Getting Comfortable With Near Death Experiences: Out of One’s Mind or Beyond the Brain? The Challenge of Interpreting Near-Death Experiences

Abstract

With one exception, near-death experiences (NDEs) may be interpreted as unusual forms of hallucinations associated with the injured or dying brain. The exception involves perceptions described from vantage points outside the body that are later confirmed to be correct and could not have been inferred. Over a century of laboratory studies have investigated whether it is possible in principle for the mind to transcend the physical boundaries of the brain. The cumulative experimental database strongly indicates that it can. It is not clear that this implies the mind is separate from the brain, but it does suggest that a comprehensive explanation for NDEs will require revisions to present scientific assumptions about the brain-mind relationship.

Introduction

Neuroscientist Francis Crick famously quipped that the mind – the self-aware, subjective aspect of the brain – is “nothing but a pack of neurons.” Crick asserted that all mental activity, all of “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”¹ This proposal, which is now a central tenet in the neurosciences,² suggests that near-death experiences (NDEs) are best understood as hallucinations caused by distortions in neural activity as the brain shuts down. No other explanation is possible, because from the “pack of neurons” perspective mind and brain are identical, in which case visions of distant environments or discussions with disembodied entities are both examples of bizarre dreams.

Among counterarguments to such brain-based explanations is the observation that NDEs are reported even when the brain’s electrical activity, as reflected in an electroencephalogram (EEG), has flat-lined.^{3, 4} This would seem to rule out hallucinations and dreams because if the brain is completely inactive then the mind must also be inactive. So NDEs could not be reported, but ipso facto they are reported, and so mind and brain cannot be identical.

At face value this line of reasoning seems persuasive, but it has been challenged by the recent discovery that brains continue to show activity below what was once considered to be flat-lined conditions in deep coma and in the dying brain. In 2013, Kroeger, et al. reported that a “novel brain phenomenon is observable in both humans and animals during coma that is deeper than the one reflected by the isoelectric EEG”,⁵ and Borjigin, et al. found evidence contrary to the assumption that the brain is hypoactive during cardiac arrest, and in particular that, “High-frequency neurophysiological activity in the near-death state exceeded levels found during the conscious waking state [, … demonstrating] that the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near-death.”⁶

Based on these discoveries, if NDEs exclusively consisted of dream-like images, however vivid, convincing or unusual they may seem, then brain-oriented explanations would be plausible. But hallucinations do not cover the full phenomenology. Some NDEs also include perceptions reportedly from outside the body that could not have been inferred from information received through the ordinary senses, and that are verifiably correct.⁷ This does not happen very often, but that it happens at all challenges the assumption that NDEs must be figments of the imagination, or that those reporting these experiences were discombobulated and, in a sense, going out of their minds.

From a conventional view “distant perception” experiences are often explained as coincidence, selective memory, confabulation, or they are simply ignored as impossible. But are such explanations correct? Is it possible to go out of one’s brain without going out of one’s mind? Philosophers have vigorously debated the mind-brain relationship without resolution for thousands of years, so further discussion or reliance on anecdotes is not likely to resolve this question. Fortunately, about a century ago a new approach was initiated in hopes of breaking the deadlock. Experiments were conducted under rigorously controlled conditions to see if distant perception was possible.

Origins

In 1876, physicist Sir William Barrett from the Royal College of Science in Dublin, Ireland, presented experimental evidence in favor of what he called “thought transference” to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Six years later, Barrett helped found the London-based Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the first scientific organization established for the study of exceptional mental capacities known today as psychic or “psi” phenomena.

Many prominent figures in science, scholarship, and politics became members of the SPR. The early roster included Sir Oliver Lodge, known for his contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy; Baron (John Strutt) Rayleigh, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the inert gas argon; Rayleigh’s spouse Evelyn Balfour, sister of Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister of Britain; and Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University. American members included Samuel P. Langley, Director of the Smithsonian Institution, William James of Harvard University, Simon Newcomb, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Edward C. Pickering, Director of the Harvard Observatory.

Over the years, members of the SPR and other scientific organizations developed increasingly stringent methods to study reports of mind-to-mind communication, distance perception, apparitions, and related phenomena. Scientists and scholars of the day were intrigued, as we are today, by the frequency and the credibility of such reports, so they sought to establish whether reports of psi experiences were real or hallucinations.

Challenges associated with studying these mental phenomena led to a series of methodological advancements, some of which have become gold-standard tools in psychology, the neurosciences and medical research. They include the use of double-blind protocols to control for expectation effects, statistical techniques for evaluating human performance, the human electroencephalograph (EEG), and methods for objectively consolidating and assessing replication rates across experiments, known today as meta-analysis.^{8, 9}

Surveys of the general population collected by the SPR and others were used to classify and create taxonomies of reported psi experiences. Four categories proved to be most amenable to laboratory study. They were mind-to-mind communication (now called telepathy), perception of information beyond the reach of the ordinary senses (clairvoyance), perception through time (precognition), and direct mind-matter interactions (psychokinesis). Publications of experiments exploring these experiences attracted a great deal of critical attention, which led to new methods and designs to address potential artifacts. Improved studies were conducted, and this cycle was repeated over many decades.

Experiments

The literature of psi research reports thousands of experiments and a growing number of meta-analyses.⁹ It is not possible within the scope of a single article to do justice to this massive database, so one class of experiments will suffice: investigations of the claim of mind-to-mind communication, or telepathy.

Some may imagine that research on telepathy still involves the use of ESP (extrasensory perception) cards, which were popularized by Duke University psychologist Joseph B. Rhine starting in the 1930s.¹⁰ Dozens of experiments conducted by Rhine and others were published, comprising a cumulative database of over four million card guessing trials collected from the 1880s to the 1940s.¹¹ Analysis of that database persuaded many scientists that ESP was an established faculty of the mind. One example of a scientist who was impressed by the state of the evidence was Alan Turing, a seminal figure in the foundations of modern computer science and the mastermind who helped break the German Enigma cryptograph machine during the Second World War.¹² In discussing the problem of how to differentiate between machine and human intelligence, Turing wrote:

“I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.… Many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.¹³

Turing’s opinion was prescient in that this line of research was indeed forgotten by most scientists and scholars. But it was also a victim of unfavorable timing. Rhine’s work reached its pinnacle during a period in which it became fashionable for academic psychologists to deny the existence of any form of mental activity, including consciousness itself, largely due to the rising influence of psychologist B. F. Skinner’s brand of behaviorism.¹⁴ But psi research did not disappear entirely for a very simple reason: Many people, including academics, continued to report psychic experiences.

By the 1970s, a new method for studying telepathy was designed to overcome two problems encountered in studies involving ESP cards. Those experiments were easy to conduct but the test design often involved guessing dozens to hundreds of cards in a row, so boredom and biases introduced by knowledge of previous guesses (the gambler’s fallacy) were inevitable. These problems contributed to what came to be known as the “decline effect,” a systematic decrease in performance over repeated testing.

The new design was called the ganzfeld telepathy experiment, where ganzfeld is a German word meaning “whole field.” The technique involved mild, unpatterned visual and auditory stimulation. In preparation for a ganzfeld session, an experimenter E collected a large set of photographs (in some experiments video clips were used instead of photos). The photos were arranged into separate pools, each pool containing four photos as different from one other in content and appearance as possible. Later, when a test session began, E escorted the “receiver” R into an electromagnetically shielded room and asked R to relax in a comfortable, reclining chair. E placed halved ping-pong balls over R’s eyes and headphones playing white noise over R’s ears. Then E directed a red light to shine on R’s face, and R was asked to keep his or her eyes open and to speak aloud any impressions that came to mind. E left the room and within a few minutes the ganzfeld stimulation reliably produced a hypnagogic, dream-like state in R. E continued to monitor R’s shielded room to ensure that no ordinary form of communication could reach R.

Meanwhile, an assistant A escorted a “sender” S to a distant location where A randomly selected one pool of four images from the larger set of prepared pools, and then randomly selected one of the four images out of the pool. That image, called the target, was to be mentally sent by S to R. In some versions of this experiment, R’s voice was audio recorded and transmitted by one-way audio link to S. This provided S with performance feedback to help optimize the sending process.

After the sending period ended, E – who, like R, was blind to the target – took R out of the ganzfeld condition and together they reviewed R’s mental impressions while examining four images, the target along with three decoys (the three unselected images from the randomly chosen pool). The images they examined were duplicates of the photos handled by S (in more recent times they could be images on a computer screen), preventing clues about the target from accidentally being conveyed from S to R or E. After examining the four images, R ranked them according to how well each matched his or her impressions of the target during the sending period. If R ranked the target image as 1, the best possible match, then the test session was considered a hit otherwise it was a miss.

This method unambiguously established chance expectation, because if telepathy did not exist then the best that R could do, on average, would be to rank the correct target first one in four times, for a 25% chance expected hit rate. A ganzfeld test session consisted of a single “guess” in which R was free to describe virtually anything that came to mind. This obviated problems of boredom and guessing strategies that plagued tests using ESP cards, but it also required far more effort to gain a single datapoint. On average, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, and today this simple design has been repeatedly tested in many variations for over 40 years. Researchers familiar with these studies, including confirmed skeptics, agree that when properly conducted this method contains no known flaws that might produce spurious results.¹⁵

From 1974 through 2004, 88 ganzfeld experiments were reported. Together they resulted in 1,008 hits in 3,145 sessions, for a combined average hit rate of 32% as compared to the chance-expected 25%.¹⁶ This hit rate is associated with odds against chance of 29 million trillion to 1. Arguments that this result might have been due to successful studies being reported more often than unsuccessful studies, known as the “file-drawer effect,” have been analyzed and reanalyzed, and critics familiar with this literature have agreed that selective reporting practices are insufficient to nullify the positive results.⁸

When the ganzfeld telepathy database is updated with new publications reported through 2010, 1,323 hits are reported in 4,196 trials, for average hit rate of 31.5%.¹⁷ The additional data increases the overall odds against chance to 13 billion trillion to 1. These analyses have been published and critiqued in peer-reviewed journals, and similar successful results have been reported by researchers who explicitly stated that they did not believe in the existence of psychic abilities.^{18 16, 17, 19}

If scientific evidence were analogous to forensic evidence presented in a courtroom, then one could justifiably say that this one class of experiments demonstrates the existence of telepathy beyond a reasonable doubt. When conceptually similar experiments are added to the evidential database, including controlled laboratory tests of the “feeling of being stared at,”²⁰ and correlation of EEG^21–25 and functional MRIs between isolated couples,^26–28 the weight of the cumulative evidence is even stronger.

The bottom line is that there is now strong evidence, confirmed using Bayesian statistical methods that take into account analysts’ prior expectations,¹⁹ indicating that the mind can indeed transcend the physical constraints of the brain. This conclusion is bolstered by other classes of experiments that also provide strong statistical evidence for clairvoyance,^{22, 29} precognition,^30,31 and mind-matter interactions.^{32, 33}

Discussion

A century of scientific studies indicate that perception is not bound by the limitations of the brain, at least not by any means that are presently understood. Theoretical explanations continue to lag behind the empirical data, but this is common in the history of science. For example, herbal preparations containing salicylates were used for thousands of years before Aspirin’s mechanism of action was identified.³⁴ And even with robust effects that are easy to demonstrate, like magnetism, it took hundreds of years before useful explanatory theories were formed.³⁵ Thus, given that no one knows how consciousness can arise out of (presumably) unconscious matter, it is not surprising that science has to yet provide a satisfactory explanation for telepathy and other subtle psychic capacities.^{36, 37}

Theoretical explanations aside, how does the existence of psi influence our understanding of NDEs? The main implication is that it reduces the likelihood that reports of distant perceptions can only be due to confabulation or coincidence. In any given anecdotal report it is not possible to know with certainty that the information was obtained psychically. But experimental data suggests that it could have been obtained that way.

Does distant perception imply that a disembodied consciousness literally leaves the body, or that NDEs provide evidence for the persistence of consciousness after bodily death? The evidence to date is insufficient to answer such questions because everything we know about psi comes from tests conducted with living persons. Studies involving mediumship, which investigate individuals who claim to be able to communicate with the deceased, have attempted to probe the boundaries between life and death, but of course all such experiments ultimately involve reports from living persons; purported participation by the deceased is inferred.^{38, 39} To further complicate matters, there is both anecdotal and experimental evidence that non-ordinary states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming, meditating, under the influence of psychedelic compounds) are more conducive to psi phenomena.¹⁷ Given that near-death is a prime exemplar of a non-ordinary state it may be that some of the strikingly vivid aspects of NDEs arise because of clearer forms of psi perception that are filtered out by a normally functioning brain.

The bottom line is that NDEs in light of psi research suggest that one or more of today’s assumptions about the mind-brain relationship are probably wrong. An improved understanding of NDEs may well be found to involve a host of mundane brain-oriented effects, but it may also include glimpses of realities that are presently beyond our imagination. Given the revolutionary changes in our understanding of the physical world over the last century through the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, it is virtually certain that the scientific worldview of the next century will include entirely new ways of thinking about space, time, and – given the challenge of NDEs – consciousness.

Biography

Dean Radin, PhD, is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University.

Contact: dradin@noetic.org