Alex Tsakiris Janice HoldenDr. Janice Holden, editor of IANDS' Journal of Near-Death Studies, was recently interviewed by Alex Tsakiris on Skeptiko.com. She commented on a recent paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Dean Mobbs and Caroline Watt, "There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences", which concluded in part, "Research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry."

Holden responded, "The material that’s out there actually supports a different conclusion. To quote my colleague Bruce Greyson, 'If you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs then it’s easy to conclude that there is nothing paranormal about them.'" ... Listen to the full interview here.


This is an excellent interview in answer to the Mobbs and Watt research. More excerpts:

Tsakiris: What are they reporting on here? What’s the news? That’s a pretty big, strong title there, "There’s nothing paranormal about near-death experiences". Have they done any original research here in this paper? What are they reporting on?

Dr. Holden: I didn’t see any original research. What I saw was a compilation of theories and some results of some research that have been published for, in some cases, quite some time and actually have been answered in—you mentioned The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. In it, Bruce Greyson, who’s a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and Emily Kelly and Edward Kelly, who are research psychologists there, wrote a chapter entitled, “Explanatory Models of Near-Death Experiences.”

They actually referred to all of these things that Mobbs and Watt referred to, but they did so by responding to them about how these theories were inadequate to explain all the phenomena that have been observed in near-death experiences. So what I noticed about this article is that it’s citing a lot of old sources that have been responded to but Mobbs and Watt did not even mention, [let alone] respond to those responses, if that makes sense.

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Tsakiris: What clinical NDE research are they referring to that supports this conclusion because I know from my knowledge of the field but also going through your excellent Continuing Education class where you identify at least 10 prospective NDE studies that have been done in hospitals that I’m aware of, I don’t think one of them would support this conclusion. I mean, what research out there are they citing that would support this conclusion?

Holden: I don’t know. I would say that the material that’s out there actually supports a different conclusion. As a case in point, they cited Van Lommel’s prospective hospital study in the Netherlands that was published in The Lancet. ...  I just found it very ironic that they cited Van Lommel et al.’s study when it does not support the conclusion that Mobbs and Watt drew. In fact, Pim is an ardent crusader for the non-materialist prospective on near-death experiences, meaning that the things that he has observed in his extensive research with NDE’ers is that any theory that tries to reduce NDEs to material phenomena like misfiring of neurons in the brain or lack of oxygen to the brain and that sort of thing doesn’t cut it.

He’s a retired cardiologist and he retired so that he could actually take on this goal of trying to bring modern medicine up to speed about how theories reducing everything to the brain and functioning or misfunctioning of the brain just don’t explain what all is there. The title of their article, “There’s Nothing Paranormal About Near-Death Experiences,” to quote my colleague Bruce Greyson, “If you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs then it’s easy to conclude that there’s nothing paranormal about them.”

And that’s what they have done; their only mention of veridical perception was to say, “The celebrated Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, argued that the veridical perceptions during out-of-body experiences, which is part of near-death experiences, is brain-based.” They didn’t cite any source.

What I can tell you is that I can quote Wilder Penfield from his 1976 book, The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness in the Human Brain. He said, “In the end, I conclude that there is no good evidence, in spite of new methods such as the employment of stimulating electrodes, that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does. I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements, brain and mind, than on the basis of one. But I believe that one should not tend to draw a final scientific conclusion in man’s study of man until the nature of the energy responsible for mind action is discovered as in my opinion it will be.” And that’s from page 114 of his book.

He’s clearly a dualist who uses the word “mind” instead of “soul” or “consciousness” which is more typical to use now. He says clearly he believes in all of his study of the brain that understanding the mind cannot be reduced to understanding the functioning of the brain.

Alex Tsakiris: So it’s interesting that they would cite him…

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Holden: Again, ironically for Mobbs and Watt to have cited Van Lommel’s study incorrectly and in that same study in that Lancet article, he gave a case study of a man who was brought in comatose and cyanotic, in cardiac arrest, having collapsed in a field and then discovered by a passer-by. They repeatedly checked his pupils; no response. The guy was just unconscious during the entire resuscitation and actually for a few days until he finally regained consciousness.

When he did, one of the male nurses who had been there in the resuscitation was walking through the ward where this patient had recently regained consciousness and the patient saw him and said, “You, you! You were there when you were resuscitating me.” He said, “I saw you put my dentures on a shelf of a cabinet nearby while you were scurrying around doing all this stuff, intubating me and all that. I need my dentures. Would you go get them?”

And the nurse was absolutely flabbergasted because he knew that this guy had been brought in unconscious; he’d been unconscious the whole time and for a couple of days after. So how could he have known even that his dentures had been removed more-or-less be able to report accurately where the nurse had put them and where they in fact still were. The nurse retrieved them and gave them to him.

So again, it’s interesting that Mobbs and Watt mis-cited this article that actually provided information that supported a different, very different, conclusion. It clearly involved a paranormal phenomenon.

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Listen to and read the full interview here. You can also view the on-line Continuing Education Course on near-death experiences, referred to in the interview, on the IANDS website here.