God’s teeth! Has someone smote you upside the head with a crystal pyramid? Scientists will accept life after death - when there is evidence for same. That’s how science works (for a further example, see debate: Earth, flat versus round).
And as for ‘it really doesn’t matter what they think’ … well, I suppose you are at liberty to ignore all neuroscience that doesn’t fit with your worldview and take solace in ignorance.
I suspect you did not read this, because it does not support the existence of life after death. What the study found was that the frequency of report of NDEs was unrelated to various factors such as time of unconsciousness prior to revival, presence of intubation, duration of myocardial infarction, and so on. In other words, in their population, you could not predict whether someone had an NDE or not based on various ‘conventional’ parameters that are supposed to be associated with NDEs.
Indeed, a reply in the Lancet to van Lommel et al.'s article by John Evans at the Dept. of Anaesthetics, John Radcliffe Hospital (Oxford) suggested:
“These episodes of recovery of consciousness are invariably attributed to an insufficient supply of anaesthetic, for various reasons, and are not generally associated with hypoxia. They occur despite the fact that patients have received a cocktail of potent, centrally acting drugs–specific general anaesthetic agents, opioids (eg, fentanyl), benzodiazopines, and other psychotropic drugs (eg, droperidol)–given with the object of preventing consciousness. Many of van Lommel and colleagues’ patients received a similar cocktail of drugs during resuscitation. I suggest that their patients’ near-death experiences were simply an episode of consciousness modulated by drugs, hypoxia, hypercarbia, or other physiological stressors.”
A further commentary in the Lancet by French (v358, i9298, p2010), states:
"van Lommel and colleagues’ report raises the possibility of a new potential artefact in such studies. It seems that at least some NDEs may be the result of false memories, of the mind trying to retrospectively “fill in the gap” after a period of cortical inactivity. The investigators report that, at the 2-year follow-up, four of 37 patients contacted to act as controls (ie, people who had not initially reported an NDE) reported that they had had one. Although these patients represent fewer than 1% of the total sample, they represent over 10% of the 37 patients interviewed with a view to acting as controls. If this subsample is at all representative, it implies that around 30 patients from the sample of 282 who initially denied an NDE would, if they had survived for another 2 years, be claiming that they had had one. (…)
Recent psychological studies have shown conclusively that simply imagining that one has had experiences that had in fact never been encountered will lead to the development of false memories for those experiences.(5-7) Interestingly, susceptibility to false memories correlates with tendency to dissociate,(8,9) which in turn correlates with the tendency to report NDEs. "
For Susan - a typo, insult, or memory Blank?
Well, her own website (linked to in my previous message) does not appear to support this contention. For example (dated Nov 2000):
“Come to think of it, I feel slightly sad. It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.”
and from here:
“I am no longer doing research on out-of-body and near-death experiences, parapsychology, and alien abductions, but see below for publications on these topics.”
Of course, her web site may be out of date although the home page has been updated this year.
Indeed there is. I’ve read some of it (see above for examples). None that I have seen gives clear support for the existence of NDEs other than as epiphenomena.
AFAIC, there is far more support that the brain is driving any NDE, and that it is not at all necessary to invoke voices from beyond the grave. For example, Britton & Bootzin (2004; PubMed investigated temporal lobe function in the light of NDEs, noting (from their abstract):
"We investigated temporal lobe functioning in individuals who reported having transcendental “near-death experiences” during life-threatening events. These individuals were found to have more temporal lobe epileptiform electroencephalographic activity than control subjects and also reported significantly more temporal lobe epileptic symptoms. (…)
These results suggest that altered temporal lobe functioning may be involved in the near-death experience and that individuals who have had such experiences are physiologically distinct from the general population."
Now, you could argue that NDEs alter brain function rather than NDEs being an outpouching of brain activity - an argument taken from the blunt side of Occam’s razor, but I’ve no doubt many people are happy to be covered in illogical razor nicks.
Back to Schiavo: As I said, there is no evidence that there is a consciouness or spirit that exists independent of the cerebral cortex. So far you have provided no evidence to the contrary. Schiavo’s consciousness has joined the choir invisible, in chorus with your grasp of scientific method.
