I don't often watch television, but on rare occasions a
programme appears that is good enough... or at least interesting enough, to
make me reach for the on-switch. The National Geographic Channel has produced a
new documentary on near-death experiences called
Return from the Dead. I've written several times about NDE's and
you can see my thoughts in the background links below; so I eagerly watched
this new show, expecting brand new information. Prof. Steven Laureys is an
accomplished neurologist from
Belgium
who is fascinated by NDE's. His own mother had one during complications when
giving birth to him. He believes that NDE's are not really a glimpse of a
spiritual afterlife and are instead caused by the brain entering a shocked
state as a result of being close to death. His hypothesis is not a new one, in
fact it's as old as NDE research itself, dating right back to the original
critics of Dr Raymond Moody. Prof. Laureys goes on a quest to investigate and
see if his belief is true. Unlike many NDE skeptics, he is willing to put
himself into altered states of consciousness personally to see if he can have
an NDE-like experience. He does this using several methods; to begin with he goes
to
Poland and takes
a ride in a centrifuge used to train fighter pilots. He sees a tunnel of light,
similar to that portrayed in Hieronymus Bosch's classic painting
Ascent of the Blessed and is described
by many NDE-witnesses. Then in
London
a colleague shows him how to induce hallucinations by using sensory deprivation;
and when somebody is in a coma they are definitely deprived sensorially. Then
he meets a man in
Canada
who developed perfect memory after suffering a stroke. This is similar to
another feature of the NDE, seeing your whole like flash before you. The
doctors MRI scan the man's brain to see that the damage he suffered did indeed
allow him total recall of his entire life. The stress of almost dying might be
able to do the same. However, can the spiritual and mystical element of the NDE
be induced artificially? He meets a woman in
Dorset,
England who often gets
spiritual experiences as a result of temporal lobe epilepsy. Using himself as a
guinea pig again, Prof. Laureys takes psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic
mushrooms, while having his brain scanned. He also had an induced out-of-body
experience. After his jet-set quest around the world, he returns home to
Belgium
to put all he has learned together by giving false NDE's to thirty voluntary test
subjects. At the time of writing,
Return
from the Dead is available online here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBE0i6cXetk.
A friend of mine is a paranormal researcher, and when he saw
the programme he wrote this:
"Oh
dear. Just had my conviction that near-death experiences were all spiritual
shot to pieces. Been watching a programme on near-death experiences called Return from the Dead on the National
Geographic Channel. It sure as hell painted a very good and sensible picture
that all NDE's can be explained away from various things to do with the brain,
more notably oxygen and blood starvation to the brain. I've always been aware
of these avenues of thought and seen them portrayed on other TV documentaries but
this one was probably the best and most informative. Sadly it answered all
avenues of the NDE experience. So do I still believe in life after death? Well,
I do although I am now more suspicious than ever before than NDE's are but a
part of it." I interpret the programme very differently. It actually
contains no major new information. All the theories Prof. Steven Laureys
addresses are ones discussed by NDE researchers before; see the background
links below for more details. Laureys' unique approach is simply to arrange
them into a single experiment never done before. My criticism of his hypothesis
is also one I've made of others'; the near-death experience has a distinct
qualitative element that is not reproduced during attempts to induce the
phenomenon artificially. This issue is defined best by a fellow neuroscientist,
Dr Andrew Newburg. He explains how hallucinations generated by the methods
Laureys uses are similar to dreams in that the test subject can easily discern
their drug or hypoxia fantasy from reality because it is simply "less real"
that our awake and conscious state of mind, what Dr Rick Strassman calls
"Channel Normal". The problem with near-death experiences is that the
witnesses relate a very different story from the same comparison yardstick.
They say their NDE is "more real" than our awake and conscious state
of mind, see:
https://youtu.be/LUjumD2Nt2s?t=12m28s.
This is beyond what can simply be explained away by context; the claim that surviving
a brush with the Grim Reaper gives the NDE pathos it would otherwise lack. The
failure of the Aware study has been a major blow to the morale of many
scientists who sought after the final proof that NDE's were spiritual; Dr Sam
Parnia especially. The skeptics are indeed calling for him and his colleagues
to concede that, in this case, absence of evidence really is evidence of
absence. However, as I say in my own report, Aware was an incredibly difficult
experiment to design. It was loaded with the inevitable shortcomings that are
part of its inherent obstacles, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/proof-of-life-after-death.html.
No way can this be used as evidence NDE's are not real. National Geographic's
Return from the Dead is not as
conclusive as it's been billed; in fact it's not even very original. I am not
convinced at all by its conclusions, and I hope my friend will reconsider his assessment
of the near-death experience that he felt the programme forced on him.
