Into the light

Perhaps the most intriguing challenge to the neuroscientific mainstream is emerging from the growing body of research into what physician Raymond Moody dubbed “near-death experiences,” or NDEs. Throughout the ages and across cultures, people have reported a variety of mystical phenomena surrounding the dying process. But with the technological explosion of the twentieth century, one medical advance in particular has opened a significant window into the phenomenology of dying—namely, our ability to resuscitate people, to bring them back from the dead. Beginning with Moody's work in the early seventies, over the past several decades, a number of researchers have been exploring this terrain, yielding a remarkably consistent picture of what happens when people make a temporary sojourn through death's door.

Thanks to Oprah and other mass media coverage of the phenomenon, most of us are by now familiar with the basic outline. Upon being pronounced dead, these patients experience themselves outside of the body witnessing the scene of the accident or operating room from above. From there, at some point they begin moving into darkness, or sometimes a dark tunnel, at the other end of which they are met by deceased relatives and perhaps a “being of light” who then prompts them to undertake a review of their life. In most cases, there is an encounter with “the light,” which is usually accompanied by feelings of overwhelming joy, love, and peace, after which they either discover or decide that it is not their time to die and are returned to their body. Although not all NDEs contain all of the above elements (in fact, some patients even report harrowing encounters with hellish realms, quite the opposite of the more common positive NDE), for most who have the experience, it is a life-transforming event, leading to a radical change in values and a loss of the fear of death.

It's easy to understand why these experiences would have such a profound psychological and spiritual impact. After an episode like that, who could doubt the existence of consciousness beyond the body and the reality of life after death? Indeed, given the widespread media attention these accounts have received, it may well be that NDEs are as responsible as televangelism for the continued widespread belief in the afterlife in contemporary America. And if we take them seriously, they certainly seem like good reason to question the notion that consciousness resides entirely in the brain. However, as neuropsychiatrist and renowned near-death researcher Peter Fenwick points out, “The simple fact that people have these experiences does not in itself prove anything one way or the other regarding the existence of consciousness outside the brain.” Simply put, how do we know the NDE is not just a brain-generated illusion? According to the “dying brain hypothesis” as put forward by psychologist Susan Blackmore, all of the specific phenomena associated with the classic NDE can be accounted for by established brain responses to the “severe stress, extreme fear, and cerebral anoxia” that would naturally accompany a brush with death.

Yet riddled throughout the NDE literature are accounts that seem to suggest that there is more going on in these experiences than can as yet fit into the materialist picture. For instance, several physicians and nurses have reported patients being able to describe in detail events that happened when they were clearly unconscious, comatose, or even clinically brain dead. In one widely reported case, a postoperative patient correctly identified the nurse who had removed his dentures and the drawer she had placed them in—while he was in a coma. In another, an unconscious patient had an out-of-body experience after which she accurately described a tennis shoe she had seen on the outside ledge of a third-floor hospital window. But the most dramatic case to date is probably the now-famous story of an Arizona woman named Pam Reynolds. In a last-ditch attempt to save Reynolds from a brain aneurysm that threatened her life, doctors performed a rare and dangerous “standstill” operation in which they lowered her body temperature to below sixty degrees Fahrenheit, stopped her heart and respiration, and drained all the blood from her body and brain. Her EEG was a flat line, and her brain stem showed no response to the “clickers” placed in her ears. She was, by any reasonable definition, dead. Yet following her recovery from the operation, doctors learned that not only had she undergone a classic NDE, but she was also able to recount with astonishing accuracy many of the details of the operation, from the surgical instruments used to the conversation between the surgeons and nurses.

So far, the research into NDEs has been largely anecdotal, and as yet, no one has provided the kind of independent verification of data that would stand as scientific proof. But it is anecdotal cases like these that have inspired researchers to focus their inquiry on documenting with increasing rigor those NDEs that could provide hard evidence that something more than the brain is at work. In the cardiac ward, where death regularly comes and goes, they have found their laboratory. As Peter Fenwick puts it,

Fenwick and other NDE researchers agree that further research is required before the case can be closed with any certainty. But initial results from several large, multihospital cardiac ward studies are highly supportive of the notion of a nonmaterial mind. If future studies are able to provide adequate empirical evidence, it will indeed raise some very big questions about consciousness and the brain.

A mind field

If the mind is not contained in the brain, then just where exactly is it? The traditional dualist answer, around since Descartes' time, is that it is a separate immaterial substance that interacts with the brain and body in some mysterious way. Trying to figure out how this interaction occurs is what launched the debate over the mind/body problem in the first place. But today, thanks to advances in scientific theory over the past century and a half, some new ways of thinking about the matter are starting to emerge.

For renegade biologists like Rupert Sheldrake, one of the most powerful tools for understanding the workings of life and mind is the physical notion of the “field,” first introduced to science by Michael Faraday in the nineteenth century. “From electromagnetic fields to gravitational fields to quantum matter fields, these field theories have taken over physics in such a way that everything is now seen as energy within fields,” Sheldrake told me one afternoon at his home in north London. “As the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper put it, 'Through modern physics, materialism has transcended itself, because matter is no longer the fundamental explanatory principle. Fields and energy are.' So what I'm asking is, When we come to the mind and the brain, what if the brain is a system that's organized by fields as well?”

According to Sheldrake, consciousness, or mind, is best understood as an information field that is anchored in the brain but extends far beyond it, that in fact, extends wherever our attention goes. “The field of a magnet isn't confined to the inside of a magnet. It stretches out beyond its surface. The field of a cell phone stretches out beyond the surface of the handset. So my point is that the fields on which mental activity depend interact with the brain and are rooted in the brain, but they're not confined to the brain any more than any of these other fields are confined to the material object they're associated with.”

Approaching the mind/body problem in this way, Sheldrake feels, allows for an explanation of both the voluminous body of data that shows the dependence of consciousness on brain function and the mysterious evidence from his own studies of telepathy and other psi phenomena that seem to point to the ability of consciousness to reach beyond the parameters of the skull. “So, just as the field around the cell phone will be changed if you oblate a component or cut a wire in the handset, so the fields around the brain and the fields within the brain would be affected by changes in or damage to the physical components. But that doesn't prove that those fields are entirely limited to what's happening inside the brain.”

Indeed, in the course of my research, the most common metaphor I encountered among those seeking to counter materialism's robust claims was a notion first put forward by William James: the analogy of the brain as a kind of receiver/transmitter for consciousness. In Sheldrake's words:

If I switch on my TV set to PBS and if you measure different bits of the tuning set, you'll find that certain bits are resonating at certain frequencies. If I switch it to another channel, like Fox News, there will be measurable frequency changes in the various bits of the TV. But that doesn't prove that all the content of PBS programs and Fox News is generated inside that bit of the TV set. I think that the thinking behind a lot of neuroscience claims is as naïve as that, because it's based on the assumption that it's all inside the brain. Therefore the next question is: Which bits of the brain explain it? But if the brain is not like that, if the brain is more like a tuning system and a center for coordinating our actions and our sensations, then there's no reason to assume that all our mental activity is confined to the inside of the head.

How exactly would such a receiver/transmitter model work in the case of the NDE, when the patient shows no brain activity at all? One idea, expressed by Dutch cardiac surgeon and NDE researcher Pim van Lommel is that “the informational fields of consciousness and memory are present around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields, but these fields only become available to our waking consciousness through our functioning brain and other cells of our body.” According to van Lommel, when brain function is lost, these information fields continue to exist. Hence, brain-dead patients can still experience identity, attention, cognition, memory, and emotion. But these experiences will be brought into our waking consciousness only when brain function is restored.

Admittedly, such ideas, like those of other researchers on the frontiers of science, are far from being accepted by the academic mainstream. In fact, in speaking with Sheldrake, it became clear that he gave up trying to directly convince the scientific orthodoxy of his ideas a long time ago and is instead focusing his efforts on igniting a sort of parapsychology revolution among the masses. Through his recent popular books The Sense of Being Stared At and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and his new participate-at-home email telepathy experiments, he is trying to awaken in the public an interest in exploring the mysteries of consciousness that surround them every day. His hope is that with enough popular support for the idea of psychic phenomena, the scientific establishment will have to start to take seriously the powerful evidence that he claims has been accumulating in parapsychology labs for decades.

The universe inside your head

“Evidence is not the issue,” the voice on the other end of the line said calmly. “We have plenty of evidence. But evidence alone is not enough. What we need now is a theory.” I was speaking with Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and one of the leading voices in parapsychology, or “psi research,” today. Having begun his parapsychology career in the mid-eighties doing government-classified research at SRI International (formerly part of Stanford University), Radin has worked in psi labs at a number of universities and spent several years as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is perhaps best known for his 1997 book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. In it, he presents an accessible and comprehensive overview of all psi research to date, including several meta-analyses of data from multiple studies that, taken together, make a persuasive case for the reality of such effects as psychokinesis, remote viewing, clairvoyance, telepathy, and distant healing—all of which seem to lend some support to the idea that the mind cannot be entirely contained within the brain.

In studies of psychokinesis, or “mind-matter interaction,” for instance, researchers have found over thousands of trials that subjects can influence the output of electronic random-number generators to a statistically significant degree simply through the power of intention. “Remote viewing” research, much of it funded by federal agencies including the CIA, has shown that skilled psychics can accurately describe remote locations in controlled tests with odds against chance of over a billion to one. And despite recent controversies that have erupted around the field of “distant healing,” studies suggest that “intercessory prayer” on behalf of others who don't know they're being prayed for can reduce secondary infection rates and hospital stays among AIDS patients, reduce the risk of complications during heart surgery, and even improve pregnancy rates for in vitro fertilization (results no doubt responsible for the 2.3 million dollars spent by the U.S. government on prayer research in recent years).

Psi research, like most frontier or “fringe” sciences, has been fiercely attacked by skeptics claiming research design flaws, inadequate samples, and experimenter bias. So I was curious to ask Radin what body of research he felt made the most irrefutable case for the existence of psi. While he was quick to point out that “nothing in science is irrefutable,” for the most convincing single body of data, he soon landed on the phenomenon of telepathy. Most of us have at some point been surprised to find ourselves seemingly picking up on another's thoughts, or knowing who was calling before we picked up the phone, or in this internet age, preparing to send someone a question via email only to receive their response before we sent it. While skeptics readily reduce all such phenomena to chance, a substantial body of research has been accumulating that aims to show just how far beyond chance they actually are.