In what appears to be an increasingly favoured area of study for Peterson, he pushes
the following on his readership.
Here is some material from Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), which was written by Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D. “AWARE-I” was the first of his major large-scale formal studies::
Importantly, in AWARE-I almost 9 percent had features of a recalled experience of death and 2 percent—two individuals—actually recalled hearing specific sounds or conversations and visually observing their own resuscitation efforts from above. They had experienced the sense of separation from the body—the elusive so-called out-of-body phenomenon. While one patient declined to return to the hospital for detailed interviews because of poor health, the other, a fifty-seven-year-old man, accurately described details of events that had occurred in the cardiac catheterization room after his heart had stopped following a major heart attack.
He specifically recalled feeling that he had been above his own body. He said he had seen people in the room around him and that they had given his heart electrical shock treatment (defibrillation) twice. He had a bird’s-eye view of all that was happening to him below while looking from above. He also specifically heard a nurse (“ Sarah”) speaking, and he also heard the staff say, “We’ve got him back.” Importantly, we were able to verify that his period of conscious awareness had happened when his heart was not beating and had lasted at least three to five minutes. This was very significant, as it was the first time that a study had identified a case of conscious awareness—in support of what so many people had claimed to have experienced—while there was no heartbeat. It had also been able to show how long consciousness had lasted.
In short, this was definitive verification of the perceived out-of-body phenomenon that people had talked about.
What Peterson neglects to mention is that Sam Parnia, in an effort to provide objective evidence, placed specific test objects and images in the areas of the operating theatres etc where the test subjects would only be able to view them as part of an actual out of body experience. But no test subject identified any of these test objects as part of recounting an out of body experience. Not one. Contrary to Peterson’s claim above, Sam Parnia’s study provided definitive verification that out of body experiences are "dreams", not actual lived experiences.
Parnia even admits his study failed! We need to consider what the odds are that one of the 140 people would have a memory (almost certainly contaminated, as no procedure was in place to prevent contamination) that matched events during cardiac arrest in some arbitrary details. This certainly sound consistent with random background noise in the data, and is therefore not evidence of anything.
Conclusion
The much anticipated AWARE study, designed to be the first large rigorous study of NDEs with objective outcomes that could potentially differentiate between the two major hypotheses, is essentially a bust. The study, for the main outcome measure for which it was designed, did not return as much data as was hoped, but the data it did return was entirely negative. This is a negative study.
Parnia, in my opinion, is desperately trying to rescue the study by falling back on simply reporting subjective accounts of what people remember long after the event. This type of information is nothing new, and cannot objectively resolve the debate. The results are also completely unimpressive, perfectly consistent with what we would expect given what is already well documented about human memory.
The only relevant part of the study is Parnia’s admission that the results may be due entirely to confabulation.
Peterson remains slapdash in his study efforts and prone to severely desperate confirmation bias. I cannot wait for him to finally produce these much touted writings of his.
No. I’m pointing out that Peterson’s spinning of the study as evidence of life after death and a literal separation of spirit and body, is not justified.