AwareofAware

Life review – just the brain closing down…really?

I love this clip, which I think is from the video of the discussion from a month back, which has now been posted on YouTube, but I just want to focus on this as these accounts are a huge lesson for all humanity:

This is one of the researchers from Parnia’s lab who describes a fairly typical account of a life review. These are almost always reported in exactly the same terms. When you listen to this, it is an absolute nonsense to believe that this could possibly be a result of the Brain shutting down.

Really worth watching. Other videos have been posted on their YouTube channel:

https://youtube.com/channel/UCOsbYu-vLtG6xOZKO09rwGw

The Art Of Fence Sitting

There has been a press release and a few Tweets from the Parnia lab. Here is a key quote from the press release:

“So far, the researchers say, evidence suggests that neither physiological nor cognitive processes end with death and that although systematic studies have not been able to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness in relation to death, it has been impossible to disclaim them either.”

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/recalled-experiences-surrounding-death-more-than-hallucinations-301519733.html

Here is the tweet that will cause the most consternation among the majority who come here:

“One of the most exciting discoveries – brain activity associated with heightened states of consciousness has been shown to be present even during cardiac arrest. This marks a pivotal moment in the study of recalled experiences of death and in our understanding of consciousness.”

In the past I have occasionally been a bit abrasive or less than complimentary about aspects of research or things that have been said by the Parnia lab. A while back I resolved to stop doing that, because while I find the words entertaining to write, if people associated with the lab read this blog, they may not find them entertaining to read and I have enormous respect for them. However, today I am struggling to stifle the snarky side, but I will do my very best from letting any acid bleed onto the page and remain as objective and even in my commentary of these statements as possible. However, I am going to unpick them surgically as I know that people will latch on to certain phrases, and they need to be addressed.

To the first statement. Does it reveal any new research findings? No. So the key question is what do they mean by “evidence suggests that neither physiological nor cognitive processes end with death”?

In the absence of unpublished new evidence or definitions of death, human physiological processes must by the definition of the word physiological, end with death. The definition of death using Sam Parnia’s own definition in previous publications, is the cessation of all measurable heart and central nervous system activity. Some definitions include respiratory processes, which can occur during CPR, and is possibly why time of death is declared on cessation of CPR. This all creates a semantic problem.

The first semantic problem is that physiological processes cannot happen after death. Biological processes such as changes in cellular chemistry continue after death, but it is actually impossible for physiological processes to continue unless the definition of physiological has changed. CPR is a grey area, but it is also the area which is most relevant to discussions of REDs or NDEs.

The second semantic problem occurs with the use of the new term RED.

For the word physiological to be correct they must now be defining the period where there is no heartbeat but CPR is being performed and therefore passive respiration is occurring, as a period where the patient is alive. If so, they have moved the goal posts and in doing so RED becomes an incorrect expression for all experiences reported during this period because they are not experiences occurring during their new definition of death…they are however “nearly”dead…mmm, can anyone think of a term to describe an experience that happens when someone is nearly dead? Anyone?

I hope any readers from the Parnia lab will allow me one indulgence of snarkiness when I ask people to rearrange the words: their eat can’t and they it have cake.

The second term, “cognitive” is much more straight forward. My current work in Alzheimer’s focuses on tests that measure changes in cognition and the definition of cognition is; “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” This is precisely what is reported during REDs or NDEs. No disputing this.

The statement then goes on to say that studies have so far been unable to prove or disprove the reality or meaning of patients claims of awareness during death.

Well that depends on whether you regard the testimony of thousands of credible individuals including healthcare professionals as evidence that provides proof. If you do, then it is proven. However, as I have stated on here numerous times, these experiences have not been scientifically validated/proven using modern scientific, digital (non-human) methods.

If I have missed something and this press release says anything new then please let me know in the comments.

Let’s move on to the Tweet. This refers to the recent “straw man”case and possibly to their own findings which they mentioned in the AHA poster in 2019 (and likely subsequent unpublished findings). In the Straw Man case, EEG activity sufficient to be associated with consciousness was measured for up to 30 seconds after death. I repeat for the nth time, there were no recollections of consciousness because the patient never recovered. There was no reported life review, or other element of a RED reported.

In the AHA poster it was reported that EEG levels that could be associated with conscious activity were measured up to 90 minutes after death (but during CPR…so were they dead?). Despite repeated efforts to get an answer to the question of whether or not there were reported experiences of consciousness during these EEG episodes, no more details have emerged. They have the data. They know whether those patients survived and were interviewed, but through reasons only they know, which I am sure are good, they have chosen not to share these important details with the wider community for over 2 years now.

Until we are presented with validated reported recollections of consciousness, either during periods of EEG activity, or in the absence of EEG activity, these findings are interesting, but not relevant to informing the scientific community on the nature of REDs (or NDEs if a patient is not technically dead during CPR 🙂 ).

Until the Parnia lab, or other researchers, present time stamped validated reports of consciousness matched with EEG data we have not moved forward significantly from the 1970s in terms of scientifically proving one way or the other what is going on.

To me these statements represent scientific fence sitting. They are very much in character with some of Dr Parnia’s previous enigmatic statements. To one community, the NDE community, he unequivocally states his belief in dualism based on scientific evidence, to the other community, the medical scientific community, he presents a more nuanced position in which the data might support the understanding that these conscious episodes are due to underlying “physiological” processes.

However, sitting on the fence is a precarious position to take, and the fence is getting thinner as he gathers more data, and at some point he will need to get off the fence, especially when addressing fellow scientists of a sceptical disposition. He can obviously only do that when he has actual data to support what he says though.

Lucid Dying Zoom Discussion – lots of talk…

Due to North America changing their clocks a couple of weeks ahead of the UK, I joined the Lucid Dying Zoom discussion an hour late. I had no excuse, I spent 7 years living in Canada, so knew this happened. Anyway, when I did join I felt that the discussion was lacking in new substance and very philosophical, with the occasional comment around science. I do think Sam Parnia was maybe catching up on emails by the looks of him during the segments I watched, but he did make a couple of very relevant contributions.

1. If you go by NDE accounts, then the soul is not some nebulous entity that gets absorbed back into a greater universal consciousness, but is an individual entity, that has a sense of self.

2. He will be publishing data soon that goes some way to confirming the findings of the recent case report of the patient who died while connected to EEG, and showed activity just before and just after death. As usual, he was somewhat enigmatic in his comments, and difficult to read. Also, his sound was not brilliant, so it will be good to listen to that again when the video is uploaded later this week.

Thankfully there were other members of this group who did turn up on time, and I thank Mery for his post which summarises the majority of the discussions in excellent detail below:

My first impression was disappointment mixed with “wow I am really enjoying this talk”. By disappointment I mean that the presenting text for the talk in the Dana foundation web (and Parnia Lab I believe) stated that they would be discussing new discoveries in this field important for society etc…thus I thought that they would be presenting some new data, or results from psychedelic studies…I was surprised when after more than 1h they were leaning towards consciousness being something else, not produced by the brain, etc and my impression was “ok, this has become a philosophy room against materialism”.

I thought that by including a researcher in the psychedelic field they had turned into materialism and that didn’t make sense since few months ago Parnia denied the drug-psychedelic states as something similar to NDEs (his Essay, the new classification of REDs…). Then it turned out that this researcher sounded more into dualism (or whatever) and he even said that the neurotransmitters involved didn’t matter (I was like what…?).

Since Donald Hoffman was invited I thought that he would be defending consciousness being fundamental, but then a neurologist was there…and she didn’t position herself, and was respectful on the view of dualism of others… somebody in the talk (I can’t remember who It was) even stated that the brain might be a transmitter, and what I perceived is that all of them agreed.
I was expecting a debate at least. Or a presentation of new findings and a dissertation over them…so a bit disappointed in that way, BUT I really enjoyed their insights and was a beautiful talk.
So, and I haven’t seen the part of the EEG comment on the straw man article, I agree with Charlie, one respected researcher doesn’t write an Essay defending survival, doesn’t spend 2 hours publicly defending the brain as a transmitter, and consciousness being fundamental/not produced by the brain whatever… And then rescinding everything he said with a very vague comment.

Parnia Lab has so far only spoke of the famous alpha rithms, and I am sure as Charlie said he has been asked for weeks about his opinion and of course he has to provide an answer.
So I think we are just where we were a week ago: he seems to be more prone to the immaterial consciousness (like the idea defended in his Essay) but then a wild strange comment appears!

EVA in RED

Although we may hopefully be talking about an EVA in RED, it won’t be about this one:

It will be about something far more exciting than the fashion choices of glamorous women!

So I have paid $15 for 72 hours access to this article. That is a bit galling, but probably worth it…and I don’t like pinching other writers material, no matter how much of a rip off it is (click on pic for link):

The article is very important as it lays a baseline for our understanding of the subject of REDs (authentic NDEs), creates key definitions for the subject and criteria that meet those definitions, and finally sets out the direction for future research. It is a consensus statement that is authored by some of the top names in the field with Sam Parnia being the first author. It is needed to avoid the kind of nonsense we have experienced over the past few days in which a publication called something an NDE which was in fact only a period of EEG readings from a dying person who never reported an experience.

My first comments are on the two new acronyms that have been created to more precisely define the different reported experiences:

RED – recalled experience of death

EVA – external visual awareness (formally OBE)

I get the need to move away from NDE, but RED? I occasionally work with marketeers to transform medical data into user friendly visuals, and red is a color that is always associated with negativity. For example, when creating a graph, we are never allowed to put a competitor’s data in red as this could be seen as biasing perception. I understand that the words forming the acronym are precise, it is just unfortunate that the acronym itself spells something that is associated with “stop” or “danger”. I know they have been struggling with this for a while, with ADE, TED etc and now RED, but just for aesthetic reasons, it may have been worth persevering a bit longer. I guess we haven’t helped. Either way, we are now stuck with this since it is part of this consensus. So from now it will be RED.

The paper is very long and contains some great material, but the key thing is the tight criteria for an experience to be defined as a RED:

1. A relation to death.

2. A sense of transcendence.

3. Ineffability.

4. Positive transformative effects (relating to meaning and purpose of life).

5. Severity of illness that leads to loss of consciousness (LOC), together with:

6. The absence of features related to other coma related experiences.

More succinctly, a RED “is defined as a specific cognitive and emotional experience that occurs during a period of LOC in relation to a life-threatening event, including Cardiac Arrest”. They go on to state that LOC “relates to assessments from the perspective of a clinician or other external observer, even though from the perspective of the person experiencing a RED, often there was no perception of any LOC”.

They also outline a fundamental narrative for REDs. This was actually something I mentioned yesterday in the comments on the Straw Man…the life review is often at the end of the sequence of events before the sense of returning. The narrative arc is basically:

1. Perceived Death and Separation from the Body.

2. Heading to a “Destination”

3. Reliving the recording of life that is educational

4. Being “Home” again

5. Returning back to life

6. Reported effects after the experience.

This is the basic narrative, but they list a whole range of other facets of REDs that are reported such as meeting a creative source and whatnot.

They then lay out why REDs are distinguishable from other experiences such as ICU delirium, drug induced hallucinations etc and the central theme of this differentiation is in fact the clear narrative that is reported in REDs. I have concerns with that because people could easily “fake a RED” if they know this narrative and happened to have a CA and recover. That comes from my skeptical and untrusting nature!

After laying out the definitions and different facets of REDs and EVAs, they propose future directions in research on subjects such as terminal paradoxical lucidity, and trying to shed light on the underlying neurological mechanisms (if neurology alone can account for these events). They also suggest taking the positive elements of REDs, the transformative aspects and finding a way of generalizing this to helping terminally ill patients cope with end of life.

They end with this neutral statement followed by a summary and key recommendations. While neutral, it most definitely points to the possibility of “other dimensions” that were mentioned on the Instagram post yesterday:

“Finally, we suggest that although systematic studies have not been able to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness in relation to death, it has been impossible to disclaim them either. Clearly, the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice.”

Overall this is a very useful paper, and will help us in terms of understanding and interpreting future research work published in this field. It is interesting that the “Straw man” paper came out almost exactly the same day…coincidence? The swivel-eyed in me is tempted to think not!

Finally, I do have one big concern with this consensus statement, and I will seek clarification on this. In the 6 criteria that they lay down that must be met to be defined as a RED, they only seem to allow for positive experiences. We know that about 25% of experiences are negative…are they discounting them despite them occurring under similar conditions and including other core elements? If this is the case, I would be very concerned, since it is precisely this kind of “only see the good” thinking that has got us into such a pickle with Putin and Xi. There are monsters. Not everyone is good. There is a heaven, but according to a significant number of RED reports, there may also be a hell, or destruction. Just a thought. Maybe given this emphasis, and their potential exclusion of negative experiences, they should call them PREDs…Positive Recalled Experiences of Death, and how about using BREDs for the others…bad recalled experiences of death. Of course I am being facetious, but the subject is very serious in reality and should be covered fully and without a preference for only the nice stuff.

Anyway, that is my first reaction. I will be reading it again over the weekend, and look forward to your comments on this “line in the sand” that these thought leaders on the subject of NDEs REDs have drawn.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before we do see EVA in RED, and in the AWARE II study.

Burning a Straw Man

I have been hearing a lot of noise about a paper which appeared this week:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.813531/full

Let’s not waste too much time on discussing the argument it sets up, since we would be “attacking a straw man”. My intent in this post is to show why it precisely fits the definition of a straw man:

A straw man is a form of  argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one.^[1] One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”. (wikepedia)

Firstly, is this paper trying to refute the argument that NDEs are evidence that the consciousness is able to persist beyond brain death – i.e. independent of brain activity? Yes, absolutely, the fact they are talking about NDEs is obvious in the opening sentence:

“The neurophysiological footprint of brain activity after cardiac arrest and during near-death experience (NDE) is not well understood.”

Here we have a clue as to the straw man nature of this research. They are blurring the definition of NDE to suit their desired attempt to refute what NDEs represent. This is where Parnia may be on to something by moving away from the term NDE and creating a number of different terms to describe the different and unique types of experience that are associated with having a CA and being revived after CPR (or spontaneously).  I will create a separate post on that this weekend. I was a bit skeptical of why he was doing this, but having seen this paper under discussion here, I now “get it”. This straw man research has crystallized the need for clarity in distinguishing what we understand NDEs are from what sceptics would try to define NDEs as. By defining what we understand NDEs to be- remembered experiences that happened while a patient was clinically dead as defined by no ECG or EEG signal, as REDs – or recalled experiences of death, it is moving them away from this potential grey zone. More on that in my next post, and other implications from the joint statement paper.

Back to the paper at hand. The authors are playing a sleight of hand here by using the term NDE. They are basically inferring that any conscious activity, indeed, any measurable brain activity close to the time of death is now an NDE. These are the legs of the straw man against which we may be tempted to argue, and get caught up in discussions on alpha gamma and theta waves etc. That is the goal of a straw man…to get us distracted in detail that is irrelevant.

The body of the straw man is that the brain activity described in enormous detail in this paper only occurred for 30 seconds after the heart stopped. However, as we know from our years of discussing various NDEs, and from the AWARE I NDE, these experiences occur for periods of time long after the 30s. Yes, while it is theoretically possible to believe that the life review and tunnel are a result of these final firings of the brain, the verified recollections reported from thousands, if not tens of thousands of documented experiences where patients witnessed observable events that occurred many minutes after their heart had stopped, cannot be accounted for by this research. This is the heart of the straw man…it does not address the NDEs that we talk about…which Parnia now refers to as REDs.

The head of the straw man is that the patient under discussion never recovered to describe any experience. There was no reported NDE RED with which the EEG data could be correlated, so the whole paper is really just a moot point and most definitely does not address the central argument that “believers” make – NDEs – REDs are a result of the consciousness persisting after the brain has become inactive/dead and incapable of physically “producing” consciousness which provides strong evidence for the philosophy of metaphysical dualism, out of which most religious/spiritual belief systems come.

It is a Straw Man…burn baby, burn!

Publication alert!

My turn to tease! Unfortunately it seems that the publication of AWARE II is not as imminent as hoped. From todays Instagram feed (btw I am Orson if you didn’t already know):

However, if they keep adding interesting stuff to their Instagram account, then maybe we won’t need to wait that long till we get something really meaty. There is obviously more than a hint in this reply that they may not have the answers we are hoping for yet though.

They’re teasing us

Given the Parnia lab seems to be trailing tidbits of its forthcoming publication of the AWARE II study on Instagram, I think it’s probably worth having a post for each teaser that contains particularly interesting content…and yesterday’s was a doozy (click pic for link).

Key quote:

We found that while the majority of the time,  the EEG data was “flatlined”, incredibly, normal or near-normal waves emerged even after 40-60 minutes of CPR. Notably, the incidence of “normal” EEG rhythms was correlated with greater probability of successfully re-starting the heart.

In summary, this expands on the findings of the AHA poster from 2019:

In particular it provides grist for the materialist mill in providing the best evidence yet that the brain is capable of conscious activity during CPR. We have discussed this many times here and while it does give ammo to the materialists, there are two things to consider that give me hope subsequent announcements will be more favourable to the cause of “believers”:

1. Previous reports of CPRIC (CPR induced consciousness) suggest that the recollections of the patients are very different in character from NDE reports. They are often traumatic and confused in nature. Parnia himself points this out in his Bigelow runner’s up prize winning essay. He also makes his position on this subject very clear…brain activity resulting from CPR does not account for NDEs. Why would he say this without concrete evidence? This brings me to my second point.

2. Two years ago I pestered the lab for clarification on this issue. I specifically asked them if they were able to correlate the NDE reports from the first AHA poster with the data from EEG and oximetry readings to determine whether these NDE reports were associated with levels capable of producing consciousness. 2 years of deafening silence. I hope very much we will get our answer to this question in the paper…it would seem to me that Parnia knows the answer or he would be less assertive in his position.

Keep coming back here for key updates and discussion. Looks like the next few weeks are going to be busy…let’s hope it doesn’t end in an anti-climax and the paper is a complete nothing-burger.