“Unless of course you believe humans have souls. I do not subscribe to that belief. It has no scientific basis and is nothing more than magical thinking.”
There are four peer reviewed, controlled, scientific long term hospital studies of near death experiences in print, including the pioneer study printed in the British Medical Journal “The Lancet”, in 2001. All four of them have produced statistically similar results.
Those results are that about 20% of people experience a largely similar series of events at the time of clinical death, including departing their body, moving towards a light, encountering a being, having a life review, being told it is not yet their time, and going back.
This is four-times duplicated and verified (there are more studies being performed) scientific evidence which supports the idea of a detachable soul. The concept of a detachable soul is not proven, but it is not mere “magical thinking” there is controlled, peer reviewed science that is evidence in its favor. There is no published study which has contradicted these four controlled hospital studies. The evidence is there. Go look it up for yourself. Start with the first study, published in the Lancet. The others you have to pay medical publications to get, but you can review the abstracts if you wish. Or you could take my word for it, as I am not making it up.
There IS scientific evidence for a detachable soul.
Those experiences can be explained by natural means. Also, if that experience is caused by the soul leaving the body, and only 20% of people have that experience, does that mean only 20% of people have souls??? ;-)
Here’s something to nibble on...
Near Death Experiences
In my experience, treating epilepsy and also seeing post-cardiac resuscitation patients in my daily job, as a Neurologist, I have interviewed and studied NDEs. The background is three possible precipitants, blunt or penetrating head trauma, decreased blood flow and O2 in the brain (Hypoxemia), and temporal lobe epilepsy (partial complex seizures.)
NDE experiences are stereotypical no matter which of the above was the cause. The person is observationally unconscious. The remembered experience often perceives an out of body experience (OBE) which has two forms. One is standing next to one’s own body or more often floating above their body, seeming to see people around the bedside such as nurses and doctors. The other is a feeling of limitlessness, expanding and merging with the universe. The OBE is followed by going through a bright tunnel in a dark background. In this phase there are the seeing images of dead relatives, angels, Jesus, or Brahma, or saints, then a smaller but brighter light. Usually at that point they either come out of it or come out of it in reverse. During the tunnel phase they may hear the voice of a dead parent or God/Jesus/Virgin Mary/Muhammad/Brahma.
On recovery, the patients often feel disappointed, cheated out of Heaven or bliss. They do have other neurobehavioural changes mainly in short term memory, attention span, and emotional regulation with loss of some inhibition, loss of rational skills, loss of some problem solving efficiency, and changes in efficiency of task specific shifts. I know of a neurologist whom I may not mention. He was a skilled, rational expert in electroencephalography and neurophysiology, author of some excellent protocols. He recovered from a cardiopulmonary arrest but his career disintegrated. His papers were incoherent, his protocols badly designed, and his papers elicited ridicule and pity. Incidentally he was also transformed from a sceptic to religious believer. The frontal religious bollocks filter obviously ceased to work or was disconnected. I was personally saddened by his deterioration and end of career.
The mechanisms of NDEs are only near death in that they sometimes are cardiac arrests which indeed are life threatening. In such cased there is a marked drop or stop in blood flow to the brain temporarily. This reduced perfusion affects the border zone between the territories of two arteries. Arteries branch into more and smaller arteries and arterioles. At the peripheral end of an arterial “tree” the capillaries merge with those of the neighbouring artery in what is called the Watershed Area. When blood flow decreases, the area getting the worst of it is this watershed area. It is the area also suffering any neuronal loss (there is likely always some neuronal loss, varying with the severity of hypoxemia). Watershed areas are in the inferior medial temporal lobe (arteries are posterior cerebral and middle cerebral), sudden hypoxemia can precipitate temporal lobe like seizures. Other watershed areas are in the upper parasagittal areas of frontal lobe (rational, inhibitory, analytical), calcarine occipital lobe (visual), and cerebellar (balance, coordination (arteries are Superior Cerebellar, Anterior Inferior Cerebellar, and Posterior Inferior Cerebellar.)
Temporal lobe seizures are epileptic discharges that begin in the mesial inferior temporal lobe to amygdala in known epileptics. They can also occur in brain hypoxia, as described above. In Epileptics they are due to temporal sclerosis (scarring), head trauma, brain tumours, arterio-venous malformations, small haemorrhages, small infarcts/strokes, and possibly by drugs such as cocaine. The electrical discharge begins in the neurons in the region of Ammon’s Horn. The discharge is transmitted to memory association areas of the nearby temporal lobe for visual and auditory memories and odd smell memories. Some go to the superior parietal lobe (body orientation/localization areas) to give the primary OBE phase. In this situation they have an inhibitory effect. Some go to cingulated gyrus as well for the affective component. In some cases frontal lobe discharges are recorded. This causes the symptoms I described in the second paragraph.
The third major cause is head trauma. Sudden trauma precipitates seizures. Americans usually remember the televised generalised seizure of Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys in the end zone of a Saturday televised game seen by millions of fans. His career soon ended. But he didn’t have epilepsy. It was just a post-traumatic seizure. Many who have these have partial seizures instead of generalised. These often manifest as Temporal Lobe seizures or focal motor seizures. The Temporal Lobe Seizure may be simple hallucinations auditory or visual or go into the full NDE described in the second paragraph.
The most important thing is that these people are not clinically DEAD. They are unconscious, and in some cases at risk of death. Those who actually die may experience NDEs before they die but cannot tell us about them. The DEAD brain cannot seize. We have no evidence of sentience in a dead brain. That is for you to speculate as you wish.
We should point out though that only a small percentage of those having NDEs report seeing entities of any kind, and of course only a small percentage of people who ‘die’ recall experiencing anything at all. And in addition to seeing God/Jesus/Virgin Mary/Muhammad/Brahma, you may also see people such as playmates who are not even dead. This is especially the case with children (Blackmore, 1991. Near-Death Experiences: In or out of the body? Skeptical Inquirer16, 34-45) who tend not to have known people who have died.
There are two prospective studies looking at the prevalence of NDEs in cardiac arrest survivors, van Lommel et al (Lancet 2001; 358: 2039-45), and Parnia et al. (Resuscitation 2001; 48: 149-56).
In both studies, about 90% of survivors experienced nothing resembling the classic NDE. In van Lommel et al (2001), 41/344 experienced a core NDE, as defined by Ring’s weighted core index. And the authors state that this may be an overestimate. In Parnia et al (2001), 4/63 (6.3%) of cardiac arrest survivors reported some form of NDE, assessed using the Greyson NDE scale.
In van Lommel et al, only 15/41 NDEs included “out of body experience,” but it is unclear what was counted as a postive. For instance, if the patient said “I lost awareness of my body,” or “It was like I did not have a body,” was that counted as a positive? About 20 reported perceptions of landscapes or persons. Parnia, et al’s prospective study found 0 out of body experiences. None of the 4 patients who experienced NDEs experienced an out of body experience. Which is a shame, because the researchers had placed hidden targets that could be seen from the perspective of the ceiling — as a test of veridical out of body perception.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=64940