In my opinion, that's a philosophical statement, really. And you know, she had to explain, "Well, yes." Alex Tsakiris: Great. And I think that, you know, when you look at the bigger picture of how the universe works, how the laws of physics work, the enormous success of understanding matter, energy, the brain, life --. Dr. Steven Novella: But the thing is, while there are the things that are different among cultures like religious belief and the importance of certain things like food or whatever, if you look at those kinds of elements that are very specific to one culture in one way or another, those things differ in how patients are remembering and making sense of their near-death experience. Dr. Steven Novella: It is absolutely true. We want to keep focused on the science and the evidence and logic, and honestly try to resolve these factual differences. Let me explain it. Now, the deeper question of what exactly is going on in the brain to cause it, I think we don’t know that the answer to that is. Dr. Steven Novella | Debaters | Discover | IQ2US Debates. But it’s an element…, Alex Tsakiris: I’m not saying it’s not an NDE…. I would expect, also, that when people did have near death experiences, and really talked to other souls in the afterlife, that they would come back with consistent, interesting, non-trivial stories to tell. Humans, composed entirely of atoms, are part of the natural world and subject to its laws. Last month, materialist neurologist Steven Novella (at Yale University School of Medicine) made a rather astonishing claim in a post at his Neurologica blog: A recent open-access study of learning and decision-making in mice shows that the human mind is merely what the human brain does. But their conclusion is that it happened during the cardiac arrest. I recently became aware of a study by a man named Dr. Kenneth Ring who had done research around near-death experiences for people who were born in this lifetime blind. As always, our debate will go in three rounds, and then the live audience votes to choose the winner, and only one side wins. Or when they said that 96% of what they encountered was accurate and realistic, so i.e., not hallucinatory. So the memory, the subjective experience of some people who are having clear-cut hypoxic episodes does overlap with NDEs. What I found myself saying over and over in the forums was, “I don’t think you guys are giving Steve enough credit.”. They went from 37 percent to 42 percent. You’re saying that the percentages are very low, which I admit on one thing. And my answer is, I don't know. Like people are trying to make sense of a near-death experience, sure they’re going to see people that they know are dead. 0. People may claim that it's produced by the brain and bound by the laws of physics, but the truth is that the origins of consciousness is a mystery. A lot of those cases I've read, that they're like cold readings, you're getting information that is either plausible or later was retrofitted to the scenario. Dr Moody: The brain does not generate consciousness. Dr. Jeff Long’s research is triangulating towards those experiences, those memories being formed during a flat EEG. Dr. Steven Novella: It could be a little longer than that. We can do better. Review of the recent controversy over the Newsweek magazine cover story, Heaven is Real, and Sam Harris’ response to an invitation to debate Dr. Eben Alexander regarding his near-death experience. Why wouldn’t that be cross-cultural? I’ve provided the link below. The serum potassium…. Alex Tsakiris: It doesn’t have to be 100%. It's more like running a script than reviewing a tape. Now these criteria are purely descriptive. Dr. Steven Novella: I didn’t say that. You didn’t say it was absolutely, positively the only explanation. Alex Tsakiris: When you dream, you don’t only see deceased people in your dream…. I’m saying the data says that it didn’t affect them. REM sleep or REM dreaming is different. Dr. Steven Novella: It was a lot of fun, Alex. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and is now on the faculty at the... Steven Novella, M.D., is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. And I know hundreds and hundreds of them. Science can weigh it and take its measurements and even cut it up into little pieces and put it into test tubes. I think that we know enough to conclude that death is final. This was a very severe meningitis. And if you're undecided, push number three. It’s because the symptoms of neurological phenomenon are not determined by the cause. Is the prospect of an existence after death “real” and provable by science, or a construct of wishful thinking about our own mortality? Dr. Steven Novella: But I don’t think – first of all, I don’t think near-death experiences have anything to do with dreams. John Donvan:Well, the great thing is we have four scientists debating tonight, so let's welcome them to the stage, and thank you to Bob Rosenkranz. I'll point out that Dr. Wilder Penfield wrote a book in 1975, "The Conscious Mind." If somebody has a cardiac arrest and we know that their brain is going to shut down within 10 to 15 seconds of that, why would we expect…. I think…. But a million years from now, our best scientific understanding will still say that the table is made of atoms. Alex Tsakiris: Hold on, hold on. Cardiac arrest, we know it’s much more sudden. I think there’s an inherent contradiction there, so I don’t think this study can possibly lend support to the mind separate from brain hypothesis because it’s contradicting it by its very premise that CO2 would have an effect. Steven P. Novella, MD, has long been a leading voice for rationality and evidence-based medicine. Biology is a process that can end. But I was talking about the unexplainable case that you specifically presented on the last episode. Suggest a topic at iq2usinfo@iq2us.org or visit our Contact Page. So to me…, Alex Tsakiris: That’s just not – I just have to…, Dr. Steven Novella: It’s not an NDE. How would we disprove it? Dr. Steven Novella: That wouldn’t be different. Alex Tsakiris: Right. Then you had a later delusional period, but at different points in time, different parts of your brain were working or not working, and you were constructing reality in a very bizarre way, in ways that we can reproduce with drugs and hypotension and, you know, with electromagnetic stimulation of different parts of your brain. Because the experience that they’re having is nowhere near what is happening to somebody who is having a cardiac arrest, for example, and needs to have resuscitation. I think that there has yet to be consensus on the data on that. So I was absolutely right in my discussion of the study and you simply misread that. The research that I mentioned and I spoke with her on our show here, is Dr. Penny Sartori, and that’s been corroborated by other researchers who have gone back and tried to match the resuscitation experience and what the experiencer remembers about the resuscitation experience and compared that to the group of cardiac arrest patients who didn’t have a near-death experience. Steven Novella, M.D., is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the founder and current executive editor of Science-Based Medicine, as well as the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society. You can tell me where I’m wrong. But…. It doesn’t hold up. Love is really important. That’s a specific neurological phenomenon that is not going on with NDE. Human consciousness remains a mystery. And in fact, I would say that that mystery has only gotten much deeper over time. That's why you must vote against this proposition. Is there some kind of brain mapping that happens, you know. The three basic kinds of explanations are 1) it’s spiritual, that it represents the fact that the mind can exist separate from the brain; 2) is that it’s psychological…, Alex Tsakiris: Hold on, but that first, that isn’t in and of itself spiritual, right? Couldn’t we interpret that as overlap?” versus you’ve got to go if you think that overlaps with the near-death experience, then you need to drill down and use the same methodology that the folks who’ve studied the near-death experience do? I think it’s an interesting idea. I guess I’ll come back to my question that I had for you. I think it’s great and you certainly haven’t disappointed me or I’m sure, any of the Skeptiko guests, in terms of 1) your willingness to engage directly on these topics and just provide a lot of insight in a very articulate way of expressing the other side, the materialistic explanation of what’s going on. I don’t know Dr. Novella and I certainly have nothing against him personally, but I was stunned by the utter lack of knowledge and critical thinking that went into his critique of our new site. And you can interfere with some function in multiple ways and it will cause a lot of overlap of symptoms. In fact, that’s a diagnostic criteria that we use in order to distinguish different types of hallucinations. The classic signs of hypoxia: inattentiveness, poor judgment, confusion, amnesia, and the list goes on, but they’re all of that kind of general…. But we don't have that. Alex Tsakiris: I hear what you’re saying in a way, but it seems to be contradictory to what I’m saying. But we can’t really say that. So the point is they don’t know when the experiences of the NDE were happening because these people were interviewed several days later. I personally am convinced by the overwhelming scientific evidence from physics,from neuroscience, et cetera, that there is one world, the natural world. They're more like little theaters. That’s what science is all about. During the day, he’s a highly-regarded academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. However, the human mind is the irrational elephant in the room, causing many thinkers to misidentify and abuse logical fallacies over the course of a debate. Top Pseudo-Skeptic, Steven Novella, Humiliated on National TV…. Alex Tsakiris: Not really. And in that context, I think there are two people in history who have more than anyone else I think stated this afterlife question very clearly and the major problems that come with it, Plato being one, who said that, "Whenever we talk about the afterlife, there's always going to be the narrative aspect, a story, because we've got to have some sort of story just to get thought about this kind of thing started, but also we've got to have some sort of set of concepts to link the -- these narratives with the statement of what --. My car turned into a lion. I think that the fact that all of the elements can be reproduced by brain phenomenon strongly argues that in the final analysis it’s going to be explained as a brain phenomenon. What contradicts what you’re saying — I don’t know how much you’ve really immersed yourself in the near-death experience research, Bruce Grayson, Jeff Long, who we’ve had on the show. Alex Tsakiris: There are some cultural differences like you pointed out in terms of seeing religious figures associated with your background. It’s an altered construction of how we construct reality, put ourselves into that reality, how we relate to that reality. Death is Not Final. It’s just…, Dr. Steven Novella: Well, it’s non-materialistic. We’ll get the other folks who don’t see it that same way. When Hindus have near-death experiences, they meet Hindu deities. It doesn’t have to be even polite, although it often is, but it often isn’t. Let me jump in on that one. They could have just been anomaly-hunting. During that time when the EEG is flat-lined, I think everyone would agree that the brain is not going to be making memories, right? We have four superbly qualified debaters, scientists all. I did not say that. But I would like to see that kind of study…. So you can interpret the study in a few different ways. That was a brief discussion on our show about it. We know what dream-like means because we all dream. The last guy we had speak specifically to this topic that you’re talking about was Dr. Peter Fenwick. Those experiences deep in coma seem almost seem to weigh too real to be real. Dr. Steven Novella: Well again, I disagree that they’re the same in that you’re still talking about a very broad experience with lots of features that are no single feature is present every time. Alex Tsakiris: Well, I have to say that you’ve given us, in this hour talk we’ve had, kind of more grist for the mill than I could have possibly hoped for. It’s determined by what parts of the brain are not working. This is only interesting in that it was prospective. Alex Tsakiris: I’ll do a full follow-up on that, but I was just reading an article published in The Journal of Near-Death Studies, I think it is, that directly refutes what you’re saying about the out-of-body  experience during seizure and the out-of-body  experience by temporal lobe stimulation as being dramatically different than the out-of-body  experience that’s reported in a near-death experience. People take their positions and then they will defend them, hopefully with logic and evidence. It says it was the PET CO2 and the partial pressure CO2. Sean Carroll and Steven Novella debate life after death with Eben Alexander and Raymond Moody. Those are the core experiences and we’re getting 37%, 10%. That doesn’t mean that pathological state can’t somehow involve neurological structures that are also involved with REM or with dreaming. There are also cultural differences in the language they use. Alex Tsakiris: Like what are those? We'll be back here at the Kaufman Center, and the debates for that are in tonight's program. That doesn’t fit in your model. And that was my very point, which the authors of this paper agree with. I think there are some psychological explanations that have been correctly dispensed with. And they, in fact, if you read their full conclusion they say the other interpretation is that the high CO2 during the CPR could just be a marker of high CO2 at other times or other metabolic effects at other times. I don’t know if they adjusted for multi-variable analysis, and if not, then again this is something else that I criticized the study about. Novella is also the host and producer of the popular weekly science podcast The Skeptics Guide to the … Over those weeks of recording my experience after coma, I also began to talk with my doctors and review my medical records, especially neurological examinations and the scans, and came to realize just how deathly ill I was and how there was no way that such an ultra-real crisp and vibrant experience could have happened in my physical brain. Dr. Steven Novella: But death is death. Again, it’s purely descriptive. I’d love to look at that study, too. I think we’re actually on the same side here. This is a syndrome in which -- well. I mean, if this is anybody's first date, you're probably --, And we are going to be announcing our fall lineup soon. And yet there are other senses – they could hear, for example, and they will visualize what the scene that they’re imagining taking place in the operating room. Alex Tsakiris: Look, I’m with you on that. I spoke with Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be elements of that, of again, of neurological function that’s involved in dreaming that then can get involved in the period of time in which people are forming memories that they then later report as a near-death experience. It just completely contradicts what you’re saying. Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome back to Skeptiko, Dr. Steven Novella, host of the very popular Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe show. But they also say that science can more or less tell us that there is not and cannot be an afterlife, that the existence of an afterlife would not fit in with everything else that we know about how the way the world works, that there are all sorts of other possible biological explanations for the experiences that people come back and describe and that psychologically, we're wired to want to believe in the story of an afterlife and that that wiring influences the kinds of accounts that come back. And they’re paralyzed and they are on medications to block any pain and during that – so imagine waking up and being completely numb to any sensations and being paralyzed and that can absolutely produce an out-of-body experience. He was trained as a scientist. We know how laws of quantum mechanics help explain how electrons move in the brain, and there's nothing in there --. So I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a core experience. I’m saying that because that is exactly what was reported in Dr. Long’s study, is that those patients who were under anesthesia were not different significantly in any respect from any of the other near-death experiencers he studied with the exception of one, a slightly higher percentage of them had the tunnel experience. So in these “NDE studies” you go back and you ask people what kind of experiences they had, right? Dr. Steven Novella: I’m not convinced by the REM intrusion hypothesis. his doctor had not been informed about this. Dr. Steven Novella: Hi, Alex. They’re trying to remember exactly what it was that they experienced; meanwhile, they’re not really fully out of their delirium or whatever they’re passing through on the way to fully waking up. Novella and Tsakiris also discuss anesthesia awareness as a possible explanation for near-death experience accounts, ” Any anesthesiologist will tell you… that patients can wake up during anesthesia… that is a perfectly plausible explanation for those cases.”, Novella stated. It’s descriptively very broad and it may, in fact, have as many different causes as there are types of experiences that people describe, that are being lumped into this sort of broad category of experiences we’re calling near-death experiences. It could be that the people who had the higher CO2 had physiologically…. There are final common pathways of neurology, of how things operate. But I think that we're past the point where it's a scientifically interesting question. There is no evidence that they have occurred while subjects' brains were inactive. Steven: we want to know what is really really true, not what we want to be true. Dr. Steven Novella: This is how science functions, right? CHECK Okay enough Craig and enough religion, how about a debate … And we also should say that statistically, really if they use – and Bruce Greyson pointed this out – using the normal means that we do, the results aren’t even statistically significant, so it’s very weak in terms of…. Steve Novella, my partner, will tell us about the neuroscience behind this. Seizures. Re: Steven Novella on Religion « Reply #6 on: June 28, 2011, 05:50:16 PM » Might I suggest looking at this talk and subsequent discussion, and that you also look here including some of the links embedded in the article. And I want to start with that point as the opening, as it's the thing that we most recently heard Steven Novella talk about. And then we can get back to this other point, too, that I think if you’re trying to make the connection between hypoxia and near-death experience, great. During the period of time when someone is undergoing CPR, after the first 30 to 60 seconds or so, it’s fairly quick, but it could be up to a minute or so, depending on exactly how catastrophic the cardiac arrest is. I don’t think we can check that box and say that we’ve demonstrated clearly that the experiences are happening during that time. And when you ask it that way, the answer is obviously yes. Alex Tsakiris: So what do you think of Bruce Greyson’s research in general? But I would have to add this one last thing, because I think it gets lost, and that’s that the conclusion that they draw at the end, and this is another quote from the study: “It’s not thought possible to explain NDEs only in terms of physiological processes.”. Alex Tsakiris: Let me answer your other – why am I saying that? There is some prior data to suggest that you can have some of the NDE elements with hypercarbia, with hypercapnia, with increased CO2, so this isn’t coming out of the blue. So therefore, if we could really demonstrate that patients were having experiences that they had to be having during that period of time, that would certainly call into question our current models of neuroscience and the whole mind-brain connection. What difference? Dr Novella is an academic clinical neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine and Founder and Executive Editor of Science-Based Medicine , one of the most well-known blogs on the Internet. So let's have it. Alex Tsakiris: Steve, as you know, on the last podcast of Skeptiko, I responded to some statements you had made about near-death experience research. It's a hard problem of consciousness and at the enigma of quantum mechanics, that the brain actually confines and limits consciousness, that science acknowledging consciousness, soul and the spirit becomes much stronger than the overly simplistic science of reductive materialism. And there's endless examples of this. 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