Near-death experiences or near-bunk journalism?
Life after death [“Life after death study freaks everyone out”, web-only]? Not so fast. Despite unquestioning, gullible reporting in the Telegraph and now in the Straight, the study itself was negative. Researchers placed images so patients could see if they had out-of-body experiences, and not a single patient could recall them. Of the 140 cases, only one reported any memories that team leader Sam Parnia “verified”, and the study itself says that their protocol “may have introduced biases (such as recall bias and confabulation) in the recollections”. The memories in question are just the sorts of vague and nonspecific ones that we’d expect to match reality by chance, especially if the patient had watched medical dramas on TV.
This is not, as Adrian Mack regurgitates, a slam-dunk for near-death experiences but yet another negative study that’s consistent with what we already know about human memory and is what we’d expect if there was no life after death.
> Adrian Powell / Burnaby
Comments
6 Comments
emma voberry
Oct 22, 2014 at 2:47pm
spoil sport!
Tim
Oct 23, 2014 at 4:14am
Hell, why bother with the facts when you don't actually report the facts correctly.
Not ONE patient had an OBE in a research area (an area with a board fitted) so how could anyone be expected to see the targets ?
Secondly, the report of the man who was in cardiac arrest was very accurate and very significant because he heard te two separate automated directions from the machine to "shock the patient"." The machine only recommends a shock when the patients heart is not pumping, therefore the man was unconscious, clinically dead...but he heard and remembered.
You may not think that is particularly important but I'm afraid it is.
tim
Oct 24, 2014 at 4:58am
Nice of you to post the comment with the spelling mistakes. That's why I posted a second comment with the mistakes corrected, but for some reason best known to yourselves you deleted that one.
And thanks for the thumbs down, whoever bestowed that upon my post. I don't care if I get a hundred, what is so, is so and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that. Have a happy Christmas.
Martin Dunphy
Oct 24, 2014 at 1:09pm
tim:
Sorry, but we do not have the time to edit comments (neither would we want to) or to edit or post comments correcting previous comments' spelling errors.
Cindy
Nov 4, 2014 at 3:38am
U must be kidding. The evidence is there face it. NDEs are proof of the afterlife, period. They have the same commonalities. ...do our dreams have the same commonalities. .no. atheists have Ndes. Its real dude
Jack
Nov 15, 2014 at 8:04am
Whoa there, Champ. That's quite a set of conclusions to jump to after very little hard evidence to the contrary and no sources to back those claims up, especially if you're going to try to disprove thousands of experiences out there in one fell swoop.
I'm not arguing one way or the other, mind, but you have to tell me how you found this out and where you got this information if you want to be convincing.