Read Online Fringe-ology by Steve Volk - Free Book Online

study as a feature of a lack of oxygen.”
    While Blackmore focuses much of her attention on the subject’s experiencing a lack of oxygen, her explanation falls apart most readily in that very instance (the same goes for Woerlee’s cardiac massage theory). According to Parnia, “Memory loss is so closely associated with any insult to the brain, whether from a blow or a lack of oxygen, that the degree of memory loss is used as a diagnostic tool to assess the severity of the brain damage.”
    Such memory loss usually encompasses a period of time from minutes to days or even weeks before losing and after regaining consciousness. So even if people were regaining awareness as chest compressions were administered, they still seem deeply unlikely to report anything at all or at best fragmented memories. Yet people who undergo NDEs enjoy seemingly complete recall. Further, numerous studies have also shown that their recollections of what happened during their resuscitation are incredibly accurate. Conversely, when patients with no claimed out-of-body experience are asked to describe their resuscitation—even if that means guessing—they get it wrong. Television hospital dramas, it seems, are no substitute for being there. But there is another subtler yet important point that I think gets lost in the debate.
    The real mystery is what happens to human consciousness after death—our memories, perceptions, and sense of self. Skeptics who adhere to a physical or materialist worldview argue that consciousness is purely a product of the brain. When the brain in my skull dies, so do “I.” But the NDE has ultimately forced skeptics into adopting, unwittingly, the same position as believers: the NDE occurs independently of the brain.
    Skeptics, more than forty years after Kübler-Ross declined to publish her own accounting of the NDE, are essentially arguing that the same experience can be had both with and without any number of drugs; in or out of the death state; and with or without a lack of oxygen—the same experience irrespective of whatever circumstances the brain might find itself in. This makes no sense from a materialist perspective. Drugs, anesthesia, a lack of oxygen, the flood of chemicals released by the brain after the heart stops beating—all these factors have known affects on the nature and quality of brain function. Skeptics, no doubt aware of this, often contend that many of the experiences lumped together under the umbrella term “NDE” are somehow different from one another. But thus far, they have failed to produce data that comprehensively demonstrate how the NDE takes on predictable, quantifiable changes in content and character, concurrent with the state of the body and brain.
    Materialists take heart. This doesn’t mean there is an afterlife. But it does mean the source of the NDE remains a mystery and could yet be proven an illusion or reality. Something is at work here, but what? I argue that, at the moment, we don’t know. We understand far too little about the experience, and the reports of experiencers yield far too little actionable data for anyone to firmly conclude the NDE represents a real glimpse of the afterlife. But as yet we have no firm materialist theory to explain the NDE away.
    So where does this leave us?
    Well, as noted metaphysician and philosopher Terence McKenna put it, in a Wired interview conducted shortly before his own passing, all argument about our mortality comes to naught. Death remains the vast black hole of biology: “Once you go over that event horizon, no messages can be passed back. It represents a limit case in the thermodynamics of information. So what is it?”
    It hurts, I think, for all of us—believers and skeptics alike—to admit it. But in answer to McKenna’s question, all we can say is, We don’t know . The black hole is just . . . black. We can, however, learn something about