‘There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences’ revisited: comment on Mobbs and Watt

[alextsakiris]

Trends in Cognitive Sciences - ?There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences? revisited: comment on Mobbs and Watt

Let's see if the publication of this response gets the same attention from the scientific media as the original article

[David Bailey]

In a nutshell, they found no evidence that NDE's are paranormal, because they didn't look at any of the evidence that NDE's are paranormal!

David

[KeithA]

All,
Regarding the Mobbs/Watt paper there is a critical comment on this in a paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, "In a recent prejudicially skeptical review, Mobbs and Watt (2011) provided a synthetic outline of possible neurobiological mechanisms of NDEs, concluding that there is nothing paranormal about them"...here:

Frontiers | Near-death experiences between science and prejudice | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

which is a recent link from Dr. Alexander's Twitter feed. So it's getting a bit of flak. It's a very interesting paper and Dr. Alexander seems very enthusiastic about it!

[KeithA]

In fact here is the reply by Dean Mobbs!

Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Response to Greyson et al.: there is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences

from Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 06 August 2012 - so it's fast moving. No mention of the shared death experiences of Dr. Ray Moody which are spoken of in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience paper by Facco and Agrillo here:
Frontiers | Near-death experiences between science and prejudice | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

[gabriel]

Mobbs' response is pejorative. He dismisses the phenomenon as anecdotal and describes alternative readings of the data as 'harmful' and media coverage in favour of the paranormal.

[alextsakiris]

Originally Posted by gabriel

Mobbs' response is pejorative. He dismisses the phenomenon as anecdotal and describes alternative readings of the data as 'harmful' and media coverage in favour of the paranormal.

yea, I'd go one step further... it's intellectually dishonest... as was Watt's defense... although she presents with a more pleasant tone

of course all this is more evidence for it not being about evidence. anyone expecting a paradigm shift better be very good at holding their breath.

[David R]

The reason why these chumps keep on disagreeing with a mysterious interpretation is because they are wrong.

Having a physical explanation for a metaphysical experience like an NDE is not proof that ghosts don't exist.

There is really, nothing more than needs to be said. There are countless phenomena that the NDE doesn't explain, and countless stuff it does explain. Let's not be pejorative.

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by KeithA

In fact here is the reply by Dean Mobbs!

Mobbs reply is bluster. He is confidentally wrong and doesn't even know it. For example ....

'... Indeed, using ‘paranormal’ in a non-standard way, whereas the standard understanding of the term is to mean ‘phenomena beyond scientific investigation’, does nothing to help the stated aim of Greyson et al., that is, the scientific investigation of NDEs – quite the contrary, it will most likely be harmful and keep the study of NDEs outside the realm of science

- Dean Mobbs

The term 'paranormal' was created to avoid what Mobbs thinks the term means (!) already implied by the term 'supernatural' .... the term paranormal can mean not yet explained by science.

Marcello Truzzi noticed this common error amongst pseudoskeptics.

While occultists and theologians have recognized this difference between the paranormal and the supernatural, many "scientific" critics merely lump them together as "transcendental nonsense."

....we can distinguish between the abnormal, the paranormal and the supernatural. If something is rare or extraordinary in science but it is explanable, we call it abnormal. The term paranormal refers to something that science can explain some day but at the present moment cannot. These are the scientific frontiers. However, there are things that are fundamentally inexplicable by science, the supernatural. Critics often confuse the paranormal and the supernatural and turn it into a political fight.

- Professor Marcello Truzzi

[KeithA]

The full Mobbs and Watt paper is here:
http://www.koestler-parapsychology.p...bbsWattNDE.pdf

This paper is criticised several times in this paper (the ref above):
Frontiers | Near-death experiences between science and prejudice | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Interestingly, if you look at the bottom, this paper is reviewed by Dean Mobbs, Bruce Greyson, and Pim Van Lommel. Considering the criticisms of their paper here one would expect a detailed reply by Dean Mobbs and Caroline Watt in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience - worth looking out for.

[KeithA]

In Dean Mobbs reply to Bruce Greyson et. al. :
Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Response to Greyson et al.: there is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences

he says: The evidence marshalled in support of the argument that NDEs cannot be explained on the basis of currently known facts about the brain is highly questionable. For example, the citation [5] used in support of the following argument from Greyson et al.’s letter is based on anecdotal reports and does not pose a challenge to the explanation we provided: Bruce Greyson "The accurate information acquired about the deaths of these deceased persons challenges the interpretation of these visions as hallucinations"

The citation [5] above is actually one paper of a special journal issue of Anthropology and Humanism, "Do Spirits Exist? Ways to Know" here:
Anthropology and Humanism - Volume 35, Issue 2 - DO SPIRITS EXIST? WAYS TO KNOW. Compiled and Edited by Joan Koss-Chioino - Wiley Online Library
with some very interesting studies.

Alex mentions the problem of "paradigm shifts" above but I would suggest there is actually something ongoing in academic studies. Something related to the above journal issue is by anthropologists Julia Cassaniti and Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Encountering the Supernatural
A Phenomenological Account of Mind here:
http://www.luhrmann.net/wp-content/u...turalfinal.pdf
which seems to describe actual encounters with spirits (or something other). It looks as though academia is getting involved quite deeply with the question of whether there is a spirit world having a real existence.

Either way, I would guess that Mobbs and Watt are quite unaware of these kinds of studies in their criticisms above.

Just on scoping around a bit to do with all this I came across this new study just out from OUP, The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality: Lisa J. Miller - Oxford University Press with papers by Mario Beauregard and Bruce Greyson.
Postmaterial spiritual psychology posits that consciousness can contribute to the unfolding of material events and that the human brain can detect broad, non-material communications. In this regard, this emerging field of postmaterial psychology marks a stark departure from psychology's traditional quantum measurements and tenets.

The editor Lisa Miller seems to be a interesting guest for an interview Alex!