Terminal Lucidity Helps to Discredit Claims That Brains Make Minds

Terminal lucidity is a phenomenon in which some very sick person  believed to be very close to death or with a very damaged brain or demented mind suddenly shows a brief period of intellectual clarity before dying from his disease. This often can occur after a long period of stupor or mental incapacity. 

In a previous post I included an image of a 1936 article mentioning cases of terminal lucidity. I should quote the entire text, particularly for any readers reading this blog in a non-English version (as you can do  using the Translate widget at the top right of this blog). Here is the text of that article, found on page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here. 

"In one of his lectures last year to the L.S.A., the Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified. 

Psychica quotes several analogous cases from the German Wahres Leben. A young girl, imbecile for eight years, one morning informed the doctor of the asylum in which she lived that she would die the following night—which she did—and discussed various points with him with full mental awareness. M. Martensen Larsen has recorded the case of an Army doctor confined for homicidal mania, who, just prior to his passing, recovered his sanity and wrote several letters asking the forgiveness of those he had attempted to injure. M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.

How can we account for his complete lucidity before death ? 

Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ” 

We have here not just one but three different cases in which it is stated that someone with the most severe brain damage seemed to gain or have normal mental function shortly before dying. In two cases it is reported that the person acting normally or with normal cognition just before death had the most extreme disintegration or wasting of the brain, leaving basically no brain left. 

At the bottom of page 79 of the book you can read using the link here, we have an account by a person who says this about her grandmother: "An hour before she passed, this old lady suddenly woke up from the stupor that she had been in for six long years." We then hear an account of the grandmother speaking well, and acting as if she saw apparitions of the dead (a common occurrence for the dying, even those without any brain problems). 

On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)." 

The paper "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants" is one that reported dreams that seemed to foretell a death, and many other hard-to-explain phenomena.  What is remarkable is the amount of hard-to-explain phenomena reported in such a small facility. Questions were asked of workers in Kingsley House, a small facility handling no more than 31 persons at a time, and reporting only about 13 deaths per year. We read of these results, coming from the ten who responded:

• "7 reported unconscious or confused residents who unexpectedly became lucid enough just before they died to interact with relatives and carers," a phenomena sometimes called "terminal lucidity."
• "6 reported dreams that help to prepare for death, and 2 reported dreams or visions that held significant meaning for the dying to help with unfinished business." The "Dreams" section of the paper on page 200 gives several examples, some involving dreams that seemed to foretell a death. 
• "5 reported the dying seeing dead relatives visiting just before death, and 4 reported the dying seeing dead relatives sitting on or near the bed." This is the well-documented phenomenon called deathbed apparitions or deathbed visions, described in my eight posts here. 
• "4 reported the synchronistic appearance of birds or animals around or just before the time of death." 
• "4 reported a change of room temperature around the time of death," with one saying, "sometimes the room is freezing," and that "at other times it is really, really hot."
• "3 reported synchronistic events at the time of death, such as clocks stopping and bells ringing in rooms of those who had recently died." Read here for examples of the clock stopping at death phenomenon. 

The year 2021 scientific paper "Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: Results From a Study on Paradoxical Lucidity" discusses many cases of terminal lucidity.  We read this:

" Detailed case reports of 124 dementia patients who experienced an episode of paradoxical lucidity were received. In more than 80% of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers

of the lucid episode. The majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode..... More than 80% of the patients in this study appeared to have experienced a full, albeit brief, reversal of often profound cognitive impairment in advanced and end-stage dementia."

In the paper we read this: "Macleod (2009) observed 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice in New Zealand and found six cases of unexpected, spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability within 48 hr before the death of the patient."

Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the  authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases.  Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this:

"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."

We also read in the new paper of a Patient Three:

"The patient was a 19-month-old boy who underwent a bone marrow transplant at 16 months of age for ill-defined immune deficiency. He was recovering with typical transplant complications until he developed fevers and progressive neurologic symptoms with loss of ability to communicate, loss of motor function, and loss of cognition.... Prior to the lucid event, he was not responding to healthcare providers and was giving parents only minimal response/eye contact. Three days prior to his death, he became much more alert and interactive, in stark contrast to his steady decline of the prior three months, which was preceded by his parents having decided they would not proceed with further life-saving medical interventions (i.e., surgeries, intubation, etc.). He was noted to be able to move, talk, eat, and communicate for 24-48 hours prior to a rapid decline and death. On the night before his death, he communicated with his parents that he 'was ready to go home' and that 'he and parents would be OK' using verbal and sign language. He talked about joining his brother who was a still-birth, and he told his parents he was going to be fine. Subsequently, he returned to severe mental impairment and died within 24 hours."

No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages. 

Cases such as these are hints that the brain is not the source of the human mind. They are part of a very large body of evidence that minds can operate normally when brains have undergone the most severe damage. Countless other cases are discussed in my posts you can read here and here. Such cases are only some of the innumerable reasons for rejecting the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. When studying such cases and reasons (discussed in the most voluminous detail in the posts of this blog), we should remember: nature never told us that brains make minds. It was merely professors who told us that, jumping to conclusions that were never warranted by observations. 

Newspaper Accounts of Memory Marvels (Part 5)

The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be recalled. There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human memory performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human mental performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do, or humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  In part 1  and part 2 and part 3 and part 4 of this series, I gave many newspaper clips giving examples of such exceptional human memory performance. Let us now look at some more of such newspaper clips. 

In the news account you can read here, we read of individuals who had memorized the entire Babylonian Talmud, a work of 12 or more volumes, totaling 5422 pages. We read this:

"Some years ago, through the kindness of my friend Professor Hollander, of the Johns Hopkins University , my attention was directed to an achievement, memorizing in which 1 venture to report; since, so far as I know, it has remained unnoticed by psychologists, and yet should be stored among the data long and still richly gathering for the study of extraordinary feats of memory. The facts of the case I can hardly do better than to allow the witnesses themselves to state. And first, Rev. Dr. David Philipson of Cincinnati to whom I was first referred by Professor Hollander. 

'The Babylonian Talmud,'  he has been good enough to write me, 'consists usually of twelve large folio volumes comprising thousands of pages. All the printed editions of the Talmud with scarcely an exception, have exactly the same number of pages and the same words on each page. This must be borne in mind in order to understand the remarkable feat of memory about to be described. There have been as there undoubtedly still are, men who know the whole text of the Talmud by heart. Some years ago one of these men, a native of Poland, was in this country. I witnessed his remarkable feats of memory. Thus, one of us would throw open one of the volumes of the Talmud, say the tractate Berakhot, at page 10; a pin would be placed on a word, let us say the fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would then be asked what word is in the same spot on page 38 or 50 or any other page. The pin would be pressed through the volume until it reached the page designated; the memory sharp would then mention the word, and it was found invariably correct. He had visualized in bis brain the whole Talmud; in other words, the pages of the Talmud were photographed on his brain. It was one of the most stupendous feats of memory I have ever witnessed, and there was no fake about it. To the company gathered about the table were a number of Talmudic experts, who would readily have discovered fraud had there been any. The technical name which was used by Jews of aforetimes to designate these memory experts was Shass Pollak; Shass is the abbreviation for the Hebrew terms for the Talmud, and Pollak is Pole; nearly all these memory experts came from Poland. A Shass Pollak then is a Pole who has memorized the entire contents of the Talmud and is able to give exhibitions of his mnemonic powers like those mentioned above.'  

And next let me quote from Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who in answer to my inquiry wrote as follows: 'I have met but one "Shass Pollak" in my life. He was brought into my library one evening by a friend. I conversed with him and experimented upon him. After he had been introduced as the expert in question, I expressed some curiosity, with perhaps a mein of incredulity. He was eager for the fray. 'You are of course aware that all (or nearly all) modern editions of the Talmud are paged alike and printed alike, each page beginning and ending with the same word in all the editions.' ...He would take a pencil and merely glancing at the page put it down anywhere and without looking told the word on which his pencil had lighted. This he did over and over again. There is no reasonable ground for the suspicion that he saw the words. 1 watched him closely, and am convinced that he did not. He had, I feel sure, a perfect image of the page and the position of every word on it in his "head." '

Finally let me give the testimony of Dr. Schechter of New York, late president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America —testimony the more interesting in that while it depends upon the recollection of an experience of many years ago, yet it is an independent account of the same kind of testing which Dr. Philipson reports — namely, by pricking through the pages —and consequently confirms the opinion of Judge Sulzberger that the success of the 'Shass Pollak' who was tested merely by pencil was not due to a sly catching of the word by the eye. President Schechter stated to me by letter that once he had come across a 'Shass Pollak,' but that it was too long a time ago to give an account of him with definiteness. 'It is at least forty-five years since the incident occurred,' he wrote. 'What I remember was that he could tell you the contents of every page of the Talmud by heart. 1 remember also that the people amused themselves by prying a needle into any volume of the Talmud, and he could tell exactly the word on which the needle touched. But I also recollect distinctly that it was nothing more than a verbal or rather local memory, the students all maintaining that he knew very little about the meaning of the contents, their interpretation and application. I heard afterwards of many similar "Shass Pollaks"  but it is a fact that none of them ever attained to prominence in the scholarly world.'  This absence of any scholarly grasp of the contents thus memorized, of which Dr. Schechter speaks, also appears in the judgment of Dr. Philipson. 'I looked upon his achievement at the time I witnessed it as purely mechanical,'  he writes. 'It is quite likely that he could not interpret the Talmud, though he knew its contents by  "heart.” ' 

And Judge Sulzberger, when proposing to his 'Shass Pollak'  that he use his knowledge to some scientific or literary end, was listened to with respect, but nevertheless received the impression that such proposals were deemed by his man to be nonsensical. All of which confirms the oft-repeated observation, that such extraordinary powers of memory may exist in a kind of intellectual disproportion where there is no corresponding development of other powers—where, indeed, there may be an actual stunting of other powers and interests; as though the mind had 'run' to memory, and been enlarged hero at the expense of other functions. As to the more precise amount of Matter that was memorized, it should be noted that a page of the Babylonian Talmud consists, as my colleague, Dr. Popper, has pointed out to me  of the text proper, called the Gemarrah,  printed as a more central portion on the page, and of a commentary printed below and around this text. Upon special inquiry whether the mnemonic feat applied only to the Gemarrah, or included also the commentary, Dr. Philipson states that the test which he witnessed was upon the Gemarrah only; and Judge Sulzberger was of the opinion that this was also true in the case that came under his observation. Even so, the task must have been a stupendous one; the reading matter upon each page is still great, and the number of pages is enormous.

Geo. M. Stratton, University of California, in the 'Psychological Review.'  Professor Popper has also referred me to the articles 'Talmud' and 'Mnemonics' in the Jewish Encyclopedia for evidence that at one period the Talmud was handed down solely by memory. The feat of the Poles here recounted may’ therefore be regarded perhaps as the survival of a custom among early Jewish students in many and widely-separated communities." 

The Babylonian Talmud is shown in the image below. We see a set of about 20 volumes:

Source: Wikipedia Commons (link)

An English translation of the Babylonian Talmud may be found on www.archive.org. Borrowing some of that translation, I see an alternating between passages that are marked Mishnah and passages marked Gemara (which must be the Gemarrah mentioned above). For example, here is a random page:

We can assume that an average page of the Babylonian Talmud had at least about 100 words in its Gemarrah or Gemara part. Judging from the photo above of the set comprising about 20 volumes each looking like they were at least 200 pages long, the Bablyonian Talmud had a total of roughly 4000 pages, with its Gemarrah or Gemara part consisting of roughly 400,000 words. 

The claim that is made in the newspaper article above is not an unprecedented claim of memory performance. In the newspaper story here, we read of a 90-day scripture memorization contest. We read this about the winner:

"On the day of the award it was found that among the older competitors the winner was Miss Leste May Williams, a young woman 16 years of age. With these ninety days, during which she had an attack of measles, she committed to memory and recited to the committee 12,236 verses of Scripture, covering the entire New Testament ...and including liberal selections from Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and other parts of the Old Testament."

The New Testament has about 180,000 words, and the average verse in the Bible has about 25 words. So it seems that when  Leste May Williams memorized 12,236 verses of the Bible, she had memorized a total of about 300,000 words.  That is a feat of memorization almost as remarkable as memorizing the entire  Gemarrah or Gemara part of the Babylonian Talmud, which I estimate as requiring the memorization of roughly 400,000 words. 

No, Scientists Did Not "Find Ways to Boost Memory in Aging Brains"

Academia press releases these days are very often guilty of bogus boasts; and press releases announcing neuroscience research are some of the worst examples of misleading PR. Looking at "science news" headlines today, I find a prime example. It is a press release from Virginia Tech, which appears on the frequently-misinforming Medical XPress site with the headline "Scientists find ways to boost memory in aging brains." 

Before reading the text below the headline I thought to myself that the research was going to be some more low-quality rodent research that sadly dominates neuroscience research efforts these days. I was right; that's just what it is. 

After making unfounded statements speaking as if scientists knew things they do not actually know, the press release claims "the researchers were able to improve memory in older rats," mentioning the study here. It's a study called "Age-related dysregulation of proteasome-independent K63 polyubiquitination in the hippocampus and amygdala" behind a paywall, and no preprint is available. But without spending 36 dollars to read the study, there's a way to tell that it is low-quality unreliable research work. When viewed with a PC (but not a tablet), the page with the abstract has an image of the paper's visuals. Although it is a low-resolution image, I can still see enough to tell that very small study group sizes were used.  There are bar graphs that look like the one below:

In a graph like this, the total number of * symbols behind each bar indicates the study group size, with each * symbol indicating the data from one animal subject. Now, by squinting at the graphs you can see here, and by looking at the number of * symbols behind the bars, you can tell that the study group sizes used in the "Age-related dysregulation of proteasome-independent K63 polyubiquitination in the hippocampus and amygdala" study were way too small, only about 10 or smaller. No study like this can be claimed as reliable evidence for anything unless it uses study groups that are each at least 15 or 20 subjects per study group. And for almost all studies of this type, a study group size much larger than 15 would be needed. 

A similar 2011 paper by the corresponding author of the paper mentioned above (Jarome) is publicly available, as is a 2013 paper, a 2024 paper, and a a 2016 paper.  All involve memory-related rat experiments using way-too-small study group sizes, typically only about 9 animals per group. You can find this kind of defect by searching in the papers for the phrase "n =" or "n=". All four of these papers also involve reliance on the unreliable "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge animal recall.  None of the four papers involved a blinding protocol, and none of the four papers seemed to have involved any sample size calculation.  The production and  publication of papers like this with such defects is a long-standing disgrace in cognitive neuroscience, where badly designed studies seem to be more the rule than the exception. 

The Virginia Tech press release also refers to a second study (co-authored by Jarome), and the full text of that study is available. It is a study called "Increased DNA methylation of Igf2 in the male hippocampus regulates age-related deficits in synaptic plasticity and memory," which you can read here. We read of way-too-small study group sizes for six experiments, with an average study group size of only about 10 subjects, and none of the study groups being larger than 12 subjects. This use of way-too-small study groups is a fatal defect in the design of the study. Also, the study used the utterly unreliable method of trying to judge "freezing behavior" in rodents, which is not a reliable way to measure how well an animal remembered anything, for reasons I explain in my post here. All correlational studies of this type relying on "freezing behavior" estimations are junk science, as are almost all studies of this type using fewer than 15 or 20 subjects per study group. 

In the case of the study "Increased DNA methylation of Igf2 in the male hippocampus regulates age-related deficits in synaptic plasticity and memory," we have three indicators of junk science:

• Way-too-small study group sizes, all 12 or smaller. 
• The use of unreliable "freezing behavior" judgments, not a reliable way to measure how well a rodent remembered anything. 
• A lack of any blinding protocol, essential for any study of this type to be taken seriously.

So the scientists at Virginia Tech sure did not "find ways to boost memory in aging brains." There are ways to effectively boost memory in aging people, but no techniques that are accurately described as techniques for boosting memory "in brains," and no robust evidence that memories are stored in brains (which fail to yield any evidence of information a human learned, no matter how closely their tissue is microscopically studied).  Ways to boost memory in aging people include things like (1) stimulants such as coffee that make a person more alert, and more inclined to learn better; (2) psychological techniques such as mnemonics, that can improve a person's ability to acquire memories and recall memories. 

The study group size required for a typical neuroscience study is related to the effect size, which is small in almost all neuroscience studies. The lower the effect size, the higher the study group size needed for a reliable result.  Well-designed studies make use of a sample size calculation to determine the study group size needed for good statistical power. No such calculation was done in the study "Increased DNA methylation of Igf2 in the male hippocampus regulates age-related deficits in synaptic plasticity and memory," 

The paper "Prevalence of Mixed-methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research" (alternate link: here) has a Table 2 (shown below) giving recommendations for minimum study group sizes for different types of research. The minimum subjects for an experimental study are 21 subjects per study group. The studies mentioned above are experimental studies that used only about half of this minimum number.  The "case study" type mentioned below is a different type of study in which you merely document one or a few occurrences of some condition or situation, without trying to show a cause. 

Postscript: A year 2025 study co-authored by Jarome is the paper "Proteasome-independent K63 polyubiquitination selectively

regulates ATP levels and proteasome activity during fear

memory formation in the female amygdala," mentioning the same K63 referred to in one of the paper titles above. Don't get the wrong idea from the mention that "Twenty-one male and 110 female 8- to 9-week-old Sprague Dawley rats were used." The real question is: how many of these rats were used for the test trying to support the claim that memory was affected? We get the answer in Figure 3E, where we learn that the study groups consisted of only about 6 rats per study group. We see the same old "freezing behavior" chart, a sign that the study used the worthless, unreliable method of trying to measure recall in rats by judging non-movement  of a rat during some arbitrary time interval. The authors claim that there was a difference in memory in females, but not in males, based on a chart showing low "freezing behavior" in six female rats. But one of the many reasons for discarding all papers based on such "freezing behavior" methods is that male rats and female rats show very different levels of so-called "freezing behavior."

The paper "The Difference between Male and Female Rats in Terms of Freezing and Aversive Ultrasonic Vocalization in an Active Avoidance Test" tells us this: "We found that males were more likely to experience freezing (40%) than females (3.7%)."  This very low levels of freezing behavior in females (and a level of only 40% in males) helps to make it all the more clear how badly neuroscientists are bungling by trying to measure recall or fear in rodents by trying to judge "freezing behavior," particularly whenever female rats are involved. The reported result that freezing behavior occurs very much less commonly in female rats than male rats is also reported in the year 2025 paper here, and you can see the difference in that paper by comparing Figure 1 and Figure 2. 

New Twin Study Clashes With "Brains Make Minds" Claim

 A recent press release has a title of "Major IQ differences in identical twins linked to schooling, challenging decades of research." We read of a scientific paper with results shocking to those who assumed that intelligence is a product of the brain. 

Two scientists compiled a dataset involving 87 twin pairs. The dataset included IQ scores and data on the educational experience of the twins. 52 pairs of twins with similar schooling had an average IQ difference of about 6 points. 25 pairs of twins with "somewhat similar" schooling had an average IQ difference of about 12 points. For the ten pairs of twins with "very dissimilar" schooling, the average IQ difference was 15 points. This is similar to the average IQ difference between two randomly selected people, which is about 17 points. 

Fifteen points is a big difference on an IQ score. A graph showing IQ scores as found in a human population will look like the graph below, with the most common numbers being found in the middle. 

We may presume that twins have identical brains. So we see a big average difference (about 15 points) between the intelligence levels of twins with identical brains, when such twins have very different educations. This is a result that clashes with claims that the brain is the source of someone's mind.  It would seem that if such claims are true, twins with identical brains should tend to have IQ scores almost identical. 

A recent article in The Atlantic by psychology professor Erik Turkheimer is entitled "Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are." We read this:

"We do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others. The more we have learned about the specifics of DNA associated with intelligence, the further away that goal has receded....If anything, we are further away now than in 2018 in knowing 'basically what's going on' with genetic influences on intelligence....All of the most direct methods of searching for IQ genes were unsuccessful."

Whenever people make statements like this, we should tend to regard them as confessions which undermine or cast doubt on one of the underlying assumptions of the confessor. When someone confesses that he does not know how we will be able to do something, we should regard that as a strong reason for doubting that he will be able to do that thing. When a prosecutor confesses that he does not know how a murder defendant committed a claimed murder, we should doubt that such a person committed such a murder. And when some expert confesses that we do not know how Factor X causes Result Y, we should regard this as being a reason for doubting that Factor X causes Result Y.  So when we hear people confess things such as "we do not understand the genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others," we should then doubt very much that there are "genetic or brain mechanisms that cause some people to be more intelligent than others." 

Men Have Faster-Shrinking Brains, But Women Get an Alzheimer's Diagnosis About Twice as Often as Men

 In the October 13, 2025 online edition of the journal Nature, we have an article with a headline of "Men's brains shrink faster than women's; what that means for Alzheimer's."  Alzheimer's is a disease involving a decline in mental function, and for older people the term is basically equivalent to dementia. 

Now, under the hypothesis that the brain makes the mind and that brains store memories, if men's brains shrink faster than women's as people age, there should be a higher rate of Alzheimer's disease in men. But the article tells us that the opposite is true. The article says, "Nearly twice as many women are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease as men." 

The article tells us that the conclusion that men's brains shrink faster than women's is based on a large study involving 12,500 MRI scans from 4,726 people who had at least two scans per person, taken an average of three years apart. We are given an example of the shrinkage rate: the claim that the postcentral cortex in men shrinks by 2% per year for men, versus 1.2% per year for women. 

The article's findings are contrary to claims that dementia or Alzheimer's disease is proportional to brain tissue loss. It is therefore very misleading for the article to include a visual like the visual it has. The visual shows a normal brain and a shrunken brain, with a caption of "A healthy brain and a brain affected by Alzheimer's disease." This is an old propaganda technique long used by those trying to suggest that brains are the source of minds and that brains are the storage place of memories. The technique involves showing photos of a normal brain and a shrunken brain, with a caption saying that the shrunken brain is the brain of the person with Alzheimer's. 

Contrary to the impression created by such a photo pair, a book on dementia says on page 35 that "there are many reports of people carefully diagnosed...as clearly having the clinical symptoms of dementia and yet showing no evidence of brain pathology."  On the same page the book gives this quote from a neuroscientist named Robert Terry:

"Over the years, investigators have sought assiduously for lesions or tissue alterations in the Alzheimer's brain which...might at least correlate with clinical determinants of the disease severity....Despite 30 years of such efforts, clinico-pathologic correlations have been so weak or entirely lacking that determination of the proximate, let alone the ultimate, cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has not been possible."

I may note that studies on the relation between dementia and brain volume are often guilty of various flaws. One flaw sometimes occurring is when the brains of people diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's are compared to the brains of healthy controls. If such a diagnosis was made after brains scans of subjects were done, the state of the brain may have influenced what type of diagnosis a person got, making the diagnosis a poor way of independently comparing brain states and mental states. A better technique is to judge dementia or Alzheimer's purely on the basis of performance on mental tests such as the MMSE, and to compare performance on such tests with brain states. The MMSE is the Mini-Mental State Examination, and is the most common test for cognitive impairment. 

The paper here shows graphs comparing MMSE scores and gray matter volumes, and shows no strong correlation between the two. We have in Figure 2 a scatter plot showing dots, each of which represents a correlation between gray matter in some region of the brain, and the corresponding MMSE scores. None of the correlations are strong, with none being higher than .5. Almost all of the correlations are weak, being well under .5; and the average correlation is only about .25.  A strong correlation is one such as .8 or .9. 

We do not have in the paper a graph showing negative correlations between regions of the brain and the corresponding MMSE scores. If such a graph had been given, we would probably have seen just as many or almost as many negative correlations (between brain volumes in different regions and MMSE scores) as positive correlations. Using the phrase "gray matter atrophy" to refer to brain shrinkage, the paper states, "The associations between gray matter atrophy, hypoperfusion, and cognitive impairment in AD [Alzheimer's disease] are still unknown, especially the causal pathways between them." The Nature article discussed in this post makes it all the more clear that there is no clear causal relation between brain shrinkage and dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Below is interesting data from Table 1 of the paper here. We have data on six elderly female subjects called "super-agers." The MMSE number is the score on the Mini-Mental State Examination, a test of cognitive ability including short-term recall and also long-term semantic memory.  The maximum score on the test is 30. Notice the lack of correlation between brain weight and IQ, and the lack of correlation between brain weight and the MMSE score. The  MMSE scores for the 1st and 2nd subjects are identical, with the 2nd subject being very slightly smarter, even though the second subject has a brain weight 25% smaller. That same 2nd subject has an IQ of 135 -- in the 99th percentile for humans -- despite her  brain being very far below the average female brain size of about 1200 grams. The 4th subject has a brain much smaller than the fifth subject, but has the same perfect MMSE score, and an IQ score 10% higher. These results are consistent with the idea that your brain is not the source of your mind, and not the explanation of your memory powers. 

NAME	AGE	MMSE (MAX=30)	IQ	BRAIN WEIGHT (GRAMS)
SA1	87	29	133	1240
SA2	90	29	135	990
SA3	99	25	112	1020
SA4	87	30	119	1090
SA5	81	30	107	1269
SA6	90	29	111	1100

A similar table with data for 50 subjects can be found in the year 2021 paper "Is there a correlation between the number of brain cells and IQ?" We read this summary of the results:

"In our sample of 50 male brains, IQ scores did not correlate significantly with the total number of neurons (Fig. 1A), oligodendrocytes (Fig. 1B), astrocytes (Fig. 1C) or microglia (Fig. 1D) in the neocortex, nor with the cortical volume (Fig. 2A), surface area (Fig. 2B) and thickness (Fig. 2C). This also applied to estimates of the four separate lobes (frontal-, temporal-, parietal-, and occipital cortices; see Supplementary Material). Neither did IQ score correlate significantly with the volumes of white matter (Fig. 2D), central gray matter (Fig. 2E) or lateral ventricles (Fig. 2F), nor with the brain weight (Fig. 3A), or body height (Fig. 3B). All of these correlation coefficients were less than 0.2." 

Can we imagine a more complete research failure of the "brains make minds" hypothesis?

Appendix: In the scientific paper entitled, “A guide to appropriate use of Correlation coefficient in medical research,” we read the following: “A correlation coefficient of 0.2 is considered to be negligible correlation while a correlation coefficient of 0.3 is considered as low positive correlation.” Below is Table 1 from that paper, which has the heading of "Rule of Thumb for Interpreting the Size of a Correlation Coefficient."

Size of Correlation	Interpretation
.90 to 1.00 (−.90 to −1.00)	Very high positive (negative) correlation
.70 to .90 (−.70 to −.90)	High positive (negative) correlation
.50 to .70 (−.50 to −.70)	Moderate positive (negative) correlation
.30 to .50 (−.30 to −.50)	Low positive (negative) correlation
.00 to .30 (.00 to −.30)	negligible correlation

If you do a Google image search for "correlation coefficient interpretation," you will find several tables or guidelines that list all correlation coefficients of 0.2 or less as either "negligible," "very poor," or "very weak," and some of them (like the table above) actually list all correlation coefficients of .3 or less as "negligible.

Every "Grade A" Report of an Out-of-Body Experience Cripples the Credibility of "Brains Make Minds" Claims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A typical observer position in out-of-body experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

suddenly I was surrounded by gentle light and soft music. 

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

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

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

to move in the direction the sounds were coming from, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilson tells us the following: 

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

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

Attempts to explain away such very common out-of-body experiences as hallucinations make no sense at all. A hallucination is by definition when you see something that is not really there. Someone reporting seeing his body from about two meters above it is not having a hallucination, because what he sees (his body) is actually there. 

Moreover, such experiences show strongly repeating very distinctive features (as discussed above), which we would not see in hallucinations (which would merely have random content).  There are a billion-and-one things someone might hallucinate about, so given so many possibilities for hallucination content and the rarity of visual hallucinations, we would expect that only once in a blue moon would any person on Earth have a hallucination about floating above his body.  Instead, a significant fraction of the human population seems to report out-of-body experiences (about 10% to 20% according to the surveys listed here).  There are many veridical out-of-body-experiences in which someone reports seeing something he should not have been able to see if he was hallucinating.  Such experiences powerfully refute claims that out-of-body experiences are mere hallucinations.  For example, in the case described here, #41, a person (S. H. Beard) tried to deliberately produce an out-of-body experience targeting the location of a second person unaware of such an attempt, and the second person reported seeing an apparition of that person at the same time, with a third person living with the second person also reporting the sight of such an apparition at that time. 

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

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

Published reports of out-of-body experiences vary in quality.  If a report is merely a recollection of what someone saw very long ago, and no earlier report was published, that does not qualify as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience. If someone writes what he claims was told him by someone else,  without quoting word-for-word exactly what the person said, that does not qualify as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.   If someone reports something he saw after using hallucinatory drugs, that is  not a "Grade A"  report of an out-of-body experience.  If someone merely reports a kind of "up in the clouds" feeling or "floating sky-high" feeling without observing his body from outside of the body, that is  not a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.  Accounts that quote from an unnamed witness do not qualify as a "Grade A" report  unless they are quotes taken verbatim from that witness  by a named reliable source. 

On the page here we have some accounts of out-of-body experiences published in the New York Times. They are only "Grade B" accounts because the witnesses are recalling what happened very long ago. Jeff Sears says that decades ago during surgery, "I found myself hovering above myself on the hospital table."  Marion Novack says that decades ago "I was floating above my body in the emergency room, watching the physicians and staff trying to save me."

A "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience occurs when a normal credible person without a psychiatric diagnosis describes in writing (or in taped speech) what he saw very recently, while describing viewing his body while totally apart from his body. There are many such reports in the literature. There are also many reports that we can classify as "Grade A+" reports. The "Grade A+" reports are those which meet the requirements of a "Grade A" report, but also involve a person reporting seeing something that he should have been unable to see if he was still in his body, with such an observation being later verified as correct.  Many such "Grade A+" reports are discussed in my post here. 

 Each and every such Grade A or Grade A+ report of an out-of-body experience is enough to cripple the credibility of claims that the brain is the source  of the human mind. No such reports should ever occur if your mind is produced by your brain.  

A system for rating the reliability of unexpected paranormal reports is discussed in my post here. I proposed a system in which up to six stars could be awarded: 

• Add 1 star if we have first-hand testimony or testimony exactly quoting what a witness said he saw.
• Add 1 star if we have a named and reliable witness.
• Add 1 star if a written dated eyewitness report was made very soon after the observation occurred, with the report being quoted, or the account being such a report.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was published very soon after the observation occurred.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was made by multiple witnesses who agree with each other.
• Add 1 star if the observation report is backed up by physical evidence such as a photo or video.

For an out-of-body experience, the last two items in the bullet list above are inapplicable. For an out-of-body experiences we might adapt the system to be like this:

• Add 1 star if we have first-hand testimony or testimony exactly quoting what a witness said he saw, in which he or she reports being outside of his body.
• Add 1 star if we have a named and reliable witness.
• Add 1 star if a written dated eyewitness report was made very soon after the observation occurred, with the report being quoted, or the account being such a report.
• Add 1 star if the observation report was published very soon after the observation occurred.
• Add 1 star if we have clear evidence the witness underwent a life-threatening experience, of a type (such as cardiac arrest) that is often associated with out-of-body experiences. 
• Add 1 star if there is verification of something the witness claimed to have seen while out of the body, something he should have been unable to observe by regular means.

We might classify testimony scoring 5 or 6 stars under such a system as a "Grade A" report of an out-of-body experience.

If the topic of this post interested you, check out my free 160-page book "Near-Death Experiences and Out-of-Body Experiences," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  which you can get by clicking the [] icon at the bottom of the file viewer, you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link.