Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [97]
In this case, Woerlee said, Pam’s addled brain created a “veridical perception” of her resuscitation. Perhaps her memory drew from what she had noticed as she was rolled into the operating room, or it could have drawn from previous memories, such as watching television shows like ER.
“But her eyes were taped shut,” I protested, “and what she saw was accurate.”
“Easily explained,” Woerlee chuckled. Take the Midas Rex bone saw. “What she heard was a sound very similar to a dental drill, and a dental drill is something that everyone born in the 1950s understands and knows all too well. Most of them have four rows of lead in their teeth to prove it.”
He argued that Pam’s mind naturally created an image of the Midas Rex that looked like a dental drill. And she could imagine what an operating theater looks like from television and movies and perhaps from personal experience.
Okay, I said, not convinced but ready to hear more.“How could she hear conversations with those ear speakers in?”
“Have you seen a lot of these kids wandering around with ear-plugs?” he asked. I had noticed by now he favored the Socratic method.
“You mean iPods?”
“Yep. And the volume turned up to maximum? And nattering to each other?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Precisely,” he said, as if that nailed the coffin shut.
“But they say these ear molds emit sound at ninety decibels, which is like a jet plane taking off,” I observed.
“Yeah, it’s all very well, but if you’ve got an iPod playing at maximum volume and you can hear your mate talking to you, then you’re not going to tell me they can’t hear each other. And that’s basically the situation here. They make a lot of talk about these [ear molds] being totally sound occlusive, et cetera. But it’s rubbish. She heard this cardiac surgeon.”
The evidence suggests Woerlee is demonstrably wrong. The electrodes in Pam’s brain stem had stopped showing any response to the ninety-decibel clicks, meaning she was not hearing anything, period. But Woerlee’s insistence is revealing: no amount of evidence would budge him from his assumptions.
Next I asked about the oxygen-deprivation argument. Wouldn’t her brain be too starved for oxygen for her to see or hear or form memories?
“No,” Woerlee replied. There had to be enough blood in her brain to sustain consciousness “because this is proven by this event.”
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re saying, if she had been unconscious, she couldn’t form memories. Therefore she had to be conscious—because she formed memories. Isn’t that circular reasoning?”
“Consciousness is a product of brain function. Period.”
I couldn’t resist baiting him one more time. “Some people believe that reductionist science is too narrow, that it has to come up with a new paradigm.”
“Everything I say can be proven,”Woerlee retorted.“Nothing they say can be proven. And that’s the difference.”
I relate this dialogue not because of its “ ’Tis not,” “ ’Tis so” quality, but because this is the paradigm that near-death researchers must shatter in order to make their case. Woerlee and other mainstream scientists may be correct, and physiology as we understand it today may explain all. But when they hear Pam’s accurate descriptions of the operating room, I wonder, aren’t they just a little bit curious?
Sitting in her touring bus, I asked Pam if she felt like William James’s white crow, living proof that consciousness is independent of the brain.
“I’m convinced it is,” she said. “But it happened to me, so I sort of have no choice but to believe. I’m not a brain surgeon, so I can’t speak to you on a scientific level of how it works. But in my mind, there’s no way that consciousness is kept and recorded only in the brain.”
She reflected a moment.“Every once and a while I wonder if it’s just some kind of big farce.”
Or, perhaps, evidence of another reality.
Before I left Pam’s bus, one question nagged at me. I wondered if she had returned from the edge of death with a physiological