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The most comprehensive research into near-death experience deals a kill shot to skeptics and aims to change how science views the afterlife.
Science has studied the near-death experience for more than 20 years. Most research has concluded NDEs are real and unexplainable, but scientists have been slow to accept consciousness beyond death. A new scientific study by Jeffrey Long, M. D. may change that. The research compiled in his new book, Evidence of the Afterlife, represents the largest, most comprehensive study of near-death experience and according to the study’s author is, “a real game-changer”.
Dr. Long explains, “we looked at nine lines of evidence that indicate the reality of near-death experiences and their consistent message of an afterlife. With each of these lines of evidence we carefully reviewed all prior scholarly research on the subject and made our contributions with our original research… from my point of view, the scientific term is compelling, but you can put it another way — the nine lines of evidence that I present is proof of the reality of near-death experiences.”
The conclusions of Dr. Long’s research are paradigm smashing for near-death experience skeptics who’ve argued that limited brain functioning may explain NDEs. “What near-death experiencers see correlates to their time of cardiac arrest and it is almost uniformly accurate in every detail. That pretty much refutes the possibility that these could be illusionary fragments, or unreal memories associated with hypoxia, chemicals, REM intrusion, anything that could cause brain dysfunction”, Dr. Long stated.
“I looked at over 280 near-death experiences that had out-of-body observations of Earthly ongoing events… If near-death experiences were just fragments of memory, unrealistic remembrances of a time approaching unconsciousness or returning from unconsciousness, there is no chance that the observations would have a high percent of completely accurate observations. They’d be dream-like or hallucinations. But 98% of them were entirely realistic… In fact, these observations of Earthly ongoing events often include observations of things that would be impossible for them to be aware of with any sensory function from their physical body. For example, they can see the tops of buildings. They can see far away. In my study over 60 of these near-death experiencers later went back and independently attempted to verify what they saw in the out-of-body state. Every single one of these over 60 near-death experiencers that reported checking or verifying their own observations found that they were absolutely correct in every detail.”, Dr. Long said.
While some near-death experience researchers have been reluctant to make the leap from NDEs to proof of the afterlife, Dr. Long is convinced by his research findings, “I’ve gone over every skeptic argument I can get my hands on. At the end of the day, I have no doubt in my mind near-death experience is for real. It’s a profound and reassuring message that we all have an afterlife. Every single one of us. And it’s wonderful. It is probably the greatest thrill of my life to be able to carry forward that important message to the world. I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t absolutely convinced that it’s correct.”
The conclusions of this research will be controversial, but Dr. Long stands ready to take on the critics, “I would be delighted to debate any near-death experience skeptic, any time, any place, on any media, as long as they’re scholarly, well informed, and as long as it can be a very high-level, intellectual debate.”
Jeffrey Long, M.D., is a physician practicing the specialty of radiation oncology (use of radiation to treat cancer) in Houma, Louisiana. Dr. Long has served on the Board of Directors of IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies), and is actively involved in NDE research. His book, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperCollins), was published in 2010.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s show I have an interview with Dr. Jeff Long, author of, Evidence of the Afterlife. As you’ll hear, Dr. Long is probably one of the most qualified near-death experience researchers. He’s just compiled a huge body of that research into this book. This guy delivers the goods. I had a chance to interview him a few months ago for the documentary film that I’ve told some of you about that we’re putting together. He’s on top of his game. A medical doctor, well qualified in the field of medicine; also a very accomplished researcher.
Near-death experience skeptic, Dr. Kevin Nelson says the burden of proof is on experiencers to show their experiences are real.
We all dream, but do we know when we’re dreaming? Recent research from Dr. Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky suggests that near-death experience is akin to dreaming, and uses the same rapid eye movement mechanism associated with sleep. In a recent interview on Sketiko.com, Dr. Nelson defends this controversial research that contradicts the accounts of thousands of near-death experiencers:
Dr. Kevin Nelson: Then you ask how can we have experiences with a flat EEG? My question to you is, that’s an extraordinary claim. Where is the data that says the experience that they later remembered actually happened at the time the EEG was flat?
Alex Tsakiris: Penny Sartori’s research, where she went and interviewed people about their resuscitation process and found that people who have a near-death experience are much more accurate in reporting the specific events that go on during resuscitation, is pretty good, solid research that backs up what so many of the near-death experiencers say, which is that this was…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: Where’s the data?
Alex Tsakiris: Well, that’s data. I mean, if you ask people…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: No, what is her data?
Alex Tsakiris: Her data is that they’re statistically significantly more likely to recount the…
Dr. Kevin Nelson: No, that’s her conclusion. What’s her data?
Alex Tsakiris: Her data is the number of events in the resuscitation process that they’re able to recall. That’s the data.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko, I’m going to dig into the near-death experience research a little bit further. It’s just fascinating to me. Every time I turn over a new stone, it gets more and more interesting.
The stone I was looking to turn over today came about when I was Googling near-death experience research. What pops up over and over again in the most popular mainstream science kind of publications like CNN Health or CBS Science News, Time Magazine, these folks who just touch on this, what pops up over and over again is some research that was done a couple years ago by this guy at the University of Kentucky named Kevin Nelson. You’re going to hear from him today. The way CNN summed up his research is as follows:
“Nelson thinks that near-death experiences are a part of the dream mechanism and that the person having the experience is in a REM (rapid eye movement) state.”
Biologist, and noted telepathy researcher, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is developing an automated telephone telepathy system and is looking for qualified interns to help.
Despite the ever increasing pace of modern life many of us experience brief glimpses of a reality just beyond our grasp. One such example is the experience of hearing the phone ring and having an unexplainable sense of knowing who is calling. The phenomenon has been called telephone telepathy by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
Sheldrake, a former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and current director of the Perrott-Warrick project, has developed a automated system for testing the telephone telepathy phenomenon in the U.K. “The experiments we’ve run in Britain have yielded impressive results, but the new telephone telepathy system we’re developing will allow us to take these tests to the next level and further investigate this interesting phenomenon throughout the U.S. and Canada.”
Sheldrake continued, “We’re in need of talented people with technical and project management experience who can assist in bringing this web-based system to completion. It’s a chance for someone to join a research project that has a chance to fundamentally change long held scientific beliefs about our connection to one and other… it’s very exciting.”
For information on the internship opportunities with Dr. Sheldrake’s telephone telepathy project please email intern@telepathyexperiment.com.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko I have another brief update for you.
If you recall, on the last episode of Skeptiko, we talked a little bit about the Global Consciousness Project and how we’ve gotten involved with that a little bit. One of the other projects that regular listeners will know that we’ve been involved with for a long time is some of the research of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now as many of you know, Dr. Sheldrake is a long-time friend of the Skeptiko show and was actually one of our first guests on Skeptiko and has been on a couple times since.
When it comes to claims of a global consciousness linking us all to tragedies like the earthquake in Haiti, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there are many skeptics.
While the research results of the 12 year old Global Consciousness Project have withstood serious skeptical examination from researchers who’ve dug into the millions of test results collected on the publicly available website, skepticism persists.
But according to Alex Tsakiris, host of the Skpetiko science podcast, dialog between controversial science researchers and their doubters is a good for science, “it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to unconventional science - that’s what makes it unconventional - but skeptics need to look deeper… critical thinking demands we’re sometimes critical of our own cherished beliefs.”
Tsakiris continued: “We’ve helped initiate a collaboration on the Global Consciousness Research Project work of Dr. Roger Nelson, and a skeptical researcher from the University of London named Dr. Chris French. That’s a step in the right direction. Many skeptics bemoan the lack of interest in science education, but when presented with the chance to explore topics like the Global Consciousness Project, that clearly have great fascination to the public, they shy away. This is unfortunate. Science is a method, it’s not a position. There are no unscientific topics, just unscientific methods.”
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko I wanted to do a little bit of an update.
Neurologist and University of Toledo Neuroscience Researcher, Dr. John Greenfield considers the EEG data from patients with near death experience (NDE).
For near death experience skeptics, medical evidence of a flat EEG during an out of body experience has always been a stumbling block. After all, a brain dead patient can’t hallucinate. But, does a flat EEG really mean no brain activity? NDE doubters have claimed activity deep inside the brain, beyond the reach of EEG instruments, must account for the complex “realer than real” experiences reported by those who briefly pass into the afterlife. Now, University of Toledo Neuroscience researcher, and EEG expert, Dr. John Greenfield explains why this claim doesn’t hold up.
“It’s very unlikely that a hypoperfused brain [someone with no blood flow to the brain], with no evidence of electrical activity could generate NDEs. Human studies as well as animal studies have typically shown very little brain perfusion [blood flow] or glucose utilization when the EEG is flat. There are deep brain areas involved in generating memories that might still operate at some very reduced level during cardiac arrest, but of course any subcortically generated activity can’t be brought to consciousness without at least one functioning cerebral hemisphere. So even if there were some way that NDEs were generated during the hypoxic state [while the brain is shut off from oxygen], you would not experience them until reperfusion [blood flow] allowed you to dream them or wake up and talk about them”, Greenfield stated.
NDE Researcher, Dr. Penny Sartori, examines memories of resuscitation by patients suffering cardiac arrest.
With near death experience cases making there way into the, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Psychiatry, and other major medical journals, NDE doubters have looked to the timing of patient memories as a way of explaining this unexplainable phenomena. If memories of out of body travel, and all embracing love occur after ones brush with death, NDEs may still fit within our medical science worldview.
The timing of NDE memories is the research question Dr. Penny Sartori sought to answer, “I worked in the intensive care unit and because of the nature of my job, of course, I’d come across a lot of death. And of course makes you wonder what happens when we die. For five years I gathered data, where I spoke to patients in the intensive care unit and particularly patients who’d had a cardiac arrest. When these patients revived, as soon as they were medically fit, I approached them and asked the simple question, ‘Did you have any memory of the time that you were unconscious?’”
“For the people who had a near-death experience and out of body experience [their recollection of resuscitation] was really quite accurate and I decided then to ask the control group, the people who’d had a cardiac arrest but had no recollection of anything at all. I asked them if they would reenact their resuscitation scenario and tell me what they thought that we had done to resuscitate them. And what I found is that many of the patients couldn’t even guess as to what we’d done. They had no idea at all. And then some of them did make guesses, but these were based on TV hospital dramas that they’d seen. I found that what they reported was widely inaccurate. So there was a stark contrast really in the very accurate out of body experiences reported and then the guesses that the control group had made.”, Dr. Sartori reported.
While research like this may never be enough to convince dogmatic skeptics, the medical evidence for near death experience continues to challenge us to reexamine our beliefs about what lies beyond death.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and I want to start by thanking those of you who’ve contacted me directly since the last episode of Skeptiko and have joined me on Facebook or joined me on Twitter. It’s been great to get to know you, to dialogue a little bit, and I hope we can keep that going.
Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.
Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles. Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980’s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.
Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy. “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”
While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types. They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and before we get started with today’s interview, and a very fascinating interview it is with Dr. Michael Persinger, I’m going to take a minute and invite you to connect - connect with this show, Skeptiko, and with me personally.
Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about Rupert Sheldrake and I found him very interesting”, Phillips said.
Although skeptical of Sheldrake’s theories, Phillips focused on how Sheldrake was being judged, “I wanted to be impartial as to whether he was right or wrong and instead go on and look at whether he’d been treated fairly.”
What he discovered surprised him. Stevens found that despite an unblemished academic record and a research fellowship at the Royal Society, Sheldrake faced public scorn from colleagues for publishing his theory of morphic fields which suggests a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. “There was a review in the journal, Nature in which the editor, John Maddox said that the book, A New Science of Life, should be burned”, Stevens said. “You’d think that that sort of attitude towards what was just a theory would be out of date and would be seen as you know, unscientific. But in fact, it damaged Sheldrake’s career, not John Maddox’s career.”
But the biggest surprise came when Stevens looked at Sheldrake’s collaboration with skeptics like Dr. Richard Wiseman. According to Stevens Wiseman failed to follow normal procedures scientists use when collaborating and reporting their results.
“Wiseman actually did repeats of Sheldrake’s results. He never denied this, but he only admitted it, I think, ten years later. I mean, in normal experiments, if you repeat someone’s results, you say it. And there didn’t seem to be any reason for him not to say, ‘I’ve repeated his results. These experiments work. Sheldrake wasn’t wrong.’ And you know what? Sheldrake was a Research Fellow at the Royal Society. I would hope that when he has some experiments and tests things he’d get it right because he’s from one of the best institutions of science in Britain and in the world. So I really don’t know why Wiseman took so long just to say, ‘Yes, the patterns in Sheldrake’s works were repeated in my own.’”, said Stevens.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko we’re going to talk about science and skepticism. You know, a few months ago I received an e-mail from a gentleman in the UK who was completing his master’s dissertation on the philosophy of science. He had chosen Rupert Sheldrake as the person that he was going to profile as part of his dissertation. I had done a couple of interviews with Dr. Sheldrake, as well as delved into the research that he had done with skeptic Richard Wiseman, who’s a professor in the UK as well.
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with remote viewer and former U.S. Army psychic spy, retired Major Paul H. Smith. The hour long interview explores the science of remote viewing portrayed in the film, The Men Who Stare at Goats and role Major Smith played in the StarGate project.
Major (Retired) Paul H. Smith served for seven years in the government’s remote viewing psychic espionage program at Ft. Meade, MD. He is one of only a handful of government personnel to be personally trained in remote viewing by Ingo Swann at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He has a MS from the Defense Intelligence College, and is currently completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, remote viewer and retired psychic spy, Major Paul H. Smith.
“Ronson himself is on record that he only cared about the people, not about the phenomena, but that’s because as I think he said on your interview, that he didn’t actually believe in the phenomenon. And he said something about he hadn’t seen any evidence that convinced him, but I know I’m paraphrasing here. I’m not exactly sure how he said it, but he said that he hadn’t seen any evidence that convinced him. In fact, kind of just the opposite. Well the fact is, he never saw any of the evidence. He never looked into the evidence.
You know, he might have listened to some of the stories but he of course, is able to dismiss those because when we did tell him credible things - now he interviewed me at length at the Remote Viewing Conference and I tried to present some real bottom-line, fundamental — this is how it really was, these are the kind of things that we did - that kind of stuff. None of that shows up in the book. None of that shows up anywhere, which just to me, that’s irresponsible. “
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with The Men Who Stare at Goats author, Jon Ronson. The 35-minute interview explores the science of remote viewing portrayed in the film, and whether skepticism is warranted.
Jon Ronson is a British journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. Ronson has a distinctive self-deprecating reporting style, which incorporates aspects of Gonzo journalism while skeptically exploring quirky characters.
Ronson’s third book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, has been turned into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson.
“They stuck a bunch of soldiers in a room at Fort Meade in Maryland, including some who’ve gone on to become quite famous paranormal buffs like Ed Dames and Dermot Monocle and Ingo Swann and so on, and they kind of stuck them in a room and told them to be psychic. And some of them tried to be psychic for like 20 years and they do point to some remote viewing successes, but even if they did manage to harness psychic powers which you know, I suspect they probably didn’t, but even if they did, there was still nothing the military could do with it.”
Announcer: Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode I have a very interesting interview with the author and really main character behind the movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson.
Of course, I was more interested in the science behind the movie and the skeptical spin on it. I mean, haven’t people like Hal Puthoff and Steven Schwartz established that remote viewing really works and that the military should be interested in it? So we had a chance to talk about that and a number of other of Jon’s projects. And stick around for the end of the interview and I’ll tell you about a little bit of the additional research I did and some of the follow-up e-mail exchange I had with Jon. Here’s my dialogue with Jon Ronson.
Guest: Troy Conrad is a comedian, writer, actor, producer, and former college teacher who comments on the hypocrisy of religion through the Comedy Jesus Show.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko comedian and creator of the Comedy Jesus Show, Troy Conrad.
“We can’t just rest on a bunch of facts and expect that to be food for the soul. Even though it may not be proven that we have a soul, I still think it’s important to feed it.”
Guest: Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is the current Perrott-Warrick Scholar and Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: The heads I win, tails you lose, Chris French says that psychic researchers do this. Actually, I think skeptics do it more. If they get a result that shows no effect then they say, oh well, it hasn’t worked to this new phenomenon here. If there’s a positive result, as there are in many of my own experiments, then they say, oh, then the experiments must be flawed in some way. So I think this way of arguing works absolutely both ways.
Announcer: Stay with us for Skeptiko.
[Theme Music]
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode I have an interesting interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now you’ll recall that on the last episode of Skeptiko we talked to Dr. Chris French, from the University of London, and one of the topics that came up was his collaboration with Dr. Sheldrake, particularly on the telephone telepathy experiment they’ve been looking at but also on the other experiments with telepathy that Sheldrake has pioneered.
Guest: Dr. Chris French of the University of London discusses his skeptical research of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s Telephone Telepathy experiments and the psychology of skepticism.
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Announcer:On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Chris French.
Dr. Chris French:I imagine in lots of ways parapsychologists are sometimes ahead of the game. I mean,again, I’ve actually argued this in print at least here. I, for a long time, as I said, when I first became a skeptic, I was kind of an early extreme skeptic and had an overly negative view of parapsychology. And I used to go along with the argument that parapsychology was a pseudo-science. I don’t anymore.
Announcer:Stay with us for Skeptiko.
[Theme Music]
Alex Tsakiris:Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko, I have an interview with Dr. Chris French from the University of London, a well-known skeptic and a publisher of a skeptical magazine there in the UK. Dr. French, of course, is not only known as a researcher of anomalous psychology, more or less his official title, but is quite a skeptic and someone who has collaborated with Dr. Richard Wiseman, who we spoke about many times on this show, in debunking various claims including psychics.
He’s appeared many times on TV doing so, and most recently began an investigation with Dr. Wiseman. They selected one very public psychic and tested her. He’s also done quite a bit of work in collaborating with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on his experiments. And he, from time to time, has investigated a number of other parapsychology claims. So we had a lot to talk about. I think it’s a good conversation. Here’s my dialogue with Dr. Chris French.
So I’m joined today by Dr. Chris French, a professor of psychology and Head of Anomalistic Psychology, the research unit at University of London. Dr. French, as many of you know, is well regarded in the skeptical community, as well as in the scientific community in general, particularly in the UK. He’s also known generally as an open-minded, fair-minded skeptic, so that’s quite a reputation and we’ve had quite a chat leading up to this conversation. I’m really looking forward to it. Dr. French, thanks again for joining me here today on Skeptiko.
Update on the Skeptiko’s Summer Vacation and my non-interview with mentalist Mark Edward.
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Read it: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. I hadn’t really planned on doing this little update here, but I was visiting the Skeptiko Forum which I haven’t been visiting quite as often lately, and I read some posts that I just thought I really need to give some attention to and update folks on a couple of things.
First thing I guess I have to explain is why I haven’t been quite as active with Skeptiko over the summer and it’s certainly not been because I’ve lost interest, but a couple things are going on and very exciting things. First, there was just the issue of summer. Summer for folks like us who have four kids and two kids visiting from Latvia can be a little bit busy, and it was for us. I just didn’t have time to do a whole lot of Skeptiko stuff. Read the rest of this entry »
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer.
Dr. Phil Plait: My initial reaction to what you’re saying is strong disagreement with what you’re saying. First of all, science is not a single track. It’s not saying let’s look for a God gene to explain everything. There are psychologists, there are researchers who’ve gone out and researched this sort of thing. Why do people believe in some things?
There are people who study brain physiology, try to figure this kind of stuff out. If – there are reasons we speak. There are reasons we communicate. There are reasons our hands work the way they do. And it all ties into the function of the brain. And there are people who are in there looking at sort of the brain-mind connection.
Announcer: Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode I have an interview – quite a long interview – with Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. Now in the course of this interview you’ll hear me several times talk about finding a skeptic to follow-up on the Global Consciousness Project and to kind of face off with the data and with me on that.
And I have followed up with Phil on that, but I’d also like to follow-up with you, the Skeptiko audience, find someone, if you’re skeptical, who you think can do a good job of debunking or just countering the claims of the Global Consciousness Project. We’d love to have them on. Read the rest of this entry »
Guest: R. Craig Hogan, author of Your Eternal Self claims studies unmistakably point to the finding that the mind is separate from the brain.
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Guest: Psychic detective Noreen Renier discusses the current state of psychic detective work and provides an overview of some of her current cases. Alex also discusses Ben Radford’s appearance on the Skepticality podcast.
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Announcer: On this episode of Skeptiko, psychic detective Noreen Renier.
Noreen Renier: “I was lecturing at the FBI Academy and it was after my lecture that it was open to questions and someone had asked me about Reagan and what I saw for the future. So I sort of tuned in and I saw coming from the outside in the upper chest, he was going to have an injury, and I told the month. So of course, when the attempted assassination happened during the month that I had said, they asked the FBI why didn’t you let us know that? It was the Secret Service that was asking them. And they said, ‘Well, we really didn’t believe her.’”
Announcer:And clips from skeptic investigator, Ben Radford.
Ben Radford:“Do you believe the psychic or do you believe the cops?”
Guest: Mark Ireland, discusses his book Soul Shift, and how psychic medium communication with his deceased son sent him on a journey of spiritual discovery.
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On this episode of Skeptiko, Mark Ireland, author of Soul Shift:
“As I was saying, he put the tape on and then three black blindfolds over it and then more tape, and people would write messages and send them up from the audience. And he would answer them and often go off of what was on the paper and tell them many other things. One of the other specialties he had was people would sometimes send up a bill, a dollar bill, a five, ten, whatever, and they would record the serial number and then ask him to recount the serial number. He would get it right about 99 times out of a hundred.”
Guest: Dr. Yvonne Kason, discusses her experience with, and research of, near-death experiences and other transformative experiences like Kundalini, death bed visions, and past life recall.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko, I have a very interesting interview with Dr. Yvonne Kason. She’s a physician and a teacher with over 25 years of experience at the University of Toronto School of Medicine, but she also has had several near-death experiences.
She’s expanded that personal experience into an extensive amount of research on transformative spiritual experiences. Her book and her interview are not only important for validating the scientific legitimacy of these experiences, but also I think to help anyone who’s had such an experience normalize it and put it into some kind of context that we can understand from an everyday, Western perspective. Here then is my interview with Dr. Yvonne Kason.
Guest: Marilynn Hughes, performs an out-of-body travel experiment for a mother grieving the loss of her daughter.
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THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode we’re going to look at the psychic medium experiment that we’ve been doing. I haven’t spoken much about it in the last few episodes, but there’s been a lot going on, really for the last few months.
Let me take everyone back to the beginning, at least the Skeptiko beginning. Let’s start by maybe defining terms a little bit. I think everyone who’s listening to this show is probably familiar with psychic medium communication. If someone’s lost a loved one they go and talk to a psychic or a medium and they try and connect with that loved one through some anomalous means that we don’t fully understand.
Science has studied the near-death experience for more than 20 years. Most research has concluded NDEs are real and unexplainable, but scientists have been slow to accept consciousness beyond death. A new scientific study by Jeffrey Long, M. D. may change that. The research compiled in his new book, Evidence of the Afterlife, represents the largest, most comprehensive study of near-death experience and according to the study’s author is, “a real game-changer”.
We all dream, but do we know when we’re dreaming? Recent research from Dr. Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky suggests that near-death experience is akin to dreaming, and uses the same rapid eye movement mechanism associated with sleep. In a recent interview on Sketiko.com, Dr. Nelson defends this controversial research that contradicts the accounts of thousands of near-death experiencers:
Despite the ever increasing pace of modern life many of us experience brief glimpses of a reality just beyond our grasp. One such example is the experience of hearing the phone ring and having an unexplainable sense of knowing who is calling. The phenomenon has been called telephone telepathy by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
While the research results of the 12 year old Global Consciousness Project have withstood serious skeptical examination from researchers who’ve dug into the millions of test results collected on the publicly available website, skepticism persists.
For near death experience skeptics, medical evidence of a flat EEG during an out of body experience has always been a stumbling block. After all, a brain dead patient can’t hallucinate. But, does a flat EEG really mean no brain activity? NDE doubters have claimed activity deep inside the brain, beyond the reach of EEG instruments, must account for the complex “realer than real” experiences reported by those who briefly pass into the afterlife. Now, University of Toledo Neuroscience researcher, and EEG expert, Dr. John Greenfield explains why this claim doesn’t hold up.
Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles. Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980’s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.
Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about 
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with remote viewer and former U.S. Army psychic spy, retired 
Join Host Alex Tsakiris for a discussion with The Men Who Stare at Goats author, Jon Ronson. The 35-minute interview explores the science of remote viewing portrayed in the film, and whether skepticism is warranted.
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