hypocaffeinemia

Near Death experiences.

Misleading “studies”.

The drama! The suspense! The Woo Woo Train is back, people!

A lot of hype has recently surrounded a story about a British ICU nurse named Penny Sartori who wrote a book claimed by woowooists as well as the author to be an academic study of near death experiences. How do we know it’s an academic study? Why, because that’s the title of the book: Near Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients, a Five Year Clinical Study.

The title sounds plausible enough, however the first red flag for you astute readers should be the fact that she elected to publish a book– a book currently retailing for $160.00, mind you– instead of publishing to an actual peer-reviewed journal. Bypassing normal mechanisms of science in order to rake in the cash is exactly the sort of thing that qualifies her for a first-class ticket on the Woo Woo Train, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and let her work stand or fall on its own merits.

She found that people who went through out-of-body experiences floated above themselves and were able to accurately recount what had happened in the room even though they were unconscious and their eyes were closed.

“People also reported travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light,” she said.

“Some reported meeting a figure who told them their time had not yet come, and others said they met dead relatives and communicated with them by telepathy.”

Okay, so no actual study was performed. Instead, she journaled fifteen patients’ experiences with near death situations. That’s noble, even intriguing, but not the stuffs of hard science, either. The problem comes later on in the article:

Near-death experiences were typically often explained away as the effect of endorphins, abnormal blood gases or low oxygen levels, she said.

However, the study measured these and took them into account when researching the patients’ reports.

“All the current sceptical arguments against near-death experiences were not supported by the research,” she said.

In one case a critically-ill patient, who also had cerebral palsy, awoke from a near-death experience able to use his right arm normally, even though it had been bent and contracted since birth.

“It shouldn’t have been possible without an operation to release his tendons, but he could open his arm freely,” said Ms Sartori.

First, she demonstrates a clear bias in the matter. Second, I am as skeptical as they come and yet I don’t know of anybody that denies patients experience all sorts of things in near death situations. She’s flinging her arms at a straw man here. To set the record straight, what I and other skeptics (and otherwise rational people) believe is that the patients’ experiences are based in neurochemistry, neuroelectricity, and simply natural effects versus supernatural explanations that require invoking, implicitly or not, some bastardized form of Descartian dualism.

“Ah,” you say, “but she addressed that!” Indeed, her rebuttal of a natural origin is based on her “taking into account” variables such as low blood gas levels, endorphins, etc. This is as flawed as her premise, however. How does she objectively define necessary endorphin or hypoxia requirements to illicit NDE’s when she has already determined in advance the NDE’s cannot possibly be natural in origin? Hell, there’s so much brain chemisty at work that even in normal healthy animals and humans, we’re not sure of how it all functions yet, let alone how it misfires in the middle of a code.

Missing the Point

While she found 15 patients reporting near-death experiences, Ms Sartori believes it could be more common but that some patients’ ability to recall the event fails shortly after they pass the critical episode and regain consciousness, like a dreamer forgets a dream.

Wow. It’s like they experience a dream! Imagine that. Talk about being blinded by your conclusion.

The final stamp on her boarding pass comes from her private, unpublished “theory”. I use the word theory loosely here as it’s at best a half-baked hypothesis:

“I don’t think it’s quite as simple as life after death,” she said.

“It’s what consciousness is and how we define it. We are entering an exciting time researching consciousness.

“Current science says it is a by-product of the brain. But it may be that consciousness is around us and the brain might be a mediator, an antenna, instead of controlling consciousness.

And it may be that we are living in a virtual world created by computers after they achieve sentience and are merely being harvested for energy our bodies produce. Maybe NDEs are a brief glimpse at the cruel, cruel, real world. This is as equally reality-backed as your active imaginations.

In the words of our savior, Woah.