Michael Shermer has a new book entitled Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia. Shermer's book contains quite a few misstatements about the brain and mind. On page 13 he tells us the following:
The soul has been traditionally conceived as a separate entity (“soul stuff”) from the body – but neuroscience has demonstrated that the mind – consciousness, memory, and the sense of self representing “you” – cannot exist without a brain. When portions of the brain die as a result of injury, stroke or Alzheimer's – the corresponding functions of the brain dies with them.
This statement is mainly false. Neuroscience has certainly not demonstrated that the mind cannot exist without a brain, and neuroscientists have no credible explanation of how brains could produce either consciousness or memory abilities like humans have or a sense of self. Shermer's claim is disproven by the abundance of near-death experiences in which people continue to have consciousness, memory, and self-hood after their brains have electrically shut down during cardiac arrest. It is also very much false that people lose mental function in proportion to brain damage. Many epilepsy patients have had an operation called hemispherectomy in which half of their brain is removed to stop very bad seizures. Such operations produce little effect on either mental capability or memory (see here and here and here for posts in which I city many scientific studies that back up this statement). Physician John Lorber documented many cases in which people had above-average intelligence even though they had lost most or the great majority of their brain due to hydrocephalus, a disease in which brain tissue is replaced by watery fluid. As for stroke, a medical web page says it has no effect on intelligence. A scientist who did a recent study on Alzheimer's disease stated, “Our study therefore suggests that, contrary to what was believed, neuronal and synaptic loss is relatively limited in Alzheimer’s disease.” A news story describing the study says, “Levels of neuron loss in patients did not indicate how far along they were in the disease, suggesting neuron death has little to do with the symptoms of dementia.”
On page 82 Shermer tries again to convince us that the mind is merely something coming from the brain. He cites some anecdote of a man who developed “pedophilic feelings” after a brain tumor, something that is dubious evidence indeed. Then Shermer states the following:
Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain scan activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct on a computer screen what someone is seeing. Brain activity = conscious experience.
The first claim (which Shermer provides no example to prove) is false. Neuroscientists cannot predict what choices people will make from brain scan activity. The second (probably exaggerated) claim (which Shermer also provides no examples to support) is irrelevant. No one disputes that the brain has an involvement in vision. If a brain scientist had some way to deduce what you were seeing from looking at your brain, that would merely confirm the brain's involvement in visual perception, which no one disputes. But such a feat would be nothing like figuring out what you were thinking of or imagining by looking at your brain. No neuroscientist has ever done any such thing, although you will occasionally read a misleading news story claiming a “mind reading bran scan.” Such hyped-up stories are actually about brain scans of visual perception rather than brain scans of pure thought or imagination in people with closed eyes. As for Shermer's claim that “brain activity = conscious experience,” that equation is unproven and unbelievable. Conscious experience is mental, and brain activity is physical. Physical things don't equal mental things.
Shermer looks at evidence for life-after-death, and his scholarship on this topic is very slight. A reader may get the suspicion that he has got all his information purely from negative sources such as the absurdly biased pages of wikipedia.org and the books of other paranormal denialists. He shows no real signs of having carefully studied any of the countless books that have been written presenting evidence for life after death or paranormal phenomena. People who have read books on a topic they are writing about tend to quote passages from such books (which may or may not be for the sake of criticizing what the book said). We find virtually no quotations from Shermer suggesting he has read any of the 100 books he should have carefully read before criticizing evidence for the paranormal or life after death.
Discussing near-death experiences, Shermer mentions the well-known case called “Maria's shoe,” in which a hospital patient said that she had floated out of her body and seen a red shoe on a hospital ledge several floors higher than her current position, a shoe that a hospital worker verified was in the specified place. Shermer does not mention details of any other similar case, and a reader of Shermer's book might think that this “Maria's shoe” case was just a one-of-a-kind freak report. In fact, there have been many similar cases, in which those having near-death experiences reported seeing or hearing things they absolutely should have been unable to see or hear, either because of unconsciousness or observational impossibility from their bodies. You can read about dozens of such cases here.
Shermer mentions the major study on near-death experiences led by Sam Parnia. Shermer tells us that only one of the people in Parnia's study reported an out-of-body experience. But that's not correct, because out of 101 people in that study who reported a close encounter with death, 13% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you feel separated from your body,” and two of them reported very detailed dramatic out-of-body experiences.
Shermer refers to a patient in the Parnia study who recounted the efforts of medical personnel to revive him while his heart was stopped and he was unconscious. Shermer suggests that the patient could have guessed the details because he had seen TV shows in which people revive patients during cardiac arrest. But the details were too specific for guesswork to be a possibility. The man accurately described specific details of the revival efforts, including the presence of a bald fat man with a blue hat, a nurse saying, “Dial 444 cardiac arrest,” his blood pressure being taken, a nurse pumping on his chest, a doctor sticking something down his throat, and blood gases and blood sugar levels being taken.
Here is what the Parnia scientific paper said in regard to the accuracy of these recollections:
He accurately described people, sounds, and activities from his resuscitation...His medical records corroborated his accounts and specifically supported his descriptions and the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Based on current AED algorithms, this likely corresponded with up to 3 minutes of conscious awareness during CA [cardiac arrest] and CPR.
On page 90 Shermer argues fruitlessly that near-death experiences don't count, because the patients didn't really die. That's not a good argument, seeing that near-death experiences are called near-death experiences and not “actual death experiences.”
On page 92-93 Shermer attempts to explain away near-death experiences by raising some possible explanations, none of which are relevant. He points out that if you take psychedelics it can be rather like a near-death experience. That's irrelevant, because 99% of the people having near-death experiences didn't take such drugs before their experiences. On page 93 and page 95 Shermer mentions experiments done by Olaf Blanke in which he electrically stimulated parts of the brains to produce hallucinations. This is completely irrelevant because people who have near-death experiences are not having their brains electrically stimulated when they have such experiences.
Shermer fails to debunk near-death experiences, and his proposed explanations (such as hallucinations) collapse when we simply consider that near-death experiences typically occur not in normally conscious people who might be hallucinating but in people who should be deeply unconscious because their brains have electrically shut down, as the brain quickly does very soon after cardiac arrest. A classic case of that is the Pam Reynolds case, in which a woman with a radically depleted blood supply and very low body temperature reported details of her drastic medical operation she should have been absolutely unable to report. Shermer makes no mention of the case.
On page 96 Shermer ends his discussion of near-death experiences with the vary lame argument that since such experiences “vary considerably” that they are “exactly what we would expect if they were the product of the inner workings of the brain” (to cite a quote of someone that he cites approvingly). To the contrary, the extremely strong amount of recurrence and similarities in near-death experiences (in which a large fraction of people report floating out of their bodies, passing through tunnels, or encountering a "being of light") is exactly not what we would expect if they were hallucinations, which would produce content as dissimilar and random as the dreams of different people or the hallucinations of schizophrenics.
Shermer then moves on to a discussion of the evidence for reincarnation. Here the principal evidence is the very weighty evidence compiled over decades by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson.
Shermer shows no evidence of actually having read or studied Stevenson's massive 2268-page two volume work on cases suggesting reincarnation (entitled Reincarnation and Biology), and does not specifically mention any of Stevenson's cases. He does nothing to discredit such cases as evidence for reincarnation (merely citing some other person who made weak general objections to the birthmark element of such cases). Shermer only attempts to debunk one specific case of a claimed past-life recollection; and here he fails to discredit the evidence.
The case he picks to discuss is that of James Leininger, who claimed as a very young boy to have been a pilot named James who had his plane shot down. He said he had flown the plane from a “boat” called Natoma, near Iwo Jima. Inquiries by his father found that there was an aircraft carrier called Natoma Bay which did operations in World War II near Iwo Jima, and that it did have a pilot named James Huston, Jr. who was killed when his plane was shot down near Iwo Jima.
Shermer's attempt to debunk this case fails. He suggests that the child got the idea for the story while visiting a war museum, which hardly makes sense given that the visit happened when the child was only 22 months old and unable to read. He also lamely complains that “Natoma Bay” is not an exact match for “Natoma.” The case still stands as modest evidence in support of either reincarnation or contact with the dead. And this case is not one of the 30 best cases in support of reincarnation, all of which Shermer ignores (a case such as the famous Shanti Devi case and the best of Stevenson's “matching birthmark” cases being far more powerful as evidence). So in regard to reincarnation evidence, the one case of alleged reincarnation Shermer chooses to debunk is one he is not even able to debunk very well.
Around page 109 Shermer begins to discuss mediums. He shows no evidence of having read anything on the massive historical evidence for paranormal phenomena produced when mediums were present. A large amount of this evidence involves inexplicable physical phenomena. Such inexplicable physical phenomena have been very often observed under controlled scientific conditions that precluded any possibility of fraud. Examples are dramatic paranormal phenomena produced by Daniel Dunglas Home while being investigated at length by the scientist William Crookes, one of the most distinguished scientists of his day (his account is here); extremely dramatic paranormal phenomena very often produced by Eusapia Palladino in front of scientists who were restricting her limbs to prevent fraud; and a host of dramatic paranormal phenomena produced by Indridi Indridason while being investigated under controlled conditions by some of the top scientific and medical men in Iceland.
Shermer does not inform his readers of any such cases. He speaks as if medium phenomena are purely an information phenomena, in which mediums seem to know things they shouldn't. His explanation is the quite vacuous explanation of “cold reading.” Cold reading simply means asking questions, guessing and making general statements that might apply to large numbers of people. That's an empty non-explanation for cases in which someone repeatedly seems to show knowledge that could not have been obtained by natural means. Shermer provides no evidence that cold reading can produce anything more than the very weak results we would expect to get from someone asking questions, guessing and speaking in generalities. He claims on page 110 that in some 2002 TV episode he tried cold reading and people said he was “eerily accurate,” but when I try the URL his book gives as something to support this claim, I only get a dead link, a URL that goes nowhere.
Mediums are still a subject of serious scientific research. Shermer discusses such research only by mentioning someone else's critique of a 2002 book by Gary Schwartz. He make no mention of the main scientific research done on mediums in the past 15 years, done at the Windbridge Institute. Peer-reviewed research on mediums published by the leader of this institute (Julie Beischel PhD) produces evidence of strongly anomalous effects that cannot at all be explained by Shermer's empty “cold reading” hypothesis.
Of course, we hear from Shermer no mention of a case such as that of Leonora Piper. In this case a person who was extremely skeptical about mediums (Richard Hodgson) came in to investigate Piper, hoping to expose her as a cheat. After spending a very long time investigating her, he became quite convinced that she was actually receiving messages from the dead. He published a 168 report on his findings, and later published a 300 page follow-up report. Several other very thorough and serious investigators of Piper became convinced that paranormal phenomena were occurring. The case of Leonora Piper is one that cannot be plausibly explained by trickery or “cold reading.” Gladys Osborne Leonard was another medium who held up very well to long investigations by scientists and serious researchers. Her many successes in providing information that should have been unknowable to her is something that cannot at all be explained by trickery or cold reading.
We can only wonder whether the omission of such cases (and countless other relevant cases) from Shermer's book is because of a poor scholarship of his subject matter, or a matter of deliberately censoring relevant information, for the sake of keeping readers in a carefully filtered information bubble. There are types of evidence for paranormal phenomena very relevant to life-after-death that Shermer says virtually nothing about. He fails to discuss or debunk the well-documented phenomena of deathbed visions (something different from near-death experiences), and says scarcely a word about apparition sightings or the fact that a large percentage of widows report experiencing evidence of contact with their deceased spouses. The index of his book has no entry for either “ghosts” or “apparitions.” He also fails to make any substantive mention of ESP, a phenomena for which there is massive experimental evidence, evidence so strong that it makes a mockery of his claim that the paranormal doesn't really exist.
Other than speaking to a boy who claimed past-live experiences at a young age (at a time when the boy was much older and had forgotten such early memories), and other than speaking to people he was on television shows or debates with, Shermer seems to show in this book no evidence of having personally spoken face-to-face with anyone who claimed a paranormal experience. Lack of legwork can be excused, but there's no excuse for writing a book about evidence for the paranormal, and failing to deeply research the evidence for that topic, when such evidence is so readily available to anyone with an Internet connection and access to a large public library.
At one point Shermer reminds us of the heavy molecular turnover in the body. He tells us that molecules in our bodies are constantly being replaced. He seems to be arguing along the lines of: you don't really have the same body you had a few years ago, so what makes you think you have an immortal soul? He fails completely to see how the very fact of rapid molecular turnover argues for life-after-death rather than against it. It is true that there is heavy molecular turnover in the body, and part of this is that the protein molecules in our synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks or less. But humans can remember many things reliably for 50 years. How could that be if the very place that scientists claim your memories are stored (synapses) are such ever-changing “shifting sands” lacking any stability? The answer would seem to be that our memories exist not in ever-changing synapses, but in some stable substrate such as a human soul.
Two other books suggesting that paranormal denialists don't do their homework is James Alcock's recent book on the paranormal (reviewed here), and Clay Routledge's recent book Supernatural. Routledge takes the approach of refusing to discuss any of the massive evidence for the paranormal, and pretending that people believe in it only for psychological reasons. Such an approach is a convenient excuse for lazily failing to read any of the relevant evidence literature.
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