Spirituality and the Brain (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, May 30, 2010, 18:13 (5052 days ago) @ dhw

An article in today's Sunday Times has the headline: That's not the afterlife ... it's a brainstorm. The subheading, under Science, is: Near-death experiences may be caused by a cascade of electrical activity in the dying brain, reports Jonathan Leake.-Researchers have observed a surge of electrical activity before death, and they suggest that "this surge may be the cause of near-death experiences, the mysterious medical phenomena in which patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a belief that they are floating above their body. Many people experience the sensation as a religious vision and treat it as confirmation of an afterlife. However, the scientists behind the new research believe that is wrong." (Note the progression here from "may be the cause" to "believe that is wrong" ... a good example of giving scientific authority to pure speculation.) -Perhaps "near-death" and "close to death" are bad descriptions, since NDEs refer to the experiences of patients who have been pronounced clinically dead. That is certainly the case in the Pim van Lommel study, which the article mentions (though not by name), as well as in the current Awareness During Rescuscitation study, in which Sam Parnia is interviewing 700 Britons who have been revived from cardiac arrests. Parnia expresses caution over the link between the surge and NDEs (as opposed to actual death), which I'll comment on in a moment. However, first let's consider the following paragraph:-"The activity [i.e. the electrical surge just before death] was similar to that seen in people who are fully conscious, even though the patients appeared asleep and had no blood pressure. Soon after the surge abated, they were pronounced dead."-I don't think anyone would question the claim that thought is accompanied by electrical impulses. The question is which is the cause and which is the effect. Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor in Washington engaged on this project, seems to assume that electrical activity is the cause, but what grounds are there for such an assumption? If you slam a door, there will be sound waves, but the sound waves are not the cause of the door slamming. The fact is, we do not know how thought comes about, or how electrical impulses and thought are transformed into each other. If dying, unconscious people observe actions and obtain knowledge from outside their bodies, is it an explanation to say this is caused by "electrical activity"? -Chawla's work (based on only 7 cases, but he knows of at least 50 more) concerns patients who have actually died, but NDE-ers have been pronounced dead and have been revived to tell their tale. The surge of electrical activity must therefore have preceded their "death", in which case ... following on from Parnia ... it would have nothing to do with experiences that follow death. A believer (David will correct me if I'm wrong) would surely argue that the spirit leaves the body after the electrical surge ... and this would tie in with the claim made by some NDE-ers that they had died but were "sent back". I'm not arguing that there is a spirit or an afterlife. I have no idea. I'm simply pointing out that while scientific observations may be objective, the conclusions drawn from them by scientists and journalists remain purely subjective.


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