Institute of Noetic Sciences Journal on studying mediumship

It's hard to get good data on mediumship.  Studies of after-death communication are like the broke and irreputable cousin in the already broke and irreputable family of parapsychology.  (A true black sheep among black-ish sheep, I guess.)  There's a couple of reasons for this.  For one thing, legitimate researchers in parapsychology (I'm sorry, consciousness studies) prefer to keep their scope small and their claims modest.  It's one thing to speculate that their may be modes of perception that are little understood.  Clairvoyance and telepathy, for instance, are moderately freaky, but still operate within our known world.  Positing the existence of an afterlife and the survival of personality after death is a whole 'nother level of weird.  Since research funds (and professional respect) are so hard to come by anyway, it's understandable that researchers want to keep their hypotheses on the near side of the twilight zone.  A second reason:  It's extremely difficult to design research that is able to isolate true mediumship from other psi phenomena.  That is, if a psychic can tell you that your deceased Uncle Bob like black walnut ice cream, that doesn't necessarily prove the existence of after-death communication.  She could have gotten that tidbit from dead Bob, or telepathically from your own (very living) brain.

I recently stumbled across a great article in the archives of the journal of the Institute of Noetic Sciences,  "Can Mediums Really Talk to the Dead?"  It's a 2011 conversation with leading mediumship researcher Dr. Julie Beischel.  The interview was conducted by Dr. Dean Radin, probably the most insightful and balanced writer psi researcher working today.  In the piece, they discuss some of the challenges of studying mediumship in a controlled research environment, and some of the intriguing outcomes of experiments done by Beischel's foundation, The Windbridge Institute.  Check it out here.