ZAVibes

Michael Shermer really has a way with words. Here he eloquently describes how someone like John Edward appears to be able to talk to the dead:

Like all other animals, we humans evolved to connect the dots between events so as to discern patterns meaningful for our survival. Like no other animals, we tell stories about the patterns we find. Sometimes the patterns are real; sometimes they are illusions. A well-known illusion of a meaningful pattern is the alleged ability of mediums to talk to the dead. The hottest medium today is former ballroom-dance instructor John Edward, star of the cable television series Crossing Over and author of the New York Times best-selling book One Last Time. His show is so popular that he is about to be syndicated nationally on many broadcast stations.

How does Edward appear to talk to the dead? What he does seems indistinguishable from tricks practiced by magicians. He starts by selecting a section of the studio audience, saying something like “I’m getting a George over here. George could be someone who passed over, he could be someone here, he could be someone you know,” and so on. Of course, such generalizations lead to a “hit.” Once he has targeted his subject, the “reading” begins, seemingly using three techniques:

1. Cold reading, in which he reads someone without initially knowing anything about them. He throws out lots of questions and statements and sees what sticks. “I’m getting a ‘P’ name. Who is this, please?” “He’s showing me something red. What is this, please?” And so on. Most statements are wrong. If subjects have time, they visibly shake their heads “no.” But Edward is so fast they usually have time to acknowledge only the hits. And as behaviorist B. F. Skinner showed in his experiments on superstitious behavior, subjects need only occasional reinforcement or reward to be convinced. In an exposé I did for WABC-TV in New York City, I counted about one statement a second in the opening minute of Edward’s show, as he riffled through names, dates, colors, diseases, conditions, situations, relatives and the like. He goes from one to the next so quickly you have to stop the tape and go back to catch them all.

2. Warm reading, which exploits nearly universal principles of psychology. Many grieving people wear a piece of jewelry that has a connection to a loved one. Mediums know this and will say something like “Do you have a ring or a piece of jewelry on you, please?” Edward is also facile at determining the cause of death by focusing on either the chest or the head area and then working rapid-fire through the half a dozen major causes of death. “He’s telling me there was a pain in the chest.” If he gets a positive nod, he continues. “Did he have cancer, please? Because I’m seeing a slow death here.” If the subject hesitates, Edward will immediately shift to heart attack.

3. Hot reading, in which the medium obtains information ahead of time. One man who got a reading on Edward’s show reports that “once in the studio, we had to wait around for almost two hours before the show began. Throughout that time everybody was talking about what dead relative of theirs might pop up. Remember that all this occurred under microphones and with cameras already set up.”

Whether or not Edward gathers information in this way, mediums generally needn’t. They are successful because they are dealing with the tragedy and finality of death. Sooner or later we all will confront this inevitability, and when we do, we may be at our most vulnerable.

This is why mediums are unethical and dangerous: they prey on the emotions of the grieving. As grief counselors know, death is best faced head-on as a part of life. Pretending that the dead are gathering in a television studio in New York to talk twaddle with a former ballroom-dance instructor is an insult to the intelligence and humanity of the living.

By Michael Shermer

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret — write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn’t. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract — positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency … If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency….”

Read the whole essay

Near Death Experiences & the Medical Literature
by Mark Crislip

Miracle Max: See, there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Now, mostly dead: he’s slightly alive. All dead, well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do.
Inigo: What’s that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
—The Princess Bride

In a recent issue of Skeptic (Vol. 13, No. 4), in the debate between Michael Shermer and Deepak Chopra about life after death, both authors refer to an article in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet about Near Death Experiences (NDEs), in which of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-death experiences, where they had an out-of-body experience and saw a light at the end of a tunnel.: Lommel, P. V., R. V. Wees, V. Meyers, I. Elfferich. 2001. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” Lancet. Vol 358 No. 9298: 2039.

I read the article from the perspective of a practicing physician who spends all his time in an acute care hospital and has been involved with many cardiac arrests over the years. The NDE question in this study hinges on whether the were dead or nearly dead. In the article the authors “defined clinical death as a period of unconsciousness caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain because of inadequate blood circulation, breathing, or both. If, in this situation, CPR is not started within 5–10 min, irreparable damage is done to the brain and the patient will die.”

Every patient in this study had CPR, most within 10 minutes of their cardiac arrest, so they all had blood delivered to their brain. That is the point of CPR. The authors write: “If purely physiological factors resulting from cerebral anoxia caused NDE, most of our patients should have had this experience.” Yet, good CPR does not lead to cerebral anoxia. Most patients in this study did not have an NDE because they had CPR, so they had blood and oxygen delivered to the brain; thus, they could not have an anoxia mediated NDE.

So the real question is whether patients who had brain anoxia had an NDE, and there is no way to determine that in this paper. CPR by its self is not a good surrogate for cerebral anoxia. Having a cardiac arrest and being promptly coded does not mean there is insufficient blood and oxygen being supplied to the brain. CPR has variable efficacy, depending on the both the patient and the experience of the provider. Most of us who have had to be involved with a code know, for example, the horrible sensation of all the ribs cracking when you start CPR on a frail old lady and knowing that the CPR is probably not going to be effective.

As a result of variable CPR, the time it takes the brain to become anoxic is variable. And it is surprising at how little oxygen people can tolerate with no discernible dysfunction in their cognition, although you might not want them flying your 747. People come into the hospital all the time with the amount of oxygen in their blood decreased by 30,40, and even 50 percent, and yet can still walk and talk.

The point is that during a resuscitated cardiac arrest the ability of the brain to get oxygen can be quite variable, and if the CPR is done effectively the brain gets enough oxygen that it is not damaged. By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn’t make you “clinically dead”. It only means your heart isn’t beating and you may not be consciousness. Declaring someone dead if their heart isn’t beating is not a good definition.

What about brain death? Here there are many criteria: the patient has to have no clinical evidence of brain function by physical examination, including no response to pain and a variety of nerve reflexes that do not work: cranial nerve, pupillary response (fixed pupils), oculocephalic reflex (steady gaze), corneal reflex (lack of reflexive blinking to stimulation), and no spontaneous respirations. They have to be off all drugs that mimic brain death for several days and they cannot have metabolic conditions that mimic death. It is important to distinguish between brain death and states that mimic brain death and most of the patients received either a benzo (valium like drugs) and/or a narcotic. A flat line EEG, two at least 24 hours apart, is another criteria. In other words, being declared brain dead is a time consuming and detailed procedure, as it should be. This will become important in a moment.

Michael Shermer at least quotes the paper that the patients were “clinically dead” using the authors’ own flawed definitions. But as we have seen, their definition of being clinically dead is an artifice used for the paper but of no clinical or physiological relevance. Deepak Chopra declares “when there was no measurable activity in the brain, when they were in fact brain dead,” and yet nowhere in the Lancet article do the authors mention whether, besides being unconscious, neurologic function was assessed and the clinical diagnosis of brain dead was determined.

In the discussion of the paper the authors state “Also, in cardiac arrest the EEG usually becomes flat in most cases within about 10 seconds from onset of syncope [loss of consciousness].” They reference an Annals of Internal Medicine article (“Electrocerebral accompaniments of Syncope Associated with Malignant Ventricular Arrhythmia’s.” 1988 Jun;108(6):791–6), as well as one in the journal Anesthesiology ( “Electroencephalographic Changes During Brief Cardiac Arrest in Humans.” 1990;73:821–25), where they put EEG monitors on patients who were having defibrillators implanted. One of the side effects of having a defibrillator implanted is that your heart is often stopped for a period of time, or you have a heart rhythm induced called ventricular tachycardia, that is usually fatal but can, to a small degree, perfuse the brain.

That is not true. I pulled the articles and read them. What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEG’s normal To quote the annals paper, “Electroencephalographic changes were variable. Background slowing was usually followed by relative loss of electrocerebral activity.” It is a big difference between this and saying everyone flat lines in 10 seconds.

How long does it take to flat line? If there is zero perfusion, the experts at my hospital tell me it is more like 20 seconds. That’s with no perfusion. And the EEG experts tell me that the sensitivity of an EEG for function is more like a one megapixel camera than a 5 megapixel. The brain probably doesn’t start to die until several minutes elapses. In my state an EEG is considered so insensitive it does not have to be included as part of the criteria for determining if someone is brain dead; although we get it anyway, a flat line EEG is only part of the mix.

So there is a flat line EEG that occurs acutely when the brain is not getting oxygen, and there is the flat line that occurs when the brain is dead, and an EEG cannot distinguish between them. Only the person at the bedside can do that. So when the authors of the Lancet article write, “in cardiac arrest the EEG usually becomes flat in most cases within about 10 seconds from onset of syncope,” this is not supported by the literature they reference.

Mr. Chopra’s analysis that NDE patients are flat line and brain dead suffers from the same problems as the authors of the Lancet article. It simply isn’t supported by the particulars of the literature he quotes. Both Chopra and Shermer quote the article correctly as to number of NDE, although it depends on how an NDE is defined, hence saying 12 percent (Shermer) or 18 percent (Chopra) of patients had an NDE is correct, depending on how many criteria you include in a definition of an NDE. As well, the Lancet paper authors suspect a selection bias in their study and offer a “real” rate of 10 percent for NDE, or only 5 percent of patients if based on the number of resuscitations, as more CPRs lead to more NDEs. They also admit in the discussion that their broad definition of NDEs makes their percentage higher because it is more inclusive. It is all in how you define NDE.

One final curious caveat appears in the Lancet paper: “The investigators report that, at the 2-year follow-up, four of 37 patients contacted to act as controls (i.e., people who had not initially reported an NDE) reported that they had had one. Although these patients represent fewer than 1% of the total sample, they represent over 10% of the 37 patients interviewed with a view to acting as controls. If this subsample is at all representative, it implies that around 30 patients from the sample of 282 who initially denied an NDE would, if they had survived for another 2 years, be claiming that they had had one. ” Some of the NDEs were, it seems, implanted memories.

The discussion also greatly exaggerates the conclusions that can be drawn from their data. “We did not show that psychological, neurophysiological, or physiological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest.” Of course not, since the study could not have any reliable data as to causation of NDE’s.

This is followed by “NDE pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain relation.” I do not see this conclusion from the data in this article. Upon close reading I think the only thing this paper is qualified to determine is a description of who get NDEs and what patients report. As to etiology of NDEs, much less mind-brain relations, it can say nothing. The authors’ reach exceeds their grasp.

I am not saying NDEs don’t happen, and I am certainly not going to disagree with the idea that nearly dying is transformative. It is probably why real NDEs have greater effects on people than lab induced NDEs. The knowledge that you are truly mortal is life altering. Cancer survivors can have the same epiphany without the cardiac arrest.

The devil is in the details. As is so often the case, when you go back and read the original paper and its references, what the paper says and what the paper is purported to say often turn out to be two very different things.