But it had a list of others with similar situations. Most are just what some of the experts say unexplained or hard to explain scientifically. Examples like patients having OBE and later correctly describing the rooms, people or conversations that they could not have sensed as they were either unconscious or clinically dead. Often describing unusual situations that would be hard to guess.
As for the Tennis shoe example I don't think this is a slam dunk for evidence either way. The skeptics arguement seems to be that Maria could have seen or heard the location of the shoe before she had her NDE and then she got confused. From memory she also describe other things in the OR and stuff so its one of those situations of she said, he said. Thats how a lot of the skeptics arguements go. But I notice they are awefully quiet on a number of cases that seem to have good support.
If you've been following this thread for a while then you've probably noticed that when it comes to NDE's I have a high degree of skepticism for anecdotal accounts. Give me one verified account and I'll be tickled pink, but so far nobody has been able to do that. And I'm sorry, but here's where I'm going to say something that you're absolutely not going to like. I don't consider veridical NDE's to be verified accounts. In fact, I consider the testimony of the doctors and nurses to be just as much anecdotal as the patient's account is.
Now this may seem extremely biased and presumptive of me, but it's based upon years of experience with normal human memory and behavior. We rarely remember things in the same way that they actually happened, and retelling them to others with whom we shared the experience often only serves to make the problem worse. We inadvertently incorporate their memories into ours, to the point that we can no longer distinguish between them. Instead the two accounts, which may have started out dissimilar eventually grow to be quite complementary.
I can understand if you discount this argument, but let me give you an analogy. Let's say that someone goes to see a clairvoyant who claims to be able to talk to the dead. The clairvoyant may begin with something very innocuous, like I'm seeing a man, his first name begins with an 'M' or an 'N'. It's either Mike, or Mark, or Nick... to which someone in the crowd will hold up their hand and say yes...Mike. To which the clairvoyant will say... he's an uncle, or a grandfather? And the audience member will reply grandfather. Now the exchange can go on like this for quite some time with the clairvoyant judiciously drawing out more and more information about the audience member's dearly departed, until at the end of the evening the audience member will be amazed at how much the clairvoyant knew about their poor deceased grandfather. Now you and I both know that this is a trick. The clairvoyant is simply following the lines of questioning that elicit a positive response, and disregarding those that don't. It looks totally inexplicable to the receptive person, but absolutely ridiculous to the skeptic.
This isn't to say that in the case of NDE's either the doctor or the patient is deliberately trying to fabricate a more spectacular story, it's just that in the normal process of sharing their own perspectives the two stories meld into one, and the result seems absolutely irrefutable. Until someone makes a claim about a red shoe that isn't correct, to which the believer will simply disregard it and continue to focus on the things that haven't been refuted. It's a form of argument that's almost impossible to defeat because the true believer will simply move on to the next example, and the next one, and the next one... It's like trying to defend against a terrorist attack, the skeptic has to defeat every single version, while the believer only has to come up with a single inexplicable example in order to consider themselves to be vindicated.
Anecdotal stories simply aren't trustworthy. Even well intentioned people can be vulnerable to misremembering and embellishing what was in the end just a perfectly natural and totally explicable event.
So does this mean that I won't accept any evidence at all? No. Combined, AWARE and AWARE II placed thousands of visual markers on hospital shelves around the U.K, U.S. and Austria. So far nobody has reported seeing any of them. If someday, someone does, then you can call it a veridical NDE, but until then it's all just anecdotal.
Unless you've got one that you find particularly convincing, in which case bring it on. But don't expect me to pick one, because then you'd just go find another. You get one chance... make it a good one.
