Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Death is, by definition, the end of life. Anyone who tells us about the death experience is very much alive, rendering their view of the afterlife, one way or the other, suspect. Further, materialist arguments can only be so authoritative on the subject. What happens to a person’s consciousness after death can be pondered, imagined, or hypothesized, but not directly observed or measured. The thought that consciousness is purely a product or epiphenomenon of the brain is the mainstream scientific view. But the truth is, as we’ll see in chapter 3, the source and nature of consciousness remains an unsolved mystery. There are numerous aspects of the NDE that can be studied by science, but what happens when we die still seems a subject most closely associated with philosophy.

  This strikes me as rather obvious. I only bring it up because so many people seem to forget it. And I believe that if we remember our own inability to deliver a definitive vision of what lies beyond death, we might find ourselves a little less threatened by others’ opinions. Welcome to reality: you don’t know what happens when you die, and the person arguing with you doesn’t know either. Some people don’t seem to care for an afterlife. Me? I’d like to believe in an afterlife. My mother has died; so have my oldest brother and a dear brother-in-law. But I’m also not interested in fooling myself.

  My mother’s death is, in part, what drew me into investigating Kübler-Ross. As my mother slowly succumbed to a long-term illness, nothing at all paranormal happened. But I did receive the benefit of Kübler-Ross’s work, rereading On Death and Dying over a couple of difficult days. The story she tells of a farmer is the one that haunted me. The farmer she describes took his beloved wife to a big city hospital in the hope of saving her. He wanted to spend every minute with her. He wanted to sit beside her during the day and sleep with her at night. But he was not allowed to stay in the intensive care unit for more than five minutes an hour. He took what he could get, coming and going under orders, staring at his wife’s white face and holding her hand till he was told to leave. In contrast, nearly forty years later, my family was allowed to stay with my mother everywhere, and at all times—when she was in a private room, and when she was in intensive care.

  My father, married to my mother for fifty years, issued a simple order. “Your mother asked that she never be left alone,” he said. “So that’s it. We’re not going to leave her alone.”

  And we didn’t. She had a family member by her side in the hospital, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. My father logged the vast majority of hours with her. The nurses and doctors were so taken with his dedication that they eventually put my mother in a private room and made a bed next to her for my father to sleep in.

  I spent comparatively few nights there—two per week. But one night, toward the end, a nurse’s aide woke me. “I had to meet you,” she said. “I’ve met the husband, and the daughters. Now I had to meet the son. Your family’s dedication is amazing.”

  I think of the old man Kübler-Ross described who could not stay with his wife for any extended period of time and feel so tremendously grateful that at the end we were able to spend this time with my mother. On maybe the most emotional of those days, my sister Karen and I spent an hour or two sitting on either side of my mother’s bed. My father had recently discovered the hospital television included an easy listening music channel. I can’t remember what song was playing. But we sat on either side of my mother, each holding one of her hands. My mother sang a little. Her voice was weak. She asked Karen to sing for her. As Karen’s voice rose, my mother closed her eyes. She smiled. “Isn’t this cozy?” she said. “Isn’t this nice? We’d never have done this if we were home.”

  She repeated that last fact a couple of times. And although her medication usually made her drop off to sleep within a few minutes, she stayed awake for nearly half an hour that night. “Don’t fight,” she said suddenly. “Life’s too short. Don’t ruin it by fighting.”

  Our family house, like so many, was not always peaceful—a subject my mother had never addressed. To have her mention it at all, saying no more words than necessary, released a tension built over many decades. She hung on to our hands. She fell asleep, smiling. This was the kind of moment Kübler-Ross sought to facilitate by encouraging medical staff and families and the sick to acknowledge the predicament they faced and settle their unfinished business.

  Had Kübler-Ross not decided to focus her book purely on the end of life, rather than the afterlife, it’s possible my family and countless others would have suffered far more difficult experiences than we did. Kübler-Ross may even have been fated to obscurity. That said, I think it’s high time we—believers and unbelievers alike—acknowledge what we do know for sure about the NDE: right now, the ultimate conclusion we each choose to draw seems based more in the vision of the world we bring to the data rather than the data itself. Believers applaud the researchers who conclude there is an afterlife; skeptics celebrate those who decide the NDE is the product of brain function. I argue that, in many cases, the data merely become a means of landing ourselves in the world we most wish or expect to see.

  By Jeffrey Long’s count, at this time skeptics have put forth no less than twenty explanations for the NDE. The number, I think, has ventured so high because people report NDEs at times when they were physically dying, and times when they weren’t dying; at times when they were merely in fear of death, and at times when they felt no fear at all; at times when they were under general anesthetic or some cocktail of drugs, and at times when they were completely unfettered by pharmaceuticals. Skeptics, then, are searching for some singular explanation or combination of explanations that can occur in various states of consciousness, yet each trigger an NDE.

  It has been speculated numerous times that some medication administered by hospital staff helps produce the NDE. But thus far, no clear correlation has been found between the use of recreational or medicinal drugs and NDE incidents. Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand-born psychiatrist, has argued for a connection between these mystical flights and the drug ketamine. But ketamine is an ass-kicker of a narcotic with profound dissociative effects; while it can lead to experiences similar to the NDE, it can also lead to myriad other sensations—trippy happenings, feelings of falling, even psychotic experiences. Intriguingly, though Jansen started as a skeptic, ascribing purely material theories to the phenomenon, he has come to believe both ketamine use and NDEs may represent a glimpse at a larger, more fundamental reality. But there seems to be some fundamental difference between the two trips, so ketamine, at this point, looms more as an idea than an explanation.

  Dr. G. M. Woerlee has claimed that NDEs during resuscitation are produced by cardiac massage, which he says can produce enough blood flow to the brain to allow consciousness. But as we’ll see in a moment, it seems unlikely that the amount of blood flow generated by CPR is sufficient to sustain consciousness at a high enough level for the brain to formulate the orderly, vivid experiences associated with an NDE. We can best view that, however, through the lens of the perhaps most publicized skeptical theory, which belongs to U.K. psychologist Susan Blackmore. She delivered the real poison pen letter for NDEs in her book Dying to Live; I focus on her version of events because most modern debunkings of the NDE originate with her “dying brain hypothesis.”

  Blackmore is an elegant writer who makes her case over the broad length of a book. But her argument can be summarized rather quickly: in short, a lack of oxygen, known medically as anoxia, results in a narrowing of vision, fading first at the edges, that would create the illusion of a tunnel and light. Further, endorphins released at the time of death, under stress, might serve as the source of euphoria associated with NDEs. Accurate perceptions made while “out of body” are created out of memory, expectation, and the sensory detail accumulated before consciousness was lost. A sensation of timelessness is created by our loss of a sense of self as the brain breaks down.

  Dying to Live stands as the most comprehensive argument anyone has launched against the NDE as a window on th
e afterlife. That said, some of Blackmore’s key points don’t stand up well under scrutiny. A number of medical doctors have conducted their own research into NDEs. Sam Parnia, Michael Sabom, and Jeffrey Long have all written books on the subject, and Parnia, as do others, notes that many people who report NDEs aren’t lacking for oxygen at the time. Perhaps even more damaging to Blackmore’s case, in his book What Happens When We Die?, Parnia writes, “If the dying brain theory were correct, then I would expect that as the oxygen levels in patients’ blood dropped, they would gradually develop the illusion of seeing a tunnel and/or a light. In practice, patients with low oxygen levels don’t report seeing a light, a tunnel or any of the typical features of an NDE; and, in fact, this experience has never been reported by any other doctor or scientific study as a feature of a lack of oxygen.”

  While Blackmore focuses much of her attention on the subject’s experiencing a lack of oxygen, her explanation falls apart most readily in that very instance (the same goes for Woerlee’s cardiac massage theory). According to Parnia, “Memory loss is so closely associated with any insult to the brain, whether from a blow or a lack of oxygen, that the degree of memory loss is used as a diagnostic tool to assess the severity of the brain damage.”

  Such memory loss usually encompasses a period of time from minutes to days or even weeks before losing and after regaining consciousness. So even if people were regaining awareness as chest compressions were administered, they still seem deeply unlikely to report anything at all or at best fragmented memories. Yet people who undergo NDEs enjoy seemingly complete recall. Further, numerous studies have also shown that their recollections of what happened during their resuscitation are incredibly accurate. Conversely, when patients with no claimed out-of-body experience are asked to describe their resuscitation—even if that means guessing—they get it wrong. Television hospital dramas, it seems, are no substitute for being there. But there is another subtler yet important point that I think gets lost in the debate.

  The real mystery is what happens to human consciousness after death—our memories, perceptions, and sense of self. Skeptics who adhere to a physical or materialist worldview argue that consciousness is purely a product of the brain. When the brain in my skull dies, so do “I.” But the NDE has ultimately forced skeptics into adopting, unwittingly, the same position as believers: the NDE occurs independently of the brain.

  Skeptics, more than forty years after Kübler-Ross declined to publish her own accounting of the NDE, are essentially arguing that the same experience can be had both with and without any number of drugs; in or out of the death state; and with or without a lack of oxygen—the same experience irrespective of whatever circumstances the brain might find itself in. This makes no sense from a materialist perspective. Drugs, anesthesia, a lack of oxygen, the flood of chemicals released by the brain after the heart stops beating—all these factors have known affects on the nature and quality of brain function. Skeptics, no doubt aware of this, often contend that many of the experiences lumped together under the umbrella term “NDE” are somehow different from one another. But thus far, they have failed to produce data that comprehensively demonstrate how the NDE takes on predictable, quantifiable changes in content and character, concurrent with the state of the body and brain.

  Materialists take heart. This doesn’t mean there is an afterlife. But it does mean the source of the NDE remains a mystery and could yet be proven an illusion or reality. Something is at work here, but what? I argue that, at the moment, we don’t know. We understand far too little about the experience, and the reports of experiencers yield far too little actionable data for anyone to firmly conclude the NDE represents a real glimpse of the afterlife. But as yet we have no firm materialist theory to explain the NDE away.

  So where does this leave us?

  Well, as noted metaphysician and philosopher Terence McKenna put it, in a Wired interview conducted shortly before his own passing, all argument about our mortality comes to naught. Death remains the vast black hole of biology: “Once you go over that event horizon, no messages can be passed back. It represents a limit case in the thermodynamics of information. So what is it?”

  It hurts, I think, for all of us—believers and skeptics alike—to admit it. But in answer to McKenna’s question, all we can say is, We don’t know. The black hole is just … black. We can, however, learn something about ourselves by taking a look at how we react to all these arguments. And we can best begin to glimpse this insight, I think, by looking at a powerful modern example of both skeptics and believers seeing only what they want and expect to see.

  The occasion was a 2004 study conducted by Willoughby Britton, then working on a doctoral thesis in psychology at the University of Arizona. Britton had been reading about theoretical connections between epilepsy and paranormal experience. Some epileptics report they hear heavenly music or have religious visions just prior to seizure (though this happens far more rarely than skeptics would have us believe). The seizures themselves are triggered by mass firings of neurons in the temporal lobe, so Britton thought she might look for a connection there with NDEs.

  She knew this sort of research was fraught with implications for her career, all of them bad. “The paranormal isn’t supposed to be discussed,” she says now. “It isn’t supposed to be studied.”

  She brought the idea to her supervisor, thinking he would shoot her down. But to her surprise, he agreed. “I’ve made my reputation,” he told her. “What are they going to do to me?”

  Britton’s idea was to find people who had experienced NDEs and monitor their brain activity overnight. In the end, she found just twenty-three subjects—not, by her own estimation, a large enough sample size to render her study authoritative but enough to start developing a picture. She also enlisted twenty people who had not undergone NDEs, or any life-threatening events, as controls. She believed that people who had undergone NDEs might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy. And five of her subjects did show these altered firing patterns. None of them were in fact epileptic, but they did display sudden spikes of neuronal activity. In the average population, according to Britton, the researchers might well have turned up no one with such abnormal brain activity, but among those who experienced NDEs they had found five—or 22 percent.

  That meant her findings were, from a statistical perspective, highly significant. Still, she also knew her study’s limitations: a small sample size, conducted over just one night, with no baseline reading for the people who had undergone NDEs. Without knowing what their brain activity looked like before the experiences, it’s impossible to know what was cause and what was effect. “I thought the study suggested it would be worthwhile to conduct further research,” she says today. “I thought it suggested there might be some link between the temporal lobe and the experience. But I also thought it was a pretty humble study.”

  She was shocked at the attention she received, which included articles in the New York Times and Discover. She also didn’t expect that people would interpret her work to be so authoritative, precisely because she knew it wasn’t. “I guess, usually, you’ll find scientists arguing for the importance of their research,” she says. “But people really went overboard with this.”

  They went overboard in arguing for her study’s significance, and worse, seemed to interpret her findings in a peculiarly biased fashion. Britton thought both the Discover and Times articles “subjected the people in my study to being told they were dysfunctional.”

  This was deeply ironic. Because in the psychological questionnaire Britton gave all her participants, those who experienced NDEs rated more highly than the controls on measures of “active coping.” What this means is that people who experienced NDEs were more likely to handle life’s problems directly—without waiting for time, someone else, or a miracle to do it for them. They were, in comparison to the control subjects who had no NDEs, more optimistic and aggressive in their approach to building the lives the
y wanted. From my perspective, however, as a reporter, I can understand why these stories turned out as they did. The default position for media covering the paranormal is gentle, learned skepticism. In these media formulations, the NDE isn’t a profound life-changing experience but an abnormal firing of neurons. And people who experience NDEs are to be characterized in kind.

  But what most stunned Britton were the letters she received afterward. “I got letters from people who told me, ‘Thank you so much for proving the Near Death Experience is real,’ ” she says, even though she felt she had done no such thing. “And I also got letters from people, including colleagues, scientists, saying ‘Thank you for proving there is no afterlife and religious belief is a brain disorder.’ ”

  Of course, she hadn’t studied religious belief at all. But to some people all paranormal claims are supernatural claims—and both belong in the same dust basket. So in this instance, even scientists weren’t immune to seeing things in Britton’s study that weren’t there.

  We could choose to see the fallout from Britton’s research as evidence of all that divides us. Some of us believe in the paranormal and see it in every coincidence. Some of us believe in a strictly materialist interpretation of the universe and see believers in the paranormal as retreating into comforting superstitions. But I believe Britton’s study didn’t reveal a fissure in our society—or at least, she didn’t just reveal a fissure. I think what she revealed is a stunning point of relatedness.

  Believers and skeptics alike tend to look at the paranormal and see what they want to see; they look at the paranormal and see a reflection of their own worldviews. And so what she calls her “humble study” and her “agnostic data” becomes confirmation in the eye of a passionate beholder. Whatever it is they’re passionate about.