Chapter 20

Cultural Conditioning and Expectation

Howard Storm did not expect to meet Jesus. He was an atheist. He was the chairman of the art department at Northern Kentucky University. He was, by his own description, hostile to religion. Then, on a tour of Europe in 1985, his stomach perforated. He was rushed to a Paris hospital. And by the time he found himself outside his body, walking down a long corridor with grey beings who began to attack him, he was as far from a Sunday-school heaven as a man can get.¹

This matters because of what skeptics often say about near-death experiences. The argument runs like this: people see what they expect to see. A Christian raised on Pearly Gates and harps will report Pearly Gates and harps. A Hindu will see Yamaraj. An atheist will see… well, the skeptic isn't quite sure what an atheist will see, but surely something in line with his prior beliefs. The whole experience, on this view, is a tape loop of cultural memory played back by a dying brain.²

It's a clean theory. It's also deeply wrong. And the simplest way to see why is to ask what Howard Storm was doing in a place he didn't believe existed, meeting a Person he had spent his adult life mocking.

A. The Cultural-Conditioning Argument

Michael Marsh makes the cultural-conditioning case in two related sections of his book. In chapter 2, he argues that what people report when they "die" reflects the place and time they live in. Medieval people saw flames and demons. Modern Westerners see soft light and loving relatives. Hindu patients meet bureaucratic messengers. The "geomorphic contours" of the other world, Marsh suggests, shift with the culture — and that fact tells us something. It tells us the experience is being produced from inside the experiencer's head, not received from outside it.³

He develops this further in chapter 4, in a section he titles — rather grandly — "Evidence That Pre-Existing Cognitive Paradigms Influence the Experiential Contours of ECE."⁴ ("ECE" is Marsh's own term for what most researchers call NDEs; we discuss the terminology in Chapter 2.) His thesis here is sharper. Marsh argues that when a person senses they are dying, they reach for whatever "model apprehensions of the hereafter" they have already stored away — ideas absorbed from religion, from funerals, from movies, from old conversations — and the dying brain stitches those bits together into the experience that follows.⁵ The afterlife the patient reports, on this account, is not a place visited. It's a scrapbook assembled.

Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin make a milder version of the same argument. Even if NDEs around the world look similar, they say, that similarity could be explained by the similarity of human brains and central nervous systems, not by everyone visiting the same nonphysical realm. And of course cultural context shapes how people describe whatever they undergo. So when researchers like Long point to the consistency of NDE reports across cultures as evidence of a real other-world, philosophers can reply that the consistency is just as easily explained by biology and by shared cultural frameworks.⁶

The argument has real force. Of course culture shapes what we report. Of course a Frenchwoman will use French words and a Tibetan monk will use Buddhist categories. No one denies this. The question is whether describing something in cultural language means the something itself was generated by culture. Marsh slides from the first to the second; he assumes that because the dressing is local, the body underneath must be local too.

B. Where the Argument Breaks Down

Two problems show up almost immediately.

The first is that Marsh's theory makes predictions, and the predictions don't match the data. If NDE content is built from what experiencers already believe, then experiencers should mostly meet the figures they already believe in. Devout Catholics should meet the saints they pray to. Convinced atheists should meet either nothing or, perhaps, a friendly nothing. Western Protestants should consistently report the gold-paved streets of Revelation 21. None of this is what we actually find. Atheists report rich, theistic NDEs. Christians regularly meet beings they did not anticipate. Children meet relatives they did not know had died. The scrapbook theory predicts a tidy correlation between prior belief and NDE content. The data shows nothing of the sort.⁷

The second problem is that Marsh's argument silently switches what it's about. He starts by noting that cultural details color the way people describe their experiences. He ends by claiming the cultural details prove the experiences were brain-generated all along. But the first claim is true and uncontroversial; the second does not follow from it. Three people can return from France and describe three different cities — food, cathedrals, traffic — and you do not conclude France is imaginary. You conclude that real visitors notice what their interests prepare them to notice.⁸ Marsh treats variation as if it were proof of fiction. It isn't.

C. The Pro-NDE Response

The core experience is not Western

We treat the cross-cultural data fully in Chapter 8, so I'll only summarize here. Out-of-body episodes, encounters with beings of light, transitions through dark spaces, profound peace, and meetings with deceased loved ones show up in NDE reports from China, India, Western Europe, North America, the Pacific Islands, and indigenous societies on every populated continent. Jeffrey Long's NDERF data set, comparing English-language reports against non-English ones, found that all thirty-three core NDE elements appeared in both groups, and no element occurred statistically more often in one group than the other.⁹ If the experiences were stitched together from local cultural materials, we would expect them to differ from culture to culture in their backbone, not just their surface. They don't.

What does vary is how the core is described. A modern American calls the dark passage a "tunnel." A Native American account speaks of a long cave. A Maori account describes a curtain of seaweed.¹⁰ Allan Kellehear has shown that life reviews appear in cultures with strong moral self-evaluation traditions (Christian, Hindu, Buddhist) and are rare in cultures without such traditions.¹¹ All this is exactly what we'd expect if real experiencers are reaching for the closest words their language gives them. None of it is what we'd expect if the brain were running a culturally-stocked slideshow.

NDEs that contradict what the experiencer expected

Now we come to the heart of the matter. The cultural-conditioning theory predicts that experiencers will meet what they expected. The actual record is full of cases where experiencers met what they did not expect.

Consider Howard Storm again. He was a tenured professor of art and a committed atheist. His experience began not with light but with darkness, with a sense of being lured down a corridor by mocking, hostile beings. By any sensible reading of the cultural-conditioning theory, this is exactly the wrong NDE for an atheist art professor in 1985 to have. He had no expectation of hell. He had no expectation of demons. He had every expectation, if anything, of a friendly oblivion. What he experienced was the opposite. And when he finally, in desperation, called out a remembered scrap of "Jesus loves me" from his childhood, he reports being lifted out of the place by a Person who looked like — well, like the very Christ Storm had spent his life rejecting. He returned changed. He left the art department and trained for the pastorate.¹²

Marsh actually quotes Storm at some length in his own book.¹³ But he never asks the obvious question: how does cultural conditioning produce a hell-and-conversion narrative for a man whose entire culture was secular academia? The expected scenery for a 1985 American atheist is a peaceful nothing or, at most, a generic warm light. Storm got something his cultural paradigm gave him no script for.

Storm is not unusual. The British philosopher A. J. Ayer — a famously combative atheist and arguably the most important defender of logical positivism in the twentieth century — reported a vivid, structured NDE during a 1988 hospital stay. Crossing a river. A red light governing the universe. Thinking, lucidly, while clinically dead. Ayer never converted, but he wrote afterward that the experiences had "slightly weakened" his conviction that death is the end. For a man whose career was built on dismissing such talk as meaningless, that is a striking concession.¹⁴ No expectation framework predicted what he saw. He was a skeptic by trade. The mind that had spent five decades arguing nothing of this sort was possible should, on Marsh's account, have produced nothing of this sort. It produced something anyway.

And it isn't only atheists. Devout Christians regularly meet figures their own theology didn't lead them to expect. Children reared in conservative Protestant homes have reported life reviews — a feature most popular Christian eschatology doesn't emphasize. Catholic experiencers sometimes report no Mary and no saints, encountering instead a Being of Light they describe in non-traditional terms. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, in their landmark cross-cultural study of deathbed visions, concluded that cultural conditioning was, in part, contradicted by what dying patients actually reported.¹⁵ That is an extraordinary sentence to find at the end of a careful empirical study, and it is not the sentence the cultural-conditioning theory predicts.

I want to underline the point Osis and Haraldsson made, because it is easy to miss. They were comparing American patients (mostly Christian) to Indian patients (mostly Hindu). They expected, going in, to find culture shaping what each group reported. They found some of that. But they also found that, again and again, the figures and messages patients encountered cut against their pre-existing beliefs. Hindu patients met figures they had not been raised to expect. American patients reported things their churches had never taught. The careful researcher's conclusion was not that culture shaped everything; it was that something kept breaking through.

The Pearly-Gates problem

Here's a test the cultural-conditioning theory must pass to be taken seriously. If Western Christians manufacture their NDEs out of what they were taught growing up, the typical Western Christian NDE should look like Sunday School illustrated for adults: pearly gates, golden streets, white-robed saints with harps, an old man with a long beard on a throne. That's the iconography. That's what the cultural files contain.

It's almost never what experiencers report. Read fifty NDE accounts from devout Christians and you will find profound descriptions of light, love, peace, presence, sometimes of Christ, occasionally of relatives — and almost no harps, no gates inlaid with literal pearl, no halos, none of the visual furniture of Western religious art.¹⁶ The dying mind appears to have a remarkably bad memory for the imagery it was supposedly going to use to fabricate the whole show.

Consider too the strange case of distressing or hellish NDEs. A 1991 Gallup survey found only about half of Americans believed in hell, and most who did thought there was little chance they personally would see it.¹⁷ Cultural conditioning predicts vanishingly few hellish reports, especially in the secular West. Yet a steady minority of NDEs — perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in some samples — involve frightening, dark, or distressing content.¹⁸ Some of the most striking such cases come from people whose Western secular frameworks gave them no preparation whatsoever for what they encountered.

Children and the blind: where conditioning has nothing to work with

The cultural-conditioning theory assumes a stocked cultural file from which the brain can pull. What happens when there is no file?

Very young children — three- and four-year-olds — have NDEs with the same core structure adults report: out-of-body episodes, light, peaceful presences, sometimes deceased relatives whom (in the most stunning cases) the child did not know had died.¹⁹ A four-year-old has not been to enough funerals to assemble a scrapbook of the afterlife. Chapter 7 handles the children's evidence in detail. The point here is just this: NDEs in children are precisely where the cultural-conditioning theory should fail most dramatically, and that is exactly where it does fail.

Likewise the congenitally blind. A person who has never seen color or shape has no visual cultural inventory to draw from. Yet, as Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper documented in Mindsight, congenitally blind NDErs report visual content during their experiences — including accurate visual descriptions of the rooms in which their bodies were lying.²⁰ The cultural file in such cases is empty. The experience occurs anyway. We treat this evidence in Chapter 6.

Veridical perception is not culturally conditioned

And then there is the move that, by itself, breaks the cultural-conditioning theory in half. Veridical NDE content — accurate perception of real, surrounding events that the patient could not have known by ordinary means — is not the kind of thing culture stocks the brain with.

When Pam Reynolds described the unusual bone-saw used during her hypothermic cardiac standstill, that detail wasn't furnished by her Episcopalian upbringing.²¹ When Maria, a migrant worker in Seattle, described a tennis shoe with a worn pinky toe and a lace caught beneath the heel, on a third-floor ledge she had no plausible way to see, that wasn't a fragment of cultural memory.²² When the patient in van Lommel's Lancet case told a nurse where his dentures were, days after she had removed them during a code blue, no Sunday School lesson supplied that information.²³ These cases are treated more fully in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

Even granting Marsh his strongest claim — that some NDE content reflects cultural categories — he still has to explain how culture put a Midas Rex bone saw, a rooftop tennis shoe, and a hidden set of dentures into the dying brains of patients who could not have seen these things by any normal means. The answer is: it didn't. Cultural conditioning, however far you push it, cannot produce accurate information that the experiencer didn't have. And it is the veridical NDE, not the colorful one, that is doing the heavy lifting in this book's argument.

This is worth lingering on. The cultural-conditioning theory has a built-in ceiling. It can, at best, explain the imagery of an experience: light, gates, robed figures, tunnels. It cannot explain the information in an experience — specific, checkable details about the operating room, the next-floor hallway, the parking lot, the dropped object, the muttered conversation. Janice Holden's review of nearly a hundred reports of out-of-body perception during NDEs found that, when the perceptions could be checked against the actual events, they were accurate in roughly nine out of ten cases.²⁵ No amount of cultural memory turns nine out of ten into accurate. Cultural memory has no idea where the dentures went.

D. Counter-Objections

Two objections need a brief word.

First, a sharper-edged version of Marsh's claim: even unconscious cultural conditioning could supply unexpected content. Maybe Storm absorbed enough Christianity by osmosis to manufacture his hellish corridor. Maybe the four-year-old child had seen something on television. Maybe Pam Reynolds had heard a description of a Midas Rex craniotome decades earlier and forgotten. The trouble with this move is that, the more it stretches, the less it explains. Saying "unconscious cultural conditioning" did all this work makes the theory unfalsifiable — any piece of evidence that contradicts the prediction can be re-described as unconscious memory. A theory that cannot be wrong is not, in the end, a scientific theory at all. And it still does not address the veridical cases, where the cultural-conditioning hypothesis would have to predict that the brain not only assembles imagery but also assembles accurate imagery of objects the person never saw. That is not cultural conditioning. That is something else entirely.

Second: Western dominance in the literature. Most published NDE studies come from Western, English-speaking research programs. Doesn't that bias the apparent consistency? It's a fair concern, and it's why the small but growing non-Western literature matters so much. Studies of NDEs in China, India, Iran, traditional Maori communities, and Latin America repeatedly find the same core features.²⁴ The variation is in the dressing, not the body. As more non-Western data arrives, the case strengthens, not weakens.

Two strands, then, run through this chapter. First: the cultural-conditioning theory predicts that experiencers will mostly meet what they expect, and the data does not show that. They meet, with striking regularity, what they did not expect — or, in the case of small children and the congenitally blind, what they could not have culturally manufactured at all. Second: the theory cannot reach the veridical core of NDE evidence, where experiencers report accurate perceptions of real events. Culture cannot put real information into a brain that did not receive it. Of all the skeptical strategies, the cultural-conditioning argument is one of the easiest to admire and one of the easiest to overrun. It explains a little, and it cannot explain enough.