The NY Times' Lazy Look at Near-Death Experiences

 In a 2016 post I stated the following:

"During the past 30 years, the New York Times seems to have had the worst coverage of the paranormal given by any major newspaper. While it has outstanding coverage of politics, world affairs, sports, and entertainment, the paper will typically not cover important news about the paranormal. In the very rare cases when it does provide coverage of the paranormal, the New York Times almost always gives us coverage that is heavily biased, inaccurate, or uninformative."

In that post I gave many examples of the appalling shortfalls and glaring bias of the New York Times in covering claims of the paranormal.  While the paper has a slogan of "all the news that's fit to print," it would be more honest if the top left corner of the New York Times had a little square looking like the one below:

These days the New York Times is mostly behind a paywall. But we do sometimes get freely accessible articles showing how third-rate the paper's coverage is on topics such as anomalous psychic phenomena. An example was the "phone it in" article here by Jessica Grose, having the title "What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness." An archived alternate link is here.

The topic is near-death experiences. But we seem to get from Grose no signs  that she is any serious scholar of this very important topic, as well as some indication suggesting she has never seriously studied it. Instead of some decent scholarship, what Grose gives us is an example of what we can call "drive-by journalism."  Drive-by journalism can occur when someone forms an opinion on some topic by attending a single meeting or hearing a single speech by someone.  An example would be someone analyzing some church, based on only attendance of a single meeting of the church members. 

Grose does her drive-by journalism by attending a single weekend conference of a group called IANDS, which studies near-death experiences. IANDS stands for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Showing zero signs that she has studied this topic in any depth, Grose gives us her impressions of the people she talked to. We have some photos that seem to have been selected to create the impression of emotion in the conference participants. The photographic impressions are misleading, because the IANDS group has long been devoted to the serious scholarly study of a topic of great intellectual significance. 

For many years the IANDS group has produced a website about near-death experiences, the website https://iands.org/. Besides scholarly articles, the website regularly publishes accounts of near-death experiences. Did Grose ever study any of these articles or accounts? She gives no evidence of doing that. Any serious scholar of this topic would have heard about IANDS years ago, but Grose makes it sound like she only recently heard about the organization after getting an email. 

After starting out her article with quite a few paragraphs showing no signs of any scholarship of near-death experiences, we get a taste of the depth of Grose's journalism on this weighty subject. It consists of comments about the clothes that people wore at the conference about near-death experiences. She writes this: 

"Then you had the experiencers and their spiritual fellow travelers, who appeared to be middle-aged. Some of them looked like stereotypical New Agers, wearing flowing boho skirts and bright colors. One young man rolled up his pant leg to show me a tattoo that said, 'Love.' But others looked aggressively normal. I saw a lot of people wearing graphic T-shirts, men in chinos attending light circles."

We have a paragraph discussing nineteenth century spiritualism and mediums. It is just the kind of paragraph we would expect in a New York Times article -- a paragraph failing to mention a single relevant  observational report. We hear not one word about topics such as how the London Dialectical Society did a long scientific investigation into the reports of paranormal phenomena so abundant at this time, and issued a long report finding resoundingly in favor of the reality of the phenomena.  We hear not one word about how the leading physicist William Crookes did a scientific investigation of the most famous medium of his time (Daniel Dunglas Home), and reported that he passed all tests very well, producing inexplicable paranormal phenomena. We get the old unhistorical suggestion that spiritualism arose to console those who had lost relatives in the American Civil War (1861-1865), a suggestion unhistorical because spiritualism had rose to great public prominence in the decade before that war started. 

Grose states: "From everything I heard at the conference and have read, the uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experiences most likely has some kind of neurological explanation, even if technology isn’t sophisticated enough to account for all the details." There is no "uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experience," and Grose's claim that there is such uniformity suggests that she has not decently studied this topic. Near-death experiences have a very great variety. But there are certain elements that recur over and over again, with a narrative element recurrence far greater than would be occurring if mere hallucination was the cause. 

According to four papers on the phenomenology of near-death experiences that I studied to make the table below, there are features that recur in a large fraction of near-death experiences.  The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "The Different Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	42%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%
“Hyper-lucidity”		41%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%
"Awareness of being dead" of awareness of dying		26%	50%
Distortion of time	79%	47%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	47%
Contact or communication with the dead	30%	23%	32%	16%
Out-of-body experience	35%	35%	24%	31%
Having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%
Life reviewed or relived	27.%	15%	13%	44%

We see here very much repetition of a core set of very distinctive features, but nothing that can be described as "uniformity of descriptions." And it makes no sense at all for Grose to be suggesting the idea that uniformity of descriptions (or strong similarity of descriptions) would be evidence that some mere hallucination was occurring. Instead, uniformity of descriptions or strong similarity of descriptions would be evidence that a hallucination was not occurring. 

Consider how erroneous Detective Smith is speaking in the conversation below:

Detective Smith: What did you see, John Davis?

John Davis: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Mary Waters?

Mary Waters: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Alan Bacon?

Alan Bacon: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun.

Detective Smith: Aha! Your descriptions are all similar ! That means you must have all been just hallucinating. 

Detective Smith here has got things backwards. The fact that all of the witnesses report the same thing is strong evidence for the objective reality that Eddie Globermitt shot the victim. And, similarly, if those having near-death experiences give very similar reports, that is evidence for the objective reality of what they are reporting, and evidence against any idea that a mere hallucination is occurring (a hallucination being something that can occur in an infinite number of ways). 

In the article Grose's faulty reasoning I just quoted has a link to an article. It is an article behind a paywall, one entitled "Psychedelic Experiences May Give a Glimpse Into Near-Death Experiences."  The idea is bunk. Skeptics have speculated that maybe humans have something like a cache of ketamine in their brains that might be released upon death. There is no evidence that any such cache of hallucinogenic substances exists in the brain, and no evidence that hallucinogenic substances are released upon death. And when people take hallucinogens, they have experiences not closely matching what is reported in near-death experiences. You can't explain experiences occurring when the brain flatlines (as it very quickly does during cardiac arrest) as psychedelic experiences, which require a brain that has not flatlined. 

Grose says, "It’s possible for patients to hear and see during resuscitation efforts." Near-death experiences are very often recorded during cardiac arrest, when brain waves very quickly flatline, within 15 to 30 seconds. Under materialist assumptions, no conscious experience should be possible in flatlining brains. Contrary to Grose's claim, there is no credible neurological explanation for near-death experiences and the out-of-body experiences they so often involve, and she provides no mention of any such explanation. When neuroscientists make their best attempts to explain near-death experiences, they often make misleading claims, and tend to give us full-of-errors papers like the one I discuss here. 

Sounding like dilettante dabbling and laziest reasoning from someone who never deeply studied the subject material, Grose's article is an example of the type of shoddy writing that the New York Times is typically guilty of when covering issues of the unexplained and anomalous. Sadly the New York Times rather often gives us equally poor journalism when writing about topics of biology, physics, cosmology, neuroscience and psychology, the main difference being that in those cases the paper's writers often take a "believe the weakest, flimsiest claims" attitude that is the opposite of the "reject strong observation claims" attitude the paper's writers typically take when covering the paranormal or anomalous. 

We have in the article not a single quotation in which someone who had a near-death experience tells the full story of what happened. It is what we would expect from the New York Times, which is a kind of Pravda for materialists. For decades Soviet communists would read their daily edition of Pravda, which would always report that the world was working just exactly as a Soviet communist expected it to work. Similarly, the materialist reader of the New York Times always reads only stories that report the world working just exactly as a materialist expects it to work. 

Did the planning go like this?

We have an example of Grose's discarding of a clue in her statement below:

"A friend of mine died in a plane crash in the summer of 1996, right after we graduated from middle school. I remember being numb at her funeral. It felt impossible to accept that she and her lovely parents had met with such a horrible and sudden end. She started appearing in my dreams when I was in college, and I still dream about her at an irregular cadence.

The dream has the same contours every time. She is flying, birdlike, in the clouds above me, and she is whatever age I am when the dream happens. She says something like: You’re sad because you think I didn’t get to grow up. You think I didn’t get to go to college or fall in love or have children. But I want you to know that I’m in another place and I’m getting to do those things."

Rather than taking this recurring dream of high conceptual complexity as the important clue that it is, Grose says this: "My materialist explanation for these dreams is that I did not properly process my grief as a teenager and this is a way for my mind to work through the sadness of this loss." The explanation makes no sense. There is no robust evidence from materialist psychologists or materialist neuroscientists that recurring dreams serve any therapeutic effect such as alleviating sadness. 

Materialists such as Grose are ever-prone to throw away important clues whenever such clues annoy them. I am reminded of the materialist astronomer Carl Sagan, who stated, "Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name." Sagan threw away this  important clue, giving a silly explanation along the lines of "I hear their voices because I miss them." To read more about this tendency, read my post "Dogma-Doling Professors Discard or Ignore All Clues That Annoy Them," or my post "Poorly Reacting to Nature's Clues, Professors Act More Like Inspector Clouseau Than Lieutenant Columbo."