The mystery of the third man

In the episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called "Doctor's Orders," the ship is passing through a region of space suffused with a field that interferes with (and could be dangerous to) most humanoid brain function.  The ship's doctor, Phlox, is from a species thought to be immune to its effects, so the captain agrees to have the entire crew (other than Phlox) put into induced comas and place the ship on what amounts to auto-pilot, leaving Phlox to re-awaken the crew once they've traversed the hazardous region.

It soon becomes obvious, though, that Phlox isn't entirely immune himself.  He begins to hear knocking noises, as if someone or something is trapped in the walls of the ship.  He sees shadows and illusory movement -- at one point, nearly killing Captain Archer's dog, Porthos, who had escaped from the captain's quarters, thinking it's an intruder who is stalking him.  After a period of becoming increasingly nervous and paranoid, he encounters the Vulcan crew member T'Pol, who was not sedated, and she not only helps him run the ship but keeps him company, significantly reducing his emotional stress.

Things take a frightening turn when both of them begin to hallucinate -- and they find that the dangerous region has expanded, turning what would have been a two-week crossing into ten weeks.  Phlox and T'Pol confer, and after weighing the options, conclude that the only possibility is to go into warp, initially thought to be too risky because of the possible interactions between the field and the ship's warp drive.  In the end, they decide that there's no way either of them will survive another eight weeks of what amounts to progressive psychosis.  They engage the engines, and successfully cross the region and back into normal space.

But when Phlox goes around to re-awaken the captain and crew, he finds T'Pol asleep in her quarters.  She has, in fact, been in an induced coma the entire time -- his interactions with her, and the help and companionship he received, were also hallucinations.

What Phlox experienced is a strange, but well-known, phenomenon called the third man illusion.  This occurs when someone in a life-threatening situation has the overwhelming sensation of being accompanied by a supportive or comforting presence, often of a particular person.  The most famous example is Ernest Shackleton, who during his harrowing crossing of South Georgia Island with two others, was frequently convinced that there was a fourth there with them, someone who was a protector and would see them to safety (which, eventually, they accomplished).  Poet T. S. Eliot referenced Shackleton's experience in his poem "The Waste Land" -- in fact, it's Eliot's lines that gave the third man illusion its name:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?

Unlike yesterday's post, where hallucinations during cataplexy were often disturbing or downright horrifying, the third man illusion is comforting, sometimes even giving the person in extremis information or encouragement that leads to their ultimate survival.

It probably should go without saying that I don't think the third man illusion is because there is an actual disembodied presence there with you, any more than the poor woman in my previous post who saw a "greenish-pale, abnormally tall man" shouting random numbers at her was seeing something real.  It's much more likely that like Phlox in "Doctor's Orders," our brains have created the sensation of something comforting or helpful as a coping mechanism to alleviate extreme stress.  But you have to wonder if this is where the whole Guardian Angel idea comes from -- that there is a being out there who is looking out for us, and helps us come safely through dangers.

But there's no doubt that it can seem one hundred percent real, and many of the people who have experienced it come away true believers.  Mountain climber Joe Simpson, in his 1988 book Touching the Void, describes falling into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes and suffering a horrific leg injury, and that a "voice" encouraged him to keep trying and guided him to safety -- a voice that came from outside him, and without which, he says, he would have certainly died.

So who knows?  I've never experienced anything of the kind myself, so perhaps it's easy for me to sit here in my comfy chair and disbelieve.  It's hard, sometimes, to balance hard-nosed rational skepticism with "there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  We certainly don't have explanations for everything.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "This is life.  For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us."

And... sometimes... may actually save our lives.

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DMT and NDEs

No one would be happier than me if it turned out there was an afterlife.

Well, at least some types of afterlife.  The tortured-forever-in-the-fiery-furnace version doesn't appeal much to me, especially given my status as an evil godless heathen.  Reincarnation, in my opinion, would also kind of suck, since it's basically getting sent back to the beginning of the game.  Valhalla would be kind of cool, though.  I could definitely get into swordfighting and quaffing mead.  And some of the ones where you get to relax in fields of flowers, with every need taken care of, also sound good, especially on work days.

The problem is, there's no real evidence of any of them.  Not that you'd expect there'd be; after all, to get to the afterlife you pretty much have to be dead.  And as Michael Shermer put it, it's easy to talk to the dead -- the hard part is getting them to respond.

There are people who claim there's evidence from near-death experiences -- NDEs, in common parlance.  The idea is that people who have had NDEs report back a lot of common features, including the well-known "tunnel of light" and feelings of oneness, bliss, and transcendence.  The argument goes that since what people claim to have experienced is often very similar, there must be something to it -- those people have peeked across the threshold, and come back to tell us about it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've never found that argument terribly convincing.  Since we all have brains (although some of us could stand to use them more frequently), you'd expect that they'd respond similarly under similar circumstances of oxygen deprivation, neural shutdown, and all the other things that happens when a person dies.  And that stance has been bolstered considerably by a study done at Imperial College (London) last month, in which thirteen volunteers were given a chemical called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and reported back experiences identical to what has been heard from people who have had NDEs.

DMT has become well-known because it is the main psychotropic ingredient in ayahuasca, a plant extract used in the Amazon Basin to induce hallucinations.  DMT interacts with serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, and that seems to be the cause of its effects, which include euphoria, visual disturbances, and -- most strikingly -- the sensation of communicating with non-corporeal beings.

What the researchers did with the test subjects in this study is to administer DMT under controlled conditions, and not only monitored their physical and mental states, but asked them for their subjective experiences when they "sobered up."  And there was an amazing similarity between the DMT trips and reports of NDEs.

One test subject described a "tunnel" that she felt impelled to enter, and once she did so, the anxiety she'd felt evaporated completely.  She was "shown" various images, and they all appeared to her to be critical to understanding her life.  "One image I do remember is lots of books flipping open and rainbows zooming out," she said.  "I felt a presence lift my head and tell me to pay attention: 'You came to discover something.'  But it was a juxtaposition because I felt disembodied at the same time. It was a strange paradox...  The normal laws of physics didn't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream.  Imagine dreaming and things morph and the normal laws of physics don't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream."

What strikes me about all this is that if it's easy to simulate an NDE by altering your brain chemistry, maybe altering your brain chemistry is what causes an NDE.  As I tell my neuroscience students, if you monkey around with your neurotransmitters, you should expect bizarre things to happen; and, after all, since every experience we have is filtered through our neurotransmitters, it's bound to change your perception of the world.

It doesn't, however, mean that any of it is real.

There's also been a conjecture by more than one neuroscientist that endogenous (self-produced) DMT exists to protect our cells from the effects of oxygen starvation, so it's released in one big shot when our heart stops in a last-ditch effort to keep our brain cells alive.  If that's true, no wonder everyone experiences the same sorts of sensations in an NDE -- and their similarity to a DMT psychedelic trip.

So the DMT experiment is fascinating, but it seems to me not to bolster the case for an afterlife.  It does make me curious about the experience, however.  A friend of mine asked me whether I would take DMT or psilocybin if it was under controlled, safe circumstances, and I knew I wouldn't get arrested.  My answer was, "Absolutely."  The idea of creating the sensation of a transcendent experience sounds pretty appealing even if I don't believe it necessarily reflects any sort of external reality.

And, after all, my other alternative is to wait until I die, which strikes me as being less than optimal given that after having the transcendent experience, I'll be dead.

Kind of a downside, that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

An instrument of the divine will

There are people for whom the line between reality and fantasy gets so blurred that at some point, I'm not even convinced they know whether they're telling the truth or not.

That's my impression of Kevin Zadai, who was a guest last week on the television show It's Supernatural!, hosted by Sid Roth.  The show itself is about using accounts of the supernatural to bolster up the claims of evangelical Christianity, and Roth himself is essentially a televangelist.  Most of the stuff on the show is the usual fare -- accounts of being led one way or another by Jesus, with positive results (of course), miraculous recoveries from illness, amazing escapes from being injured during natural disasters, and so on.  But last week, Zadai took a different twist on the whole thing.

He related to Roth how he'd gone in for a dental procedure, and he had a reaction to the anesthetic, and his heart stopped.  While he was dead (for want of a better word), he went to heaven, where he met Jesus:

… [Jesus] told me that I didn’t have enough depth in my prayers, that I didn’t have enough access to the depths of my heart, and He explained it…  In Psalm 16, David wrote that, prophetically, for me, He said. Jesus said that David wrote that Psalm, and He memorized that Psalm, because when He was in the depths of Hell, He said He rehearsed that Psalm over and over again, and He said, “I cleared a way out in that place for you, and for everyone, in Messiah, to pray from those depths.” 

He said, “I prayed Myself out of Hell because I had the Psalm 16, and I prayed that continually, and then the Holy Spirit came and resurrected me.”  And he said, “When you pray, you pray with that kind of a fervency, where you know who you are based on the scripture.”  Because He said, “I had no witness when I was down there.  I had no Holy Spirit help.”  He said, “If the Father had not given the command,” he said, “I would sit down there until He gave the command for Me to be resurrected. That’s how much I trusted Him.”  He said, “That’s where you pray from. You pray from those depths. That trust.”

So far, nothing too unusual.  People who have near-death experiences often meet supernatural personages, although interestingly enough, it's always the ones that come from whatever religion they already believed.  If a devout Christian had a near-death experience and met Ganesha, for example, I might be more willing to sit up and take notice.

But then Zadai took an abrupt left turn.  When Roth asked him for more details about his meeting with Jesus, Zadai happily complied -- and said that Jesus had taught him to play the saxophone.

I am not making this up.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Messiah, Zadai said, had a pretty nice instrument, and was happy to give him a lesson on it:

...This particular one He had was a soprano sax.  It was a beautiful gold saxophone... He was standing there, and He had this saxophone in His hands, and He started to play it over me…  He took it away from His mouth and handed it to me and He said, “You play.”  And I go, “Lord, I can’t play like that!” 

He said, “That’s because you’re doing it wrong.”  He said, “Let me show you.”  He said, “Stand up.”  So I stood up...  And I looked around and He goes, “See all that around you?”  He said, “That’s the Holy Spirit and the presence and glory of My Father.”  He said, “That’s always there.”  He said, “What’s wrong is that you’re not breathing in Heaven first.”  He said, “Breathe that in first, and then blow it through your horn, and it’ll work out just fine.”  So I took a big breath and all this gold air around me went inside of me, and I put that horn that He handed to me in my mouth, and I blew, and it was exactly like Jesus had played.

Well, I play a wind instrument, and I have to admit that standing up while you play and using your breath to support your tone isn't bad advice.  But this image I have of Jesus playing the soprano sax... well, it's just not working for me.  I know he's supposed to be super-powerful and all-knowing and whatnot, but I honestly never considered that his abilities would extend to having good blues chops.

Now, what strikes me about this is not Zadai making a weird claim.  After all, weird claims are a dime a dozen, and are in fact have been the bread and butter of this blog for going on nine years.  I'm not even surprised about Roth's generally positive reaction, because televangelists, like a lot of talk show hosts, thrive on people saying and doing weird shit, because face it, weird shit sells.

What surprises me is the audience's reaction.  No one -- not a single person -- started laughing.  No one got up and walked out.  Instead, they looked at Zadai as if he were the recipient of a holy miracle.  The audience cheered and shouted "Hallelujah" and "Praise Jesus."  Some audience members were in tears.

I mean, I know that the audience was made up of people who were devout Christians; I'm sure they take great pains to screen out professional scoffers such as myself.  But even so, don't they draw the line somewhere?  What would it take to make them frown and say, "Wait a minute..."?  Would they believe it if someone said Jesus had paid off his credit card bills?  That the Lord had given him some golf tips?  That he got a divine suggestion to play one more round on the roulette wheel at the casino?

On the other hand, these are the same people who think that god cares about the outcome of the Superbowl.

Never mind.

I'm not bringing this up to be scornful (honestly, I'm not).  It's more that I'm curious about how someone could believe in a deity that is so bent on micromanaging everything that he takes the opportunity of a near-death experience to teach a guy a few riffs on the soprano sax.  Of course, in Matthew 10:29, Jesus himself says, "Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will."  So as bizarre as it seems to me, at least it's scripturally consistent.

What I get least, however, is how anyone can find this worldview comforting.  Do you really think it's reassuring that Jesus is always watching you?  Twenty-four hours a day?  To me, that's more "creepy stalker" than it is "light unto the world."

So the whole thing leaves me a little baffled, frankly.  Maybe my own scientific view of the universe seems a little impersonal, but at least I don't have to worry about the spirit of Stephen Hawking watching me while I take a shower, or something.

Comas, the afterlife, and absolute proof

Just yesterday, I was telling my Critical Thinking class to be cautious whenever an argument includes, in its conclusion, the word "only."  A set of premises that is followed up by, "... and the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from this is..." is,  in my opinion, automatically suspect.  Even given the truth of the premises, is that really the only possible conclusion?  There isn't any other explanation that adequately fits what is known?

All of this is germane to a story that has been making the rounds of Christian and atheist websites, and has even hit mainstream media, which makes a fascinating claim -- that a doctor's experience of visions during a coma proves the existence of an afterlife.  The fullest accounts are to be had in Newsweek and in an online version over at The Daily Beast -- the latter article, called "Proof of Heaven: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife," details the experiences of Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who contracted bacterial meningitis and was plunged into a coma that lasted seven days.  During those seven days, Alexander experienced a profound set of visions:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

In that "larger dimension," Alexander experienced seeing flocks of "transparent, shimmering beings,"  felt a wind that was "like a divine breeze," and had a conversation with an angelic female being who, amongst other things, told him that he was loved and cherished, that he had nothing to fear, and that he could do nothing wrong.

From his experiences, Alexander says, there can only be one possible conclusion:

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

Okay, I will accept that this is one possible conclusion; but is it the only possible conclusion?

The commonalities between many Near-Death Experiences -- the tunnel of white light, the experience of being surrounded by love, the meetings with deceased friends and relatives -- might have as an explanation that there is an afterlife, where we are being eagerly awaited by those who loved us, and hosts of angels will sing at our arrival.  It might, of course, only be what some neurologists believe -- the common sensory experience of neural shutdown as our brains run out of oxygen.  It has been noted that many times NDEs are populated with experiences that follow the lines of what we expected to happen -- Christians, for example, tend to fill their NDEs with Christian imagery, Hindus with Hindu imagery, and so on.  This by itself makes me wonder.  (For the best exposition of the discrepancies and cultural dependency of NDEs I've come across, see this site.  It brings up a lot of questions that are hard to answer if you believe that NDEs are actually visions of an afterlife.)

Of course, my thoughts are also colored on this topic by the fact that a dear friend of mine, who is (like me) a devout atheist, spent not seven days but a full month in a deep coma following a botched surgery.  Alex has only just begun, after three years, to share with his friends what he experienced in that month during which he was effectively shut down, but the little has told me is mindboggling.  He had visions, he said, of whole other lives, spent years that somehow were collapsed into the space of less than a month.  He visited places he's never been, had relationships with people he's never met. 

Was all of this stuff that Alex experienced real?  I would never presume to answer this myself, having never experienced anything remotely similar; and I think that Alex himself is still struggling to settle on an answer in his own mind.  I think, however, that it is both premature and presumptuous to use the word only in any conclusion we draw from what we now know about NDEs, coma visions, and out-of-body experiences.  Could they be experiences of an afterlife, or at least a life beyond what we see?  It's possible.  Myself, I'd be thrilled at the prospect; I'm not fond of the idea of checking out, and if I knew that there was a happy world waiting for me filled with divine breezes and beautiful angelic women, no one would be happier than me.  Could these experiences be only byproducts of our dying brains, a byproduct of the flurry of electrical activity that occurs as our neurons run out of oxygen?  It's possible.  At the moment, I just don't see that there's enough evidence to decide either way.

Eben Alexander, whose memoir Proof of Heaven is soon to be released by Simon & Schuster, is absolutely convinced by what he saw and heard while he was in a coma.  For the rest of us, who have not shared his experiences, the fact of the matter is that we'll just have to wait until the end... and see what happens.

A study of life after death

Today we have news that the Templeton Foundation is giving a three-year, five million dollar grant to John Martin Fischer of the University of California-Riverside to conduct an in-depth study of the afterlife.  [Source]

"People have been thinking about immortality throughout history.  We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death," said Fischer, the principal investigator of what is being called the Immortality Project.  "Much of the discussion has been in literature, especially in fantasy and science fiction, and in theology in the context of an afterlife, heaven, hell, purgatory and karma.  No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy."

The project will involve an in-depth analysis of reports of near-death experiences, spirit survival, and out-of-body experiences.  Fischer is careful to emphasize the rigorous nature of the study his team intends to undertake.

"We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions," Fischer said.  "Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous.  We’re not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports.  We will look at near-death experiences and try to find out what’s going on there — what is promising, what is nonsense, and what is scientifically debunked.  We may find something important about our lives and our values, even if not glimpses into an afterlife."

And that's the problem, isn't it?  How can you tell the difference between the two -- a true, scientifically verifiable "glimpse into an afterlife," and a mere collection of stories that tell us "something important about... our values?"  With near-death experiences, and anything else that relies solely on anecdotal reports, it is often impossible to eliminate the effects of the inevitable skewing of memory that occurs because of inherent flaws of our perceptual and integrative neural mechanisms.  If there is a commonality between stories of NDEs, what does that mean?  Are reports of NDEs similar because people are experiencing contact with a consistent, real afterlife, or because we all have basically the same brain wiring and that wiring fails in a consistent way when we are nearing death?

I just don't know how you'd sort the two out, frankly.  Myself, I have no idea if there is an afterlife -- but even if there is, it may well be out of the reach of an acceptable empirical protocol that would convince someone who wasn't already convinced.

And that brings up the second problem.  The Templeton Foundation is a granting agency whose stated purpose is

[to serve] as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality.  We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will.  We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.  Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring "new spiritual information" and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship.  The Foundation's motto, "How little we know, how eager to learn," exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

All of which sounds nice, but it does put a rather heavy burden on the researcher receiving their grant money to find a connection between science in spirituality, given that taking five million dollars and turning up empty-handed would be a bit of an anticlimax.

I'm not alone in having some questions about the Templeton Foundation's motives.  Rationalists such as Richard Dawkins, John Horgan, and Peter Woit have all made pointed comments about the Foundation's money biasing any projects that they might support.  Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, said, "the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking. It's all about appearances."  Carroll did add, however, "I appreciate that the Templeton Foundation is actually, in its own way, quite pro-science, and is not nearly as objectionable as the anti-scientific crackpots at the Discovery Institute."

It's telling if in order to place a funding agency on the side of rigorous research, you have to compare it to the Discovery Institute.

On the other hand, I'm cautiously in favor of such research.  As I've said many times before in this blog, I'm perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of there being many phenomena that fall outside the ken of current understanding -- but if you think such things are real, you damn well better have some hard evidence to support your position.  The "Big Questions" -- and the existence of an afterlife is certainly one of the biggest -- are deserving of research, and if it is done with acceptable scientific rigor, the Immortality Project is a fascinating thing to undertake.  I can only hope that the researchers involved with the project aren't going to end up being corrupted by the inherent bias of their grant foundation.