Notis 210, 2012-02-24. Ny summering av nära-döden-forskning, av Bengt Friberg

Kanske det intressantaste just nu är det projekt som Sam Parnia leder. Bruce Greyson är en annan intressant och erfaren forskare, professor i psykiatri, medförfattare till Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century och The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences – vid sidan om Peter Fenwick och framför allt kardiologen Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, The Science of the Near-Death Experience och den färska Consciousness Beyond Life (2011).

/BF+GB

Det händer en hel del på området och det forskas på många håll. Kanske det intressantaste just nu är det projekt som Sam Parnia leder (wikipedia nämner det, se nedan!). Bruce Greyson är en annan intressant och erfaren forskare, professor i psykiatri, medförfattare till Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Rowman und Littlefield, 2007) och The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (2009) – vid sidan om Peter Fenwick och framför allt kardiologen Pim van Lommel som jag tidigare refererat till: Consciousness Beyond Life, The Science of the Near-Death Experience (Harper Collins, 2010) och den färska Consciousness Beyond Life (2011).

Pim van Lommel är troligen den som kommit längst, vilket bl a visas av att han blivit publicerad i den ansedda medicinska tidskriften The Lancet. In Van Lommel’s opinion, the current views on the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too narrow for a proper understanding of the NDE phenomenon. The author provides examples and ways that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions; that consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body / (Enligt van Lommel är den gällande åsikten hos flertalet läkare, filosofer och psykologer om sambandet mellan hjärnan och medvetandet alltför snäv för en riktig förståelse av NDU-fenomenet. Författaren ger exempel på hur vårt medvetande inte alltid sammanfaller merd hjärnans funktioner; att medvetandet också kan upplevas åtskild från kroppen).   /wikipedia/.

Polemiken med Lakhmir Chawla (se nedan) visar också att detta fortfarande är ett vitalt forskningsområde och jag tror att vi så småningom kommer att få fullständig vetenskaplig klarhet i hur det ligger till. Tendensen är ganska tydlig, allt fler forskare menar att de hjärnrelaterade teorierna inte alls förklarar viktiga ingredienser i dessa upplevelser. Parnias slutkommentar nedan är intressant: ”Arch sceptics will always attack our work. I’m content with that. That’s how science progresses.”(Ärkeskeptiker kommer alltid att attackera vårt arbete. Jag är nöjd med det. Det är så vetenskapen utvecklas.) Den öppna debatten är ett hälsotecken.

”In September 2008, it was announced that 25 UK and US hospitals will examine near-death studies in 1500 heart attack patient-survivors. The three-year study, coordinated by Sam Parnia at Southampton University, hopes to determine if people without heartbeat or brain activity can have an out-of-body experience with veridical visual perceptions. This study follows on from an earlier 18-month pilot project. On a July 28, 2010 interview about a recent lecture at Goldsmiths, Parnia asserts that ”evidence is now suggesting that mental and cognitive processes may continue for a period of time after a death has started” and describes the process of death as ”essentially a global stroke of the brain. Therefore like any stroke process one would not expect the entity of mind / consciousness to be lost immediately”. He also expresses his disagreement with the term ’near death experiences’ because ”the patients that we study are not near death, they have actually died and more over it conjures up a lot of imprecise scientific notions, due to the fact that [death] itself is a very imprecise term”.

Researcher Lakhmir Chawla George Washington University medical centre in Washington DC argues that near-death experiences are caused by a surge of electrical activity as the brain runs out of oxygen before death. Levels were similar to those seen in fully conscious people, even though blood pressure was so low as to be undetectable, and could generate vivid images and feelings. The gradual tailing off of brain activity had occurred in the hour or so, before death, and was interrupted by a brief spurt of action, lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes. Sam Parnia refuted this explanation, claiming that Lakhmir Chawla had not provided proof that the electrical surges he recorded were linked to near death experiences, saying: ”Since all the patients died, we cannot tell what they were experiencing.”

Bruce Greyson claims that: ”No one physiological or psychological model by itself explains all the common features of NDE. The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a period of impaired cerebral perfusion raises particular perplexing questions for our current understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function. A clear sensorium and complex perceptual processes during a period of apparent clinical death challenge the concept that consciousness is localized exclusively in the brain.”

^{/Ytterligare data om Sam Parnias forskning:/}

Another account by a student nurse named Jeanette Atkinson from Eastbourne, who experienced a near-death experience, says that, ”There is no doubt in my mind that there’s life after death because I’ve seen the other side. I don’t believe in a benevolent God. I’ve seen too much suffering for that but I’m very spiritual.” A recent study by Sam Parnia, shows that such patients are ”effectively dead”, with their brains shut down and no thoughts or feelings possible for the complex brain activity required for dreaming or hallucinating; additionally, to rule out the possibility that near-death experiences resulted from hallucinations after the brain had collapsed through lack of oxygen, Parnia rigorously monitored the concentrations of the vital gas in the patients’ blood, and found that none of those who underwent the experiences had low levels of oxygen. He was also able to rule out claims that unusual combinations of drugs were to blame because the resuscitation procedure was the same in every case, regardless of whether they had a near-death experience or not. According to Parnia, ”Arch sceptics will always attack our work. I’m content with that. That’s how science progresses. What is clear is that something profound is happening. The mind – the thing that is ’you’ – your ’soul’ if you will – carries on after conventional science says it should have drifted into nothingness.”