It was about a scientific study of near death experiences, not an essay. Why do you misrepresent it, why would it not be important to call it what it really is?
Perhaps you could tell us why you believe it to be flawed, and I could put you in touch with the good doctor to discuss it.
I just don’t have the answer to everything you ask, I wrote what I experienced, it was misquoted on purpose in my belief, I am not sure why. The truth will always win in the end. I answered your question many times.
He did not misrewpresent it and he did call it what it was: it was an essay written in response to a different essay that criticized erarlier statements he had made. It was not a scientific paper and any claim that it was a scientific paper would be false.
As to the “scentific study” that prompted the exchange of essays between Shermer and van Lommel, it would most reasonably be considered a series of interviews seeking information, but all it was capable of producing was a series of interesting, perhaps even provocative, impressions of unsubstantiated memories. Those are, by definition, anecdotes. They provide tantalizing glimpses into the working of the brain following trauma, but they do not establish any evidence for the claims made by van Lommel or, earlier, Sabom.
This is not a series of interviews, it was substantiated, verified, evidence of a patient telling what happened while they were clinically dead. Now, if everything that comes out of the mouth of a person is anecdotal as you seem to think then there is nothing but anecdotal evidence of all studies and nothing, no matter how rigerously it follows the scientific method is null and void. It would be impossible to match your criteria. But that does not change the facts in the least.
Because you can duplicate them at will,it sounds like self hypnosis to me. But no matter what your experiences are,if they are good for you then I am glad they help you.
The fact that scientists investigate spiritual themes doesn’t mean they buy into it, either emotionally or scientifically. As scientists, their job requires them to investigate stuff. That doesn’t mean there is some “evidence” that a handful of people have a handle on that the most respected members of the scientific community just can’t grasp. Any scientist who ignores evidence in favor of emotions really isn’t a scientist at all. But you knew that…
Despite all your claims about your knowledge about science, this statement pretty clearly indicates that you have never grasped the meaning of scientific methodology.
Your first sentence should read This was a series of interviews of patients describing their memories of events that happened before, possibly during, and after they were clinically dead. As such, they provide strong evidence that the brain (and its memory) might be affected in particular ways by a “death” experience (although for only 18% of the respondents surveyed). That means that the interviews do, indeed, provide a motivation for someone to set up an actual series of experiments. Memory is malleable. The interviews were not conducted while the patients were in step-down with no possibility that their memories could be affected by conversations with medical staff or family and friends. Any number of “events” that they purportedly “saw” could have entered their memories as recreated events* based on what they heard before and after the “death” event–particularly conversations among the operating team–or by tales related to them by staff or friends after the operation.**
I am not denigrating the interviews. I am pointing out that the information gathered in those interviews should suggest that van Lommel or Sabom or any of their fellows who wish to conduct science should set up a rigorous scientific experiment–preferably a double blind test where no information could “leak” to the subjects. For example, if an OBE always or usually occurs with the patient looking down on the operation from above, a simple test would be to provide a whiteboard or a computer monitor that is suspended above the operating table on which are displayed different words or shapes. The words or shapes would be set there by an investigator who had no contact with the surgical staff so that there would be no way to pass the information from the investigator to the team to the patient. Then, after some number of reported OBEs, the investigator could examine how many people who claimed an OBE actually saw what was on the monitor or whiteboard. Yet, 20+ years after Sabom and van Lommel have begun publishing their beliefs, no one has ever bothered to do the science to check out their claims.
Years after the Watergate investigation had come out as a movie, someone discovered that Woodward and Bernstein always pictured their editor as a blond man, even though they had worked for their dark-headed editor for years. Apparently, seeing Jason Robards playing the role of their editor in the movie actually changed their memories of their actual boss. Memory is malleable.
** Much is made of Pam Reynolds’s description of the skull saw, yet her description is general enough to describe any Dremel or similar rotating saw–the sort of saw that one would expect to use to do fine cutting in an operating room environment. In addition, while neither Reynolds nor Sabom remember showing her the saw between their first interviews and his later recording of her statement, we have only their fallible memories that the saw was not shown to her (before or after) the surgery. There was a long, drawn out battle on the SDMB over a supposed urban legend for a ribald comment that was supposed to have been broadcast nationally on a TV game show. One of the key points of “evidence” was that the show’s host never remembered the (pretty unforgettable) remark. Eventually, after years of being treated as an urban legend, someone actually found a tape of the show on which the remark had been made. The remark on the tape was not identical to the one that had been repeated in the UL, but it was close enough to have clearly been the sourse of the story. So you have a human memory (mistaken as to exact words) that an event occurered balanced against a human memory that a particular event had never occurred. Without actual investigation, with standards and protocols to avoid the contamination of memory, you have nothing but anecdotes, not science.
What you say is true, but it is also true that any new evidence can take years for the scientific community to accept. Einstein’s relativity theory is an example. That cholestrol was involved in heart attacks was another that took years. There are many examples. Scientists are human as everyone else and hard to convince of anything. That consciousness is non-local has been proven by thousands of near death experiencers. There is simply no other explanation for the phenomenon. Research is on-going at many Universities at this time. Those who do the research go in as skeptics and become believers as their research unfolds. There will be those who say the research is tainted right up to the finish. One of the main things is current science has no proof of consciousness being a local phenomenon. There is no physical evidence at all. It is even illogical to assume a two pound bunch of cells could produce a human personality. Then there is the surrounding evidence that backs up non-local consciousness such as children’s memory of past lives, death bed visions, out-of-body experiences, pre-birth experiences and other experiences that are also under investigation at the moment by researchers. It all comes together to show sold evidence of life after death. Now I don’t know how long it will take to convince the scientific community but the general public for the most part is convinced now.
The items of the near death experience and the out-of-body experiences are compelling and will prove more and more compelling in the future.
Time will prove we are spiritual beyond any doubt.
Below is a link to a list of studies now finished or in progress. Anyone who actually reads this list will find what I am talking about. http://www.near-death.com/evidence.html
We have never had a real discussion of the elements of near death experiences on this board. Most attempts have been hand-waved as not science. Well, I know for sure the researchers won’t give up and neither will I, this information leads to the most profound positive changes possible in our society.
Tom I don’t agree with anything you say anymore. We are worlds apart. I will always believe the research is good and solid and will lead to proving a non-local consciousness. I will just agree to disagree with you on all things and leave it at that. No need to waste mine or your time anymore.
You provide 53 links that you now claim are studies.
Anonymous anecdote-not a study.
Article about possible NDEs-not a study.
3-53. I’m tired of this. All you have done is linked to a bunch of anecdotes, puff pieces and interpretations of supposed studies done elsewhere. 53 links from the same page, and not one goes to an actual study. Congratulations, lekatt-you’ve managed to be wrong about what your links contain 53 times in a single post.
Czarcasm, I went there and saw the 53 links. I followed a few of them, and none of the ones I followed went to anything like peer-reviewed scientific studies. Granted, I just followed half a dozen or so, but the ones I chose were the ones that looked most likely to go to peer-reviewed research.
This was a link lekatt offered demonstrating that NDEs were a real phenomenon. Well, yes, they are: according to this research, they comprise a glitch in consciousness similar to that experienced by pilots undergoing extreme g-forces. I don’t think that bolsters his case.
So out of 53 links, only one is a secondary link that goes to the results of a study(not the actual study itself, it seems), and that one study contradicts lekatt’s beliefs about NDEs.
To be clear, I followed item 37’s supporting link to an internal document. The internal document was full of mumbo-jumbo about how (for example) "quantum theory is allowing new paradigms to take flight " and the like. I moused over various links in that document until I found one that looked like it might lead to a real study:
None of the other links I moused over looked remotely like they’d link to anything substantive. Digging three layers deep in a page purportedly full of links to scientific research is as far as I’m willing to go, unfortunately.