An interview with Caroline Watt at skeptiko.com exposes her paper that incorrectly states near-death experiences are not paranormal.

In March of 2012 Alex Tsakiris of skeptiko.com interviewed Caroline Watt about the paper she co-authored with Dean Mobbs: There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them. This paper is one of the main sources skeptics refer to when asserting that near-death experiences can be explained by ordinary biological means. The article misrepresents what is known about near-death experiences. In the interview, Alex does a thorough job of showing how inaccurate and misleading this paper is.

Key Facts About NDEs

• Medical explanations cannot explain NDEs.
  
• Researchers have ample evidence that NDEs occur when there is no brain activity.
  
• Veridical NDEs, where an experiencer perceives verifiable events that he should not be able to perceive without brain activity, or would not be able to perceive with his normal senses even if he was conscious, are common.
  

How Alex's interview exposed the inaccuracies in the paper:

• In the interview, Watt admits that neuroscience does not show there is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences. She admits the title of her paper is an overstatement and explains this deception by saying that the article is designed to be provocative and is not intended to be balanced.
  

  
  

• Alex goes on to point out that all the main NDE researchers say that neuroscience cannot explain all the data about NDEs.
  

  
  

• Alex gives further evidence that the paper is deceptive by pointing out an example of an assertion made in the paper that is not supported by the reference cited.
  

  
  

• Watt tries to fall back on the canard that no one can pinpoint when the NDE actually occurs, implying NDEs could occur after the experiencer recovers consciousness. Alex replies with a quote from NDE researcher van Lommel stating that they do have evidence that the NDE occurs when there is no brain activity. Alex also cites papers by Jan Holden and Penny Satori that also support this view.
  

  
  

• The strongest evidence that NDEs are paranormal comes from people who perceive verifiable events during their NDE which they could not have perceived with their normal senses even if they had been conscious. Watt explains that this aspect wasn't covered by the paper because it only happens rarely. Alex counters this by naming an NDE researcher who has of hundreds of these types of cases in his database.
  

  
  

• Alex quotes Dr. Bruce Greyson: “If you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs, then it’s easy to conclude, there’s nothing paranormal about them.”
  

  
  

• Alex also points out how the paper cites a researcher who denied being a researcher and who's work on the subject has been refuted.
  

  
  

• Dr. Caroline Watt for all practical purposes admits Greyson is right and her paper is a inaccurate when she says the paper, "... was intended to be a provocative piece. It’s not claiming to be balanced."
  

Excerpts from the Interview:

Watt admits the title of the paper is an "overstatement", that it "goes too far", that neuroscience does not show there is nothing paranormal about NDEs.

Dr. Caroline Watt: These articles are deliberately designed to be provoking of debate. The whole idea of this group of articles, this type of articles in this journal, is not to claim that you’re making some comprehensive review. It’s not to produce any new evidence for testing a theory, for example.

...

Alex Tsakiris: Do you stand by the title?

...

Dr. Caroline Watt: ...I believe it’s an overstatement. It’s too soon to say there’s nothing paranormal, because we don’t have all of the evidence in yet.

...

I think the title, which is deliberately provocative, is going too far because it’s too soon to say there’s nothing paranormal. The content of the article itself is not saying anything new.

Alex points out all the main NDE researchers say medical explanations do not fit the data.

Alex Tsakiris: ... all the main researchers in the NDE field; Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia; Pim van Lommel, who you cite in the paper; Jeff Long; Peter Fenwick; all of them agree in saying a conventional medical explanation of NDEs doesn’t fit the data.

I don’t know where you can point to any prominent NDE researchers that would support the title like that. It’s provocative, okay, but is it representative even of the field and of the research?

Alex points out an assertion in the paper that is not supported by the reference cited:

Alex Tsakiris: In the paper, your first citation for van Lommel doesn’t seem to be correct. You site this case; here’s from your paper. ... “One example is a case study in which a patient with diabetes reports a near-death experience during an episode of hypoglycemia. There’s REM…” At the end, it’s cited as being in the Van Lommel paper.

I can’t find that in the van Lommel paper; I have it pulled up right here. Did I miss something? What is going on there?

Alex shows Watt is not accurate when she questions whether NDEs occur when there is no brain activity. Alex names a number of researchers who have evidence that NDEs occur when there is no brain activity:

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s the point, I guess. What I read, I’m going to read directly from his paper on his findings, and this is the most important point. Occurrences of the experience, the near-death experience, were not associated with duration of cardiac arrest—that’s very important, or unconsciousness, medication, or fear of death before cardiac arrest.

This directly contradicts what your inclination or theory about what some of the causes would be. That’s why this was such a landmark study, because they looked for these things on the physiological or psychological front, and they didn’t find it. I guess I’d come back to saying, if we’re really going to push against this, then I think it behooves you to put forward some data.

...

Dr. Caroline Watt: I disagree with you on that, because I don’t think van Lommel or anybody else has yet provided the evidence that the experience occurred during the time when the patient was clinically dead.

...

Alex Tsakiris:

Dr. Pim van Lommel: …an out-of-body experience, where they have [inaudible 32:57] perception. These aspects can be corroborated by doctors, nurses, and family members. It’s important, because it not only can tell us what they perceived, but also the moment that it happened can be corroborated. That what they perceived from a position out of the body really happened at a time that they were unconscious. In other words, no cardiac function; there was no brain function at all.

Alex Tsakiris: He goes on in that quote, then, to cite the paper by Dr. Jan Holden, who I told you we just had on in the previous episode to talk about this paper. She did a peer reviewed published paper that did exactly that; it followed up with people, and found that their perceptions were significantly more accurate than the control group. We’ve also had Dr. Penny Sartori from the UK who’s done a similar study, and had similar findings. I think we can pinpoint and say that these conscious experiences are happening during the time when there is no brain activity.

Alex corrects another incorrect assertion when Watt suggests that veridical NDEs are rare:

Dr. Caroline Watt:

These out-of-body experiences are actually quite rare when you tabulate their frequency. Even when people have a near-death experience, they don’t always have an out-of-body experience as part of it, so it takes a lot of time to gather the data.

...

Our paper didn’t deal with this question of veridicality at all.

Alex Tsakiris:... Dr. Jeff Long. ... He’s compiled probably the largest database of NDE accounts, and has done some very insightful analysis that I think would contradict a couple of things that you’re saying. One, the veridicality of the evidence and the number of percentage of people who have had an out of body experience is much larger. Hundreds and hundreds in her [sic] survey have experienced that, and have reported that.

Alex points out how the thesis of the paper is contrived with a quote from Bruce Greyson:

Alex Tsakiris: Let me just throw this last quote. I’ve been dying to get this quote in. Please. This is Dr. Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, and it’s a great response to your article.

His quote is, “If you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs, then it’s easy to conclude, there’s nothing paranormal about them.” That’s what I think I hear over and over again. Let’s ignore this, and then we can talk about how they’re not paranormal.

Watt's paper cites a researcher who denied being a researcher and who's work has been refuted.

Alex Tsakiris:You also reference people like Susan Blackmore in the paper. We’ve had her on. She said, specifically, “I’m no longer a researcher in this field. I shouldn’t be considered a researcher in this field,” and yet she’s cited, even though her research has been pretty thoroughly countered in, for example, the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences by Greyson and Jan Holden. They cover all that stuff.

For all practical purposes, Watt admits the paper is inaccurate:

Dr. Caroline Watt: As I said, it was intended to be a provocative piece. It’s not claiming to be balanced.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander: Heaven is real and consciousness is not produced by the brain.

The neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, has a book coming out soon about his near death experience, Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. The book describes the near death experience Dr. Alexander had while he was hospitalized and in a coma caused by meningitis. Dr. Alexander's near death experience is of particular importance because he was medically monitored during his illness and his brain is known to have been inactive. His near death experience occurred in the absence of any brain function. During the near death experience, he received a message that is important to everyone, and he learned from direct experience about God's love for each of us.

Alexander gave an interview on skeptkio podcast last fall. In that interview he explained why, as a neurosurgeon, because of the way the brain is wired, he is sure that his experience can only be explained if consciousness is independent of the brain. He also explained that biological explanations like abnormal CO2 and oxygen levels or abnormal brain chemicals like DMT or ketamine cannot explain his experience. He says that before his NDE he believed neuroscience could explain how the brain produced consciousness, but after the NDE he understood that "mind and consciousness are independent of the brain". This is extremely significant coming from a neurosurgeon who combines what he knows about neuroscience and what he learned from his own near death experience. Dr. Alexander states, "consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact."

You can read an excerpt from his book at the thedailybeast.com.

Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife
When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

Dr. Alexander was medically monitored during the time he had his near death experience and his brain is known to have been inactive. His experience occurred in the absence of any brain function. This shows that we survive the death of our bodies.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

...

For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

...

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

...

But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

During the experience he received a message that is important to everyone:

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

Dr. Alexander's experience renewed his belief in God and he learned from direct experience of God's love for all of us:

In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.

The book will be published on October 23.

Here are an mp3 and transcript of an interview with Dr. Eben Alexander from skeptiko.com

In this interview, Alexander explains that his experience could not have occurred if consciousness was produced by the brain because the brain does not have the necessary structure to produce what he experienced.

In fact, one of the hypotheses that I entertained about all this was because the experience that I’ll describe to you seemed very hyper-real and extremely crisp and vivid, much more real and interactive than sitting here and talking with you right now. I mean, it was extraordinary. That is something that is often described in near-death experiences and of course one of my early hypotheses was well, maybe there’s some differential effect against inhibitory neuronal networks that allowed over-expression of excitatory neural networks and gave this illusion of kind of a hyper-real situation.

I can tell you from having lived through it that it was so powerful and so beyond that kind of explanation that I wasn’t very hopeful that that would work out in the end. But I figured I needed to give it a chance and look at the microanatomy in the cortex and the different connections with the thalamus and basal ganglia and see if I could come up with some way that one might have an illusion of hyper-reality.

I can tell you because of the kind of content of the experience and the powerful, overwhelming nature of it and the fact that it was so complex, I think much of what I remembered from that experience, I don’t think my brain and mind could possibly manage that even now.

I mean, the kind of mental function that occurs when you’re in that hyper-real state, the way that information comes in from spiritual beings and kind of the interaction with them is so intense and extraordinary, it’s really inexplicable in earthly terms. But it would basically outrun any of those kind of theories. That was something I was looking for. In fact, I never found an anatomic distribution that would support that over-activity of excitatory pathways.

He explains a little bit about what time is like in the spirit world. They have time but it is different than what we experience.

But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.

Alexander rejects the explanation that NDEs are caused by abnormal CO2 and oxygen levels.

Initially I thought, “Gosh, it was almost too real to be real.” That hyper-reality that people describe, I just wish we could bottle that up and give it to people so they could see what it’s like because it is not something that is going to be explained by these little simplistic kind of talking about CO2 and oxygen levels. That just won’t work. I promise you that won’t work.

He also rejects the explanation that NDEs are caused by chemicals like DMT or ketamine.

I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, ”or“ That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not hearing something.

Alexander explains how his belief about the origin of consciousness was changed by his NDE. Before the NDE he believed the brain produced consciousness but after the NDE he knew consciousness was independent of the brain.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

He says:

... consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

If you found this article interesting you may also want to read my article about the skeptiko interview of near death experience researcher Melvin Morse.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Skeptiko Interview with Dr. Melvin Morse

In the skeptiko podcast interview with Dr. Melvin Morse, Morse tells of the case of a child drowning victim who had been underwater for 17 minutes and after being rescued had no heartbeat for an additional 45 minutes. Dr. Morse never saw any sign of life in the patient. At the time he thought she had died. It was only long afterward that he found out she survived.

Yet during that time, the patient experienced floating out of her body and remembered being intubated, hearing a phone conversation the doctor had, and hearing the nurses talking about a cat that died. When she regained consciousness she asked the nurses where her friends from heaven were. She also remembered that heaven was "fun".

The full interview is here.

So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.