The Washington Post ran an article with the provocative title, “These Patients Saw What Comes After Death. Should We Believe Them? Researchers have developed a model to explain the science of near-death experiences. Others have challenged it.” It’s obviously empty fluff, garbage of the kind that gets pumped out all the time to appeal to the gullible yokels in their readership. I’m not one of them. I also refuse to read the WaPo anymore (rot in hell, Jeff Bezos), but then, fortunately or unfortunately, the same article has appeared on Beliefnet, sans paywall. Now everyone can see how insipid the ‘evidence’ for life after death is. This article should present some evidence. It doesn’t. It’s the usual anecdotal silliness.
Here’s their big example.
After she dropped to her knees outside her home in Midlothian, Virginia, suffocating, after she was lifted into the ambulance and told herself, “I can’t die this way,” and after emergency workers at the hospital cut the clothes off her to assess her breathing, Miasha Gilliam-El, a 37-year-old nurse and mother of six, blacked out.
What happened next has happened to thousands who’ve returned from the precipice of death with stories of strange visions and journeys that challenge what we know of science. Last year, a team of researchers from Belgium, the United States and Denmark launched an ambitious effort to explain these experiences on a neurobiological level — work that is now being contested by a pair of researchers in Virginia.
At stake are questions almost as old as humanity, concerning the possibility of an afterlife and the nature of scientific evidence — questions likely to take center stage at a conference of brain experts in Porto, Portugal, in April.
“The next thing I knew, I was out of my body, above myself, looking at them work on me, doing chest compressions,” Gilliam-El said, recalling Feb. 27, 2012, the day she suffered a rare condition called peripartum cardiomyopathy. For reasons that aren’t fully understood, between the last month of pregnancy and five months after childbirth, a woman’s cardiac muscle weakens and enlarges, creating a risk of heart failure.
Gilliam-El, who had given birth just three days earlier, recalled watching a doctor try to snake a tube down her throat to open an airway. She remembered staring at the machine showing the electrical activity in her heart and seeing herself flatline. Her breathing stopped.
“And then it was kind of like I was transitioned to another place. I was kind of sucked back into a tunnel,” she said. “It is so peaceful in this tunnel. And I’m just walking and I’m holding someone’s hand. And all I’m hearing is the scripture, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’”
Please, please learn about the concept of confabulation. If you black out, when you resume consciousness, your brain quickly invents stories to fill the gap. They aren’t necessarily accurate. A trained nurse is going to be familiar with happens to patients who lose consciousness, and could overlay that on the period when she was actually non-functional. She’s also pre-loaded with religious mythology, and that gets stuffed into the constructed memory. It’s not evidence of anything.
I have a recent personal experience that applies. I too blacked out after a fall; I remember the pain of bouncing my skull off the sidewalk, and then the next thing was becoming aware that I was sitting in my office at work. I remember nothing of what happened between those moments.
But I quickly made assumptions. I must have (scenario A) got up, dusted myself off, and walked to work by force of habit. Or (scenario B) a pedestrian must have helped me up and sent me on my way, or (scenario C) a passing motorist pulled over and gave me a lift to the building, or (scenario D) an angel swooped down, clutched me to her soft downy bosom, and transported me to my office chair before giving me a revitalizing swig from the cask of whisky she carried in a cask on her collar. Do I have any evidence for A) my indomitable will, B) a pedestrian, C) a motorist, or D) an angel? No I do not. Some might be more likely than others, but I can’t claim I have any verifiable evidence for any of them.
Likewise, Gilliam-El knows she passed out in an ambulance — and we can find evidence for that — and that she regained consciousness in a hospital some time later — also based on evidence. But all the stuff about entering a tunnel and holding hands and hearing scripture, is an unverifiable invention of her brain.
That’s all these articles ever provide, a collection of stories people provide after periods of unconsciousness to rationalize their experience, and then calling them “evidence for life after death”. They’re not.
It’s always annoying that these ideas get “experts” who are unable to distinguish fantasy from evidence to support a popular myth.
E) Time traveler.
I guess there must be different levels of this sort of thing, and suspect that some people’s idea of what constitutes a coma differs too. I’ve been in a coma once, fortunately a short one (bicycle versus car – car won). In my case it was total though. Brain switched off, woke up later in hospital wondering what happened. Zero experience.. Anything other than that would have been a fabrication.
I suppose in a way you could call it a near death experience, since I expect death to be a permanent absence of being similar to that temporary one. So aside from not wanting it any time soon, I don’t see much to fear in death. I won’t be around to notice it.
Huh,
Looks like the parking DNS has propagated enough that no-one can access FTB. Unless they, like I just did, remember that the last time this happened, they put the correct IP addresses in their host file, and commented them out rather than deleting them when things were fixed. And uncommented them just now to see if it works. It does!
So. Um.
I’ve kinda wondered what would happen if you asked people who believe in this sort of OOB (out-of-body) experience what exactly is going on. “She says she saw her own body. If the eyes of her body were on the operating table, what was she seeing with?”
The response would probably be something like “Well, the eyes of her soul, of course”.
And my own response would be “If souls can see with soul-eyes, why do we even need physical eyes? Why are there any blind people at all? Why do we need corrective lenses? Shouldn’t everyone everywhere have perfect vision using the eyes of their soul?”
Dunno what they would come up with.
One of Oliver Sacks’ fascinating books is Hallucinations, which describes the many different ways the brain can confabulate visions (or other sensory phenomena) of things that are not actually there. Many hallucinations are obviously not real. But some do seem to be visions of things that seem real, and require careful discernment to determine their lack of reality.
Owlmirror @4:
PZ – Near-death, distorted
Blast from the past there . . . Also in the archives right here:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/04/24/the-nde-delusion/
and the followup:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/04/30/near-death-rehashed/
Seeing the mental deterioration of my grandmother before she died I have real trouble believing there’s a wonderful afterlife of rainbows and bunnies if it does exist. It’s another one of those things where the believers have a very specific idea of the concept, because other concepts are scary and don’t give you a nice ending. Like God existing, but having no interest in letting you live in a wonderful Heaven if you were good enough.
Registered Nurse, worked in hospitals for 25 years, 15 of them in ICU. Watched hundreds of people die. Recently watched as my sister die. I was the medical power of attorney and had to have her treatments stopped. Agree with #7 timgueguen, there is nothing special when someone dies, there are no rainbows unicorns or lollypops. Who knows what the brain does or visualizes when the oxygen level drops below functioning levels.
One thing that was a constant during my career: When someone is at the end of their life and they started seeing or talking to dead relatives, the end is near.
I, for one, am grateful that Pharyngula has been brought back to life.
As for “brains filling in blanks in consciousness” there’s ample evidence of that in: “your eye’s blind spot”, and “hearing the missing fundamental”.
Welcome back.
Perhaps it is my engineering background and knowledge of the Kalman filter but I have another view.
The human nervous system is slow and to compensate for that, the brain runs a model of the world around it. Not a very good model, but it gets updated frequently with new data. The model pretty much never stops running. Hence dreams and other such phenomena.
Without fresh data to correct the model, it just wanders about.
Yay! Welcome back from the other side.
Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions O. Blanke, S. Ortigue, T. Landis & M. Seeck (2002)
I consider this to be the most convincing single report on out-of-body experiences. In preperation for surgery, researchers electrically probed a woman’s brain, specifically the cingulate gyrus. They were repeatedly able to induce out-of-body illusions. The woman reported being able to see her body from above, but could never actually see anything that was not in here line of vision (e.g. a card held near her legs). Unlike the experiences in the Beliefnet article, the woman was conscious and reporting her experiences to the researchers in real time so that they could run checks.
I agree that there is no good evidence of OBEs but the belief is not as unsupported as most here believe. I recently examined the evidence and found this. There are a number of serious academic researchers who have been researching this for decades who believe that OBEs indicate life after death. One of the most prominent is social psychologist Kenneth Ring, professor emeritus of the university of Connecticut. I studied with him as an undergraduate and graduate student (briefly-I left and got my Ph.D elsewhere) in the 1960s. In the 70s he started research into this area and continued for decades . Besides his publications in journals he wrote a series of books about it, notably “Lessons From The Light”. A few months ago I read “Lessons” and then several books by Susan Blackmore , a British psychologist, a good friend of Ring’s who disagrees. She writes quite persuasively in her books “Consciousness “ ,”Dying to Live…” “Seeing Myself…” that the experiences are caused by chemical changes in the brain. Blackmore got a degree Ph.D In parapsychology in England and for 20 years tried to find proof of paranormal experiences after an OBE in college. After 20 years of negative results she became a non-believer and has vigorously argued against OBEs as being paranormal. I found her quite persuasive . There have also been attempts to verify patients statements that they saw what was happening in the hospital room when they were unconscious by placing things visible only from a spot at the ceiling and not from below. The results were negative.
As I read Ring’s book I was becoming less skeptical but Blackmore helped me return to being extremely skeptical of his conclusions. In an interview of Ring in the Times some time ago Ring says he is looking forward to dying as the place beyond seems to him like a good place. Must be nice.
2.Currie “ I don’t see much to fear in death. I won’t be around to notice it.”
Yes, but then the process of dying can be quite horrible.
@14
Another believing researcher is Sam Parnia. He did a study where cards were placed in emergency rooms where they would only be visible from near the ceiling. The results were completely negative. My impression from reading the paper is that he really wanted to believe, and when the main experiment came up negative, he switched to other, anecdotal avenues. That was a while ago, and his views may have shifted since. The most recent stuff I have seen from him is along the lines of “they were only mostly dead.”
I sometimes think that the dying brain, in an effort to forestall impending insanity, cooks up a pleasant mental illusion before it winks out. But quantum theory says that information cannot be destroyed, so the information contained in the brain must be preserved somehow. That’s the notion of quantum immortality, and I can’t see a way around it.
Welcome back, blog! Saw the story of how that unfolded.
As for this sort of thing, I spent a month in an induced coma and I have some…memories from that time. It provided a better understanding of how a ‘religious experience’ can shake people up. Also the readiness of the religious to happily interpret them.
weylguy–
Conservation of quantum information does not help the afterlife hypothesis. First of all, while the total information of a quantum system cannot change, the specific values within it can definitely change (otherwise there would be no such thing as a quantum interaction). That is, the overall QI is conserved, not every specific datum. (Also, the data itself is not completely knowable, it is impossible in quantum information to measure the exact value of a qubit.)
Secondly, there is no reason to think that mental processes and memories run on the quantum level. During a head MRI, the protons in your brain are having their spin angular momentum flipped one way and then flipped back by a huge, rotating magnetic field. And yet there is no sign of any change in conscious state during or after an MRI. One would have thought that if our minds were largely quantum-based, then an MRI would be a major consciousness-altering event.
I also had an out-of-body experience when I was seventeen. It was caused by extreme physical exhaustion, not a near-death event, and at no stage did I feel it was supernatural, not even while it was happening. My thoughts were “this is interesting.” I was not hypoxic.
I suspect that near-death experiences share some of my exhaustion-triggered sensations combined with brain hypoxia, neuronal dysfunction/death, and crucially, the person’s existing cultural expectations. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363461507088001
Are you sure the re-appearance of freethought blogs is real and not an Ed Brayton near death experience?
I have had those near-death experiences while very much alive. The first was under anaesthetic where I manufactured an hallucination out of the voice of the anaesthetist telling me to relax and the grey loss of vision when the anaesthetic mask was shoved over my face. The other was an out of body experience when I was using a deep relaxation technique I had learned for stress management. I was asleep and knew it but I could see myself looking down on my sleeping form. Ag that point I woke jup. The mind is very good at playing tricks.
A few years ago, three miles from home, I coasted my bicycle down a slope, leaned into the turn, and… I’m pedaling my bike, one mile from home, bloody and sore. A couple weeks later I saw kids playing at the turn and asked them. I wiped out and was unconscious for 10 minutes. When I woke I asked the mom to take me home. She wouldn’t. (I will think ill of her for the rest of my life.) So I got back on my bike and left. Evidently I was functioning well enough to pilot and navigate because when my memory resumes I was on the usual route.
No angel rescued me. I saw nothing. There is simply a gap.
The thing is, the NDE people kind of invent their own terminology. They refer to having “died and came back”, whereas in most of these cases, these people merely lost consciousness. I’ve heard a “near death” experience that sounds like someone who fainted.
Brains seem to differ in how much they are likely to confabulate. The times I’ve recovered from losing consciousness have just been confusing, but my brain doesn’t seem interested in filling in anything about what might have happened.
Some people also don’t accept that memories aren’t like photographs or video recordings. Just recalling memory is more an act of confabulating the scenario based on the ad-hoc associations the brain actually does keep.
Eyewitness testimony = notoriously unreliable.
Human memory = notoriously fallible.
Hallucinations = very much a thing.
So yeah.
Of course, proving subjective experiences true = pretty fucking exceedingly difficult so, well..
Own conclusions you must draw if like Yoda you speak.
“Of course, proving subjective experiences true = pretty fucking exceedingly difficult so, well.”
By definition, all experiences are subjective; else they would not be experiences.
So you make no sense, StevoR.
@ ^ John Morales : Do you really not understand of the idea of context which I’d have thought made what Iwas aying there clear?
Yes, all experiences are technically subjective – but some we have evidence for that can be examined and studied and known.
We can say X happened – but we can’t say for example subjective hallucination Y was real except in the memory of the person who had it. I can tell you what I dreamt about last night – but there’s not going to be any objective, tangible evidence of it oustdie of my subjective, personal memory and testimony of it.
“@ ^ John Morales : Do you really not understand of the idea of context which I’d have thought made what [I wa saying] there clear?”
Heh. Actually, I do. Which is why I wrote that.
(Perceiving evidence is itself an experience, which is recursive :)
Anyway.
The term you wanted was ‘phenomenon’, as opposed to ‘experience’.
Experiences are… well, experienced. Phenomena are inferred.
You were/are doing what Wittgenstein called ‘language games’.
“E) Time traveler”
Ok. Ok. I get the hint. I’ll go back and take care of it after breakfast.