Below are excerpts from an interview conducted with Dr.G.M. Woerlee, a practicing anesthesiologist in the Netherlands and author of the book, "Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near-Death Experiences":
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"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.' . . .
Alex Tsakiris: "Let me start by attempting to give a little bit of a big picture summary and you can see if you think this is accurate or not."
"Both you and Dr. Long have looked at the near-death experience phenomena in some depth and Dr. Long thinks that his research and the research of other folks in the field is highly suggestive that consciousness somehow, in some way, survives death. In other words, he finds reason to believe these near-death experiencers who think they’ve experienced what we all call an afterlife.
"Then you, on the other hand, believe that there’s a more physiological explanation for what’s going on and you mainly focus on the hypothesis that near-death experiencers are, in fact, conscious in a normal way through the faculties of their brain when they’re having these experiences. Is that more or less correct?"
Dr. G.M. Woerlee: "Yes, that’s more or less correct. In fact, I’ve read the book of Jeffrey Long extensively and also I’m very familiar with all other, well, most other near-death experience research. Those are indeed my conclusions that the persons undergoing a near-death experience are indeed undergoing a real experience; it’s a profound experience; it even has sometimes a life-changing effect; and it’s a real, human experience.
"But I do not agree that the explanation is a supernatural or paranormal one. I believe these people are indeed conscious. But that brings us into another subject of what is a near-death experience?"
Tsakiris: "Yes, and before we even sort that out, let me lay the groundwork for how we’re going to proceed, because what you did in your critique which I thought was really good and helpful in terms of analyzing someone’s claims, in this case Dr. Long’s claims, is you followed the format that he did. He lays out in his book nine lines of evidence that he believes are highly suggestive of the near-death experience suggesting an afterlife. You go point-by-point. So that’s how I thought we’d proceed here.
"Before we jump into those nine lines, the first thing I guess I’d do is touch on something that you touched on real briefly in your introduction. That is the research that Dr. Long has done, because when I talk to some folks who are skeptical and maybe unfamiliar with the importance and the use of surveys in medical research, they may not be aware of how to look at this.
"Is survey really a valid way of looking at medical information? Then they have questions about this particular survey. Is looking at 600 cases, Dr. Long’s research population, is that enough? He had this questionnaire, it’s 150 questions, pretty extensive. But is that enough?
"What folks are telling me is that this kind of survey research with that kind of database, properly reviewed, properly constructed, and is a reasonable way to collect these accounts. Would you care to weigh in on that at all?"
Woerlee: "I would, indeed. The thing is that surveys are very powerful instruments, but they should be used very carefully. What you actually have in the case of Dr. Long, is a good survey. He had a questionnaire, an extensive one; I’ve looked at it. The problem is that the people who respond to is are the ones with the story to tell. So often, the people with a story to tell will respond to these stories and people with less of a story or with no experience whatsoever, they will not respond at all to the survey. So what you actually have is a bias of the respondents.
"In other words, it’s like you send out a survey to 1,000 people; you get 400 completed surveys back. You base your story on the 400 that were returned. But the other 600, you’ve heard nothing from them. So it depends on what sort of survey are you doing and what is the purpose of the survey? If you are just orienting yourself as to what is possibly going on, then a survey such as Dr. Long’s is quite good in the sense that it will show you, “Ah, these points are the ones we’ve got to look for, look at, and examine.” But it will not tell you any more than that."
Tsakiris: "Okay, that’s interesting. I’m not sure how that will play itself out in the content that we’re going to talk about, but I think that’s a point that we’ll leave out there on the table for further discussion.
"The other point that I want to bring up is something that you mentioned in the introduction to your critique, and that’s this idea that Dr. Long is essentially arguing this 'God of the gaps' argument. In your article you suggest that he’s confronting scientific uncertainty, areas where we don’t know what’s going on, and he’s maybe interjecting that with the presumption that if there’s a gap there, then God must be there."
Woerlee: "Well, I’m not actually saying that it is God in this case, but the God of the gaps argument is a well known theological argument commonly used by intelligent design people and creationists of all types. But it’s also commonly used in science. But in this particular case, I call it the God of the gaps argument because this is an argument familiar to most people. In the case of Jeffrey Long, what he does in his book is he has nine lines of evidence as he calls them, and he tries in some of them to provide a scientific explanation.
"Then he cannot provide an explanation so he says, 'Yes, this is inexplicable, therefore, the cause must be supernatural or the cause must be that there really is an afterlife.' That’s a system of argument consistently used throughout the book. In every one of the examinations of every one of these nine lines.
Tsakiris: "That will be another point we’ll just leave on the side and let listeners decide, because you make a point there. I would come back and say I didn’t really read it that way. I read it as someone who was approaching a topic where there are admittedly a lot of gaps. When we get into the whole area of consciousness in general, let alone survival of consciousness, clinical death, and all the definitions we can go through that. We all realize there’s a lot of gaps so I think what he’s trying to do is fill in those gaps the best he can with the best science that’s available.
"I think you could make the argument that the ‘other side,' whatever that side is, materialistic neuroscience or whatever, can be just as guilty of trying to fill in those gaps, as well by saying, 'We don’t know what’s going on, but we’ll figure it all out and it’ll all map to neurocorrelates.' That’s also filling in the gaps, so I’m willing to leave the gaps be gaps and just say, 'What’s the best evidence we have?' Maybe that’s all you’re calling for, too."
Woerlee: "No, not quite the same way. The thing is that when I see a gap I say, 'This is unknown. Okay, let’s leave it at that at the moment and see if we can’t approach the problem in a different way and also find a solution,' instead of saying, 'Oh, there’s a gap. Therefore, the explanation must be something quite different.' There are many fields of physiology, chemistry, and in medicine where basically this type of gap does exist. People don’t go on basically empirical explanations.
"That is the difference between Jeffrey Long and my approach. I try and find an explanation. I keep puzzling and puzzling until--and that is what most skeptics or scientists will do – and not call it a gap which needs a different type of explanation altogether until you’ve actually exhausted all other possibilities. I do not find that Dr. Long does this."
Tsakiris: "I would have to take a point with that. I do think you fill in those gaps when you say, 'We don’t have any knowledge of this at this point but we’re going to discover it someday.' These are these promissory notes that get issued that say someday we’re going to fill in this gap.
"So, what I think he’s doing is saying, 'Here’s from the empirical evidence that I have, here’s the possible explanation.' It’s sending us in a different direction in terms of theories that have to be played out, but he’s looking at the evidence, too. I don’t know. I can leave that alone for now, but if you have anything else to say about that, please go ahead."
Woerlee: "I think that basically, he has done some serious research; he has a large database; all the near-death experience reports are very good ones, I assume, because it’s more than 1,300 or 1,600 or whatever number of cases. It’s large. Certainly he has a large database, but the problem is that in his book he seems to accept these explanations at face value.
"The problem is that he does two things.
"1) He views the near-death experience as a unitary phenomenon. That means regardless of the cause, the near-death experience is the same all the way around for all people. But when you look at near-death experience causes, you see they arise during cardiac arrest, they arise during anesthesia, when there’s absolutely no question of brain oxygen-starvation. They’re under the effects of drugs.
"In cardiac arrest you have drugs and brain oxygen-starvation that also arise during people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. And these people are certainly not oxygen-starved and they are not under the effect of drugs. There have been interviews with survivors of these jumpers.
"2) There are also people with near-death experiences basically due to fear. Fear of execution, fear of other things, or anxiety attacks. So the cause is very different. The final common pathway as we call it within medicine and biochemistry is the experience. This is a profound experience with several characteristics and these are what Dr. Long also refers to. So the near-death experience is not entirely the same thing.
"You’ve also got to look at the cause and Dr. Long, he has a large database, and he fails to actually look at the cause except in one particular case where he mentions that he studied near-death experiences during anesthesia and compared them to other near-death experiences. He found that these people reported more darkness and tunnel experiences. Okay. And that was the only difference.
"I find this rather absurd, actually, because Dr. Moody in 1973 was the first publication of his book, 'Life After Life.' He did a similar study on admittedly far fewer patients, and came up with the same characteristics. So I found myself very disappointed in that regard."
Tsakiris: "I actually see that as more evidence to support his conclusions. As you say, he has a large database. He’s looked at many different cases with many different causes of the NDE. I’m not sure all the causes that you mentioned would really qualify as true NDEs, but leaving that aside for a minute, if we look at most of the ones you mentioned, I’m sure there would be agreement there.
"But then the real question is if we have all of these different causes, why would we expect to have such similarity in the experiences? Let’s use that point as a jumping off point to jump into these nine points, because I think it will help structure what we’re talking about.
"The first point that you address is Dr. Long’s contention that these patients experience a lucid death, and that it’s medically inexplicable to have a highly organized, lucid experience while unconscious or clinically dead. So why don’t you tell us your response to that?"
Woerlee: "I’ll begin by first talking about clinical death. Many people, when they talk about near-death experiences or write about them, talk about the phenomenon of clinical death.
"What do they actually mean? It is often, in many of these more simple books, defined as basically the absence of breathing and in particular, the absence of heartbeat. In fact, when you look at many of these things, the evidence that most people consider the hardest is the evidence of near-death experiences occurring during cardiac arrest. In that case, people have demonstrated cardiac arrest. That means the heart has stopped beating or is beating so abnormally that it no longer pumps blood.
"Several good studies have been done of the speed at which consciousness is lost and the electrical activity of the brain ceases. Usually, the first good study was done in 1943 in an American prison by Lieutenant Colonel Rosson and a certain cadet and was published in the Journal of Mental Science at the time. A good study.
"And then several more recent ones like Aminoff in the '80s with turning off pacemakers. Also Vissa in 2001. They all came to the same conclusion. Within 4 to 30 seconds, all electrical activity, measurable in an electroencephalogram, ceases. Dr. Pin van Lommel, who performed one of the better prospective studies of near-death experiences in the Netherlands, with a big number of patients--I can’t remember the exact figure--he also stated the same in his article in The Lancet.
"What he then further forgot to say was that the people who are interviewed after a cardiac arrest have all survived. In other words, they are alive to tell the tale. Why are they alive? Because they received heart massage. Heart massage means that someone energetically presses on the chest to generate a sort of pumping action of the heart. Without heart massage, a person with a cardiac arrest simply is dead. Very dead. And they do not come back to tell their story.
"So, what you actually have is cardiac massage generates a flow of blood. This flow of blood actually has been measured in a number of studies. Not many studies and you have to look very carefully in all the scientific literature to find some studies where this actually was measured. Usually, in around 20 percent of cases to about 40% of cases, enough blood flow is generated by cardiac massage to sustain consciousness. I say, potentially, to sustain consciousness. That doesn’t mean it automatically does.
"Then, we come to the matter of what people describe during their near-death experiences during cardiac massages. They saw the people working upon them or they heard people rushing to them. In that case they were in the coronary care unit and had suddenly stopped pumping. They got 30 seconds to see and hear people running toward them because they are conscious for these 30 seconds, and they can hear even though they have no heartbeat.
"It’s a commonly heard complaint from coronary care units, for example, where the heartbeat of some people suddenly stops. They complain bitterly when they’re jumped upon by a whole pile of doctors and nurses and defibrillated. They complain bitterly about the pain of the cardiac massage and also the pain of the defibrillation.
"Now, in fact a lot of experiments in America and even medical practice in the United States with artificial hearts clearly demonstrates that heartbeat or actual heartbeat is not really needed for consciousness. For example, in the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as in LDS’s Hospital in Arizona, and several other large medical institutions where they do heart transplantations, some people are so sick, their hearts are so diseased, they cannot survive the period of waiting until a donor heart becomes available.
"So, what is done in some cases is take out the old heart, put in a mechanical heart; it’s just a machine to pump blood around, and you connect that to a battery-driven pneumatic unit, and the people can go home and live for a few months until a donor heart becomes available. This is standard practice in some places in the U.S. where enough money and facilities are available to provide this highly technical and medical service.
"So.\, in other words, what you’re actually doing with cardiac massage is something very similar. The heart is not beating but you induce heart massage, a pumping action which pumps blood around. Now most people getting heart massage during a cardiac arrest are never attached to an electroencephalograph. That’s very rare.
"In fact, most people fall down in the street or they suddenly have a heart attack in a ward or another place in the hospital. An electroencephalograph is never attached for the very simple reason that it’s very difficult to do that at the same time as someone is receiving heart massage.
"In fact, the presumption that all these people were flat-lined at the time is only a presumption. And in fact, no one actually of these people in the research of Dr. Pin van Lommel or Sam Parnia and other people ever had an electroencephalograph machine attached to their heads.
"So, the presumption of flat-lining is purely an assumption because they remember electroencephalographic activity ceases after 4 to 30 seconds. In that case, they’re flat-lined. They forget the action of the cardiac massage, which is to pump blood around the body."
Tsakiris: "A couple of points there: I think it’s good that you remind us, which we often forget when we’re talking about death, death, near-death, that we’re talking about the folks who come back to life. I think that’s a valid point.
"But I still have a couple of pretty big problems with your argument.
"1) The first is the people who die, particularly those who have a heart attack because it’s easier to study because we know the physiology--they’re not supposed to have the kind of experiences that Dr. Long found. One point that you just mentioned was pain. In particular, these people complain about pain from the defibrillator, pain from people pounding on their chest, and yet Dr. Long’s survey finds that there isn’t this pain. That appears hardly at all in the surveys.
"2) The other thing I would interject while we’re talking about heart massage and that; I don’t know this, but one of my listeners contacted me and his sister is an emergency care nurse and said that the most common procedure when someone is in hospital and has cardiac arrest is the defibrillator. Pounding on the chest is secondary. The first thing you do is go over and zap them with the paddles. A lot of times, the heart massage is the last resort many minutes later.
"All that leads back to what you’re alluding to, and we really have to break it down. There’s three parts to this process, particularly when we look at cardiac arrest. There’s that 10 to 15 seconds between when the heart stops and the brain stops. Our best medical knowledge says that the brain is under a lot of stress and it shouldn’t be lucid and coherent during that time.
"The second part we have is when the brain is flat-lined or dead or we can assume nothing is happening. There hasn’t been any attempt to resuscitate this person, and during that time we definitely don’t have any explanation for why they were having a conscious experience.
"The third part you are alluding to, and you mentioned quite rightly that now we’re getting blood flow back to the brain so there is a chance for some conscious experience, but again, I’m going to rely on you here, but doesn’t our best medical knowledge tell us that during that process of resuscitation, the brain coming back online after it’s been dead, we wouldn’t expect it to be lucid and coherent. Isn’t just the opposite the normal expectation of how that brain is working during that time?"
Woerlee: "They’re all interesting problems and in fact, they can be answered. To begin with, a person who has a cardiac arrest has a short period of consciousness when they can hear people rushing to the bed if they’re in a coronary care unit. As you quite correctly said, in a coronary care unit the first thing they do is defibrillate people. Out on the street or elsewhere in the hospital they don’t have this luxury, so they first do cardiac massage. That is what most people undergo.
"Then, we come to the point of cardiac massage as I explained does restore a flow of blood to the brain. But does this restore any electrical activity to the brain? That’s an interesting question. In fact, there are several studies which do show and also case reports which do show that this is the case.
"What you actually have during a cardiac arrest is blood flow to the brain stops. This means within seconds the brain becomes oxygen-starved. No one denies this. This is certain because the brain has no reserve store of oxygen. The brain becomes oxygen-starved and then when you have cardiac massage, a flow of blood is restored, sometimes sufficient to sustain consciousness.
"One study which was done on a patient who actually had an EEG or electroencephalograph – I’ll use the longer term because the Americans use ECG instead of electroencephalograph, while in Europe we use EEG so it’s a bit confusing for many people. Anyway, they had an electroencephalograph but that’s to the head of this person. He had a cardiac arrest. The electroencephalographic activity fell away as expected. Heart massage was applied, or cardiac massage, whatever you like to call it, and within 20 seconds after cardiac massage was instituted, electrical brain activity was restored.
"Similarly, other studies have been done with bi-spectral analysis, an apparatus that’s a method and sort of integrated electroencephalograph used to monitor awareness during anesthesia. Some people have had this apparatus attached to their head during anesthesia and during the pre-period they developed a cardiac arrest. During cardiac massage, bispectral activity reappeared. In other words, electroencephalo-graphic activity reappeared. So in fact, cardiac massage can restore electroencephalographic activity if applied efficiently.
"It will not occur in all people because not everyone is expert at applying cardiac massage and not everyone has a chest which makes cardiac massage easy. Not everyone has enough broken ribs to make cardiac massage very effective."
Tsakiris: "That last part of what you were just saying there brings me to the larger point, which you’ve cited some cases there which you think are pretty good evidence that heart massage might regenerate conscious experience inside the brain. But don’t we have to deal with the entirety of the data? We say we’ve got a pretty good database here of near-death experiences. We have to try and explain as much of that as possible.
"So, if you’re right for 50 percent of the cases, and I don’t think it’s anywhere near that much because I think we have other problems to overcome, like the symptoms of hypoxia should be present and they’re not present. The symptoms of when the brain is coming back online, there’s normally a lot of confusion, maybe even amnesia. There are a lot of studies that suggest these are the normal symptoms. We don’t see those.
"But let’s take all that aside and even say you’re right and your explanation accounts for 50% of the cases. We still have a medical miracle here, even if you have only 50% of Dr. Long’s 600 cases being unexplained. It seems to me like there’s a lot of wiggle room in his data, and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room in your explanations. In your explanations you have to account for all the cases."
Woerlee: "Actually, it does, because what you have is a difference between the observer and the experiencer. Now the thing is that in Dr. Long’s cases and in all other studies of near-death experiences during cardiac arrest, no one has actually any electroencephalographic data. They go on presumption. Therefore, you cannot say. We do know from the cases where people did have an electroencephalograph attached that electrical activity in the brain is restored with efficient cardiac massage. That is a fact.
"But then we come to the matter of the hypoxia or the oxygen-starvation of the brain, as I would rather express it because that’s a more easily understood term. There have been many studies of oxygen-starvation and in fact, there are very good books written by Van Liere and Stickney from Chicago University in 1963 and also the similar studies have confirmed the same phenomenon. And that is 1) if you observe a person who is oxygen starved, they look confused, dazed, they don’t walk properly. It’s like these dazed mountaineers above 5,000 meters without oxygen.
"But the person undergoing this, they have two ways of experiencing it. Many people who undergo – and I refer to a colleague of mine, Professor Derham in the local University of Leiden, who does experiments with hypoxia and oxygen drive and respiratory drive. He administers oxygen-starved mixtures regularly to people and he says, 'They look like rubbish, but they feel like heaven.'
"They feel fantastic. They feel more awake, aware and everything like that. In fact, precisely what people describe during near-death experiences due to hypoxia. But hypoxia, as I say, is not the only explanation for near-death experiences as it certainly is with cardiac arrest. But not during anesthesia. Not during jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge or fear experiences."
Tsakiris: "Let’s get into anesthesia in just a minute. Before we read this lucid experience part, and maybe we’ll come back and touch on it later."
Woerlee: "I’ll add one thing to this lucid experience. It’s very curious, but during extreme hypoxia or oxygen-starvation of the brain, two senses are preserved. One is hearing that remains preserved until you’re unconscious. So even though people are extremely oxygen-starved, they can hear. Second, although the sense of body position, while this is abnormal, it is to a degree preserved. These are the two things.
"But the sensation of pain or the sensation that pain is painful and unpleasant is lost. That can be explained also with the physiology of oxygen-starvation of the brain.
"Anyway, you shouldn’t eliminate hypoxia or oxygen-starvation of the brain as an explanation because people do –many of them do — feel fantastic during oxygen-starvation of the brain. They feel their senses are more acute. Their hearing is better, and their perceptions are better, and their thoughts are more accurate and better and faster. So that explains a great deal."
Tsakiris: "We still have two big problems in that time sequence, right? We have the problem after the 15 seconds when the brain does go flat. You said we don’t have these people hooked up to an EEG so we don’t know, but we can be pretty confident when they’re having a cardiac arrest that within 20 seconds their brain is flat, whether we have them hooked up to an EEG or not. And I’d go back and say I’m not entirely sure that in every one of the cases we don’t have any EEG data. I just don’t know that and it sounds like you’re pretty confident that we don’t, so I’ll just leave that as an aside.
"So, we have these two other timeframes that we have to worry about. One is when we know the brain or we can reasonably assume that the brain is flat, and if there’s any lucid experience during that time we don’t have any way of accounting for it.
"The third part is when the brain is coming back online and as you just mentioned, we do have these other problems of confusion and pain and these other symptoms that are normally reported that aren’t present at all in the data that we’re working with in terms of Dr. Long. So we do need some kind of explanation to jibe those two together, don’t we?"
Woerlee: "Not really. The thing is that:
"1) with this business of cardiac arrest, there are near-death experiences where people describe themselves boom! Cardiac arrest and they hear people around them saying, 'Oh, he’s fallen down. Oh, cardiac arrest.' And they hear people running towards them. Then what most people describe is they describe themselves as looking down upon their bodies as their doctors are working upon them. In other words, they’re actually undergoing cardiac massage at the time."
Tsakiris: "Okay, but let me just interject. So what if their experience includes a period of looking down at their body before they have cardiac massage? Before they have defibrillation? Before that. What about when they have that experience?"
Woerlee: "I have seldom come across--I have never come across, actually--a person or a near-death experience of a person who had a documented cardiac arrest and in between before feeling themselves fading away that they have an out-of-body experience or another experience where they saw nothing happening but just their body lying there."
Tsakiris: O"h, no, there are plenty of those in Dr. Long’s database. All the accounts are there online. Anyone can read it. There’s plenty of folks who said they experienced cardiac arrest and then they just saw their body flat or they saw the line go flat on the EKG machine for an extended period of time and then they saw them scrambling. They’ll say the whole thing. They saw everyone scrambling around in the thing and they didn’t know what to do and there was some confusion. They wheeled in one cart and then they wheeled that out and then they had to wheel in another one. So they’d go through the whole thing."
Woerlee: "No doubt about that. The thing is that what he is describing is time dilation, which is something that can actually happen.
"2) The fact that a person does not move during oxygen-starvation does not automatically mean that they are unconscious. In fact, several studies have shown that during extreme – and case reports during extreme hypoxia – just before a person loses consciousness due to oxygen-starvation, they are paralyzed due to oxygen-starvation. It’s a phenomenon very similar to the locked-in syndrome. I think the mechanism is more or less the same. They are paralyzed but conscious. In that case, you don’t need many seconds to have an experience…"
Tsakiris: "Let’s be clear. Just so we’re talking about the same thing, your explanation has to fit in every case, and if we limit it to just talking about cardiac arrest because it’s easier, then your explanation has to fit every cardiac arrest incident when we know that there’s no medical explanation for them having any conscious experience beyond 15 seconds, right? Isn’t there a problem that all the cases have to match up to your explanation?"
Woerlee: "I don’t see any problem at all. In fact, I’m sure a good analysis will show this very point. The second thing is that not every one of these people that has a cardiac arrest has no cardiac output at the time. I have seen people during ventricular tachycardia--which is an abnormal heart rhythm – who have a reasonable blood pressure and everything else.
"Also, there are the anecdotes that you have, or these stories, that do not entirely convince. In fact, they don’t convince at all because some people may well have had a low cardiac output and they see people rushing to them and they see something on the monitor, but when did they see this? So I think my explanation accounts for most of it."
Tsakiris: "Okay, let’s move on because we have a lot of ground to cover and it’s already very, very fascinating. I like the way you come at these topics. It’s very straightforward and with very solid medical understanding of it. I think that really helps contribute to this whole discussion, this dialogue, so that folks can figure this stuff out.
"With that, let’s go on to point 2, which is the out-of-body experience and the near-death experiencers see and hear the out-of-body state and what they perceive is nearly always real. That’s Dr. Long’s assertion. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us your response to that."
Woerlee: "It’s a nice question, actually. And it’s a fascinating experience. It’s also a real experience. There’s no doubt about it. People really do feel themselves disassociated from their bodies and they do really perceived themselves as looking down upon their bodies, etc. So there’s no doubt about it. It’s a real experience.
"What is very curious is when you look at it and study many of these reports about out-of-body experiences during cardiac arrest or other medical emergencies or whatever, they usually describe themselves as either floating above or standing at the same level as their body and usually separated by a distance of around two or three meters, something like that. In other words, 6 to 10 feet, something like that. This is precisely what you would expect from most people with otoscopic experiences as described by a layman.
"What is very curious--and that’s my big problem with this-- is that many people describing their out-of-body experiences describe what they hear and what they see. This is amazing because when you’re talking about out-of-body experience or a possible separated consciousness, a consciousness separate from the body and distant from the body, you’re talking about something which is immaterial.
"In other words, this separated consciousness can pass through doors, can pass through walls, and can even move out of the body without any sort of interaction with the material matter of the body. Yet, this separated consciousness can somehow hear sound waves. Sound waves are basically pressure waves in air, which is very material. Yet the same separated consciousness did not interact with any solid material like the body as it left, or operating theatre drapes, as in the case of Pam Reynolds and other people who have had out-of-body experiences during surgery.
"It can also see things. And it doesn’t just see things, it sees things with light. And light is just basically another form of electromagnetic radiation and it’s the same sort of forces that bind molecules together, etc. Yet moving out of the body, no interaction with these electromagnetic forces.
"Yet, it sees colors with light, and sees colors of clothing, it sees people, and the combination of these sounds and this sight make up the verifiable out-of-body experience reports. They hear people who are present at the time. They report also, yes, these things were said at the time. These things were seen at the time. These people wore these types of clothing. Yes, these people were there."
Tsakiris: "So, what’s your explanation, then? I hear what you’re saying. So your explanation for the out-of-body experience, collecting this data, is…?"
Woerlee: "What you have are these people who observe, they see with light and they hear with sound. Otherwise it wouldn’t be verifiable. So in other words, what you actually have is these people who have undergone out-of-body experiences, their separated consciousness is actually somehow interacting with light and sound, whereas before, it did not at all."
Tsakiris: "But, Dr. Woerlee, isn’t there a certain degree of circular reasoning there? If we start with the assumption that you can’t hear and you can’t see without your brain and without interacting with the material world, and then we say, “Okay, so then we can assume that any account that describes hearing or seeing without the brain being present, we should dismiss that account.” How would we ever get out of that loop if we start with the presupposing that there isn’t any possible way that the out-of-body experiencer can really be seeing and hearing?"
Woerlee: "There is one very simple way and that is that the out-of-body experiencer is actually seeing and hearing with their body. They are hearing with their ears and that means they can hear the sound. And they see with their eyes in some cases because their eyes are open so they can see people around them. When you close your eyes, you can actually visualize in your mind’s eye as it were, quite a lot of what is happening around you."
Tsakiris: "But, again, to me that doesn’t fit the data. It’s an explanation out there but when we try to match it up with the data it doesn’t fit. What I think the out-of-body experiencers would immediately point out is that the biggest way it doesn’t fit the data is that they’re often bringing in data that they couldn’t possibly see right inside the immediate vicinity of down the hall of the hospital or on a different floor or miles away."
Woerlee: "You are confusing two types of out-of-body experiences. One type of out-of-body experience is in the vicinity of the person, and the second is separated by a long distance from a person. To begin with, in the region of the person themselves, in the immediate vicinity, physical hearing and physical seeing as well as building up an image in the mind’s eye will explain most of it.
"In fact, there is a very good out-of-body experience report by Dr. Pin van Lommel in his article in 'The Lancet,' in which he describes a man who fell down in a field east of Holland, and was collected by the ambulance, brought back to the hospital, resuscitated and during his resuscitation he heard these people speaking and saying, 'Shall we continue or not?' He tried telling them, 'I’m alive, I’m alive.' No one heard him, of course.
"What he described was he saw himself lying there. He saw these people resuscitating him. He could describe a number of women and men and what he also described was hearing, seeing, and also the pain of the resuscitation. He was placed underneath an apparatus that’s called a Thumper. It’s made by Michigan Instruments. What that does is it’s sort of a pneumatic ram which does heart massage without any people being needed. It just a piston which bangs up and down, doing heart massage. He described the pain from this.
"In other words, what this fellow was describing and was actually hearing with his ears because he could feel the pain of the heart massage continuing at the same time. It’s one of the unusual reports. For people in the immediate vicinity of a person undergoing heart massage for cardiac arrest or an out-of-body experience due to anything else, they’re hearing and seeing and building up an image in the mind’s eye, and the person will describe this.
"As to distant out-of-body experiences where they make observations at a distance, there are anecdotal stories of these reports actually describing the reality at the time and what was seen and what was heard. However, when you examine these very carefully and look at the evidence piece by piece, you find that there are many inaccuracies and it does not always correspond all that well.
"It’s a bit like people in the book of Jeffrey Long where they meet deceased relatives and they haven’t recognized them, they don’t know who these relatives are, so they arouse from the near-death experience. They go to old family photo albums and they look through and they say, 'Hey, that’s Aunt Tilly. Or that’s Uncle Bob. I remember seeing him there.' It’s a bit like that."
("Near-Death Experience Skeptic, Dr. G.M. Woerlee Takes Aim at Dr. Jeffrey Long’s 'Evidence of the Afterlife,'" interview with "Skeptico," 16 March 2010, at:
http://www.skeptiko.com/near-death-experience-skeptic-gm-woerlee/)
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to Part 2:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,976496,976498#msg-976498Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2013 03:44AM by steve benson.