Teachings from Near Death Experiences(Interpretations of an Amateur Scientist)

By: John Winders

(The illustration on the cover is the watercolor “The Angel with the Book” by painter/engineer John Martin. It was inspired by the Book of Revelation, but I think it's also a pretty good depiction of a near death experience.)

According to the prevailing reductionist paradigm, human consciousness is defined as brain wave activity. Electrical discharges from neurons in the brain are manifested as thoughts and feelings. The near death experience (NDE) is therefore nothing more than a predeath hallucination in a dyingbrain that are triggered by neurons that are deprived of oxygen. Scientists think they have even identified specific locations in the brain that are associated with this particular predeath hallucination. Such an explanation may sound plausible to a closed-minded or intellectually lazy person; however, it just won't stand up to closer examination, as I will argue below.

People have related the near death experiences throughout history. Scientists generally dismiss these accounts as unproven and unsubstantiated, relegating them to the occult or paranormal. Whennon-scientists or even qualified scientists try to study NDEs in a consistent and methodical manner, their attempts are simply brushed off as “pseudo-science.” The main difficulty in validating NDE tothe scientific community is that those experiences are usually spontaneous, unpredictable, and are therefore not amenable to controlled experiments. I think insisting on controlled experiments in order to prove a point is an unfair standard of proof. When Albert Einstein published the general theory of relativity in 1915, the only way that theory could be tested was through astrological observations. The precession of Mercury's perihelion and the bending of starlight around the limb of the Sun during a solar eclipse were judged to be sufficient evidence to accept general relativity asfact; there simply were no other credible theories that could explain those observations. Even though this didn't rise to the level of a controlled experiment, the data were repeatable and good enough to validate his theory.

A similar situation exists in the area of jurisprudence. In the American legal system, criminal cases must be based on a legal standard known as “beyond a reasonable doubt” for proving guilt. This level of proof is equivalent to controlled, repeatable experiments used in the scientific method. But a lower standard, known as “preponderance of evidence,” applies in civil cases. Hearsay evidence is usually not allowed in court, so of course we should discount all NDE cases based on anecdotal or evidence that can't be substantiated. However, I believe there are enough well-documented casesto satisfy the burden of proof for NDE based on preponderance of evidence. In fact, any fair examination of the data will show the evidence is overwhelming.

NDEs occur either when a person is approaching death or is clinically dead. Many of the reported incidents are spontaneous, involving violent accidents, drownings, or similar circumstances that lack corroboration from reliable, independent witnesses. However, quite a few NDEs occur during surgery in operating rooms when the subjects are placed under general anesthesia and are being closely monitored. These cases are particularly interesting to me because they practically rise to thelevel of controlled experiments in accord with the scientific method, particularly because there are trained medical professionals on hand who can independently verify details reported by the NDE subjects. This kind of professional verification transforms mere subjective experiences into objective data that can be analyzed scientifically.

First of all, it is widely accepted that there are many different states of consciousness that are qualitatively dissimilar. Normal waking consciousness is qualitatively different than sleep, both dreaming and non-dreaming. There are meditative states of consciousness and various states of “unconsciousness,” including coma. Mental illnesses and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs defineother mental states. Autism represents an entire spectrum of mental states.

The brain under general anesthesia stands out as a particular mental state that is qualitatively different than the rest. Science still doesn't have a complete understanding of how anesthetics really

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work, but their effects are well known. An anesthetized person does not respond to any external stimuli, including a surgeon's knife cutting through flesh, and after recovery, the person doesn't remember anything that occurred while the person was “under.” There are no sensations, no dreams, no hallucinations – just nothing. Consciousness is completely suspended while the patient is anesthetized; nevertheless, using EEG data, researchers from the University of Virginia have identified specific brain wave patterns that are associated with anesthetized brains as it loses consciousness. Interestingly, it seems that neurons are still firing without consciousness.

Now sometimes NDEs occur during surgery while the patient is under general anesthesia. The patient feels nothing, thinks nothing, and dreams nothing until the surgery “goes sideways.” If the patient goes into cardiac arrest, the heart stops beating, blood pressure plummets, and there is no oxygen flow to the brain. At that point, the patient's brain may “flat line,”where there is no detectable brain wave activity at all. According to the current scientific theory that brain waves accompany consciousness, there would be no possibility of consciousness at that point – the patient is clinically dead. It is precisely at that stage, however, when the patient may experience a NDE. The subject is suddenly very aware and lucid, and can experience sight, sound, smell, and touch. The colors seen are so vivid that the subject cannot describe them in terms of ordinary colors. Thoughts race through the mind with extreme rapidity, the person's perception and understanding are magnified tremendously. In some cases, the entire life of the subject is displayed almost instantaneously; all of the lessons from the subject's life are immediately understood and indelibly recorded in memory. If these kinds of thoughts really do occur while the brain has “flat lined” and the patient is clinically dead, this certainly blows a hole in the position that consciousness is nothingmore than a collection of neurons firing off electrical impulses.

These types of incidents are actually not all that rare, and when a NDE occurs during surgery, it's about as close to a controlled scientific experiment that can be performed legally. During all major surgery, patients are monitored carefully; almost always with an EKG device and sometimes with an EEG device as well.1 Furthermore, trained professional medical personnel are always present to document everything going on during the operation. If the NDE is an hallucination, then why do patients remember the NDE – but nothing else about the surgery – after they recover from general anesthesia? How could a person correctly observe details of events taking place in the operating room in a NDE through the ordinary senses even while they are under general anesthesia? If the NDE is just an hallucination, how is it that events that were reported by the patient as taking place in the operating room during the NDE are also corroborated by the professional medical staff who were present at the time? Surely the preponderance of evidence gathered from NDEs that occur during surgery is enough to prove there is something very wrong with the current scientific definitions of consciousness and death.

One well-documented case of NDE involved the singer/songwriter Pam Reynolds. She underwent complicated brain surgery that required her to be placed into a state of suspended animation with allof the blood drained from her brain. While Pam was in that suspended state – without anesthesia – she was clinically dead. But during that time, she suddenly became conscious of her surroundings from a vantage point outside her body, and she could both see and hear everything that was happening in the operating room even though her eyes were taped shut and her ears plugged. Therewere about 20 medical professionals present during her NDE, and some of them later corroborated details of what Pam had experienced. This was one of the strongest cases of NDE ever reported. But when neuroscientists were asked to comment on the case, most of them flatly rejected the evidence out of hand, stating that this event simply could not have happened. It really saddens me when scientists and engineers refuse to even look at evidence just because it conflicts with their long-held beliefs. After all, science is supposed to be all about gathering and examining all

1 When patients are hooked up to EEG devices, it's called intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring.

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evidence – especially evidence that may contradict or disprove a prevailing scientific theory.2

So what lessons could be gleaned from an objective scientific examination of available NDE data? Well, I still accept that consciousness is associated with the brain. Injuries, disease, and lesions in the brain clearly cause loss of consciousness or altered states of consciousness, so there's a definite connection between the two. However, the NDE teaches us that consciousness may dissociate fromthe brain at the time of death. People who have had the full-blown NDE describe leaving and reentering the body, viewing the body rather objectively while they were out of it, as if it were an external inanimate object, like a suit of clothes, instead of an integral part of themselves. (Autistic people also sometimes describe their brains and bodies as external objects that are not fully under the control of the consciousness.) Also, after people leave their bodies during a NDE, they often have a sensation of being more “at home” while they are detached from their bodies.

The data show that the NDE is fairly consistent across a wide cultural spectrum. Most NDE subjects recall meeting a divine being who nurtures and instructs them throughout the experience. The specific persona of that divine being may vary depending on culture. For instance, most people(even atheists) who live in Western societies where Christianity is the prevalent religion usually report meeting Jesus. Hindus meet Krishna, Buddhists meet Buddha, Muslims meet Muhammad, etc. However, regardless of the person's cultural background, the overall quality of the experience is almost always said to be very positive and enlightening – not scary or unpleasant at all. Having apositive near death experience doesn't seem to depend on having particular religious beliefs prior to the NDE, being righteous, or even being a “nice” person. It's almost as if a joyful afterlife is a kind of birthright that every human is entitled to.3

Every NDE subject (that we know of) eventually returns his or her body, although many subjects said they would have preferred to stay “at home” outside the body. They say the predominant reason for returning to the body is to complete some important task. (By inference, these people would have been allowed to remain “at home” permanently if there were no more tasks they neededto complete.) This evidence leads me to believe that the sole purpose of being in the physical worldis so the consciousness can learn and develop; apparently, the required learning and development are impossible unless the consciousness is attached to a nervous system that can interact with the physical world. Those who believe in reincarnation stress that learning is the primary purpose for being alive, with the physical universe serving as a kind of school or training ground. NDE subjectsalso report that this is one of the main lessons they learned from their NDEs.

Although almost every NDE subject seems to experience a joyful, uplifting experience, there seems to be at least one exception: People who attempt suicide almost always report a hellish experience during their NDEs, so apparently suicide is an especially abhorrent act in the grand scheme of things. This fits in with the belief that life is for learning and we're all in some kind of finishing school. You don't get passed to the next grade by cutting classes; instead, you spend time in detention, where things are unpleasant.

But what good would it do to put people who commit suicide in a hellish afterlife for eternity in order to “teach them a lesson,” instead of offering them an opportunity to apply that lesson later on?And what purpose would it serve to “go to school” in a body only once, then have those lessons cut short by death at a young age? If there is any purpose at all to being attached to physical bodies thateventually grow old and die, then it seems almost self-evident that we must experience life in a series of bodies in order to properly complete that process.4

2 NDE deniers make an absurd claim that Pam Reynolds was in fact still very much alive. She was simply in a very peculiar altered state of consciousness that allowed her to receive and process stimuli through her ordinary senses, even with all the blood drained out of her brain.

3 This is very bad news for religious fundamentalists who think that paradise is reserved exclusively for people like them.

4 Of course I could be wrong; life may have no purpose at all. Nevertheless, like the metaphor of a relay race where

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I find it interesting that the “school of life” motif is replicated in our educational system, with grades K through 12, followed by college, graduate school, and post doctoral studies. Students are given lots idle time during summer recess where they break away from their studies and are allowedto loll around, reflect, and do nothing in particular. I'm inclined to think that we unconsciously designed this system of education as a reflection of the type of “schooling” we go through in one physical body followed by the next. (Many people have had recurring dreams where we are enrolled in some sort of school, are trying to get to some class in a building we can't locate, and are very late. Then it dawns on us that we're supposed be taking a final exam that day, but we have never attended a single lecture all year, and have absolutely no chance of passing that course.5 This recurring dream is undoubtedly our higher subconscious mind warning us that we've been spending too much time avoiding pain and seeking pleasure instead of going to class and learning important lessons, and that the time for learning is running out fast.

I mentioned earlier that barring suicide, the NDE is positive and enlightening regardless of one's prior beliefs or religious affiliations. Almost everyone who goes through the NDE comes out of it as a better person. People who had faith in God prior to their NDE generally come out of it with an even deeper and more mature faith. Those who didn't believe in God prior to their NDE generally come out if it with increased spirituality, with a feeling of oneness with the universe. Almost everyone who has had a NDE report they no longer fear death, their lives have more purpose and meaning, and stress the importance of loving and caring for others. From a purely scientific perspective, the fact that a consciousness actually can dissociate itself from a physical nervous system brings about all sorts of possibilities about reality and the true nature of the physical universe.

If consciousness can exist independently without being attached to a physical body, then what does this indicate about physical reality? Maybe everything we consider as “real” is actually a manifestation of something that is non-physical but is even more real. Through the study of quantum physics, some scientists have embraced the “It from Bit” conjecture, which holds that the fundamental building block of the universe is pure information. Because we live in the digital age, we assume that software requires preexisting hardware to run on. It's a bit disconcerting to think about disembodied software existing without hardware, or to imagine that software could even create its own hardware out of nothing. But as strange as that sounds, the NDE may be teaching us that the “It from Bit” conjecture is really true; that the “hardware” – our brains, our bodies, and the entire physical universe – may be secondary manifestations of information, and that our conscious selves are the only permanent things about ourselves that truly exist.6

In summary …

The current scientific paradigm of material reductionism has problems accommodating a theory of the conscious mind, so it defines away the problem by claiming that consciousness equals neuron activity. That claim does not hold up to preponderance of evidence that proves an alternate state of consciousness, called a near death experience, can and does occur even after trauma to the brain ceases all neuron activity. Furthermore, NDE subjects report that their minds are far more lucid in that state than when they are awake or dreaming. Many NDE subjects get a clear impression that life is meant for learning and that being present in physical bodies is necessary for that to happen.7

the baton represents our conscious self and the runners are our physical bodies. Runners drop out of the race, but the baton is passed from one runner to the next until the race is finished.

5 Back in college, I knew people whose actual college careers were like this dream.6 This attitude comes dangerously close to solipsism, so we need to be careful about carrying that idea too far.7 Some NDE subjects describe their afterlife experiences as being somewhat chaotic and almost too vivid. This

implies that the main purpose of the physical brain could actually be to limit or filter out information flowing into the conscious mind in order to facilitate learning. Just as you wouldn't try to teach calculus to a kindergarten student, you wouldn't want to overload consciousness with unfiltered reality until it is ready to receive it.

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Appendix A – The Curious Case of Dr. Alexander

Eban Alexander is a trained neurosurgeon, who had completely bought into the material reductionistparadigm that the brain equals consciousness … until he had a NDE brought about by a bacterial meningitis infection that put him into a coma for about a week at the age of 55. The bacteria in question were E. Coli, which normally live happily in our large intestines, making vitamin K2 and helping to ward off harmful bacteria. But when E. Coli get loose in the spinal column and in the brain, they wreak havoc and usually either kill their hosts or put them into a permanent vegetative state. The fact that Dr. Alexander survived this ordeal and recovered completely is remarkable enough, but his NDE experience was very atypical as well.

Alexander wrote a book entitled Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife, which triggered a firestorm of criticism and rebuke from scientists, who apparently felt betrayed by a member of their community. One critic called his book “alarmingly unscientific,” although I haveto wonder if this person actually read it. Alexander chose a rather unfortunate title for his book in my opinion; it conjures up images of Jesus, angels, meeting dead relatives, etc. – things typically found in cheesy books about the afterlife written by religious propagandists like Todd Burpo, a Christian fundamentalist pastor whose book Heaven is for Real was made into a movie. But reading Alexander's book gave me a reaction completely opposite from what was implied by the title. Alexander was a just another casual Episcopalian, who attended church services mainly on Christmas and Easter. He has no personal stake in any particular religion, or religion in general for that matter. He refrains from referring to the cosmic Spirit as “God” and uses the gender-neutral name “Om” instead. But Alexander isn't just a burned-out hippie promoting crystal-based New Agepseudoscience. When describing his condition, he uses the precise scientific terminology he learned in medical school, although he admits difficulty in describing the NDE experience itself through the use of human language that is based on normal linear consciousness.

As a neurosurgeon, he is very familiar with the conventional “nuts and bolts” theory of the brain. But having experienced NDE first-hand, he now says that the brain acts as a kind of filter to limit and modulate consciousness. I stated the same thing earlier in this essay; but thinking about this further, it seems that the brain is also some sort of super-efficient correlation engine that takes noise-like stimuli and correlates them into meaningful patterns. Take stereograms for example. These were very popular in the 1990s, on display in shopping malls everywhere, although I don't see them much anymore. They're 2-dimensional images consisting of what appear to be random dots or periodic waveforms. If you stare at a stereogram by “looking through” it long enough, 3-dimensional dolphins, butterflies, geometric shapes, etc., will “pop out” of the flat image. It seems the left eye and the right eye send signals that are spatially offset to the visual cortex, which integrates and correlates those signals into 3-dimensional images, doing what the brain does best.

What we refer to as “intelligence” is basically the ability to correlate and do pattern recognition. Most IQ tests are actually implicitly testing this ability through questions involving word associations, identifying geometric similarities, logic and mathematics. Although I'm not a neurologist or a psychiatrist, it seems that the condition known as autism might be caused by an impairment of the brain's ability to correlate information. People with autism often report being overwhelmed by a world that seems to bombard them with random noise they can't process. This may be due to an overall impairment of their ability to correlate information; however, some autistics are extremely gifted in specific areas in which that ability is augmented. At the opposite end of the scale, people suffering from schizophrenia always seem to have their correlation engines running on high-octane fuel. They have an enhanced ability to “connect all the dots,” sometimes interpreting newspaper headlines as coded messages directed specifically at them, or concocting elaborate secret conspiracy theories. People label that as paranoia, but there's truth to the saying, “There's a fine line separating genius from madness.” John Nash is a prime example.

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But let's go back to Dr. Alexander. His NDE was atypical on a couple of counts. First, the duration of his experience was unusually long. His neocortex (the part of the brain that involves memory, logic, personality, identity, and other “higher” brain functions) was completely shut down for about a week. Second, he had total amnesia about who or what he was throughout the NDE. Most NDE subjects remember their identities throughout their experiences and report a sense of separation from those whom they “left behind.” Alexander went into his NDE as a “clean slate,” like a newborn baby coming into this world, with no recollection of a previous existence, including his own identity. Because he had an NDE over such an extended period of time, he was able to repeatedly navigate back and forth between what he calls the “Earthworm's-Eye View,” a primitive mental state where his consciousness barely functioned at all, and a place he calls “the Core” where he encountered the cosmic Spirit “Om” while being in a state of super awareness. But I'm not goingto describe his NDE in detail because you can read all about that in his book.

Thankfully, Dr. Alexander emerged from the coma, which he describes as similar to being born all over again, and slowly regained his mental faculties. Needless to say, this experience changed his views about consciousness entirely. Before, as a neurosurgeon, he subscribed to the belief that consciousness and self-awareness are simply illusions generated by neurons firing in the brain. Change the patterns of neurons firing, and you change consciousness. Theoretically, you could change someone's entire identity by altering those patterns. Dr. Alexander now believes that consciousness resides outside the brain, and the brain's function is to slow down or limit thought.

There is some experimental evidence that supports this view. The Libet Experiment8 showed that exercising the will to perform an action is registered in the brain waves before the subjects are even aware of exercising their will. The time delay is significant – about ½ second. This changes the model of consciousness from the current conventional wisdom:

Awareness → Thoughts, exercising will

To this: Thoughts, exercising will → Awareness

Finally, an article in “Science Daily” reports on research by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose thatshowed quantum vibrations taking place in the microtubules inside neuron cells. Microtubules are ultra-fine structures that certainly are at the right scale for quantum processes to take place. So instead of information correlation, computation, or whatever else is happening in the brain taking place between neurons at the synapses, the actual processing could be taking place at the quantum level inside the neurons. I'm not in a position to judge Hameroff's and Penrose's thesis, and naturally, they have their share of critics and detractors in the scientific community who claim the brain is “too warm, wet, and noisy” to carry out any sort of process involving quantum wave functions. “Science Daily” says the Hameroff-Penrose research raises the following questions:

“Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?”9

I think there are important lessons about consciousness and the brain we could learn from near death experiences if scientists would just examine the evidence objectively. But as interesting as Dr. Alexander's case is, I don't think it will help that cause. Unlike many NDEs that provide objective data that could be cross checked scientifically, his NDE was entirely subjective. And since it can be argued that he lost his sense of identity purely because his neocortex shut down, his case could provide convincing proof that sense of self (consciousness) really resides inside the brainand nowhere else. But the argument of a missing neocortex then raises another question: If consciousness resides in the neocortex, then how could Dr. Alexander have experienced super awareness – super consciousness – while in a coma with the neocortex completely shut down?

8 This was actually a series of experiments performed by Benjamin Libet and validated by other researchers.9 Uh oh. There's that offensive word “spiritual” again.

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Appendix B – Moments of Awareness and Psi Phenomena

According to conventional wisdom, consciousness consists of electrical wave patterns in the brain. All thoughts, emotions, including self-awareness, are products of coordinated “firing” of neurons that produce these patterns. In other words, what we call consciousness takes place in the synapses between the neurons on a scale that is appropriate for the classical laws of electromagnetism to prevail. Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers maintain that it will soon be within our grasp to duplicate the level of complexity in the brain (based on the synapses model) using silicon-based electronics to replicate neural networks, making it possible to duplicate (or replace) human intelligence with machines. All it would take would be to connect a network of 100 billion or so logic gates (switches) on silicon chips and voilà, we would have an artificial human brain like HAL from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But according to the Hameroff-Penrose model of quantum consciousness, mentioned in Appendix Aof this essay, consciousness takes place at a much more subtle level than the synapses. In their model, the actual thought process does not involve the synapses at all, but rather computations using quantum bits (qubits) taking place within the cytoplasm of the neurons in structures known as microtubules. The existence of microtubules is a known fact, although there is some debate about what their exact functions are and how they carry out these functions. Microtubules are on a scale small enough where quantum mechanics would dominate whatever physics is taking place.10 If Hameroff-Penrose are correct, the AI folks will have to scale up the complexity of their machines by many orders of magnitude to even come close to the computing power of the human brain. I'm not going into their work in any detail – it's quite extensive and very deep – although I would strongly encourage the reader to investigate it further at the following web site:

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html

The long and short of it is this: Quantum computations involving superimposed qubits occur inside the microtubules, which somehow shield the qubits from the warm, wet and noisy environment. The qubits themselves might involve electron spin states, although Hameroff and Penrose aren't sure. Vibrational frequencies within the microtubules are over a very wide range of frequencies all the way up to the gigahertz level. When a “solution” is optimized, the quantum wave functions collapse and the microtubule takes on a definite state, which translates into a macroscopic electrical signal that causes the neuron to fire. Coordinated firings among neurons produce the brain-wave patterns that are familiar to neuroscience having distinctive frequencies: delta (0.1 – 3 Hz), theta (4 – 7 Hz), alpha (5 – 15 Hz), and all the way up to gamma (32 – 100 Hz).

Penrose isn't quite willing to abandon reductionism, which says that consciousness is equal to brain waves, and Hameroff-Penrose define coordinated neuron firings as “moments of consciousness.” I would amend that slightly; since consciousness really takes place at the quantum microtubule level, neuron firings are really “moments of awareness,” when quantum consciousness finally emerges and manifests itself at the macro level of classical physics. The neuron could be a sort of link between the hidden quantum world and the objective reality of the macroscopic universe.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which is discussed in some of my other essays, all physical reality consists of a linear superposition of quantum wave functions with no boundary between observer and observed, or between the microscopic and macroscopic. I personally do not subscribe to that extreme view, but I'll concede there is a level of truth to it. Let me explain what I mean by this.

10 Similar cellular structures, found in plant cells, appear to mediate the process of photosynthesis, converting energy from photons into food through a super-efficient process that seems to rely on a quantum-mechanical superposition effect that is not well understood.

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As an electrical engineer, I used a technique called Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis are similar to quantum wave functions in that both have roots in a mathematical concept known as Hilbert space. According to Fourier analysis, any electrical signal can be represented as a linear superposition of an infinite number of sinusoidal waves, which are “basis vectors” in a Hilbert space. As a simple example, consider a switch connected between a 1-volt battery and a loudspeaker. Suppose I close the switch at t = – ½ second, sending electrical current to the loudspeaker and open it again at t = + ½ second, interrupting the current. The electrical pulse pushes the speaker cone outward and then releases it, producing an acoustic pulse lasting 1 second. According to Fourier analysis, this 1-second pulse is equivalent to an infinite number of superimposed cosine waves of various amplitudes with frequencies from zero to infinity. Although the actual pulse in the time domain has a finite duration, the Fourier transformation implies that the cosine waves that comprise the pulse have durations that extend to infinity in both the positive and negative time directions. In other words, according Fourier analysis, those cosine waves have been around since the big bang and they'll be still be around for billions of years in the future.

Now are these cosine waves real? Well, yes. If I take a large collection tuning forks all tuned to different frequencies and place them in front of the loudspeaker, every tuning fork will vibrate at its resonant frequency when it is hit by the 1-second acoustic pulse. The vibrational intensities correspond to the amplitudes of the cosine waves given by the Fourier transform. Therefore, the pulse really is equivalent to the sum of those cosine waves; however, the tuning forks certainly don'tresonate before the switch closes, as implied by Fourier mathematics. So clearly Fourier analysis is valid in a restricted sense, but not in the abstract sense of cosine waves having infinite durations.

Quantum wave functions are also basis vectors in an abstract Hilbert space, and any object can be transformed into a collection of superposed wave functions – at least mathematically. But are they real? Considered as probability amplitudes of photons and electrons, these wave functions certainlyare real, as shown by many experiments. But I'm not sure they really apply to macroscopic objects like Schrödinger's cat. Although you might be able to mathematically transform a cat, or the whole universe for that matter, into a set of superimposed wave functions, I don't see how “cat waves” would physically affect anything on the classical scale, unless …

If neuron microtubules form a gateway to the world of quantum waves (qubits), then could so-called psi phenomena simply be a matter of quantum consciousness producing observable effectsby using the brain as a conduit? For example, let's assume for a moment that people really do have premonitions about airplane crashes, and it could be scientifically verified with high degree of certainty that there is a positive correlation between people avoiding certain flights and those flightsthat do crash. Most scientists would simply discount that evidence out of hand because they simply cannot identify any physical mechanism that could send information about a crash in the future into the present and produce negative feelings, either conscious or subconscious.

But what if there were a large hidden crack in the tail section of a plane, or suppose the pilot were sleep-deprived, suicidal or high on drugs? Could that kind of information (encoded somehow in quantum wave functions) seep into the microtubules of the passengers' neurons, altering the qubit computations inside them, and trigger feelings in “moments of awareness” that “something just isn'tright about that plane?” Even a passenger who doesn't have any conscious feelings about the plane might just “forget” to set his alarm clock and miss his flight because his neurons made a deliberate choice not to get on the plane.

I don't know how or if any of the so-called psi phenomena directly relate to NDEs, although NDEs are similar in some ways to “out-of-body experiences” that could tie in with quantum receptors in the brain. At any rate, I think there is a lot more we need to learn about the brain and consciousnessbefore we can write any of this off. That's why I'm really excited by the work by Hameroff and Penrose, although I don't necessarily agree with Penrose's reductionist interpretation of their results.

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