Media Manipulation – The Guardian
I am in the process of writing my piece on Psychedelics, but today the Guardian followed up its recent interview with Sam Parnia, with this, and I decided it was worth addressing since your friends and family may bring it up (my mother has already!). The Psychedelics article is coming…promise!
This article starts out with a fairly balanced account of how the field of NDE research evolved. It lulls you into a false sense of security that the balance will continue, but whenever you read the name Borjigin referred to in terms of progress in understanding, then you know that balance is likely to evaporate very quickly.
My previous post relates to the kind of work that Borjigin does, and the data that she has produced. In summary, and for the umpteenth time, Borjigin and others have shown that in rats brains activity can persist for maybe up to a minute after death without CPR. The studies in human coma patients have shown that immediately prior to death, and immediately after life support is withdrawn, coma patients have a number of minutes in which the brain produces EEG data that might be associated with consciousness. Moreover, Parnia’s own data has shown that the brain is capable of producing activity that might be associated with consciousness up to an hour after CA but while CPR is being administered and therefore while there is still oxygenated blood flow to the brain. I have explained ad nauseum here why this data, while interesting, says absolutely nothing at all about NDEs since no NDE has to date been reported that could even be associated with, let alone correlated with EEG activity. Nothing. Using the coma patients is particularly egregious since the patients had no reported EEG activity after death.
However, because of the profile of the Guardian, and the bias that emerges towards the end of this article, it is my duty to provide a reminder to people on here that to draw the conclusion that this EEG activity is the cause of NDEs is a gross conflation. The author also makes false assumptions:
As more and more people were resuscitated, scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether.
Yes it does. Without the flow of oxygenated blood, the brain stops functioning after about 30 seconds. The journalist has misunderstood the findings of the studies, or is deliberately misrepresenting the findings of the studies. This is the kind of understanding that is picked up by the reader who goes on to parrot or paraphrase that “the brain can work for hours after death”. As we on here know, it is capable of working hours after death provided that cellular death has not occurred on too large a scale, but without the flow of oxygenated blood, it does not work. Just like a computer without power. I suspect that this misunderstanding was helped by Borjigin who we well know can be misleading in the use of language:
At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death. “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.
The implication is that the brain is active in CA for long periods without CPR. There is zero evidence to support this and decades of data to contradict it. WITHOUT THE SUPPLY OF OXYGENATED BLOOD THE BRAIN BECOMES COMPLETELY INACTIVE WITHIN A MINUTE OF DEATH AT MOST (and usually within 20-30 seconds).
Unfortunately once such a fundamental false understanding is assumed to be fact, then you know that the article can only go one way…and it does.
“So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,” Charlotte Martial, the University of Liège neuroscientist, told me. The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?
Definition of empirical: based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.
Using this definition then the 130 odd cases in the The Self Does Not Die is empirical evidence. What he really means is scientifically verified cases, i.e. cases that have been proven using the scientific method. Create hypothesis to explain a phenomenon – devise experiment to test hypothesis – results from experiment verify or falsify hypothesis. The ‘journalist’ does not explore the possible reasons why there have to date been no scientifically verified OBEs, but I have explained many times on here why the AWARE studies have not provided a scientifically validated OBE. This shows his bias, in that he will only come up with materialist objections.
This is super interesting though:
Borjigin hopes that understanding the neurophysiology of death can help us to reverse it. She already has brain activity data from dozens of deceased patients that she is waiting to analyse. But because of the paranormal stigma associated with near-death studies, she says, few research agencies want to grant her funding. “Consciousness is almost a dirty word amongst funders,” she added. “Hardcore scientists think research into it should belong to maybe theology, philosophy, but not in hardcore science. Other people ask, ‘What’s the use? The patients are gonna die anyway, so why study that process? There’s nothing you can do about it.’”
This is proof, as if we needed it, that the scientific community, or the funding establishment, is overtly suppressing research into this most important of fields – even when the research might support a materialistic finding! Parnia has alluded to this before. It stinks, but there is nothing we can do about it.
Towards the end we see the author’s bias against anyone who entertains belief in the possibility that these experiences might be real and evidence of the understanding that the consciousness persists after physical death. This is overt gaslighting of anyone who might be “NDE curious”:
Meanwhile, in parts of the culture where enthusiasm is reserved not for scientific discovery in this world, but for absolution or benediction in the next, the spiritualists, along with sundry other kooks and grifters, are busily peddling their tales of the afterlife. Forget the proverbial tunnel of light: in America in particular, a pipeline of money has been discovered from death’s door, through Christian media, to the New York Times bestseller list and thence to the fawning, gullible armchairs of the nation’s daytime talk shows. First stop, paradise; next stop, Dr Oz.
Now, while I say it is gaslighting, I have a little sympathy for this position. Having spent a number of months going through YouTube NDE accounts, and reviewing the literature of “post tunnel events”, my position on NDEs has subtly changed. OBEs are objective, but what happens once people venture beyond the observations they make of this world, while having some common core themes, are so utterly different and unique, that I am coming to some conclusions about them that differ from the mainstream NDE community position. This will be presented in my next non-fiction book which I will publish later this year (after Part 1 of my fiction book is complete). However, this section of the article is 100% gaslighting and is deliberately attempting to manipulate those who may be “NDE-curious” into scuttling back into their materialist pens lest they be regarded as kooks or gullible. Nasty.
So if someone brings this article up and says “I read an article that says there is proof the brain is active for long times after CA and that is causing NDEs” hopefully you will now be suitably equipped to put them straight. If not then review the countless posts I have created responding to these claims before.
AwareofAware 