Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The effects of cerebral anoxia are well-known (Alcock 1981). Initially there is a feeling of well-being and power. As the anoxia continues and more neurons become impaired, there is a loss in the ability to make critical judgments, reality becomes vague, and hallucinations appear.

The response of the proponents of life after death to this argument is to admit that cerebral anoxia, drugs, and brain damage can cause hallucinations that are essentially identical to deathbed visions. But the hallucination hypothesis, they claim, is not sufficient to explain the visions because not every patient who has ever had such a vision has been conclusively shown to have been anoxic, brain damaged, or drugged. Again, the “irreducible minimum” number of allegedly unexplainable reports is thrown up as proof of the paranormal hypothesis after the initial mass of supposedly supportive evidence that the proponents started with has been whittled down to almost nothing by careful inspection. Certainly there will always be cases in which, because of incomplete medical information, it is not possible to show that a particular patient was anoxic or intoxicated. However, the fact that anoxia and drug intoxication are known to produce hallucinations just like the report given by the patient would suggest the rational conclusion that the patient was anoxic or drugged, not that the patient had visited the threshold of the afterlife.

When recovered, patients sometimes report comments and bits of conversation that took place while they were presumably unconscious, either due to the severity of injuries or to anesthesia. Should this be seen as convincing evidence for some sort of “astral” body being detached from the physical body and observing the situation? No. Even during unconsciousness, the brain is able to register sensory impressions. Thus, events that occur when an individual is asleep may appear in the dreams (Arkin, Antrobus, and Ellman 1978; Foulkes 1985). Further, the brain can discriminate between important and unimportant events while the individual is asleep (Arkin, Antrobus, and Ellman 1978). A classic example is the new parent who is awakened by the slightest cry of the infant, but sleeps right through much louder, but less important, noises. Registration of sensory inputs also can take place while the individual is anesthetized, as general anesthetics do not block the sensory inputs to the brain. The registration of stimuli in anesthetized patients was recently demonstrated by Millar and Watkinson (1983). While patients who were undergoing surgery were anesthetized, a tape-recorded list of words was presented to them. After recovery from anesthesia their memory was tested. When asked to recall the words on the list, they were unable to do so. However, when they were asked simply to recognize which of two words had been presented to them, they were correct at a rate significantly above chance. Thus, even while under general anesthetic, the brain does retain some capacity to store new information, although it may be difficult to retrieve this information later. This is very likely the source of the snippets of conversation that sometimes turn up in deathbed visions.

Near-death experiences do seem to have psychological effects on those who experience them. The individuals may become more secure, more religious, and may adopt a generally more mystical and “spiritual” worldview (Irwin 1985). These personality changes testify to the power of the misinterpretation of what is actually happening to the individual. Similarly, although less dramatic, changes may take place in those who have experienced an auditory hallucination that they misinterpret as evidence of life after death or see an object in the sky which they can’t identify at once and therefore misinterpret as an extraterrestrial flying saucer.

The personality changes and the extreme conviction with which people hold to the new beliefs engendered by a near-death experience convince many that the new beliefs are valid. It is important to remember, however, that the strength of a belief is no guide to its validity. Hundreds of people, for example, believed with all their heart that the Reverend Jim Jones was a true miracle worker (in fact he used sleight of hand to fake faith healings) who would lead them to the promised land. Many converts experienced personality changes after joining Jones’s church. In spite of the firmness of their convictions, they died in the jungles of Guyana.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) can occur in non-life-threatening situations, and some individuals claim they can leave their physical bodies at will and travel through space using their “astral” bodies. Another term for this ability is astral projection . It has attracted considerable interest among parapsychologists. At least conceptually, testing for the reality of such OBEs would seem to be quite easy: You find a subject who claims to be able to have an OBE at will, place the subject in a sealed room, and ask the subject to, for example, read the serial number of a dollar bill sealed in a box in another room. Experiments similar in concept to this one have been done. They have not yielded evidence to support the reality of the OBE (Blackmore 1992).

A phenomenological point is often raised to argue that OBEs really are due to something leaving the body: People reporting OBEs almost always report seeing their own body from a vantage point somewhere above it. If the OBE were nothing more than a hallucination combined with bits and pieces of memories acquired during the event, wouldn’t one expect the result to be seen from the perspective of the physical body— for example, with the doctors looking down on the patient? In fact, there is nothing at all unusual about the vantage point seen in OBEs. Remember the last time you went to the beach? Or the dinner you had last night? Try to form a visual image of some such occasion. The overwhelming majority of people see the scene from a vantage point above where they actually were. They, and presumably you, “see” themselves in the scene. This is in spite of the fact that all the information used to construct the image comes from memory. As far as I know, no one has ever used this fact about mental imagery to argue that whenever we form a mental image of something that happened to us in the past, we are actually projecting our astral body back in time. But such a claim would make as much sense as the claim that because the person is looking down on his body in the OBE, the OBE must be truly paranormal in nature.

In her book-length review of the OBE literature, parapsychologist Susan Blackmore (1992) concluded that the OBE experience, while extremely interesting from a psychological point of view, provides no evidence for any type of paranormal event. Irwin (1985) reaches the same conclusion. Both Blackmore and Irwin focus on psychological differences between those who have and have not experienced OBEs (OBE-ers and non-OBE-ers). Blackmore hypothesized that OBE-ers would be better than non-OBE-ers at forming visual images and that OBE-ers would be poorer at distinguishing reality from fantasy than non-OBE-ers. Recent research on the psychological differences between OBE-ers and non-OBE-ers has strongly confirmed Blackmore’s hypotheses. OBE-ers are more likely to remember dreams from a bird’s-eye perspective and are better at forming visual images from that perspective than are non-OBE-ERS (Blackmore, 1986a). It is this bird’s-eye perspective that is so common in OBEs and is one of the aspects of the experience that OBE-ers find so compelling. People who have experienced OBEs are also more susceptible to hypnosis than are non-OBE-ers (see Irwin 1985, for a brief review). OBE-ers also show greater suggestibility and become more deeply absorbed more easily than non-OBE-ers (Irwin 1985). Individuals who can be hypnotized are more likely to experience imagined or suggested events as real, even when not hypnotized (Irwin 1985). Thus, the individual who has become convinced that some nonphysical aspect of her personality has left her physical body differs from the individual who has not had such an experience in that she is less able to distinguish reality from fantasy.