Take this recent study reported on in Science magazine. An apparently dead subject was shown images of faces which displayed a variety of human emotions. A type of brain scan detected some activity when the images were changed. It appeared that the brain, even after death, was perceiving visual images and thinking about the emotional meaning of them in some way.
At least, that’s one way to interpret the data. Another way to look at the data is to take into account that the dead subject was a salmon, which is incapable of registering human emotions even when it’s alive.
This was part of an experiment to test the degree to which scientific equipment can provide false positives – the appearance of meaningful data where none exists.
The experiment did not prove that there is life after death, that the brain keeps on thinking and feeling things long after the heart and lungs have stopped. It merely showed that people eager to find such things could easily do so, just by looking at the equivalent of snow on an old broadcast television.
The study concludes that people who are predisposed to see patterns in data will see those patterns, and interpret them as proof of what they already believed. That’s just a part of being human.
