Neuroscientist: Doubt of materialism is “cruel”

In “Near-death neurologist: Dreams on the border of life”, neurologist Kevin Nelson recounts for New Scientist’s Amanda Gefter (4 January 2011) his take on near death experiences. Mostly, it is just materialist explaining away, but there are some useful suggestions:

Lucid dreams are among the closest things we know of to an NDE. They are very similar. Brainwave measurements show that lucid dreaming is a conscious state between REM and waking. During REM consciousness, the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex is turned off. As that's the executive, rational part of the brain, this explains why dreams are so bizarre. But if the dorso-lateral cortex turns on inside a dream, you become aware that you are dreaming. It is like waking up in your dream. When the body is in crisis during an NDE and the brain is slipping from consciousness to unconsciousness, it can get momentarily stuck in a borderland between REM and waking, just like a lucid dream.

Can it indeed? Many people don’t find their lucid dreams bizarre at all; what they often do is represent a life situation as a little drama, with different props and events. Sometimes seeing it clearly that way helps facilitate a solution.

By the way, did you know:

People like to say that these experiences are proof that consciousness can exist outside the brain, like a soul that lives after death. I hope that is true, but it is a matter of faith; there is no evidence for that. People who claim otherwise are using false science to engender false hope and I think that is misleading and ultimately cruel.

There. Anyone who doubts materialism is just plain cruel.

(In fairness to Dr. Nelson, he may not believe that. He may just have to say it to avoid criticism.)

New book sympathetic to near death experiences

Here is a new book by a philosopher, Dr. Carter, sympathetic to near-death experiences.

I admit, I have never had a near-death experience, but then I have never been near death. Except once when I was a small child, and pictured it only as climbing up to an attic, and God would then take me out to see all kinds of things I did not know about before, the way a favourite uncle would take me out to the fair.

Fun note: I have, however, had what I would call a “near dick” experience. A cop pulled me over on the highway for not having my car lights on near sunset. Like most O’Learies, I have excellent night/dark vision (a neuroscientist once commented that I had the most fully dilated pupils he had ever seen).

Hey, win some, lose some, right? We’re stupid, but we can see.

I was so upset by the encounter that the cop did not even end up giving me a ticket.

Here is what I wrote to a friend:

Near death experiences became an interesting field of study because death became a more complex concept in recent years. More people are around to tell us what they experienced, however we may interpret it. A relative in medicine has sometimes pointed out that when physicians are doing defib or cardio revert, the patient is technically dead, at least if you use the old standard.

- Recent experience dealing with a very elderly relative (nonagenarian, = 90+) who had a stroke and copes with Alzheimer has helped me understand the fluidity of the brain better than anything I ever learned from books. I admit that I am not good at learning from books anyway.

Listening to that old guy carefully, I realized that he had lost contact with words but not concepts. He could not reliably remember my name, but he almost always remembered that I was his daughter.

Various people were pestering him to get involved with memory exercises, etc., but he was despondent, thinking it would do no good, because his short term memory was gone.

Although his short term memory was indeed gone (shot to hell, I would say), his long term memory was surprisingly good. He remembered detailed information from 70 years ago, such as that Fr. Athol Murray had got him into the Regina Rifles when World War II was imminent, and ...

Okay, so we now have something to work with, right?

Finally, his family hit on a strategy: His short term memory is shot, fine. But that is the easiest one to reconstitute, because most of the people involved are still alive, and can just reestablish contact.

So everyone phoned and visited frequently, and - as a result - he has become much better at remembering names, faces, and detailed information. As one relative in medicine put it, "If there are spare neurons, he can just lay down new short term memories."

"Skepticism" - of the usual variety - is much less than helpful because it consists merely in trying to debunk, not to understand. It could also lead to lost opportunities. For example, a merely mechanical view of the brain (it's bust and it won't work any more) could lead to lost opportunities to connect with someone.

Near death experiences in the news

In The Times Online (December 14, 2008), Bryan Appleyard offers a look at the current state of study of near-death experiences:

NDEs are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action. Their problem is that the human mind is unreachable. We can’t see what’s going on in there. Even if we could rush cardiac-arrest patients into an MRI scanner, we’d only see lights in the brain. We wouldn’t know what they meant. But now NDEs are to be scientifically investigated in a US and UK study involving 25 hospitals. This is co-ordinated by Dr Sam Parnia at Southampton University and is designed to find 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrests — "clinical death" — who tell such stories.

While we are here: Hannity's America "Beyond Belief" (February 18, 2008) features Bill Wiese (November 23, 2008), who had a vivid dream of hell.

Hey, all I can say about hell is, if you know you are doing stuff that's, like, wrong, stop. Stop now. Why wait till you have this kind of a dream to see that you have a problem? Love yourself more, and you will love other people more. That's what "Love your neighbour as yourself" means, okay?

See also: Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - afternoon; and Mind-Body panel 2: Bruce Greyson - "Brain and mind don't seem to be the same thing;

"Near death experiences: Large project to study up to 1500 cases; Near death experiences: Interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine; Sci Phi show podcast features researcher on near death experiences; Near death experience gaining recognition in medical journals; Reader asks: By what mechanism are near death experiences transmitted?

Near death experiences: Large project to study up to 1500 cases

The "Random Samples" feature in Science Magazine (Sept. 26, 2008) highlights Sam Parnia's large-scale project to study near-death experiences.

The study of Awareness During Resuscitation, sponsored by the University of Southampton, U.K., was announced this month at a United Nations symposium on consciousness by project leader Sam Parnia, a resident at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. Parnia has recruited 25 hospitals, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom, to monitor as many as 1500 people during cardiac arrest who then survive to tell about it. "About 10% of such people report some kind of cognitive process" while "dead" for a few seconds to more than an hour, Parnia says.

Doctors' ability to maintain people in a state of clinical death for long periods and then revive them has produced this interesting result, which may change our understanding of the relationship between the mind and the brain.

See also Near death experiences: Interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

Sci Pho show posstcast featurs researcher on near death experiences

Near deaht experience gaining recognition in medical journals

Reader asks: By what mechanism are near death experiences transmitted?

Near death experiences: Interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

Time Magazine's M.J. Stephey asks Sam Parnia," a fellow at New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center and a leading expert on the study of death, What happens when we die?" (September 18, 2008). Parnia has announced:

a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S., and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest.

He talks about the people he has met who have had near death experiences:

... first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about five hundred or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than ten years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also get the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on.

Well that should be interesting. One thing Mario and I noted in The Spiritual Brain is that near death experiencers tend to change their priorities, whether they are religious believers or not. They tend to focus more on relationships, and they lose their fear of death.

Sci Phi Show podcast features scholar on near death experiences

Here's Australian Jason Rennie's SciPhiShow interview with Christian scholar Gary Habermas on near-death experiences.

Also, here's Habermas's Web site, and here is his Veritas forum video, "Near Death Experiences as an Argument Against Naturalism."

I remember when my lead author Mario Beauregard first proposed that we cover near-death experiences in The Spiritual Brain. I was dead against the idea, fearing we would be swamped over our eyeballs with nut cases who claimed to channel the dead.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that near-death experiences are attracting considerable interest among reasonable folk these days, for the simple reason that so many people are resuscitated through modern emergency medicine techniques. And many have stories to tell, stories that result in changed lives.

Note: Rennie has also interviewed me on The Spiritual Brain.

Near death experiences gaining recognition in medical journals

Gary Habermas offers a talk on near death experiences (experiences that the patient recalls frm a time when he or she is clinically dead), available online. "Near Death Experiences and the Afterlife"was given at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 2008, and sponsored by the Veritas Forum:

In this talk, Gary Habermas will address the definition of death, and then set parameters for potential afterlife evidence. In looking at testimonies of near death experiences in each of the categories that we will have established, we will discuss the nature of this data and what we can learn about a potential afterlife.

I listened to some of it and it is quite good. One thing Habermas notes is that near death experiences (NDEs) - which we discuss in some detail in The Spiritual Brain - have been discussed in about ten medical journals. The trend today is to seek to understand what is happening and what difference it makes, rather than explain the experience away. One factor has undoubtedly been the increased number of people who have returned to active life from states of clinical death.

Habermas mentions that near-death experiences often don't realize at first that the body they are looking at is theirs, because they don't see the face. (In a medical situation, the face is likely obscured by drapes or medical staff.)

That must be quite the wakeup call. No wonder so many NDEers change their lives' priorities.

Reader asks: By what mechanism are near death experiences transmitted?

A reader writes,

... I'm reading The Spiritual Brain, and I already believe in the existence of the soul, in free-will, and life after death. But there is something that puzzles me about Near Death Experiences. If the brain shuts down at death, how can the revived person remember whatever experience he had while out of the body? Isn't memory a physical/chemical process? I'm inclined to believe that it is because you can lose memory through dementia, a blow to the head, etc. If memory were a spiritual process, I don't think a hammer blow would have an effect on one's recall, because a hammer can't have an effect on one's soul. So lets assume I have an NED, and the NED was truly an out of body experience. My brain did not go along with me to record the event. I return to life, and depend on my brain to recall the trip--but the brain wasn't along for that ride. The brain could not remember a remote event when it was not there to "record" it.

I replied,

If a person is clinically dead but on life support, his brain is not functioning but it is also not in the process of being destroyed by lack of oxygen, which is the usual fate of brains apart from high tech treatment.

Therefore, his brain is at least potentially a working organ.

Thus the question is, how does the mind transmit a perception of an experience to the currently inactive brain? If there is a time delay in the transmission, where is the experience in the meantime?

One thing that is becoming more apparent from studies of psychokinesis and correlations of the separated, which we address in The Spiritual Brain, is that our minds are not as tightly bound to our brains as was formerly believed.

Now, just what THAT proves may take many decades to unravel.

Can atheists have near death experiences?

They can, apparently, and at least one, A. J. "Freddie" Ayer did .

A reader of The Spiritual Brain, David Rice III, noted that we discuss Ayer's experience, and generously permits me to reprint his own interpretation of Ayer's near death experience, from a Philosophy of Religion assignment:

Phil 613 - Problems in the Philosophy of Religion
Assignment #6

David Rice

Read A. J. Ayer's "What I saw when I was dead"; what, if anything, should Ayer have concluded from his experience?

The late A. J. Ayer reported that he was clinically dead for four minutes after choking on a piece of fish while suffering complications from pneumonia. Ayer, who was a devout atheist, recalled his experience with death to be "very vivid". He describes being encountered by a bright, red light that was painful to behold even when not looking at it directly. In addition, there were other beings in its presence. Two agents were "put in charge of space". Ayer then detects a defect in space itself and attempts to repair it and notify these "two creatures". However, his cries fall upon deaf ears. Ayer then recalls that Einstein gave us a theory of relativity that dictates that space and time are part of one continuum. Realizing this Ayer believes that if there is a problem with space there must be a connected problem with time and thus he attempts to find the defect with time so that it might be repaired. This would presumably restore space to its operational condition. Once again, the ministers of the red light who are supposedly in charge of this very important system do not hear Ayer's voice. They have either gone out to lunch or ignored Dr. Ayer completely. After further desperate attempts to grab the attention of these guards of time and space, Ayer's experience ends and he is brought back to life. All of this in four minutes. Ayer then comments on a similar account given by the mother of one of his friends. She too had confessed of seeing a great red light.

Ayer believes that although his heart had stopped functioning that his brain continued to provide mental experiences. To him this means that the light he was seeing was not real but was an epiphenomenon of brain activity. Further, Ayer says that since we have no real guarantee that we will have a future life that we should therefore not expect one. He also thinks that since one cannot have an identity without a body that one cannot therefore presume a discontinuity between the body and the mind (identity) once death occurs. Thus, if the body dies then the identity (or the continuity of our experiences) will cease as well. In other words, the continuity of experience must take place in the context of one or more bodies. That Ayer does not think that experience is tied to the enduring identity or soul rather than the body, which must be periodically replaced, is illustrative of his naturalistic assumptions.

Ayer seems to be arguing that the identity is coextensive with the body and that our lives consist of "an extended series of experiences". For him these experiences must take place in an embodied soul (if there is one), not a disembodied one. As a logical consequence of this, we should not be surprised that our identity and body really are united beyond the grave. He thinks that it is surprising that Christians are apt to forget that there is a bodily resurrection after death. However, Ayer does not seem to realize that Christianity also tells us that our identity is not coextensive with our bodies. We have souls and the soul resides in the body. Upon death, the soul or identity does not vanish. There can be identity without body. Once the soul is given its final home it will reside in a resurrected body. This body will not be a physical body as we currently understand it.

Ayer notes that simply showing the existence of an afterlife will not prove the existence of a deity. He is right. An afterlife alone will not provide sufficient grounds for such a belief. However, I think that Ayer's particular account, if in fact he was in contact with the afterlife, does provide some ground for belief in a God. In other words, the experience of some sort of afterlife will not prove the existence of God. The experience of a particular kind of afterlife would. Ayer I believed was warned.

The unapproachable red light that he experienced was I believe a vision of God's glory. The scripture speaks of God's pure brilliance and that looking into his face will destroy you. The ministers he witnessed might very well have been angels in God's presence. These angels follow God's commands, not the petitions of Ayer. That Ayer was not much interested in the red light is revealing. Instead of attempting to approach, understand or even glorify the light, he was too busy trying to fix what he considered deficiencies of the created order. He could not seem to get the ministers to listen to his proposals for correcting the glaring mistakes, which the creator somehow was incapable of preventing much less repairing. The angels ignored him and God gave him pains.

The question is whether Ayer really did experience the next world or if he simply experienced his own mental states in a time of temporary cardiac failure. It may be that he experienced a vision of sorts if not a direct encounter with the afterlife. His experience of frustration and despair, I believe, notifies us of something very important. God can use certain events and even visions to reach people. Whether we take heed is another matter.

Any other thoughts on what happened there?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn on death

In a recent interview with Germany's Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn, 88, was
asked

SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?

Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me -- he died at the age of 27 -- and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

My favourite life-changing Solzhenitsyn quote:

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Near death experiences - a new research area or a happy hunting ground for cranks?

Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I talk about the medical research into NDEs in The Spiritual Brain.

I should confess, I suppose, that at first I was very reluctant to get into NDEs because - flaky as the materialist cranks are - non-materialist cranks are no less flaky. The main difference is that in these times your tax dollars are far more likely to support materialist cranks.

But Mario challenged me to read medical research into on NDEs. As I did, I learned that in recent years, thanks to advanced resuscitation techniques, many more people get revived from states in which they are known to be clinically dead than was true in the past. That is why so many NDEs are reported now. And significant patterns can be found in the experiences.

Anyway, in our book we avoid possibly sensationalized popular accounts and focus on the medically verified ones. Non-materialist neuroscience is in a much better position to understand and deal with NDEs than materialist neuroscience is. For one thing, a non-materialist is not stuck with trying to explain away a growing mountain of information. For another, handling NDEs the right way is important because the person who has one is often much less than thrilled to return to ordinary living. Genuine interest and sensitivity is what is needed right now, not dogma.

Here's an interesting video clip on an account of a near-death experience (NDE). Agnostic pediatric intern and brain specialist Melvin Morse admitted a small girl, Katie, to a mid Western American emergency room. She was said to have been under water for nineteen minutes and was comatose. She was hooked up in the ICU but was not treated. She came to three days later, and remembered the two doctors who worked on her. That is, she watched them at work on her while she had no brain wave activity. She recalled other details that could later be verified.

Morse, who currently practices in Renton, Washington, later wrote up this case and other cases of chindren who had near death experiences in the medical literature. Here's another interesting file of information about NDEs. I have not read it all, and can't vet it, but on a brief scan, it looks like there is a fair amount of reasonable stuff.

Skepticism? Yes, of course. A double helping, please. I always say, when in doubt, doubt, and if it sounds unbelievable, don't believe it. But one must also distinguish between skepticism and dogmatic materialism. The dogmatic materialist knows that it ain't so - and that's all there is to it! That's not skepticism.