Very many of today's neuroscientists waste endless hours and vast amounts of money doing the wrong kind of research. They spend huge amounts of time doing very poorly designed studies that are guilty of various types of Questionable Research Practices such as lack of pre-registration, use of way-too-small study group sizes, lack of adequate blinding protocols, and use of poor methods of measuring animal learning and animal fear (such as the use of unreliable "freezing behavior" judgments). When it comes to researching human mental phenomena, neuroscientists very often fail to do their homework by adequately studying the phenomena and related phenomena. Again and again neuroscientists will rush into some harebrained neuron-related investigation into some type of mental phenomena that the neuroscientist failed to ever study in any depth.
A recent essay by neuroscientist Christof Koch sounds like another example of a neuroscientist doing research in the wrong way. Koch discusses near-death experiences, and then tells us he took some of the hallucinogenic drug DMT, making it sound like he did this to get insight about near-death experiences. That sounds very silly. 99% of near-death experiences occur to people who did not take any hallucinogenic drugs, but who have had experiences such as heart attacks and automobile accidents. There does not exist in the human brain more than the most minute trace amount of DMT, and speculations about DMT being released during a near-death experience are without any foundation, as I discuss here. The question of DMT in the brain was clarified by David E. Nichols in a paper he authored in the Journal of Psychopharmocology. Speaking of DMT (also known as N,N-dimethyltryptamine) in the paper Nichols says, “It is clear that very minute concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine have been detected in the brain, but they are not sufficient to produce psychoactive effects.”
Elsewhere describing his DMT experience with the words "I almost died," Koch gives this description of his DMT experience, which is internally inconsistent, and does not hold water as an accurate account of his experience:
" As I was sucked into a black hole, my last thought was that with the dying of the light, I too would die. And I did. I ceased to exist in any recognizable way, shape, or form. No more Christof, no more ego, no more self; no memories, dreams, desires, hopes, fears—everything personal was stripped away. Nothing was left but a nonself: this remaining essence wasn’t man, woman, child, animal, spirit, or anything else; it didn’t want anything, expect anything, think anything, remember anything, dread anything. But it experienced. It saw a point of cold white light of unbearable intensity, a timeless universe convulsed to a blazing, icy light. That and a profound feeling of both terror and ecstasy, the awfulness of pure experience lasting indefinitely—for there was no perception of time. The experience wasn’t brief or long. It simply was."
This account is self-contradictory. On one hand, Koch records having memories of experiencing intense emotions, but on the other hand he claims that he had "no memories" and "no more self." If you had memories of an experience, then it can't be accurate to say you had "no memories" and did not "remember anything." And the only way you can have intense emotions is as a self, not as a total non-self. We need not take very seriously any claims Koch has made about temporarily becoming a non-self by using DMT. Such claims may be just subjective interpretations of an unusual experience he had.
Very strangely, Koch attempts to insinuate that his DMT trip had some relevance to explaining near-death experiences. He sounds like someone who has never very seriously studied such experiences. The Greyson Scale (widely used in research on near-death experiences) is a list of the common features of near-death experiences. Some experience of having "no memories" is not one of the items on such a list. Some experience of having "no self" is not one of the items on such a list. Quite the opposite often occurs in near-death experiences. People have experiences of being a kind of "realer-than-real" version of themselves, and have very distinct and very vivid memories of such experiences, describing them in great detail. For example, in the account of a near-death experience here, a woman says, "I was more of a person than I had ever been before." And instead of finding themselves with "no memories," people having near-death experiences very often report having a "life review" experience in which they vividly review or re-experience some of their most important life experiences. Here is a typical account:
"It was a scene from my life. It flashed before me with incredible rapidity, and I understood it completely and learned from it. Another scene came, and another, and another, and I was seeing my entire life, every second of it. And I didn’t just understand the events; I relived them. I was that person again, doing those things to my mother, or saying those words to my father or brothers or sisters, and I knew why, for the first time, I had done them or said them. Entirety does not describe the fullness of this review. It included knowledge about myself, that all the books in the world couldn’t contain. I understood every reason for everything I did in my life. And I also understood the impact I had on others."
People having near-death experiences also report forming vivid new memories during such experiences, such as memories of contacting deceased relatives or encountering some mystical realm of existence.
Koch gives some language which sounds like he is trying to make people guess that he had something a little like an out-of-body experience, saying, "My mind gradually returned to my body." But he does not describe anything like the out-of-body experiences that so often occur during near-death experiences. In such an experience an observer will see their physical body from a viewing position outside of their body. Koch reports no such thing. It sounds like he was merely kind of spaced-out by the drug he took, and then very gradually got back to normal, as the effects of the drug very gradually diminished. That isn't having an out-of-body experience. People who have out-of-body experiences during near-death experiences do not report gradually returning to their body, but instead report very suddenly returning to their bodies.
The type of accounts we get in near-death experiences
We may wonder: what was this "point of cold white light" Koch describes seeing which he describes as having "unbearable intensity"? This sounds nothing like what is reported in near-death experiences. In such experiences people often report encountering a Being of light, which they describe as having enormous warmth and love, rather than a cold point of light. An honest title for Koch's essay would have been, "I Tried a DMT Trip, and It Was Nothing Like a Near-Death Experience."
Our "sounds like he didn't do his homework" neuroscientist makes these untenable claims:
"All three classes of transformative experiences that I described—religious or mystical, psychedelic-induced, and near-death experiences—probably have a common underlying neurobiological mechanism. One possibility is a lull of neural activity in the posterior hot zone, especially in the visual, auditory and somatosensory cortices, posterior cingulate, and precuneus cortices."
Near-death experiences typically involve very vivid visual imagery. Under the "brains make minds" hypothesis, it makes no sense to be trying to explain very vivid experiences by imagining a "lull" or decrease in neural activity in the visual part of the brain. It is nonsensical to claim that an experience produced by psychedelics has a "common underlying neurobiological mechanism" with experiences that are not produced by psychedelics. That's like saying that cars raised in the air by cyclones are raised by a "common underlying mechanism" as cars raised in the air at auto shops. Near-death experiences commonly occur to people during cardiac arrest, when electrical activity in the brain has shut down. As discussed here, EEG readings show that electrical activity shuts down within a few seconds after the heart stops. When that happens, you do not have a mere "lull of neural activity" but a cessation of neural electrical activity. It is just such a cessation that rules out neural explanations for near-death experiences.
The study here discusses EEG readings taken during DMT trips. Those taking DMT trips have not-very-unusual brain waves that are nothing like the flatlining of brain waves that occurs during cardiac arrest. So Koch's claim of a "common underlying neurobiological mechanism" in near-death experiences and DMT trips is untenable. A brain with its electrical activity shut down is in a totally different state than a brain with near-normal EEG readings.
Instead of taking a DMT trip, Koch should have seriously studied near-death experiences and related paranormal experiences for insights. But alas, most neuroscientists these days seem to be not-very-diligent scholars of human minds and the full spectrum of human mental experiences. Koch is a proponent of the extremely misguided theory called integrated information theory, which you can read about in my posts here. The theory relies on shadow-speaking about human minds, in which human minds are typically described using the "make it sound like a mere shadow of itself" term "consciousness," an approach that we tend to get from lazy scholars of human minds and human mental experiences, who don't want to go to the trouble of deeply studying and analyzing the full spectrum of human mental experiences and human mental abilities.
A 2023 paper by Christof Koch has the misleading title "Do not go gently into that good night: The dying brain and its paradoxically heightened electrical activity." Making use of a vague term "end-of-life" (a term which is not clear about whether it means before or after a heart stops) Koch states this:
"These end-of-life EEG surges were initially believed to be artifacts but are now recognized as reflecting high-frequency brain activity. They are common (46% in ref. 3) in critically ill patients who die but, importantly, are not found in brain-dead patients."
See the appendix of this post for why the study he references does nothing to show surges in brain activity after the heart stops. The title of Koch's paper is misleading. There is no robust evidence of "heightened electrical activity" after the heart stops in a dying person. To the contrary, the evidence shows unequivocally that brains shut down and flatline within about 10 seconds after a heart stops. That fact is one that prevents any credible neural explanation for near-death experiences, which are often long, vivid experiences that occur after a person's heart has stopped.
Then there's the reality of incredibly fast memory recall in near-death experiences. In such experiences people will often report some incredibly fast recall in which they recalled very quicky all of the major life experiences they had had. The ordinary fact of instant recall is the gravest problem for all claims that memory recall occurs through brain activity, for reasons I fully explain in my post "Why the Instantaneous Recall of Old Memories Should Be Impossible for a Brain." There is not a neuroscientist in the world who can give a halfway credible explanation as to how a human can instantly recall facts as quickly as people do when they play the game show Jeopardy. Such instant recall should be impossible in a brain, which has none of the things that computers have which allow fast retrieval of information: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting. The near-death experience vastly exacerbates the instant recall problem, by giving us countless cases of people who claimed to have "seen their whole lives flash before their eyes," as if they could suddenly recall all of their main life events instantly -- with this often occurring in shutdown brains when such recall should be the least likely thing to ever occur. I will explain this point more fully in my next post.
Because near-death experiences blast into smithereens the credibility of claims that neuroscientists like to make (that the mind is merely the product of the brain and that memories are a neural effect), I can understand why all the reports of near-death experiences might cause a kind of panic mode in neuroscientists, leading them to start throwing desperate Hail Mary passes such as trying to go on DMT drug trips in hopes of resolving their dilemma.
I myself am a lifelong non-drinker and non-smoker who has never used any kind of illegal drugs or so-called mind-expanding drugs. I have never even tried marijuana. Now, I hear quite a few people claiming that the use of certain substances such as LSD or DMT or psilocybin can be "mind-expanding." And I have written very much about certain types of experiences that seemed mind-expanding such as near-death experiences and experiences under hypnotic trances. So, you may ask, why don't I try adding to my body of knowledge and study by experimenting with such substances? Let me try to answer in a way that I hope will not sound "holier than thou," but which is mostly peculiar to my situation, rather than any invocation of a general principle.
The first reason I avoid all alcohol and all mind-altering substances has to do with my long-time history as an observer of spooky phenomena and paranormal-seeming phenomena. My observations of spooky phenomena have long been published on my "Orb Pro" blog you can read here. Mostly these observations consist of photographs and videos. But an important subset of the observations involve my frequent eyewitness testimony of spontaneous spooky events that I was not able to photograph, typically because of an event occurring so quickly. Now, for me it is important that my reports of such spooky events have high credibility. And I think that the credibility of such reports might be weakened if I were the type who sometimes uses substances that might distort a person's perception or judgment, or substances that might produce a hallucination. I wish to always be a Grade A witness to anything paranormal-seeming that I report, with all observations occurring when I was as sober as a judge. I don't wish to engage in consumption of alcohol or mind-altering substances that might make me less than a Grade A witness of such phenomena.
Another reason I avoid all alcohol and all mind-altering substances has to do with my long-standing role as a trying-to-be-objective analyst of minds, brains, human mental phenomena, biology, psychic phenomena and grand philosophical topics such as whether our universe is a mere accident or the product of some transcendent will. I want for my analysis of such topics to be based on solid reasoning, solid evidence and solid scholarship rather than subjective feelings that might be produced by mind-altering drugs or mind-affecting drugs. I want my reasoning on such topics to always be very level-headed reasoning, and I wouldn't want to ever publish some post that had a "trippy" or soggy-headed sound to it. When I state a conclusion on one of my blogs, I want my readers to have confidence that my conclusion was based on the calmest reasoning, rather than some emotional state created by drug use or alcohol use.
I hear that some people use mind-altering drugs or leisure drugs or alcohol to reduce stress or the effects of trauma. I would not criticize someone for doing that. In my own case I have been very lucky to have led a mostly low-stress life with no great stress or trauma in the past 40 years (with the exception of the World Trade Center bombing). So having had the great fortune of having had no great stress or trauma for decades, I have had no need to ease pain through the use of drugs or alcohol.
But, you may ask, are you not interested in one day "opening the doors of perception" and taking a sojourn that may offer the thrill of some higher state of consciousness? I am actually very interested in doing just that. But I figure I will not have to wait terribly long before experiencing such a thing. My studies of near-death experiences and many other types of psychic phenomena lead me to think that death is the doorway to a higher state of consciousness and a much greater state of perception. Given my advanced age, I figure that I will not have to wait terribly long before passing through such a doorway, without having to use mind-altering drugs. I can see how it might be very different for some young person. A person who was, say, age 20, might think, "I'm not waiting 60 years for my doors of perception to open."
Appendix: I mention above how Koch has a paper that states this:
"These end-of-life EEG surges were initially believed to be artifacts but are now recognized as reflecting high-frequency brain activity. They are common (46% in ref. 3) in critically ill patients who die but, importantly, are not found in brain-dead patients."
The study that Koch refers to in Reference 3 is the 2017 study "Characterization of end-of-life electroencephalographic surges in critically ill patients." There are quite a few problems with that study. First, it did not use the type of EEG device used by neurologists, but a much cheaper device called the SEDLine device, one "developed as an assessment of hypnosis during anesthesia." The manual of the device tells us that it computes a single number, something called a Patient State Index which it defines as the likelihood that a patient is anesthetized. The devices were not designed for the purpose the paper authors used them for. The SEDLine device does not measure pulse or heart rate. Some dubious-sounding data analysis is described:
"Raw data files from SEDLine devices were de-identified and analyzed with the assistance of engineers from Massimo Inc. Files with adequate data integrity were then analyzed for EEG frequency and waveform characteristics."
That sounds like something that could easily have gone wrong. The paper defined an "end-of-life electroencephalographic surge" as any increase of 50% above baseline, but the paper authors did not have heart-rate data corresponding to their brain wave data, as they were analyzing solely from a head-only device (SEDLine) that does not take pulse or heart rate measurements (according to its manual). So we do not know how many (if any) of these so-called "end-of-life electroencephalographic surges" were things occurring after someone's heart stopped. The term "end of life" (which the paper authors fail to precisely define) is a vague term that could refer to any of the last hours of someone's life. Since it has no combination of brain wave (EEG) data and heart rate data, the paper provides no actual evidence of brain wave surges after a heart stops.
Contrary to the insinuations of this paper, the evidence shows unequivocally that brains shut down and flatline within 10 seconds or 20 seconds after a heart stops. That fact is one that prevents any credible neural explanation for near-death experiences, which are often long, vivid experiences that occur after a person's heart has stopped.
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