The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [78]
4. Near-death experiences. There are thousands of people who have suffered traumatic accidents, near-drownings, emergency-room collapse, and especially heart attacks who are subsequently resuscitated and report experiencing some aspect of the afterlife—floating out of their bodies, passing through a tunnel or white light, and seeing loved ones or witnessing God, Jesus, or some manifestation of the divine on the other side. If these people were truly dead, then their conscious “self”—their soul or essence—somehow survived the death of the body.
Let’s examine each of these carefully.
Information Fields and the Universal Life Force
Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to do a newspaper crossword puzzle later in the day than it is to do it in the morning? Me neither. But according to British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, it is because the collective wisdom of morning successes resonates throughout the cultural “morphic field.” In Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, similar forms (morphs, or “fields of information”) reverberate and exchange information as extended minds within a universal life force. “As time goes on, each type of organism forms a special kind of cumulative collective memory,” Sheldrake wrote in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. “The regularities of nature are therefore habitual. Things are as they are because they were as they were.” In this and his most popular book, The Presence of the Past, Sheldrake, a University of Cambridge trained biologist and onetime research fellow of the Royal Society, explained that morphic resonance is “the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.”6
Sheldrake believes that these information fields form a universal life force connecting all organisms and that morphic resonance explains phantom limbs, homing pigeons, how dogs know when their owners are coming home, and how people know when someone is staring at them. “Vision may involve a two-way process, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images,” Sheldrake wrote.7 Thousands of trials conducted by anyone who downloaded the experimental protocol from Sheldrake’s Web page “have given positive, repeatable, and highly significant results, implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being stared at from behind.”8 When someone stares at you it apparently creates something like a ripple in the morphic field that you sense, causing you to turn and look.
Let’s examine this claim more closely. First, science is not normally conducted by strangers who happen upon a Web page protocol, so we have no way of knowing if these amateurs controlled for intervening variables and experimenter biases. Second, psychologists dismiss anecdotal accounts of this sense to a reverse self-fulfilling effect: a person suspects being stared at and turns to check; such head movement catches the eyes of would-be starers, who then turn to look at the staree, who thereby confirms the feeling of being stared at. Third, in 2000, John Colwell from Middlesex University, London, conducted a formal test using Sheldrake’s suggested experimental protocol, with twelve volunteers who participated in twelve sequences of twenty stare or no-stare trials each, with accuracy feedback provided for the final nine sessions. Results: subjects were able