Psyconoclasm

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Changed lives

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:49:45 GMT

This is the ninth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressed thefirst of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long providesfor why near-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existenceof the afterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part four addressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under general anesthesia. Part five addressed enhanced sight for the blind during NDEs. Part six reviewed the concept of the "life review." Part sevenconsidered the five people you meet in your near-death experience. Part eight explores whether different cultures and age groups havesimilar NDEs, and why that might be.

This post takes a softer tone as it explores the last of the lines of evidence Dr. Long presents: The change that near-death experiencers (NDErs) report after their NDEs.

9. NDErs are transformed in many ways by their experience, often for life.

Dr. Long convincingly demonstrates that many people find their near-death experiences profound. No argument here about that. According to his survey, 75% of people reported that their lives had changed after their NDE, but Dr. Long thinks that this number is misleadingly low. Dr. Long thinks that some NDErs report their NDE before it has had time to change their lives (If you asked NDErs seven years after their NDE, you'd get a good figure, he says).

However, this line of evidence is another one where the sampling bias can creep in. Perhaps people who had NDEs that weren't transformative are less likely to seek out opportunities to talk about them, and therefore less likely to show up in this survey. Dr. Long argues that the 75% figure is misleadingly low, but it's possible that it's misleadingly high.

Let's get into the changes that NDErs report. There are some predictable changes: increased belief in the afterlife, increased sense of love in relationships, decreased fear of death, increased religiosity or spirituality. Then there are some less predictable changes: increased psychic abilities and miraculous healings. Indeed, 45% of those surveyed reported receiving "psychic, paranormal, or other special gifts" after their NDE. I don't want to get into whether psychic gifts are real or not. It is sufficient to say that the narratives of these gifts are self-reports by NDErs, and that the stories he provides do not constitute evidence of psychic abilities. Likewise for the miraculous healings. And even if psychic abilities did exist and were tapped by the NDE, there is no reason to believe that this is because the afterlife is real. It is just as possible that the same process in the brain that caused the NDE phenomenon to occur also jostled something that allowed psychic abilities to appear in the NDEr.

Dr. Long cites a few studies showing that it is the NDE itself, not the brush with death, that produces the changes. The studies gathered patients who had heart attacks and nearly died, and followed them for several years. Those reporting NDEs reported significantly more aftereffects of their experience than those who did not have an NDE. That makes sense on it's surface, since not only did NDErs stare down death, they also had an additional very emotional experience occur.

I just don't see this as evidence for the afterlife. Dr. Long claims that the changes are "evidence that those who step briefly into the afterlife bring back a piece of it when they return" (Kindle 2718). How does he reach this conclusion? He provides no reason to believe that the "changed lives" evidence differentiates between NDEs as occurring in the afterlife versus NDEs as occurring in the brain. All the changed lives evidence provides is evidence of the sincerity of the NDEr.

And I do want to emphasize the sincerity of the NDErs. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the people filling out the surveys Dr. Long uses are very sincere. They had a real experience, sometimes a very profound one. Even if the experiences do not constitute evidence of the afterlife, the people who have them deserve respect and deserve to have their experience validated as meaningful.

Just like understanding the science behind the rainbow does not destroy its beauty, understanding the brain mechanisms behind the near-death experience does not destroy its meaning.

My next entry will be my last on the topic, a brief-ish summary of the book.

"Evidence of the Afterlife": The universality of near-death experiences

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:30:00 GMT

This is the eighth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part two addressed thefirst of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides forwhynear-deathexperiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence oftheafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part four addressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under generalanesthesia. Part five addressed enhanced sight for the blind during NDEs. Part six reviewed the concept of the "life review." Part seven considered the five people you meet in your near-death experience. This post explores whether different cultures and age groups have similar NDEs, and why that might be.

7. The striking similarity of content in NDEs among very youngchildren and that of adults strongly suggests that the content of NDEsis not due to preexisting beliefs.

8. The remarkable consistency of NDEs around the world is evidence that NDEs are real events.

These two lines of evidence have the same argument underpinning them: NDEs are consistent when if this was a cultural phenomenon we would expect cultural differences, which is proof for the supernatural nature of NDEs, which is proof for the afterlife. There are several responses: 1) bias in the survey sample, 2) absolutely criminal mishandling of the analysis of the data, 3) human biology and anatomy isn't very different from place to place or age to age, and 4) cultural transmission is broader than the author, Dr. Long, cares to realize. Any of these provide reasonable doubt to Dr. Long's conclusions.

1) Problems with the samples

According to Dr. Long, there is no statistically significant difference between the NDEs of children and the NDEs of adults (Kindle 1900). I'll set aside the problem I have with Dr. Long's cutoff for statistical significance, since I've discussed it before. He makes this statement based on 26 NDEs that occurred to children under the age of 5. The problem is that I doubt many three-year-olds are typing in their NDEs. Either the children are telling their parents who then fill out the survey months or years after the fact, or the children are filling out the survey years or decades after their experience.

In either case, there is a significant chance that the experience has been filtered through the cultural beliefs before being reported to Dr. Long. Vague stimuli are given names that fit the cultural milieu. The edges are sanded down into a clearer, more coherent story.

Dr. Long claims that embellishment over time does not occur in any NDEs. His claim is based on research conducted by someone else. The researchers compared answers to a survey given to 72 NDErs in the 1980s and then given to them again some 20 years later. From the abstract: "mean scores did not change significantly" on any factor. I managed to access to the full paper, and it seems that the research didn't track individual variations in the survey results, but rather just compared the average from the 1980s to the averages from the 2000s.

That means that everyone's answers could be different to every question, but as long as the changes offset each other then the conclusion is "NDErs don't embellish their stories." For example, if Joe went from a 3 to a 5 and Jim went from a 5 to a 3, then their stories have changed, but they changed in such a way that the average score doesn't change. Why didn't the researcher analyze the variation between the two related sets of data, and report the mean of the differences between the two samples? In the example of Jim and Joe, that would lead to an average variance of 2, whereas the original researcher's method would lead to a reported difference of 0. Mine method would make for a more meaningful result.

And even then, a potential problem with the research is sampling bias. Specifically, the people who make it to the point of being willing to fill out a survey about their NDE -- twice -- are people who have already constructed a solid story. They've already sanded the edges and assigned labels to the events that occurred. In other words, they've already embellished their story (probably subconsciously) before the study began, and that's why the stories might not seem to change.

There are also sampling problems with the cross-cultural research. First, there were only 19 NDEs reported from non-Western countries. That's a small number from which to draw conclusions. Second, those 19 NDErs probably aren't representative of their countries, in that they knew what they had was an NDE and managed to find this online survey written by some American. Likewise for the 79 NDEs that were not reported in English (Kindle 2078). Dr. Long complains about how hard it is to get people to fill out the surveys in non-Western and non-English-dominant countries, which only makes me more confident of the sampling problem here. The sampling bias favors those who have NDEs similar to the "classic" reports.

2) Crimes against data analysis

I nearly quit reading in disgust as I read what I'm about to report to you. To quote a note I wrote at the time: "wow. take a research methods class." While analyzing the 79 NDEs not reported in English, Dr. Long came across a problem for his ideology. Despite his overly strict definition of what constitutes a statistically significant difference, he managed to find several differences between NDEs in English-speaking countries versus NDEs in non-English-speaking countries. In fact, there were 11 (out of 33) differences that were statistically significant. That's a blow to the hypothesis that NDEs are the same around the world. Good for him for reporting a negative result!

But wait. He's not done. Instead of reporting the negative result and leaving it at that, he creates a new questionnaire and has an NDE believer fill it out on behalf of each of the 600+ NDEs. Yes, that's right, he created a new measure and had someone with a huge potential bias score the NDEs. And what do you know, there were only two statistically significant differences from this second questionnaire.

That's like stepping on a scale, not liking the weight that comes up, then ignoring the number you saw and instead asking your boyfriend if you look like you've gained weight. Surprise surprise, he's going to say no! Dr. Long says that the problem must be in the translations of the survey, so he was justified in making this complete nonsense move, but that's like saying that the bathroom scale must have had a loose spring, so you're justified in relying on your boyfriend's opinion. You don't have any proof that something's wrong with the scale, whereas there's definitely something wrong with the new "scale" you've chosen.

3) The similarity of humanity

Dr. Long says, "It's amazing to think that no matter what country we call home, perhaps our real home is in the wondrous unearthly realms consistently described by NDErs around the world" (Kindle 2348). But I have another take.

It's amazing to think that no matter what country we call home, we fundamentally have the same brain structures and processes. When we go through the dying process, our brains react the same way across the world. If NDEs truly are a function of something going on in the brain, it would be no surprise if the broad contours are the same, with the details being drawn from a person's individual life, including drawn from his culture.

In these two chapters, Dr. Long does not make much mention of the skeptics and their arguments. I don't see a way he could argue against them in this case. The similarity of NDEs across cultures (and across different ages) is not an argument necessarily for the existence of the afterlife. It is entirely compatible with the hypothesis that NDEs are caused by the brain.

4) Understating the pervasiveness of cultural influences

One child reports being taken up by Mother Mary (Kindle 1668). Do you think he was a Hindu boy who had never heard of Jesus? Of course not. I would bet you anything that he's been taught somewhere that when you die your soul goes to Heaven. Maybe he heard the poem that goes "If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take" (which, may I add, is an incredibly creepy poem to be teaching children).

And yet, later we are told by Dr. Long (in the chapter about cross-cultural similarities) that the "core features" are the same for Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc. (Kindle 1245). But he lists as part of the "core" experience the life review, which only occurs in 15% of NDEs! How "core" is that? I don't remember seeing any statistics on this, but I would bet that close to, if not more than, 15% of NDErs saw figures of their religion during their NDEs.

It's important to realize that NDErs aren't just saying "I felt a presence, and it was Jesus." They're reporting what he looks like, and it's like something out of a picture in a church. Dr. Long considers it proof for the afterlife that people meet their dead relatives in NDEs, so clearly he trusts the reports by NDErs. Why the sudden about-face?

Dr. Long's inconsistency in this regard is an attempt to minimize the influence of culture onto the NDE. But cultural influences about what happens after we die start as soon as we learn about religion or watch our first episode of Family Guy (watch the episode "Death Lives" for the out-of-body experience, life review, and change in purpose and attitude of the NDEr upon revival, three parts of the "classic" NDE).

In closing, Dr. Long has not convincingly shown that NDEs from different cultures and ages are truly similar in a way that cannot be explained by cultural transmission. Nonetheless, any similarities between NDEs from different parts of the world and across the lifespan are easily accounted for by similarities in the brain across all humans of all ages. in fact, the brain-origin hypothesis is superior in that it is able to better account for the differences that do appear.

My next post will be looking at the ways NDErs are changed by their NDEs. After that, I'll try and write one last post, a short summary that might be suitable for an Amazon review.

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Family Reunion

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:42:00 GMT

This is the seventh in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressedthe first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for whynear-deathexperiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of theafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part fouraddressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under generalanesthesia. Part five addressed enhanced sight for the blind during NDEs. Part six reviewed the concept of the "life review." This post considers the five people you meet in your near-death experience.

6. Virtually all beings encountered during NDEs are deceased at the time of the NDE, and most are deceased relatives.

The author, Dr. Long, reports that in his online survey of self-selected near death experiencers (NDErs), only 16% of NDEs involved experiences with other humans (as opposed to angels, etc.). That doesn't count the other humans seen in, say, the out-of-body experience. Out of that subset of NDErs, nearly all were relatives (85%), and nearly all were dead (90-95%).

First, 16% is a shockingly small portion of NDEs. That goes back to my first post, about how NDEs aren't a single type of event, but rather are incredibly variable.

However, the reason the percentage is so small is because Dr. Long makes an artificial distinction between seeing angels and seeing dead humans. Nearly half of all NDEs involved a mystical presence or voice (Kindle 1820). Under the brain-related hypotheses presented earlier, there is no reason to believe that seeing a dead relative is any different than seeing an angel.

The reason it's important for Dr. Long to make the distinction isn't because it is relevant, but because it allows him to make this false arguments like this: "If the deceased relatives encountered during NDEs were only a product of earthly memory, it would be expected that older people, who would have experienced more deaths of people that they knew in their lifetimes, would encounter more deceased relatives" (Kindle 1846). Or this: "living beings would be much more likely to occupy a place in NDErs' recent memory" (Kindle 1855).

Not good arguments. I think this part of the phenomenon is driven by expectations, not past experiences or what's fresh in the memory. If people expect to see angels and deceased relatives when they die, then wouldn't we expect that to be what they report seeing? Even if they don't know before the NDE begins that they're dying, perhaps something in there knows, even at a neurochemical level.

One theory of dreaming is that upon waking, the brain cobbles together all of the neural firing that goes on during the night and creates a story. That's why dreams seem so consistent. It also helps explain how external stimuli such as the sound of an alarm clock or the smell of bacon can be incorporated into a dream so seamlessly. Rather than it being an interruption in the narrative that must be accommodated, it's just another one of billions of stimuli the brain integrates. Perhaps the same thing happens here when a person comes out of the NDE.

It's important to note that I don't have any evidence for this speculation. Neither does Dr. Long for his. The difference is that I'm not writing a book about my "scientific" evidence for my speculation.

Part of the reason this chapter might seem compelling is because the encounters allegedly occur even when the NDErs don't know 1) that they're seeing people who have died, or 2) that they're seeing relatives. The example he uses for the first case is dubious. A man and his grandfather were both in hospitals for heart attacks. Both were clearly in danger of dying. The man had another heart attack, and during this incident had an NDE. He saw his grandfather in his NDE. This makes sense by any account: if he's going to see someone, it's going to be his grandfather. However, because the man's grandfather had actually died (presumably from another heart attack) at the same time, this is somehow jaw-dropping evidence of the afterlife.

If it was true that people were seeing total strangers that were identifiable after the fact as relatives, that would be good evidence for the reality of an afterlife. However, Dr. Long's anecdotes are unimpressive. Dr. Long relates the story of a girl who had an NDE at the age of five. She saw a girl in her NDE. Later, she drew the girl, and her parents noticed. Apparently, the girl had had a sister who died before the girl was born. Amazing story, right? Except it's unknown how accurate the picture was. People assume that when you die you meet your relatives. Perhaps the parents assumed that the girl in the picture of the NDE was the NDEr's dead sister. Who knows?

That's the problem with this type of "research." I would be impressed if immediately after waking up from an NDE, 20% of NDErs said things like this: "I saw someone claiming she was my Great-Great-Aunt Jane Marie Woods-Meltzoff, she had brown hair, overweight, big mole on her cheek, her social security number was 302-73-1294, and she was a hermaphrodite. Is any of that true?" I'm not impressed by stories of people looking at family pictures a decade later and saying, "Wow, that guy looks like someone I saw in my NDE!"

Dr. Long's research methods just aren't cut out for providing the kinds of evidence necessary to prove his case. This would be great first-round data, something that researchers would use to design real studies. If we were studying a disease, collecting a bunch of self-reported case studies would be a fine first step in a research program. You have to have a rough understanding of what you're studying before researchers can do more rigorous studies. However, Dr. Long does a disservice to his work by dressing it up as proof of anything. On the other hand, the book is a New York Times best-seller, and it wouldn't be if he was making more modest claims.

Next: Why children and adults have similar NDEs, and why people from different cultures have similar NDEs.

"Evidence of the Afterlife": The Life Review

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:15:00 GMT

This is the sixth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for whynear-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of theafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part fouraddressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under generalanesthesia. Part five addressed enhanced sight for the blind during NDEs. This post reviews the concept of the "life review."

5. A life review during the NDE accurately reflects real events in the NDEr’s life, even if those events have been forgotten.

A "life review" is when someone sees parts of their past replaying, where they have a third-person point of view. Think of A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of Christmas Past is showing Ebenezer Scrooge scenes from his life.

A few interesting tidbits came up here. In the first incarnation of the NDERF survey, 660 experiences were collected, and only half were considered NDEs, and of that half, only a quarter reported a life review. In the second incarnation, it is unknown how many experiences were collected, but 617 NDEs were studied, of which only 14% reported the life review (Kindle 1609). Why did the percentage of NDErs reporting a life review drop by 50% between the two times of the survey?

Dr. Long also says that he didn't think any of the life reviews contained elements that were "unrealistic," which is a broad understanding of what should be included as evidence of the phenomenon. Something can be realistic without actually having happened.

One NDEr reports seeing "my whole life in a flash of an instant. I was shown all the details of my life" (Kindle 1623). Huh? On what basis does the NDEr assume that 1) the long-forgotten details are accurate and 2) there are not more details that remain forgotten? I find it difficult to accept these assertions as true. I don't doubt that the NDEr felt as though she saw all the details of her life, but that is different from accepting it as fact that she did see her entire life in a flash.

Dr. Long attempts to counter two skeptical points against the claim that the life review is evidence of the afterlife. The first is the idea that the life review is really due to fear of death: the NDEr suffers a life-threatening event and retreats to pleasant memories. This is impossible because it cannot explain instances where the NDE is unexpected (a sudden car crash, anesthesia error, etc.). Dr. Long lists as a reference a book by Dr. Susan Blackmore, but I haven't been able to find the claim made by her (or anyone else) in any of the articles she has written and have been posted on the Internet. It's a bad theory, highly speculative and probably untestable.

The second theory is that the brain, as it is dying, might trigger activation in the temporal lobe. In the lab, activation of that part of the brain by an implanted electrode is known to trigger the sudden flashes of recall memory. Dr. Long claims, and quotes other NDE-believer researchers as claiming, that the experiences of participants in lab studies bear little resemblance to reported NDEs, in that the memories induced in the lab were shorter and repetitive. Well of course. The electrodes aren't creating the same kind of activity as would occur under life-and-death situations, and the temporal lobe activity would be broader than one electrode implantation. The lab experiences provide a proof of concept for this alternative explanation.

One last note. As I mentioned, only 15% of NDErs reported experiencing a life review. This means it is even more likely that the reporting of this particular aspect of the NDE is caused by 1) cultural factors, 2) complex brain events (such as messing with the temporal lobe), and 3) sampling bias. If 100 people experience temporal lobe activation cascades during resuscitation, and only two experience something resembling an NDE, those are the ones who are going to reach the websites to report their NDEs. People who don't experience NDEs don't fill out surveys on NDE sites.

Next up: Why NDErs see their dead relatives.

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Blind sight

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:40:00 GMT

This is the fifth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part two addressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for why near-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of the afterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part four addressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under general anesthesia. This post addresses another of the lines of evidence Dr. Long claims as proof of the afterlife:

4. NDEs take place among those who are blind, and these NDEs often include visual experiences.

It's important to note from the start that Dr. Long makes an appropriate distinction between those who are congenitally blind (blind from birth) and those who become blind later in life. If all of the NDEs from blind people occurred in those who became blind after the age of eight or so, it would be easy to explain. After all, people who are blind later in life are able to see in their dreams -- and in their LSD trips.

I was able to find a study showing that people born blind have activation in their visual cortex while they dream. I don't have access to the full study, so I can't give it a good critique, but taking it at face value it seems possible that people having NDEs are also experiencing activation of their visual cortices. The study also showed that blind people were able to draw their dream content. I have no idea what the content of those drawings were, however.

One critique of the study suggested that the congenitally blind aren't "seeing" so much as imagining spatial relationships, which it is already widely accepted they are able to do. In other words, the congenitally blind may have activation in their visual cortices, but they're not seeing the color blue.

But I'm not sure why I'm spending so much time on this. Dr. Long doesn't tell us how many NDE reports he received from people born blind. He provides an NDE narrative that someone else collected, and he provides two sentences from an NDE he collected from someone legally blind without his glasses. The rest of the chapter is about people with regular or slightly diminished sight having super-clear or 360-degree sight, which isn't nearly as breath-taking as blind people having visual NDEs. I assume this means that the NDERF has not received an NDE from someone born blind, and I'm not impressed with one or two anecdotes.

At the level of one or two anecdotes, "blind sight" is easily explained by a few factors. The first deals with the selection bias: only people who have accurate reports of NDEs will go on talking about them. So if 100 blind people report visual content during NDEs, we'll only hear about the one who had an accurate report. The second factor is lucky guessing. That may be why there are so few stories from congenitally blind NDErs. The third is prior knowledge. For example, it seems impressive that this woman in Dr. Long's book saw her wedding ring and knew that it had bits of orange on the sides (Kindle 1200), but I can't imagine her not knowing that there was orange on the ring. Wouldn't she have asked to have it described to her? The fourth is that, in the same way that a congenitally blind person's visual cortex is able to create imagined spatial relations through the information gathered from the other four senses, a person could create the visual aspects of the NDE from what is heard during the resuscitation.

That leaves the much less impressive issue of "super-sight" in the regularly-sighted NDErs. This seems consistent with the idea of NDErs taking in information from the outside world and constructing a narrative. Since they have no point of view from which to remember the experience, it makes sense that the brain would construct a third-person view.

Next: The "Life review," or "My life flashed before my eyes."

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Anesthesia and the Brain

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:54:00 GMT

This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for whynear-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of theafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience.

I noticed an error in the book. In the introduction, it lists the third line of evidence as being about anesthesia. In the book structure and chapter titles, though, the third line of evidence is listed as "blind sight." I'll follow the numbering presented in the introduction, chapter 2.

3. NDEs occur during general anesthesia when no form of consciousness should be taking place.

Boom. The article describes a talk given by Dr. Jackie Andrade, describing her work which suggested that people under anesthesia are capable of forming memories based on what they hear. She is quoted by the BBC as saying: "What we think is happening is that surgery involves tissue damage which increases the release of adrenaline, and it's the adrenaline that enables people to learn even when they are unconscious."

I found one of her studies, published in Neurosciences and Neuroanaesthesia, available online. You can read the PDF here. The conclusion from the abstract: "Existing knowledge can be primed by information presented during [. . .] anaesthesia. The priming is evidence of unconscious information processing and not the result of moments of awareness."

The main problem with this research as regards my argument against Dr. Long is that the memories here are implicit. The researchers took people who were put under anesthesia, and played a recording of words into their ears. After waking up, none of them said "yeah, you said 'bunny,' 'Christmas,' and 'hot peppers." That would have been explicit memory. Instead, the memory was implicit: it helped them perform better on word completion tests, which meant that somewhere in the subconscious the brain recognized the words presented under anesthesia. The participants had the knowledge in their brain, but they couldn't just blurt it out.

It seems like a big leap from the implicit memories shown in the research to the explicit narratives people tell about their resuscitation while under anesthesia. However, it is evidence that sensory information can reach the brain, even under anesthesia.

How the sensory leakage under anesthesia turns from implicit to explicit memory? What Dr. Long doesn't seem to realize is that organized experiences CAN occur in the brain of people who have been anesthetized: it's called dreaming, and the medical literature is full of reports and studies of dreaming under anesthesia. The brain doesn't just stop working when anesthesia is present.

If you take the same argument I made in my previous post about sensory leakage when the brain is under duress and apply it to cases of anesthesia, it fits pretty well.

Dr. Long does something here that a lot of people with dubious claims love to do: they find a Nobel Prize winner who agrees with them. He quotes Sir John Eccles as "a Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist who studied consciousness" (Kindle 1444). Each of those words is true, but misleading. Eccles won his Nobel Prize for his work on the synapse, one of the basic parts of the brain's structure. He did some excellent foundational work in neuroscience. He was also a religious man, and one who philosophized about the possibility of consciousness outside the brain. It seems that whenever Nobel Prize winners go outside their area of expertise, they get it wrong.

Dr. Long cites this speculation in the book, where Eccles says that "the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism." Yeah, and evolution is demeaning to humanity because we came from apes, and doing any work at all in neuroscience demeans the mystery of that essential organ the brain. Why are we to care about this man's speculation? Sir Eccles is not bringing any research to the table here, he's just spouting his opinion. He has every right to do it, but there's no reason for Dr. Long to mention it in this book. Dr. Long just wants the readers to be impressed that a Nobel Prize winner spouts the same opinion as himself, and neither have evidence to prove the case.

There's one more thing I want to talk about here, and it's going to come up again later. Dr. Long makes the claim that there is only one statistically significant difference between the experience of NDErs who were anesthetized versus those who were not anesthetized. He says that his cut-off for reporting significance was p<.01 (Kindle 1422). That is, if the difference could have occurred randomly less than 1 time in every 100, then it was considered significant. That is a strict criterion. Typically, results in science are considered significant if there is a less than 5 in 100 chance of the results being random. Dr. Long tries to justify this strict criterion because of the large number of questions being analyzed -- so if we ask 20 questions, and there is a 1 in 20 chance of the answers being different do to chance, then we would expect 1 of the questions to show a difference. However, this strict threshold for significance probably masks the true variability in the individual components between the groups.

Next up will be a post about "blind sight."

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Out-of-Body Experiences

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:50:00 GMT

This is part three in my review of Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. I originally intended this series to take two or three posts, but I think it's going to end up being closer to ten (god help me, there's just so much juicy discussion material here). Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part two addressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for why near-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of the afterlife.

2) NDErs may see and hear in the out-of-body (OBE) state, and what they perceive is nearly always real.

Scientists know how to cause out-of-body experiences (OBEs), and it doesn't involve getting someone close to death. OBEs are pretty clearly caused by disruption of a part of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction. Using electrodes, it is possible to disrupt the electrical activity in this specific region of the brain, and in doing so scientists have artificially induced out-of-body experiences.

There are other ways of inducing OBEs, but I like the TPJ method best because it narrows down the specific part of the brain that causes the sensation -- and it causes the sensation without altering any other part of consciousness. If OBEs can be triggered by disruption in the brain, and brain impairment is something to be expected when oxygen levels in the brain drop, then it's no surprise that NDErs report OBEs.

Now it's time for a story. I used to spend my summers working at a camp for mentally and physically disabled adults. One day, I was called into a room by one of the other counselors. When I walked in, one of the non-verbal campers was making threatening gestures toward another camper. He began to try to hit her, and I stepped in to prevent him from doing so. He picked up a chair and threw it at her, which meant at me. Eventually, another counselor was called in and we were able to calm the camper down. Throughout the event, and for about five minutes afterward, I felt like I was an outside observer watching my movements. I have no idea what caused the sensation. Perhaps it was stress, perhaps it was adrenaline, but it sure wasn't my soul leaving my body.

But what about accuracy? Any improvement in accuracy can be explained by what I discussed in my previous post about brain functioning during a near-death experience. The brain can still take in information from the outside world.

One of the most compelling cases Dr. Long presents involves a manmissing his dentures (which were removed during his resuscitation), herelied on his OBE to help the doctors locate the dentures. This may bea case where someone receiving heart massage actually became conscious (though still paralyzed).

Dr. Long makes an interesting sidestep in this section. In discussing one study, he says that NDErs had better recall of the events taking place during their medical emergency resuscitation than non-NDErs. However, he admits that some NDErs were wildly inaccurate, then makes excuses for them ("it must have been the meds the doctors gave them that made them forget"). So when NDErs guess correctly, it's evidence for the accuracy of OBEs, but when NDErs guess incorrectly, it's evidence for the memory loss effects of medication. Got it.

Of course, Dr. Long references back to his Internet survey, the basis of his book. He claims that 45% of NDErs had an OBE that contained earthly events that could be verified or disproven, and that 98% of these OBEs were 100% realistic -- as judged by the man who is trying to get this to be evidence for his argument. What if they reported seeing dragons eating their feet? That wouldn't count as "earthly events," otherwise the angel floating next to them would count as something unrealistic. Perhaps he's talking about depictions of the resuscitation, so that if the NDEr reports "someone was pounding my chest screaming at me to 'just breath damnit!'" then that would be inaccurate. Still, I'm not impressed with his assessment of claims of accuracy. I'm not going to trust a subjective evaluation of which claims are "earthly" and which claims are "100% accurate"; who knows how vague those 45% of NDErs who had OBEs were, for example.

Finally comes Dr. Long's "Skeptics say" segment. He doesn't cite any skeptics, but he says that skeptics claim OBEs are partial reconstructions of memories formed before or after the time of unconsciousness, and that NDErs are lucky guessers. He counters with his unconvincing "98% of OBEs are 100% realistic!" discussed above. Dr. Long also reports that NDErs tell him their greatest level of alertness occurs in the middle of the NDE, not at the beginning or end, which seems to fit fine with the tale I spun above.

Next time: How the congenitally blind see during NDEs.

The 9 Lines of "Evidence of the Afterlife"

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:30:00 GMT

In my previous entry, I outlined the reason why the survey that forms the basis of Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D., cannot provide a scientific proof of the afterlife, and that it even harms the argument for the existence of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a single phenomenon. Over the next few posts, I'll go through the nine lines of evidence that Dr. Long provides in the book, and tell you why I don't find them convincing.

You can find the nine lines of evidence outlined here, if you look toward the bottom of the article under the heading "Evidence of the Afterlife." The link is to a reproduction of the second chapter of the book. In the book itself, each of these nine points forms a separate chapter.

1) It is medically inexplicable to have a highly organized and lucid experience while unconscious or clinically dead.

This is a doozy, and I'll hope you'll bear with me. I got many of the ideas here from G.M. Woerlee's review of this book. The rest of the sections should be shorter. It's important to address this line of evidence, because if it stands scrutiny, the case for the reality of NDEs would be made. It would raise a number of questions -- how close to bodily death does one have to be to trigger the end-of-life process vis-a-vis consciousness, for example, and why are NDEs so variable -- but the reality of consciousness separate from the brain would be established.

First, what is "clinical death"? According to the author, it's "a loss of breathing and heartbeat" (Kindle 804). The standard definition of clinical death is now related to brain death, when the brain ceases all activity (which can be confirmed by two flat EEGs 24 hours apart). According to Dr. Long, someone without a heartbeat will show a flat EEG (which measures electrical activity at the surface of the brain) 10-20 seconds later.

This is true, but misleading. If someone had no heartbeat and had a flat EEG for more than a few minutes, irreparable harm would be done to the brain, and the person would die.

However, all of the people reporting NDEs are still alive, which means that they had to have received some sort of artificial form of blood circulation, which means that their brains were still capable of experiencing the world around them, even if they appeared unconscious. Heart massage (such as CPR) keeps semi-oxygenated blood flowing to the brain.

The amount of oxygen provided to the brain by heart massage can be enough to allow someone to actually be conscious without a heartbeat. Sometimes this is accompanied by the ability to move, sometimes there is paralysis. Even when actual consciousness is not achieved, there will be enough blood flow to be able to receive and store sensory data from the outside world, which can later be used to (unconsciously) fabricate out-of-body experiences. It's like when you're dreaming, and sensory information from the outside world (the smell of bacon, the sound of the alarm clock) become incorporated into the dream.

Dr. Long claims that these people had lucid experiences even though they were unconscious. As I've explained, there is no reason to believe that the experiences that are reported occurred during a period of total unconsciousness, and every reason to think that the brain is still doing some processing of sensory information even if unconscious.

Many NDErs report that they had enhanced mental abilities, including enhanced visual perception despite being unconscious (Kindle 861). However, they never report seeing in the ultraviolet, infrared, radio, etc. -- it's always the same visual spectrum of light, except clearer. If consciousness really left the body, there's no reason to assume that it would be incapable of seeing these other wavelengths; that is a limitation of our brains or our eyes, not necessarily our inner selves. In fact, chickens are able to see in the ultraviolet; are our souls that much weaker?

Some NDEs involve excellent hearing: "clearer and crisper, as if in a chamber of silence listening to whispers" (Kindle 907), according to one NDEr. Some NDEs involve profound silence: "There was no sound at all. [. . .] Thick, thick silence" (Kindle 930). Why the difference, if consciousness is actually leaving the body? Are some souls deaf?

At the end of each chapter, Dr. Long tries to provide the skeptic counterargument. In this case, he says that the counterargument is that NDErs aren't really near death. He says that hypoxia (described above) would result in confused NDEs, rather than the smooth narratives that arise in NDEs. I don't have the expertise to counter that claim, but perhaps there's an analogy to sleep. If you are feeling very tired, you are not as coherent as you usually are; however, if you sleep your mind can experience very smooth narrative dreams.

The other notion he tries to dismiss is "the Oprah Factor"; that is, the cultural transmission I mentioned earlier. Basically, the objection skeptics make is that NDErs are exposed to the basics of an NDE (going to the light, out of body experiences, etc.) through the pop culture (such as through Oprah), and use that background information to construct, consciously or not, their own NDE narrative. Dr. Long claims that this is impossible, since the term Near-Death Experience was coined in 1975.

His reference for that assertion is a study he published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies where he took the responses to his web survey and compared NDEs that were reported as occurring before 1975 with those occurring after 1975 and found no difference. That is jaw-droppingly bad research. The sampling bias is clear: these are people who have self-identified as having NDEs -- they knew what they had, and they knew how to find the survey -- and they were filling out a survey at least 25 years after their claimed experience.

But that doesn't even matter. Let's assume the NDE is consistent pre- and post-1975. Here's a picture painted depicting several elements of the NDE:

Can you guess when this was painted? I'll give you a hint: It was before 1975. The point here is that depictions of NDEs were in the culture, even if the term we currently use -- near-death experience -- wasn't. According to Dr. Long's survey, 66% of NDErs claimed not to "have any knowledge of near-death experience (NDE) prior to your experience." I say that's a badly-written question. If someone heard of someone's life flashing before their eyes, if they heard about ascending toward the light, but never heard the term near-death experience, then they might answer "no."

In any event, Dr. Long closes the chapter by saying "Standard logic does not apply." I couldn't have said it better.

"Evidence of the Afterlife" can provide no such thing

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:23:00 GMT

I'm certainly not the first to cast a skeptical eye on Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, MD, the latest best-seller on near-death experiences (NDEs). In fact, if you go to Dr. Long's homepage, his wife is asking for near-death experiencers (NDErs) to write reviews on Amazon to counter the "negative reviews by ignorant , opinionated people." I think she's talking about people like me! But, I read the book, and I feel like I would have wasted the $10 Kindle purchase if I didn't write up a review.

Dr. Long and his publisher have put the second chapter, the real introduction, online for free. If you read that, you'll get the essence of the book.

I don't want to squeeze everything I have to say into one blog entry, so this is the first of a few posts on it. In this post, I'll try to address the question that the survey Dr. Long conducted can actually help answer.

The subtitle of the book is "The Science of Near-Death Experiences," which brings me to my main critique: The book is based on data from people coming to his website and describing their NDEs. This information can only be used to establish the existence of the NDE phenomenon; it is not evidence of the afterlife, it's only evidence that people are reporting these experiences. There are a hundred little things that go wrong with Long's treatment of the survey data once it is received, but this is the central complaint I have. It's trying to answer a question it just can't.

Throughout the book, I kept seeing parallels to alien abduction research, something I've investigated previously before interviewing Dr. Chris French and Dr. David Jacobs. The main example of this is that both NDE and alien abduction (AA) researchers claim that the personal experiences of the people they have interviewed constitute conclusive evidence for the existence of the phenomenon as more than something happening in the brain. Relying on such a low level of evidence for the objective reality of NDEs and AAs sets a threshold for belief that is too low; there is virtually no limit on the number of things that someone would have to belief if they applied that threshold for every claim.

What, then, is the use of survey data? Survey data can be used to identify the phenomenon. If I want to prove the existence of the Eiffel Tower, I need to first define what the Eiffel Tower is. Let's say our definition is "a tower a thousand feet high, made of metal, and in the city of Paris." To simplify the definition down to factors easily observed, "The Eiffel Tower is tall, gray, and in a city." If we survey 100 people who have seen the Eiffel Tower and 20% of them say it's made of bright green wood, then we have a problem.

Is there a consistent near-death experience? No. In the beginning of the book, Long provides a list of the elements of the NDE. He then lists the percentage of people who reported having each element. Consider the following:

1) 25% of NDErs did not have an out-of-body experience.
2) 65% didn't experience going through a tunnel.
3) 35% didn't experience a bright light.
4) Only half met other beings such as dead relatives.
5) Less than 25% reported a "life review" (their life flashing before their eyes).

All of the elements excluded at least 20% of respondents. If NDEs were a single phenomenon, we would expect a lot more agreement between the stories. For example, one person reports seeing "a beautiful landscape of tulips of every color imaginable." If the NDE is something actually objectively happening, why wouldn't more NDEs involve a field of tulips? On the other hand, if NDEs were really manifestations of something happening in the brain, we would expect the kinds of variability in general experience and specific detail that we actually see.

The NDE proponent will say that the differences in the NDEs are insignificant compared to the similarities -- a sense of consciousness when the brain should not be able to produce such a thing. "It's like a bunch of blind people all feeling different parts of an elephant, and describing only the parts they are aware of. One person will say that the elephant is like a snake, because he feels only the trunk. Another says that it's like a tree, because he feels only the legs. Similarly, one person sees a field of tulips, another has a life review, and another travels down a tunnel." I don't buy that explanation, and I have an alternative one.

What we call "near-death experiences" might have a number of complementary explanations, each describing a different type of NDE. In the same way that alien abduction reports might be explained by a number of different psychological factors (such as hypnogogia, fantasy-prone personality type, and cultural transmission), NDEs might have different explanations (such as cerebral anoxia, REM intrusion, and cultural transmission).

An important point to remember, though, is that Dr. Long has the burden of proof here. When skeptics say "REM intrusion is the cause of NDEs," they assume the burden of proof for their claim, but here Dr. Long is saying that the existence of the afterlife is the cause of NDEs. So even if every theory put forward by skeptics falls, that doesn't mean that NDEs are proof of the afterlife. Dr. Long has to actually make a case showing that NDEs prove the existence of the afterlife.

In the next post, I'll list Long's nine proofs for the existence of the afterlife, and I'll explain why they're wrong.

Deep Brain Stimulation in OCD

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:24:00 GMT

Modern psychiatry has a number of treatment modalities at its disposal. The most commonly known and used modalities are psychotherapy (talk therapy) and psychiatric medication (such as Prozac). Sometimes, however, drugs and talking just can't resolve a person's problems.

There are a number of other more invasive interventions. Psychosurgery is one option, where a doctor removes part of the brain to improve symptoms. Another last-ditch procedure is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), where electrical pulses are sent through the brain to sort of "reset" the brain. While both of these procedures show efficacy in difficult to treat cases, the side effects are so significant that they are rarely used.

One of the most promising new last-ditch treatment options is called deep brain stimulation (DBS). The best analogy is that it is a pacemaker for the brain. The device is surgically implanted into the brain, where it emits periodic bursts of electricity to interfere with the brain activity associated with the target site. Like with a psychiatric medication, it can take time to get the dosage right.

This "brain pacemaker" makes sense on the surface. We know that certain parts of the brain are associated with certain behaviors, and with some behaviors there is enough accuracy to justify the surgery. We also know that the brain operates largely on the sending of electrical signals; inputting electrical signals that don't belong will mess up the system. It's the same theory behind ECT, but more refined and with fewer side effects (the side effects of ECT include serious memory loss, which is not a side effect of DBS).

But does it work? Yes, for certain problems. Parkinson's Disease, major depression, and Tourette Syndrome all seem to respond to DBS, though the sample sizes in the studies are small and most of the trials have no placebo wing, so it's hard to know if it's the actual electrical pulses doing the work or just the fact that the person is receiving any new treatment at all.

Neuroskeptic covers a new study on the use of DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder that does use a placebo control. He (or she?) covers the study in more detail, and has a much firmer grasp on the neurology of the study.

The study has a small sample (6 patients), but divides the sample into two groups of three patients. All six patients received the surgery to implant the "pacemaker," but the doctors activated one group's pacemaker thirty days after implantation, and the second group's pacemaker was activated sixty days after implantation. The patients weren't told when the devices would be turned on. It's unclear from what I've read, but I would hope that the doctors at 30 days pretended to turn on the devices in that second group of patients.

Two of the three patients in the first group responded immediately after the device was activated, and none of the three patients in the second group responded until their devices were activated. About a year into the study, one of the patients suddenly stopped responding to the treatment. However, it was discovered that this was because the battery died. After the battery was replaced, the patient improved again. The fact that there was no response after the battery died provides additional evidence that the effect is due to the electrical impulses being sent through the brain, rather than only a placebo effect.

More studies like this are needed, and on larger scales, before definitive proof can be provided for deep-brain stimulation, but the results so far are promising for this relatively new treatment.

Why people blame rape victims, part 2

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:30:00 GMT

In my last entry, I talked about some of the faulty linguistic thinking that helps people feel comfortable blaming rape victims for their plight. In this entry, I want to talk about two other factors: the "just world" assumption, and the "Lake Wobegon Effect."

The "just world" assumption is this: We live in a world that is fundamentally fair (just). People get what they deserve. However, we are constantly assaulted with situations that seem to contradict this assumption. If there is a major earthquake in Haiti, how can that happen in a just world? There are fundamentally two ways to make the just world assumption seem correct when it is challenged.

The first possible reaction is to act to maintain the existence of a just world. This can be done by donating to an earthquake relief fund, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or performing some vigilante justice. We alter the world around us to create a more just world. As my examples illustrate, this can take a number of forms, not all of them necessarily for the better.

The second possible reaction is to twist the events in such a way that what seems unjust is actually just. If there is an earthquake in Haiti, someone might say that it is God's punishment for making a pact with the devil (true story). If someone is poor in this life, then they have great riches awaiting them in the afterlife. If someone gets hit by a car, it's karmic retribution. And if someone gets raped, they did something to deserve it.

The problem with the second reaction is that it cuts off our ambition (since our poor lot will automatically be enhanced in the future by the just universe) and, importantly for rape victims, it cuts off our natural sympathy. Those looking to rationalize away suffering in a just world must blame the victim. Anything will do: 8% of respondents in a recent survey said that a woman can be held responsible for her own rape if she accepts a drink from and talks with a man.

The "Lake Wobegon Effect" is sometimes called the "above average effect". A public radio program (A Prairie Home Companion) features a weekly news report from a fictitious place called Lake Wobegon, where, as Garrison Keillor reminds us each week, "all the children are above average."

If you understand anything about statistics, you know that all the children cannot be above the average, by definition. And yet, it describes a real phenomenon. Most people think that they are above average in many tasks. Just ask 100 people if their driving skill is above average, and you'll find that most people do consider themselves above the average. I took a cognitive psychology class where we were discussing how easy it is to fall victim to biases, and that everyone exhibits them from time to time. She claimed that that might be true for most people, but certainly not her -- thus exhibiting the Lake Wobegon bias!

Likewise, some women might be stupid enough to get raped, but not me -- I'm too smart to walk down a dark alley, or take a drink from a creepy guy, or dress "provocatively."

These three aspects -- passive voice thinking, the just world phenomenon, and the Lake Wobegon effect -- combine to give people the means and motive to blame women for their own rapes. Passive voice thinking helps enable a "blame the victim" reaction under the just world phenomenon, and that is compounded by the desire to think of one's self as better than others (the Lake Wobegon effect). The result is the harsh, cruel, evil statement "Women are responsible for their own rapes."

Why people blame rape victims, part 1

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:30:00 GMT

A poll sponsored by a British rape crisis center found that "over half of those surveyed think that there are some circumstances where a person should accept responsibility" for being raped (you can get the PDF summary of the survey on Haven's website here).

It was an Internet poll of 1,000 people, so that's reason enough to doubt the results. The group that actually conducted the research, OpinionMatters, is basically a PR firm that uses dubious polls as a method of getting a company or issue group into the newspapers. The PDF linked above doesn't list the actual questions and responses asked, and there is no other mention of the survey on Haven's site. Without knowing the exact questions asked and more demographic information about the 1,000 people polled, it's hard to make a real judgment about the validity of the percentages presented in the results. After all, according to a CBS poll, 59% of Americans "strongly favor" allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the military, but only 34% "strongly favor" allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. The blogger Neuroskeptic provided a good critique of a similar online polling group a few months ago.

But that only changes the number on the margin; the fact remains that a significant portion of the population is willing to say that a woman bears some responsibility if she is raped. I'd like to offer three reasons for this; let me know what you think.

The first is a trick of the language. Think back to English class. There are two basic forms of sentence structure: active and passive. Active sentences go "Subject verb object," while passive sentences go "object verb subject." For example, "Joe ate the hamburger" is active, while "the hamburger was eaten by Joe" is passive. We use the active voice for the most part, but we use the passive voice to emphasize the object of a sentence, usually for dramatic effect. "Ten students are needed to start a campus group" is passive, but it works because there is no ambiguity and no distortion of the facts. The popular phrase "Mistakes were made" is passive, but it doesn't work because there is intentional ambiguity and a gross omission of the facts.

It is true that there are things a woman can do that will make her more likely to be raped. If she leaves a drink unattended, if she goes home with a guy she doesn't know well, if she walks down a dark alley, if she drinks to the point of blacking out. All of these things can increase a woman's risk of being raped.

In a similar way, smoking can increase a person's likelihood of getting lung cancer. If Bob never smokes a day in his life, but gets lung cancer, no one says he is responsible for getting lung cancer. If Bob smokes two packs a day and gets lung cancer, everyone says he is responsible for getting lung cancer, because he exposed himself to such a great risk that he is in some way responsible for the outcome.

I suspect that some people think that if someone does not take precautions against rape, then they are responsible for that rape. "If Sally didn't walk down that alley, she wouldn't have gotten raped" sounds a lot like "If Bob didn't smoke two packs a day, he wouldn't have gotten lung cancer." This comparison becomes more obviously absurd if we re-phrase the sentences from the passive voice to the active voice. "If Sally didn't walk down that alley, the rapist would not have raped her" sounds very different from "If Bob didn't smoke two packs a day, lung cancer wouldn't have afflicted him."

The sentences sound different because the rephrased sentence about Sally acknowledges a second moral agent -- the rapist -- while the sentence about Bob doesn't introduce anything new. By thinking in the passive voice, by hiding the presence of the rapist, it becomes easier to blame the victim. The perpetrator of the crime just doesn't show up.

Using the passive versus the active voice is not just something to worry about when writing, it's something to worry about when thinking. Hmm, I bet I could write a self-help book containing just that piece of advice.

This is getting a little long, so I'll make this a two-part post. Tomorrow I'll examine two of the cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, that may underlie this "blame the victim" phenomenon: the "just world" assumption and the "Lake Wobegon Effect."

Why treat the dead with respect?

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:15:00 GMT

A few months ago I picked up Edith Hamilton's Mythology. It's a collection of myths from Greek and Roman religion (though the last 30 pages or so are Norse myths). It's also one of those books I read in high school but never really appreciated. One of the aspects of some of the stories that struck me was the degree to which they would honor the body of a fallen comrade. In The Illiad, when Achilles and Hector face off, Hector accepts that he is going to die, but he asks Achilles to treat his corpse with respect, so it can receive a proper burial. Achilles refuses, and when Hector is dead Achilles desecrates the body, until the Greek gods -- the gods, so you know this is culturally important -- step in and make sure the body is returned.

Modern cultures, too, can fetishize corpses. An episode of Criminal Minds I recently watched featured a killer who took a part of his victims' body as a trophy. The family of a Hindu victim told the investigators that they really needed to find that missing body part, otherwise the victim's soul would wander for eternity looking for it.

The Israeli government has traded captured guerilla fighters in exchange for body parts of dead Israeli soldiers. The American military received criticism for burning the corpses of two insurgents in Afghanistan -- especially offensive because Islam prohibits cremation.

This last story shows just how arbitrary the specific rules can be. Islam forbids cremation, while last week, a Hindu man in Britain won the right to an open-air cremation. The man claims that it is a necessary part of "a good death." Meanwhile, the British government argued against the open-air cremation because it was an afront to "decorum and decency."

When I talked to a few of my non-religious friends about why cultures seem to be so concerned about what happens to human remains, the first suggestion was that this is something religions created as part of their concern with the afterlife. That doesn't sit right with me, though. I don't hold any supernatural beliefs about an afterlife, and yet I know that if I saw someone urinating on a human corpse I would feel incredible disgust. I might be able to talk myself out of that disgust, but that initial reaction is a real feeling. Even though I know no harm can come to the person who used to exist in the corpse, I would still feel as though he was being violated. I suspect that religions have co-opted that sense of disgust and created rituals to remove that disgust, rather than actually creating the disgust in the first place.

The second suggestion I came across was that perhaps the obsession with the corpse is an evolutionarily adaptive feature, based on the common thought that dead bodies are bad for public health. Unfortunately for this theory, dead bodies aren't that dangerous (exceptions would be during a plague outbreak of some sort). A decomposing body is not a pleasant smell, but it's not a carrier of disease.

This leads to the third suggestion, that the proper care of the deceased is part of the grieving process. Even if having corpses lining the streets in Port-Au-Prince won't lead to outbreaks of disease, it must be psychologically very difficult for the survivors to walk by such literal reminders of their own mortality, not to mention reminders of their own dead loved ones.

The instinct to take care of the dead isn't so much about protecting the dead, though religions might say it is, but rather it is to protect the living from feeling despair at their grief and at their own mortality. Maybe later this week I'll find some published studies supporting this view.

Episode 6: EMDR and the Military, with Cmdr. Mark Russell

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:32:00 GMT

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My apologies for taking so long between episodes. I just finished unpacking after a move, which will explain the harsher sound in my outro this time. The room I'm recording in now is much more echoic than my old recording space. I also just finished studying for the GREs, as I'm on the march toward grad school application season. But, never fear, I'm committed to keeping this going. It's just too much fun!

This episode features a great interview with Commander Mark Russell, Ph.D. Commander Mark Russell and I discuss Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), with a focus on its use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. EMDR is a controversial treatment. We discuss evidence for its efficacy, doubts about its proposed mechanism of action, and Cmdr. Russell's battles with the military hierarchy. Spoiler: He lost the battle, but he's hoping to win the war.

I came into my research for this episode a knee-jerk skeptic, but I'm leaving more curious than ever. It works as well as other conventional treatments: the Cochrane review seems to show this pretty conclusively. But how does it work? Supporters say that bilateral stimulation of the brain, achieved by inducing rapid horizontal eye movement, helps reprocess the memory. The more "out there" supporters say that EMDR works by manipulating an as-yet-undiscovered energy field in the brain. There is evidence to suggest that it works by having the patientperform a distraction task while recalling the memory, and that anydistraction task -- Tetris, for example -- might help. What seems clear to me is that some more research into its mechanism is a good idea.

I hope you'll give it a listen, and let me know what you think! I'm especially interested to see if the conversation changes anybody's mind. I know it changed mine. And let me know if I shouldn't have changed mine; let me know why you still think EMDR is bunk!

Commander Mark Russell's faculty page at Antioch University, Seattle
British Psychological Society Research Digest reports on a study questioning the mechanism of EMDR
Cochrane review showing EMDR's efficacy
USA Today article chronicling Cmdr. Russell's travails

Follow-up to my interview with Dr. Jacobs

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:30:00 GMT

About a week ago, I posted my interview with Dr. David Jacobs, of the International Center for Abduction Research. My process is to record my introduction before starting the interview, so that if I get some facts wrong the guest can catch me and I can redo the intro. For example, I mistakenly said that Temple University, where Dr. Jacobs is a tenured professor, was in Chicago, when it was actually in Philadelphia (and I had even written in my notes beforehand that Temple was in Philadelphia; something got lost on the way to my mouth). Then, I edit the interview, and as I do so I come across things to bring up during my outro, which I record after the interview is edited down. In the past, it's been a few things, so I've just shared all my thoughts there. But listening to the interview with Dr. Jacobs, there was so much to add that I didn't want to make the episode longer than it already was. Below the fold are my long-winded thoughts.

A good place to start is to look at the comment left by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files, another excellent psychology podcast, which recently celebrated its 100th episode. Congratulations, Michael! Michael notes that Dr. Jacobs sets up a dilemma where people who aren't as steeped in the scientific literature as he is shouldn't be taken as seriously as people who have devoted their lives to the area of research. The thing is, you're never going to find a critic of the alien abduction phenomenon that has devoted their life to it. There are researchers, such as Dr. Chris French, whom I interviewed previously, who have done some level of serious published research into the matter, but their knowledge is nothing compared to the stories Dr. Jacobs has. The reason that critics don't spend their lives studying the abduction phenomenon isn't because they are ignorant of the data, it's that they've examined the best data and found it lacking. Why study something without promise? For skeptics, it's just a few people who have weird experiences. It's of interest, but not of dire consequence for most. But for believers, it's a total world-changer; if we were actually being visited by aliens, I would be really tempted to make that my life's work too.

The second point Michael made that I wanted to discuss is about memory. Dr. Jacobs claimed that memory won't be heavily distorted in alien abduction accounts, because the time between the event and the reporting is sometimes days, or even hours. I'm taking a cognitive psychology class on the side, and we're just getting to memory research. The distorting effects of memory occur seconds after the event. There seems to be a lot of research about cars. For example, if we see a BMW and a Volkswagon Polo going the same speed, we're likely to remember the BMW as going faster, and this effect only takes a day to set in -- and may increase over time. Elizabeth Loftus, in a four-page, very accessible article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (PDF), points out many similar examples from real life. For example, people misreported the D.C. sniper as driving a white van, when this was not the case -- and the witnesses gave their reports days or even minutes after reportedly seeing it. In short, Dr. Jacobs underestimates the malleability of memory.

I started having questions and objections from the beginning. I was talking with a tenured professor at a major university who has made his career, from his Ph.D. dissertation onward, defending the existence of the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon. He's edited and written several popular books. So it sounds disingenuous to me to say that it's all hardship to come out of the abduction closet as an intellectual. It seemed like an attempt to gain sympathy from me and my audience, and to establish his credibility using an argument from embarrassment, but for me it rang hollow.

Speaking of the argument from embarrassment, the first few minutes of the interview consisted of Dr. Jacobs explaining why the argument from embarrassment should give us confidence that the accounts of alien abductions are true. I've never found the argument from embarrassment very convincing, and all it could prove is that these people are honest and earnest in their statements -- something skeptics like Dr. French don't doubt.

When Dr. Jacobs was talking about group abduction stories, where two or three people are able to confirm each other's stories, he's assuming that since this proves they aren't having delusions that that makes it true. It reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials, where a few teenage girls made up stories, and the lies got out of control. Dr. Jacobs would say that no one would ever lie about such an outrageous thing, but hey – the stories, true or false, are believed by many. And he could have used the same argument at the Salem Witch Trials.

I would also disagree with his description of fantasies as basically “happy places we can go in our mind” (my words, not his), and that fantasy-prone personality is when men indulge in feeling powerful and sexually awesome and whatnot. What it's really about is having an active imagination and about blurring the lines between that imagination and reality. Scientific studies have shown that alien abductees DO blur the line between reality and imagination, according to the criteria of the fantasy-prone personality. Joe Nickell – an investigator, but I'm sure Dr. Jacobs would call him a debunker – reviewed the thirteen cases described in John Mack's seminal Abduction, and found that the majority of them fit the diagnosis. Dr. Jacobs is confusing the lay definition of fantasy with the technical definition provided for FPP.

As Michael Britt points out in his comment, some skeptics do have a knee-jerk "it can't be true because of reason X" reaction. But some skeptics, such as Dr. French, take a broader approach. They don't argue that one explanation fits all the evidence, they say that lots of explanations are needed, with a few overarching ideas (for example, media influence). Road hypnosis can't explain everything, sleep paralysis can't explain everything, but if you start adding up the explanations, pretty soon you've covered the vast majority of cases. Dr. Jacobs is setting up a strawman.

I still don't trust hypnosis. It's clear that Dr. Jacobs is shaping the memories over a handful of hypnosis sessions, which is why they start as “confabulations” and end with the same story. When you harp on something, in a disapproving, unbelieving tone, you shape their memories. You can't tell them straight out “You're a chicken” (starting 9 minutes into the video) unless they want to act like a chicken like with stage hypnosis. But you can mold memories. That's my armchair explanation of why the confabulations resolve, to please the hypnotizer. Especially revealing was this: when were were discussing hypnosis, he mentioned that disconfirming evidence that comes up under hypnosis – evidence that doesn't fit the narrative – is ignored until someone else mentions it. The problem is that he then says that the stories aren't idiosyncratic. Well, of course not, because he's ignored out of hand all the idiosyncrasies! He can't have it both ways.

Let's talk scars. People have scars, and they don't know how they got them, and they discover them all the time. Just a week ago, I found a scar in my bellybutton. I happen to remember that I had surgery a few years ago that went in through my belly button, but imagine if I had forgotten that. Or waking up with clothes on backwards. A few weeks ago, I took the bus to work, went around my business, and only near noon did I realize my shirt was on inside out. Isn't it possible that these people just put their clothes on incorrectly? In fact, that's a common theme I picked up from the interviews. Stuff happens to people, they can't explain it, therefore it's an abduction. It's the argument from ignorance: “We don't know what's causing it, therefore we know what's happening.” It's more complicated than that, with hypnosis and cultural influence, but that's a significant part of it.

Almost done. I want to talk about the depth of the evidence. When Dr. Jacobs was talking about the ghost phenomenon and how little knowledge there is about it, he mentioned where they get their energy, who they haunt, where they spend their down time, why they haunt some times and not others – all questions we could ask about the aliens! A common atheist line is that everyone thinks everyone else's religion is absurd. Maybe that's true of people who believe in the paranormal.

Lastly, the point skeptics hate to make: people lie. They do it all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. Dr. Jacobs admitted there were scammers and liars in the UFO abduction phenomenon, but he seems to imply that they're all easily discovered. I don't know one way or the other. What I do know is that people can hold very elaborate lies for very long times, regardless of what Law & Order says. Bill Clinton lied on national television for months about Monica Lewinski. Spouses lie for lifetimes about their illicit affairs. It's something that has always bothered me about self-report, one of the most common tools in social science research. For example, there was a pilot study conducted by a university research group in London that aimed to track how active children were. They gave the children pedometers that would track the number of steps they took. The researchers were shocked to discover that some obese children were extremely active. This finding contradicts all sorts of evidence showing the exact opposite: sedentary lifestyle leads to obesity. So what happened? The children were attaching their pedometers to their dogs' feet. The lesson: people lie. It's rude to accuse someone of lying without hard evidence, but I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that someone who claims to have been abducted is lying.

I tried. I really tried to believe it. How fantastic would it be to be visited by aliens? All the skeptics' questions could be answered. How did they get here? Well, we could ask them. In fact, I want to be abducted. I want so badly to get a chance to talk to these guys, to meet them and believe in them. I'm a science fiction dork, I would love it. But . . . . eyewitness testimony just isn't enough. No matter how hard Dr. Jacobs tried to say these witnesses were unimpeachable, I just can't buy it. Some physical evidence – a subdermal implant, a captured alien hybrid, anything. People are so susceptible to the variety of psychological phenomena that Dr. French discussed, so susceptible to false memories – and to telling exaggerated stories, and outright lies – that the rate of abduction stories, given the cultural influences, isn't a big shock.

Episode 5: The Evidence of Alien Abductions, with Dr. David Jacobs

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:39:00 GMT

Subscribe through iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=312619164

This is a fun one. Skeptics, stick with this one if you can; the psyconodrabble ("The Bunker") at the end will make it worth your while. In a response of sorts to episode 4, Dr. David M. Jacobs and I discuss the evidence for alien abductions. Be sure to listen toward the end, we talk about the mean old jerks who call themselves "skeptics." I have too much to say about this interview, and once you listen, I think you'll understand. We get into some deep water. Expect a blog post later in the week about this one.

Assorted links:

Dr. Jacobs' organization, The International Center for Abduction Research
Dr. Jacobs' book The THREAT: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda on Amazon
My interview with Dr. Chris French, a skeptic of the alien abduction phenomenon.

Episode 4: Psychology of Alien Abduction Experiences, with Dr. Chris French

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:09:00 GMT

Time for another episode! This episode is an interview with Dr. Chris French of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in London. He's a famed British skeptic, and we have a great discussion. We start by talking about the Shirley Ghostman incident (check out the YouTube link below), and move on to the topic of his lab's research. He says that alien abductions can be explained largely by psychological phenomena, including false memories and sleep paralysis. We spent a while talking about false memories in general, it's a fascinating topic. At the end, there's a new thing I'm trying to do: drabbles. Drabbles are 100-word fiction stories. I wrote one about Dr. French and the topic we were discussing. I hope you like it! I'm going to try and do one for each episode going forward.

I think I fixed some of the problems with the audio I was having. The levels were way off. Thank you to Michael Britt of The Psych Files and "Dr. Dave" Van Nuys of Shrink Rap Radio for pointing out the problems and helping me fix them. Check out their podcasts, those two are what got me into psychology podcasting in the first place.

Links:
The website for the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit
An abstract for a paper on alien abductions authored by Dr. French
Shirley Ghostman's lame attempt at humor, with Dr. French and other British skeptics
Michael Shermer and Brian Dunning had more recent run-ins Ghostman
A favorite episode of mine from Shrink Rap Radio
A recent episode of The Psych Files on replication of Stanley Milgram's famous experiments

Episode 3: Article Review: Astrology Versus Personality Tests

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:33:00 GMT

This episode is a change in format. I go solo to explain a particular piece of research. The article is "Science Versus the Stars: A Double-Blind Test of the Validity of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory and Computer-Generated Astrological Natal Charts," by Alyssa Jayne Wyman and Stuart Vyse. It appeared in The Journal of General Psychology in 2008. It touches on a few issues raised in episode 2, my interview with Dr. Glenn Perry. Let me know how you like it!

Some links:

The abstract of the Wyman & Vyse paper
A short personality test based on the Big Five personality traits
Blog entry outlining the proposed move to make personality disorders based on the Big Five (part 2)
B.R. Forer's 1948 "personality analysis"
Tyler Cowen's tasty, tasty economics blog
Zac Efron

Episode 2: An Astrologer Critiques Science, with Dr. Glenn Perry

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:40:18 GMT

My last episode was with a staunch proponent of the scientific method. This time, I interview a critic of the scientific method. Dr. Glenn Perry is an astrologer with a doctorate in clinical psychology. He maintains that some phenomena, such as astrology, cannot be detected by scientific methods. It's a good interview, Dr. Perry does his best to defend his views, and I do my best to push back a little against them while letting him have his say. It's good for defenders of science to interact with critics of science. I hope you'll give a listen, take his criticisms seriously, and see if they change your mind. I'll be updating my blog with more later, so click on that button on your right to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Links:

Dr. Glenn Perry's website
An article from Dr. Perry's website: "From Paradigm To Method In Astrological Research"
Dr. Perry's self-published books
The unaccredited Academy of AstroPsychology