ASM027 Night Terrors, Near Death Experiences, and the Burden of Proof

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night terrors near-death experiences and the burden of proof all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i've got an event coming up in september in new york city with forefront church but tickets are on sale right now and space is really limited so if you're interested in seeing me live in new york talking about sex drugs violence and addiction go to ask sciencemike.com for tickets and information but otherwise let's get it started [Music] hey science mike uh i have a question that i've been asking for a long time and don't feel like i've ever gotten a straight answer on so i want to know how we know that we're all seeing the same colors so for example when i was young my parents trained me to call the color of the grass green but i don't know that what i'm seeing is green and what you're seeing is green are the same thing i'd love to know more about the science behind how this works and finally get a straight answer on this uh thanks for everything you do with the show love listening okay i've got to tell you the truth these are my favorite questions we talk about science faith in life and we go into any question you guys have and part of the value of this show is being able to talk about topics you can't talk about elsewhere but i can't deny that i don't have the most fun answering questions like these just straight up weird science questions so how do we know our greens are the same how do i know that what i call green to me isn't blue to someone else and they just also call it green we have how could we prove that how could we know that well we can't there's actually no scientific way to validate that everyone's perceptions of green or red or blue or any other color are the same in fact we already know that they often aren't we already know that our perceptions of color are different sometimes under different circumstances first of all color doesn't exist in the natural world in physics there's no such thing as color all there is is electromagnetic radiation with a given frequency now we have a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation we call visible light because it strikes our retinas and we can sense it and we sense different wavelengths as having different colors sort of and i'll get to this sort of in a minute but first of all not all eyes are equipped with the same photo detectors and not all eyes can sample all frequencies of visible light and discern different levels of frequency and hence we have colorblindness there are people who have different degrees of colorblindness and because of that literally don't see the same variety of colors that the rest of us do but even if you have non-colorblind eyes i almost said normal but i don't want to imply that a colorblind eye is ab normal but even with eyes that are not colorblind or have full color perception our understanding of color differs for example the color blue is a recent construct in terms of human society ancient cultures had no color blue and ancient literature does not make reference to things we call blue as blue they spoke of wine colored seas for example and good luck finding a blue sky in ancient literature it doesn't exist and in fact there are some contemporary cultures that still don't have a word for blue and science tells us therefore can't see it there's been an experiment done with the himba tribe from africa they don't have a word for blue and if you show them 12 squares 12 color swatches in a circle 11 are green and one is blue they can't pick out the square that's different they are not perceiving blue as blue in the way that we do on the other hand they have over 60 words for green and so if you show them the same experiment but one color is a slightly different shade of green the himba tribe can immediately recognize which square is different but most westerners can't they just see similar shades of green and that's because our cognition plays a role in our perception of color and our other senses now you can go to ask sciencemic.com and click the show notes and i'll give you a couple freaky examples of this i'll have a video that goes through some optical illusions that are based on your inability to absolutely identify color our eyes don't absolutely measure the frequency of electromagnetic radiation instead well our eyes may but our brains fudge it our visual cortex puts these pictures together and tries to make sense of them that's why your brain may interpret a shadow in the corner you know in your peripheral vision as a cat or an animal but it's really just a shadow that's your your brain trying to make sense of sensory data it's trying to create a cohesive and comprehensible narrative out of the universe and it does that all the time now when your eyes are not colorblind and your cultural contexts are similar it's reasonable to believe that our colors are probably perceived in the same way because you're talking about you know very similar cellular structures brain structures and then neurocognitive constructs running in those brains i think it's safe to say my blue is probably your blue our brains are similar enough that our blues are probably the same with the same linguistic input the qualia if you will a word from philosophy to describe the raw experience of senses are similar or exact but we can't prove that we have no way to transmit qualia from one brain to another i can't describe green to a person who has never seen green a blind person you can't describe grain i can't describe the taste of a good steak to someone who's never had one or had a similar food these absolute sensory experiences our language doesn't actually address them and if you doubt that we have different perceptions of color go look on the internet at that blue black white gold dress and ask someone what color it is and even though in absolute terms people's eyes are seeing the same electromagnetic frequencies one group absolutely and resolutely says it's white and gold and the other group says that it's blue and black and that's because sometimes our greens are not the same greens [Music] a science mic in a typical discussion between an atheist and a christian the question what would it take for you to believe in god might come up which the atheist might respond nothing and then ask the christian what would it take for you to not believe in god and which they respond nothing which then accomplishes nothing in the conversation i guess my question to you is you talk about how you went from being a christian to an atheist and now you are a believer again and you might say that you live in the tension but did anyone ever ask you the first question while you were an atheist and how would you answer or how would you answer the second question now that you do believe in god is there anything that could ever be solved or discovered or take place in which you would no longer believe in god what would it take for you to walk away from your faith again thanks how fun is it we live in a society now where there is a typical conversation between christians and atheists that's actually kind of cool there's a degree of religious liberty that exists that allows not only christians to be christians but for atheists to be atheists and for both groups to have a right to those beliefs and to not be persecuted i think that's fantastic on the other hand i do get a little bored with uh the way it tends to unfold is the same conversation over and over so let's go into a time capsule for a moment and i'll put on my atheist hat and uh i'll go back and think how i would answer the question what would it take for me to believe in god and i think my answer as an atheist would be similar to most atheists when i say evidence it's not that i as an atheist outright rejected any possibility of god it's that i found insufficient evidence to believe in something so extraordinary as a man who rose from the dead or a conscious entity who created the universe and then continues to intervene in it every claim i found about god from every religion wasn't backed by enough good evidence to support their claims and therefore i rejected belief in god i think most atheists today would say something similar what they need is evidence evidence would change their views now when i was a young southern baptist i would have said nothing can change my view because i have known and experienced god personally i have seen answered prayer i have evidence of god's actions through the bible which is authoritative not only because god says so but because they were innumerable eyewitnesses to the accounts in scripture and they are historically trustworthy and i think that's common especially among conservative religious people to say nothing would change my view in this way the atheist view is the more open of the two now there are plenty of christians today who say you know some days i don't believe in god and are very open to examining evidence and very open to having a discussion we live in a very diverse church today especially since the advent of american protestantism the number of christian theologies out there has just splintered and exploded into thousands and thousands and thousands of different traditions and streams and ideas and i think that's a wonderful thing now if we go to the present how would i answer now what would it take to change my beliefs evidence changes my beliefs i am an empiricist evidence changes my beliefs it happens all the time as someone presents me with a rational case backed by evidence i reconsider my views all the time on the daily i am a work in progress i'm on a hunt every day for what i don't know and what i know that's wrong and i view it as a service when someone points out a flaw the problem with me learning something that would cause me to walk away from my faith is that my faith is both based on science and very simple i'm a mystic so i don't have like very specific ideas about god in the tradition of not only christian mystics but mystics of every faith there is a god i experience that i cannot put into words so i don't make fact claims about god very much now just so i can have some intellectual rigor so i can keep doubt at bay and so i cannot trivialize my own experiences with god i have a simple axiomatic definition for god that goes something like this god is at least the set of forces that created this and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains i'll say that again god is at least the natural set of forces that created and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains now that's that falls pretty short of the old testament god or the new testament god i get it but when i talk about god that's the definition i'm using at least to note that this understanding is limited that there is more information to find but that's what i can prove about god so for someone to take my faith away they would have to prove to me that there were no forces that create or sustain the universe and that those forces don't create people who can experience wonder and awe and reverence that's a tall order uh my faith is pretty secure in that and because i understand god to be this thing i can experience this maybe even impersonal force i don't know i experienced god personally but that could be me be me projecting myself onto god i'm just open to those experiences and i participate in christian tradition and practice because it is through christ that i experience god i also don't make empirical fact claims about jesus i personally believe that jesus was a man i think that's a relatively safe assumption in scholarship but i also make the unsafe assumption that he was a man who rose from the dead because of my strange personal experiences with a risen christ i would never for a moment scoff at or minimize someone's skepticism over my belief in the resurrection so in my faith today there is an openness to the way that it is personal but there's a confidence in the way that science validates religious experience and religious beliefs as helpful and beneficial to our species so in a very real way to deconstruct my faith would also deconstruct science itself and the claims of modern science for me my scientific beliefs and my faith beliefs are inextricably attached to one another so what would cause me to change my beliefs evidence but i'm pretty confident that evidence to undermine my current faith stance is relatively hard to come by [Music] hi mike this is beth from tallahassee florida a place i think you know pretty well my question is about near-death experiences i know that there have been a lot of books about this and i know that there's even been a neurosurgeon who wrote a book about it but i want you to synthesize it for me what happens in a near-death experience and are people connecting with god in those moments or is there just something happening in our brain that makes us think that it's god love to hear your thoughts on this thanks so much for all your great work bye most scientists believe that near-death experiences are related to what happens in the brain when it's deprived of oxygen which is obviously a significant part of our process of death so when we read books about people who've undergone medical procedures or for other reasons had near-death experiences those experiences are remarkably similar to what happens to astronauts and test pilots who are put into a centrifuge as part of their training and pass out they pass out because not enough oxygen is reaching their brain because not enough blood is reaching their brain and when that happens near death experiences typically have a few things in common first of all your sense of being attached to physical space and proximity is weakened as the outer parts of your brain are first deprived of oxygen and so that your parietal lobe runs out of steam and since it's what anchors you to your sense of physical space you feel like you may be going somewhere else you may even have an out of body experience as your consciousness tries to make sense of this strange sensory data the next thing that happens typically is a tunnel of light as the visual cortex on the outer and rear brain also begins to run out of oxygen and your visual aperture narrows to a point of light it would look a lot like passing through a tunnel on the other side of that tunnel is deeper in the brain your hypothalamus and other parts of your brain associated with memory formation and memory recollection and so now that your visual cortex isn't passing external information to you anymore as you fade from consciousness you begin to experience people and settings from your memory so your life may flash before your eyes and you may see loved ones appear as your brain recalls them around this time your brain's ability to experience pain begins to fade and you experience a sense of painlessness and peacefulness now a near-death experience is what happens when the memories of this process are presented to the higher brain again you didn't die somehow you regained consciousness the surgery ended the coma ended or if you just passed out you wake up and your brain is a story making machine it tries to make sense of sensory input and memories and so it ascribes significance and a narrative to these events that are associated with the brain losing consciousness that's the the best understanding we have in science i've read these these books about heaven i've even read the book by the neuroscientist the name of his book and his name escapes me for the moment i apologize but i will put a link to it in the show notes on asksciencemike.com in his case he had a brain infection that affected his neocortex his higher brain was not functional but his lower brain continued to struggle to continue his life and assert some control over the situation and later when his higher brain recovered it tried to make sense of his limbic system's attempt he felt like an earthworm and then like a butterfly he had these increasingly more sophisticated experiences as more and more of his brain started to work again but his brain like our brains do attached a narrative to that we make sense of the senseless we find patterns in the meaningless that's what human brains do now is this a near-death experience is this really something that makes us closer to god or is it just a brain thing well is love real or is it just in our brains do i really love my wife or does my brain just make me think i love my wife what's the difference is a sunset objectively beautiful well probably not it's probably there's no objective measure of beauty i think there's not a huge difference between just happening our brains and real the subjective the things that happen in our emotional and internal experiences are part of reality they exist this place of reverence we're sent to in the face of death and these experience is precisely what i refer to when i use the word god that is what it means to go into the presence of god and for god to dwell within us god does not live in the pump of your heart god lives in the synapses and dendrites and neurons of your brain and so of course we stand face to face with god when we turn most inward in the face of death [Music] hi science mike it's alison laurel calling from fort worth texas and my question is about dreaming specifically night terrors occasionally i experience a full-blown night terrors when i'm sleeping so what happens is i'll be asleep and then suddenly i'll be aware in my sleep realm that i'm in my room and it's still my room with all the sounds and and everything that is my room and some conscious part of me will be telling my subconscious part to wake up somebody is in the room something in the is in the room with me some dark sinister presence is bearing down on me wake up wake up wake up and eventually i will wake up into the dream and i'll see a dark figure coming towards the bed and i will be awake but i'm still in the dream and my body will be paralyzed for however long and my heart will be racing and i'll be terrified and either actually wake up or go back into some peaceful state of dreaming my question is what is going on in my brain when this happens and is it similar to the same kind of presence that i sense when i when i sense a good kind benevolent presence when i'm praying or when i'm practicing yoga a presence that i would perceive as god a good energy a good presence that fills up inside me are these two things the same sort of thing happening in my brain and if so why don't i have dreams where a benevolent presence comes into the realm of my dream and and i can sense that that that's never happened but the night terrors they do happen is it a trick of my brain some of my friends who are more mystical and science fictiony might say that it's some presence from another dimension or another realm or a ghost or a bad spirit passing through me or some kind of negative energy that i've channeled what is it is it all just happening in my brain thanks there's a set of related conditions that are based neurologically they're not entirely well understood in the specific mechanisms of the brain but there are set of related sleep conditions one is sleep paralysis one is narcolepsy one is night terrors and they're similar but distinct and someone with narcolepsy the brain has difficulty regulating wakefulness and so people drift into a sleepful state or even a paralyzed state frequently and with no ability to control it a sleep paralysis is when is actually what you're describing when you enter a semi wakeful or wakeful state and are unable to move it's quite terrifying and i do suffer from occasional sleep paralysis much worse when i don't get enough sleep for too long night terrors are different night terrors are when sleeping people walk around still asleep and the world you see intermingles with the world of your dreams and it's typically terrifying so let's talk about sleep paralysis first then we'll talk about night terrors and then we'll talk about benevolent spirits in the brain versus frightening ones so sleep paralysis is this strange overlap of rem sleep and waking cycles and in sleep paralysis you have some sense that you can't move and that's true there are components of your brain that keep you from moving while you're asleep so you don't injure yourself you know running after something that's only happening in a dream this is a survival adaptation quite useful and when you become semi-conscious and you become aware that you're paralyzed there is an innate lower brain understanding that you are incredibly vulnerable when you can't move and so your brain becomes distressed and also tries to make sense of this distress and we believe from that our brain creates these figures these dark figures that move some people see them moving progressively closer and then they'll come and sit on your chest i've occasionally seen a figure in sleep paralysis i've never had the really intense experiences but a lot of social scientists and anthropologists believe that sleep paralysis is part of the origin of demonology and uh you know ideas of succubus and all these different demonic understandings that visit us as we sleep it's a neurological phenomenon and here's here's a real kick a panic can deepen sleep paralysis as it can deepen narcolepsy feelings of embarrassment or fear tend to make slip you deeper into this paralysis over the years i've developed a technique to deal with sleep paralysis i get very calm i intentionally calm myself i remind myself that i'm stuck between sleepfulness and wakefulness and i remind myself that i'm safe that i'm in my room and that any figures are imaginary i often try to smile at them and let them know that i'm not afraid and then i either try to go back to sleep or if i'm a little too frightened i'll try to wiggle my fingers that can break it it can take a while and i've also learned if i work really hard to scream at the top of my lungs like a bellow not a horror movie scream i can usually make just enough of a whimper that uh jenny my wife hears me and she knows the drill she knows if i'm sleep paralyzed i need some help she'll shake my shoulder a little bit you know move my face and that pulls me out so you know i tend to take a very a very rational approach to my sleep paralysis since i've researched the mechanisms you may find that helpful now preventing sleep paralysis they've identified several things insomnia and sleep deprivation can increase your likelihood of experience in sleep paralysis so can an erratic sleep schedule so can stress using too many stimulants being too physically tower tired or fatigued and then some medications used to treat adhd so you want to try to get good sleep you want to go to bed about the same time you want to get your eight hours you want to wake up about the same time you want to manage your stress those sorts of things basically good healthy sleep habits help to mitigate the frequency of sleep paralysis night tears are a little different they're much more common in children than adults and night terrors are where this idea of don't like a sleepwalker comes from because as they are panicked they are very afraid they may lash out and injure you uh in our home we're lucky enough to have both sleep paralysis and me and night tears and my wife and in my children and my girls can wake up and walk around and not recognize me luckily these days their sleepwalking tends to be much more benign they come out and talk nonsensically but when they were younger they would be afraid and they wouldn't even recognize us i have a friend who has night terrors and he's described seeing shadow figures or spiders crawling all over everything as he walks around awake it sounds terrifying and in fact i had one of my children sleepwalk into the room uh just a couple of weeks ago while my wife was having a nightmare night terror and i woke to sustained horror movie screaming and two people who were screaming and asleep and when i woke them up neither of them knew why they were there it's wild now these are they seem like dark spirits because they're based in fear they are originating in your amygdala primarily and that is very distinct from the sort of beautiful transcendent moments we experience in meditation and in prayer and in yoga and in worship those moments live in our anterior cingulate cortex our prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain they are completely neurologically dissimilar which is why they seem so beautiful but i have to be honest i am more likely and i guess maybe because i meditate so often to experience that transcendent love when i sleep than i am any fear and sleep paralysis i've had dreams where i begin to float and leave my body and merge with a beautiful light i've had dreams where i was pulled alongside god to gaze upon the earth with his eyes of loving kindness i suspect that how we have a temperament that's prone either towards anxiety or towards you know more sanguine feeling is one component and then the amount of stress and uh the way we approach our spiritual disciplines we can either increase or decrease our propensity for fearful dreams or positive spiritual dreams i don't want to minimize that though if your life is difficult and stressful if you have a genetic predisposition to night terrors it's i'm not saying you should feel bad about having night terrors i'm not saying you can prevent them what i am saying is i suspect and this is i don't have data to back it up but a frequent meditative practice may help alongside proper sleep therapy it's pretty wild the good news is these are definitely brain-based phenomena i don't think they are dark spirits although i do think when people talk about dark spirits this is what they are talking about it's a dark part of our nature in the same way that a lot of what we experience as god is the better part of our nature it is it is that that gift we receive from the source of all that we call god whatever happens i hope you found this answer helpful and i'll have links in the show notes at asksciencemike.com for further information and resources regarding sleep paralysis and night terrors [Music] well there we go another episode of ask science mike is in the books i've got tons and tons of events coming up i'm going to be at the collective church in fort worth texas in august i'll be going to relevant podcasts 10th anniversary in orlando i'd love to see you there i'm going to be in new york in a couple of weeks for rob bell's everything a spiritual tour i'd love to shake your hand if you're there i'm not on stage or anything just just uh attending like you are i've got an event coming up as i said at the top of the program at forefront new york city uh september tickets are on sale now you want to grab those before they disappear i suspect we'll sell out uh in september in tallahassee i'll be talking about the science of peacemaking at my church good samaritan which is a talk i just gave at the wild youth festival that a lot of people have asked for me to give again and i'll be doing an event online in september called the sandbox cooperative that's going to have a live streaming component and a web-based q a so if you've wanted to see what i do live and haven't been able to be in the same city that i am that one's going to be on the internet so uh you can go to asksciencemike.com and click events to learn more about these also if you're interested in having me come to your community to talk to your church your college your conference i'd love to come just go to ask sciencemike.com click on bookmike and my friends at chafee management would be happy to help you with that really great questions this week we have tons of good questions lined up for future episodes of the show but keep them coming you can go to ask sciencemike.com to put in a voice or text message you can even submit questions anonymously very few people use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube but i do still collect and respond to those questions as well and our show is listener supported thank you so much everyone who gives financially to the program since this is my full-time job now that does things like mortgage and health insurance and food so i get really excited about at science mike patrons now but i do want to say as always if you like the show and you want to give me a couple bucks i appreciate it but when money gets tied i get it so you can cancel or change a pledge at any time if you're at five dollars you can only afford one great i understand if you're at you know 25 and it's just too much you can't do it every month please never feel coerced or guilty about giving to this program understand only that i am grateful for all the generosity that my listeners show me uh pre-production work on ask science mike is handled by hayley high haley hi stand up by hayley hyde oh man i'm an idiot and our show is produced by greg nordin the amazing canadian and our theme song is by chad botiford if you need original music for something you're producing he can write he can record he's in a one-stop shop uh links for all the questions ever asked in the history of the program are available on asksciencemike.com as are links to haley jeb and greg thanks for listening guys and i'll see you next week