Keith Augustine interview

Just an after burner (I had written this already a few hours ago)

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Initially I had planned to write a lengthy response to Max-B’s posts.
But now I think a fairly brief  summary will do.

First of all, to consider Keith Augustine*) a real expert in this field is a bit of a 'chutzpah,' because the true experts are the people who operated on Pam Reynolds, i.e. Dr's Robert Spetzler and his assistant (at the time) Karl Greene. They did the hard work, Augustine did not (besides, Augustine is a philosopher, not a physician) nor did Woerlee, and neither of them were involved in the operation.

We in the Netherlands have a saying pertaining to this type of behaviour, which can be translated thus: the best coaches are in the stands. Meaning: there are always people who think they know better than the experts who do the hard work on the ground.

In any case, Augustine doesn't know what he's talking about. Max however, thinks he does, and thus says that it was not known when EEG Burst Suppression occurred. But it was and is known. There is faulty reasoning (Max's) regarding the procedure. It was NOT decided during the operation that Pam’s heart would be stopped using the cooling down procedure, aka “operation standstill”. That decision had already been made long before, after Spetzler et al. had seen the enormous aneurism at the base of her skull, on the CAT scan.

So, from the very beginning of the operation the anaesthesiologist placed her under deep anaesthesia using thiopental to induce burst suppression. Only after Pam had been deeply unconscious could Spetzler open her skull. Somehow Pam 'saw' that  (she got out of her body) and next heard what the cardiovascular-surgeon said about a vein/artery in her groin. And Spetzler made it very clear to us that she was then under EEG Burst Suppression, not later!

This is all clearly laid out in our book The Self Does Not Die. I consider this exposé (in the book) the last word on the Pam Reynolds case.

*) Regarding Keith Augustine, he has been given the opportunity to fill three complete issues of the Journal of Near Death Studies to show his ideas about NDE's. His final conclusion? Nothing but elaborate hallucinations. Of course, in an issue afterwards there came proper rebuttals from the real experts in the field. But there are no signs that Augustine changed his mind. Far from it, because he is an ideologist, and ideologists are always right...
Anyway, this extremely large allocation of space in the JNDS shows that NDE-researchers are not suffering from "confirmation bias" as one Dutch skeptic recently told me. We are quite willing to consider sensible arguments, but not arguments of the nature: "I cannot be therefore it is not".

Smithy

Just grabbed some links to papers that seem related to awareness and burst suppression for future reference... whilst its on my mind... they may or may not be relevant...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full...99.00300.x

http://www.jcafulltextonline.com/article...4/abstract

https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-anal...ne.18.aspx

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0707361

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/1...727/288868 **
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/39/10597.full **

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1100403

http://anesthesiology.pubs.asahq.org/art...id=1934032

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17995997

Understood, Max. After all, someone like Pim van Lommel did take that course and dedicate part of his career to writing papers and further investigating the phenomena. Perhaps Spetzler didn't see that as a desired direction; maybe he was busy with other things. I'm guessing that a formal paper would need accompanying research into other possible cases and causes.

I don't know, it just would be useful to see the recordings, but I doubt they are going to change anybody's mind, they just contribute to the literature, although it seems so common, many thousands every year have some sort of awareness under anesthetic, and a brief look at some articles on google scholar shows burst suppression (BS) to be pretty much an unknown, and the different research papers appear to show really complex and nontrivial mechanisms at work...

It definitely seems accepted that BS reduces metabolism (hence it's neuroprotective properties), but it also seems to increase excitability in the brain, not reduce it. The periods of quiet interspersed by bursts on medical EEG with a limited number of scalp sensors, also gives one the impression it's like that all over the brain, but it seems its not, there may be burst going on next door to a sensor during a quiet period, it's just the widely dispersed sensors ain't positioned to pick them up. I mean we don't know how anesthetics work anyway, and they don't work the same way on everybody either. Using larger amounts of anesthetic also seems to change things in the brain in very unexpected ways, ironically it may push some mechanisms of the brain in quite the opposite direction than what was intended, even if overall brain metabolism is reduced.

Anyway, I'm happy to admit that Pam was very likely to have been in burst suppression during the periods of her recollections.

What exactly is Keith Augustine  an expert in? Perhaps philosophy - I think that’s his background but to be honest I can’t be bothered to confirm it. I’m puzzled as to why he is considered any kind of authority on the subject of psi. I’ve seen his discussions online for many years (admittedly it’s been a while since I have read his material) and found his arguments partial (ie he seems to largely ignore evidence that doesn’t support his position or hand-waves it away) and sometimes seemingly disingenuous in the sense that he didn’t appear to have much understanding of the the research into psi but had paid close attention to the debunking arguments of others. I haven’t read anything new in his lines of argument. He reads like a professional debunker to me and in that sense he seems to be simply ‘noise’ on the subject of psi. A personal opinion only of course, fwiw.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t able to ask valid questions of course, but as a balanced debater   of the phenomena he seems to speak so confidently about, I think he offers very little value.  Rather than him being a person who has a genuine interest in the subject in terms of finding out the truth of the matter,  he seems to be the very opposite. 

A person approaching the subject for the first time might well read his writings, but they would, IMHO,  be very ill-advised to consider him as a source of balanced opinion or information. Like a great many others of his stripe.

IMHO the only way to develop an informed view on the complex subject of psi and its varied specialist areas - which in themselves often have many decades of research - is to actually look at the research that has been carried out for oneself first. I don’t think philosophical debates add anything to the body of evidence or help people to form a clear view of the facts, nor does sniping at the research of others - as opposed to asking genuine questions with a view to learning the truth of the matter.

As for the suggestion that the surgeons might have produced a paper - I think perhaps this would have been very difficult because the phenomenon wasn’t something that was planned or expected and therefore it’s difficult to see why or how they might have made sufficient provision to have produced a report that would be acceptable in their professional environment. They were performing an urgent medical procedure weren’t they? Not excecuting a research project.

As for the suggestion that the surgeons might have produced a paper - I think perhaps this would have been very difficult because the phenomenon wasn’t something that was planned or expected and therefore it’s difficult to see why or how they might have made sufficient provision to have produced a report that would be acceptable in their professional environment. They were performing an urgent medical procedure weren’t they? Not excecuting a research project.

I wasn't suggesting publishing a study or research paper?

The medical profession write short retrospective articles and case reports for professional publications all the time, often just a brief article, sometime little more than a letter. If it's an interesting/unusual case (perhaps like a case of anesthetic awareness and explicit recall under BS), then adding it to the literature can be useful, because other medical professionals and researchers looking for similar information may find it again in a search.

Here is an example publication in the UK which focuses on case reports exclusively (so you can see what I mean)....

https://www.anaesthesiacases.org/case-reports/2016-0158

I wasn't suggesting publishing a study or research paper?

The medical profession write short retrospective articles and case reports for professional publications all the time, often just a brief article, sometime little more than a letter. If it's an interesting/unusual case (perhaps like a case of anesthetic awareness and explicit recall under BS), then adding it to the literature can be useful, because other medical professionals and researchers looking for similar information may find it again in a search.

Here is an example publication in the UK which focuses on case reports exclusively (so you can see what I mean)....

https://www.anaesthesiacases.org/archive/year-plus

Ah ok! Thanks for clarifying.

I wasn't suggesting publishing a study or research paper?

The medical profession write short retrospective articles and case reports for professional publications all the time, often just a brief article, sometime little more than a letter. If it's an interesting/unusual case (perhaps like a case of anesthetic awareness and explicit recall under BS), then adding it to the literature can be useful, because other medical professionals and researchers looking for similar information may find it again in a search.

Here is an example publication in the UK which focuses on case reports exclusively (so you can see what I mean)....

https://www.anaesthesiacases.org/case-reports/2016-0158

Alright! But as for Reynolds case, would such a letter be taken seriously? I doubt it.

Nowadays Spetzler is almost unassailable.
Not only an excellent surgeon, but also the director of the Barrows hospital, I believe.

Smithy

Alright! But as for Reynolds case, would such a letter be taken seriously? I doubt it.

I can't see why? Looks interesting.

Unless you're assuming he was going to write up the case from an NDE OBE perspective. Obviously that's not going to happen!! :-)

...the case would just be written up as just a factual account for the record, what they did, and what happened sort of thing, and confirming the explicit recall as apparently accurate under BS etc.. He was interviewed in the media about it, so he's not exactly shy.

I can't see why? Looks interesting.

Unless you're assuming he was going to write up the case from an NDE OBE perspective. Obviously that's not going to happen!! :-)

...the case would just be written up as just a factual account for the record, what they did, and what happened sort of thing, and confirming the explicit recall as apparently accurate under BS etc.. He was interviewed in the media about it, so he's not exactly shy.

That is correct. But realize that the case happened in the early nineties.
As far as I know the case became widely known in 2002 or 2003, via the BBC documentary The Day I Died.
Spetzler had then already become a highly respected surgeon, and he could thus talk about it more freely.
In any case, it is still a tough thing for physicians to talk about NDEs.

Smithy

Up until five years ago, there were three of these cases at Barrow Institute, of conscious awareness while the brain was dead. Dr Allan Hamilton was very approachable with questions (not so much now, I think he got fed up with me and I don't blame him) and he told me this and he also revealed it in his memoirs, The Scalpel and the Soul.

He amalgamated the three cases into one and called her 'Sarah Gideon.' One was Pam Reynolds.
One of the cases was not an aneurism but she was still placed in standstill for some reason. Whist there was no blood in her body, no brainwaves whatsoever (she was dead Hamilton said)  she apparently heard a conversation about a yellow diamond ring with all the details and she was able to describe the surgeons and doctors etc.

I specifically asked Dr Hamilton if this conversation about the ring really happened and he said 'yes' but it wasn't an aneurism. Anymore than that he wouldn't tell me. Like many others, I found it frustrating that he'd cobbled them all together. We could have had a 'field day' discussing them individually, but there you go.

One of the cases (don't know which) caused such a rumpus that the chief At Barrow told them to stop talking about it, saying that it must have been the case that there was still some electrical activity in the brain. But Hamilton went through the whole EEG records with experts and viewed all the film track of the operation. The brain had been dead.

There was some big-wig from England there too who said it was a clear case of consciousness without a brain.
Hamilton said in his book there was a big argument about it in the hospital canteen.