowning in 1974. Their findings:
"The fact that among 99 items of specific information there was not a single one wrong seems remarkable. Chance alone could have explained the fit of a few isolated cases of information, but it does not seem plausible that the accuracy of such a large set of data could be explained by merely lucky chance hits."
The authors write that the results are important because they seem to "yield empirical support for nonreductionist theories of the mind."
One gets the sense -- a sixth sense, perhaps -- that we could clear up the whole mind-brain dialectic if we just asked Xavier.
Xavier, are you listening?