#2944: Bruce Greyson

Charles Bruce Greyson is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Perceptual studies at the University of Virginia, as well as a semi-legendary parapsychologist and pseudoscience promoter. He is also affiliated with the Esalen Institute and with the International Association of Near-Death Studies, a group of very silly people who try to continue to promote the work and ideas of Raymond Moody, who is most famous for thinking that near-death experiences are a evidence for an afterlife. They are not. Greyson himself is co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (2009) (as well as author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021)), and has, in fact, himself been called ‘the father of research in near-death experiences` – he has even developed a scale to ‘measure aspects of near-death experiences’ that has apparently become very popular among like-minded researchers (or whatever you call them) and various media of the kind you’d expect would be interested in such stuff. He has also devised a truly pseudoscientific 19-item scale to assess experience of kundalini, the “Physio-Kundalini Scale”. Greyson doesn’t really like science but he enjoys the trappings of science and the sheen of respectability that comes with dressing nonsense up as science.

 

Greyson is a Cartesian dualist of the old-fashioned kind, and like most defenders of Cartesian dualism seems to operate largely in blissful unawareness of the devastating problems with and 350-year history of refutations of that idea. Cartesian dualism is e.g. the point of departure for his book Irreducible Mind (2007), which he co-edited with Alan Gauld and a gaggle of other parapsychologists. Although Irreducible Mind purports to be a kind of psychology book, it is in fact a ridiculous pseudoscience tome filled with anecdotes that are supposed to promote paranormal claims. Serious psychologists were largely unimpressed and/or embarrassed by the book and its attempt to promote substantial (and silly) claims without empirical evidence.

 

Diagnosis: You’d perhaps be excused for thinking that this is hardly among the most serious challenges humanity is facing at present. However, this kind of pseudoscience is, in fact, rather insidious: It is carried out by people with genuine credentials and presented with a sheen of scientific respectability – to very many people, the work of Greyson and his ilk might unfortunately be rather difficult to distinguish from real science. As such, it will certainly be ammunition for those who seek to discredit real science (‘look how silly those scientists are’), and there are quite a lot of those these days.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki