As she read my mood with such fluency, I thought about the man who had been my coworker and partner in frustration that day—the physicist Stephen Hawking, who could hardly move a muscle, thanks to a forty-five-year struggle with motor neuron disease. By this stage in the progression of his illness, he could communicate only by painstakingly twitching the cheek muscle under his right eye. That twitch was detected by a sensor on his glasses and communicated to a computer in his wheelchair. In this manner, with the help of some special software, he managed to select letters and words from a screen, and eventually to type out what he wanted to express. On his “good” days, it was as if he were playing a video game where the prize was the ability to communicate a thought. On his “bad” days, it was as if he were blinking in Morse code but had to look up the dot and dash sequence between each letter. On the bad days—and this had been one of them—our work was frustrating for both of us.

And yet, even when he could not form words to express his ideas about the wave function of the universe, I had little trouble detecting when his attention shifted from the cosmos to thoughts of calling it quits and moving on to a nice curry dinner. I always knew when he was content, tired, excited, or displeased, just from a glance at his eyes. His personal assistant had this same ability. When I asked her about it, she described a catalog of expressions she’d learned to recognize over the years. My favorite was “the steely-faced glint of glee” he displayed when composing a potent rejoinder to someone with whom he strongly disagreed. Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words, and are communicated—and understood—without conscious thought.

The experience of feeling connected to others seems to start very early in life. Studies on infants show that even six-month-olds make judgments about what they observe of social behavior. In one such study infants watched as a “climber,” which was nothing more than a disk of wood with large eyes glued onto its circular “face,” started at the bottom of a hill and repeatedly tried but failed to make its way to the top. After a while, a “helper,” a triangle with similar eyes glued on, would sometimes approach from farther downhill and help the climber with an upward push. On other attempts, a square “hinderer” would approach from uphill and shove the circular disk back down.

The experimenters wanted to know if the infants, unaffected and uninvolved bystanders, would cop an attitude toward the hinderer square. How does a six-month-old show its disapproval of a wooden face? The same way six-year-olds (or sixty-year-olds) express social displeasure: by refusing to play with it. That is, when the experimenters gave the infants a chance to reach out and touch the figures, the infants showed a definite reluctance to reach for the hinderer square, as compared to the helper triangle.

Moreover, when the experiment was repeated with either a helper and a neutral bystander block or a hinderer and a neutral block, the infants preferred the friendly triangle to the neutral block, and the neutral block to the nasty square. Squirrels don’t set up foundations to cure rabies, and snakes don’t help strange snakes cross the road, but humans place a high value on kindness. Scientists have even found that parts of our brain linked to reward processing are engaged when we participate in acts of mutual cooperation, so being nice can be its own reward. Long before we can verbalize attraction or revulsion, we are attracted to the kind and repelled by the unkind.

One advantage of belonging to a cohesive society in which people help one another is that the group is often better equipped than an unconnected set of individuals to deal with threats from the outside. People intuitively realize that there is strength in numbers and take comfort in the company of others, especially in times of anxiety or need. Or, as Patrick Henry famously said, “United we stand, divided we fall.” (Ironically, Henry collapsed and fell into the arms of bystanders shortly after uttering the phrase.)

Consider a study performed in the 1950s. About thirty female students at the University of Minnesota, none of whom had previously met, were ushered into a room and asked not to speak to each other. In the room was a “gentleman of serious mien, horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in a white laboratory coat, stethoscope dribbling out of his pocket, behind him an array of formidable electrical junk.” Seeking to induce anxiety, he melodramatically introduced himself as “Dr. Gregor Zilstein of the Medical School’s Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry.” Actually, he was Stanley Schachter, a harmless professor of social psychology. Schachter told the students he had asked them there to serve as subjects in an experiment on the effects of electric shocks. He would be shocking them, he said, and studying their reactions. After going on for seven or eight minutes about the importance of the research, he concluded by saying,

“These shocks will hurt, they will be painful. . . . It is necessary that our shocks be intense. . . . [We will] hook you into apparatus such as this [motioning toward the scary equipment behind him], give you a series of shocks, and take various measures such as your pulse rate, blood pressure, and so on.”

Schachter then told the students that he needed them to leave the room for about ten minutes while he brought in still more equipment and set it all up. He noted that there were many rooms available, so they could wait either in a room by themselves or in one with other subjects. Later, Schachter repeated the scenario with a different group of about thirty students. But this time, he aimed to lull them into a state of relaxation. And so, instead of the scary part about intense shocks, he said, “What we will ask each of you to do is very simple. We would like to give each of you a series of very mild electric shocks. I assure you that what you feel will not in any way be painful. It will resemble more a tickle or a tingle than anything unpleasant.”

He then gave these students the same choice about waiting alone or with others. In reality, that choice was the climax of the experiment; there would be no electric shocks for either group.

The point of the ruse was to see if, because of their anxiety, the group expecting a painful shock would be more likely to seek the company of others than the group not expecting one. The result: about 63 percent of the students who were made anxious about the shocks wanted to wait with others, while only 33 percent of those expecting tickly, tingly shocks expressed that preference. The students had instinctively created their own support groups. It’s a natural instinct. A quick look at a web directory of support groups in Los Angeles, for example, turned up groups focused on abusive behavior, acne, Adderall addiction, addiction, ADHD, adoption, agoraphobia, alcoholism, albinism, Alzheimer’s, Ambien users, amputees, anemia, anger management, anorexia, anxiety, arthritis, Asperger’s syndrome, asthma, Ativan addiction, and autism — and that’s just the A’s. Joining support groups is a reflection of the human need to associate with others, of our fundamental desire for support, approval, and friendship. We are, above all, a social species.

Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer. Many languages have expressions—such as “hurt feelings”—that compare the pain of social rejection to the pain of physical injury. Those may be more than just metaphors. Brain-imaging studies show that there are two components to physical pain: an unpleasant emotional feeling and a feeling of sensory distress. Those two components of pain are associated with different structures in the brain. Scientists have discovered that social pain is also associated with a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex—the same structure involved in the emotional component of physical pain.

It’s fascinating that the pain of a stubbed toe and the sting of a snubbed advance share a space in your brain. The fact that they are roommates gave some scientists a seemingly wild idea: Could painkillers that reduce the brain’s response to physical brain also subdue social pain? To find out, researchers recruited twenty-five healthy subjects to take two tablets twice each day for three weeks. Half received extra-strength Tylenol (acetaminophen) tablets, the other half placebos. On the last day, the researchers invited the subjects, one by one, into the lab to play a computer-based virtual ball-tossing game. Each person was told they were playing with two other subjects located in another room, but in reality those roles were played by the computer, which interacted with the subjects in a carefully designed manner. In round 1, those reputedly human teammates played nicely with the subjects, but in round 2, after tossing the virtual ball to the subject a few times, the teammates started playing only with each other, rudely excluding the subject from the game, like soccer players who refuse to pass the ball to a peer. After the exercise, the subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure social distress. Compared to those who took the placebo, those who took the Tylenol reported a reduced level of hurt feelings.

There was also a twist. These researchers had the subjects play the virtual ball game while lying in an fMRI machine. So while they were being snubbed by their teammates, their brains were being scanned by the machine. It showed that the subjects who’d taken Tylenol had reduced activity in the brain areas associated with social exclusion. Tylenol, it seems, really does reduce the neural response to social rejection.

When the Bee Gees long ago sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” they probably didn’t foresee that the answer was to take two Tylenols. That Tylenol would help really does sound far-fetched, so the brain researchers also performed a clinical test to see if Tylenol had the same effect outside the lab, in the real world of social rejection. They asked five dozen volunteers to fill out a “hurt feelings” survey, a standard psychological tool, every day for three weeks. Again, half the volunteers took a dose of Tylenol twice a day, while the other half took a placebo. The result? The volunteers on Tylenol did indeed report significantly reduced social pain over that time period.

The connection between social pain and physical pain illustrates the links between our emotions and the physiological processes of the body. Social rejection doesn’t just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being. In fact, social relationships are so important to humans that a lack of social connection constitutes a major risk factor for health, rivaling even the effects of cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of physical activity. In one study, researchers surveyed 4,775 adults in Alameda County, near San Francisco. The subjects completed a questionnaire asking about social ties such as marriage, contacts with extended family and friends, and group affiliation. Each individual’s answers were translated into a number on a “social network index,” with a high number meaning the person had many regular and close social contacts and a low number representing relative social isolation. The researchers then tracked the health of their subjects over the next nine years. Since the subjects had varying backgrounds, the scientists employed mathematical techniques to isolate the effects of social connectivity from risk factors such as smoking and the others I mentioned above, and also from factors like socioeconomic status and reported levels of life satisfaction. They found a striking result. Over the nine-year period, those who’d placed low on the index were twice as likely to die as individuals who were similar with regard to other factors but had placed high on the social network index. Apparently, hermits are bad bets for life insurance underwriters.

Excerpted from “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.” by Leonard Mlodinow. Copyright © 2012 by Leonard Mlodinow. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

One such case was reported by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel and his colleagues in an article published in The Lancet journal. Here is a brief summary of the case.

During a night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year-old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit (CCU). This man had been found lying in a cold, damp meadow about an hour before. He was hypothermic and he had no heart rhythm. At arrival (at the CCU), he is placed upon a resuscitation bed. Next, he receives artificial respiration without intubation, while heart massage and defibrillation are also applied. When the medical team wants to intubate the patient, he turns out to have upper dentures in his mouth. A nurse removes these upper dentures and put them onto the “crash cart.” Meanwhile, extensive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is continued.

After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated, intubated, and comatose. He is then transferred to the intensive care unit to pursue the necessary artificial respiration. After more than a week, the nurse meets with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. The moment he sees the nurse he says: “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are…you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” The nurse was amazed because the patient remembered this happening while he was in the process of CPR (i.e. while his brain was not functional). Asked further, the patient reported that he had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present.

Dr. Myers also claims that Maria’s story has been completely demolished. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, skeptical investigators have attempted to debunk the case of Maria. However, they did not succeed in explaining how she was able to “see” that the little toe area of the shoe was worn and one of the laces was stuck underneath the heel while (of note, she was confined to bed and attached to physiological monitors). The debunkers suggested that Maria could have become aware of the shoe prior to her NDE. Since a shoe placed on the ledge of the north side of the third floor could have been visible, both inside and outside the hospital, to people who could have come into contact with Maria, she could have overhead from staff commenting on it. Still, even if this was true, it is highly unlikely that hospital workers would have talked in detail about the shoe’s appearance. In addition, it would have been difficult for Maria to understand the location of the shoe in the hospital and the details of its appearance because she spoke very little English.

Over the last several centuries in the West, many scientists have functioned within a strict materialist, reductionist framework that holds to one essential assumption: “Matter is all that exists.” This materialist viewpoint has become the lens through which most of us interpret the world, interact with it, and judge what is true. Within the view of materialism, everything is composed of collections of material particles. All that we experience—including our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, sense of self, and spiritual insights—results from electrochemical impulses in our brains.

Along with an increasing number of scientists, I argue that science should not be equated with materialist metaphysics. In my view, science should be an objective process of discovery, i.e. metaphysically neutral.

Corroborated veridical NDE perceptions during cardiac arrest (and several other phenomena discussed in “Brain Wars”) strongly suggest that so-called “scientific materialism” is not only limited, but wrong. In line with this, nearly a century ago, quantum mechanics (QM) dematerialized the classical universe by showing that it is not made of minuscule billiard balls, as drawings of atoms and molecules would lead us to believe. In other words, QM acknowledges that the physical world cannot be fully understood without making reference to mind and consciousness, that is, the physical world is no longer viewed as the primary or sole component of reality (this was well explained by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of QM—I suppose Dr. Myers also considers Pauli to be another “mystical moron”).

It is not difficult to understand why Dr. Myers has launched a personal attack against me. He is well known as an ideologue (masquerading as a person of science) driven by an intense desire to further the materialist agenda. His tactics are nothing new: incendiary rhetoric, swearing, and insults to raise doubts about the competence and integrity of scientists (and others) who threaten his belief structure. I do not think that too many people are fooled by such blatantly deceptive tactics.

Full of hate and anger, Dr. Myers postures as a champion of rationality. But, as a matter of fact, he behaves like a fanatical fundamentalist engaged in a holy war to defend the materialist doctrine. His emotional attachment to this ideology leads him to deny the existence of phenomena that do not fit with his preconceived view of the world. In doing so, he avoids being forced to relinquish his deeply held, cherished beliefs.

In other respects, it is the first time I hear someone says that he found “The Spiritual Brain” (my previous book) unreadable and idiotically conceived. In fact, this book has received several favorable reviews and perhaps Dr. Myers does not have the intellectual sophistication required to appreciate its value.

Finally, with respect to my credibility as a neuroscientist, I would like to tell readers that I have authored/co-authored more than 100 publications (some in highly ranked journals) in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Alone and in collaboration with colleagues, I have amassed millions of dollars in grant money. Moreover, I have received a number of scientific awards. It is also noteworthy that I am not involved in the Intelligent Design debate and I am not affiliated with any religious organization.

Essentially, Pam agreed to die in order to save her life—and in the process had what is perhaps the most famous case of independent corroboration of out of body experience (OBE) perceptions on record. This case is especially important because cardiologist Michael Sabom was able to obtain verification from medical personnel regarding crucial details of the surgical intervention that Pam reported. Here’s what happened.

Pam was brought into the operating room at 7:15 a.m., she was given general anesthesia, and she quickly lost conscious awareness. At this point, Spetzler and his team of more than 20 physicians, nurses, and technicians went to work. They lubricated Pam’s eyes to prevent drying, and taped them shut. They attached EEG electrodes to monitor the electrical activity of her cerebral cortex. They inserted small, molded speakers into her ears and secured them with gauze and tape. The speakers would emit repeated 100-decibel clicks—approximately the noise produced by a speeding express train—eliminating outside sounds and measuring the activity of her brainstem.

At 8:40 a.m., the tray of surgical instruments was uncovered, and Robert Spetzler began cutting through Pam’s skull with a special surgical saw that produced a noise similar to a dental drill. At this moment, Pam later said, she felt herself “pop” out of her body and hover above it, watching as doctors worked on her body.

Although she no longer had use of her eyes and ears, she described her observations in terms of her senses and perceptions. “I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar,” she said. “I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not.” She also described the Midas Rex bone saw (“The saw thing that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it … ”) and the dental-drill sound it made with considerable accuracy.

Meanwhile, Spetzler was removing the outermost membrane of Pamela’s brain, cutting it open with scissors. At about the same time, a female cardiac surgeon was attempting to locate the femoral artery in Pam’s right groin. Remarkably, Pam later claimed to remember a female voice saying, “We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.” And then a male voice: “Try the other side.” Medical records confirm this conversation, yet Pam could not have heard them.

The cardiac surgeon was right—Pam’s blood vessels were indeed too small to accept the abundant blood flow requested by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, so at 10:50 a.m., a tube was inserted into Pam’s left femoral artery and connected to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. The warm blood circulated from the artery into the cylinders of the bypass machine, where it was cooled down before being returned to her body. Her body temperature began to fall, and at 11:05 a.m. Pam’s heart stopped. Her EEG brain waves flattened into total silence. A few minutes later, her brain stem became totally unresponsive, and her body temperature fell to a sepulchral 60 degrees Fahrenheit. At 11:25 a.m., the team tilted up the head of the operating table, turned off the bypass machine, and drained the blood from her body. Pamela Reynolds was clinically dead.

At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”

Meanwhile, in the operating room, the surgery had come to an end. When all the blood had drained from Pam’s brain, the aneurysm simply collapsed and Spetzler clipped it off. Soon, the bypass machine was turned on and warm blood was pumped back into her body. As her body temperature started to increase, her brainsteam began to respond to the clicking speakers in her ears and the EEG recorded electrical activity in the cortex. The bypass machine was turned off at 12:32 p.m. Pam’s life had been restored, and she was taken to the recovery room in stable condition at 2:10 p.m.

Tales of otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975 by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular book Life After Life. He presented more than 100 case studies of people who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during “clinical death” and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term NDE to refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and consciousness.

NDEs are the vivid, realistic, and often deeply life-changing experiences of men, women, and children who have been physiologically or psychologically close to death. They can be evoked by cardiac arrest and coma caused by brain damage, intoxication, or asphyxia. They can also happen following such events as electrocution, complications from surgery, or severe blood loss during or after a delivery. They can even occur as the result of accidents or illnesses in which individuals genuinely fear they might die. Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.

The effects of NDEs on the experience are intense, overwhelming, and real. A number of studies conducted in United States, Western European countries, and Australia have shown that most NDErs are profoundly and positively transformed by the experience. One woman says, “I was completely altered after the accident. I was another person, according to those who lived near me. I was happy, laughing, appreciated little things, joked, smiled a lot, became friends with everyone … so completely different than I was before!”

However different their personalities before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar psychological profile after the NDE. Indeed, their beliefs, values, behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. Importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination. And, as noted NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated, these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.

Some skeptics legitimately argue that the main problem with reports of OBE perceptions is that they often rest uniquely on the NDEr’s testimony—there is no independent corroboration. From a scientific perspective, such self-reports remain inconclusive. But during the last few decades, some self-reports of NDErs have been independently corroborated by witnesses, such as that of Pam Reynolds. One of the best known of these corroborated veridical NDE perceptions—perceptions that can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

NDEs experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper decided to undertake a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind. They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to report on verifiable events that took place when they were clinically dead, that would mean something real was occurring. They interviewed 31 individuals, of whom 14 were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the participants had had an NDE; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly, the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern, whether they were born blind or had lost their sight in later life. The results of the study were published in 1997. Based on all the cases they investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on the senses of the physical body. They proposed to call this other mode of perception mindsight. 

Despite corroborated reports, many materialist scientists cling to the notion that OBEs and NDEs are located in the brain. In 2002, neurologist Olaf Blanke and colleagues at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland described in the prestigious scientific journal Nature the strange occurrence that happened to a 43-year-old female patient with epilepsy. Because her seizures could not be controlled by medication alone, neurosurgery was being considered as the next step. The researchers implanted electrodes in her right temporal lobe to provide information about the localization and extent of the epileptogenic zone—the area of the brain that was causing the seizures—which had to be surgically removed. Other electrodes were implanted to identify and localize, by means of electrical stimulation, the areas of the brain that—if removed—would result in loss of sensory capacities, linguistic ability, or even paralysis. Such a procedure is particularly critical to spare important brain areas that are adjacent to the epileptogenic zone.

When they stimulated the angular gyrus—a region of the brain in the parietal lobe that is thought to integrate sensory information related to vision, touch, and balance to give us a perception of our own bodies—the patient reported seeing herself “lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” She described herself as “floating” near the ceiling. She also reported seeing her legs “becoming shorter.”

The article received global press coverage and created quite a commotion. The editors of Nature went so far as to declare triumphantly that as a result of this one study—which involved only one patient—the part of the brain that can induce OBEs had been located.

“It’s another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain,” said psychologist Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, which seeks to debunk all kinds of paranormal claims. “In reality, all experience is derived from the brain.”

In another article published in 2004, Blanke and co-workers described six patients, of whom three had experienced an atypical and incomplete OBE. Four patients reported an autoscopy—that is, they saw their own double from the vantage point of their own body. In this paper, the researchers describe an OBE as a temporary dysfunction of the junction of the temporal and parietal cortex. But, as Pim van Lommel noted, the abnormal bodily experiences described by Blanke and colleagues entail a false sense of reality. Typical OBEs, in contrast, implicate a verifiable perception (from a position above or outside of the body) of events, such as their own resuscitation or a traffic accident, and the surroundings in which the events took place. Along the same lines, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia commented that “We cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions.”

Materialistic scientists have proposed a number of physiological explanations to account for the various features of NDEs. British psychologist Susan Blackmore has propounded the “dying brain” hypothesis: that a lack of oxygen (or anoxia) during the dying process might induce abnormal firing of neurons in brain areas responsible for vision, and that such an abnormal firing would lead to the illusion of seeing a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Would it? Van Lommel and colleagues objected that if anoxia plays a central role in the production of NDEs, most cardiac arrest patients would report an NDE. Studies show that this is clearly not the case. Another problem with this view is that reports of a tunnel are absent from several accounts of NDErs. As pointed out by renowned NDE researcher Sam Parnia, some individuals have reported an NDE when they had not been terminally ill and so would have had normal levels of oxygen in their brains.

Parnia raises another problem: When oxygen levels decrease markedly, patients whose lungs or hearts do not work properly experience an “acute confusional state,” during which they are highly confused and agitated and have little or no memory recall. In stark contrast, during NDEs people experience lucid consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning. They also have an excellent memory of the NDE, which usually stays with them for several decades. In other respects, Parnia argues that if this hypothesis is correct, then the illusion of seeing a light and tunnel would progressively develop as the patient’s blood oxygen level drops. Medical observations, however, indicate that patients with low oxygen levels do not report seeing a light, a tunnel, or any of the common features of an NDE we discussed earlier.

During the 1990s, more research indicated that the anoxia theory of NDEs was on the wrong track. James Whinnery, a chemistry professor with West Texas A&M, was involved with studies simulating the extreme conditions that can occur during aerial combat maneuvers. In these studies, fighter pilots were subjected to extreme gravitational forces in a giant centrifuge. Such rapid acceleration decreases blood flow and, consequently, delivery of oxygen to the brain. In so doing, it induces brief periods of unconsciousness that Whinnery calls “dreamlets.” Whinnery hypothesized that although some of the core features of NDEs are found during dreamlets, the main characteristics of dreamlets are impaired memory for events just prior to the onset of unconsciousness, confusion, and disorientation upon awakening. These symptoms are not typically associated with NDEs. In addition, life transformations are never reported following dreamlets.

So, if the “dying brain” is not responsible for NDEs, could they simply be hallucinations? In my opinion, the answer is no. Let’s look at the example of hallucinations that can result from ingesting ketamine, a veterinary drug that is sometimes used recreationally, and often at great cost to the user.

At small doses, the anesthetic agent ketamine can induce hallucinations and feelings of being out of the body. Ketamine is thought to act primarily by inhibiting N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors, which normally open in response to binding of glutamate, the most abundant excitatory chemical messenger in the human brain. Psychiatrist Karl Jensen has speculated that the blockade of NMDA receptors may induce an NDE. But ketamine experiences are often frightening, producing weird images; and most ketamine users realize that the experiences produced by this drug are illusory. In contrast, NDErs are strongly convinced of the reality of what they experienced. Furthermore, many of the central features of NDEs are not reported with ketamine. That being said, we cannot rule out that the blockade of NMDA receptors may be involved in some NDEs.

Neuroscientist Michael Persinger has claimed that he and his colleagues have produced all the major features of the NDE by using weak transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the temporal lobes. Persinger’s work is based on the premise that abnormal activity in the temporal lobe may trigger an NDE. A review of the literature on epilepsy, however, indicates that the classical features of NDEs are not associated with epileptic seizures located in the temporal lobes. Moreover, as Bruce Greyson and his collaborators have correctly emphasized, the experiences reported by participants in Persinger’s TMS studies bear little resemblance with the typical features of NDEs.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

Excerpted with permission from “The Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives.” Courtesy of HarperOne.

These two were not fired for suddenly revealing some hitherto unknown and successfully buried racist attitude — these were not out-of-left field outbursts, like Michael Richards’ onstage meltdown — but for beliefs they had always had and had always expressed. This is what makes it a purge — a decision that this sort of modern “racialism” is no longer considered an acceptable mainstream Conservative attitude.

That’s good! Though it took a while. The National Review’s rejection of the overt racists is actually a fairly new phenomenon. Joan Walsh recently wrote of how the magazine was a strong supporter of racial segregation in its early days, and while that support didn’t last long, prejudice against black Americans and crank “racialist” beliefs were welcome in the magazine long after the 1960s ended.

In September of 1997, the magazine published a lengthy attack on Steven Jay Gould by white supremacist psychologist J. Philippe Rushton — another “American Renaissance” conference speaker — in which he argued that “Mongoloids average about a cubic inch more [brain mass] than Caucasoids and over three cubic inches more than Negroids.” This, again, was in 1997, not 1897. In 1997 the magazine also published a lengthy attack on interracial marriage by Steve Sailer, who’s made a career out of pseudo-academic nativism. (He is, I believe, still the “film critic” at the American Conservative.) Sailer also penned the National Review’s not particularly warm obituary of Gould, in 2002.

When, in 2007, stalwart conservative Linda Chavez complained in a National Review Online piece about rampant bigotry against Hispanics by a few NR contributors, including John Derbyshire, they allowed her targets — and numerous other contributors not named in her piece but still offended by it — to respond. And most did, at great length, by accusing her of hurling the dreaded label “racism” at them unfairly, arguing that there’s nothing wrong with jokingly referring to all Mexican-Americans as “Aztecs” (Derbyshire) or attacking “Hispanic family values” by claiming that “Hispanic immigrants bring near-Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy” (Heather MacDonald). Perfectly legitimate political arguments, right?

The National Review represents the most mainstream and least “fringey” element of modern conservatism, and they regularly police themselves to remain so, which is why it’s particularly notable that the nativists and white nationalists and white supremacists were welcome members of the NR-dictated establishment up until so very recently. (Of course, they didn’t even fully flush out the anti-Semitism until 1993, when Joe Sobran — still widely considered a brilliant mind with an unfortunate proclivity for Holocaust denial — was ousted from the magazine by William F. Buckley.)

There are a few more recent examples of American Renaissance conference participants popping up at the National Review: a link to a “revelatory” video chat with Paul Gottfried, a past American Renaissance speaker. Stanley Kurtz (he who regularly paints a dramatic picture of our moderate president’s “radical” ties) linking to a “deeply frightening” post on Iran written by “Path to National Suicide” author Lawrence Auster, who spoke at the very first AmRen conference and describes himself as a “racialist.” Another positive review of an Auster piece from Candace de Russy. (Auster split with the AmRen crowd due to their anti-Semitism, but he considers founder Jared Taylor a “talented and impressive person” whose “contributions to the understanding of racial realities have been indispensable …”)

Two of those links are from “Phi Beta Cons,” the National Review’s education blog, where purged Weissberg also contributed. Weissberg’s contributions to the site were predictable variations on common conservative themes: p.c. liberals were brainwashing our children, and black people are stupider than white people, because of genetics.

That latter claim is the primary argument of the modern version of the very old field of scientific racism, and it is incredibly popular among a certain variety of paleocon. It was also, as you see, perfectly acceptable at the NR until last week.

The “race and IQ” controversy is largely a lot of bullshit. IQ is partly heritable, and “race and IQ” obsessives draw from that fact the conclusion that black people are genetically inferior to whites (and, often, Asians as well). Then they crow about how liberals are “anti-science” for disputing their methodology and conclusions, because they are essentially trolling.

Let’s deal with this as swiftly as possible: “IQ” measures one variety of cultural literacy — are you good at taking a specific kind of test? — not innate “intelligence.” IQ generally correlates to economic advancement, because, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in one of his least annoying pieces, it measures “modernity.” Plenty of things are “heritable” but not genetic — like taste in music. An Ireland-born person of South Asian ancestry is almost certainly more likely to enjoy Jedward than an Indian-born person of Irish ancestry, so while the Irish can be said to be more likely to have shit taste in music on that account, it is by no means determined by their genes.

The fact that IQ has been steadily increasing for as long as we’ve been measuring it — the famous Flynn effect — indicates that the test measures a characteristic determined primarily by environment. “Heritability” of IQ is higher in more prosperous classes than in lower classes. In other words, “for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.”

Race itself is socially and culturally constructed; basic visual “racial” markers are genetically dictated but any randomly selected white person may be more genetically similar to any randomly selected Asian or African person than another randomly selected white person. “The great majority of genetic variation … [is] within the so-called races, not between them,” according to Jan Sapp.

Between 5 and 7 percent of human genetic diversity is between subgroups within the classically defined races; 6 to 10 percent of the total human variation is between those groups that we think of as races in an everyday sense based on skin color. The remainder of the variation occurs at the individual level and cannot be categorized by group or subgroup.

If IQ were primarily or even marginally genetically determined, “race” would be about as useful a rubric for analyzing differences in intelligence as hair color or nose shape or any other cosmetic difference. If our society had a history of oppressing red-haired people, there would be researchers manipulating statistics to prove that gingers are simply genetically inferior, and John Derbyshire would be warning his children to avoid large gatherings of Scottish people.

What liberals find obnoxious about the conservative obsession with IQ and its heritability is that it’s a patently obvious smokescreen for racism. Charles Murray and his ilk pose as disinterested scientists, but they are political actors. The people who care deeply about the supposed innate genetic differences between “the races” also almost invariably use those supposed innate differences to justify attitudes and behaviors that are indistinguishable from “classic” American racism.

Derbyshire’s lessons to his children don’t even make sense if you suppose that intelligence is genetically determined, because the “races” are not genetically distinct enough for you to draw useful conclusions about people based solely on those visual cues. It is much more “useful” to draw inferences based on purely cultural signifiers; that group of drunk guys in New Jersey Devils apparel staggering down 35th Street toward Madison Square Garden may seem like people you should avoid, but not specifically because they are white people unknown to you.

The purge at NR is still limited to those who link their preoccupation with “the IQ question” to explicitly white supremacist or nativist politics, like Derbyshire and Weissberg. Charles Murray, who pioneered the argument but who’s always careful to stop short of open association with Stormfront types, remains a welcome presence.

Phi Beta Cons, the aforementioned higher education blog where Weissberg was published, is edited by Robert VerBruggen, who, while declaring himself “agnostic” on the issue of genetically determined race-based IQ heritability (hmm), has certainly demonstrated an interest in the subject.

VerBruggen, for example, defended DNA co-discoverer James Watson, who has revealed himself in his old age to be a racist, sexist crank.

Watson isn’t a “racist” but a “racialist”; in other words, he believes that genetic differences between the races might explain differences in ability and behavior, and that’s a travesty.

Watson had recently said (among other things) that aid to Africa was useless because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” He also said that “people who have to deal with black employees find” the idea that all people are created equal to be “not true.” VerBruggen allows that Watson’s comments were “unprofessional,” but apparently not “racist.” (Racialist! There’s a difference!)

Conservatives like VerBruggen seem attracted to genetic determinism, especially when it reinforces their view that society’s “winners and losers” each deserve their lot in life: When research shows that the lower classes tend to score worse on IQ tests than rich people, the conservative interpretation is not that IQ increases with, say, greater economic security and nutrition and access to healthcare and a million other environmental factors, but that rich people are rich because they are smarter. This leads to fatalism — to Murray’s sorrowful belief that there’s only so much we can do as a nation to improve the lives of our downtrodden underclass. They’re just dumb!

To be clear, I’m not calling VerBruggen a “racist,” or accusing him of anti-black bias — I just think that his repeated need to defend practitioners of racialist IQ hogwash is ill-advised, and it certainly helps explain how a white supremacist found a welcome home at the National Review without anyone (apparently) noticing.

If conservatives seriously want to understand why the “cudgel of racism” is still wielded against them, they may want to try to picture how actual black people interpret their fascination with “proofs” (or even just “interesting arguments”) that blacks are genetically inferior.

Oh, but what’s that? The year-old turbulence of a butterfly halfway around the world? By the time Bockscar passed over its target at 10:44 a.m., the city was covered in haze. According to the pilot’s flight log, “Two additional runs were made, hoping that the target might be picked up after closer observation. However, at no time was the aiming point seen.” So the crew left the city of Kokura and made their way over to their second choice, Nagasaki.

Most people have never heard of Kokura. In this regard, it can be counted as one of the luckiest cities in the world.

We’re fascinated by near misses. In 1993, a German motorcyclist hit a truck, went flying into a tree, and was impaled on a branch. The headline in a Norwegian newspaper, next to a photograph of this unfortunate gentleman with a branch still going into his chest and out his back, read, “Verdens Heldigste,” or “World’s Luckiest.” Now, before you protest that perhaps I have made a spectacular error in translation, let me add the ending: the man survived. The branch had missed all his vital organs.

Luck is as tricky to define as it is to tame. As a first pass, you might calculate an outcome’s level of luck by multiplying its positivity by its improbability. Rare good things are lucky. But what about Kokura? Nothing positive happened to it. In fact, it lost thousands of neighboring countrymen. And the German motorcyclist had surely seen better days. “Luck” is often yoked to terrible, terrible things.

Karl Teigen, a psychologist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, has spent years studying what we mean when we talk about luck. One conclusion he’s reached is that, on par, “lucky” events are not pleasant. In a search of newspaper stories, for example, he found that “with the exception of an occasional sports champion and a double N lottery winner, the typical lucky person had survived a plane or car crash, had been stabbed or shot, fallen off a cliff or bridge, been shipwrecked, or surrounded by flames.” In a one-month period, he found one mention of “bad luck,” in a story about a soldier who had stepped on a mine — but the soldier had nevertheless commented on his own good fortune in losing just the one leg.

Teigen concluded that luck derives not from the absolute value of an outcome but from its relative value — we assess luck by standing reality next to its most salient counterfactual neighbor. If you lose a leg but think of how you almost lost two, you’ll consider yourself lucky. If you win second prize in a lottery, but miss first prize only by changing a digit at the last minute, you’ll consider yourself unlucky. Why wouldn’t you compare losing a leg to not stepping on the mine at all? Mentally altering an effect or a recent cause in a chain of events comes more naturally than mentally undoing an earlier cause. Once you’ve skewered yourself on a tree, you’ll tend to think of the untouched organs right next to the branch hole, not about how this never would have happened if you hadn’t taken the extra five minutes to floss this morning.

Luck isn’t a direct product of improbability, either. In one study, Teigan divided a roulette wheel into three wedges of equal size: one red, one yellow, and one blue. He divided another into eighteen sections of equal size: six red, six yellow, and six blue, interspersed. Landing on red wins. Eighty-five percent of subjects felt it was luckier to land on red on the wheel with eighteen divisions than the one with six, even though the probability was the same on both wheels. On this wheel, whenever you land on red, the slice is so narrow you’re almost landing on blue or yellow. It’s a close call every time. Similarly, of two boys standing near a large icicle that falls and lands between them, people judge the closer boy to be luckier, not despite the fact that he was closer to death but because of it.

Teigen concluded that the two factors defining luck aren’t positivity and improbability but rather the difference in value between reality and its most salient counterfactual, and the closeness of that counterfactual. How much better or worse things could have been, and how nearly they were. The chance of a cloud layer over Kokura wasn’t remarkably slim, and the city looked pretty much the same on August 10 as on August 9. Kokura’s luck comes from how easily we can imagine the clouds not being there and from how big a difference those clouds made.

And luck is not an impersonal impetus. Teigen has found that feeling lucky correlates with feelings of gratitude, a distinctly social sentiment. And the thanks are often of an existential kind, directed not toward a person but toward God or the universe or fate.

A few years ago, Eugene Subbotsky, a psychologist at Lancaster University who studies magical thinking, was strolling through Moscow with his young son, with no one around. They walked past an empty, parked car. “Just when we were passing by, the engine started,” Subbotsky told me soon after the event. “My son said ‘beebee’ — he calls cars beebees, he’s only three years old — ‘Papa, beebee.’ And then I look at his eyes, and I see his eyes widening.” The car starts moving. It swerves toward them. Finally, it turns a little more and hits an iron gate a few inches away. “We escaped death very narrowly,” he says. “I could have been smashed to pieces with my little son. I am a rational man, I am a scientist, I’m studying this phenomenon, but there are some events in your life that you cannot explain rationally. Of course you can always write it down to chance and say, ‘Okay, it’s a coincidence,’ but it’s such a rare coincidence that you start thinking mystically and magically about things.”

We define ourselves using narratives, according to Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University and a leading researcher in “narrative psychology.” “To be an adult means, among other things, that you’ve figured out how you got to where you are and where you’re going,” he told me. “And the only way I know of to convey that to another person is through a story.” People also explain their pasts and futures to themselves in terms of narratives. “These stories function to give life a certain level of coherence,” McAdams says. Lives comprise many unrelated events, but our pattern-finding minds draw connections. We revise our histories to make better stories, omitting certain details and changing others so they conform to a cohesive, compelling, and often complimentary tale.

We compose our life stories using the data given — the somewhat random happenings of our pasts — but then we get the roles of the data and the interpretation confused: we stare in wonder at how well the events seem to fit the theme, forgetting that we custom-fit the theme to the events. Instead of drawing a target around a cluster of bullet holes and gawking at the aim of a marksman, you’re constructing a story around a series of occurrences and marveling at the insight and wisdom of providence. One stray bullet and you wouldn’t be who you are today.

One can certainly tell a good story of one’s life without resorting to unnatural intervention. Event B just logically followed event A. You decided X because you wanted Y. But it’s those crucial turning points where things could so easily have gone a different direction — the ones that invoke counterfactual thoughts — that arouse a sense of guidance. Some people would prefer to attribute these defining incidents to rolls of the cosmic dice, but perceiving fate can inject one’s narrative with greater meaning. Laura Kray and colleagues found in their research on counterfactual thinking and fate perception that those who considered alternative outcomes to their lives not only saw the real outcomes as fated but also more strongly agreed that “It made me who I am today” and “It gave meaning to my life.” Further, the data revealed that the sense of meaning was brought about by the perception of fate. “When people believe their lives are as they were meant to be,” the authors wrote, “they experience the gratification of being on the ‘right’ course and fulfilling their life’s mission.”

Laura King has found that, when combined with positive affect, referential thinking (seeing events such as traffic light changes as having a significance meant specifically for oneself) is correlated with finding one’s existence purposeful and meaningful. “It makes events that are random and chaotic feel like they belong in a coherent narrative about who you are and what your life is,” she says. “You become a character in a much more interesting narrative when the whole world is conspiring to take part in your personal drama.”

You want to believe that all those flukes of luck leading to where you are were somehow meant for you. Customized kismet means someone’s got your back. It also means that those events that happened for a reason may be building up to some future purpose. It gives the entire story of your life both continuity and a destination, something to strive for. You were put here for a reason, you matter, and you’re on a mission. Everything before now was to prepare you for your calling! The universe is counting on you! Now hop to it!!!

Sometimes it’s fun to pretend.

Excerpted with permission from “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking,” by Matthew Hutson, from Hudson Street Press.