Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection (review)

Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection brings new insights to the realm of technology-based art and science thinking and practice. Given the proposition of a mind-body model where both elements are an indivisible whole, we are inevitably induced to conceive new art forms. One can sense the presence of Ornella Corazza and her profound engagement with the book's subject matter. This personal and serious approach is the result of her activities as a researcher on Near Death Experiences (NDE) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In the course of her career she has been very close to Eastern conceptualizations of body and soul. As a previous Member of the 21st Century Centre of Excellence involved in the program Construction of Death and Life Studies, she established an intellectual flight path between London and Tokyo. Somewhere up there in the stratosphere, midway between the U.K. and Japan, she is in a privileged position to bring along Eastern and Western cultural and philosophical perspectives on the mind-body problem. This is brilliantly done throughout the book, which combines her background as someone who is extremely involved, with the rigor and critical distance needed in scientific studies.

Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection is a comprehensive reference for anyone interested in consciousness studies. Although Corazza builds a number of strong arguments in favor of characterizing mind-body as a single and indivisible entity, she does not dismiss any of the alternative perspectives on the problem. The palette of authors analyzed is extremely rich and covers a wide spectrum of thought, ranging from theological theories about NDE to biologists and psychoanalysts arguing the nature of NDE as a defense mechanism of the dying brain. The transdisciplinary nature of what is known as "the hard problem" in consciousness studies is well characterized and extends to the mind-body problem. The fact is that subjects who reported on NDEs tended to describe these experiences in keeping with their respective cultural circumstances. This presents a problem, but one can argue that those subjects employ a vocabulary available to them that is naturally conditioned by their culture.

Corazza's main contribution to the realm of art, science and technology is in her proposed rethinking of embodiment as a non-dualistic, non-reductionist concept. The recon-figuration of the way we conceive the functioning of our senses is instrumental in the development of new technologies and new approaches, for instance on human-computer interaction. Contemporary computers are built mirroring our present understanding of the mind-body connection. Briefly put, there are a number of peripheral inputs and outputs, sometimes autonomous, that communicate with the core processor responsible for almost everything that is going on.

Out-of-body experiences (OBE) force us to re-conceptualize vision and its correlations with other senses. Subjects reporting OBE claim not only to have seen their own bodies from an outside perspective, but actually to be somewhere else in relation to it. The fact that OBEs happen not only during the physical experience of NDE, but can also be induced through electromagnetic stimulation of a specific area of the brain is in itself a step forward in the area of bio-electromagnetism-related technologies. Artists are already exploring this realm as a new spectrum for expression. A good portion of the book is dedicated to the study of chemically induced NDE as a consequence of the recreational use of Ketamine. Results obtained in those cases are analyzed and compared with others reported by subjects who were close to death due to either natural causes or accidents. This incorporation of new medical research challenges the "survivalist hypothesis" that takes NDEs as a proof of the existence of an afterlife.

Ornella Corazza, in this book, extends the teachings of Yasuo Yuasa and Hiroshi Motoyama and tells us, in a very well-documented manner, that we are...