The dying of the light

In the brilliant, funny, thought-provoking, and often poignant television series The Good Place, a character named Simone, who is an Australian neuroscientist, ends up in heaven (the titular "Good Place") and flatly refuses to believe it.

The whole thing, she claims, is merely a hallucination cooked up by her dying, oxygen-starved brain.  That she died (or was in the process of it), she could believe; but knowing what she does about neurophysiology, it is simply impossible for her to accept that what she is seeing is real.

The more you know about the brain and its sensory/perceptual system, the easier it is to understand how an actual neuroscientist would come to that conclusion.  As we've seen here at Skeptophilia a good many times, what we perceive is fragmentary and inaccurate, and that's even while we're alive, wide awake, and all the relevant organs are in good working order.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, all too accurately, "The human brain is rife with ways of getting it wrong."

Oh, it works well enough most of the time.  We wouldn't have survived long otherwise.  But to assume that what you're perceiving, and (even worse) what you remember perceiving, is at all complete and accurate is simply false.

It gets even dicier when things start to go wrong.  Which was why I was so fascinated with a study from the University of Michigan that was published a couple of weeks ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at EEG traces from comatose patients who had experienced cardiac arrest and died, and the researchers found as the patients died, their brains showed a surge of activity in the regions associated with consciousness and perception.

Gamma wave activity -- associated with awareness -- spiked, as did signaling at the junction of the temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes of the cerebrum.  This area is correlated with dreaming, hallucination, and other altered states of consciousness, and the high activity there might be an explanation for the commonalities in near-death experiences, like the familiar "tunnel of light" that has been reported hundreds of times.

This story was reported in a lot of popular media as providing support for claims that "your life flashes before your eyes" as you die, but that seems to me to be a significant stretch.  For one thing, the study was small; only four individuals, understandable given the specificity of the criteria.  For another, the spike of activity in the temporal-occipital-parietal junction is correlated with altered states of consciousness, but it doesn't tell us what these people were actually experiencing.  And we can't ask them about it, because they're dead.

[Image from Punch, 1858, is in the Public Domain]

So what this says about the experience of dying is in the category of "interesting but very preliminary," and what it says about the possibility of an afterlife is "nothing."  My guess is people who already disbelieve in an afterlife will, like Simone, add this to the evidence against, and the people who already believe in it will add it to the evidence in favor.  In reality, of course, the new study only looks at the threshold of death, not what happens after it occurs.  I'm still agnostic about an afterlife, myself.  I recently read an article written by by Stafford Betty, professor emeritus of religious studies at California State University - Bakersfield, who stated that survival after death was "a near certainty" and that doubters are simply ignoring a mountain of evidence.  "They are so dug into their materialist worldview," Betty writes, "that they refuse to investigate research that contradicts it.  They are afraid of getting entangled in a worldview, often religiously based, that belongs to a past they 'outgrew.'"

Well, maybe.  I've read a lot of the research, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as all that, nor is my skepticism due to my clinging to materialism or a fear of getting trapped in religion.  In fact, I can say without hesitation that if I found out there was an afterlife, I'd be pretty thrilled about it.  (Some afterlifes, anyway.  I'm not so fond of the ones where you're tortured for eternity.  But Valhalla, for example, sounds badass.)  It's more that the evidence I've seen doesn't reach a level of rigor I find convincing.

But I'm certainly open to the idea.  Like I said, the other option, which is simply ceasing to be, isn't super appealing.

Anyhow, the University of Michigan paper is fascinating, and gives us a unique lens into the experience of someone while dying.  It's the one thing that unites us all, isn't it?  We'll all go through it eventually.  It reminds me of the passage from my novel The Communion of Shadows, where the main characters are discussing the fear of death:

“Aren’t you scared?” came T-Joe’s voice from behind him, after a moment’s silence.

“Scared? A little.”  Leandre paused.  “It’s like when I was a child, and I used to climb an oak tree that leaned out over the bayou.  You’re there, hunched on the branch, nothing but the empty air between your naked body and the water’s surface.  It looks like it’s a hundred feet down.  You think, ‘I can’t do it.  I can’t jump.’  Your hands cling to the branch, your heart is pounding, you’re dripping sweat.  You know once you jump it’ll be all right, you’ll swim to shore and in a moment be ready to do it again.  But in that instant, it seems impossible.”  He paused, giving a lazy swat at a mosquito.  “I’m once again that skinny little boy in the tree, looking down at the bayou, and thinking I’ll never have the courage to leap.  I know I can do it, and that it’ll be okay.  Think of all the people who have passed these gates, endured whatever death is and gone on to what awaits us beyond this world.”  He turned around with a broad smile on his face.  “If they can do it, so can I.”

****************************************

In your wildest dreams

So, last night, this weird thing happened.  I was skinnydipping in the Caribbean, swimming along trying to get to the other side, when I noticed some people on a boat following me.  They started yelling at me, not (surprisingly) to ask why I was out in the middle of the ocean, but to let me know that there was a hurricane coming and I'd better swim faster because otherwise I wouldn't reach Senegal (which is apparently on the "other side of the Caribbean") in time to avoid drowning in the storm.  They then motored off to get to safety themselves.  It never crossed my mind to wonder why, if the situation was so dire, they hadn't hauled me aboard.  Maybe it was because they were embarrassed by the fact I was naked and they didn't have an extra pair of swim trunks, although I don't remember being much bothered by the fact myself.  Or maybe it was because I'd apparently gotten out there myself, I could damn well get myself out of it, and they'd done their duty by at least letting me know that I was about to be in the middle of a cyclone.

I don't remember what happened after that.  I think it got a little weird.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up, and in the words that every bad fantasy writer has written at some point, "He realized it was only a dream."  Lying there in the dark, I started wondering why my errant brain had come up with something that odd, and came to the conclusion that it was an amalgam of various things over the last few days, like the NOAA bulletin I read saying we were likely to have an above-average year for dangerous hurricanes, and looking at some photos someone posted on Twitter from West Africa.  The skinnydipping part at least makes a modicum of sense because I love to swim but kind of hate swearing swim trunks.  Fortunately I have a pond that's in the privacy of my fenced back yard and only visible from the road if you look exactly in the right direction at exactly the right time, and my opinion is if someone's that determined to see my bare ass, they can have at it.  (Of course, given the way the weather's currently going in the Northeast, it'll probably be August before I'd be willing to swim without a fully-insulated dry-suit, much less naked.)

And for the record, this dream still wasn't as completely fucked up as my wife's dream a couple of nights ago about being tackled by an enormous kangaroo, or the one last night where she had rented an apartment in Washington D.C. but was dismayed to find that it had no door, and the only way you could get in was by climbing through the mail slot.

Apparently even King Solomon had some weird dreams, because I don't know what the hell this is about.  Luca Giordano, The Dream of Solomon (1694) [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this comes up because of a paper this week in Cell Reports about a study of two epileptic patients who had implants to monitor their brain activity.  These electrodes were supposed to act as neuromuscular interfaces, allowing the individuals to overcome motor paralysis and move their arms simply by thinking about it, but along the way the devices made sensitive readings of neural firing patterns.  And what the researchers found was that when the patients went into the REM (rapid eye-movement) phase of sleep, during which we dream, the brain was apparently replaying firing patterns for motor control that had been learned the previous day.

So the researchers had the patients play a mental game of "Simon" -- remember the popular electronic toy where you had to press buttons to repeat a pattern of sounds and colors?  Of course, given these individuals' disabilities, they couldn't play the actual game, so the scientists instructed the patients to think through and recall the pattern they'd just seen, picturing themselves pushing the buttons in the correct order.

Then the patients took a nap.  And during REM, the same pattern emerged as they'd seen during the mental game.

Apparently, they were playing Simon in their dreams.

My wife had an experience like this back when she was in graduate school, and engaged in the occupation that all serious grad students take part in, namely: playing video games instead of studying.  In her case, it was Tetris, and she finally realized she was spending way too much time playing it when she started having Tetris dreams.

But evidently this is something we all do, and gives us a lens into why we dream in the first place.  It's long been thought that dreaming has to do with memory consolidation -- reinforcing pathways that the brain has decided are important, moving critical memories into long-term storage, and pruning away information that is less essential.  Your brain makes the understandable (if sometimes erroneous) judgment that if you repeat an activity a bunch of times, it must have some survival value, and you replay it while you sleep so you can do it more fluidly when you're awake.

Even if all you're practicing is your ability to stack up bunches of colored blocks while vaguely Russian-sounding music plays in the background.

"This study is fascinating," said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an interview with CNN.  "Despite decades of research, it remains somewhat unclear how 'short-term' memories get filed away to become 'long-term' memories that can be recalled later.   Using a brain-computer interface is an exciting way to study memory since it can record brain cell activity patterns and then look for those exact patterns later...  This supports the notion that in order to optimize memory function and learning, people need to prioritize restful activities -- most importantly adequate sleep -- to keep our 'engines' running at peak performance."

Which is fascinating, but hardly news to chronic insomniacs like myself.  I know that after a night's poor sleep, everything -- memory, motor responses, mood, sensory awareness -- is affected negatively.  The restorative power of sleep is well-documented, and absolutely essential to health, both physical and mental.

What this study does, though, is to pinpoint one of the ways sleep helps us -- by reinforcing our memory of critical events from the previous days.  We already knew why dreams are so bizarre; during REM, the prefrontal cortex -- which among many other things, acts as a sort of "reality filter," allowing you to sift fact from fantasy -- is essentially offline.  Apparently the memory consolidation function works best when you can get the hypercritical "Okay, that is clearly not real" part of your brain out of the way.

But I still don't think it can explain why I was swimming toward Senegal, naked, during a hurricane.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Aesthetic synchrony

Probably most of you have had the fortunate experience of being in a situation where you were completely engaged in what you were doing.  This can be especially powerful when you are being given the chance to experience something novel -- listening to a lecture by a truly masterful speaker, attending a performance of music or theater, visiting a place of great natural beauty -- when you are having what writer Sir Ken Robinson (speaking of masterful lecturers) calls in his talk "Changing Education Paradigms" "an aesthetic experience, when your senses are operating at their peak, when you're present in the current moment, when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing you're experiencing, when you are fully alive."

When this happens, we often say we are "on the same wavelength" with others who are sharing the experience with us.   And now, a team led by Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that this idiom might literally be true.

Dikker's team had thirteen test subjects -- twelve high school students and their teacher -- wear portable electroencephalogram headsets for an entire semester of biology classes.  Naturally, some of the topics and activities were more engaging than others, and the researchers had students self-report daily on such factors as how focused they were, how much they enjoyed their teacher's presentation, how much they enjoyed the students they interacted with, and their satisfaction levels about the activities they were asked to take part in.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dikker et al. write:

The human brain has evolved for group living.  Yet we know so little about how it supports dynamic group interactions that the study of real-world social exchanges has been dubbed the "dark matter of social neuroscience."  Recently, various studies have begun to approach this question by comparing brain responses of multiple individuals during a variety of (semi-naturalistic) tasks. These experiments reveal how stimulus properties, individual differences, and contextual factors may underpin similarities and differences in neural activity across people...  Here we extend such experimentation drastically, beyond dyads and beyond laboratory walls, to identify neural markers of group engagement during dynamic real-world group interactions.  We used portable electroencephalogram (EEG) to simultaneously record brain activity from a class of 12 high school students over the course of a semester (11 classes) during regular classroom activities.  A novel analysis technique to assess group-based neural coherence demonstrates that the extent to which brain activity is synchronized across students predicts both student class engagement and social dynamics.  This suggests that brain-to-brain synchrony is a possible neural marker for dynamic social interactions, likely driven by shared attention mechanisms.  This study validates a promising new method to investigate the neuroscience of group interactions in ecologically natural settings.

Put simply, what the researchers found is that when the students reported feeling the most engaged, their brain activity actually synced with that of their classmates.  It squares with our subjective experience, doesn't it?  I know when I'm bored, irritated, or angered by something I'm being required to participate in, I tend to unhook my awareness from where I am -- including being less aware of those around me who are suffering through the same thing.

It's no wonder we call this kind of response "disengaging," is it?

So apparently misery doesn't love company; what loves company is engagement, appreciation, and a sense of belonging.  "The central hub seems to be attention," Dikker says.  "But whatever determines how attentive you are can stem from various sources from personality to state of mind.  So the picture that seems to emerge is that it's not just that we pay attention to the world around us; it's also what our social personalities are, and who we're with."

All the more reason we teachers should focus as much on getting our students hooked on learning as we do on the actual content of the course.  My experience is that if you can get students to "buy in" -- if (in my case) they come away thinking biology is cool, fun, and interesting -- it doesn't matter so much if they can't remember what ribosomes do.  They can fit the facts in later, these days with a thirty-second lookup on Wikipedia.

What can't be looked up is being engaged to the point that you care what ribosomes do.

Unfortunately, in the educational world we've tended to go the other direction.  The flavor of the month is micromanagement from the top down, a set syllabus full of factlets that each student must know, an end product that can fit on a bubble sheet, "quantifiable outcomes" that generate data that the b-b stackers in the Department of Education can use to see if our teachers are teaching and our students learning.  A pity that, as usual, the people who run the business of educating children are ignoring what the research says -- that the most fundamental piece of the puzzle is student engagement.

If you have that, everything else will follow.

Brain waves in the afterlife

It's understandable how much we cling to the hope that there's life after death.  Ceasing to exist is certainly not a comforting prospect.  Heaven knows (pun intended) I'm not looking forward to death myself, although I have to say that I'm more worried about the potential for debility and pain leading up to it than I am to death itself.  Being an atheist, I'm figuring that afterwards, I won't experience much of anything at all, which isn't scary so much as it is inconceivable.

Of course, if the orthodox view of Christianity is correct, I'll have other things to worry about than simple oblivion.

It's this tendency toward wishful thinking that pushes us in the direction of confirmation bias on the subject of survival of the soul.  Take, for example, a paper that came out just this week in PubMed called "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death."  The paper was based upon studies of four patients who had died after being removed from life support, in which electroencephalogram (EEG) readings were taken as their life signs faded away.  In one case, a particular type of brain waveform -- delta waves, which are associated with deep sleep -- continued for five minutes after cardiac arrest and drop in arterial blood pressure to zero.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authors were cautious not to over-conclude; they simply reported their findings without making any kind of inference about what the person was experiencing, much less saying that this had any implications about his/her immortal soul.  In fact, it is significant that only one of the four patients showed any sort of brain wave activity following cardiac arrest; if there really was some sort of spirit-related phenomenon going on here, you'd think all four would have shown it.

That hasn't stopped the life-after-death crowd from jumping on this as if it were unequivocal proof of soul survival.  "One more piece of scientific evidence for an afterlife," one person appended to a link to the article.  "This can't be explained by ordinary brain science," said another.

The whole thing reminds me of the furor that erupted when the paper "Electrocortical Activity Associated With Subjective Communication With the Deceased," by Arnaud Delorme et al., showed up in Frontiers in Psychology four years ago.  The paper had some serious issues -- confirmation bias among the researchers, all of whom were connected in one way or another to groups more or less desperate to prove an afterlife, being only one.  The gist is that the researchers did brain scans of alleged mediums while they were attempting to access information about the dead.

To call the results equivocal is a compliment.  There were brain scans done of six mediums; of them, three scored above what you'd expect by chance.  In other words, half scored above what chance would predict, and half below -- pretty much the spread you'd expect if chance was all that was involved.  The sample size is tiny, and if you look at the questions the mediums were asked about the deceased people, you find that they include questions such as:

• Was the discarnate more shy or more outgoing?
• Was the discarnate more serious or more playful?
• Was the discarnate more rational or more emotional?
• Did death occur quickly or slowly?

Not only are these either/or questions -- meaning that even someone who was guessing would have fifty-fifty odds at getting an answer correct -- they're pretty subjective.  I wonder, for example, whether people would say I was "more rational" or "more emotional."  Being a science teacher and skeptic blogger, people who didn't know me well would probably say "rational;" my closest friends know that I'm a highly emotional, anxious bundle of nerves who is simply adept at covering it up most of the time.

Then there's this sort of thing:

• Provide dates and times of year that were important to the discarnate.

Not to mention:

• Does the discarnate have any messages specifically for the sitter?

Which is impossible to verify one way or the other.

Add that to the small sample size, and you have a study that is (to put it mildly) somewhat suspect.  But that didn't stop the wishful thinkers from leaping on this as if it was airtight proof of an afterlife.

Like I said, it's not that I don't understand the desire to establish the survival of the spirit.  No one would be happier than me if it turned out to be true (as long as the aforementioned hellfire and damnation isn't what is awaiting me).  But as far as the 2013 paper that was setting out to demonstrate the existence of an afterlife, and this week's paper that some folks are (unfairly) using for the same purpose -- it's just not doing it for me.

Be that as it may, I still have an open mind about the whole thing.  When there's good hard evidence available -- I'm listening.  Unless it happens after I have personally kicked the bucket, at which point I'll know one way or the other regardless.