Fringe-ology (6 page)

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 ourselves by taking a look at how we react to all these arguments. And we can best begin to glimpse this insight, I think, by looking at a powerful modern example of both skeptics and believers seeing only what they want and expect to see.

The occasion was a 2004 study conducted by Willoughby Britton, then working on a doctoral thesis in psychology at the University of Arizona. Britton had been reading about theoretical connections between epilepsy and paranormal experience. Some epileptics report they hear heavenly music or have religious visions just prior to seizure (though this happens far more rarely than skeptics would have us believe). The seizures themselves are triggered by mass firings of neurons in the temporal lobe, so Britton thought she might look for a connection there with NDEs.

She knew this sort of research was fraught with implications for her career, all of them bad. “The paranormal isn't supposed to be discussed,” she says now. “It isn't supposed to be studied.”

She brought the idea to her supervisor, thinking he would shoot her down. But to her surprise, he agreed. “I've made my reputation,” he told her. “What are they going to do to me?”

Britton's idea was to find people who had experienced NDEs and monitor their brain activity overnight. In the end, she found just twenty-three subjects—not, by her own estimation, a large enough sample size to render her study authoritative but enough to start developing a picture. She also enlisted twenty people who had
not
undergone NDEs, or any life-threatening events, as controls. She believed that people who had undergone NDEs might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy. And five of her subjects did show these altered firing patterns. None of them were in fact epileptic, but they did display sudden spikes of neuronal activity. In the average population, according to Britton, the researchers might well have turned up no one with such abnormal brain activity, but among those who experienced NDEs they had found five—or 22 percent.

That meant her findings were, from a statistical perspective, highly significant. Still, she also knew her study's limitations: a small sample size, conducted over just one night, with no baseline reading for the people who had undergone NDEs. Without knowing what their brain activity looked like before the experiences, it's impossible to know what was cause and what was effect. “I thought the study suggested it would be worthwhile to conduct further research,” she says today. “I thought it suggested there might be some link between the temporal lobe and the experience. But I also thought it was a pretty humble study.”

She was shocked at the attention she received, which included articles in the
New York Times
and
Discover
. She also didn't expect that people would interpret her work to be so authoritative, precisely because she knew it wasn't. “I guess, usually, you'll find scientists arguing for the importance of their research,” she says. “But people really went overboard with this.”

They went overboard in arguing for her study's significance, and worse, seemed to interpret her findings in a peculiarly biased fashion. Britton thought both the
Discover
and
Times
articles “subjected the people in my study to being told they were dysfunctional.”

This was deeply ironic. Because in the psychological questionnaire Britton gave all her participants, those who experienced NDEs rated more highly than the controls on measures of “active coping.” What this means is that people who experienced NDEs were more likely to handle life's problems directly—without waiting for time, someone else, or a miracle to do it for them. They were, in comparison to the control subjects who had no NDEs, more optimistic and aggressive in their approach to building the lives they wanted. From my perspective, however, as a reporter, I can understand why these stories turned out as they did. The default position for media covering the paranormal is gentle, learned skepticism. In these media formulations, the NDE isn't a profound life-changing experience but an abnormal firing of neurons. And people who experience NDEs are to be characterized in kind.

But what most stunned Britton were the letters she received afterward. “I got letters from people who told me, ‘Thank you so much for proving the Near Death Experience is real,' ” she says, even though she felt she had done no such thing. “And I also got letters from people, including colleagues,
scientists
, saying ‘Thank you for proving there is no afterlife and religious belief is a brain disorder.' ”

Of course, she hadn't studied religious belief at all. But to some people all paranormal claims are supernatural claims—and both belong in the same dust basket. So in this instance, even scientists weren't immune to seeing things in Britton's study that weren't there.

We could choose to see the fallout from Britton's research as evidence of all that divides us. Some of us believe in the paranormal and see it in every coincidence. Some of us believe in a strictly materialist interpretation of the universe and see believers in the paranormal as retreating into comforting superstitions. But I believe Britton's study didn't reveal a fissure in our society—or at least, she didn't
just
reveal a fissure. I think what she revealed is a stunning point of relatedness.

Believers and skeptics alike tend to look at the paranormal and see what they want to see; they look at the paranormal and see a reflection of their own worldviews. And so what she calls her “humble study” and her “agnostic data” becomes confirmation in the eye of a passionate beholder.
Whatever
it is they're passionate about.

We should hover over this fact for a good, long while. We are, each and every one of us, just trying to get from day to day as best we can, with as little pain as possible. In this deep and abiding similarity, we each fight to maintain our worldviews. And we become irrational in various areas of life, from the paranormal to politics. In the year after President Barack Obama's election, in fact, polls were conducted that showed both Democrats and Republicans held withering opinions of each other's presidents. Big chunks of the Democratic electorate believed George W. Bush had some foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and allowed them to happen. An even higher percentage of Republicans believed Obama to be a socialist, questioned his citizenship, and wanted to see him impeached. Nevermind the facts. When someone advances an idea inconsistent with our own worldview, we don't just disagree—we start painting a mental picture of the person we oppose as somehow deficient, all higgledy-piggledy in the temporal lobes, perhaps, or just an outright villain.

And the beat goes on.

Just as I was finishing this manuscript, a study was released in which a small correlation was found between elevated carbon dioxide levels and the occurrence of NDEs. The study sparked headlines of the “NDEs Explained” variety. But anyone who has reviewed the literature can immediately recognize this research as a total outlier. Number one, the sample size was just eleven people, and their CO2 levels were only slightly elevated—in fact, scuba divers can have similar carbon dioxide levels, but they don't go around claiming they swam their way to God. More important, numerous studies had already found that there is no apparent link between an NDE and heightened levels of carbon dioxide.

Jeff Wise, a science reporter for
Psychology Today
, was among those who wrote enthusiastically about this new carbon dioxide study, claiming it as an explanation for the NDE. Alex Tsakiris invited him on his podcast,
Skeptiko
, to discuss why he granted so much authority to research with so little actual weight. For the most part, the discussion was completely cordial. But toward the end, after Tsakiris had gently schooled Wise for about twenty minutes, the reporter broke in with a question of his own. “Are you,” he asked Tsakiris, “a creationist?”

His implication was clear: anyone arguing that the NDE remains unexplained must not believe in evolution, must be anti-science. And that pretty much captures the tenor of the debate between believers and skeptics, each side harboring ill opinions of the other, each side making strange assumptions about the other's beliefs.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross made history by initially avoiding such debates altogether. But before long, she would be drawn into them. And the personal consequences she suffered were tremendous.

W
HEN
O
N
D
EATH AND
D
YING
was published, the changes in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's life came quickly. She had written an unlikely bestseller, a book that became, seemingly overnight, part of the canon of course work for medical and nursing students; and, she reached the people who watched loved ones die in a soulless, dehumanizing fashion. Everyone wanted a piece of her. And in time, she visited nearly every continent and received twenty honorary degrees.

Her son Ken remembers the biggest change came in the form of a giant U.S. Postal Service sack that arrived every few days, bearing hundreds of letters. “My mother thought it was important to respond to every letter, personally,” he said. “I didn't feel abandoned. She took me on trips with her when I was out of school. But it
was
different. She tried to do all the things we did before, and called us on the phone every night when she was gone.”

Speaking to Ken Ross, I can't help but notice that his normally ebullient tone drops an octave when he talks about those days. Kübler-Ross's sudden, international celebrity created a massive strain on her marriage. And she had also developed a kind of paranormal problem. She didn't publish her own experiences with NDEs in
On Death and Dying
. But she kept working at the bedsides of the sick, and strange events did not seem to leave her be. Less than two years later, in fact, she had her strangest experience of all, which she documents in
Wheel of Life
.

The constant lectures, seminars, and out of town speaking engagements, the hours spent attending to the dying, had worn her down. She was considering giving up the work.

She stood in the Chicago hospital where she became famous, talking to a colleague, when she noticed a woman near the bank of elevators. Kübler-Ross had been deep in thought. But this woman caught her attention. She thought she had seen her, somewhere, before. Then she noticed something alarming.

The woman was semi-transparent.

After Kübler-Ross ended the conversation with her colleague, the woman approached her, not walking so much as floating. “Do you mind if we walk to your office?” the apparition asked.

Kübler-Ross said yes, and started the strangest walk of her life, a few dozen yards to her office. Inside, she remembered the woman's face. It was Mrs. Schwartz. She sat down, thinking she might faint. Schwartz had died some ten months earlier.

Kübler-Ross questioned her own sanity.

In the course of her work she had counseled schizophrenics. And when they saw something that wasn't there, she didn't feed their fantasies. She told them they were hallucinating. So she reached for her pen, her papers, her coffee cup. She tried to tether herself, through touch, to the real world. But the apparition didn't fade at the great lady's attempts to make her go away. In fact, the spook spoke. “I had to come back,” Schwartz told her, “for two reasons. Number one is to thank you and the Reverend [Imara] for all you have done for me. However the second reason I came back is to tell you not to give up your work on death and dying . . . not yet.”