First of all, I was very pleased to reach the end of this article and find a reference to CERN's particle accelerator, Wikipedia this because I didn't realize Dan Brown's Angels and Demons was based on so much fact, and finally find the movie version staring Tom Hanks will arrive in May.
But to get to the article, it's title is exactly what Dr. Sam Parnia wants to find out. He and the Human Consciousness Project at New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center are undertaking a 3-year study on out-of-body experiences. The project will be called “AWARE” for AWAreness during REsuscitation. This TIME interview answered a lot of questions that I and other bloggers have had on the subject.
First of all, they will verify people's claims by providing pictures of the ceiling or the directly vertical view to about 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. Then they will have these images confirmed, since that's what the cardiac arrest survivors would see during those moments lying on the ground or a hospital bed. If survivors can verify the images it will be assumed they are confirming consciousness during "clinical death" as well.
Dr. Parnia also answered some questions about what happens to the body. Death is socially perceived as a moment, but it really is a process. Where as in the past loss of eye reflex, mediated by the brain stem, was the point in which one could be confirmed dead, technology today can bring people back after this. Within about 5 minutes inside a "clinically dead" body, the cells damage themselves and change while attempting to survive with a lack of blood flow. Within about an hour the cell damage is too great to allow the body to be viable in most cases. But the question for Dr. Parnia is, "What's going on to a person's mind?" (Stephey, 2008)
He points out that the old assumption that the brain and mind are the same thing is no longer seeming true. This is exactly what this course believes as a whole as well. "What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death?" is what he aims to discover. Maybe the most interesting thing he brings up, though, is the ethical issues. Apparently there's a drug in the works, which Parnia says may never surface, but could potentially stall the process of death from hours to days, therefore giving hospitals more time to save more people. He brought up CERN and the Big Bang theory as well. He makes it known, and good thing I think, that there will indeed be "lots and lots of ethical questions" as well.
What do I think? I think I'd like to know and that I'm curious. I'd like to know what is going on in our minds. I'd like to know if people really do have consciousness of their surroundings during resuscitation, or if they are just claiming to have seen what they assume they should have been able to see. They can't all be liars – Dr. Parnia says all the survivor stories and doctor/nurse stories he's heard are completely genuine. Unfortunately I wont be able to know one way or another for about 3 years.
Stephey, M.J. “What Happens When We Die?” TIME Magazine. September 18, 2008. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html.
Redefining the "out of body" exprience
The part in your review "the old assumption that the brain and mind are the same thing is no longer seeming true" caught my eye and I looked at the article to find exactly what you were referring to. Finding that this challenge to the mind=body way of thinking is a reference to Parnia (the interviewee’s) research into “out of body experiences” I was obliged to reply to your post. I do not think that the phenomenon of “out of body experience” challenges the mind=body theory, rather it is a figure of speech that incorrectly defines the phenomenon which it refers to.
First, I have experienced this particular phenomenon myself, and it was not in the context of being near death and beginning to leave my body, but rather induced by the combination of a hallucinogenic drug and me concentrating on :’loosing all sense of myself.’ During a discussion in a different class I have taken with Hawks, we talked about the brain having a function which actually makes us experience our bodies as separate from the rest of the universe. What I’m implying is that the separation is actually a psychological phenomenon and not real.
Back to “out of body experiences;” I believe that when a person experiences this, it is actually because there is a physical change within their brain, and in addition, their mind is not actually separating from their body but, to define this phenomenon in another way—their brain is no longer telling them that they are separate from the rest of the universe. Thus, in this case, brain function and mental experience within the mind are unified.
Interview?
Rob Lewis2, because this is a topic of great interest to me for this course, I am somewhat excited to have a student reply with a personal experience. If you would be interested, I'd love to chat with you sometime about it. It would be a sort of interview I guess, and maybe I could gain some knowledge for my final paper through it - but again only if you were totally comfortable talking about this with me. Let me know what you think. beardmore@wisc.edu
Testing out of body experiences
I have some doubts about the methods being used in the study. A big problem with out of body experiences is this: did the experience really happen after the brain shut down, or did it happen as the brain was shutting down? Notice that just because a person is non-responsive doesn't mean that they aren't receiving information--if only at a subconscious level--from the outside world.
An alternate proposal out there is this: because the way out-of-body experiences are described makes them in a sense like ESP, we should test if people who flatline are able to, say, see an object hidden above the operating table, whose identity could be kept secret even from the surgical team. If people did start successfully identifying such objects, it would be very powerful evidence of something happening far beyond our current understanding. From what I understand, though, when such experiments have been tried they've been unsuccessful.
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