I recently attended a Harvard Medical School seminar on the frontiers of mind-body medicine. During the question period, a doctor from Cambridge rose from the audience and described her cardiac arrest during her own Cesarian section. She had had no heartbeat. Her eyes had been taped shut. Still, the obstetrician told her rapt colleagues, "I could see everybody in the room, hear the swearing as they tried to revive me, just as if I were standing at the head of the operating table."
"But I could see nothing was working. My brachial artery had narrowed too much to get a line through my neck. Suddenly I saw the chairman of the department, whom I had never met, reach in and through my abdomen and put his ungloved hand around my aorta. I felt a powerful surge of energy. He held my aorta in this very firm and loving way until it started to beat again." Later, she said, every detail of this account was confirmed by those who were present at her operation.
Michael B. Sabom, M.D., cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University, staff physician at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, was skeptical of increasingly common accounts of such out-of-body experiences, or OBEs. He set out to compare a group of heart-attack patients who had never had OBEs to those who claimed that they had. He found, to his surprise, that those who had ostensibly experienced OBEs were able to provide far more accurate descriptions of cardiac procedures, and that some were able to give highly specific, verifiable details of their own particular resuscitations.
At end of his 1982 book, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation, he states, "If the human brain is actually composed of two fundamental elements—the 'mind' and the 'brain'—then could the near-death crisis even somehow trigger a transient splitting of the mind from the brain in many individuals? My own beliefs are leaning in this direction. The out-of-body hypothesis simply seems to fit best with the data at hand."
The NIH's Dossey told me, "How mind might operate beyond the physical brain is not comprehensible. But the inconceivable has become commonplace in fields like quantum mechanics. With phenomena like the instant, simultaneous change in the spin characteristics of photons separated by distances of light-years, what I'm calling 'nonlocal mind' is right at home in modern physics. Physicists don't have a clue how things in the quantum world can happen, but they don't question that they do. They honor the data."
Indeed, many theorists are looking to the brain-teasing, mind-twisting strange-but-true factoids of quantum physics to provide at least provisional explanations for the mysteries of consciousness. Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on quantum tunneling and superconductivity, has said that evidence for apparent faster-than-light signaling in quantum physics "raises the possibility that one part of the universe may have knowledge of another part—some kind of contact at a distance." Josephson suggests that such interconnections could permit the operation of 'psi functioning' between humans, currently anathema to biomedical science.
"The fact that nonlocal events are now studied by physicists in the microworld," the NIH report adds, "suggests a greater permissiveness and freedom to examine phenomena in the biological and mental domains that may possibly be analogous."
That, according to renowned neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, M.D., is nothing but a load of Mandrake the Magician-class hooey. Edelman and colleagues at Rockefeller University's Neurosciences Institutes are working assiduously on a purely biological theory of how "higher-order consciousness" could be produced in the brain through a reflexive "bootstrapping process" of its own neuronal circuitry.
Edelman, who once planned a career as a concert violinist, sees the mind as an emergent property of brain tissue-"an orchestra without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music," in the approving summation of fellow neurologist Oliver Sacks, M.D. "To attempt to explain aspects of consciousness using as-yet-undiscovered physical fields or dimensions," Edelman comments acerbically, "is a bit like a schoolboy who, not knowing the formula of sulfuric acid asked for on an exam, gives instead a beautiful account of his dog Spot."
"Some very good physicists," he adds, "have reached beyond the biological facts and have supposed that [the quantum is] the answer to the riddle of consciousness. This is an off-putting way of proposing physics as a surrogate spook."
Michael Scriven, Ph.D., a philosopher of science who can recall with relish the occasion when, barely more than a graduate schoolboy himself, he argued with Einstein over "whether time could be closed as well as space," finds such dismissals a little glib. "I'm a little irked," he says in his crisp Down Under accent, "about mainstream scientists' knee-jerk reactions to strangeness, as if kangaroos can't be real because they've never seen one themselves. It's pathetic to hear Nobel-Prize winners acting like children seeing a ghost at night."
Scriven, who has been around the scientific block (he worked for the NIH in the forties and in the fifties served on the board of the Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases), is a member of a loosely affiliated group of thinkers who are trying to come up with less reductionist solutions to the conundrums of consciousness. He refers to himself as the "Guardian at the Logical Gates" for the group (dubbed the Causality Project and sponsored by the same Fetzer Foundation that funded the Moyers series.)
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