Sharon Rawlette
New
I do think Graziano had at least one point that should be taken more seriously in our discussions of what exactly NDEs prove and how they do it. I think it may be a mistake for us to harp on the fact that NDEs show that people can have substantial conscious experiences without brain function. After all, it IS very difficult to get hard data showing that there is no brain function at the exact time the experiences are happening. It seems to me that skeptics are right to point out that it needs to be shown (1) that there was a point for the NDEr at which they had no brain function and (2) that the experience happened AT EXACTLY THAT TIME, and not, for instance, as the brain was shutting down or coming back online. It seems to me that the best way to prove when the experiences actually happened is to focus on information that the subjects obtained that they couldn't have known had they not been conscious at the very time that they had no brain function. It's my impression (from listening to a lot of Skeptiko episodes!) that these cases do exist in the literature, and I think they are the ones that need to be focused on during a debate with a skeptic. That being said, someone who believes in psychic phenomena might not be convinced by them: what's to rule out the possibility that the person was not conscious during the time their brain was offline but, when they began to revive, their brain had clairvoyant access to past events? Just saying--the subject of proof can get very murky!