New Kid On The NDE Block

(If Ms Martial sees this picture, I hope she takes it in the spirit of fun it is intended…maybe she was a fan of these blokes if she is old enough to remember them…I was not).

I started this blog primarily to discuss clinical research into NDEs. Sam Parnia’s AWARE studies have formed the backbone of such research over the past 2 decades, but there is a new kid on the block and her name is Charlotte Martial (thanks Z for the heads-up). Below is a link the latest interview with her:

https://nautil.us/the-new-science-of-the-near-death-experience-1279957

Martial approaches the subject from a different angle to Parnia, specifically she is clearly a physicalist and unfortunately, I believe this prejudices her work. Parnia, while apparently a dualist, at least attempted to maintain some impartiality and retain an open mind as to what was causing NDEs…he allows for a physiological explanation while stating that the evidence defies this. Martial does not allow for non-physiological causes at all. This necessarily means that all of her discussions and conclusions will be framed by this thinking, forcing her to interpret the data in one way only, even if logic dictates otherwise. It is also possible that it may also influence her presentation of the actual data too. This is something that we observed in extremis with Jimo Borjigin who went beyond just allowing bias to enter discussion, to the point where she completely “misrepresented” her data to create an entirely false conclusion (which was lapped up by the media)…specifically she claimed that there was an increase in brain activity DURING cardiac arrest in coma patients when her own raw data clearly showed that it happened PRIOR to Cardiac arrest, and that by the time the heart had stopped beating all notable EEG activity had ceased. On this point, Martial sets out her stand on more solid ground from the start.

Moreover, unlike Borjigin who never actually researched NDEs, but rather looked at neurological output around the time of death in rats and coma patients, Martial has been running a study similar to the AWARE studies, interviewing patients after resuscitation and it seems that she has now garnered enough data to publish.

From the interview this is a summary of the data she has:

We tracked 180 patients, and of those, 12 had near-death experiences. Our preliminary results suggest that the brains of patients who had near-death experiences showed greater complexity than those who did not.

and

what we observed is that as soon as several days after the acute severe crisis, we can see memory change in terms of content of the experience, which challenged what was found in the retrospective literature.

Some features appeared, and some others disappeared in their memories. For instance, you can have someone who doesn’t report an out-of-body experience upon awakening, however, two months later, the person does report it.

By now readers of this blog will be familiar with the idea of headline hype. What I mean by that is that the headlines about a study, even sometimes the title, over-egg the actual findings that can be drawn from the data. Sometimes there is [innocent] conflation of data, such as in Parnia’s recent AWARE study in which he seemed to merge data from his prospective observational clinical study with retrospective reports from his database, and from this you get headlines that are spuriously related to the data. In the case of Borjigin, it goes way beyond that. Headlines and statements in the press are designed to draw attention, and in this case in the first paragraph we are obviously drawn to the words:

Our preliminary results suggest that the brains of patients who had near-death experiences showed greater complexity than those who did not.

Given the fact that she says this is the first time that EEG data has been collected in patients who have had NDEs, the implication is that she has managed to link EEG output associated with high level brain activity with actual NDE reports. If this is true, then this is definitely a step beyond what was achieved in AWARE II which also collected EEG data in patients undergoing CPR. In that study there was high level brain activity in some patients, but none who later reported an NDE. BUT while the wording of her statement seems to imply that Martial has this kind of data, will the reality survive rigorous scrutiny? Key questions to consider when she publishes her data:

• Was this EEG activity before, during CA, or after resuscitation? She says patients were unresponsive, does that mean that they had no vitals (no heartbeat), or were they just unconscious but with a heartbeat.
• If the EEG activity was during CA…i.e. they had no heartbeat, were they undergoing CPR at the time? This is what was observed in AWARE II.
• Have they been able to “timestamp” the NDE. This requires an OBE which contains an observation that can be linked to a specific timepoint, and if so, what were the physiological parameters of the patient. Were they still in CA? Were they undergoing CPR?

With regard to the report of at least one OBE, she states that the patient did not recall the OBE until an interview 2 months later. It is great that there was an OBE (if it is a proper OBE), but depending on the content, it is definitely open to accusations of corruption – not deliberate necessarily, but of the notion of false memory creation. This piece of data will be of greatest interest of all to me.

How long will we have to wait?

 As is the case in research, I would expect that a publication would be preceded by an abstract at a conference, and that given her increased press activity, that is likely to be in the near future. The spring conference season runs till early July, then things tend to die over the Northern Hemisphere summer, before resuming in the Fall. Given the data she is already talking about, I suspect that she will have submitted her abstract to at least one or two conferences, and deadlines for submission are usually about 3 months prior, so we may get something as early as June, but may have to wait till the backend of the year. I put money Z will spotting it first! I will set up a PubMed and other alerts though as this certainly has the potential to be the most important study in this field since AWARE II.

I just wish she would adopt a more open-minded approach though. It would actually be in her interests if she wanted to sell books or gain publicity one day, although that is not a good reason to bias research of course. The fact is there is a massive interest in the area of spirituality among younger people today, and unless her data absolutely rules out the possibility of NDEs being the result of non-physiological origins, she should avoid presenting it in that light, as she does in this interview. She completely shuts down the possibility of non-natural causes, and I seriously doubt that the data proves this to be the case as it is extremely hard to prove a negative. It would better that she adopted the nuanced position that Parnia does…namely she could say that while this data supports the NEPTUNE model for explaining NDEs, it is still possible there are other causes, and there remain many accounts of NDEs that defy natural explanation.

Frankly no one is going to give a monkey’s about her NEPTUNE model except a few Guardian-reading cranks, since it is not really that different from previous attempts to explain NDEs as being the result of neurotransmitters. These attempts have been thoroughly debunked by the likes of Greyson, and even Parnia. The NEPTUNE model has the added weakness of being linked to the theory that NDEs are a form of Thanotosis:

“Basically, we suggest the NDE is a defense mechanism for coping with a life-threatening situation. It permits the person to disconnect from the environment, from the surroundings, to be absorbed into a more peaceful mental experience.”

The interviewer does a pretty decent job of highlighting the obvious flaws in that approach. The last thing you want is to be peaceful in a life-threatening situation…normally it is fight or flight, and while playing dead (Thanatosis) may suit some creatures in certain situations, they are not actually going through physiological death, they are just “scared to death”. The way she answers that is to claim that the psychological outcomes of NDEs are usually positive and that this may have evolutionary benefit:

for some at least, have psychological benefits. A lot of people who experience NDEs say it’s life transforming. It allows them to evolve and change their own behavior or beliefs. We suggest that the NDE arises when you don’t have any other kind of escape. So there is this fight-or-flight mechanism, but when neither fight nor flight is possible, this alternative would arise

I hope that was her just making it up on the spot as it not a very robust theory.

Ultimately her whole NEPTUNE model and accompanying theory suffers from a whopping great big flaw. Prior to the 1950s the overwhelming majority of people who had CAs stayed dead. It was only through the invention of CPR that people were able to come back (this coincided with the massive uptick in reports of NDEs). If the proximity of physiological death triggers an NDE, and prior to the 1950s physiological death meant permanent death, then whatever processes occurred immediately before CA would have no evolutionary benefit because they wouldn’t have survived. Given that her theory specifically relates to people who had CA (she  states this explicitly), and given our collective knowledge of how these experiences are generally associated with CA, the whole evolutionary benefit theory collapses. Without this her NEPTUNE model is just previous [debunked] arguments about neurotransmitters.

No, it would be better for her if the data allowed for a non-natural explanation as well. The world is shifting – we are entering a post-materialistic age. I know so many scientists who accept that there is more to what we observe than just the natural explanations that science has thus provided and either believe in a “spiritual” explanation or that we are living in a simulation.

Given her answer to the final question about NDEs being real, I hold zero hope for such a Damascus moment:

When you meet entities or when you feel as though you’re out of your body, those are non-ordinary states of consciousness caused by disturbed perception. So you don’t actually meet your father in a tunnel of light, for example. But near-death experiences are real in the sense that the person who reported it did have this vivid and intense subjective experience

She is stating as fact they are physiological. She had better make sure that her data absolutely supports that position, or I suspect she may end up with egg on her face like Borjigin.

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