Susan Blackmore
Published in Skeptical
Inquirer 1991, 16, 34-45 and Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
1996
What is it like to die? Although most
of us fear death to a greater or lesser extent, there are now
more and more people who have "come back" from states
close to death and have told stories of usually very pleasant
and even joyful experiences at deaths door.
For many experiencers, their adventures
seem unquestionably to provide evidence for life after death,
and the profound effects the experience can have on them is just
added confirmation. By contrast, for many scientists these experiences
are just hallucinations produced by the dying brain and of no
more interest than an especially vivid dream.
So which is right? Are near-death experiences
(NDEs) the prelude to our life after death or the very last experience
we have before oblivion? I shall argue that neither is quite right:
NDEs provide no evidence for life after death, and we can best
understand them by looking at neurochemistry, physiology, and
psychology; but they are much more interesting than any dream.
They seem completely real and can transform peoples lives.
Any satisfactory theory has to understand that tooand that
leads us to questions about minds, selves, and the nature of consciousness.
Deathbed Experiences
Toward the end of the last century the
physical sciences and the new theory of evolution were making
great progress, but many people felt that science was forcing
out the traditional ideas of the spirit and soul. Spiritualism
began to flourish, and people flocked to mediums to get in contact
with their dead friends and relatives "on the other side."
Spiritualists claimed, and indeed still claim, to have found proof
of survival.
In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research
was founded, and serious research on the phenomena began; but
convincing evidence for survival is still lacking over one hundred
years later (Blackmore 1988). In 1926, a psychical researcher
and Fellow of the Royal Society, Sir William Barrett (1926), published
a little book on deathbed visions. The dying apparently saw other
worlds before they died and even saw and spoke to the dead. There
were cases of music heard at the time of death and reports of
attendants actually seeing the spirit leave the body.
With modern medical techniques, deathbed
visions like these have become far less common. In those days
people died at home with little or no medication and surrounded
by their family and friends. Today most people die in the hospital
and all too often alone. Paradoxically it is also improved medicine
that has led to an increase in quite a different kind of report
that of the near-death experience.
Close Brushes with Death
Resuscitation from ever more serious
heart failure has provided accounts of extraordinary experiences
(although this is not the only cause of NDEs). These remained
largely ignored until about 15 years ago, when Raymond Moody (1975),
an American physician, published his best-selling Life After Life.
He had talked with many people who had "come back from death,"
and he put together an account of a typical NDE. In this idealized
experience a person hears himself pronounced dead. Then comes
a loud buzzing or ringing noise and a long, dark tunnel. He can
see his own body from a distance and watch what is happening.
Soon he meets others and a "being of light" who shows
him a playback of events from his life and helps him to evaluate
it. At some point he gets to a barrier and knows that he has to
go back. Even though he feels joy, love, and peace there, he returns
to his body and life. Later he tries to tell others; but they
dont understand, and he soon gives up. Nevertheless the
experience deeply affects him, especially his views about life
and death.
Many scientists reacted with disbelief.
They assumed Moody was at least exaggerating, but he claimed that
no one had noticed the experiences before because the patients
were too frightened to talk about them. The matter was soon settled
by further research. One cardiologist had talked to more than
2,000 people over a period of nearly 20 years and claimed that
more than half reported Moody-type experiences (Schoonmaker 1979).
In 1982, a Gallup poll found that about 1 in 7 adult Americans
had been close to death and about 1 in 20 had had an NDE. It appeared
that Moody, at least in outline, was right. In my own research
I have come across numerous reports like this one, sent to me
by a woman from Cyprus:
An emergency gastrectomy was performed. On the
4th day following that operation I went into shock and became
unconscious for several hours. . . Although thought to be unconscious,
I remembered, for years afterwards, the entire, detailed conversation
that passed between the surgeon and anaesthetist present....
I was lying above my own body, totally free of pain, and looking
down at my own self with compassion for the agony I could see
on the face; I was floating peacefully Then . . . I was going
elsewhere, floating towards a dark, but not frightening, curtain-like
area.... Then I felt total peace.
Suddenly it all changedI was slammed back
into my body again, very much aware of the agony again.
Within a few years some of the basic
questions were being answered. Kenneth Ring (1980), at the University
of Connecticut, surveyed 102 people who had come close to death
and found almost 50 percent had had what he called a "core
experience." He broke this into five stages: peace, body
separation, entering the darkness (which is like the tunnel),
seeing the light, and entering the light. He found that the later
stages were reached by fewer people, which seems to imply that
there is an ordered set of experiences waiting to unfold.
One interesting question is whether NDEs
are culture specific. What little research there is suggests that
in other cultures NDEs have basically the same structure, although
religious background seems to influence the way it is interpreted.
A few NDEs have even been recorded in children. It is interesting
to note that nowadays children are more likely to see living friends
than those who have died, presumably because their playmates only
rarely die of diseases like scarlet fever or smallpox (Morse et
al. 1986).
Perhaps more important is whether you
have to be nearly dead to have an NDE. The answer is clearly no
(e.g., Morse et al. 1989). Many very similar experiences are recorded
of people who have taken certain drugs, were extremely tired,
or, occasionally, were just carrying on their ordinary activities.
I must emphasize that these experiences
seem completely realeven more real (whatever that may mean)
than everyday life. The tunnel experience is not like just imagining
going along a tunnel. The view from out of the body seems completely
realistic, not like a dream, but as though you really are up there
and looking down. Few people experience such profound emotions
and insight again during their lifetimes. They do not say, "Ive
been hallucinating," "I imagined I went to heaven,"
or "Can I tell you about my lovely dream?" They are
more likely to say, "I have been out of my body" or
"I saw Grandma in heaven."
Since not everyone who comes close to
death has an NDE, it is interesting to ask what sort of people
are more likely to have them. Certainly you dont need to
be mentally unstable. NDEers do not differ from others in terms
of their psychological health or background. Moreover, the NDE
does seem to produce profound and positive personality changes
(Ring 1984). After this extraordinary experience people claim
that they are no longer so motivated by greed and material achievement
but are more concerned about other people and their needs. Any
theory of the NDE needs to account for this effect.
Explanations of the NDE
Astral Projection and the Next World:
Could we have another body that is the vehicle of consciousness
and leaves the physical body at death to go on to another world?
This, essentially, is the doctrine of astral projection. In various
forms it is very popular and appears in a great deal of New Age
and occult literature.
One reason may be that out-of-body experiences
(OBEs) are quite common, quite apart from their role in NDEs.
Surveys have shown that anywhere from 8 percent (in Iceland) to
as much as 50 percent (in special groups, such as marijuana users)
have had OBEs at some time during their lives. In my own survey
of residents of Bristol I found 12 percent. Typically these people
had been resting or lying down and suddenly felt they had left
their bodies, usually for no more than a minute or two (Blackmore
1984).
A survey of more than 50 different cultures
showed that almost all of them believe in a spirit or soul that
could leave the body (Shells 1978). So both the OBE and the belief
in another body are common, but what does this mean? Is it just
that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that we are nothing
more than a mortal body and that death is the end? Or is there
really another body?
You might think that such a theory has
no place in science and ought to be ignored. I disagree. The only
ideas that science can do nothing with are the purely metaphysical
onesideas that have no measurable consequences and no testable
predictions. But if a theory makes predictions, however bizarre,
then it can be tested.
The theory of astral projection is, at
least in some forms, testable. In the earliest experiments mediums
claimed they were able to project their astral bodies to distant
rooms and see what was happening. They claimed not to taste bitter
aloes on their real tongues, but immediately screwed up their
faces in disgust when the substance was placed on their (invisible)
astral tongues. Unfortunately these experiments were not properly
controlled (Blackmore 1982~.
In other experiments, dying people were
weighed to try to detect the astral body as it left. Early this
century a weight of about one ounce was claimed, but as the apparatus
became more sensitive the weight dropped, implying that it was
not a real effect. More recent experiments have used sophisticated
detectors of ultraviolet and infrared, magnetic flux or field
strength, temperature, or weight to try to capture the astral
body of someone having an out-of-body experience. They have even
used animals and human "detectors," but no one has yet
succeeded in detecting anything reliably (Morris et al. 1978).
If something really leaves the body in
OBEs, then you might expect it to be able to see at a distance,
in other words to have extrasensory perception (ESP). There have
been several experiments with concealed targets. One success was
Tarts subject, who lay on a bed with a five-digit number
on a shelf above it (Tart 1968). During the night she had an OBE
and correctly reported the number, but critics argued that she
could have climbed out of the bed to look. Apart from this one,
the experiments tend, like so many in parapsychology, to provide
equivocal results and no clear signs of any ESP.
So, this theory has been tested but seems
to have failed its tests. If there really were astral bodies I
would have expected us to have found something out about them
by nowother than how hard it is to track them down!
In addition there are major theoretical
objections to the idea of astral bodies. If you imagine that the
person has gone to another world, perhaps along some "real"
tunnel, then you have to ask what relationship there is between
this world and the other one. If the other world is an extension
of the physical, then it ought to be observable and measurable.
The astral body, astral world, and tunnel ought to be detectable
in some way, and we ought to be able to say where exactly the
tunnel is going. The fact that we cant, leads many people
to say the astral world is "on another plane," at a
"higher level of vibration," and the like. But unless
you can specify just what these mean the ideas are completely
empty, even though they may sound appealing. Of course we can
never prove that astral bodies dont exist, but my guess
is that they probably dont and that this theory is not a
useful way to understand OBEs.
Birth and the NDE:
Another popular theory makes dying analogous with being born:
that the out-of-body experience is literally just that reliving
the moment when you emerged from your mothers body. The
tunnel is the birth canal and the white light is the light of
the world into which you were born. Even the being of light can
be "explained" as an attendant at the birth.
This theory was proposed by Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax (1977)
and popularized by the astronomer Carl Sagan (1979), but it is
pitifully inadequate to explain the NDE. For a start the newborn
infant would not see anything like a tunnel as it was being born.
The birth canal is stretched and compressed and the baby usually
forced through it with the top of its head, not with its eyes
(which are closed anyway) pointing forward. Also it does not have
the mental skills to recognize the people around, and these capacities
change so much during growing that adults cannot reconstruct what
it was like to be an infant.
"Hypnotic regression to past lives"
is another popular claim. In fact much research shows that people
who have been hypnotically regressed give the appearance of
acting like a baby or a child, but it is no more than acting.
For example, they dont make drawings like a real five-year-old
would do but like an adult imagines children do. Their vocabulary
is too large and in general they overestimate the abilities
of children at any given age. There is no evidence (even if
the idea made sense) of their "really" going back
in time.
Of course the most important question
is whether this theory could be tested, and to some extent it
can. For example, it predicts that people born by Caesarean section
should not have the same tunnel experiences and OBEs. I conducted
a survey of people born normally and those born by Caesarean (190
and 36 people, respectively). Almost exactly equal percentages
of both groups had had tunnel experiences (36 percent) and OBEs
(29 percent). I have not compared the type of birth of people
coming close to death, but this would provide further evidence
(Blackmore 1982b).
In response to these findings some people
have argued that it is not ones own birth that is relived
but the idea of birth in general. However, this just reduces the
theory to complete vacuousness.
Just Hullucinations:
Perhaps we should give up and conclude
that all the experiences are "just imagination" or "nothing
but hallucinations." However, this is the weakest theory
of all. The experiences must, in some sense, be hallucinations,
but this is not, on its own, any explanation. We have to ask why
are they these kinds of hallucinations? Why tunnels?
Some say the tunnel is a symbolic representation
of the gateway to another world. But then why always a tunnel
and not, say, a gate, doorway, or even the great River Styx? Why
the light at the end of the tunnel? And why always above the body,
not below it? I have no objection to the theory that the experiences
are hallucinations. I only object to the idea that you can explain
them by saying, "They are just hallucinations." This
explains nothing. A viable theory would answer these questions
without dismissing the experiences. That, even if only in tentative
form, is what I shall try to provide.
The Physiology of the Tunnel:
Tunnels do not only occur near death.
They are also experienced in epilepsy and migraine, when falling
asleep, meditating, or just relaxing, with pressure on both eyeballs,
and with certain drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline.
I have experienced them many times myself. It is as though the
whole world becomes a rushing, roaring tunnel and you are flying
along it toward a bright light at the end. No doubt many readers
have also been there, for surveys show that about a third of people
havelike this terrified man of 28 who had just had the anesthetic
for a circumcision.
I seemed to be hauled at "lightning speed"
in a direct line tunnel into outer space; (not a floating
sensation . . .) but like a rocket at a terrific speed. I
appeared to have left my body.
In the 1930s, Heinrich Kluver, at the
University of Chicago, noted four form constants in hallucinations:
the tunnel, the spiral, the lattice or grating, and the cobweb.
Their origin probably lies in the structure of the visual cortex,
the part of the brain that processes visual information. Imagine
that the outside world is mapped onto the back of the eye (on
the retina), and then again in the cortex. The mathematics of
this mapping (at least to a reasonable approximation) is well
known.
Jack Cowan, a neurobiologist at the University
of Chicago, has used this mapping to account for the tunnel (Cowan
1982). Brain activity is normally kept stable by some cells inhibiting
others. Disinhibition (the reduction of this inhibitory activity)
produces too much activity in the brain. This can occur near death
(because of lack of oxygen) or with drugs like LSD, which interfere
with inhibition. Cowan uses an analogy with fluid mechanics to
argue that disinhibition will induce stripes of activity that
move across the cortex. Using the mapping it can easily be shown
that stripes in the cortex would appear like concentric rings
or spirals in the visual world. In other words, if you have stripes
in the cortex you will seem to see a tunnel-like pattern of spirals
or rings.
This theory is important in showing how
the structure of the brain could produce the same hallucination
for everyone. However, I was dubious about the idea of these moving
stripes, and also Cowans theory doesnt readily explain
the bright light at the center. So Tom Troscianko and I, at the
University of Bristol, tried to develop a simpler theory (Blackmore
and Troscianko 1989). The most obvious thing about the representation
in the cortex is that there are lots of cells representing the
center of the visual field but very few for the edges. This means
that you can see small things very clearly in the center, but
if they are out at the edges you cannot. We took just this simple
fact as a starting point and used a computer to simulate what
would happen when you have gradually increasing electrical noise
in the visual cortex.
The computer program starts with thinly
spread dots of light, mapped in the same way as the cortex, with
more toward the middle and very few at the edges. Gradually the
number of dots increases, mimicking the increasing noise. Now
the center begins to look like a white blob and the outer edges
gradually get more and more dots. And so it expands until eventually
the whole screen is filled with light. The appearance is just
like a dark speckly tunnel with a white light at the end, and
the light grows bigger and bigger (or nearer and nearer) until
it fills the whole screen. (See Figure 1.)
If it seems odd that such a simple picture
can give the impression that you are moving, consider two points.
First, it is known that random movements in the periphery of the
visual field are more likely to be interpreted by the brain as
outward than inward movements (Georgeson and Harris 1978). Second,
the brain infers our own movement to a great extent from what
we see. Therefore, presented with an apparently growing patch
of flickering white light your brain will easily interpret it
as yourself moving forward into a tunnel.
The theory also makes a prediction about
NDEs in the blind. If they are blind because of problems in the
eye but have a normal cortex, then they too should see tunnels.
But if their blindness stems from a faulty or damaged cortex,
they should not. These predictions have yet to be tested.
According to this kind of theory there
is, of course, no real tunnel. Nevertheless there is a real physical
cause of the tunnel experience. It is noise in the visual cortex.
This way we can explain the origin of the tunnel without just
dismissing the experiences and without needing to invent other
bodies or other worlds.
Out of the body experiences:
Like tunnels, OBEs are not confined to
near death. They too can occur when just relaxing and falling
asleep, with meditation, and in epilepsy and migraine. They can
also, at least by a few people, be induced at will. I have been
interested in OBEs since I had a long and dramatic experience
myself (Blackmore 1982a).
It is important to remember that these
experiences seem quite real. People dont describe them as
dreams or fantasies but as events that actually happened. This
is, I presume, why they seek explanations in terms of other bodies
or other worlds.
However, we have seen how poorly the
astral projection and birth theories cope with OBEs. What we need
is a theory that involves no unmeasurable entities or untestable
other worlds but explains why the experiences happen; and why
they seem so real.
I would start by asking why anything
seems real. You might think this is obviousafter all, the
things we see out there are real arent they? Well no, in
a sense they arent. As perceiving creatures all we know
is what our senses tell us. And our senses tell us what is "out
there" by constructing models of the world with ourselves
in it. The whole of the world "out there" and our own
bodies are really constructions of our minds. Yet we are sure,
all the time, that this constructionif you like, this "model
of reality"is "real" while the other fleeting
thoughts we have are unreal. We call the rest of them daydreams,
imagination, fantasies, and so on. Our brains have no trouble
distinguishing "reality" from "imagination."
But this distinction is not given. It is one the brain has to
make for itself by deciding which of its own models represents
the world "out there." I suggest it does this by comparing
all the models it has at any time and choosing the most stable
one as "reality."
This will normally work very well. The
model created by the senses is the best and most stable the system
has. It is obviously "reality," while that image I have
of the bar Im going to go to later is unstable and brief.
The choice is easy. By comparison, when you are almost asleep,
very frightened, or nearly dying, the model from the senses will
be confused and unstable. If you are under terrible stress or
suffering oxygen deprivation, then the choice wont be so
easy. All the models will be unstable.
So what will happen now? Possibly the
tunnel being created by noise in the visual cortex will be the
most stable model and so, according to my supposition, this will
seem real. Fantasies and imagery might become more stable than
the sensory model, and so seem real. The system will have lost
input control.
What then should a sensible biological
system do to get back to normal? I would suggest that it could
try to ask itselfas it were"Where am I? What
is happening?" Even a person under severe stress will have
some memory left. They might recall the accident, or know that
they were in hospital for an operation, or remember the pain of
the heart attack. So they will try to reconstruct, from what little
they can remember, what is happening.
Now we know something very interesting
about memory models. Often they are constructed in a birds-eye
view. That is, the events or scenes are seen as though from above.
If you find this strange, try to remember the last time you went
to a pub or the last time you walked along the seashore. Where
are "you" looking from in this recalled scene? If you
are looking from above you will see what I mean.
So my explanation of the OBE becomes
clear. A memory model in birds-eye view has taken over from
the sensory model. It seems perfectly real because it is the best
model the system has got at the time. Indeed, it seems real for
just the same reason anything ever seems real.
This theory of the OBE leads to many
testable predictions, for example, that people who habitually
use birds-eye views should be more likely to have OBEs.
Both Harvey Irwin (1986), an Australian psychologist, and myself
(Blackmore 1987) have found that people who dream as though they
were spectators have more OBEs, although there seems to be no
difference for the waking use of different viewpoints. I have
also found that people who can more easily switch viewpoints in
their imagination are also more likely to report OBEs.
Of course this theory says that the OBE
world is only a memory model. It should only match the real world
when the person has already known about something or can deduce
it from available information. This presents a big challenge for
research on near death. Some researchers claim that people near
death can actually see things that they couldnt possibly
have known about. For example, the American cardiologist Michael
Sabom (1982) claims that patients reported the exact behavior
of needles on monitoring apparatus when they had their eyes closed
and appeared to be unconscious. Further, he compared these descriptions
with those of people imagining they were being resuscitated and
found that the real patients gave far more accurate and detailed
descriptions.
There are problems with this comparison.
Most important, the people really being resuscitated could probably
feel some of the manipulations being done on them and hear what
was going on. Hearing is the last sense to be lost and, as you
will realize if you ever listen to radio plays or news, you can
imagine a very clear visual image when you can only hear something.
So the dying person could build up a fairly accurate picture this
way. Of course hearing doesnt allow you to see the behavior
of needles, and so if Sabom is right I am wrong. We can only await
further research to find out.
The Life Review:
The experience of seeing excerpts from
your life flash before you is not really as mysterious as it first
seems. It has long been known that stimulation of cells in the
temporal lobe of the brain can produce instant experiences that
seem like the reliving of memories. Also, temporal-lobe epilepsy
can produce similar experiences, and such seizures can involve
other limbic structures in the brain, such as the amygdala and
hippocampus, which are also associated with memory.
Imagine that the noise in the dying brain
stimulates cells like this. The memories will be aroused and,
according to my hypothesis, if they are the most stable model
the system has at that time they will seem real. For the dying
person they may well be more stable than the confused and noisy
sensory model.
The link between temporal-lobe epilepsy
and the NDE has formed the basis of a thorough neurobiological
model of the NDE (Saavedra-Aguilar and Gomez-Jeria 1989). They
suggest that the brain stress consequent on the near-death episode
leads to the release of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters (in
particular the endogenous endorphins). These then stimulate the
limbic system and other connected areas. In addition, the effect
of the endorphins could account the blissful and other positive
emotional states so often associated with the NDE.
Morse provided evidence that some children
deprived of oxygen treated with opiates did not have NDE-like
hallucinations, and he his colleagues (Morse et al. 1986) have
developed a theory based on the role of the neurotransmitter serotonin,
rather than the endorphins. Research on the neurochemistry of
the NDE is just beginning and should provide us with much more
detailed understanding of the life review.
Of course there is more to the review
than just memories. The person feels as though she or he is judging
these life events, being shown their significance and meaning.
But this too, I suggest, is not so very strange. When the normal
world of the senses is gone and memories seem real, our perspective
on our life changes. We can no longer be attached to our plans,
hopes, ambitions, and fears, which fade away and become unimportant,
while the past comes to life again. We can only accept it as it
is, and there is no one to judge it but ourselves. This is, I
think, why so many NDEers say they faced their past life with
acceptance and equanimity.
Other Worlds:
Now we come to what might seem the most
extraordinary parts of the NDE; the worlds beyond the tunnel and
OBE. But I think you can now see that they are not so extraordinary
at all. In this state the outside world is no longer real, and
inner worlds are. Whatever we can imagine clearly enough will
seem real. And what will we imagine when we know we are dying?
I am sure for many people it is the world they expect or hope
to see. Their minds may turn to people they have known who have
died before them or to the world they hope to enter next. Like
the other images we have been considering, these will seem perfectly
real.
Finally, there are those aspects of the
NDE that are ineffablethey cannot be put into words. I suspect
that this is because some people take yet another step, a step
into nonbeing. I shall try to explain this by asking another question.
What is consciousness? If you say it is a thing, another body,
a substance, you will only get into the kinds of difficulty we
got into with OBEs. I prefer to say that consciousness is just
what it is like being a mental model. In other words, all the
mental models in any persons mind are all conscious, but
only one is a model of "me." This is the one that I
think of as myself and to which I relate everything else. It gives
a core to my life. It allows me to think that I am a person, something
that lives on all the time. It allows me to ignore the fact that
"I" change from moment to moment and even disappear
every night in sleep.
Now when the brain comes close to death,
this model of self may simply fall apart. Now there is no self.
It is a strange and dramatic experience. For there is no longer
an experienceryet there is experience.
This state is obviously hard to describe,
for the "you" who is trying to describe it cannot imagine
not being. Yet this profound experience leaves its mark. The self
never seems quite the same again.
The After Effects:
I think we can now see why an essentially
physiological event can change peoples lives so profoundly.
The experience has jolted their usual (and erroneous) view of
the relationship between themselves and the world. We all too
easily assume that we are some kind of persistent entity inhabiting
a perishable body. But, as the Buddha taught we have to see through
that illusion. The world is only a construction of an information-processing
system, and the self is too. I believe that the NDE gives people
a glimpse into the nature of their own minds that is hard to get
any other way. Drugs can produce it temporarily, mystical experiences
can do it for rare people, and long years of practice in meditation
or mindfulness can do it. But the NDE can out of the blue strike
anyone and show them what they never knew before, that their body
is only that a lump of fleshthat they are not so very
important after all. And that is a very freeing and enlightening
experience.
And Afterwards?
If my analysis of the NDE is correct,
we can extrapolate to the next stage. Lack of oxygen first produces
increased activity through disinhibition, but eventually it all
stops. Since it is this activity that produces the mental models
that give rise to consciousness, then all this will cease. There
will be no more experience, no more self, and so that, as far
as my constructed self is concerned, is the end.
So, are NDEs in or out of the body? I
should say neither, for neither experiences nor selves have any
location. It is finally death that dissolves the illusion that
we are a solid self inside a body.
Note
In November 1990, I visited the Netherlands
to give two lectures. The first, on parapsychology, was part of
a series organized by the Studium Generale of the University of
Utrecht and titled "Science Confronts the Paranormal."
The second was at the Skepsis Conference. Skepsis refers to the
very active Dutch skeptics organization called Stichting Skepsis,
which means "skeptical foundation." Cornelis de Jager,
professor emeritus in astronomy, is the Chair. Skepsis was established
in 1987 and publishes the journal Skepter. Stichting Skepsis also
publishes conference proceedings and monographs on subjects like
reincarnation, spiritism, and homeopathy. As its purpose is to
educate the public, Skepsis received a starting grant from the
government but is now self-supporting, thanks to many generous
donations. This is the lecture I presented at the organizations
1990 conference, on "Belief in the Paranormal."
References
Barrett, W. 1926. Death-bed
Visions. London: Methuen.
Blackmore, S. J. 1982a. Beyond
the Body. London: Heinemann.
. 1982b.
Birth and the OBE: An unhelpful analogy. Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research, 77:229-238.
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