Marshalling “The Spirit” for the Martial study
Thanks Paul for letting me know about this IANDS podcast with Charlotte Martial, the consciousness researcher from Liège University in Belgium (Liège is a top European university – when I was doing my Ph.D. I collaborated with them on anti-viral projects)
Firstly, it is not a great interview as the interviewer doesn’t seem to understand her position, or properly listen to her. She is a physicalist, and nothing that she has seen in her research has changed that position, so when he asks her at the end about the shift in understanding to a post materialistic world, he is barking up the wrong tree! As a result he doesn’t really challenge or probe her position, which is disappointing. Anyway, key relevant points:
She refers to her publication back in May last year that we discussed previously that proposes a model explaining NDEs physiologically. She makes the same fundamental mistake as Borjigin from Michigan by stating that the observed EEG activity is occurring during Cardiac arrest (CA). It is not. The EEG and neurotransmitter data she is referring to in humans is all before CA in patients who were in comas and whose EEG were isoelectric by the time they entered full CA. In rats there was EEG for maybe 20-30 seconds post CA. After that, nothing. In none of these studies was any patient recollections collected, so everything is speculative at best, but in reality it is worse than that.
There is no brain activity during CA, and therefore no observations can be made or new memories can be formed in the brain. Her hypothesis is that the NDE memories are created during this period (prior to CA) when the brain becomes hyperactive while starved of oxygen, but that theory has been debunked over and over again, not least in instances of sudden CA where there was no period of oxygen deprivation in the brain prior to CA. I have always said that the activity they have observed when patients or rats were basically suffocated, is the brain screaming at every system in the body to get oxygen moving around, but these are very different circumstances to the vast majority of NDEs that follow a different path, usually involving sudden death and CA, followed by immediate loss of consciousness. This is why more and more I am of the view that Sam Parnia’s acronym – REDs – recalled experiences of death, rather than Near Death, are superior when it comes to discussing these phenomenon in a research context.
They also talked about her ongoing AWARE-like study and why nobody has seen the hidden targets (they ignored the HCP validated OBE in AWARE I or the fact that so few even survived to be interviewed). Her explanation is that is scientifically impossible to observe things outside of ourselves while unconscious, so they will never see a hidden target. She said that the scientific explanation for OBEs is that the brain is conflating observations made before becoming unconscious with false memories of events – they are overlaying what they remembered about the environment prior to CA with new memories that didn’t happen. Of course when you look at some of the OBEs reported over the years, particularly those in the Titus Rivas book, the Self Does Not Die, this explanation falls apart.
Her AWARE-like study is ongoing, but she doesn’t expect there to be a hit for this reason. She is open, but her fundamental baseline position is that there is no afterlife…let’s see if we can change that!
CALL TO ACTION – for those of you who believe in the afterlife and God I am going to ask you to do something unsual…I am asking you to pray. If you are Christian, then pray specifically to Jesus, but if you have a general belief, then pray to God/the great spirit/the being of light etc. This is really important. I think that while Charlotte Marshall is obviously a materialist, I also think she is open to new evidence, but the only evidence that would challenge her worldview would be scientifically validated empirical evidence. It is a shame that she does not regard the testimonies of hundreds of patients and attending HCPs of observations of events/objects that could only be observed if the person’s consciousness had actually left the body as valid empirical evidence, but she is a scientist who seems only to regard scientifically produced evidence as valid. To this end she has created an experiment similar to the AWARE study (but really with the objective to disprove OBEs), and the only way that her worldview would shift is if there is a hit in her study. I say it is set up to disprove NDEs being real because she is only intending to recruit 100 patients, and as we know from previous studies, this is nowhere near enough. However, I mention in my book that it would delicious irony if the study set up by a sceptic to disprove NDEs would be the one that actually had a hit. Well let’s pray for it. I want you to pray the following, and try to remember to do it frequently:
“Dear God/Jesus/etc, I know you are real, I know that my soul will survive death, but so many people don’t and that this is a bad thing for them and for the world as their thinking is only focused on the material and passing. At the moment there is no scientifically validated evidence supporting the understanding that the consciousness can survive death, and that without such evidence it is hard to convince a materialistic world this may be true, therefore please allow at least one person in Charlotte Martial’s study, who has a full CA with no ECG and EEG, to observe the hidden target (s)and recall it accurately, and for this person’s testimony to be validated and presented publicly by Marshall.”
Simple. I believe in the power of prayer, and I believe that while it is vital that free choice is maintained, at the moment the lack of a scientifically validated OBE presents a very real barrier for some who might otherwise be inclined to believe. Hardcore sceptics will still dismiss it, but for those who have “eyes to see and ears to hear” it may be enough to spark their wider curiosity.
“God, please throw us a bone!”
Please visit my book site to find out more about my fiction and non-fiction books:
AwareofAware 
Well said Orson
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Thanks. I have retired my pseudonym Ben Williams, and now will post and comment under my real name…Orson Wedgwood. I think that NDEs are shortly going to be part of mainstream research, and I think there is more acceptance by many that they are real, so as a scientist I do not have to fear being “cancelled”. My employers know about my writing, so they are not bothered.
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That’s good to know that your employer is open to your views. I sometimes wonder how many doctors are open to these views but do not express them for fear of retribution.
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Lots. I’ve met many.
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Thanks for your analysis! The podcast is sadly pretty bad in general. Luckily, there are other free good ones out there.
I truly wonder why Martial goes to these podcasts. I first thought she was trying to come out of the post-materialist closet, but wasn’t at ease in English. I can confirm that her position is even more strict (and weird) in french. She went to this obviously new age podcast and the host concluded asking her to explain her hypothesis on how consciousness can exist outside the brain. It created a super awkward moment as she had to explain she didn’t believe that at all. The host was like : But … but what about all the cases reported ? Martial was like : none are scientifically solid. I truly felt the host was wondering at that moment why she accepted the interview. Maybe she choked vs her pre-interview stance?
Anyways, I truly wonder what her intentions are. Maybe she’s feeling the change you’re suggesting we pray for! Will do!
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Great take Dr!
I have reached out myself to Dr Martial to invite her onto my SeekingI to try and speak with her. Rest assured I certainly would press her on the phenomenon of veridical perception as outline especially in The Self Does not die. As you say, it seems so often to be ignored or bypassed when a person is arguing materialism.
Keep up the great work!
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>they are overlaying what they remembered about the environment prior to CA with new memories that didn’t happen
But then we’d expect these ‘memories’ to be wholly inaccurate as to what’s actually occurring beyond the body, especially when it comes to the actions of others after the period when the ‘real memories’ stop. Then you have cases where people have described events occurring well outside that immediate environment, and how would someone blind describe accurate visual experiences when their memories of the environment would be mostly auditory and tactile.
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Exactly…Martial does not address these OBEs. Her belief is that there is no afterlife, there is no God, there is no eternal soul and that science is able to explain everything. Therefore, since in the world in which she believes, it is not possible for someone to see something outside their body while unconscious, or as you correctly point out, sometimes even in another room, she ignores these accounts or discounts them as fabrications.
This is a very dangerous position to take. If, as the overwhelming empirical evidence from HCP and patients accounts suggests, there is an afterlife, and that in some of these accounts there are consequences for leading people away from faith, then she is putting herself in peril. Having said that, she is not strident as Borjigin in her position, and does not openly insult or deride those researchers who believe that NDEs are real, so there is hope for her.
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“There is no brain activity during CA,”
I guess you mean no normal wakeful EEG activity? But that’s not accurate either. As you pointed out, Borjigin’s iEEG cardiac arrest study showed spontaneous conscious-like activity in rodents after 15s, and up to 30s into CA. Bear in mind that there was no attempt to resuscitate these rodents.
NDE OBE experients who go into cardiac arrest in medical settings, often recall visual imagery of their OBE, from the time period of their resuscitation (rather than some other place, or time period). Suggesting their NDE OBE actually occurred around the time of resuscitation.
So the experients specific physiological state during the resuscitation period is very much implicated as a factor in these anomalous experiences. Had Borjigin’s rodents been resuscitated, we could surmise the conscious-like iEEG activity she observed would have persisted beyond 30s.
People recall seeing EMT’s etc working on them during cardiac arrest NDE OBE’s. The person generally has a memory gap between their wakeful state/initial CA collapse, and their anomalous OBE.
It’s their physiological state during resuscitation that is implicated. This is not a zero oxygen, or zero neuron firing state. The OBE component of the NDE seems to occur at some electromagnetic energy sweet spot between wakefulness, and the later NDE. Enough energy available for their network firing to be entrained by, but insufficient to overwhelm, external EM fields.
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There are countless OBEs reported from outside the setting where immediate resuscitation takes place. Moreover, many of the OBEs persist beyond the immediate attempts to resuscitate. But that is all irrelevant when you take into account the fact these people observed things that could not observed even if they had been wide awake lying on the gurney.
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I’d add, aside from my lack of trust in Bjorgin since the cardiac arrest study, that brain imaging techniques are tricky. They rely on algorithms and are sensitive to various elements. Using them to study new phenomena probably requires working on the data. Neuroscientists defend themselves hard when we remind them of that study, but they did once find brain activity in a dead salmon (not a recently dead one) using a precise technique (FMRI). Erik Hoel describes the limits of EEG in identifying consciousness. My argument goes both ways (prove or disprove NDEs), but I’m pretty sure physicalists would invoke it if they identified an OBE with a flat EEG.
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I enjoyed reading the books Irreducible Mind, Beyond Physicalism and Consciousness Unbound by the University of Virginia division of perceptual studies. Book 4 will be published this year.
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>conscious-like activity
I feel like it’s putting the cart before the horse given that we have no real way of knowing whether or not this activity was correlated with any actual experience. During Parnia’s study, conscious-like activity was found during the resuscitation but none of the patients who had this activity described any experience during their resuscitation.
Not only this, but we do have cases where people have described events prior to any resuscitation attempts, so I don’t think this theory really holds.
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Very good points. The problem with the Parnia data is that we do not even know if the patients with EEG activity survived. They definitely were not interviewed. Personally I just think that the activity is due to efficient CPR causing an attempted reboot…for anyone to infer that this is an NDE or consciousness is pure speculation.
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Surely you’re not denying the largest proportion of medical-type NDE OBE’s are recalled within the spacetime of the patients locality/resuscitation time period.
Yes there are outliers… but as these recalled experiences move further away from the patients locality… they also move from strangers to people the patient is related to.
Veridical NDE OBE’s are only veridical, because the recalled information comes from from the everday-world/spacetime.
I wouldn’t even compare the spatio/temporal resolution of Borjigins iEEG rodent study, with medical EEG, apples and oranges. Borjigin’s study is the absolute gold standard of dying studies. Her detailed results are amazing, they show distinct correlates with wakeful human and primate EEG/iEEG studies.
People overlook the fact that Borjigin didn’t attempt to resuscitate any of her rodents.
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Borjigin’s studies may have been well conducted, but the conclusions she drew and the statements she made in the press regarding those conclusions were not “Gold standard”. She claimed that the EEG activity they recorded occurred during CA. It did not. Cardiac arrest is when the heart has stopped. In the human coma patients none of the EEG activity occurred during CA, and yet she claimed it did. Her own charts presented in the paper show meaningful EEG activity stopping long before heartbeat ceased.
Yes, in the rats there was a short period (20-30s) of EEG after CA, and while some of the EEG signals produced were consistent with signals that occur during consciousness, they are also associated with [other] physiological processes. As you say, there is no evidence that the rats were conscious or capable of producing NDE like memories, and as far as I am aware there is not a single incidence in all of recorded medical history where a patient has maintained consciousness for a second or two beyond the heart stopping unless they have CPR. Heart stops>patient immediately loses consciousness > brain activity ceases. If anything Borjigin’s work confirms this established understanding. What she said in the press or what was said in the press about her work was extremely misleading.
CA causes an immediate drop in blood in pressure and cessation of heartbeat which causes immediate syncope in humans that require vast amounts of oxygenated blood to maintain consciousness. The brain is the most energy hungry organ in the body, and controls every aspect of bodily function. Consciousness, a higher level function, would be the first thing to go in an emergency situation where all focus would go on restoring heartbeat.
Going back to the rats (because in truth we should dismiss the coma patient studies as they did not produce the same results as the rats and said absolutely nothing groundbreaking), the suggestion that the EEG activity was possible evidence of conscious activity or brain activity capable of producing NDE like memories is pure speculation…it is far more likely that it is the brain using every last ounce of oxygenated blood to restart the heart.
Now, if we look at Parnia’s data from AWARE II, in which EEG data was recorded during CA while undergoing CPR, that was groundbreaking and of genuine interest. It is also rational to speculate that this activity could produce NDEs, but at the same time there is absolutely no evidence that it did (or does) since none of the patients who had activity were interviewed or recalled any memories during CA. This was Parnia’s position, and one that is consistent with the data. Borjigin’s statements are not consistent with the data. Martial also makes a similar statement in the IANDS interview, and it is a shame that the interviewer was insufficiently versed in the science to challenge her false assertion.
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Orson, You’ve just slid off the point I was making, and not addressed it.
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Actually my 2nd post in this thread was addressed to Paul’s 2nd post – but I missed out opening the post with his name.
Again Orson, you’ve missed addressing the points I was making in my 1st and 2nd posts, I’m not sure you’ve properly understood what I’ve written.
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IMO, the problem with the arguments made is the conscious-like EEG activity part. Borjigin claims her data has been over exaggerated by the media, but she’s part of the problem. She makes claims about brain activity that are a stretch. On a side note, she also doesn’t even adress possible confounding variables or limitations, which is wild to me. It’s an interesting preliminary study.
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To be completely fair to her, in the actual paper she published she does tone it down a bit, and points out that they could obviously not confirm that there was conscious activity. However, when she presented her work to a group of her peers at Michigan she adopted a completely different tone, saying it was during CA and was rudely critical of leading researchers in the NDE field. She showed herself as ideologically atheist, not just intellectually atheist. It is important to note her roots are from communist China I believe.
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In the interest of full disclosure let me state that I have not seen the interview nor do I have the interest in watching it. I did come across it when first posted on YouTube and was planning on bringing it to your attention. At the time, however, I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, which made reaching out very difficult.
When I first saw the interview posted on my YouTube feed, I was puzzled. I knew that Marshall was a physicalist and placed no credence on the proposition that consciousness could exist outside the brain. So what was she doing on IANDS? In fact, on October of 2024 I sent her an email requesting she clarify her position and much to my amazement, I got a response:
Hi,
Thank you for your interest in my research. As a neuroscientist, I hypothesize that consciousness is produced, at least in part, by the brain. However, there is still much to be done to fully understand how consciousness is created. The same applies to near-death experiences (NDEs); I believe that this subjective experience arises from neurophysiological mechanisms, but we still have a long way to go in understanding this phenomenon.
Best wishes, Charlotte Martial
That response told me plenty, which made her appearance on the IANDS YouTube account odd. Now I read that this interview suffers from what many interviews of this nature suffer from – an interviewer who can vigorously pursue answers that require a deeper understanding of both the subject matter and the background of the person that they are interviewing. This anemic style of interview I’ve seen many times before. Initially, though, I had hopes. I thought the interviewer would press Marshall with some of the more compelling particulars that make postmortem consciousness a viable option. Or, even better, that Marshall would either have a change of position or at least soften her materialistic attitude to consciousness. My hopes were dashed after reading your post, but I was grateful I had not wasted my time watching a video that would only frustrate me (mostly with the guy doing the interview). Well, let’s see what the future holds for Marshall. For now, I’m skipping the interview.
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Wish you all the best with your recovery!
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>I hypothesize that consciousness is produced, at least in part, by the brain
But no matter how detailed a description of the brain we have, nothing in that description entails experience. There’s also the issue that if the brain gives rise to experience, you need to be able to pinpoint a precise moment where you go from non-experience to experience, you’re describing the emergence of a new property that is not identical to nor entailed by whatever gives rise to it.
If she’s going the emergence route then she’s no longer a physicalist, she’s a property dualist. As Ralph Weir has, rightfully imho, argued property dualists should be substance dualists.
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Good afternoon, Orson, and to all the readers of the blog.
Regarding the phenomenon of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), I believe that, for now, we do not need to focus on whether it definitively proves the survival of consciousness — although, as a matter of common sense, I am inclined to believe in such survival. The AWARE II study, led by Parnia, showed that the experiences associated with NDEs do indeed occur; however, the author does not state whether their origin is physical or extraphysical, and further research is needed to clarify this distinction.
I therefore suggest that we concentrate on the derived phenomena — such as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) — and especially on Extrasensory Perception (ESP), which, in my view, is closely related to NDEs and may constitute a facet of the same process. I support this equivalence for a central reason: controlled studies on ESP, particularly in selected individuals, present very robust statistical evidence. When no known physical mechanism is identified that could explain these results — as discussed in scientific debates, such as the overcoming of Persinger’s ELF-wave model by the work of Stephan A. Schwartz in the Sanguine and Deep Quest projects — it becomes plausible to consider that ESP has an extraphysical origin and is intrinsically related to consciousness.
There is also a clinically relevant fact. Parnia reported that only about 1% of cardiac arrest victims undergoing CPR show eye opening and rolling at the critical moment. On the other hand, reports such as those of Sabom show that patients who experienced NDEs describe CPR procedures with high accuracy — in some cases with greater precision than experienced cardiac patients — even without showing signs of eye opening. Classical studies, such as those of Sabom, as well as later analyses (including van Lommel and AWARE I), reinforce these findings.
In light of this, the question arises: how can laypeople, with their eyes closed, report CPR procedures with such precision? A coherent explanation is that ESP manifests during NDEs in a visual modality, allowing non-sensory observations directly associated with consciousness. If ESP displays extraphysical characteristics and, at the same time, explains the “visual” component of NDEs, then this suggests that, at least in part, consciousness itself possesses an extraphysical aspect. In other words, if a phenomenon intrinsically linked to consciousness operates beyond the limits of known physical mechanisms, this points to the existence of a component of consciousness that transcends the physical.
Thus, by combining the controlled evidence of ESP in selected individuals with the clinical reports of NDEs, it becomes reasonable to investigate the hypothesis that ESP and NDEs share the same extraphysical substrate of consciousness, indicating that at least some dimension of consciousness is not exhausted by a purely material explanation.
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Zero doubt in my mind that people really do occasionally recall experiences that are not their own.
I don’t doubt that ‘veridical’ out-of-body experiences, really are anomalous.
How we currently understand ‘Experience’ seems to be incorrect. That is, our observations are correct, but the consensus stories we’ve made-up, to join these observations together are incorrect.
The two main polarized positions on the NDE / NDE OBE keep slugging it out. 1). It’s all happening within an isolated brain. Or, 2). something leaves the body. Both positions seem to assume a separate physical world? One posits a separate isolated brain, the other a separate isolated ‘soul’?
Both positions use old ideas that isolate the experient from some separate physical world, and because of lots of very good evidence, they are both doomed to failure IMO.
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Orson — unfortunately I can’t listen to the audio because I don’t speak English, but I read the text and noticed that the interviewee makes strong criticisms of the NDE phenomenon.
If she really wants to test these criticisms in practice, I propose two concrete approaches:
To repeat, with rigorous criteria, Sabom’s foundational study — credibly interviewing people who report NDEs and who suffered confirmed cardiac arrest during CPR, and comparing them with experienced cardiac patients who have never reported NDEs.
An experiment like the one described by the Brazilian neurosurgeon Dr. Edson Amâncio: placing lay people, while conscious, in the same position as CPR victims and simulating, as much as possible, the resuscitation procedures (with their eyes closed). Then, the volunteers are taken out of the room and asked to describe everything they remember. According to Dr. Amâncio, most of them are unable to describe even half of what was observed.
If critics truly wish to assess the strength of their objections, I invite them to replicate these protocols — with well-defined samples and rigorous recording of procedures — to see whether their criticisms hold up in the face of empirical evidence.
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The fact that these experiences occur during a state of CA with the absence of brain activity definitely points out that people are thinking too narrow mindedly of the situation. There is definitely something at play here and we don’t even know what it is. “Oh but it’s the brain” “Oh it’s DMT” “Oh it’s spikes of energy.” No no and no. There is no physicality involved in any of this. Do people not see the bigger picture here. If there was physicality then the more private testimonies that state otherwise would have detailed it. There is not. I swear people are afraid of some form of eternal life sometimes. And they will do anything to think otherwise.
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But is not ‘an absence of brain activity’, it’s ‘an absence of normal brain activity as measured by medical EEG’. That suggests our stories about how the brain works are inaccurate.
Anyone is welcome to come up with a story to explain what is going on.
For myself, I’ve been forced to accept that Experience emerges from just one thing that we share. It seems inevitable there is going to be some 1:1 mathematical correspondence between some structure/s in the brain, and some future mathematical theory-of-everything (i.e. generalizing QM and Relativity).
We’re stuck within Experience, and the organism apparently coming up with the theories, is the same organism having the Experience. The predictive stories (theories) with which we join our observations together, come from the same organism. Scientists are only exploring their own Experience.
If there is any truth to Experience (and surely there must be), the predictive mathematical stories must eventually collide with the organism itself. We end up coming full circle – and finding ourselves.
No way out that way…
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I think we’ll first have to explain consciousness before concluding anything about the brain. And even if there was brain activity involved, you’d still be left with anomalous phenomena to explain. I think the reasons for physicalism lie in the fact that it’s associated with a long gone past where we misunderstood a lot of things. Our progress make it seem like every past ideas were at best naive even if it’s not the case at all. Hard physicalists push that button a lot, so one in the scientific field with no personal mystical experience (my case) will fear sounding stupid entertaining those ideas while lacking the experience to counterbalance this. Personally, I therefore stay in the closet. Michael Shermer’s radio story shows how intensely people will react even in front of a slight relaxing of this mistrust of all non-physical stuff.
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I meant the reason for physicalists reactions to Non-physicalist theories, not the reason for physicalism!
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That is interesting. Yes, because I have a very powerful “mystical experience”, and many other less powerful, but nonetheless amazing experiences, I am not in the closet any more. I actually find a lot of people are very open to these things, even in the scientific community in which I work. I my experience millennials and Gen Z are much more interested and open to spiritual ideas than Gen X or boomers.
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Check out the book Lucid Dying by Sam Parnia
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Good week to everyone.
I recently commented that Extrasensory Perception (ESP) is a plausible mechanism to explain the detailed observation reported by near-death experience (NDE) victims during CPR procedures. There is solid statistical evidence from studies with selected sensitives — for example, work involving Sean Harribance and Ingo Swann — that supports the empirical robustness of the phenomenon. At the same time, strictly materialist explanations have encountered relevant theoretical and empirical difficulties. Indirect investigations conducted by the U.S. Navy, as well as analyses by researchers such as Stephan Schwartz, weaken the hypothesis that ESP can be sufficiently explained by simple electromagnetic mechanisms, such as ELF waves proposed by Michael Persinger.
Persinger did, in fact, show correlations between electromagnetic fields and the activity of some sensitives, proposing that ELF activity could mediate anomalous experiences. However, even if in the future defenders of materialism again attempt to explain NDEs through these mechanisms — for example, claiming that the brain remains functional during CPR and produces extrasensory perception via ELF — the current limits of such explanations require us to consider broader theoretical alternatives.
For this reason, I propose widening the focus: instead of restricting ourselves only to NDEs, it is worth incorporating into the debate an anomalous phenomenon that has been well documented for more than fifteen years and is capable of shedding light on the hypothesis of the non-locality of consciousness — the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). Conceived by Roger Nelson, with contributions from researchers such as Dean Radin, the GCP (version 1.0) operated from the late 1990s until approximately 2015–2016 and used a global network of truly random number generators (RNGs). In more than 500 formal predictions, the project reported highly improbable statistical deviations in these RNGs during emotionally charged global events — orders of magnitude so low that, according to the reports, they would correspond to probabilities of less than 1 in 1 trillion. From the beginning, the data, methodology, and results were kept publicly accessible.
Nelson and Radin interpret these findings as indications that when a large number of humans cognitively converge on an event, a statistical anomaly emerges in the behavior of physical systems that are demonstrably random in nature, without any currently known physical bridge capable of explaining such an effect. The discussion gained academic visibility when Etzel Cardeña addressed the topic in an article published in American Psychologist, which helps legitimize the debate within psychological science.
The central question I propose for reflection is the following: how can a set of minds, without any known physical mediation, influence the functioning of truly random number generators distributed around the globe? In light of the GCP findings, together with the evidence from ESP and NDE studies, it becomes reasonable to consider hypotheses according to which consciousness has non-local components or is not strictly reducible to the physical brain. In other words, these results may be seen as circumstantial indications that consciousness, at least in certain aspects, extends beyond the boundaries of the body — a hypothesis that deserves serious and rigorous investigation rather than aprioristic rejection.
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The video above is a news report from a U.S. television network about the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), possibly from 2008. It clearly summarizes the methodology and the results accumulated up to that point: there was already strong statistical evidence — with levels of improbability relative to chance on the order of 1 in a million — and, by the end of the project, the accumulated results had surpassed the trillion mark.
Using the heads-or-tails metaphor, and assuming that true random number generators (True-RNGs) produce independent events, the behavior observed is not what would be expected from purely random fluctuations. In other words, the data point to a robust statistical anomaly that deserves attention and further investigation.
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Observation: In the news report, as a counterargument, the network turned to a NASA scientist to invalidate the observations of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This rhetorical choice, in my view, involves two clear persuasive fallacies: first, an appeal to authority — argumentum ad verecundiam — since authority in astrophysics does not substitute for a specific statistical analysis of the project; second, an appeal to ignorance — argumentum ad ignorantiam — because the scientist stated that “there is nothing there” without presenting any quantitative counter-analysis that refutes the published statistics. Anyone can consult the public archive of GCP 1.0, examine the data, the pre-specified time windows, and the cumulative tests (Z-scores, Monte Carlo simulations, etc.), and draw a conclusion based on evidence. Personally, I believe that the correct scientific stance, when faced with a statistical anomaly, requires documented refutation, not an unsupported denial.
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How the GCP choose significant events was opaque. But even worse, the problems with using these random number generators for their work, convinced me there is nothing anomalous to see here. One can’t attach a 100 dollar RNG to a PC, and state you are measuring consciousness, without first demonstrating one has removed all other more obvious causes.
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Good midweek, Max.
Respectfully, I disagree with the interpretation that characterizes the selection of events by the GCP as obscure. In the hypothesis registry published on the project’s official website, the researchers describe in detail how most events were preselected — for example, commemorative dates such as New Year’s Eve — and also explain the procedure for unpredictable events (human or natural disasters). In these unpredictable cases, the general criterion of the event (e.g., “earthquake”) and the study window were preregistered; therefore, the event’s significance was not defined a posteriori. All of this can be examined in detail on the GCP 1.0 website.
Personally, I have not identified methodological flaws or obscurity in the selection of events. Regarding the causal link between the statistical anomaly observed and “collective mind” influences, it is worth noting that many high-impact events (such as the fall of Muammar Gaddafi) coincided with deviations from randomness, while non-impactful events (for example, certain routine political speeches) showed no such deviations. These deviations, often small in each individual event, accumulated cumulatively to produce an overwhelming improbability relative to chance (on the order of 1 in more than a trillion).
Monte Carlo simulations, used to model the expected behavior under randomness, did not reproduce the curve observed by the GCP — the “red line” reached by the project’s data lies outside the envelope generated by the simulations. How can a naturally random process deviate so markedly from randomness — and do so predominantly in the events that were preregistered as significant? In my assessment, this convergence is strong evidence of a causal nexus that warrants careful investigation.
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To consult the formal results of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP 1.0), interested readers can access the following address:
https: //noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html
To view the results of the Monte Carlo simulations of GCP 1.0, visit:
https: //noosphere.princeton.edu/images/images2/currzrand.500.2.gif
Note: the links above were intentionally separated after “https: //”. To access them, simply remove the space and join them again.
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It is also worth consulting some studies conducted prior to GCP 1.0 by the same researchers — Roger Nelson and Dean Radin — in which selected individuals (especially meditators) were invited to attempt to influence truly random number generators (RNGs). According to the authors, the results of these experiments were positive.
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In the article “The Emotional Nature of Global Consciousness – Paper for the Bial Foundation 7th Symposium, March 2008,” by Roger D. Nelson, the author states, in the procedures section, that the general hypothesis of the GCP consists of the prediction that correlated structure will be found in nominally random data during major world events that mobilize the attention of large numbers of people. These events are analyzed in a series of replications previously specified in a public registry, prior to the examination of the data. For each event, the researchers define its beginning and end, extract the corresponding data, and submit them to pre-established statistical procedures (Nelson et al., 2002; Nelson & Bancel, 2006; Bancel & Nelson, 2008). Event selection depends on what is occurring in the world and is influenced largely by media interest. Both negative events — wars, terrorist attacks, major accidents, and natural disasters — and positive events — celebrations, religious gatherings, organized meditations, and peace demonstrations — are taken into account. Although the selection criteria are not strictly algorithmic, they prioritize occurrences capable of generating deep emotional involvement and broad, potentially global, interest, allowing comparisons among emotional categories and intensities, as well as between predominantly emotional and intellectual content.
The author further emphasizes that, although events are not chosen according to fixed or algorithmic criteria, the hypothesis tests conducted in the GCP are statistically and scientifically valid. All analysis parameters are specified in advance for each individual event, and the results are fully reported and included in cumulative statistics. Thus, each event constitutes a fully qualified hypothesis test, with a measurable outcome that can be evaluated against a theoretical or empirically derived distribution. The experiment as a whole can be described as a test of a composite hypothesis that generalizes the event-based hypotheses and investigates whether there is evidence of structure in the GCP data correlated with major global events. This demonstrates that the selection and registration of events were carried out in advance, as described in the experimental protocol itself.
Regarding defects in the RNGs used in the project, this issue is addressed on the official GCP 1.0 website, in the section “The GCP Data.” The researchers explicitly recognize that the random number generators — the so-called “eggs” — are not perfect devices and may occasionally produce defective data sequences, the so-called “bad eggs,” resulting from technical failures or hardware instabilities. Throughout the development of the project, these problems were systematically identified, leading to the creation of specific procedures for their detection and correction. Public lists of known errors were established, as well as methodological criteria to exclude, from formal analyses, periods in which the devices showed anomalous performance. In this way, the researchers not only acknowledged the limitations of the RNGs, but also implemented statistical and operational safeguards to prevent such defects from contaminating the results.
Considering these two points — the preregistration of events and the methodological treatment of RNG defects — it can be understood that the experiment rests on consistent scientific foundations and successfully identifies a clear statistical anomaly in the project’s data.
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With a wider frame of reference one starts to appreciate the absurdity of the GCP’s claim, such as: how different RNG’s work, what they are designed to do, how they achieve this. Problems with RNG’s, what environmental factors / power supply issues can alter output, papers on how secure RNG encryption can be hacked.
As a child, I got to tour a Nuclear Power Station with the school. In the control room, we were shown one of the most important pieces of information they used… the TV Guide… there were huge power spikes as everyone turned their kettles on, and flushed the loo, washed hands etc between popular TV programs, and during Ad breaks etc.
I’ll say it again, one can’t attach a 100 dollar RNG to a PC, and state you are measuring consciousness, without first demonstrating one has excluded all other more obvious causes.
I’ve discussed The GCP to death on forums like mindenergy, skeptiko and psiencequest, I have little interest in discussing it here, and certainly not when arguing with AI output.
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Max, I’m curious about how electricity spikes could influence the RNG (though I could ask the same question for consciousness 🤣). I feel it could be a valid confounding variable that could easily be either controlled physically or statistically. Have you ever reached out to the authors?
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Oh, just read the answer online, thought it would be more complicated lol. Can’t believe they can’t control for external factors or use multiple devices to attenuate the effects? I haven’t read their results though, it’s not something I’m super interested in…
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Max B I asked Copilot …”In the Princeton Global Consciousness Project are the random number generators shielded against other sources apart from consciousness effects”
Now I knew they are … but got this reply,
“Yes — the random number generators (RNGs) used in the Princeton Global Consciousness Project (GCP) are carefully shielded against ordinary physical and environmental influences. They rely on quantum-indeterminate noise sources and undergo extensive calibration to ensure that any deviations cannot be explained by external interference such as electromagnetic fields, temperature fluctuations, or hardware bias.”
Look, when you think of it they’d be way ahead of your criticisms from the very start. They’re Uni. level researchers not some random dudes.
Besides Dr. Dean Radin and colleagues have demonstrated in completely unrelated and extensive experiments that consciousness can alter quantum level experiments to the level of a scientific discovery.
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I saw the book The Self Does Not Die referenced in the original post here. I have concerns about this book and could you some perspective on this blog. I decided to do my own investigative research on many of the cases in the book. I focused primarily on Peak in Darien cases as I feel that encountering deceased individuals not known to have died is some of the best evidence of consciousness surviving death. However, what I found was quite troubling.
The first case I looked into was the case of Eddie Cuomo. In The Self Does Not Die the case is written as follows:
9 year old Eddie Cuomo was admitted to hospital in Pennsylvania in the late 80/early 90s with severe fever. He was attended too by a physician named K.M. Dale. Eddies prognosis was quite grim and he had to be resuscitated. After 36 hours he improved and he reported to his father that he had a NDE where he encountered many deceased relatives but also his older sister Teresa Cuomo. This concerned Eddies father because he had just spoken to Teresa over the phone at her college in Vermont a few days ago. The father is reported to be so troubled by this that he actually asked Dr. Dale to sedate Eddie. Later when Eddie was discharged the family returned home and had several messages on their answering machine from Teresa’s college in Vermont desperately trying to inform them of Teresa’s death in a car accident right at the time of Eddies reported experience.
Now, this is quite good evidence Teresa’s consciousness survived her death and was able to communicate with Eddie during his experience. Furthermore, The Self Does Not Die claims to have done verification on all the cases in the book but I decided to research on my own as well.
The Eddie Cuomo case is included in Dr. Bruce Greyson’s 2010 academic paper compiling many reported Peak in Darien cases. In Greysons paper, the Cuomo case is written just the same as what is in the book The Self Does Not Die. It appears that the case was taken from Greyson’s paper and included in the book and that since Greyson is regarded as a very solid researcher, no additional verification was conducted.
I then looked at where Greyson derived the case from and I saw in the reference that Greyson had taken the case from a 1993 book by Brad Steiger called “Children of the Light.” I looked up Steiger and found that he was widely regarded as a very bad researcher. Many of his books had been called out widely as having been poorly researched and even completely fabricated. Regardless, I bought and read the book. Again, in Steiger’s book the story is included much the same but also the book never states who reported the case to Steiger or how or if Steiger ever verified the case as accurate or real. It appeared Greyson had taken the case from Steiger’s book and simply included it in his academic paper.
I then looked up historical records of physicians and pediatric physicians in Pennsylvania. I found no record of a K.M. Dale having ever have been licensed anywhere in Pennsylvania. I found a Dale E. King in Pittsburgh but he’s much too young and is licensed currently. I then looked up death records in Pennsylvania, Vermont, and also New York for a Teresa Cuomo. The only 3 Teresa Cuomo’s who are in any of the records are were all over 80 years old at the time of their deaths.
At this point it is really appearing that the case never happened then was never verified by subsequent researcher. I emailed Titus Rivas about this who then emailed Greyson about how he verified the case. Greyson responded that he hadn’t. He had included the case because that paper was to highlight the Peak in Darien phenomenon as opposed to researching their objective reality. This was highly disappointing. In the second version of The Self Does Not Die the authors included a footnote about how this case was not rigorously validated but the case was kept in the book.
Another case I researched was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s case about a boy in her care who reported a Peak in Darien case to her. This case was also in The Self Does Not Die and Greysons 2010 paper.
In the book the case is written as follows: A young boy who had been involved in a severe car accident was admitted in critical condition and placed under Ross’s care. The accident had claimed the life of the boys mother at the scene and the boys twin brother Peter had been burned and taken to a burn unit at a different hospital. As the boy was dying he reported to Ross that “Everything is okay, mommy and Peter are here to take me.” The boy died shortly after. This was peculiar to Ross as she believed that Peter was alive in the burn unit at a different hospital. However, when Ross went back to the nurses station she received a message that Peter had died right at the time the boy in her care reported he had seen him.
Again, this is very good evidence that Peter’s consciousness had survived his death and was able to communicate with his brother. The case is also included in Greysons paper in exactly the same way. Kübler-Ross, like Greyson, is regarded as a very good researcher so it appears the case was included in The Self Does Not Die for this reason alone.
I researched where Greyson took this case from and the references in his paper listed Kübler-Ross’s 1992 book “On Children and Death.” I read the book and the case is written about by Kübler-Ross in exactly the same manner as in Greysons paper and as is included in The Self Does Not Die. However, I then watched a YouTube video of Kübler Ross talking about this case in an interview in the 1980s. In the interview she refers to the patient in her care as a little girl, not a little boy. I also found a 1987 LA Times article where Ross also refers to the patient as a little girl. However then in her book she refers to the patient as a little boy. Why this discrepancy? This is not as fatal as what I found in the Cuomo case but still if this case was poignant enough for her to speak of it in multiple interviews and articles as well as include it in her book, why is there this discrepancy?
Lastly I looked into a third case in The Self Does Not Die. This was a case reported by Dr. Raymond Moody.
In the book it is reported that Moody was giving a talk to soldiers at Ft. Dix New Jersey. After the talk a young Army Sergeant approached Moody and wanted to tell him of his own experience. He reported to Moody that relatively recently he had been admitted to a hospital in New Jersey and subsequently went into cardiac arrest. In his arrest he had a NDE where he encountered his sister who he believed to be alive. In the experience, his sister told him he had to go back but she would be staying. He then survived and reported to his attending physician that his sister was in the same hospital and had died. The physician didn’t believe him but at the sergeants insistence he went to check and was stunned to find that the sergeants sister had been admitted to another area of the hospital in a diabetic coma and had died just as his patient had described. Moody was also stunned by this case and decided that since he was in New Jersey he would go see if he could speak to this physician himself. He did speak to this physician who also told Moody that everything the sergeant had told him was true.
Again, this is great evidence that this sergeants sisters consciousness had survived her death, and the fact Moody was able to confirm this event with the attending physician is also huge.
This case is also in Greysons 2010 paper so I looked in the references and saw that this case had been included in three of Moody’s books. One in the 80’s, one in 2010, and again in 2023. In the book from the 80s and 2010 it is reported that the sergeants sisters consciousness was admitted to a different area of the same hospital. In the 2023 book it is reported that she was admitted to a completely separate hospital. This discrepancy matters because it affects how the physician was able to verify so quickly the death of his patients sister. Again, not as fatal as the findings in the Cuomo case but I decided to look into this. I was able to set up a phone call with Moody. I asked him about this and he said he could not recall if it was the same hospital or a different hospital. I left this alone and then asked him about when he verified with the attending physician that this event happened. He told me he could no longer recall if he had actually spoken with the physician, only that he recalled speaking with someone who had confirmation knowledge.
This is a problem. The physicians confirmation is central to the objective reality of this case.
All three of these cases are included in both versions of The Self Does Not Die and presented as truly verified. But are they? This has pulled the rug out from under me about NDEs in general and especially the cases in The Self Does Not Die. How was I, a layperson, able to find all this? What other cases are not truly verified or worse totally fabricated?
Any help here?
I’m working on a paper on my findings but I’m not an academic and it’s taken me years to do this. It’s been peer reviewed by researcher associated with the Journal of Near Death Studies once and needless to say it didn’t go well because my writing style isn’t academic.
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Hi Micky,
Welcome. I truly commend your curiosity and tenacity in pursuing these cases and determining that they may not have been as watertight as claimed. Well done.
It is indeed troubling if what you say is true, and that the details were not just lost in time. Such instances do undermine the credibility of such accounts, and by implication other accounts, so I can understand why you would be struggling with accepting the reality of NDEs. I have two points that may add perspective:
1. I have never personally put much stock in these Peak in Darien cases, or regarded them as a central piece of evidence. I find them interesting, and in some instances possible supportive evidence of NDEs, but otherwise to me they are just a curiosity. In my latest book I discuss the possibility that what is happening in NDEs after the OBE, while authentically experienced, and a result of the consciousness leaving the body, may not be as straightforward as people report. Are people really meeting dead relatives, or is something else going on?
2. While it appears that you have found good reasons to cast doubt on these particular cases, have you been able to do the same for the other 120 odd cases in Rivas’ book, many of which have been reported elsewhere and in some instances where the physicians are on camera describing the incident? If you were able to do that with all these cases, then you would have good cause to suspect that all NDEs are indeed either a fabrication or an hallucination, but given this is not the case, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Orson,
thanks for your reply. I did not research in depth all the cases in the book. I really just stuck to the Peak in Darien cases. I did look into a few other cases.
You are right that it’s easy to throw the baby out with the bath water so I need to watch that. There are still strong cases of the strictly veridical perception type. The case from AWARE I, Pam Reynolds, Dr. Lloyd Rudy, Al Sullivan, and I like the French case documented by Sonia Barkallah (sp?) added in the second edition. That one seems to have good documentation.
This has just really confused me about why these cases are repeatedly presented as fact by researchers when I was able to find such holes. How do you incorporate this into the big picture here?
-Micky
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I think the idea of the big picture is the point. The veridical OBEs are very grounded in the reality we are familiar with, and given the large number of cases where physicians have said that there was no way they could see the things they reported, and that we have a number of these testimonies documented on video, that is our baseline position. As far as I am concerned these OBEs are fact, there are just too many respected doctors who have concluded the same after being involved in one, and put their reputations on the line.
The Peak in Darien is part of the subjective experience in my view. They seem to be objectively testable because they meet people who have just died but couldn’t have know they died, but at the same time they are entering a different dimension not connected with this reality, so I would argue they are less likely to be reliable and more subject to speculation and falsification.
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Excellent research… but don’t expect any thanks… IMO people generally ignore the cases you’ve researched, and simply point to another case you haven’t researched.
I’ve never taken much interest in the so called Peak in Darien cases, a) people also see the living in their NDE’s. b) I think NDE’s tell us really important NEW things about the living, and have nothing to say, either-way, about an ‘afterlife’. c) We’re all going to die anyway, and find out (or not) what happens at death.
As for Rivas & Smit book, (I looked back at my Amazon review…) it has lots of cases, but I found the detail lacking. Everything gets presented from a ‘life after death’ viewpoint. I found important details from some cases missing, and the authors’ discussion didn’t challenge their own position – very biased IMO.
Smithy recently published a new example case (on psiencequest) as a teaser that’s going into a forthcoming addition to the book. I’ve researched that case (results on here somewhere IIRC). What he published doesn’t resemble my research on that case. I think the authors are now just appealing to their audience, and sticking two fingers up at their critics – behind their back.
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Thing is Max, you ignore or don’t know peripheral related evidence like reincarnation memories, Cardena’s 2018 psi review in American Psychologist. I could go on. Since psi phenomena are real there’s the base – minds don’t necessarily need brains because stuff “gets out” over distance. If it stays out you’ve got non-corporeal existence.
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Alan, actually I’m not ignorant or unaware of other anomalous phenomena.
If there is any truth to Experience (and surely there must be), then our Experience of the organism which is ‘apparently’ having the Experience (you and I) must also have some truth.
The problem IMO is around the naive framing and assumptions we were taught about Experience (what physicists call Nature).
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Max, I thought you put that very well. Experience is also “nothing like” anything else and that opens a lot.
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I see Greyson and his incumbent NDE scale has fired a broadside back at Martial’s challenger NDE-C scale… lol
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810025001722?dgcid=coauthor
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Ive read The Self Doesn’t Die. Both the first and second edition. I take it with a grain of salt. However, researchers like Sam Parnia, Bruce Greyson, Jeffery Long and others research is credible. Melvin Morse research in children’s NDES is very good. Check out the books Irreducible Mind Beyond Physicalism and Consciousness Unbound from the University of Virginia division of perceptual studies. Also Sam Parnia book Lucid Dying and After by Bruce Greyson as well.
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saw an interesting video on YouTube. The name was
He PROVED the Afterlife Is REAL: A Clinically Dead Patient’s Verifiable NDE Story
Good case from those that like veridical cases.
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i meant to say good case *for* those that like veridical cases
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I saw the video too. I agree
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Great veridical NDE OBE case… a classic… OBE recall starts from resuscitation. And, when there are multiple third parties looking down… it’s correlated with the experients sense-of-self logically located higher – to make sense of the anomalous visual information.
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Hi Orson, as you’re in NZ I just spotted FYI Dr. Jesse Bering is there too. Has a deep book on Ian Stevenson coming out 2026. You’d both have a lot to talk about!
The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson One Scientist’s Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul
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