More Martial Mahem
So in this post we are going to look at a slide presentation created by Charlotte Martial and presented recently (click on the diagram below to access the full PDF). Thanks Mak and Z for providing this. As we know Martial is more than sceptical about supernatural or paranormal explanations for NDEs. This presentation is very much along those lines in its attempt to provide a natural explanation for NDEs and also presents evidence from their NDE study which appears to be data that will be presented in a journal in the near future by her colleague Fritz.
First let’s look at the model she uses to explain the natural emergence of NDE’s in a life-threatening situation. I’m not going to look too closely here at the neurotransmitter explanation because frankly the interaction of neurotransmitters with their various receptors inside the brain are extremely complex, and while what is offered in the diagram may appear plausible, its relevance is a moot point. Why do I say that?
The neurotransmitter diagram is just the biochemical explanation underpinning the overarching hypothesis behind the Martial group’s natural explanation for NDEs. The central premise of the hypothesis is based on the idea that NDEs, or specifically the phenomenology associated with NDEs, are a product of evolutionary processes and provide a survival advantage. This hypothesis, which has been presented in various forms by sceptics over the past decade, ultimately fails to survive contact with serious scrutiny. There are a number of reasons why I say that:
- Prior to the discovery and implementation of CPR in the 1950s, authentic near death experiences were extremely rare. Moreover there is absolutely no evidence that NDE like experiences ever contributed towards survival when humans were threatened. For a neurological mechanism to emerge through evolutionary processes, it would be a trait that is relatively common and would’ve been observed and known about prior to the emergence of CPR. This is something that would’ve been observed during battles throughout history or when humans were hunted by predators. That just isn’t the case. You do not hear of hundreds of examples of soldiers having near death experiences and surviving battles. Martial tries to imply that this process kicks in when fight or flight is no longer an option. This is speculation based on absolutely zero evidence from the historical record, and does go against what we do know about the fight or flight system. So the only instance in which this might have occurred is on operating tables since the 1950s and this is not long enough to allow evolution to create this new mechanism.
- The idea that becoming floppy or imobile or in a state of peace is going to aid survival in the kinds of life-threatening situations where humans would be exposed to just does not make sense. Survival in life-threatening situations is almost always dependent on fighting back or running away from the life-threatening situation. Yes people might pretend to play dead but this would be a conscious process, and particularly when it comes to natural predators would prove futile as they would just be an easy meal, but even in a military situation it is well known that soldiers pretended to play dead and enemy combitants would go round putting their swords through bodies lying on the ground to make sure that the soldiers were dead. The other kinds of life-threatening situations usually caused by disease or old age or drowning or fire would not really see a benefit from the phenomenology of NDEs either. It’s nonsense.
- Moreover, when it comes to the actual definition of NDEs, Martial has created her own set of parameters which allow her to expand experiences away from the parameters that the consensus statement created. As a result, she is able to claim that fainting produces NDE like experiences. These experiences are nothing like authentic NDEs. This is one of the reasons why I’m much more supportive of Sam Parnia’s RED definition since the patient actually must have their experience in proximity to clinical death and the experiences must contain more clearly defined elements following a narrative arc.
Now we’ll look at the EEG data that is presented and will be in the paper being prepared by Fritz. Obviously without the full data set which will hopefully follow in a future publication it is difficult to tell precisely what is going on. However, it appears that they have data on the EEG of 11 unconscious patients, seven of whom didn’t have NDEs and 4 who did have NDEs. They then look at the complexity of the EEG signals of the two different groups and claim that the NDE group has a higher level of complexity. In one breath they state correctly that they can’t determine things with absolute precision, in the next they make the claim that the brain of NDE patients remains more organised and dynamically active. Any medical scientist of any repute looking at the bar charts representing this data and considering the tiny numbers of patients involved, would instantly dismiss any assertion. The error bars overlap, and there is insufficient difference between the two groups to draw any conclusions about the level of complexity between them. This won’t stop the Guardian and other atheist press outlets from claiming that this data shows that is are the result of brain activity. The fact that there is brain activity in both groups, combined with the reality that there is no statistical difference between the activities of both groups, and our knowledge that they are using a loose definition of NDE to characterise these groups, means that this study is not providing anything new (unless they have an authentic NDE with associated EEG…but even then for the reasons below, it is irrelevant).
Even if we saw significant differences in the brain activity between the NDE group and the non-NDE group, as we have said so many times association is not necessarily causation. Sam Parnia’s dissociation explanation is just as valid. If any such difference did exist it could be related to the consciousness separating from the brain.
Finally, while all this is interesting and gives sceptic something to talk about, none of this comes close to explaining validated OBEs and never will.
Interestingly while making a video about animals, I learned that rabbits (and I’d imagine other common prey animals) have a system in place so that once they’re caught, their brains release large quantities of endogenous analgesic chemicals for apparently no survival purpose other than to give them a less painful ending. It does make you wonder whether there may be some evolutionary mechanism for the NDE – although this would not necessarily make any claims about what they actually are and how chemicals that would (in this framework) induce them actually work. IE whether they produce hallucinations (which we know is phenomenologically very different to NDEs) or whether they open us up to a more “real” state.
Interesting post & food for thought.
Paul
Interesting Daren, although the release of a chemical to make death less frightening or painful would be counter evolutionary…if anything it would be evidence of a God who has a particular compassion for bunny rabbits!
I think with this study, given the lack of any evidence of this mechanism being around in a significant way before CPR, it is unlikely to have been a result of evolution in humans. They are clutching at straws.
Recently I read that DMT has neuroprotective properties, particularly against ischemia-reperfusion injury. Just a suggestion here that when DMT is artificially introduced, the mechanisms behind it’s well known psychedelic effects are what makes it neuroprotective.
That would be an evolutionary process, if more organisms auto-resuscitated and survived with this DMT trait, following cerebral anoxia, than those who did not have this DMT trait.
But I’m no longer very sure of what evolution is – or can be influenced by. Eric Nestler’s 2011 study on epigenetic inheritance, and Dias & Ressler’s 2013 paper both indicate that very specific fear conditioned memories from male IVF donor mice can be inherited by both their children, as well as their grandchildren, even though they had been killed by the IVF harvesting procedure, some time before their offspring were even conceived!
All the useful predictive stories we make up to join together our observations – are not how nature (experience) actually works, they are just approximations.
But now with Maldacena, Penington and Nima’s work, the whole thing has been blown apart. It’s all far more strangely connected, and yet simpler too, than I could ever have imagined 20 years ago.
Thanks Max, interesting insights. My response to the first one would be that general evolution works under certain constraints. For a trait to become predominant it must provide such a significant benefit that it results in members of that species who have that trait having a much better survival advantage. Auto-resuscitation is an extremely rare event, and not widespread enough to provide a benefit to outcompete the rest of the species and become a predominant genetic trait.
On your second point…there is much about evolution that is still being determined. I tend to avoid discussions on it in general and focus on origin of life which shows beyond any doubt that life could not have emerged through natural means. However, what I have come to understand from my dipping into evolution is that micro evolution absolutely happens…I’ve seen it in the lab with bacteria and viruses, but macro-evolution – the emergence of new phenotypes or species, seems extremely unlikely through stepwise mutations, and once life moved beyond the bacterial stage, gene swapping is taken out of the possible pathways.
I guess these slides may have been part of a poster/presentation that Martial gave at the BIAL symposium in April – they are dated 12th April 2026 – the day after it ended.
I couldn’t get much out of the sides.
Although I did notice there was a big red cross over the cartoon eyes looking at an overhead shelf (on slide 29), and the earlier slide 27 used the same picture, but only had a question mark (?).
It suggested that some subjects in the study may have recalled auditory targets, and perhaps other visible (not hidden) visual targets (ladybird and cuddly toy?), but no one saw the hidden visual targets.
This slide does suggest they used a similar hidden/secret visual target setup as previous studies… which would be depressing (and get a zero for creativity from me) if correct 🙁
On the other hand, someone may have recalled the visible cuddly toy from an OBE… yay!
Good spot Max. I suspect they will claim that because no one saw a target it proves that the OBE is not real. That was always my suspicion with this study.
Mine too.
In between slide 27 and 29, slide 28 says 28.6% of the emergency patients
reported disconnected consciousness
episodes (where an individual retains internal mental awareness, such as thoughts, dreams, or vivid hallucinations, but loses conscious perception of their external environment).
And of these 28.6% (I assume) the table below shows 70% had an OBE?
It looks that way, which makes me extremely sceptical about the definitions used because that percentage having OBEs is 3 times more than observed previously. Again, I suspect that just as they are trying to reframe the term NDE, they are also trying to reframe the term “Out Of Body Experience” to include distorted visual perceptions of their bodies and other things so they can then say that OBEs are a natural phenomenon. If so they are deploying the usual dishonest tactics used ideological physicalists. We saw this with Borjigin who tried to reframe the term “Cardiac arrest” to the period before cessation of heartbeat instead of what it always has been…when the heart has stopped. Borjigin’s evidence did not support the position that brain activity persisted beyond the traditional (correct) understanding of cardiac arrest, so she tried to change the definition of cardiac arrest. I suspect that her sister in arms, Martial, is trying to:
1. Reframe NDEs as any experience in which the patient has “feelings of peace”, “altered sense of time” and other perceptions that are associated with non-NDEs such as syncope or drugs.
2. Reframe OBEs as any experience in which a patient perceives things about their own bodies or their surroundings during a state of “disconnected consciousness” rather than the existing understanding of a true OBE during an authentic NDE being a situation in which someone observes their entire bodies from outside of themselves, events that they could not possibly have witnessed since they were fully unconscious.
They are moving the goalposts…and again Sam Parnia was way ahead on this one by creating the definitions of RED and EVA (external visual awareness) – (sorry Dr Parnia, I should not have dismissed these so quickly, but I stand my ground on the issue of negative NDEs). EVA cannot be reframed in the way that I suspect Martial and Fritz will try to reframe OBEs…external visual awareness is a very precise expression.
If this is what is happening, it is really unethical, but it is what we have come to expect from people like this. They are driven by an ideological obsession that is not dissimilar to religious zealotry.
I use the word unethical because IF this is what is going on then they are deliberately manipulating the framing of the argument to favour their position without providing new evidence to support that position. I.e. If they can’t find the evidence to explain the observations, so they alter the defintions of the observations to fit their evidence hoping no one will notice.
I WILL NOTICE!
We are talking about existential matters here, a subject that is more important than anything else in my view…the nature and destiny of consciousness after physical death.
Excellent post, Orson. It’s never been clear to me how the rich “hyper-real” multi-faceted NDE experience confers a survival advantage, under the Martial et al. hypothesis. Typically some physical mutation, in and of itself, confers an advantage and this gets selected for. So, a faster runner might avoid predation and pass on his/her fast running genes. But how does an NDEr’s hyper-real internal experience confer a survival advantage in the first place? I just don’t see the connection. The thanatosis argument has some superficial attraction because someone feigning death might be passed over by a predator. This might explain why a primitive defensive shutdown response could have been adaptive. But it does not by itself explain why the full NDE experience would be adaptive, nor does it show that ancestral NDErs formed a reproductively successful subgroup. To me, conceptually, the hypothesis is misplaced from the outset. As you say, it’s nonsense.
Thanks Hugh, and welcome to the comments. You put it much better than I did!