Interview with neuropsychologist, Dr Peter Fenwick

Allowing us to peak into his private life today is the esteemed Dr Peter Fenwick. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and currently Emeritus senior lecturer, and now visiting lecturer at King’s College, London. He has run a neurosychiatry unit at the Institute of Psychiatry London, he talks exclusively to Spirit Today regarding his very important studies into the relationship between the mind and the brain as well as the end-of-life phenomena. Dr Fenwick is the president of the Horizon Research Foundation, an organisation that supports research into end-of-life experiences, and president of the Scientific and Medical Network. He has been part of the editorial board for a number of journals, including the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, the Journal of Consciousness Studies and the Journal of Epilepsy and Behaviour. He has also carried out a study into the spiritual needs of near-death patients and this is detailed in his book, The Truth in the Light, which he co-authored with his wife, Elizabeth. He also studied the dying process and this is given in his and his wifes book The Art of Dying. We also discuss why human consciousness may be more than just a function of the brain, ask him who he would have at his fantasy dinner party, as well as what his passions in life are.

There is also the small matter of his near-death experience stories.

So without further ado..

Enter Dr Peter Fenwick

Question: Dr Fenwick, it’s a wonderful honour to have you take some time out of your busy schedule for Spirit Today. May I address you as Peter?

Dr Fenwick: Yes, certainly.

Question: Thank you very much. For those who don’t know you, could you please introduce yourself?

Peter: I am a Neuropsychiatrist, which means that I’ve been trained in the understanding of the brain and its functioning, as well as in the nature of mind. So I stand in the zone between mind and brain and am therefore well placed to answer questions about the nature of consciousness.

Question: Fantastic. You are very well known for your work with the dying, however I’d like to start by talking about you if I may. Allow me take you back to your younger days. What kind of childhood did you have?

Peter: I was extremely lucky. I was born in Kenya and brought up on my parents coffee estate. In fact my childhood was spent under the cloud of the Second World War. So my mother, who was a general surgeon, had to work extremely hard at the local hospital, doing every sort of surgery with little medical team support. Consequently I was sent away to boarding school at the age of 4 ½, together with my 9-year-old sister, who looked after me. Being born in Kenya I was a wide sky child, learned to become independent very early, able to wander through the coffee estate at will, very free possibly rather too free from a modern perspective. My brother and I learned to make home made bombs which we used to throw into a pond and produce huge water spouts with the blasting powder my father used in his quarry, a skill which my grandsons have repeatedly asked me to pass on.

Question: And your teenage years?

Peter: I came back to England to boarding school when I was 12. I’d become interested in electronics by then, using the surplus electronic equipment which was being sold off cheaply by the army after the war and by the time I was 13 had made a TV set out of old radar units (it is still in our attic, has a green and black screen and works on 405 lines, then the British standard, long since discontinued). I was good at games, in the 1st XV rugger team, enjoyed sports, and very much enjoyed my school years. I also became interested in making cine films, and with a group of friends made a film involving the whole school in its crowd scenes – a kind of public school version of Animal Farm.

Question: Both your younger and formative years sound wonderful. When did you first become interested in the workings of the brain?

Peter: Ever since the age of 7 I’d wanted to be a doctor, particularly a surgeon, so following in my mother’s footsteps. This has been a guiding passion throughout my life. As I went through my teenage years and learned more biology at school, I became fascinated by the brain and wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I remember looking in the school library for books on consciousness, but in those days – the early 1950s – there were no such books there, the nearest I could get to it was a book on hypnotism. But the Wireless World, a technical radio journal, published a circuit for an EEG machine, which was a new technique for measuring electrical brain waves. With the help of the physics teacher I made an EEG machine, which actually worked.

Question: Great stuff. At what age did you first set your sights on studying at Cambridge?

Peter: At that time there were two routes for anyone wanting a career in medicine; to go straight to a teaching hospital, or to spend three years at University studying Natural Sciences, before going to a hospital to do the clinical training. University sounded more fun, and most of my friends had chosen Cambridge, so I did too.

Question: Happy days?

Peter: Yes, it was a very happy time. I was at Trinity and the Master at that time was Lord Adrian, a neuroscientist and Nobel prizewinner. My tutor was Andrew Huxley, also a Nobel prizewinner, who determined with Hodgkin, the mechanics of the neural impulse. So you can imagine that the physiology department at Cambridge at this time was buzzing, and a very exciting place to be. It clarified my desire to become a neurosurgeon and gain a better understanding of the relationship between the brain and consciousness.

Equally important though were the friends I made, most of whom I am still in touch with – including my wife who was a Girton girl, with whom I have just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary.

Question: Many congratulations on reaching 50 years together, a wonderful achievement. I’m sure learning from such great men helped you immensely during and after university. Most people remember their first job after graduating. Do you?

Peter: After graduating from Cambridge I did my clinical training at St. Thomas’s Hospital, and my first job after qualifying was in the eye department – I can’t remember my salary but it was in the region of £10 a week. But it was the second house job I did that really set me off in the direction I needed to go. This was with Mr. Harvey Jackson, the neurosurgeon. I was able to assist in a number of neurosurgical operations. I would hold the retractors, and watch as he identified different brain structures and then carried out the necessary surgery. At that time psychiatrists were still recommending patients for leucotomy (the cutting of the major tracts to the frontal lobes) as a cure for schizophrenia. I was able to watch Mr. Jackson easing a rather blunt knife through the brain tissue to separate it. It struck me that this was a very crude process and we still didn’t really know enough about the brain to tackle brain disease in this hamfisted way. So I decided to change from neurosurgery to the path of neurologist/neurophysiologist/psychiatrist. I felt that if I were trained in all these areas I would come to understand brain function much better. So I went to the National Hospital in Queen Square to study neurophysiology and neurology. And then to the Maudsley Hospital to study psychiatry under Sir Dennis Hill, then one of the leading psychiatrists of the time, with an interest in epilepsy and brain function. This was the start of a long journey to discover what underpinned everyday consciousness and the wider states of consciousness experienced by the mystics.

Question: I see. I also believe Japan is close to your heart. Can you tell us why?

Peter: In 1999, just after I had retired, our son moved to Japan and married a lovely Japanese girl and we went out to Tokyo for the wedding. An old colleague of mine, a leading scientist in the relatively new field of magneto- encephalography (the measurement of small magnetic fields in the brain) had just set up a new unit at Riken, a major Neurosciences research Centre just outside Tokyo, and he invited me to join his unit. So for the next ten years I spent 3-6 months each year working there, and we published a number of cutting-edge papers. We were the first to show, non-invasively, the action of the brain-stem and cerebellum during eye movements. I was able to combine my interests in this new area of brain research with my interest in Japanese Zen culture – and we were also able to spend time with our son and daughter in law and get to know our two grandsons who were both born while we were working there.

Question: Behind every great man there’s a great lady and this seems very true in your situation. Can you talk about Elizabeth?

Peter: I was very lucky that Elizabeth agreed to marry me, because we make the perfect couple. Being a Girton girl she is highly intelligent and we have a very successful working partnership – quite noncompetitive because our skills are so different. She’s the wordsmith and I’m the scientist. She is wonderful wife, mother to our three children and grandmother to nine. We share an interest in traveling, eating good food. She never quite managed to share my enthusiasm for flying, though she did manage to keep the aeroplane in the air on one occasion when the engine stopped and I had to tinker with the controls. I could never quite understand why when we finally landed safely she got out, burst into tears and said, “I’m never going to go up in that thing again.” But I talked her round.

Question: Great stuff. Now that we know a little about you let’s move forward. With over 200 published papers on brain function, and a longstanding interest in consciousness you seem best placed to know what happens when we ‘die’. In your view, what will the next twenty years bring us in relation to understanding consciousness and the dying process? What will we learn?

Peter: I think we are now at a most interesting point in the development of our ideas about consciousness I think it’s sensible to start from the point of view that Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon from Canada, put forward about brain and mind in a final summary of his life’s work. He said that there was no doubt that mind showed its presence when the great centres of the brain came into action, but yet was different from them. It had an energy which was separate from that of neuronal impulses. His final conclusion was that mind and brain are different. He pointed to the fact that knowledge of neuronal function, although it might help to show the relationship between different areas of mind, would not explain the all-important difference between objective structure and subjective perception. I was disappointed when I read that Freud rejected transcendent experience as neurosis, thus degrading some of the wider experiences of humankind. The totally mechanistic view of consciousness as being only elaborated by the brain had to be wrong, as it was a denial of the enormous creativity shown by our species.

Question: Being a Neuropsychiatrist I would think a lot of your training would have leaned toward viewing the mind (consciousness) as a mere function of the physiological brain. Did you go into that field suspecting otherwise

Peter: In my 20s and 30s I spent time searching out those people who had wider and in my mind special states of consciousness, which suggested that they had access to different realms of reality, and just the brain substance could not contain these realms. William James, a Harvard psychologist, had already come to this view in his work on the nature of religious experience. As I listened to descriptions of transcendent and ecstatic states and read more widely in the Eastern mystical literature, it became apparent that our day-to-day conscious experience was only a fraction of what was possible. As yet we have no clear understanding either of the nature of consciousness or of its range.

Question: What’s the most exciting thing about the brain for you?

Peter: It’s not really the brain itself that’s exciting, although of course the wonderful complexity of the brain’s mechanism and architecture are totally fascinating. But for me the really exciting fact is that it appears to be the gateway to consciousness.

Current neuroimaging both by the examination of blood flow as in fMRI scanning and magnetically as in magnetoencephalography, have shown us the physical structures which underpin mind and their relationship to function. The latest 9 Tessler fMRI magnets which are now coming on-stream will give us a resolution of brain function right down to a faction of a millimeter, while magnetoencephalography will give us a time resolution right down to a fraction of a millisecond. With these enhanced resolutions I suspect we shall find even more about the details of the mechanisms which manifest consciousness. But still consciousness itself will be elusive.

Question: I see. You have done your research within a western atmosphere where such work is at odds with the entrenched materialism of most scientists, doctors and philosophers, as well as the rest of us. It would be interesting to know whether there is interest in NDEs, etc., in environments such as Japan?

Peter: It depends who you speak to in Japan. Those within a scientific environment stick very closely to the Western model – it’s only brain activity. And those who stray outside that frame are not encouraged to work in a scientific department. However, the interest shown by the general public is the same in Japan as in other Western countries I have worked with.

There have certainly been some NDE studies in Japan. However it has been much more difficult to interest researchers in Japan in my related research into the very similar experiences that are said to occur when people are actually dying. I first started to study these ‘approaching death’ experiences because it seemed to me that if the near death experience had anything to contribute to the understanding of consciousness we should see similar elements repeated when consciousness disintegrates as we die. We have set up studies in the UK and Holland to look at the experiences reported by carers of the dying and the dying themselves, and Dr. Una McConville has done a similar study in Ireland. What we found was that there was indeed a close similarity between these two sets of experiences. For example people who have an NDE say that dead relatives come to meet them, and those who are dying say that they are visited by dead relatives who come to help them through the dying process. Another phenomenon is that some people seem to transit in and out of another reality as they are dying, which has the same characteristics as that seen in the NDE. Around the time of death shapes are seen leaving the body and the room is sometimes illuminated by a spiritual light, which is not dissimilar from that seen in the NDE.

One of the most interesting aspects of the approaching death experiences is the deathbed coincidences which are reported at the time of death. These show a linking between people who are emotionally connected even though they may be continents apart, suggesting that mind has a non-local quality. We have published a number of papers giving more details of all these experiences and their relative frequency.

Question: Are there any cultural differences?

Peter: Yes, there are cultural differences reported in the NDE. We still need more cross-cultural studies; hunter-gatherers for example, have simpler experiences which are much more closely linked to their culture. In India two studies show the occurrence of Indian deities and there are a number of other differences which distinguish the NDE in that culture from those in the West. There is a very good summary of research into the NDE over the last 30 years (The Handbook of Near-Death studies, 2009. Ed. Janice Holden).

The difficulty in the acceptance of approaching death experiences by the scientific community in Japan is even more pronounced than in the West. In our studies in the UK and Holland approaching death experiences are frequently reported by nurses and carers, but not nearly as generally acknowledged by the medical profession they are counter-culture to our current mechanistic science. When I tried to set up a similar study in Japan I found that there seemed to be an even stronger cultural bias on the part of the medical profession not to talk about death. When the first hospice was set up in Tokyo I am told that it was two years before it was finally accepted by the hospice staff that part of the process of dying was coming to terms with it. But instead of discussing and accepting death, it was much more likely to be ignored. However, outside the medical profession, Japan’s attitude to death is in many ways better than our own, in that it still has many rituals associated with death, and special ceremonies for the remembrance of dead relatives. At Riken there was a special thanksgiving service once a year when all those animals whose lives had been sacrificed to scientific research were remembered and honoured.

Question: Yes, when my dog died here in Japan, my wife and I had to sift through the rather large bones to choose the ones we wanted to keep. Due to the low heat of the fire, his cranium was completely intact, and to this day we still can’t close the urn properly. It is all part of the ritual here. Moving on from Japan now. Have the ‘numbers’ which are placed high up towards the ceiling in some testing labs or operating rooms throughout the world been seen by anyone yet?

Peter: Neither clearly nor repeatedly. So the simple answer is No.

Question: Many people report having psychic abilities after an NDE. What is your opinion on this phenomenon?

Peter: I’m simply driven by the data. I’ve come across NDErs who report having become more psychically sensitive after their experiences, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. It’s worth remembering that there is a small but clear literature on the development of psychic abilities after head injury. There are also reports in the esoteric literature of people who have had spontaneous experiences of wide mystical states who have subsequently developed psychic abilities. So the link between altered mental states, psychic ability and trauma is well recognised.

Question: Notwithstanding the criticism of the Pam Reynolds case, how evidential do you think the Pam Reynolds case is?

Peter: There are certain clear difficulties about the onset of the experience as it seems to have occurred before major cooling had happened. Having said that, there are also very good pointers to her veridical perception under anaesthesia being accurate. And the deeper part of Pamela Reynolds experience after she had gone down the tunnel etc certainly seems to have occurred after cessation of brain function during the period of cooling and blood withdrawal from the brain.

A much better case, which comes from the AWARE study in the Southampton Hospital, is described in Dr. Sam Parnia’s book The Lazarus Effect. Here a patient with diabetes felt unwell, had cardiac pain and was rushed to a cardiac catheter lab. Under medical supervision he spontaneously developed ventricular fibrillation and required two sets of shocks from a defibrillator, interspersed by a round of cardio-respiratory resuscitation before the heart restarted. There is thus a very clear time-line of his level of consciousness, which was zero and lasted 3-5 minutes before his heart was restarted. He reports being called to the ceiling by an angelic being, hearing the commands from the defibrillator and watching the resuscitation process, all at a time when he was clinically dead. It is very difficult to argue in this case that the events the patient reported did not occur when he was brain dead, and I think we should accept this as a prima facie case of an NDE occurring during brain death.

Question: Dr Parnia has done some great work. Thanks for bringing that case to our attention. Moving forward now, do you think the world that we live in is more deeply interconnected and more complex than the simple materialistic model we have at present?

Peter: Be very careful about this question, because quantum mechanics tells us that every particle within the universe is interconnected with every other one. So the universe is, even in the standard model of quantum mechanics, highly inter-connected. Do I believe that individual minds are more interconnected than mainstream science would have us believe? I don’t take a position of belief, but follow the data, which is very clear, and shows that there is interconnection between minds and there are effects of mind obtaining information at a distance.

Question: If so, don’t the “when you’re dead you’re dead” scientists need to rethink their model?

Peter: This is a profoundly deep question and one that has been asked throughout the ages. To begin with, what do we think survives? Is it our ego-centred personality to which we are all attached? Or is it to some essence of us which carries more fundamental values? Since we do not yet know from a scientific point of view what the exact nature of consciousness is, it would seem presumptive to give a view either way about survival. More work needs to be done on end of life experiences before one can be certain that those features which point to survival can only be explained by that hypothesis. There are a number of other studies which seem to point in this direction. The line that the late Professor Ian Stevenson took concerning reincarnation has been confirmed by his successor, Professor Tucker. This data certainly needs close examination.

Question: In your view is Superpsi a valid alternative to the Survival hypothesis?

Peter: Superpsi has become a catch-all for difficult concepts without clear data supporting them. As such I’d much rather break the question down into parts which have an easier and simpler answer.

Question: That’s clear and concise. Well, what about the media, do you agree that the media overtly support the anti psi lobby?

Peter: The data points completely in that direction! However, I have some very good friends in the media who are, more enlightened!

Question: Do you see a significant change in the number of your peers and associates accepting the survival hypothesis?

Peter: When asking this question you have to be very careful about the intellectual grounds from which it springs. My colleagues’ personal beliefs are often very different from their public beliefs.

Question: We don’t have a balance on TV when it comes to reporting matters of life after death or NDEs etc. When will we see you face to face with Chris French or Susan Blackmore on TV discussing these issues?

Peter: As soon as I’m asked! I’ve had plenty of excellent discussions with both Chris and Sue, both of whom are well informed in the subject, but neither of whom are brain physiologists In my view neither know the details of brain mechanisms which come into play around the time of death and which are required for consciousness to appear in the experience of that brain. Both are open minded and, as good scientists, would accept data which truly persuaded them. Susan always says to me, show me the number which has been shown on the ceiling and I will believe. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, we are not quite there yet!

Question: I see. Some commentators say we are on the cusp of a new paradigm shift in science where psi will be mainstream and not marginalised. What are your thoughts on this?

Peter: If one accepts the esoteric literature that the development of the siddhis is a natural process, that telepath, bilocation etc are part of what can be achieved by training of the mind, then as more examples of this come to light psi will fall naturally into our science. At the moment we are using mechanics to simulate the siddhis. We don’t seek telepathy, we seek a mobile phone. We don’t seek bilocation, we use SKYPE. So I think there’s going to be a period, where we will intensify mechanical ways of dealing with expansions of mind.

And here one is forced back on the idea of Internet and global consciousness. Beyond this mechanical era I believe there will be a development in individual consciousness so that transcendental experiences can become the norm rather than those of a special group of the population.

There are also new and interesting ideas about the nature of consciousness which suggest that it may be a five or more dimensional structure. If this is so then it would explain why we can’t find it in the brain when we look with our current instruments.

Question: In my research for this interview I watched a video where you said, “In our culture we have lost ‘how’ to die”. Can you explain this?

Peter: We have spent little time defining the pathway that leads to death. We’ve studied how the heart shuts down and the kidneys fail but we haven’t yet studied the process of the loosening of consciousness and the detailed change in the mental state of the dying.

What is a good death? It’s important that people are able to die where they want to, and that they have adequate pain control and physical care, at which we are very good. We are not so good at spiritual care. Dying should be a time of reconciliation, so that family discord is healed and the dying person is able to face his death without guilt or regret, with the support of his family. The end of life experiences that I’ve already described need to be brought into the open and become part of the acknowledged process of death – because they have been shown to be as comforting for the bereaved relatives as for the dying themselves. If we succeed in doing this we shall understand much about consciousness, its structure and dissolution and we will come to change our attitudes to death so that we can see it as being very much part of life. When the wind blows through a forest it is the old trees that are blown over, but their removal allows light to allow new young growth (and wild raspberries to grow!).

Question: And I’m all in favour of wild raspberries. You also mentioned that we can negotiate when we die. Can you briefly touch on this?

Peter: Some of the people who have described the appearance of deathbed visitors who say they have come to take them on a journey, say they’ve been able to negotiate a short postponement, perhaps because someone they want to say goodbye to is on their way to see them. It seems you may be able to manage a few days extra time for some good reason.

Question: Okay, I’ve noted that for future reference. You have written 5 books with your wife, Elizabeth. What was that like?

Peter: It’s a real pleasure working with her as she understands the mechanism of words. I am happy with concepts; she loves words and clarity and makes the concepts intelligible.

Question: With all your important work elsewhere, was time management an issue when writing the books?

Peter: My wife would have a very brief answer to this! An unqualified Yes! I thought things would get a little easier when I retired, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

Question: Which book, or chapter, or sentence has most stirred the pot amongst your peers and why?

Peter: Amongst my peers I’m usually accepted as I work as a mainstream scientist and am a careful, supportive clinician. I think I have managed to steer clear of any major controversy. The boiling occurs usually in people who don’t know me, haven’t read widely enough around the subject and so don’t know the data and have little understanding of the physiology and brain processes and their functioning.

Question: In your book Truth in the Light you ask, “How Real is the Real World?” For those who have not read your book, in your view, how real is it?

Peter: The realness of reality is like most other cerebral functions and is dependent on the experience that you are having. Transcendent experiences are realer than real and there are wonderful accounts of these which lead us to understand, as I have already mentioned, that our current perception of the world is only a limited subset of what appears to be possible to experience.

Question: Here on Spirit Today, and in my email team, we often discuss such things as materialisation mediums and the materialisation of the so-called ‘dead’. Do you ever find yourself chatting about such things?

Peter: I’ve never personally experienced this, and although I find the accounts interesting, I don’t know this area well enough to give a truly informed opinion.

Question: Would you be prepared to take part in experiments with a contemporary materialisation medium if his/her etheric team gives the go-ahead to bring in a scientific team?

Peter: Provided it was set up properly with proper controls and an authentic medium it would be interesting. It’s worth noting that such respected intellectuals as William James and Alfred Russell Wallace were prepared to investigate this area.

Question: Ron Pearson says that theoretical physicists will dismiss and discredit materialisation evidence (including video evidence) attested by an eminent physicist until science has reformed its theories to accept survival is possible. Would you agree this is a barrier that first needs to be overcome, or would video of a materialisation of a ‘dead’ person (greeting their loved ones in a sitting) with attestation from a physicist offer the breakthrough?

Peter: You only need to go back to the difficulties experienced by Alfred Russell Wallace with his colleagues when he dealt with this area to see that little has changed since then.

Question: What about personal proof? Have you ever had any personal proof of survival?

Peter: No personal experience, but friends who I know and trust have had very convincing experiences. But I find ‘survival’ is a difficult term because everyone has their own views on what survives.

Question: Christopher Robinson provided very interesting results with his precognitive dream experiments in the States. However he has not had a single university in the UK willing to conduct experiments, which is surprising given how little it would cost. Would you recommend or support testing of Chris?

Peter: The trouble is I haven’t come across Chris or his work and so don’t have an opinion. But proper scientific testing of any concept is the way to progress, and that I would most certainly be in favour of.

Okay, we are nearing the end of this monumental interview, but before we do please allow me to ask you ten hard and fast questions in 60 seconds.

Here we go…

1. Question: What are you passionate about?

Peter: My family. And understanding the nature of consciousness.

2. Question: Any pet hates?

Peter: Dogma and dogmatic assertions by people who refuse to examine anything which challenges their belief system.

3. Question: I know you travel to Japan as often as your schedule allows. What are your favourite things about Japan?

Peter: Their recognition and appreciation of beauty in nature, their sense of order and control, their tempura and my two half Japanese grandsons.

4. Question: Has anyone ever mentioned how comforting your voice is?

Peter: Yes, but don’t forget I’m a trained psychiatrist! It goes with the territory.

5. Question: Great answer. Describe yourself in three words?

Peter: Curious, open-minded, over-committed.

6. Question: And please tell us your hobbies or interests?

Peter: Flying, and listening to music. For a while I collected old organs, till they crowded us out of the house, and I enjoyed restoring and trying to play them. A friend started to give me piano lessons when I was about 45, but I have to confess I never got beyond Grade II.

7. Question: Please tell us something about Jon Beecher at White Crow Books?

Peter: Jon approached us about three years ago, asking if we would like him to re-issue our first book about near-death experiences, which had been out of print for several years. He does a fantastic job resurrecting out of print books, largely those with a spiritual basis of some kind, both as eBooks and in print. He has built up a very impressive list in a relatively short space of time.

8. Question: Yes, he appears to be doing a great job at White Crow Books. Okay, it’s that fictional party time again. You can invite five people past or present to a dinner party at your place. Absolutely anyone. Who do you invite?

Peter: William James, Arthur Koestler, Hercule Poirot, Jane Goodall and the Dalai Lama.

9. Question: Any superstitions or wee habits that you do?

Peter: Getting my wife to scratch my back, at least once a day. Must be my Kenya upbringing, watching the animals rubbing their backs against the trees. Sometimes she’ll do the soles of my feet too.

10. Question: Please thank someone, anyone.

Peter: My wife, obviously, who’s survived the last 50 years with me! And my children and grandchildren who I think are my most valuable thing I’ll leave behind.

End of Interview

Peter, on behalf of the Spirit Today community, many thanks for this wonderful interview. And Elizabeth, thanks for all your kind help too.

It is quite obvious that Team Fenwick make a spectacular outfit.

I wish you many more fruitful years together. 本当にありがとうございました。

Author of several books including 'The Art Of Dying,' 'The Truth In The Light' and 'The Hidden Door' neuro-psychiatrist Peter Fenwick talks about his research into End of Life Experiences and deathbed phenomena and what these mean in the greater picture of who we really are.

The problem with current research is that often there is no clear distinction between consciousness, mind and brain. We know that the functions of mind are supported by the brain and constructed by it. There is a widespread acceptance that mind and consciousness are the same. Consciousness is intimately entwined with the brain, and that is why the usual fMRI experiments cannot distinguish consciousness from mind and the proposition that these two functions are the same persists. In order to distinguish mind from consciousness, situations (outliers) in which brain function and the associated mind are absent or degraded and yet consciousness appears to persist must be examined. At present the only circumstances in which the brain is not working, mind is absent and yet consciousness appears to persist, are in approximately 10 – 25% of people who have a cardiac arrest. In these circumstances higher brain function and mind are absent, and yet after recovery the subjects report consciousness experience very similar to the near death experience; these are called Actual Death Experiences (ADE). A recent PhD thesis by David Rousseau, who has interpreted the nature of the world, assuming the phenomenology of the veridical nature of the out of body experience in the ADE is correct, postulates a five-dimensional consciousness and the presence of ‘psychic stuff’ in the universe. The other outlier is the death process itself. Brain function becomes increasingly compromised as death approaches. About 50% of people who have clear consciousness until nearly the moment of death may have experiences similar to those who have ADEs. This suggests that these experiences may originate in consciousness rather than in a mind which is degrading. Certain end of life experiences (ELEs), such as deathbed visions, transiting to a new reality, aspects of terminal lucidity are similar to the ADE and also raise the question of consciousness beyond the brain. At the moment of death, a number of phenomena, for example deathbed coincidences, mechanical malfunctions and odd animal behaviour suggest a non-local effect and add an additional argument for consciousness beyond the brain. Further, work by David Luke on DMT and psychotropic drugs suggests that the best explanation for transcendent conscious experiences is the filter theory with the brain restricting the input of wider cosmic experiences If that is so, then the ADE, the NDE and the ELE all point towards the universal nature of consciousness.



Peter Fenwick is Consultant Neuropsychiatrist Emeritus to the Epilepsy Unit at the Maudsley Hospital, which he ran for twenty years. He is presently appointed as Emeritus Senior Lecturer, at the Institute of Psychiatry Kings College and Southampton University, and Emeritus Consultant Clinical Neurophysiologist at Broadmoor Hospital. From 2000 to 2009 he spent several months a year working in the field of magnetoencephalography in a neuroscience research laboratory in Japan. He has a long standing interest in brain function and the problem of consciousness and has published a large number of research papers related to altered states of consciousness, and abnormalities of consciousness and behaviour, NDEs and end of life experiences. He has researched into meditation and continues to be interested in the relationship between meditative states, cognition and brain function. One of his main interests for some years has been near death experiences and the dying process, and he is at present carrying out a research project in hospices in the UK, Holland and Japan into the experiences reported by the dying and their carers around the time of death, the results of which are included in The Art of Dying, co-authored with his wife, with whom he has also published a study of near death experiences, “The Truth in the Light”.