A pleasant family vacation ended abruptly with an unpleasant outcome for seventeen-year-old Michaela (Roser) Chatterjee. In the blink of an eye, a relaxing drive back home turned into a horrific car accident, followed by the chaotic scramble of a life flight via helicopter to emergency surgery.
Another driver had panicked at the sight of oncoming traffic while trying to pass on a hill and smashed into the family vehicle, forcing them under the trailer of an eighteen wheeler. Three medical evacuation helicopters and five ambulances were called to the scene. Michaela’s injuries were by far the most serious.
Her facial wounds looked particularly gruesome. A deep laceration extended across her forehead and ripped into her right eyelid, exposing two inches of skull and her eyeball. Her bicep was completely severed when her left arm smashed through the rear windshield. As a result, Michaela had gone into shock. The force of impact had been so great that she suffered a diffuse axonal injury to her brain, meaning her brain literally sheared and twisted inside her cranium, creating a blood clot.
Fortunately for Michaela, the accident occurred only two miles from the personal residence of emergency room physician Scott Magley. He arrived at the scene and began administering first aid. Michaela flat lined on the flight to the hospital despite Dr. Magley’s best efforts to save her.
Michaela was so badly injured that Dr. Magley was able to intubate her without anesthesia. Due to the severity of her brain injury, she remained completely unresponsive. Intubation provided a critical supply of oxygen to her brain, but Dr. Magley timed Michaela’s respiration at only eight breaths per minute. She slipped into a coma before arriving at the hospital.
When Michaela finally awoke from her coma, she reported “life review” visions that were both pleasant and unusual because she claimed to see visions of her future with children and grandchildren in addition to memories from her past. Then she said,
The next thing I know, I was up in the corner of the hospital room, looking down at my body as it lay there. When you’re having an out of body experience, it’s like watching your life unfold in front of you like a movie. [Michaela starts smiling.] I remember seeing my Mom and Dad in the cafeteria and it’s like a bench-style seat…my grandma (maternal grandmother) and my gram (paternal) were sitting across from my parents. My Dad is a smoker and said he wanted to have a cigarette because he wanted to have some breathing room, just to get out of there. And it’s funny because my grandmother, my Mom’s mom who would never, had never and would never have a cigarette in her life said, “Oh, I need one, too. I’m going to have one, too.” And my other grandmother said, “Me, too.” Neither my Grand Mom or my Grandmother would ever smoke a cigarette [under normal circumstances].
Michaela Roser, “I Survived: Beyond and Back”
Michaela thought the story was hilarious because her two grandmothers were acting so out of character. Her mother wasn’t amused. She was amazed, because Michaela had described the incident in the hospital cafeteria in exact detail.
Mrs. Roser said, “There was no way she could have known that happened unless she was there.”
Skeptics will probably want to argue that one of Michaela’s family members must have recounted the story in the presence of the unconscious body of Michaela at some point during the two weeks she spent in a coma, and even though her brain was critically injured, her normal auditory inputs were working normally. They might want to speculate that her imagination filled in the details of an event she could not possibly have witnessed, yet somehow managed to describe accurately in detail.
The only alternatives would be that everyone is lying, and the entire story was fabricated, or somehow Micheala’s mind had separated from her physical brain temporarily, and she was able to learn and later recall accurate, new information she did not know prior to the accident.
Any of the three alternatives are theoretically possible: Michaela’s subconscious mind could have learned the anecdote by overhearing a conversation during her coma. However, that assumes the anecdote was repeated in her room and learned that way without any evidence to substantiate that argument. The second option, that everyone is lying about the incident, requires a motive. Cui bono?
Who benefits from this lie?
The third and final option is the human mind and physical brain could be caused to temporarily separate due to trauma, and the problem is that possibility is not scientific. Or is it?
For any scientific theory to be validated, evidence to support such a claim must be observable and repeatable. The problem is that it’s tough to find volunteers willing to suffer new trauma just to satisfy a skeptical audience. On the other hand, we don’t need to repeat the exact same scenario to provide corroborating evidence. We simply need to look for additional examples of quantum memories that could be investigated and confirmed.
Pam Reynolds claimed to have created new memories while on the operating table, during neurosurgery for an aneurysm at the base of her brain. Pam clearly and accurately recalled a conversation which occurred at a point in the process when her surgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, insisted that it would have been impossible for her to see or hear anything.
Either of these stories could be absolutely true. There’s no obvious motive for anyone involved in either story to lie, and the witnesses all appeared to be credible. In both cases, for the new memory to be false, multiple people including disinterested medical professionals would have to have conspired for no discernible reason or tangible benefit, unless “lying for Jesus” really is a thing people do.
The problem for monists is that every such account must be false. Not only the accounts of Pam Reynolds and Michaela Chatterjee, but every other documented and investigated example of corroborated veridical information learned while the mind and brain were separate. Allegedly.
If even one account can truly be verified, then perhaps we already have solid scientific evidence demonstrating that consciousness itself has quantum properties.
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