AwareofAware

Emptiness

I came across this in my googling of NDE research, and I think it may have been mentioned in a previous chat (sorry for not calling out the person who mentioned it). Click on the link to access the pdf. It is free to download.

Meditation-Induced Near-Death Experiences: a 3-Year Longitudinal Study William Van Gordon et al.

This “paper” was published last month in the Mindfulness journal. Anything with that name in the title is going to be Buddhist, so I approach anything I read with the appropriate filters in place.

In summary the researchers recruit 12 advanced meditators who conduct a specific form of meditation which induces a “Near-Death” like state. The researcher calls the experiences that these meditators have MI-NDEs (meditation induced NDEs). These meditators practice at least one of these types of meditation a year as a normal part of their spiritual pursuits. For the study they are asked to complete a number of questionnaires after each MI-NDE session, including one that identifies components of NDEs as defined by the Greyson scale. Most frequenters to this site will be familiar with the scale, but for those that aren’t I have included it at the bottom of this post:

There are some other questionnaires more related to Buddhist beliefs, and one face to face interview conducted very soon after one of the MI-NDE sessions. The study was run over 3 years, with data collected from each participant each year. In addition “controls” were used, which included recording the same subjective output from non-MI-NDE meditation sessions.

Below is the key statement regarding the conclusions of the authors:

“Findings demonstrated that compared to the control conditions, the MI-NDE prompted significantly greater pre-post increases in NDE profundity, mystical experiences and non-attachment. Furthermore, participants demonstrated significant increases in NDE profundity across the 3-year study period.”

Now, I am not going to in anyway criticize Buddhist beliefs. Nor am I going to question the claims of people who practice Buddhist meditation that they have deep and profound spiritual experiences, which may indeed include out of body elements etc. If I believe that the conscious is a separate entity to the brain and that it is separated from the brain at death, then it makes sense that it may be possible under certain conditions to separate it during life too.

However, this paper has two major issues to me:

1. The experience described by the meditators does not sound like an NDE
2. There are some whopping design flaws that open it to ridicule by anyone with even the remotest understanding of how (not to) conduct a rigorous scientific study, and which relates to one of the issues I repeatedly mention with regard to blinding the investigators

Firstly, from a qualitative perspective, the experiences described by the meditators do not sound like classic NDEs. The word Emptiness is used a lot. While some NDEs do report emptiness, I believe a higher proportion of true NDEs describe different sensations which are more positive. Moreover there are no reports of specific verified OBEs, a crucial element to lending credibility to any study like this. They do describe spiritual elements and encounters with spiritual beings, but having read many NDEs, what these guys are taking about feels very different. I want to state again, that I am not doubting that they experienced something, but it was not a classic NDE in the sense that we know it. However, without more detail, it is hard to say for sure.

Now to my second point. This study has more holes than a sieve from a credibility perspective. The language used is very scientific, and creates the air of genuine academic research, but the reality is very different.

1. The main author is a practicing Buddhist. Fine. However, he selects the study subjects from a group of people that he knows. Yep, that is the end of all credibility straight away. I understand why he did this: if you put this out there for all-comers you will attract a multitude of crazies, but that doesn’t change the fact this introduces humungous bias into the study, and lots of opportunities to influence outcome.
2. Who conducts the interviews etc is not really discussed. Neither is how the data was “protected”. This is my potential beef with AWARE II. There needs to be blinding otherwise a study is open to accusations of bias, which leads to me point 3.
3. Look at the graph below. It represents the improvement in the quality of NDEs over the 3 year period. In the first year the Greyson score barely exceeds 7, suggesting that they were not very NDE-like at all, but in the third year we have scores exceeding the average NDE score of “true” NDEs. In fact these meditators are getting so good at it that they experience virtually all of the components in the Greyson scale, something that very few true NDErs ever do.

Now I don’t want to suggest that anything nefarious is going on, but this graph screams “something fishy is going on” to me. The author puts it down to practice makes perfect. Mmm. That would be fine if these guys weren’t already top of their game in meditating. They had on average over 30 years’ experience of meditating, and performed 3 MI-NDE type mediations a year. They should be able to meditate in the spiritual Olympics…if such a games existed. No. What that graph says to me is that either deliberately, or not, the meditators were getting feedback that influenced how they answered the questions. They were possibly “coached”, or prompted in how to more “accurately” describe their experiences.

For me the real result is the year 1 result, and given the other things I said, this study experiences emptiness when it comes to generating useful data with regard to validating NDEs, or indeed supporting the belief that NDEs can be induced by certain types of meditation.

The Greyson Scale

– Experiencing an altered state of time

– Experiencing accelerated thought processes

– Life review

– Sense of sudden understanding

– Feelings of peace

– Feeling of joy

– Feeling of cosmic oneness

– Seeing/feeling surrounded by light

– Having vivid sensations

– Extrasensory perception

– Experiencing visions

– Experiencing a sense of being out of physical body

– Experiencing a sense of an ‘otherworldly’ environment

– Experiencing a sense of a mystical entity

– Experiencing a sense of deceased/religious figures

– Experiencing a sense of a border or point of no return

Anyone having an “experience” can assess whether it is an NDE by assigning scores of 0-2 for the elements listed above. If an experiencer gives 0, then the element wasn’t present, if it’s 2 then definitely present. In general a score of <7 is not considered to be an NDE.

Get Paid To Study NDEs

Thanks to Samwise for posting this in the comments section of the last post. Again, I felt this was worth creating a seperate post out of since it is news about the AWARE study, and the last post was nearing a hundred comments, so time to move on.

The link below is for a new position as a research data associate at New York University School Of Medicine. The job description is clearly for someone to be working alongside the AWARE II study team as it references Sam Parnia and describes elements of the protocol that we are familiar with.

AWARE study position

They are looking for a graduate level employee, and someone who is either studying for a Ph.D. or who has relevant qualifications. When I first looked at it, I thought it was full time, but it would appear to be a bit of a zero hours type position, with variable hours, and on a temp basis. This ties in with a comment that David said, and that they may be looking to recruit a few people, so that they have someone “on call” at all times to attend the crash cart in the event of a CA. There are also a number of other duties which focus on the data processing side of things.

As I mentioned in the comments section, my one big concern about this is the lack of blinding that this position introduces into the study. If the same person who attends the CA, does the interview and processes the data, then this opens up any positive hits to accusations of potential cheating. It is in many ways a small detail as I am sure there will be other ways of verifying the validity of any confirmed OBEs, but my preference would be to remove any possibility of the interviewer knowing what image was projected. It may be that this is indeed the case, but without seeing a copy of the full protocol it is impossible to know for sure.

Anyway, this is all good in every other respect. This study is really ramping up by the looks of things, and is being taken very seriously. Roll on 2020.

Tin Foil Hat or Genuine Press Bias?

I am in the process of working on a review of the literature on evidence against NDEs being a genuine out of body phenomenon. The key piece of evidence relates to reports of brain activity after the heart has stopped. There have been reports in rats up to 30 seconds after death, and also in some human studies, but for now I want to highlight the reality of mainstream media reporting on this topic, and how utterly dishonest it can be.

Further down is a quote from the Independent newspaper in the UK discussing a 2017 publication by a group of Canadians that was discussed briefly in the comments section of my last post (Alan mentioned a Newsweek article that cited the same original piece of research). The background is that four patients on an ICU had life support withdrawn and their brain activity was monitored closely before and after cardiac arrest. One of the patients showed some delta wave EEG activity up to thirty minutes after the heart had stopped supplying oxygenated blood to the brain. (Delta wave NREM sleep is not associated with dreaming or conscious sleep, but rather is the deep sleep when the body is repairing itself). Here is the EEG data showing the anomaly:

It is notable that the signals are extremely low in intensity after “death” (the dashed line), and therefore even if they are real, are extremely unlikely to signify “conscious” neuronal activity of the type that would be required to generate complex NDEs and store the information. However, our delightful media have a different take:

The UK Independent quote:

“But tests showed that the patients’ brain appeared to keep working ”

And

“The doctors don’t know what the purpose of the activity might be, and caution against drawing too many conclusions from such a small sample. But they write that it is difficult to think the activity was the result of a mistake, given that all of the equipment appeared to be working fine.”  Link to article

What was actually said in the publication:

“An unexpected finding in the current work was that single bursts of delta wave activity persisted following ECG and ABP cessation for one patient. It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG activity given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation. These waveform bursts could, therefore, be artefactual in nature, although an artefactual source could not be identified.”

And in the discussion section:

“Finally, we also encountered one case where EEG activity persisted beyond the cessation of ABP. Given that this was only observed in one case and it persisted well beyond the loss of circulation, we speculate that this activity could reflect a nonneuronal artefact.”

Can J Neurol Sci. 2017; 44: 139-145

The inference in the Independent is that this “unexplained” activity invites speculation that the brain is up to something after death, adding credence to the meme that NDEs are a natural phenomenon, however the actual publication suggests it is most likely an artifact. Most people don’t bother reading the original piece of research, so will finish this media article concluding that brain activity occurs long after death, and thereby possibly dismissing NDEs as having natural explanations.

Anyway, as mentioned I am going to do a review of current literature on this topic and provide a summary. I will also be looking to shed more light on the difference between death of brain activity and permanent cellular death. Please feel free to make suggestions for appropriate articles in a comment (Please note, if you are posting a comment for the first time on this blog it will not appear immediately to avoid SPAM, trolling and BOTs. Due to my workload, it may be a day or two before I review it.)

Happy Christmas!

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.”

John 1:9

I usually avoid referencing my faith as I want this blog to focus objectively on the research around NDEs. However, in an era where I see my fellow Christians being persecuted on an ever larger scale, and the establishment doing its best to eradicate faith in Christ from the public space, please indulge me on this day that is special to me and billions of others, and let me wish you a Happy Christmas.

Many people who have NDEs report a being of light emanating unconditional love. I personally believe this light is a being we call God, and that today, I celebrate the moment I believe this light came to earth in the form of a man called Jesus and shared a message that is echoed in many NDEs: Love one another…everyone, without exception.

A Little More Detail

I finally received a response from Dr Parnia today to my questions. As I said previously, many of the questions had been answered in the various twitter posts he had created, specifically about numbers recruited so far, and timelines. There was a little more detail about the latter in the email.

• The announcement next year will effectively be the launch “proper” of the study once the new sites have fully come on board and the methodologies fully nailed down
• No analysis of the data will be undertaken until the study is complete in 2020
• The results of the study will most likely be announced just prior to publication in 2021

There are obviously a number of aspects to the study, and aside from the area we are most interested in, there will be data that will help enhance treatment of patients during and after resuscitation.

This is all good news, apart from the fact we will have to wait so long. The reason this is good news is that the steps that are being taken will insure this is a high quality study and that the results will stand up to kind of scrutiny that can be expected.

From my end, I am going to tone down the speculation on what has or has not happened, as frankly, while we can guess, we don’t know, and I don’t want to do anything that might in any way jeopardize this important piece of research.

However, I will still be posting on NDEs, and other bits and pieces of research etc that appear from time to time.

False Alarm

Thanks Z for alerting me to Dr. Parnia’s new tweets (he tweets so rarely that I don’t check as often as I should).

Some of my regular contributors in the comments section did caution me about getting excited and it turns out they were dead right. I sent an email to Dr Parnia asking him about numbers recruited, when there would be any announcements about the data and a few other points. It seems I probably wasn’t the only one as he answered these exact questions in a series of tweets:

If you read from the top it starts out promising, but then:

3 years. Oh dear. I get it, they want to be thorough and make sure it is done properly. they do have new sites on board, which is good and should accelerate the recruitment.

My question though is that if they have completed recruitment by the middle of 2018, they will surely only need to do the statistics after that. Another 2 years to go through the data and write it up seems like a very long time to me. However, he’s pretty clear that there won’t be any interim announcements, and that they will wait till the study is complete before saying anything.

No one is just an empty meat suit (probably)

I wanted to clarify my position on the whole 10-20% of people experiencing NDEs issue.

I am a scientist, and as a scientist I am taught to look at all possible explanations for a phenomenon, and refute ones that aren’t correct, and prove ones that are, through a rigorous analysis of the evidence. Just because a possible explanation for something is unpleasant, shocking, unpopular or even potentially absurd, it does not in and of itself disprove its validity. In the last post I said there were two main reasons why (lack of memory, or lack of experience, with two examples). Below are all the different potential explanations for 80-90% not reporting NDEs that I can think of:

1. Lack of Memory:

• This in my view is the most likely explanation i.e. they don’t remember the NDE even though they had one. This is supported by people who die and come back more than once not always reporting an NDE…this is analogous to people not always remembering their dreams. It may also be due to physical memory impairment from injury, lack of oxygen, age, disease etc.
• Related to this I would add the idea of a lack of well-developed spiritual “receptors” in the brain. It has been shown that there is a part of the brain that is associated with spirituality through brain imaging studies undertaken while subjects were claiming to have spiritual experiences. There has also been the idea of a God Gene that has been floated in the past which results in some people being born with different levels of development of this part of the brain. If the brain is the receptor for the conscious, or spirit, then it is possible that some people will be less able to process or remember an NDE, which is of course a highly spiritual experience.
• It is also possible that some people are having NDEs but they are so traumatic or disconcerting that their brain suppresses the memory.

2.Not all people have NDEs when they die and come back.

• Again, the fact that some people die and come back more than once and don’t always report an NDE could support this. I think some detailed research would be required (or has probably been done if I could afford all back issues of IANDS), that would shed more light on this.
• Now the big question is that if some people are not having NDEs (as opposed to just not remembering them), why aren’t they having them? This is where my possible explanation mooted in my last post caused such offence. It is indeed a logical possibility that some people are without a spiritual being inside of them. Do I believe that? No. But it is a possible explanation.
• Another explanation, as one poster mentioned in the last discussion, is that maybe they weren’t supposed to have one…maybe they would have reacted so badly, it would not have been of benefit.

3. They are having NDEs, and are remembering, but not reporting them

• They are ashamed to report what happened even if they do remember it OR they are too afraid of others laughing at them to report the experience.

So I hope this clarifies things…I am not of the view that the vast majority of humans are soulless meat suits, but as a scientist, I want to assess all possible explanations, and not exclude any until the evidence strongly suggests I should.

Death and taxes

As the well-worn phrase states, neither can be avoided. I think this video has been mentioned in various posts before, but I wanted it to be highlighted as I think it is really important.

Firstly it is a video of Sam Parnia, the principle investigator of the AWARE II study, the central theme of this blog. Secondly it is a really neat summary of our current understanding of what years of research on NDEs tell us. Thirdly, it shows us that for the most part, we shouldn’t be afraid of death. But, there are caveats.

The first caveat is one that Dr Parnia himself alludes to, and that is suicide. It seems fairly consistant that people who kill themselves and come back often report different outcomes to those who die of natural or non-self-induced causes. This is hard, as suicide is often the result of unbearable anguish, and so I have sympathy for these people. However, that is what the reports say, and in our modern era in which physician assisted dying is either becoming legalized or being debated by democracies, this important information from NDEs should be included in these discussions.

The second caveat is one that Dr Parnia doesn’t mention, and that is the fact that only about 10% of people report NDEs. There are two potential explanations for this. The first is that the person had the experience, but for some reason is unable to remember it. The second is that the person didn’t have any experience at all. One reason could be that they didn’t have a soul. This is obviously extremely controversial, and even insulting to the 90% who don’t have NDEs, but it is nonetheless one possible explanation. I personally hope it is the former.