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Interview with Dr. Stephen Braude reveals challenges and opportunities of controversial psi research into mediumship and psychokinesis.
Research into controversial topics like psychic mediums is tough, but some researchers find it’s made even tougher when skeptics favor the weakest cases over the strongest.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for and interview with Professor of Philosophy and psi researcher, Dr. Stephen Braude. During the interview Dr. Braude recounts his entree into psi research, “… there was all this other stuff that had been happening outside the lab from séances and anecdotal reports and I figured if I was an honest intellect I at least needed to become acquainted with it before I rejected it summarily. So I first studied the evidence for large-scale, and physical mediumship in particular. That was a momentous event because the evidence blew me away… I discovered that the evidence was much cleaner than people made it out to be.”
Braude continues, “The usual arguments about the evidence being easily dismissed because of poor observation or poor conditions of observation demonstrated really a lack of command of the evidence. One of the things that struck me was that people were dismissing the non-experimental evidence by appealing to the sleaziest of arguments. They would focus on the weakest pieces of evidence and then generalize from that, which is simply straw man reasoning. The principle on which I operated all along is that the cases that matter from outside the lab have to be the strongest cases, the ones that are the hardest to explain away.”
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Cornell University Professor and NDE researcher seeks to verify out of body experience after clinical death.
What will you see when you die? According to near death experience researcher Dr. Sam Parnia you may see a carefully hidden image placed several inches below the ceiling of your hospital room.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for the opening round of a dialog with well known near death experience researcher Dr. Sam Parnia. Dr. Parnia has made worldwide headlines with his novel approach to proving whether out of body experiences of cardiac arrest patients demonstrate proof of an afterlife, or whether such reports are merely a, “trick of the mind”. Dr. Parnia’s group is using visual targets placed near the ceiling of the patient’s hospital room in an attempt to objectively establish whether near death experiencers can see what others can’t.
According to Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris the study is unlikely to produce positive results, “I’ve spoken with a lot of near death experience researchers. They’re telling me Parnia’s methods go against what we’ve learned about NDEs”. Tsakiris continued, “near death experiencers have been know to bring back some remarkable, verifiable information about what happens after clinical death, but there’s little to suggest they will see and remember Dr. Parnia targets.”
Tsakiris also questions whether Dr. Parnia’s skepticism about near death experiences has led him to create an experiment that’s designed to fail, “it’s a subtle thing, Dr. Parnia public statements about his skepticism of the near death experience doesn’t mean he’s intentionally trying to debunk the survival of consciousness hypothesis… but it does make you wonder.”
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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 be opening up a dialogue with Dr. Sam Parnia. Now, the unusual thing about that is that Dr. Parnia isn’t here and he isn’t going to be joining me for an interview. In fact, what I’m doing is preparing some questions that I’m going to transcribe and then send to Dr. Parnia in hopes of getting a response from him.
Oxford Professor of Medicine, and theologian, Michael Marsh finds much he doesn’t like about near-death experience claims of spirit communication.
Many within the mainstream medical community have reservations about near death expereincers who claim to experience an afterlife, but many are surprised to hear the same doubts from Christian theologians.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Professor Michael Marsh, a former Professor of Medicine, at Oxford who returned to Oxford to complete PhD in Theology. Dr. Marsh, who recently authored, Out-Of-Body Experience and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality?, rejects claims made by near-death experiencers. When asked if those who claim to encounter Jesus during their near-death experience are communicating with Christ Dr. Marsh responded with and emphatic, “no!”
Marsh also offers his opinion on how near death experiences compare to biblical accounts of an afterlife, “I don’t think there’s much that compares with our ideas of resurrection or theology. We talked a little bit about spirituality, and I don’t think that the sort of disclosures that we have… the inconsistencies of the pictures of so-called heaven, and the pictures of so-called Jesus and all the rest of it are consistent. You might expect them to be consistent if people really had been to heaven and seen Jesus or been in the presence of God.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by Professor Michael Marsh, a highly regarded academic biomedical researcher and physician who was formerly a Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and then later in his career returned to Oxford to complete a PhD in theology. Now, his doctoral thesis was on near-death experience and out-of-body experience, and that’s also the subject of his recently published book titled, Out-Of-Body Experience and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality?
Righteous Indignation Skeptics not persuaded by psychic medium experiment, find fault with controls and results.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for discussion with Michael Marshall, Trystan Swale Gavin Schofield of the Righteous Indignation Podcast. During the hour-long discussion the group discusses a variety of topics including psychic medium communication experiments like the ones carried out by Dr. Julie Bieschel of the Windbridge Institute, and human consciousness experiments like those from the Global Consciousness Project headed by Dr. Roger Nelson.
Although the panel remains divided on the conclusions that can be drawn from this research, they found common ground on the need for dialog among skeptics and believers. “Everyone hates the phrase ’skeptics versus believers’, but that’s where the lines of debate are usually drawn… the key to generating any understanding between these groups is to keep the dialog going and resist the urge to shut down and stop listening”, Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris stated. Listen to Alex’s appearance on the Rightous Indignation Podcast
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Yale University Neurologist skeptical of near-death experience research claims.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for the second in a two-part series with Yale University Neurologist, Dr. Steven Novella. During the hour-long interview Dr. Novella had this to say about the near-death experience research, “It’s descriptively very broad and it may have as many different causes as there are types of experiences that people describe, that are being lumped into this sort of broad category of experiences we’re calling near-death experiences.”
But, this view was immediately challenged by Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris, “I don’t see where in the literature… particularly among near-death experience researchers, where there is this broad collection of different symptoms that are being lumped together, or experiences that are being lumped together. If anything, it seems like they’re honing in more and more…”
Novella and Tsakiris also discuss anesthesia awareness as a possible explanation for near-death experience accounts, ” Any anesthesiologist will tell you… that patients can wake up during anesthesia… that is a perfectly plausible explanation for those cases.”, Novella stated.
Tsakiris replied, “It doesn’t hold up… first of all its rare… the other thing is it has all sort of symptoms associated with it that don’t show up in any of these cases.
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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 I have an interview with Dr. Steven Novella, to discuss his take on near-death experience research.
Skeptiko show considers claims of Yale University Neurologist regarding near-death experience research.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for the first in a two-part series with Yale University Neurologist, Dr. Steven Novella. The shows examine whether near-death experiences are best explained by conventional medical science. Novella, host of The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, recently stated that research into the near-death experience phenomena is, “triangulating on the fact that this is probably a brain experience”. But, according to Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris, “Dr. Novella isn’t just a little bit wrong, he’s completely at odds with the large body of published research on near-death experience… the science of researchers we’ve interviewed like, Dr. Jeffrey Long, Dr. Peter Fenwick, Dr. Penny Sartori and others like Dr. Bruce Greyson and Dr. Sam Parnia and Dr. Michael Sabom, Dr. Pim Van Lommel, and many, many others all point in the opposite direction.”
The show also examines Dr. Novella’s recent analysis of research linking the CO2 blood levels in cardiac arrest patients with the near-death experience. According to Tsakiris, “Dr. Novella’s statements seem to contradict the very research he’s reporting on… his conclusions are also significantly different from the authors of the study.”
The second part of this broadcast, including an interview with Dr. Novella’s, is scheduled for June 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 this episode of Skeptiko I was planning on interviewing Dr. Steven Novella, who is the host of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, as well as being an academic neurologist at the Yale School of Medicine. We were going to talk about near-death experience and Steve’s public statements about that recently. We’re still going to do that, but Steve had a scheduling conflict and we needed to reschedule that for a couple of weeks.
Interview with science journalist Jeff Wise examines the accuracy of news reports on near-death experience research.
Recent headlines on ABCnews.com, NationalGeographic.com, and RichardDawkins.net trumpeted a recent scientific study suggesting near-death experiences are caused by carbon dioxide in the blood. This stands in contrast to the opinion of near-death experience experts, and even the study’s authors, but they news reports persist.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with science journalist and author of ‘Extreme Fear’, Jeff Wise. During the 30-minute interview Mr. Wise explains why and how he and other science journalists reported on this recent near-death experience study. And whether science journalism, according to Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris, “is driven by a code… an invisible hand that drives them away from anything that might be labeled ’spiritual’, and simultaneously lowers their guard against weak research that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.”
Mr Wise replied, “That’s not what it feels like from my perspective… we’re interested in things that make sense in the context of everything else that we know, but that’s novel. So things that are boring, that we see every day we’re not interested in. Things that completely don’t make any sense or we have to completely deconstruct our entire worldview in order to incorporate them, those things also aren’t interesting… I think that’s really the problem. If you’re trying to propose a theory or a view of a phenomenon that is radically at odds with how, let’s say mainstream science views the operation of the world…”
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by Jeff Wise, a journalist, science writer for such publications as Popular Mechanics, the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, and many others. He’s also the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger.
Interviews with Tamas Borbely of Goldsmiths College and Dr. Peter Bancel of the Global Consciousness Project reveal common ground on revolutionary research.
The notion of a collective global consciousness is accepted truth within many cultures, but scoffed at by modern scientists. That may change. Once skeptical researchers investigating the 10-year Global Consciousness Project are finding solid data to support the conclusion that we’re all connected.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris an interview with Tamas Boberly of Goldsmiths College at the University of London, and Dr. Peter Bancel of the Global Consciousness Project. During the 50-minute interview Mr. Boberly recaps his analysis of the work done so far, “I’ve been reading the papers that Dr. Nelson and others produced on the Global Consciousness Project and it is my impression that they have a very, very solid methodology and a very good grasp of the statistics that are used… and if you look at the results, obviously the results they report are astronomical. They are very, very convincing. I think the only criticism, which is perhaps even unjust, could come in the form of claiming that because of the lack of a clear-cut definition for these events, perhaps not all, the negative results are reported. And like I said, I’m not suggesting that this is the case. But defining the events in advance would be an excellent way of silencing critics, because otherwise, having looked at the database that they have compiled in the past decade or more, it is certainly very convincing.”
Dr. Peter Bancel describes his involvement with the project, “I came into the project after it had been going for a couple of years and even at that point the cumulative effect of these events that Roger Nelson had been looking at had considerable significance. So one of the first things I set out to do was to see if I could find something methodological or otherwise wrong in how the project was set up. I was asking myself if there was anything fatal, and there wasn’t at all.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by Tamas Borbely, who is a research assistant at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. Tamas is one of the researchers that Chris French has tasked with looking into the Global Consciousness Project and doing a little bit of collaborative work and making an attempt to see if any of that research makes sense or needs further analysis. So with kind of a stumbling introduction, Tamas, welcome to Skeptiko.
Series of interviews with leading near-death experience skeptics show no plausible medical explanation for afterlife experiences.
The idea of an afterlife doesn’t sit well with the science-minded. Our mind is our brain and when we die we die they claim. But as conventional medical explanations for near-death experiences fall flat, and NDE research progresses, tradition-minded scientists are facing the impossible notion that the afterlife may be real.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for his second interview with near-death experience skeptic and author of Mortal Minds, Dr, G.M. Woerlee. During the 30-minute interview Dr. Woerlee continues his assertion that near-death experiences have normal medical explanations. When presented with the case of a young woman who suffered a severe a gunshot wound and was pronounced clinically dead by her doctor only to be miraculously revived after two unsuccessful rounds of defibrillation Dr. Woerlee concluded, “No, she was not dead… if she was dead the doctors would not have resuscitated her. She would have remained dead.”
As to her amazing near-death experience during which she left her body and was able to look down on medical stuff during their frantic attempt to revive her, Woerlee offered this explanation, “…she hears the conversations. She feels the sensations. And she also is a woman who also has seen films and she knows how these things go. She hears the conversations, why? Because she is awake. That does not surprise me.”
Dr. Woerlee’s claims contradict the accounts of medical staff on the scene. They indicated she was clinically dead, “what we call sheet-faced”, and under heavy anesthesia making it medically impossible for her to have a consciousness memory of the experience.
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome back Dr. G.M. Woerlee, an anesthesiologist in the Netherlands and a NDE skeptic and the author of several books, including Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near-Death Experiences. Dr. Woerlee, welcome back to Skeptiko.
Dr. G.M. Woerlee: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.
Near-Death experience researcher Dr. Long offers a point-by-point response to skeptics of his New York Time best seller, Evidence of the Afterlife.
When near-death experience researcher Dr. Jeffery Long decided to publish his 10-year study of NDEs he knew there would be controversy, and critics. His conclusion, that consciousness survives bodily death and moves to an afterlife, is unsettling to many within a medical community built on death being absolute and final. But rather than shy away from critics, Dr. Long has engaged them.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an in-depth interview with near-death experience researcher, Dr, Jeffrey Long. During the 45-minute interview Dr. Long offers a point-by-point response to skeptics of his New York Time best seller, Evidence of the Afterlife.
In response to the criticisms of former Skeptiko guest Dr. G.M. Woerlee, Dr. Long said, “I think one of the biggest defenses from people that don’t believe in an afterlife, and this was brought out in your interview with Dr. Woerlee, is this barrier where they won’t hear it. They won’t respond to it. It’s just not something they care to address, which is somewhat surprising. I think all scholarly discussion of really any topic requires an open-minded dialogue about the evidence. It really starts with evidence.”
Regarding speculation that NDEs result from regaining consciousness during CPR chest compressions, Dr. Long said, “When you talk to the patients who have actually survived CPR one thing that is very, very obvious is that the substantial majority of them are confused or amnesic when they’re recovered. If you read even a few near-death experiences, you immediately realize essentially none of them talk about episodes of confusion when they just don’t understand what’s going on. You really don’t see that at all. In fact, our research found that 76% of people having a near-death experience said their level of consciousness and alertness during the NDE was actually greater than their earthly, everyday life. So, you have to come away with the conclusion that even if there’s blood flow to the brain induced by CPR, it’s not correlated with the level of consciousness and alertness reported during near-death experiences.”
Dr. Long continues, “But also, in addition, the substantial majority of people that have a near-death experience associated with cardiac arrest are actually seeing their physical body well prior to the time that CPR is initiated. Once CPR is initiated, you don’t see any alteration in the flow of the near-death experience, suggesting that blood flow to the brain isn’t affecting the content in any way.”
Dr. Long also discusses the nature of NDE skepticism, “The other issue I’ve seen with skeptics is they often have their pet theory. Their theory of how the world works, how things work, and it’s very, very difficult to dislodge them from their pet theory, even with overwhelming evidence.”
In the end Dr. Jeffery Long believes in his evidence, “I have confidence in the substantial majority of people. When they hear evidence, and it’s presented in a straightforward way, they’re smart enough to understand what’s real evidence and what’s evasiveness.”
Jeffrey Long, M.D., is a near death experience researcher and physician (radiation oncology). His book, ‘Evidence of the Afterlife’ (HarperCollins), was published in 2009.
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by Dr. Jeffrey Long, a practicing physician, he’s a radiation oncologist, and a near-death experience researcher. His book, Evidence of the Afterlife, is the most comprehensive study of NDEs ever published and it’s been a huge success.
Anesthesiologist Dr. G.M. Woerlee believes NDEs are in our body and our brain - not in the afterlife.
As a practicing anesthesiologist in the Netherlands G.M. Woerlee M.D. has seen many approach death’s door. For those returning with stories of an afterlife he advises a closer look at the medical evidence.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a vigorous discussion with near-death experience skeptic, anesthesiologist G.M. Woerlee. During the 90-minute episode Woerlee sets out to refute the research Dr. Jeffrey Long published in, Evidence of the Afterlife.
According to Woerlee, there are a number of conventional medical explanations for the phenomena reported during NDEs, “ultimately, when you look at the total body of evidence explaining the physiological or biological basis of the near-death experience, the out-of-body experience, and the other experiences as reported by those undergoing near-death experiences, you come to the conclusion that most of them — in fact all of them — can be explained by body function and the changes in body function induced by the various - I call them stressors - or causes of the near-death experience. Hypoxia, drugs, anxiety and on and on.”
The discussion includes a point-by-point examination of the nine lines of evidence for the existence of an afterlife as outlined in Dr. Jeffrey Long’s book. Dr. Long has agreed to issues a response during a future episode of Skeptiko.
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by someone well qualified to enter into a discussion on the evidence of survival of consciousness and the near-death experience. Dr. G.M. Woerlee is a well-respected anesthesiologist in the Netherlands, a frequent lecturer in his field, and an author of three books including, Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near-Death Experiences.
Lively debate between biologist Rupert Sheldrake and telepathy skeptic Richard Wiseman reveals wide rift between skeptics and psi proponents
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a spirited debate between biologist, author, and telepathy researcher, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and noted researcher of anomalous psychology, and parapsychology skeptic, Dr. Richard Wiseman. During the 90-minute episode Sheldrake and Wiseman discuss the scientific evidence for telepathy and other psi phenomena.
The debate covers a range of topics, but according to moderator Alex Tsakiris, the real friction began after the debate ended, “During the debate, Dr. Wiseman appeared eager to participate in collaborative research with parapsychologists. He went to great lengths explaining why skeptics and psi proponents should team-up on experiments of telepathy and other psi phenomena. But during an email exchange following the debate (published on the Skeptiko website), his stance took a radical change.”
According to Tsakiris, Wiseman stonewalled attempts to create a skeptics/proponents research forum, “I contacted three very prominent psi researchers and convinced them to take Wiseman up on his offer. They agree, but Wiseman would not. He made various demands aimed at agitating the other researchers, and even balked at a mere one-hour initial dialog. I was stunned, especially since I offered to fund the research.”
The discussion began with Professor Richard Wiseman offering a defense for scientific skepticism regarding psi phenomena, “In terms of my own research, some of it has looked at the notion that certain individuals possessing very strong psychic abilities, the mediums and the psychics and so on, and I’m very, very skeptical about that data. I don’t think it shows anything particularly remarkable in terms of psychic ability going on. And then I’ve done a small amount of work, although other people have done a lot more, into the notion that psi is a more subtle signal. There, I’m fairly skeptical about the literature. I certainly wouldn’t want to argue the case that psi definitely exists on the basis of that literature.”
But Sheldrake challenged the idea of relegating telepathy and other psi phenomena to the fringes of science, “I just want to go back a bit to what Richard called the Humian argument against miracles. Hume’s argument against miracles was that miracles are extremely rare and it’s more likely that people have been lying about them than that they actually happened. They so defy the common experience of humanity. Now, I think the argument is exactly reversed when it comes to phenomena like telepathy. They’re not extremely rare. Whether it’s 30 percent, 50 percent, 70 percent of the population who have had them, the details don’t matter. The point is these things are very common. Hume’s argument was that commonsense, the kind of common experience of the bulk of humanity, is what gives credence to something. So I think it’s completely inappropriate to apply an argument against miracles to phenomena which happen on an everyday basis to large numbers of people.”
Next, the discussion examined the institution of science itself. Wiseman was asked to defend his statement, “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that [psi] is proven. That begs the question do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal?”.
In defense of this, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” argument, Wiseman stated, “I think that parapsychologists by not far from 100 years of research have failed to come up with that level of evidence. It’s not to say they couldn’t in the future, but to me there just hasn’t been the level of progress that you would expect given the amount of work that’s been put in… that strength of evidence simply isn’t there.”
To which Sheldrake responded, “Again, I come back to the fact that what we’re dealing with here is an ideological issue. I mean, what Richard calls mainstream science and there’s a kind of materialistic faith that many scientists have, at least in public. Many of them in private have telepathic experiences and have quite different views.
Nevertheless, he’s right. There is a kind of materialistic ethos in science. I think that itself is something we need to question and look at because it leads to an extraordinary blindness. He said that if you said there’s a car outside, you wouldn’t need to look. If you said there’s a spaceship, you would, because that’s an incredible claim. So it’s okay for cosmologists to claim there are entire universes out there, a whole lot of universes, not just one, but trillions. No one bothers to look. The reason that gets past the filters is it doesn’t overturn a particular ideology. What’s at stake is not science itself but ideology.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We have a very special live dialogue today between Dr. Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at University of Herefordshire in the UK. In addition to his job there at the university, Dr. Wiseman, as many of you know, is also a parapsychology skeptic and an author of many popular books such as Quirkology, which explores the quirky way our mind works.
Skeptic’s Million Dollar Challenge To Be More Open and Transparent Says JREF President, D.J. Grothe
Join Skepitko host Alex Tsakiris for a 90-minute interview with journalist, skeptic, and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, D.J. Grothe. During the interview Grothe discusses the science of skepticism, evidence for survival of consciousness, what constitutes “extraordinary proof”, and changes to the JREF Million Dollar Challenge.
“If some people conceive of the Million Dollar Challenge as the way science works, in other words, ‘to advance our scientific understanding in this field, be challenged for a million dollars’… well, science is not a cage match, despite the fact that you put some big personality scientists in a room and they fight, science doesn’t work that way.
The Million Dollar Challenge is done in the spirit of science. It’s done looking at the evidence, but it is a vehicle of a non-profit educational foundation to raise public consciousness and awareness about these important questions”, Grothe said.
Grothe also discussed ways to make the challenge of paranormal and supernatural claims more open and transparent, “I’m proud of the transparency so far and we want there to be even more transparency in the following ways. The claimants, when they apply, in short order - although I’m kind of letting the cat out of the bag - in the months ahead we want to have a running public display of all the claimants and the progress of their challenges and their applications.”
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Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by someone whose skills as a broadcaster, journalist, and activist I greatly admire. Formerly the host of Point of Inquiry, D.J. Grothe stood toe-to-toe with Nobel Prize winners, leading public intellectuals, and scores and scores of best-selling authors. He not only held his own, but he brought a depth and a command of the topics that was, well, was pretty darned impressive.
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.
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. “
Research into controversial topics like psychic mediums is tough, but some researchers find it’s made even tougher when skeptics favor the weakest cases over the strongest.
What will you see when you die? According to near death experience researcher Dr. Sam Parnia you may see a carefully hidden image placed several inches below the ceiling of your hospital room.
Many within the mainstream medical community have reservations about near death expereincers who claim to experience an afterlife, but many are surprised to hear the same doubts from Christian theologians.
The notion of a collective global consciousness is accepted truth within many cultures, but scoffed at by modern scientists. That may change. Once skeptical researchers investigating the 10-year Global Consciousness Project are finding solid data to support the conclusion that we’re all connected.
The idea of an afterlife doesn’t sit well with the science-minded. Our mind is our brain and when we die we die they claim. But as conventional medical explanations for near-death experiences fall flat, and NDE research progresses, tradition-minded scientists are facing the impossible notion that the afterlife may be real.
As a practicing anesthesiologist in the Netherlands G.M. Woerlee M.D. has seen many approach death’s door. For those returning with stories of an afterlife he advises a closer look at the medical evidence.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a spirited debate between biologist, author, and telepathy researcher, 
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.
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 
