If we went back to 1970, the day after your out-of-body experience...
Nice time machine you're going to give me.
That's right, that's right. And we tried and we approached you and tried to convince you
that this out-of-body experience could be explained using natural means. What would
it have taken to convince you? Could it have happened? Would you have changed your mind very easily?
How interesting. I think you should work on this time machine, and we'll find out.
That's really interesting. I'm trying—44 years I've dreamt of it. I think there would
have been two things going on in my mind at once. I think there even were during the experience
those things going on, on the one hand would have been: "But I know. You don't understand.
You don't understand how real it was. How could you possibly—this is so important
to me, and it means so much to me," and simultaneously would have been going on: "But there has to
be an explanation. What's going on?"
I've always been a scientist in the broader sense since I was a kid. How does that work?
What's this doing? How's this fire...? How about... And that would have been going on as well.
I think if you'd approached me as perhaps one of the worst members of the skeptical
community, would be like, "That's rubbish," then I would have been absolutely against
it. But if you'd come along and said, "Well, could it be there's something in the brain?
Could it be..." I'd have been thinking, "Could be." I might have been frightened because—the
day after, I was so confused. I think you'd have to come a week later when I've sort of calmed down a bit.
In a way, when people have these very dramatic experiences, and I've met lots and lots of
people who have, you feel threatened if somebody tells you it's not what you thought. If you're
a sort of rigid, close-minded kind of thinker, and when you've had this extraordinary
experience, you snap on to your own explanation, then it's very, very, very hard. You feel
frightened when people say, "Yes, but it's happening in the medulla or the prefrontal cort..." or whatever."
But if you're a more open-minded, if you're good at thinking, if you're good at asking
questions, if you're good at exploring possibilities, then I think it's much easier. If the person
confronting you is also like that, "Let's explore this together. How did it really feel,
and then what happened," and take an interest, then I think I would have responded quite
well to you and been, "Hey, you might be my savior. Let's go and find out."
But I didn't have a savior. I had to go and find out myself. In an age where the science
was—there wasn't any neuroscience. We had very little idea what was happening in the
brain. The paranormal stuff out there and the new age and the Age of Aquarius and all
that stuff, the end of the '60s was like a world apart, and that's why it's taken me
a lifetime, I would say, to bring together extraordinary experiences and neuroscience.
A lot of people who are going to be watching these videos and taking this course would
have had something similar, some vivid experience that they can't really explain. We've done
these questionnaires in this course and in others where students have heard a story from
parents about ghosts or they've experienced something themselves. Given what you know
now about opinion change and changing your own opinion, what would be the best way to
approach somebody and change their mind or at least get them to consider the alternatives
that it might not be what they think?
I'm glad you made that switch. I don't go at anyone who's had an extraordinary experience,
"I want to change their mind," unless they are just so rigid, I'd despair and I don't
want to have anything to do with it. But for most of the people I've met, so many have
had an experience they can't understand, and they don't know what to do with it.
The first thing to do is to listen and probe. Some people will be very rigid, particularly,
I think, of near death experiences where it has so much of religious connotations. In
our culture, this tends most often, not always, but to be Christians who are convinced that
they have seen Jesus or pearly gates, the Judgment Day; they've been to heaven, or they've
seen heaven, or they've seen hell. They've got all this baggage.
What I first do is, "Okay, then what happened? Then what happened? Could you see anything else?"
Get them to loosen up because if what they've done is had this extraordinary experience,
typically in a near-death experience, if it's a long one, they will typically start with
a tunnel, like I did, and go into the light. They'll have an out-of-the-body experience,
and they'll watch what's physically happening or seem to. Then they'll go on to other worlds.
After that, it becomes dependent on your culture and your upbringing. So if they are a religious
person, Muslim or Hindu or whatever it might be, or a Christian, they kind of know where
they are and they've set their own experience in that box.
So part of my job is to actually get them to remember other things. What did these pearly
gates look? Were they really gates? What else could you see around? Very often they'll come
up with all sorts of other stuff which they hadn't really thought about, which will help
them. The point is I'm grounding it in what really happened because I want to know, because
I'm always thinking what's going on in their brain? Where is this relating to what's happening
in the temporal lobe? What's happening in their visual cortex where we know the tunnels
are generated? What kind of tunnel was it? What emotional state were they in when it
started? Because very often, these experiences have a most wonderful profound sense of,
"It's all alright," which is probably endorphin-based but it's—saying that doesn't put it down.
It's got to have a physical basis somehow, but that can be quite an important thing also
for people to know it possible as a human being on this earth without gods, spirits
and everything else to know that it's alright and you're alright. It's okay.
I sort of like to help people just to talk about their experiences. Sometimes that will
lead them to their own interest and their own inquiry, and they'll go off and read stuff
and they'll talk stuff, and I let them do that. Other times they'll just reject it and
go, "Yes, well, I know and I saw Jesus." Okay. I might want to—but you know that's not
going to work, there's no point. I'd rather people use their experience as basis to go
on and try to understand themselves and the world, than I would try to change their mind
to the truth. We don't know the truth. We know little bits. We know a lot. We know as
much as we can know—that nothing leaves the body in these experiences, and that there
is no spirit and no soul and so on—but so much more to find out.
I can't do it myself, so these people who've had experiences—actually they're important
and they're the ones who can explore more and find out more.
Yes. One of the real knee-jerk responses with opinion change is just to remain passive and
unconvinced. Yes, I know what you're telling me, but that's fine. I'm going to continue
my merry way and not do much about it.
Yes, we're trying to provide students with the tools specifically to look at the data
and to try not to remain passive and unconvinced, figure out what it would've looked like in
other sorts of scenarios where it didn't happen just the way that it did in yours.
I think it's absolutely foundational to being a good thinker. That reminds me of two things.
One's a bit depressing. It's when I used to do interviewing for admissions to the university
in psychology degree. I would set some kind of challenging scenario as purely hypothetical:
"What if it turned out that black people can't do this," or some challenging thing. I'm not
saying it's true. I'm just saying, suppose it did, what are the possible explanations?
Now the good student, the one I'm going to admit, says, "I don't think it's true but,
if it were, it could be because of their upbringing. It could be because of whatever. It could
be, it could be, it could be. How would I find out? Blah, blah, blah." The student I'm
going to say no, is going to go, "But that's not true! But that's wrong! How could you
say that?" That's sort of the rigidity.
But it also makes me think more about the kind of paranormal things that we're thinking
about and the strange experiences that people have. The student I want, the student I will
enjoy, would go, "Well, I think that this happened but, hang on a minute, okay, it's
emotionally difficult. It's challenging to me. I don't like it. But let me imagine a
purely mechanistic explanation. Let me imagine an explanation in terms of a religion that
I don't know much about or isn't mine. Let me imagine..." And they would actually be
willing despite the, "It hurts. I don't like this," to do that.
Now I've had a lot of experience in my life of that anguish. I mean, the world's a simple
place if you know how it works. You know, I'm in here. I'm me. This is who I am. This
is what I do. That's how the world—you know. It's a simple place. It's horrible that it
doesn't work as a life strategy, but you feel you're going to be safe that way.
You could imagine me having started out with all these beliefs. I honestly believed that
out there is this great psychic field and that I was going to be the great heroine of
science who is going to change the world forever because I'd prove once and for all there are
paranormal phenomena. Duh. There aren't any. This was not a comfortable time for me. It
was horrible. I'm wrong.
Now also imagine me, I mean, not only with my crystal ball and my tarot cards, but—I
suppose I've got colored hair still; there's a bit of that left—but, you know, the late
'60s, early '70s, wafty clothes and headbands and "Wow. Peace, man," all that. I looked—everything
about my life was like that, and I had to give up—well, let go of—let go of all
of that in order to move forward, to ask questions, to learn. I look back now and, "Good," because I found out so much.
Also, all that led me to exploring a whole lot of different things, and the only one
that stuck was meditation. I've been training in Zen for 30 years, and that is also training
in flexibility, letting go, openness to experience, openness to different explanations. That training
goes along very, very well with a scientific mind that asks questions and doesn't take
the first theory I come up with as the truth and that's it.
The goal of the course is to improve people's everyday thinking. Do you have any recommendations
for how people in the course might improve their everyday thinking?
Yes. Start with your intuitions. Watch yourself. Feel those intuitions coming up, and question
them, because some of your intuitions will be fine: "Yes, I think if I lean on here it'll
be fine," but some of your other intuitions: "I'm in here looking out through my eyes.
I know what that is. That person's nice," a lot of your intuitions won't be. So question
your intuitions and be willing to give them up if there's a good reason to do so.
That's hard but, yes, throw out some of those intuitions.
My name is Sue. I think about consciousness.