0
Author: Robert McLuhan
As we know, the secular world pays little attention to scientific research on psi and survival of death. But every so often someone stirs the pot, and then all its confusions and anxieties rise to the surface. We saw it last year with Daryl Bem's precognition experiments. Now it's Eben Alexander's turn, with the Newsweek article trailing Proof of Heaven, his book on his near-death experience that's about to be published.
It's being treated as a big deal because Alexander is not just anbody, he's a neuroscientist. The kind of person who knows that near-death visions are hallucinations. But he's had one himself, it was a zinger, and now he knows better. He's converted. These things do really happen, he recognises, and he's had to rearrange all his ideas and prejudices.
You can see why sceptics have so much trouble with this. A scientist is supposed to be above this sort of thing, not tamely to give in to it. The main line of defence is that the experience didn't happen during the period of coma, but as the patient was starting to recover. Less seriously, Alexander is just "making up fairy tales to comfort himself after a serious shock".
There are also those who reassure themselves that these experiences are just an expression of humanity's deep-seated "longing for heaven" - as described in its culture and literature through the ages - which in my view is about as anti-scientific as you can get. A couple of things occurred to me. One is about Alexander's experience, and the way he's presenting it; the other is about the coverage.
I'll be interested to see the detail in his book. I hope and expect that it will engage with the very considerable NDE research, and with the critical comment. But I didn't get much sense of that from the article. There Alexander acknowledges that he's far from being the first person to have had this sort of experience, however he believes he's the first to have done so while their cortex was completely shut down. But surely that was the case also with Pam Reynolds, and we know what sceptics thought of that.
He also thinks he's the first to have had such an experience "while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma." Perhaps so. But it's not the kind of detail that will change sceptics' views. They will continue to insist that the experience must occurred as he was coming out of coma..... continues
Copyright©Robert McLuhan
Reproduced courtesy of Robert McLuhan
Randi's Prize
Source
