From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Fri Dec 30 2005 - 13:39:55 MST
At 03:19 PM 12/30/2005 -0500, micah glasser wrote:
> someone might be in surgery and have a flat EEG for 10 minutes, when
> resuscitated he may claim to have been observing the entire surgery while
> 'dead' and be able to recount everything that happened in detail.
>I think this kind of evidence is intriguing because it plays havoc with
>the accepted materialist paradigm
Possibly, but far more likely it suggests (if the evidence holds up under
extreme scrutiny) that EEG is not a very good index of complex brain states.
I'd suggest that the place to look for indefeasible psi phenomena is
precognition of in-principle-unpredictable events--the cumulative curve of
a true random number generator output (although this is so boring it's
almost a classic extinction paradigm), or "presentiment" spikes in brain or
other scans where shocking stimuli register *in advance of presentation* as
well as shortly after, while control banal stimuli fail to. There is an
increasing amount of this work being done, some of the most intriguing
being reanalyses by Radin and Bierman and others of non-parapsych databases
built by neuroscientists interested in tracking which part of the brain
responds to what kinds of stimuli. No urls I know of, sorry, but look for
Radin's book sometime next year. (I know it's coming because of my
precognitive powers.)
Damien Broderick
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