Boy Goes to Heaven and Back? There's A Saying For That.

“Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof” Carl Sagan

Did four-year-old Colin Burpo nearly slip away from life with a burst appendix to sit in the lap of Jesus and meet a ‘sister’ who had ‘died’ due to the mother’s miscarriage? Now an eleven-year-old, Colin Burpo is making the rounds with his father who has written a book about the boy’s alleged  Near Death Experience (NDE), which I saw on the Today Show.

“‘Pops’ had huge wings in heaven.”

It’s such an appealing idea - a little boy who comes back from the brink of death to tell all about his experience in heaven - commonly referred to as a Near Death Experience or NDE.  According to his parents, the boy only began recounting his experience some months after his recovery, and his father - a pastor - began relating the boy’s stories to his congregation.

There probably aren’t any ‘true believers’ that would be swayed by logical arguments contrary to the belief of life after death - or at least the belief that a person can somehow travel out of this corporal existence, visit another reality, and return. I’m not going to try and change any minds here. What I will do is pose some rather mundane possibilities that could also explain this phenomena, in addition to some things people should keep in mind when confronted by reports of extraordinary events.

“Boy’s trip to heaven blessing for family.”

The simple fact that Colton’s father is a pastor at the local Baptist church sends up red flags, since it’s been repeatedly observed that people react according to the dogma they adhere to. When confronted by things we don’t understand, as humans we try to restore order and fill knowledge gaps utilizing whatever is closest - the context of our closely held religious or philosophical beliefs. Given a set of events, Hindu’s will interpret them within the framework of Hindu tradition. The same holds true for any other belief system - including Colton Burpo’s father, Todd Burpo.

Human nature is such that we also embellish - both consciously and unconsciously - events over time, again according to our belief systems. An oft used example is the ‘fish story’ - where the fish that got away gets larger and more fierce with each telling. We humans have a richly textured history of story telling that spans thousands of years.

That Colton’s pastor father might be innocently tempted to gradually embellish the boy’s tales to enlighten or engage his Sunday audiences wouldn’t be hard to understand.  This would be especially so if the stories met with great approval from the congregation and an expressed desire to hear more of the youngsters ‘experiences’.

Colton’s alleged ‘knowledge’ of things that his parents claim he couldn’t possibly have known is a bit specious as well. To suggest that it was absolutely impossible for the boy to have somehow gleaned that an embryo had been lost to a miscarriage asks a lot of listeners. It has been observed a multitude of times in trial settings that people have a very hazy, and often inaccurate, memory for timelines - what was said, when and in the company of whom.

It wouldn’t have been terribly far fetched for the parents to have discussed - under the tremendous emotional stress of thinking their son may die at any moment - having also lost a potential child to natural miscarriage. It also wouldn’t have been surprising that the parents might have no conscious memory of such conversation as fearful and agonizing emotions tumbled and turned. Research about patients who are seemingly unconscious has shown that they ‘hear’ and are aware of much more than we previously believed possible. Even when under general anesthesia, patients have been known to have horrible ‘waking’ events when they are indeed ‘aware’ of their surroundings and the activities going on around them. Yet they appear to be completely unconscious to the observer.

If the parents could step back out of their belief system briefly, they might be able to see that it is unlikely that they didn’t in some way ‘contaminate’ an impressionable young mind. Is it so unlikely that, in a very religious household, that they might have unwittingly conditioned the boy to frame his puzzling experiences in a manner most familiar to the parents and their world view? This, of course, assumes there could be more than one possible explanation for the event. It doesn’t sound like the Burpo family can entertain any such possibility.

The very idea of Near Death Experiences (NDE) run across all cultures, and have become a huge presence in the popular media and the internet. There are entire websites dedicated to the discussion of NDE’s by those who feel they have experienced an NDE. Popular motion pictures entertain us with the idea that persons can come back from ‘heaven’ and tell us what they experienced.

According to RationalWiki:

“A near-death experience may refer to anything experienced by someone in clinical death, though usually refers to some kind of spiritual experience, such as an out-of-body experience, and is often cited as evidence for the existence of an afterlife by people who believe in an afterlife.

By the broadest definition, a near-death experience (NDE) can occur as a result of a coma, near-death accident, dreaming, drugs, stress, surgery, seizure, sudden oxygen deprivation, deathbed, brain stimulation, or orgasm. Around ten to 20 percent of people coming close to dying reported experiencing some form of NDE.”

Several shows on television and radio have looked at NDE’s, and pondered the possible causes. A 2010 National Geographic feature speculated that too much C02 in the blood (hypercarbia) could account for such experiences as feeling displaced from one’s own body, floating sensations and the reported perceptions of traveling toward a bright light, down a long tunnel.

In 2009, NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment looking into the Near Death Experience phenomena - Decoding the Mystery of Near-Death Experiences. They recounted the NDE reported by singer-songwriter, Pam Reynolds, as she underwent dangerous surgery for a brain aneurysm. Also interviewed was Gerald Woerlee, and Australian anesthesiologist and researcher/debunker. He posed several possible explanations for her event.

You can go through an interesting multimedia tour of what scientists know about the brain and spiritual belief - including NDE’s:

Unfortunately, there are no established research criteria when it comes to the Near Death Experience, and the term itself wasn’t coined until 1975 in psychologist Raymond Moody’s book ‘Life After Life’. Another writer who was influential in sparking interest in NDE’s was author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

There are similar experiences and common elements that have been observed across the entire literature of NDE’s that stretch back as far as Plato’s ‘Republic’. They include:

A feeling of well-being. A trancendent mystical or spiritual state. All encompassing sense of love, peace, beauty, harmony, contentment, timelessness and painlessness. It should be noted that some who’ve claimed this experience have reported very frightening feelings and images, too. These either don’t happen as often, or simply aren’t reported. Our literature is filled with mentions of ‘life having passed before our eyes’ when near death, as ones life experiences are rolled like a film or life review.

Another common element is the ‘tunnel’ experience where people have the sensation of traveling down a long, dark tunnel toward a bright light or place. This could be some sort of transitional zone.

Equally common is the reported presence - and even interaction with - godlike persons or beings, long dead relatives, friends, famous persons or even the living.

Finally, those claiming to experience a Near Death Experience also report an OBE or Out of Body Experience, and often say they were floating above their own corporal body during death or medical procedures.

I find it interesting that for all the claimed instances of NDE, nobody seems to ask “how many times hasn’t it happened?” Of the millions who nearly die every day around the globe, under all manner of circumstance, how many don’t experience NDE. A real insight into the entire question is whether or not the experience is rare.

One possibly explanation posed by psychologists is that such experiences offer a protective element during the process of dying. They posit that they brain’s automatic processes are such as to calm us during trauma. It has been noted that brain chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin can reproduce similar perceptions, as can certain anesthesia agents like Ketamine which is known for producing dissociative anesthesia. Ketamine has also been used as a recreational drug for this reason. Researchers have looked at chemical, electrical and mechanical causes - individually or in concert.

“Near-death experiences (NDE’s) can be reproduced by ketamine via blockade of receptors in the brain (the N-methyl-D-aspartate, NMDA receptors) for the neurotransmitter glutamate.”^[8] Most of this explanation is based on well-understood observations of neurological processes.” Dr. Karl Jansen.

The notion of NDE’s has been taken into the academic fields for more rigorous study by Bruce Greyson, Kenneth Ring, and Michael Sabom - who launched the field of near-death studies. They have been developing assesment/evaluation tools for use in clinical settings. Unfortunately, funding has been a constant problem.

Neuro-biological factors in the experience have been investigated by researchers in the field of medical science and psychiatry. Among the researchers and commentators who tend to emphasize a naturalistic and neurological base for the experience are the British psychologist Susan Blackmore (1993), with her “dying brain hypothesis”,and the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer (1998).

More recently, following upon the heels of data collected in 25 UK and US hospitals among heart attack patients, there was an interview, in July 2010, of Dr. Sam Parnia of Southampton University - The AWARE Study - who designed the study.

This is what he said:

 “evidence is now suggesting that mental and cognitive processes may continue for a period of time after a death has started” and describes the process of death as “essentially a global stroke of the brain. Therefore like any stroke process one would not expect the entity of mind / consciousness to be lost immediately”. He also expresses his disagreement with the term ‘near death experiences’ because “the patients that we study are not near death, they have actually died and more over it conjures up a lot of imprecise scientific notions, due to the fact that itself is a very imprecise term”.

Dr. Parnia stresses that, contrary to popular belief, death is not a specific moment, but a continuum of processes that wind down as the heart stops beating, the lungs quit working, and the brain’s activity ceases.

Dr Sam Parnia: Near Death Experiences During Cardiac Arrest from APRU on Vimeo.

At the end of the day - or life - what remains is still a mystery. We have tantalizing glimpses of what may be the mechanisms at play during the most profound of all experiences aside from birth - death. But those glimpses have been provided courtesy of science and medicine - following the well-established criteria of critical thinking, scientific method and peer review.

The Burpo’s may not be guilty of anything more than theorizing in advance of the facts, in order to protect their own cherished worldview, and hold back ambiguity. Unfortunately, this type of fuzzy thinking can become problematic when it goes beyond a father writing a book about a supposed experience by his toddler son.

If we were to base our entire medical and scientific world on this type of unquestioned  ‘thinking’ we’d be in very deep trouble indeed.

Finally, it puzzled me that nobody seemed to ask the obvious. Why did little Colton’s parents wait five days to get him into the ER with a burst appendix? Having known somebody that it happened to, the symptoms are fairly obvious and don’t take long to manifest themselves. It depresses me that everybody seems so willing to accept the Colton family’s explanation - and not wonder if they instead ‘loaded’ the kid up - post experience - with the requisite near death/afterlife thoughts.

In the end, it’s all rather like a Rorschach ink blot. Open to the interpretation of the viewer, but far removed from either fact, science or clear conclusions. The unexplained is not inexplicable, simply beyond our intellectual reach at the moment, people have once again engaged in ‘after-the-fact’ reasoning while rationalizing ‘facts’ that don’t fit their theories. Appealing anecdotes do not make science, nor do they satisfy the burden of proof.

Blind people see what they expect to see.

-maven

Comments

[blackantilope]

I agree with you.Colton's parent history has a lot of gaps.