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13 comments

1 Charles Johnson  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 12:28:45pm

Sorry, I’m not buying it. Another viewpoint: Renowned psychologist Oliver Sacks debunks “near death experiences.”

2 Political Atheist  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 12:55:38pm

re: #1 Charles Johnson

What part do you not buy?

Parnia: Throughout history, we try to explain things the best we can with the tools of science. But most open-minded and objective scientists recognize that we have limitations. Just because something is inexplicable with our current science doesn’t make it superstitious or wrong. When people discovered electromagnetism, forces that couldn’t then be seen or measured, a lot of scientists made fun of it.

Scientists have come to believe that the self is brain cell processes, but there’s never been an experiment to show how cells in the brain could possibly lead to human thought. If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, and I tell you, “this brain cell thinks I’m hungry,” that’s impossible.

It could be that, like electromagnetism, the human psyche and consciousness are a very subtle type of force that interacts with the brain, but are not necessarily produced by the brain. The jury is still out.

Oh, and I personally have more respect for the brain researchers/physical hands on researchers work than psychologists, unless they have the appropriate neuroscience degree and experience.

3 Political Atheist  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 1:04:07pm

Merely dismissing this phenomenon as hallucinations is a crappy idea in a couple ways. First and foremost it is intellectually cheap. It is an excuse to not do the work to find the science.

Second, the exact physical nature of the mind is not at all understood. It deserves the work to find out.

5 Political Atheist  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 1:44:52pm

re: #4 Charles Johnson

He makes fewer claims than the headlines others write about his work I notice. Publishers gotta grab attention somehow I guess. Plus his work is based on bringing minds (aka “people) back from the the brink, or beyond what we medically call death. And he has far better credentials than any preacher or miracle advocate. He is working the scientific rescue edge, and positing some philosophical possibilities. “Dead” used to mean a stopped heart. Then a lack of brain waves. Now we have people medically back from either of both states.

So, what/when is death? Do doctors define it? Maybe but as their tools advance so does their ability to save us. Death is not what it used to be thanks to resuscitation medicine. The mind has more resilience than what we thought decades ago.

The bottom line is not proof of heaven or not, it’s about understanding that death is a moving goalpost, and preserving the human mind in it deserves the work. For the life of me I don’t understand the conflation of God or heaven and the soul.

Career

In the late 90s, he was a member of the Southampton University Trust Hospitals resuscitation committee, where together with Dr. Peter Fenwick he set up the first study of near death experiences in the UK. Since then, they have published several articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals in the field Near-death studies.[6][7] He is also a researcher in pulmonary medicine[8] and a current reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine.

He spends time between UK hospitals and Stony Brook Medical Center, NY, where he is an Assistant Professor of Critical Care Medicine. He founded the Consciousness Research Group at the University of Southampton and is chairman of the Horizon Research Foundation.

6 Charles Johnson  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 1:52:32pm

re: #3 Political Atheist

Merely dismissing this phenomenon as hallucinations is a crappy idea in a couple ways. First and foremost it is intellectually cheap. It is an excuse to not do the work to find the science.

Second, the exact physical nature of the mind is not at all understood. It deserves the work to find out.

The article by Oliver Sacks does much more than dismiss NDEs as hallucinations; it’s quite detailed and persuasive. He cites research and studies that showed, for example, that it’s possible to induce the same types of illusions of “transcendental” experiences with other techniques.

His argument is simply that the human neurological system is wired in a way that is conducive to these kinds of altered states, that it’s not evidence of some unknown mechanism. The conclusion of his article:

In the last decade or two, there has been increasingly active research in the field of “spiritual neurosciences.” There are special difficulties in this research, for religious experiences cannot be summoned at will; they come, if at all, in their own time and way — the religious would say in God’s time and way. Nonetheless, researchers have been able to demonstrate physiological changes not only in pathological states like seizures, OBEs, and NDEs, but also in positive states like prayer and meditation. Typically these changes are quite widespread, involving not only primary sensory areas in the brain, but limbic (emotional) systems, hippocampal (memory) systems, and the prefrontal cortex, where intentionality and judgement reside.

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

7 Political Atheist  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 2:15:18pm

re: #6 Charles Johnson

But none of that matters in the sense of extending the time we can resuscitate a mind intact. Understanding that phenomenon in a limited empirical sense has already saved lives. Better science gets us better medicine. That is the point of the article I Paged. All this other stuff about souls or heaven of God is beside the point made here.

“Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death.”

This is about saving lives. Back from the brink, or by now outdated definitions of death, back from what we used to call death. Irretrievable death. Then we had some “miracle” recoveries.

You and I probably agree that there is a scientific reason for that “miraculous” recovery, and I will stick to my point that we have something there well worth understanding so it can be replicated in trauma centers and emergency rooms.

8 sauceruney  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 7:07:52pm

I got into an argument with someone over their hardcore materialist view of the universe and how it was inconsistent with the fiction they were writing, once. They refused to accept any anecdotal accounts of NDE because they were easily reproduced by electromagnetic stimulation or hallucinogenic drugs, torture… though one could argue torture’s a near death experience in and of itself.

Sure, maybe the pineal gland decides to excrete enough dimethyltryptamine in order for the mind to go on a little trip, and there are various ways to trigger this. It doesn’t make the experiences themselves any less valid to the individuals who’ve had them. It’s when someone tries to standardize these results and form a religion around them, that we seem to run into trouble. It’s on the researcher themselves to retain the language of science and refrain from sounding too much like a heretic. From what I’ve seen, there’s a place for this research, but we have so little framework to build upon, it ends up sounding too much like metaphysics and causes people with a more materialistic view of things to attack it, rather than consider possibilities.

9 Flavia  Wed, Apr 24, 2013 10:22:40pm

As if we needed more reasons to be scared of dying. Now our last hours are going to be with our consciousness trapped in a dead body. Wonderful.

10 Glenn Beck's Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut  Thu, Apr 25, 2013 4:41:58am

re: #3 Political Atheist

Merely dismissing this phenomenon as hallucinations is a crappy idea in a couple ways. First and foremost it is intellectually cheap. It is an excuse to not do the work to find the science.

Second, the exact physical nature of the mind is not at all understood. It deserves the work to find out.

I’d advise you to read “Spook”, Mary Roach’s excellent and informative book on investigations into life after death, including things like this.

11 Glenn Beck's Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut  Thu, Apr 25, 2013 4:47:37am

re: #7 Political Atheist

Sam Parnia has some significant problems with his research. One of the biggest is that these memories can be formed in seconds, and could be taking place as the brain is entering or leaving a non-active state.

Basically, he’s conflating two things: Yes, it is possible to ‘bring people back to life’. This isn’t new. We know that people falling into cold water, for example, can be brought back when many tests would say they were ‘dead’.

We also know that people who have near-death experiences often have bizarre and confounding ‘memories’. That doesn’t prove that those memories were formed while unconscious, in any way, shape, or form.

Parnia is glomming a religious explanation on top of scientific phenomenon, and as such, he’s impeding study, not promoting it.

12 Political Atheist  Thu, Apr 25, 2013 6:52:22am

re: #11 Glenn Beck’s Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut
If Amazon has your Spook book I’ll buy it today. I’m down with a back injury so I’m reading quite a bit.

He did not glom religion onto the article I read and wrote about here. He plays it reasonably straight. I can’t see myself or Page authors having points made in other articles challenged. Or over the top headlines written by publishers or editors.

If you read this clip you will see how straight he works this-

Wired: You also study near-death experiences, but you have a different term for it: After-death experience.

Parnia: I decided that we should study what people have experienced when they’ve gone beyond cardiac arrest. I found that 10 percent of patients who survived cardiac arrests report these incredible accounts of seeing things.

When Tiralosi woke up, he told nurses that he had a profound experience and wanted to talk about it. That’s how we met. He told me that he felt incredibly peaceful, and saw this perfect being, full of love and compassion. This is not uncommon.

People tend to interpret what they see based on their background: A Hindu describes a Hindu god, an atheist doesn’t see a Hindu god or a Christian god, but some being. Different cultures see the same thing, but their interpretation depends on what they believe.

13 Glenn Beck's Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut  Thu, Apr 25, 2013 11:27:09am

re: #12 Political Atheist

He wrote two books before starting his study that very much begged the conclusions of it. I’ve looked into him at length, and, while he is producing some usable data, he is very much the hopeful figure and nothing at all that he’s found challenges the idea that what people see and remember are ‘halluciations’ inside the brain during the trauma.


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