Not strictly on social sciences, Stijn Ruiter discusses The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Especially the origin of (human) morality caught his interest. Dawkins quotes brain researcher Hauser, who “does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people […] the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.” That’s interesting – isn’t it – doing statistical investigations to morality? The way people responded to the moral tests given, did not correlate with their religion or religious beliefs. Dawkins builds upon this finding, by arguing that people do not require the existence of a God to be or become good: if the human body can do it for itself, no external force is required.

This line of reasoning reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago, about a Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel who wrote a book about near death experiences. This book was based on findings he published a few years earlier in the Lancet. In that publication, the occurrence of near death experiences during cardiac arrest is cross-tabulated with several variables, such as used medication, but more interesting also with the patients’ religion. Since it was shown that these variables did not relate to the occurrence of near death experiences, the article rejects many existing theories about the experience of an afterlife. Very interesting, but in the book this finding is extended to argue that since the body cannot sustain consciousness during cardiac arrest, the consciousness apparently exists independent of the body. In that, the line of reasoning is quite the opposite of the from Dawkins: since the human body cannot do it, it must lie outside the human. In my contribution I argue that these findings are quite likely to be due to lack of measurement accuracy.

Finally, a warm welcome to a new participant of this blog carnival. Bram Hengeveld discusses (in Dutch) quite some literature from a behavioristic school of research, which he elegantly applies to his own discipline: geriatric nursing. The behavioristic study is basically a replication of the classic Milgram experiments (the one in which participants were stressed to obey authority to administer electrical shocks to others, despite their (seeming) objections). Bram applies the findings from these kind of studies to his nursing profession. Interestingly, he does not focus on the patients (which probably could initiate some more posts), but on the nurses themselves. Most people working in health care, according to Bram, are not satisfied by the conditions under which they work and how these dictate (read: restrict) the level of care they can provide. However, as the experiments showed, in certain circumstances people readily seem to accept their situation and ‘go along’.

That’s it for today’s edition. I hope you’ll enjoy the posts gathered here, and please keep the new posts coming! Next edition will be on March 3rd.

Is there an afterlife? The Lancet-published cardiologist Pim van Lommel believes there is. I believe his central statements are based on inaccurate (interpretation of) measurements.

Based on findings on Near Death Experiences (NDE) that he reported upon in the Lancet, van Lommel recently wrote a popularized book in which he explains his beliefs and research findings to a larger public. There, he argues that our consciousness is not located within our physical body. As could be expected, this book (called `Endless Consciousness’, my translation) raised a lot of discussion between ‘believers’ and ‘critics’.

But let’s take a closer look at the peer-reviewed research findings on which the statements on the afterlife are based. In the Lancet article, Van Lommel and colleagues do not speak of the existence of an afterlife, but refer to the locality of our consciousness. In an intelligent research design, van Lommel and colleagues asked hospitalized cardiac patients to participate in his research. In case these people had a cardiac arrest, from which they were successfully reanimated, these people were surveyed on whether or not they had experienced a Near Death Experience (NDE) and if so, what exactly their experiences during the NDE were.

Based on this design, Van Lommel was able to show that from the people who survived the cardiac arrest, approximately 18% had a Near Death Experience. Existing explanations on the prevalence of NDE’s, such as the religious conviction of people, the medications they used prior to the cardiac arrest, or the duration of the cardiac arrest, could all be refuted. This was done by means of cross-tabulations with the (nature of) experiences and additional information on the participants recorded prior to the cardiac arrest.

So, none of the commonly addressed alternative explanations hold. This conclusion is extrapolated to the supposed location our consciousness, which supposedly cannot be in our brain (according to the Lancet-article), and subsequently extrapolated to the existence of an afterlife (in his book). True crucial argument proposed by Van Lommel is that this is necessarily so, and not due to distorted brain functioning, because we know that during cardiac arrest the human blood pressure is too low to sustain brain functions and thereby consciousness. Thereby, the linchpin of his argument is the accuracy of the measurements on brain activity during cardiac arrest.

Although in general I do have confidence in the instruments measuring brain activity, after reading an article in a non-peer reviewed journal (Natuurwetenschap en Techniek, written in Dutch by Niki Korteweg) I recently lost my confidence in these instruments for this purpose. These measurements only give an indication of the combined pulsing of brain-cells. But there are indications that, when deprived of enough oxygen, brain cells tend to pulse randomly. That is not picked up by the measurements Van Lommel refers to. It is unknown whether or not this leads to some form of consciousness, and thereby cannot be ruled out.

Additionally, the argument that during cardiac arrest blood pressure is too low to sustain consciousness is crucial to Van Lommels statement that consciousness cannot emerge from brain-activity during cardiac arrest. However, this only holds for people in average. So, the average blood pressure is too low to sustain consciousness. However, an average comes with a standard deviation, which learns us that about 20% of the people have a blood pressure high enough to sustain some kind of consciousness, even without a heartbeat. To me, this percentage is very close to the percentage of people that had a near death experience (18%) in the Van Lommel study. So, their near death experience (I do not contest the experience they had, only its origin) is not an outside-body experience, but a result of a physical brain that basically functions but is distorted by shortage of oxygen.

There is much more to be said regarding the existence of an afterlife. However, in this case of scientific inference on this subject, I cannot but conclude that the measurement issues form an alternative explanation on near death experiences that is much more likely than the existence of an afterlife. To me, this is another example of what I recently wrote on the importance to reflect on the uncertainty that is associated with research methods, instead of building castles on loose sand.

VANLOMMEL, P., VANWEES, R., MEYERS, V., ELFFERICH, I. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358(9298), 2039-2045. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(01)07100-8

Is there an afterlife? Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, thinks so based on his own, empirical research. He recently received a lot of attention when he published his book (2007). This book is a popularized elaboration of an article he wrote in the scientific medical journal The Lancet (van Lommel et al., 2001). In this article Van Lommel and his colleagues studied 344 cardiac patients in the Netherlands who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest. Of these patients, 62 (18%) reported to have experienced a near death experience (NDE). Van Lommel et al. eliminate the viability of several prevailing theories on the origin of these near death experiences, such as cerebral anoxia (absence of oxygen in the brain), religiousness, or use of medication prior to cardiac arrest. This is done by cross-tabulating these characteristics with whether or not a respondent did experience a near death experience, as well as with the nature of the near death experience. No differences between groups in occurrence or nature of the near death experiences were found.

Van Lommel does not write in his Lancet article (2001) about the existence of an afterlife. But, in his recently published book, he does (van Lommel, 2007). The book is titled ‘Never Ending Consciousness’ and contains many stories of people who have had a near death experience. The notion of the existence of an afterlife is all the more present in the reception of his book, and the publicity surrounding it, by the public.

This is the start of a research paper I recently wrote. It is nothing very special, but the basic thought that the way people think about an afterlife and the way people live might be related, is somewhat nice. The paper shows that this might indeed be the case, at least when we compare the Tlingit, the Yanonamö, and the Dogon.

Maybe we can extrapolate these findings to the fact that in our western society we need a medical scientist (amongst others of course) to tell us some about the existence of an afterlife. The paper is to be found below.

Epistemoloy of an afterlife