Escape to the Wet Planet: A Science Fiction Story

"Mommy," asked young Carsa, "why do I have to eat you and Daddy next year?"

"I'm surprised to hear you ask that," said Alara, Carsa's mother. "I thought I had gone over that several times before."

"Please explain it all for me one more time," said Carsa.

"Okay, I'll do that," said Alara. "Let's start with some basic facts of life. Our family is one of only seven families living on a very dry planet with only a tiny, tiny amount of water. So the Supreme Rule of our tiny society has always been: not a single drop of water should ever be wasted."

"Yes, I know that," said Carsa. "That's why if anyone washes his  body, it's a crime punishable by death."

"Now consider two parents like me and Daddy," said Alara. "Once we have had a child, and raised that child to be be old enough to take care of herself, then our job in life is pretty much finished, and it's silly to be spending very precious drops of water to keep us living. Rather than consuming more and more of our very precious water drops, it's much better if me and Daddy give up our bodies, to provide more precious water and food material for children. That's why it is a rule of our society that when parents reach the age of 25, they must allow their bodily food and water to be recycled for consumption by their children."

"Oh, I remember," said Carsa. 

"So next year, Daddy and me will give up our bodies for recycling," said Alara. "That will happen except in the very unlikely event that Scorus wins the election."

"Who is Scorus?" asked Carsa.

"He's a candidate in next month's election for Big Leader," said Alara. "He has a kind of crazy plan to completely change our way of living. Scorus says that we should gamble everything on a risky plan to abandon our planet, and take everyone to Planet Three."  

Carsa and Alara lived on Planet Four in their solar system. It was widely believed that Planet Three in the system was a planet with a great abundance of water.

"Do you think Scorus will win the election?" asked Carsa.

"I think that is as unlikely as water ever falling from the sky," said Alara. 

But the next month against many predictions Scorus was elected as Big Leader.  That made him the dictator of the tiny society on the dry, dry world. 

"We will gamble everything on building a spaceship that can go to Planet Three," commanded Scorus. "The spaceship will be big enough to take all thirty-one people on this planet to Planet Three."

Scorus gave commands on how to implement his risky plan. All the metal irrigation tubes used to move precious water around would be recycled, to use as metal in building the spaceship. Various sticky fluids on the planet's surface would be modified to make the rocket fuel.  Oxygen tanks would be built to allow the passengers to have oxygen during the journey from the fourth planet to the third planet. 

Carsa was very happy about all this. The thought of going to a new planet excited her tremendously. But her mother Alara was very worried that the rocket might fail, and that everyone would die when the rocket attempted to lift off into the air. 

Aboard the rocket ship before it lifted off, Alara told Carsa to say goodbye to every place she had known on her planet, telling her that for sure she would never see such places again. 

"Good bye, and good riddance!" said Carsa. "I'm sick of this dry dust bowl of a world."

The rocket lifted off successfully. Eventually everyone found themselves floating around in the spaceship as it reached outer space.

"We must have all died!" said Carsa. "I've heard stories of this, that when you die your soul kind of floats around in the air."

"No, we're not dead," said Alara. "This is just some weird thing they call zero gravity." 

"How long will it take to get to Planet Three?" asked Carsa.

"Sixty days," said Alara. "But it will only seem like a single day because we will now begin to hibernate." 

The mission plan was followed to the letter. After the ship was set on a course to the third planet, everyone on the spaceship except the pilot began to hibernate.  No special drugs or equipment were needed for such hibernation.  The race that Alara and Carsa belonged to had long ago mastered the skill of hibernation, which was needed to help them survive during periods when water was very short. 

Eventually the pilot guided the spaceship into orbit around the third planet. He woke up all of the thirty other passengers. They looked out the window, and were stunned by the beauty of the planet beneath them. 

"Look at the size of those clouds!" said Alara. "They're gigantic!" On the planet she had come from, seeing a cloud was as rare as seeing a rainbow.

"What are all those blue areas?" asked Carsa.

"Those are giant areas of water," said the pilot. "On this planet there's water all over the place."

There then came a crucial part of the mission. All of the thirty-one passengers crammed into the landing capsule at the front of the spaceship. The capsule detached from the spaceship, and plunged into the atmosphere of Planet Three.

"What happens now?" asked Carsa. "Won't we all die when this capsule smashes into the ground?"

"Pray to the gods for luck," said the pilot. "We're now going to try some new invention that may slow down our speed.  It's like some big sheet with lots of strings attached." 

The parachute was deployed, and the pilot was rather amazed that it worked. The plunging capsule slowed down to a moderate speed.  After a while all the passengers felt a jolt, as the capsule landed safely on the ground. 

Exiting the craft, the passengers were astonished. As far as their eyes could see was green vegetation. On the planet they had left, plants were as rare as gold. 

"We can probably squeeze some of these plants to get water," suggested Alara. 

"I have a better idea," said Scorus. "Let's start walking, and maybe we'll find a lot of water -- maybe even a whole big puddle." 

"That would be insanely lucky," said Alara.

They all started walking.  Scorus walked a little ahead of the group. After a long walk he came to a high spot, and looked at a wonderful sight below. 

"I don't believe it!" said Scorus. "It's just too glorious!"

They all ran ahead to see what he was talking about. Now they were all on the bank of something they had never seen before: a river. None of them had previously seen a pond, a river or even the tiniest stream. 

"It's impossible!" said Carsa. "I must be dreaming. How can there be so much water?"

"There's only one way to find out if it's real," said Alara. "Follow me!"

They all ran down to the river, and began to jump into it. It was joy like they had never felt before. The planet had never had such ecstatic splashing.  

"Water!" cried Carsa. "It's real water! More than we could ever drink in a lifetime!"

"We have no word for this act of hitting water with your hands to make noise," said Alara, splashing the water joyously. "We'll have to invent a word for that." 

"Oh no, I just remembered something," said Carsa. "Washing in water is a crime punishable by death!"

"Don't worry about that -- with all this water, we can change our laws and customs," said Scorus. "From now on, parents will be able to live for as long as they can. We can stop recycling parents for food and water when they reach age 25."

"Did you hear that?" said Carsa. "Maybe you and Daddy will even live long enough to see me raising my own child one day."

"That would be so amazing!" said Alara. "I've never heard of any parent ever seeing their own child's child."

Alara went up to Scorus, and thanked him for his brilliant plan. 

"What we did was the thing any race would do eventually," said Scorus. "Moving from a very arid world to a water-rich world made perfect sense."

"But imagine if there were some people who had always lived on a water-rich world," said Alara. "Do you think they would ever do the opposite of what we did, and try to send people to a planet with so little water?"

"Not unless they were crazy," said Scorus. 

"Chimera" Charade Was Just Kooky Injections

There are many serious problems plaguing the people advancing the claim that all organisms share a common ancestor.  One of the biggest problems is the appearance in natural history of some types of organism without any clear evolutionary path that might explain their appearance. For example:

• Almost all animal phyla (the main divisions of animals) appear suddenly in the fossil record at the time of the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Birds appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Flying insects and flying dinosaurs appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Humans appear suddenly in the natural history record about 100,000 years ago, when we first start to see signs of the symbolic activity that is the true hallmark of humans (fossils long before that are often called human fossils without warrant, in cases where there is no corresponding evidence of symbolic activity). 

Darwinists have long had a strategy for dealing with such problems, the strategy of trying to assert that one group of organisms "really is" just an example of some other group of organisms that preceded it.  This strategy hasn't been used in connection with the first item on the bullet list below, there being almost nothing in the way of known animal predecessors of all the animal types appearing in the Cambrian Explosion. But the strategy has been used very much on the last three items on that list. Specifically:

• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "birds are dinosaurs."
• The nonsensical claim has sometimes been made that "insects are crustaceans."
• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes."

You can call this type of talk Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense, and you can call the people who advance such nonsense DENiers. That seems like an appropriate term, since advancing Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense is very much a case of denying facts.  The facts are that there are a great many dramatic physical differences between birds and dinosaurs, that there are some huge physical differences between crustaceans and insects (particularly flying insects), and that there are a host of physical and mental differences between apes and men. The absurd claim that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes" has always been a claim that facilitated racism, because once a man believes that some other men are "just apes" or "just animals," he may be more likely to abuse other humans on grounds that "their race is more apelike" or to abuse or destroy such men, thinking that such actions are not much different from slaughtering cattle. 

It is easy to see the reason why Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense occurs. When you have a giant leap you can't credibly explain, it helps to try to portray the leap as no leap at all. So if you want to maintain that a  heap of auto parts naturally and accidentally transformed into a working car, it sure helps if you can say, "a heap of auto parts is a working car," or "a working car is just a heap of auto parts." And if you want to maintain that some dinosaurs transformed into birds, it helps if you can say "birds are really dinosaurs," a phrase that is a classic example of ivory tower inanity. 

One of the strangest DENiers was a Soviet biologist named Ilya Ivanov who developed plans to secretly inseminate women in French Guinea with chimp sperm, under the guise of a physical examination. He hoped that this would result in a chimp-man hybrid.  The French governor did not permit this. 

Later Ivanov actually got five women to agree to be inseminated with chimp sperm.  You can only wonder what was going on in their minds. Maybe some zealot sold them on the need to prove the claim that men are really just apes, by having a baby that was half-chimp.  Nothing resulted from Ivanov's nutty schemes. But it is rather obvious what his motivation was. A New Scientist story says, "When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes."

Recently there was something in the science news that made me say "shades of Ivanov." Some scientists injected some human cells into some very early monkey embryo. Only 25 human cells were injected into each such very early monkey embryo, which is not a visible amount. This was reported with news headlines such as "Scientists generate human-monkey chimeric embryos."  But such headlines suggested that something was going on much bigger than what actually occurred. 

When you think of an embryo, you visualize something with at least a shape a little like that of a baby.  But no, all we see at the end of the video provided in the scientific paper is a formless round blob.

The scientists injected only 25 human cells into each monkey embryo blob grown in a lab. Most of these tiny embryo blobs died before 20 days, but some lasted 20 days, never developing beyond a round blob-like shape.  The press coverage and the scientific paper avoid telling us how big these blobs were, and we may presume they were barely even visible. Calling such things "chimeras" is quite misleading. They are properly described as monkey embryos injected with a tiniest trace of human cells.  A wikipedia article on biological chimera says " animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs," but that was not done in this case, so the press stories calling these wacky blobs "chimeras" are not accurate. 

Why on Earth did the scientists perform such a stunt? Perhaps so that the DENiers could have a new talking point.  We can imagine how they will enthuse about this result:

"Didn't we tell you that humans are just apes or monkeys? Why now they've even made something that is part-monkey and part human. That shows we were right all along."

But such reasoning would be baloney. You probably could have done the same silly stunt with monkeys and sharks, injecting some shark cells into a monkey embryo, to get a mangled blob of cells that might survive for a few weeks.  But that would do nothing to show that monkeys are really sharks.  And putting some human cells into a mangled monkey embryo living for a few weeks does nothing to show that humans are really just apes or monkeys, just like a man getting some intestinal worms does not show that men are kind of worms.  

Everytime someone brings up the topic of embryonic development in the connection of Darwinism, they should be reminded of the most important relevant truths:

• There is no specification or blueprint or recipe for making an  adult human being in DNA or the fertilized egg that is the beginning of the process of embryonic development (contrary to the untrue statements that Darwin enthusiasts often make about such a topic, statements many biologists and professors have refuted by reminding us that DNA has only low-level chemical information, not anatomical specifications). 
• The progression of such a speck-sized cell to a full grown human with so many levels of stunning hierarchical organization is therefore a miracle of origination utterly beyond the understanding of today's scientists, no more understandable than a tornado passing through a lumber yard and hardware store, and creating from its materials a large house with working electricity and plumbing. 
• Lacking any such understanding of how the body or the mind of a single adult human being arises from a speck-sized egg cell, there is no basis for claiming that we understand the vastly harder problem of the origin of the human race, or that random  changes in DNA can explain the origin of species, since their anatomy is not specified by DNA. 
• Because there are a host of dramatic differences between the minds and behavior of humans and the minds and behavior of apes, statements such as "humans are just apes" are nonsensical and are violently contrary to a multitude of human observations.  

The tactic of claiming that "men are apes" is an example of what we may call shrink-speaking. Shrink-speaking is when someone describes some reality as being vastly less than what it actually is. Below are some examples of shrink-speaking, all absurd examples of reductionism: 

"Mentally you are just a bundle of sensations."

"Humans are just apes."

"The United States is just a bunch of addresses."

"A human body is just a heap of cells."

"Living your life is just hanging around."

"History is just some lines on pages."

"Earth is just a rock with a little extra gas and water." 

"You're just some nerve impulses bouncing around in a brain, like pinballs bouncing around in a pinball machine."

Shrink-speaking is one of the the main tactics of a certain type of thinker, a thinker who also uses very often an opposite type of technique we may call humbug hype. Humbug hype is when some thing small or relatively insignificant is trumpeted as if it were something extremely important. Nowadays our science news sites are overflowing with humbug hype, as such sites (financially motivated to maximize their web page hits to increase advertising revenue) give us a constant stream of stories in which insignificant, unimpressive or flawed and poorly designed studies are heralded as if they were major breakthroughs. 

Through a combination of shrink-speaking and humbug hype, many on-the-wrong-track thinkers try to persuade us that they are on the right track.   Their general strategy is often kind of like this: try to verbally shrink something or someone to a mere shadow of itself or himself, and then hype up some crummy little thing until it sounds like it might explain such a shadow.  Combining shrink-speaking and humbug hype is kind of the "rinse and repeat" of some people. 

Weird Convoluted Rules of the Self-Described "Scientific Thinker"

During the Middle Ages, you could shut down many a conversation by simply claiming that believing some particular thing wouldn't be Christian. Around 1930 in Russia you could shut down many a conversation by claiming that some particular idea was "counter-revolutionary." Nowadays, when a particular possibility is raised, someone may try to exclude such a possibility by saying, "Yes, you could believe that, but to think that wouldn't be scientific." But what are the thought rules of people who describe themselves as "scientific thinkers"? It turns out they do not have any straightforward rules of thought. 

The  word "scientific" can be defined in many different ways. A stringent way to define "scientific" is "based on or limited to that which has been observed." But clearly our self-described "scientific thinkers" are not limiting themselves to that which has been observed. The world of academic scientists is an extremely speculative world in which many professors seem to spend as much time speculating about things as they do rigorously observing things. Our self-described "scientific thinkers" give their blessing to a host of speculative ideas such as extraterrestrials, abiogenesis, the evolution of dramatic new biological innovations by random mutations, the multiverse, string theory, dark matter, dark energy and so forth.  So it is clear that when they describe themselves as "scientific thinkers" such people do not mean "limited only to what has been observed." 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they accept all that has been established by reliable observations? No, because such people tend to reject or avoid studying huge numbers of observations reported by reliable witnesses,  particularly any observations suggesting ideas such as paranormal abilities or a soul or life after death.  Such people may pay lip service to a "believe according to the evidence" principle, but do not follow it, often believing in things supported by no robust evidence, while disbelieving in things supported by mountains of robust evidence. 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they restrict their claims purely to claims about physical things? It seems not, for such people will frequently try to advance explanations of things that are mental, such as thought, memory, feeling, consciousness and so forth.  Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they base their opinions on data, and not on authority? No, apparently not, for such people seem to very much kowtow to the authority figures of academia and one or more authority figures of the past. 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they restrict their claims purely to claims about the physical and the human, excluding all claims about superhuman power? No, because such people have no hesitation about evoking god-like superhuman powers. They sometimes claim that the galaxy is filled with extraterrestrial god-like powers, the idea being that there are beings from civilizations that appeared many thousands or millions of years ago. We are told that such beings may have powers that may  seem to us just like magic, because of the "law" proposed by Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  The same person wrote a science fiction novel describing extraterrestrials evolving into creatures of pure energy, and those who believe in mind uploading may think of a mind as mere patterns of energy that do not necessarily have to stay chained to a body.  So it seems our self-described "scientific thinkers" are quite ready to believe in god-like immaterial powers that might influence mankind (although they would scold anyone using the word "spirits" to describe such powers that sound like spirits). 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they exclude all claims of immortality? No, such people sometimes express interest in the idea that people will one day be able to attain immortality by uploading their minds into a computer. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they believe that the origin of Earth life and human life was purely natural, without any design involved? No, because such people seem quite ready to believe in something called directed panspermia, under which earthly life is explained as being planted here by extraterrestrials. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they believe only in things that are mathematically probable? No, because such people tend to believe in a great abundance of fantastically improbable miracles of luck involving random mutations causing great wonders of biological organization, events that seem as mathematically improbable as someone throwing a deck of cards into the air, and the deck forming into a house of cards.  

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they completely trust the observations of distinguished scientists? No, because there are very many such observations they refuse to believe in, such as observations of the paranormal by distinguished scientists such as Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Camille Flammarion, Professor Joseph Rhine and Professor William Gregory. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves  "scientific thinkers" is that they believe only in recently formulated ideas of reality, rather than ideas originated long ago? No, such thinkers tend to be inordinately addicted to the ideas of nineteenth century biology, ideas that remind us of notions of random accidental human origins that are thousands of years old, such as the ideas of Democritus and Lucretius. 

Think of the strange rules of such people claiming to be "scientific thinkers." In their social circles you will be applauded if you suggest that some super-advanced extraterrestrials (belonging to some  civilization millions of years old) are trying to communicate using radio dishes (a twentieth-century technology their civilization would have developed millions of years ago). But you will be condemned the moment you suggest that such god-like beings might have developed the power to transmit thoughts directly to our minds. You will be blessed if you say we should spend more money looking for radio signals from extraterrestrials (despite the complete failure of countless well-funded attempts), but condemned if you suggest that radio signals might come from a mysterious realm that could be a realm of the dead (despite Raudive's reported success at such an attempt).  In their social circles you will be condemned if you believe there is a single unseen realm of existence inhabited by spirits, but you will be applauded if you believe in some multiverse infinity of unseen universes.  

In their social circles no one will object if you suggest that maybe visiting extraterrestrials might communicate by sending see-through holograms into our homes, but you will be fiercely criticized if you suggest that see-though human forms may arise from some source other than visiting extraterrestrials.  In their social circles no one will object too much if you believe that all observed matter is just a computer illusion generated by extraterrestrials simulating our existence, but you will be scorned if you simply suggest that all such matter truly physically exists but that it cannot explain our minds or human origins. In such social circles you will be warmly applauded if you speculate about design being the cause of some slightly odd distant speck in telescopes, but bitterly condemned if you suggest some almost infinitely-harder-to-naturally-explain biological wonders in all of us are the product of design.  In their social circles you will be scorned if a great body of evidence compels you to say that you will have some future life after you die, but you will not be scorned if you claim that you are currently living some infinity of lives because of all the copies of you in parallel universes (an extremely silly idea favored by some professors despite no evidence for it). 

Looking for some overriding thought principle of those describing themselves as "scientific thinkers," no such principle can be found.  Their only thought principle seems to be: you can believe in or speculate about anything that a certain favored group of people (mainly certain cocksure male professors and their followers) like to believe in or speculate about these days, but you should scorn and disbelieve in any ideas that enrage such people (particularly any ideas suggesting that there exist souls or spirits or some purpose to the universe, ideas which they particularly scorn and despise). Trying to firmly grasp what such people mean by "scientific thinking" is like trying to grasp a handful of moonlight.  

It seems that the term "scientific" has become so socially entangled and conformist and political and wobbly that nothing very clear is stated when you claim that your thought is "scientific." So rather than having the goal of being a "scientific thinker," it might be better to have goals such as being able to truthfully make statements like this:

"My statements are accurate, well-reasoned and mathematically reasonable."

"My assertions are well supported by observations."

"My claims are not discredited by any observations."

Birth of a typical self-described "scientific thinker"

"Red Lights Everywhere": Why Brains Must Be Way Too Slow for Instant Recall and Fast Thinking

Claims that brains store memories and produce thinking are not well-established scientific facts, but mere speech customs of neuroscientists who belong to a belief community as dogmatic as the communities of organized religions. Such neuroscientists tend to pay shockingly little attention to the implications of the low-level findings neuroscientists have made about brains.  Replacing its proteins at a rate of about 3% every day, brains are neither stable enough nor fast enough to explain things such as the instant accurate recall of 50-year-old memories.  

People who write about the brain frequently use a trick to make you think that brains are very fast. Such people will tell you that brain signals can travel up to 100 meters per second. But this is the speed when signals pass through the fastest tiny parts of the brain. This is the speed of signals when they travel through what is called a myelinated axon. The mylein sheath around the axon (with a white color) is what makes it so fast. It is interesting that the site here says, "The axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin." Axons without much of a myelin sheath are believed to transmit brain signals about 5 times slower.  According to the diagram here, signals travel across myelinated axons at speeds between about 20 and 120 meters per second (depending on the thickness of the axon), and signals travel between unmyelinated axons between about 5 and 25 meters per second.

But citing a speed of meters per second for the speed of a brain signal is very misleading. It is as misleading as saying that you can drive through New York City very quickly, on the grounds that you can reach a speed of 30 or 40 miles per hour.  Considering only such a maximum speed is misleading, because when you travel through  New York City, you will be slowed down by many red lights.  Similarly, while some microscopic parts of the brain allow a fast transmission of signals, there are very many microscopic parts of the brain which very much slow down brain signals.   You might figuratively put it this way: the brain has billions of red lights all over the place, and each of those spots will slow down the speed of a brain signal.  So while the maximum speed of a brain signal during any millionth of a second may be as high as meters per second, the average speed of a brain signal is much, much slower, something on the order of one centimeter per second or slower. 

The schematic diagram below illustrates the point. We see a diagram of a neuron, one of the billions of cells that make up the brain. Protruding from the main part of the neuron are dendrites. The transmission of signals through dendrites is slow, so next to the dendrites is a snail icon representing how slow such units are. According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons.  Such a speed bump seems more important when we consider a quote by UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta: "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue."  Given such a percentage, and such a conduction speed across dendrites, it would seem that the average transmission speed of a brain must be only a very small fraction of the meters-per-second transmission in axons. 

In the diagram above, we see a chain-like unit in the middle. That part is a myelinated axon, which can transmit a brain signal quickly. So I have put a rabbit icon next to that part, to indicate the relatively speedy signal transmission of that part. 

The bottom right part of the diagram shows some axon terminals that have synapses at their ends. Synapses are a serious "speed bump" for signal transmission in a brain. So I have put a snail icon at the bottom right of the diagram to indicate that slowness. 

How much of a "speed bump" are synapses? There are two types of synapses: slow chemical synapses and relatively fast electrical synapses. The parts of the brain allegedly involved in thought and memory have almost entirely chemical synapses. (The sources here and here and here and here and here refer to electrical synapses as "rare."  The neurosurgeon Jeffrey Schweitzer refers here to electrical synapses as "rare."  The paper here tells us on page 401 that electrical synapses -- also called gap junctions -- have only "been described very rarely" in the neocortex of the brain. This paper says that electrical synapses are a "small minority of synapses in the brain.")

We know of a reason why transmission of a nerve signal across chemical synapses should be relatively sluggish. When a nerve signal comes to the head of a chemical synapse, it can no longer travel across the synapse electrically. It must travel by neurotransmitter molecules diffusing across the gap of the synapse. This is much, much slower than what goes on in an axon.

Diffusion across a synaptic gap

There is a scientific term used for the delay caused when a nerve signal travels across a synapse. The delay is called the synaptic delay. According to this 1965 scientific paper, most synaptic delays are about .5 milliseconds, but there are also quite a few as long as 2 to 4 milliseconds. A more recent (and probably more reliable) estimate was made in a 2000 paper studying the prefrontal monkey cortex. That paper says, "the synaptic delay, estimated from the y-axis intercepts of the linear regressions, was 2.29" milliseconds. It is very important to realize that this synaptic delay is not the total delay caused by a nerve signal as it passes across different synapses. The synaptic delay is the delay caused each and every time that the nerve signal passes across a synapse. 

Such a delay may not seem like too much of a speed bump. But consider just how many such "synaptic delays" would have to occur for a brain signal to travel from one region of the brain to another. It has been estimated that the brain contains 100 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of them).  So it would seem that for a neural signal to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain that is a distance away only 5% or 10% of the length of the brain, that such a signal would have to endure many thousands of such "synaptic delays" resulting in a cumulative synaptic delay of quite a few seconds of time.

The problem is that we know humans can instantly recall obscure pieces of information, and instantly do complex calculations.  We see this on TV shows such as Jeopardy,  where people again and again give correct answers after a delay of only about 1 second when being presented surprise pieces of very obscure information such as "Works of this Nobel Prize winner include Song of Solomon and Beloved," and "This was the city where King Louis XIV died." It is well known that certain people (some called autistic savants) can do things like instantly tell you the day of the week for any day you select in the century. There are some math calculation prodigies who can actually calculate faster than any person using a hand calculator. It is impossible to account for such speed under the theory that your brain stores your memories and your brain produces your thoughts. 

Here are all the time factors we would need to account for under a theory of neural memory storage:

(1) The time needed to find where a memory was in the brain.  Since the brain has no indexing system, no addressing system, no coordinate system, and no position notation system, we can only assume that this would be a very long time, like the time required to find a needle in a haystack. 

(2) The time needed for an encoded memory stored neurally to be decoded and translated into a thought ending up in your mind.  That would take quite a while. We know that it takes quite a while (many seconds) for the brain to do the only type of decoding known to occur in it, the decoding of genetic information stored in DNA (a type of decoding incomparably simpler than the fantastically complex decoding that would be needed to decode some memory encoded as neural states or synapse states). 

(3) The time needed for signals to travel around in your brain. That would take quite a few seconds, because signals would have to travel across thousands of synapses, each of which would produce a synaptic delay (and also thousands of dendrites that would slow down things). 

In short, there are multiple redundant reasons why you would never be able to recall something instantly if memories were stored in your brain.  The slowness of brain signals also means very rapid thinking cannot be a brain effect. An example of rapid thinking is that when asked in a competition what was 869,463,853 times 73, Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash correctly gave the answer of 63,470,861,269 in only 26 seconds. Similarly, Scott Flansburg added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times, in only 15 seconds. Such calculations could never occur that quickly if it were performed by a brain with "red lights all over the place."

I'll give an example of a type of question no one would be able to answer in a short time if recall and thinking were the products of the brain. Consider the question: which Broadway composer may remind you of a children's TV show? Many people my age can answer such a question fairly quickly. But think of how much mental activity it involves:

(1) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of Broadway composers.

(2) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of children's TV shows.

(3) Looking for some kind of fuzzy match (not an exact match) between the two different groups of items. 

The correct answer is: Rodgers, because the great Broadway composer Richard Rodgers has a name sound-matching the name in the once-famous children's TV show "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood." It would take you hours or days to answer such a question if you had to use slow synapses and slow dendrites to solve it, searching through a brain without any indexing system or coordinate system; but many people my age could answer such a question in a few seconds. 

It would be very incorrect to suggest that when humans remember, they always only use some memory acquired at one time.  For example, ask a man to describe the difference between modern living and ancient living, and someone might quickly say something like this:

"We use cars not chariots, and fight with armored divisions not legions. We message with emails not carrier pigeons.  We read using  smartphones not scrolls, and wear trousers not togas. We pray to Jesus not Jupiter. We are paid with direct deposits, not coins."

Such a simple response could easily occur in a few seconds, but if brains store our memories, it would require finding, retrieving, understanding and intelligently using information stored in a dozen different little spots in a brain (a brain without an addressing system or indexing allowing fast retrieval). So it would take a long time, and could never occur instantly. 

A scientific paper suggests that neuroscientists are not paying proper attention to signal delays when calculating the speed of brain signals. It says, "Despite their inevitable physiological significance in living systems, propagation delays are usually overlooked in mathematical models, presumably to avoid further complexity."  That's as silly as calculating the time it would take you to drive through the middle of New York City without taking into account the time spent at traffic lights.  

Focal seizures in the brain propagate at a speed of about 1 millimeter per second. We read the following in one paper about the speed of seizures:

"The spread of activity through cortical circuits has been studied in experiments by means of electrical registrations and optical imaging [1–3], and high-density microelectrode arrays [4]. Experiments show slow propagation of an ictal wavefront and fast spread of discharges behind the front [3] [5]. The ictal wavefront progresses through the cortical area at a pace of < 1 mm/s, which is consistent with propagation speeds measured with electrodes and imaging in brain slice models [1, 2, 6–9] and in vivo (0.6 mm/s in [10] with two-photon microscope and 0.5 mm/s in [11] with widefield imaging in mouse neocortex)."

There is no particular reason for thinking that information-transmitting brain signals in the cortex would travel very many times faster than this low speed of about 1 millimeter per second.  The surface area of the brain is about 2500 square centimeters (about 2,500,000 square millimeters), about the size of a pillow case.  The brain can fit in the skull because of extensive folding, rather like a pillow case folded up to fit inside your coat pocket. If brain signals travel about as fast as seizures, it would take something like 1500 seconds (or 25 minutes) for some thought to travel from the middle of one brain half to the middle of another. 

A 2020 paper was entitled "Kilohertz two-photon fluorescence microscopy imaging of neural activity in vivo." It used some fancy new technology to clock the speed of brain signals in a living mouse, a "latest and greatest" technology that takes thousands of snapshots every second. The paper has only one exact mention of a speed: supplementary Figure 5 of the paper refers to a calcium propagating speed of about 25 microns per second, which is a very slow speed of only about 0.0025 centimeters per second (about .02 millimeters per second). If human brain signals travel at anything like such a speed, the brain must be way, way too slow to be the cause of instant recall and fast problem solving. 

We do not think at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We do not recall at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We think and recall at the speed of souls.

Updating Sagan's Analogy of the Scientist as Candle Holder

Today at one prominent site presenting itself as a science news site, we have not just one article bitterly blasting scholars expressing concern  about pesticides and herbicides, but two such articles. At  another prominent web site presenting itself as a science news site, a site boasting about being written by "the world's best scientists," we have today a strange article claiming that formaldehyde is "the carcinogen that wasn't," even though several expert health agencies have declared that formaldehyde is a carcinogen (a cancer risk).  This is a reminder that science these days is all mixed up with other things, including corporate-funded propaganda and nineteenth century belief customs, with such strange mixtures simply marketed as "science." Scientists are created in university departments that are often ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some environment where almost everyone believes in some particular ideology or belief system. 

A seminary is an example of an ideological enclave. A seminary is an institution where people are trained to be ministers or priests of some particular religion. A university graduate school program (one issuing masters degrees and PhD's in some academic specialty) may also be an example of an ideological enclave. Just as a seminary trains people to think in one particular way, and to hold a particular set of unproven beliefs, many a university graduate program may train people to think in a particular way, and to hold a particular set of unproven beliefs. 

Once a person starts being trained in an ideological enclave, he will find relentless social pressure to conform to the ideology of that enclave. This pressure will continue for years. The pressure will be applied by authorities who usually passed through years of training and belief conditioning by the ideological enclave, or a similar ideological enclave elsewhere. In a seminary such authorities are ministers or priests, and in a university graduate school program such authorities are professors or instructors. Finally, after years of belief conditioning the person who signed up for the training will be anointed as a new authority himself. In the university graduate school program, this occurs when something like a master's degree or a PhD or a professorship is granted. In a seminary, this may occur when someone becomes a minister or priest.

Groupthink is a tendency for some conformist social unit to have overconfidence in its decisions or belief customs, or unshakable faith in such things. Groupthink is worsened by any situation in which only those with some type of credential (available only from some ideological enclave) are regarded as fit to offer a credible judgment on some topic. In groupthink situations, an illusion of consensus may be helped by self-censorship (in which those having opinions differing from the group ideology keep their contrary opinions to themselves, for fear of being ostracized within the group). In groupthink situations, belief conformity may also be helped by so-called mindguards, who work to prevent those in the group from becoming aware of contrarian opinions, alternate options or opposing observations. In an academic community such mindguards exist in the form of peer-reviewers and academic editors who prevent the publication of opinions and data contrary to the prevailing group ideology

For the person who completes the program of a university graduate school program, and gets his master's degree or PhD, is that the end of the conformist social influence, the end of the pressure to believe and think in a particular way? Not at all. Instead, the “follow the herd” effect and the pressure to tow the “party line” of the belief community typically continues for additional decades. The newly minted PhD rarely goes off on his own to become an independent thinker marching to his own drummer, outside of the heavy influence of the belief community. Instead, such a person usually becomes a kind of captive of a belief community. The newly minted PhD will very often get a job working for the very ideological enclave that trained him, a particular academic department of a university. Or, he may end up employed by some very similar academic department of some other university, a place that is an ideological enclave just like the one in which he was trained. Having very stringent speech  conformity requirements for promotion, such employment typically lasts for decades, during which someone may be stuck in a kind of echo chamber in which everyone parrots the same talking points. So when there is groupthink and ideological conformity in some academic specialty, peer pressure can continue to act for decades to prevent people from deviating from the prevailing conformity. 

Conformity

Scientist Carl Sagan liked to state an analogy comparing the scientist to a person holding a candle in the dark, the candle representing the techniques of science. Sagan made this analogy in the title of his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. This was a 438-page book on paranormal phenomena in which Sagan showed zero signs of having seriously studied the observational claims he was writing about. You can tell Sagan's dismal lack of relevant scholarship on this topic by simply examining the many books mentioned in the references at the back of the book, almost none of which is an original source material. Not one of the books mentioned is one of the 100 top books that Sagan should have read before writing about paranormal phenomena, and we see a complete or almost-complete failure to examine relevant original source materials such as the many volumes of the Journal and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. And so it is for the overwhelming majority of scientists who talk about paranormal phenomena, 99% of whom show zero signs of having seriously studied the evidence for such phenomena.  What we get in Sagan's book is a kind of ersatz scholarship, filled with lots of erudite digressions about extraneous matters that might fool some people into thinking the author made a serious study of the main thing he was writing about.  

After considering the groupthink and conformity factors at play in scientific academia, we can update Carl Sagan's candle-holder analogy, to take into account the theory-laden interpretations that scientists are so often socially pressured into making, because of a conformist culture they belong to.  We can imagine two men walking in the dark with the scientist holding the candle, two fellow scientists. The two scientists would constantly pressure the candle holder to think and interpret in a particular way. So the conversation between the three may go rather like this:

Candle holder: I'm going to go walking in the dark woods now, so I sure am glad I have this little candle.
Scientist Bob: Let's walk along, and Dave and I will help you interpret what you see.
Candle holder:  Why, I think I see rather dimly ahead of me something that looks designed. 
Scientist Dave: No, we are in nature, and our rule is there can be no design in nature. So what you see ahead must be merely an illusion of design. 
Candle holder: Really? 
Scientist Bob: Yes, there are millions of different species that resemble things that were designed, but these are all just millions of illusions that nature has given us.
Candle holder: Uh...okay, if you say so.  Well, as I look over there I think I see what looks like a tree. 
Scientist Dave: So you had the idea of a tree, and that idea no doubt came from your brain, so this is really further proof that your brain is what causes your ideas, not something else like a soul.
Candle holder: Uh...okay.  Now, looking over to the right, I dimly see a dark shape that looks quite spooky. 
Scientist Bob: No, you must not think that. If you start thinking that something out there is spooky, then you might believe in other spooky things: things like spirits and paranormal phenomena. Scientists like us must not believe in such things, for we fear above all the disapproval of our peers, who tell us not to believe in such things.
Candle holder: Uh...okay.  Now, looking over to the left, I think I see an animal scurrying around. 
Scientist Dave: It's locomotion from a mammal, no doubt. Such impressive functionality is further proof of the ability of random "copying error" genetic mutations to produce stunning wonders of hierarchical biological organization such as conscious moving animals. 
Candle holder: Uh...okay.  If you say so.  Now I think I would like to go off the trodden path of this dark woods, and try to discover something in that very dark area over to the left of the path. 

Scientist Bob: That sounds rather like what some might call "exploring the occult," and is greatly discouraged by your fellow scientists. Our way is to walk on the well-trodden path. We kind of figure, "It's probably the right way if so many have walked that way." 

Scientist Dave: Yes, don't "raise eyebrows" by straying from the footsteps of your colleagues. A safe career move is to do something like write paper #987 speculating about extraterrestrials, or write paper #1452 speculating about string theory, or do the 287th experiment this year electrically shocking the feet of mice. 

Candle holder: Very well, I'll stay on the well-trodden path. Now, I must confess that despite having this candle, I am really quite ignorant of what there is around me in this dark woods, particularly anything that is more than a few meters away from me.

Scientist Bob: How will people follow us authorities if we sound like we know so little? It's better that a scientist should sound like a great lord of knowledge, or students paying very high tuitions may complain about their professors knowing too little. 

And so peer pressure and groupthink and careerist conformism may cause the candle holder to often reach a dubious or wrong conclusion about what he sees in the dim light, and may prevent the kind of disruptive discoveries that would be the most valuable or illuminating.  Our scientists have lit many candles, but very many of our scientists have also tried to snuff out many important candles that were lit in the past. That occurs whenever some scientist who hasn't bothered to study the evidence for some phenomenon or effect claims that there is no evidence for such a phenomenon or effect, rather than honestly telling us that he has not properly studied the evidence for such a phenomenon or effect. Because so many of them have tried to snuff out important candles that offended them, and because so many of them they have spent so much time pushing ideas that offer very little or no real illumination, it may seem somewhat uncertain whether the  scientists of the past 100 years have increased mankind's illumination, or decreased it.  The countless scientists who got so entangled with military projects and destructive corporate projects may have looked more like bringers of darkness than bringers of light.   As for physicists like Edward Teller, they helped invent atomic bombs which were very bright when they exploded, but which led to a dark night of nuclear fear that lasted for decades (causing billions of healthy people to often wonder whether they would soon die in a fiery nuclear holocaust). 

We have in these days a thousand glittering ways to be distracted by entertaining trivialities, but there seems to have been little increase in our insight about the questions that are most important. Despite all our technical conveniences and comfort, and all our glitzy neon sparkle, it is quite possible that more enlightened humans of the future (holding bright torches of spiritual and moral insight) may look back on our current era as rather much a dark age.

Postscript: Speaking of formaldehyde (which I mentioned at the beginning of this post), I remember the insanity of forced exposure to it during a high school biology class. Students were forced to dissect cats, with such a dissection lasting for many days.  Provided with no protective gear, each student would retrieve his dead cat from a big trashcan filled with formaldehyde, a carcinogen; and the liquid splashed all over the place. Some distinguished authorities had determined that such formaldehyde exposure and prolonged dissection of dead cats was not only allowed, but actually required of all the senior high school students.  In another high school class, each student was socially pressured to stick his hand into a container filled with mercury, a very hazardous material. 

The Evidence for Out-of-Body Experiences

Very many people are familiar with how people in recent decades have reported moving out of their bodies during near-death experiences.  But many people are not aware that the evidence for such out-of-body experiences goes way back before the publication of Raymond Moody's famous 1976 book Life After Life. 

An early account for an out-of-body experience can be found on page 447 of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, dating from 1889. A  Mrs. N. J. Crans wrote the following to the distinguished researcher Richard Hodgson, telling of an out-of-body experience that seemed to have details corroborated by another person:

"After lying down to rest, I remember of feeling a drifting sensation, of seeming almost as if I was going out of the body. My eyes were closed ; soon I realized that I was, or seemed to be, going fast somewhere. All seemed dark to me ; suddenly I realized that I was in a room, then I saw Charley lying in a bed asleep; then I took a look at the furniture of the room, and distinctly saw every article of furniture in the room, even to a chair at the head of the bed, which had one of the pieces broken in the back ; and Charley's clothes lay on that chair, across the bottom of chair."

The full account includes a "veridical verification" element, as Charley later writes back to Mrs. Crans to say that the room looked exactly as described, and that he also saw someone named Allie at the time Mrs. Crans reported seeing her during the out-of-body experience. 

A few years later there was published an account you can read at the link here, which takes you to page 180 of Volume 8 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, published in 1892. I have summarized this account of an out-of-body experience at the post here. 

A long account of out-of-body experiences was given in the 1929 book The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan J. Muldoon, which you can read here. Muldoon claims to have had many out-of-body experiences, but gives little in the way of corroborating evidence to back up his tales. 

In the 1960's and 1970's the scholar Robert Crookall PhD collected many accounts of out-of-body experiences.  His works on the topic include these:

• The Supreme Adventure (1961), which you can read here. 
• The Techniques of Astral Projection (1964), which you can read here.
• More Astral Projections (1964), which you can read here. 
• Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1970), which you can read here.

The More Astral Projections book gives about 160 cases of out-of-body experiences. Below are some examples, none of which involved people under anesthetics:

• Case #161. A Mrs. J. Douglas Newton reported this: "My son, then 8 years of age, who had never heard of any¬ thing of this sort, had gone to bed one night and was lying reading. Suddenly he called rather urgently for me. I found him sitting up, rather scared. He said, 'Such a funny thing has happened. I was just lying reading when I felt I was rising into the air. I seemed to go up, near the ceiling. Then I looked down and could see myself lying in bed. I came slowly down.' "
• Case #162. A B. Barrett reported this: "I was in perfect health when one night I found myself looking down at my earthly body and could not make out why it was not lying there dead as I thought."
• Case #164. A Florence Roberts reported this: "I have had many out- of-the-body experiences when a child. ... I found myself above my physical body on the bed. "
• Case 165. A Mrs. Lambert reported this: "Suddenly I shot out of my body. I lay about six feet up, looking down at myself."
• Case 170. A Peter Urquhart stated this: "I went outside and found myself out of the body again. This time the sensation was like being in a balloon, attached by a cord somewhere in the region of the navel, like the umbilical cord."
• Case 172. A Mrs. Argles reported this: "I found myself standing on the top of the steps, looking down on my body, lying on the floor. There was a cord connecting me to the body on the floor."
• Case 173. Vera Oates stated this: "in the early hours of the morning I was suddenly wide awake, but, to my amazement, I was hovering between the railing and the bed. I looked down and saw myself on the bed."
• Case 174. A Mrs. G. Teakel stated, "I have many times been outside my body and found it a lovely experience. It happens mostly around 3 a.m."
• Case 175. A Mrs. Harris stated this: "I have left my body many times, walking round the room and looking at my body which is joined by a cord." Reports of such a cord connecting body to soul are not very rare.
• Case 176. A Mr. Jebb stated, "I walked round the room twice when out of my body."
• Case 183. A Mrs. M. F. Hemeon stated this: "Suddenly I felt myself  ‘swimming’ up out of my body...I was very startled, and by an effort of will... returned to my body."
• Case 194. A woman states, " Suddenly I was floating with my nose almost touching the ceiling—I saw all the little imperfections in the distemper."
• Case 201: An R. J. Carlson states, " I suddenly found myself out of and above myself—and yet I could either sense or see my body in bed."
• Case 204: A Rebecca Schreiber stated "I suddenly felt I had left my body and was flying over the ocean until I came to the ship" (the Queen Mary) that her daughter was on. After asking her daughter what was wrong, and being told she was sea-sick, she told her daughter she would soon feel better. Her daughter later said she had an experience matching this visitation account, while on the ship, at about the same time. 
• Case 236. Oscar Mockler stated, "The next thing I was aware of was standing on the floor of the cabin and looking down at my body lying asleep in the bunk."
• Case 241.  Mrs. N. Matile stated this: "I found myself floating above my bed (about three feet above). I then quickly passed out of the window to the middle of the Mews where we were living. It was a starry night and it was a lovely feeling, floating in the air. "
• Case 243. An M.E. Fearn stated this: "I felt myself arise and float off the bed and ... was at the foot of our bed, looking at myself asleep, facing my husband’s back. Then I floated towards the window."
• Case 246.  A Mrs. Eyres stated, "I had a feeling that the real Me came out of my body through the head and I had the sensation of flying.” She claimed to have visited other countries in out-of-body experiences. 
• Case 247. A Mrs. Watkin claimed to be visited by two figures who took on a visit to some spirit world. She states this: "I was brought back to my bedroom and there the three of us again stood looking at my lifeless-looking body. Suddenly I slipped easily and swiftly into it."   
• Case 259. A Miss Douglas stated this: "“One night I awoke from sleep to find that I was in a horizontal position and suspended in mid-air. In this position I travelled at moderate speed through the bedroom windows out into the night. It was moonlight and I could see the houses very clearly. I felt thrilled as I travelled along ...It was so real. I drifted across the roof-tops and identified the neighbours’ gardens. ... On the return journey I seemed to be losing height but not speed. ... Finally, I arrived in the garden at home, still remaining in a horizontal position and suspended in mid-air."
• Case 267. A Mr. Hall stated this: "Presently a most strange sensation passed through my body. Next I floated out through the winidow and across the town. I seemed to be several hundred feet above the ground."
• Case 268. A C. H. Normanby stated, "About the age of 15 years I experienced passing out of my body on two occasions."
• Case 269. A Mrs. Flint stated, "One afternoon, while resting on my bed, I felt myself floating, or rather suspended in the air, and I was actually looking down at my body on the bed."
• Case 285. A Mrs. Mansergh stated this: "In February, 1939, my husband and I retired to bed as usual and I awoke to find myself standing by the side of the bed looking down on the sleeping forms of my husband and myself. I moved away from the bed to the window. As I moved, I noticed a glistening cord trailing from me." 
• Case 309. A G. Bradley stated this: " I awoke about 7 a.m., and had the sensation of leaving the body. All I could see was the frame of myself left in the bed. I was floating around the room feeling peaceful. Suddenly I had the urge to get back into the shell of my body. What a struggle I had to do it!"
• Case 310. A Mrs. Shakespeare stated this: "During the night I seemed to float down the ward and then returned and hovered over my bed, looking down at myself. I felt calm and peaceful.”
• Case 313: A Mrs. Fyal stated this:  "Suddenly I felt myself leaving my body and looking around my bedroom... I saw my own body...Suddenly I found myself wandering again and floated to my body where, in the morning, I was astounded that I was in it."
• Case 314: A Mrs. Langridge stated this: "I was outside my body, suspended in air, and looking down upon my body. Three or four people were reviving me. I was in a pleasant state of freedom and thought, ‘I wish these people would leave me alone!' "
• Case 327. Dr G. B. Kirkland stated this: "To my surprise, I found myself looking at myself lying on the bed. The thought; just flashed through me that I didn't think much of me —in fact, I didn’t approve of me at all. Then I was hurried off at great speed. Have you ever looked through a very long tunnel and seen the tiny speck of light at the far end ? It seems an incredible distance off. Well, I found myself with others vaguely discernible hurrying along just such a tunnel or passage—smoky or cloudy, colourless, grey and very cold."
• Case 329:  A Mrs. Florence Phillips stated this: " Suddenly I began to float away from my body and entered a grand garden. ... I seemed to float through the trees into a mist. Suddenly it seemed as if a gun went off  and I was back in bed."
• Case 336: An F. W. Talbot stated this: "The next  moment I was suspended in mid-air, horizontal, and looking down at my body on the bed. I could see myself lying in bed quite clearly. I watched an attendant go to my body, lift my arm and plunge in a needle. This was extremely interesting; I was suspended over his head and my feeling was that of detached curiosity."
• Case 337: A Mrs Rowbotham stated, "I remember being on the ceiling of the room looking down at the two doctors and two nurses—just floating and watching."
• Case 339: A Kathleen Snowdon stated this: "Suddenly I realized a feeling of great excitement, wonder and delight surpassing anything I had ever experienced as I felt my body [‘double’] completely weightless and floating upwards in a golden glow towards a wonderful light around hazy welcoming figures and the whole air was filled with beautiful singing. I floated joyfully towards the light and then I heard my mother’s voice calling me. My whole being revolted against going back."
• Case 343: An S. H. Kelly stated this: "As I lost consciousness, certain things in my life came in front of me. This was followed by a queer sound of music and the next thing I was suspended in mid-air and looking at them bringing my body out of the water and trying artificial respiration. I was very happy and free and wondered why they were doing that when I was here! At that moment I was transported to my mother’s room. I stood beside her as she was by the fire in an easy chair, trying to tell her I was all right and happy. Afterwards, I was back, looking at my body, when a brilliant light shone around me and a voice said, ‘It is not your time yet—you must go back. You have work to do!' "
• Case 346:  A Mrs. Maries stated this: "Meanwhile I  had left my body and felt myself floating in what seemed like a dark tunnel (with a glimpse, at the end, of a lovely countryside). I had no pain, only a wonderful feeling of happiness. I felt I had somebody with me, but saw nobody. Only I heard a voice which said, ‘You must go back! That child needs you!’ I returned to my body and heard the doctor say, ‘No, by Jove, I can still feel her heart!’ "

At the end of his book More Astral Projections, Robert Crookall has some interesting summary statistics regarding how often such accounts had recurring characteristics. He used the term "the double" for a kind of spirit body that was a double of the human body. For what he called "single-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "The fact that the ‘double’ left the body chiefly via the head was noted in 29 natural and two enforced cases (i.e. 13.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively)."
• "The fact that, the newly-released ‘double’, often took up a horizontal position (usually not far above its physical counterpart), was noted in 50 natural and 7 enforced cases (i.e. 23.3 per cent and 18.9 per cent respectively)."
• The percentage of people reporting a "silver cord" or "shining cord" connecting the human body and a spirit body (or something like that) was "43 (20.0 per cent) natural cases, 6 (16.2 per cent) enforced cases." 

For what Crookall called "double-type cases" the statistics included the following:

• "People who saw the ‘dead’ (including ‘deliverers) comprised 57 natural and 6 enforced cases (26.6 per cent and 16.2 per cent respectively)."
• "‘Level’ of consciousness: (a) ‘super-normal’ (with clairvoyance, telepathy, foreknowledge, etc.)—41 (19.0 per cent) natural cases and 2 (5.4 per cent) enforced cases; (b) normal—6 (2.8 per cent) natural cases and 1 (2.7 per cent) enforced case; (c) ‘sub-normal’—3 (1.4 per cent) natural and no enforced case." In the book people often report having a sharper or faster or clearer mind during an out-of-body experience. Such cases are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is not the source of human thinking, but a kind of valve that restricts the human mind, allowing a mind to focus on mundane little tasks such as food gathering and wealth accumulation. 

We surely would not expect anything like such percentages if mere hallucination was involved.  In random hallucinations, you would expect matching specific details in fewer than 1 in 1000 cases, there being innumerable thousands or millions of ways in which a random hallucination might unfold. 

The source here discusses a variety of surveys taken to try to determine how common out-of-body experiences are.  It gives  numbers which suggest that out-of-body experiences occur to significant fractions of the human population, something like between 10% and 20%.

The 1973 book Glimpses of the Beyond: The Extraordinary Experiences of People Who Crossed the Brinks of Death and Returned by Jean-Baptiste Delacour preceded the much more famous Life After Life book by Raymond Moody. (Reading the book may require setting up a login with archive.org and doing an online "borrow" of the book.) Some of the accounts in Delacour's book sound like the well-known type of near-death experiences Moody described. For example, on page 14 Daniel Gelin (a well-known French actor) states that when being treated in a hospital "suddenly, I found myself floating through the room." On the next page, Gelin describes encountering his deceased mother and father, who led him to a "rose-colored world, a sort of fairy garden" where he encountered his deceased son. But then an "inexorable force" caused him to return to the hospital room.  

On page 20 of the same book, we hear the account of Betty Patterson, who said this:

"At first I felt as if my spirit, my self, was separating from 

the bulk of my body and floating up to the ceiling of the room.

From up there I could look down at my body on the operating table. Then this scene vanished from my field of view, and

suddenly I was surrounded by gentle light and soft music. 

I was overcome by a feeling of deep content that I had

never felt in life. This sensation overpowered me in such a 

way that I no longer felt any desire for earhly life. I tried

to move in the direction the sounds were coming from, 

but something forcibly prevented me. Apparently, the time had not come for the final separation from the body."

On page 20 of the book, we also read of a James Lorne who was clinically dead for five minutes after suffering a heart attack. Lorne states this:

"I felt myself floating in the air and could clearly see my body lying down there. I landed in a long corridor filled with soft twilight. At the end a bright light was shining.  I could also hear voices coming from there." 

Lorne describes encountering some "splendid garden" with people in it, but when he tried to move closer, the scene always receded. 

On page 37 we read of a Mrs. Francis Leslie who had her heart revived after it had stopped for quite a while, for so long that she was declared dead. She said that she found herself mysteriously "floating in a long shaft" that she also described as a "tunnel." She heard a voice calling from far away in the tunnel, which she identified as someone who had died.  She then felt herself back in the hospital. After describing her experience, she died about 12 hours later. 

On page 40 a doctor says that heart patients "again and again have the sensation of being disembodied" and that "in a sense they feel they are floating above themselves," and that they see their body "lying below them on the ground." 

What is interesting about the accounts I just gave from the 1973 Delacour book is that at the time it was published, almost no one except scholars of the paranormal had heard about out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences, so such accounts cannot be dismissed as some kind of conformity to a widely-known pattern. Several years after Delacour's book (after the publication of Moody's Life After Life) a host of people began reporting out-of-body experiences, and such reports have continued at a constant pace. 

In a book by Colin Wilson, we read the following:

"In the 1960s the psychologist Charles Tart studied a borderline schizophrenic girl whom he called Miss Z., who told him that she had been leaving her body ever since childhood. To test whether these experiences were dreams Tart told her to try an experiment: she was to write the numbers one to ten on several slips of paper, scramble them up, then choose one at random when her light was out and place it on the bedside table. If she had an out-of- the-body experience in the night she had to try to read the number (she claimed to be able to see in the dark during her OBEs). She tried this several times and found she always got the number right. So Tart decided to test her himself. The girl was wired up to machines in his laboratory and asked to try and read a five-digit number which Tart had placed on a high shelf in the room next door. Miss Z. reported correcdy that the number was 25132."

Wilson tells us the following: 

"Many thousands of examples of out-of-the-body experiences have been reported in the literature of the paranormal: one eminent researcher, Robert Crookall, devoted nine volumes to such cases. Another, the South African investigator J. C. Poynton, collected 122 cases as a result of a single questionnaire published in a newspaper. A similar appeal by the English researcher Celia Green brought 326 cases. One survey even produced the incredible statistic that one in ten persons have had an out-of-the-body experience."

Out-of-body experiences are very powerful evidence against the central dogmas of modern neuroscientists, the dogma that the brain is the cause of human mental phenomena such as consciousness, self-hood and thinking,  and the dogma that the brain is the storage place of memories.  There are a host of good reasons for rejecting such claims, such as the fact that brains are too slow and noisy to account for instant very accurate human recall, the fact that many people think very well and remember very well after half or most of their brain has been destroyed by disease or surgery (as discussed here and here), the fact that the brain has nothing like what it would need to have to instantly store and instantly retrieve memories, and the fact that the proteins that make up brains have average lifetimes of less than two weeks (1000 times shorter than the longest length of time humans can remember things).  Out-of-body experiences are just exactly what we would expect to have happening if mind and memory are not brain effects, but something like soul effects.  Nature never did anything to tell humans that brains make minds and that brains store memories. Neuroscientists merely jumped to such conclusions without any adequate warrant, ignoring many a reason for rejecting such conclusions. 

Attempts to explain away such very common out-of-body experiences as hallucinations make no sense at all. For one thing, such experiences show strongly repeating very distinctive features (as discussed above), which we would not see in hallucinations (which would merely have random content).  There are a billion-and-one things someone might hallucinate about, so given so many possibilities for hallucination content and the rarity of visual hallucinations, we would expect that only once in a blue moon would any person on Earth have a hallucination about floating above his body.  Instead, a signficant fraction of the human population seems to report out-of-body experiences (about 10% to 20% according to the surveys listed here).  There are many veridical out-of-body-experiences in which someone reports seeing something he should not have been able to see if he was hallucinating.  Such experiences powerfully refute claims that out-of-body experiences are mere hallucinations.  For example, in the case described here, #41, a person (S. H. Beard) tried to deliberately produce an out-of-body experience targeting the location of a second person unaware of such an attempt, and the second person reported seeing an apparition of that person at the same time, with a third person living with the second person also reporting the sight of such an appartion at that time. 

Postscript: In the paper The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences by Bruce Greyson and Ian Stevenson, which examined in depth 78 near-death experiences, we have this very interesting quote (which may corroborate some of what Crookall suggests about a "second body" linked to the normal body by something perhaps cord-like):

"The impression of having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body was reported by 58% of our respondents (77% of those reporting out-of-the-body experiences). The nonphysical body was most commonly described as lighter in weight than the respondent’s physical body (74%) but the same size (68%) and the same age (84%). The nonphysical body was described as showing some indication of 'life'(e.g., pulse, breath) by 67% of those reporting a non-physical body and as ‘linked’ ‘to the physical body insome way by 28%. Twenty percent of those reporting a nonphysical body claimed that sensonimotor or structural defects present in their physical body (e.g.,partial deafness, missing limbs) were absent in the nonphysical body; 3% reported such defects to be present in the nonphysical body."