Fame at last!
Well maybe not fame, but a bit of attention. Rob Waugh got in touch with me last week and asked a few questions, next thing thoughts from my book appear in the Mail!
There are a few mistakes in it which I’m sure some of you will notice unfortunately. The journalist said he will change them when he is able to access it again…can’t ask for more than that
Anyway, I am putting this in the general news section and I want to steer clear of the religious implications, but I do want to revisit this topic as I believe it is incredibly important. We need to understand just how real and just how prevalent these experiences are so that we can determine if we should take them seriously and do more to help others avoid this fate. Obviously my faith does influence my stance on this, but I do not want to bring that into this discussion, just focus on the evidence we have from research and individual accounts.
Firstly, Parnia’s consensus statement said that negative NDEs weren’t REDs (or authentic NDEs) but episodes of consciousness during CPR, however the very paper he used to justify that, a paper by Cassol published in Memory in 2019, said the opposite…that they were identical to positive NDEs except for leaving the experiencer with a negative rather than a positive feeling. The first question I would love to hear from you on is whether you think these are authentic NDEs, and if they aren’t, what evidence do you have to support that position? Or if you feel they are, likewise.
Secondly the article highlights only one of the potential theories explaining why only 10% have NDEs…namely that due to dissociative amnesia it is possible that many more people have these negative experiences than is currently the case. I do state that this is only one possible explanation rather than THE explanation as the article implies, but obviously to attract attention the story focuses on this one and not on the less interesting ones. I can live with that even if it’s a bit of a distortion of what I say. What are your thoughts on this?
