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.