deegee, great articles. Thanks for posting. I'm not sure what your point is though. The studies didn't prove or disprove anything.
For example, let me write from the psychology today article:
To put this another way, the low level of activity in the experienced mediums' frontal lobes should have resulted in vague, unfocused, obtuse garble. Instead, it resulted in more complex writing samples than they were able to produce while not entranced.
Why? No one's sure.---
Also a quote from the Atlantic article:
To take his scans, Newburg uses functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), and single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) imaging. The book Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, lists their technological limitations. The authors, Drs. Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld, write that one limitation of brain imaging is that researchers can’t make a neat map of the brain centers for different activities like phrenologists once did. Even if most people process language expression in one particular area, this processing is highly dependent on connections to other brain activities. The brain is also plastic, so if the usual area for speech is damaged, other areas in the brain may reorganize and take over the function.---
Heads up, you can be of sound mind and still believe in spirits. That was another take away from the psychology today article:
The mediums ranged from 15 to 47 years of automatic writing experience, performing up to 18 psychographies per month. All were right-handed, in good mental health, and not currently using any psychiatric drugs. All reported that during the study they were able to reach their usual trance-like state during the psychography task and were in their regular state of consciousness during the control task.