The brain filters consciousness | Alex Gomez-Marin

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There are two big ways we can think about our brain. Two Ps. So the first P is the brain is a productive organ. Brain produces everything. Everything. Perceptions, intention, consciousness, memories are stored in it. The second P is permissive organ. If the brain is not what they've told me as a neuroscientist, because 99% of neuroscientists are convinced that the brain is productive. But if the brain is permissive, then the crazy shit I'll tell you in a minute is not only possible, it's perhaps likely. Okay? Okay. So now we go into near-death experiences.

Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Daniel here, and today I'm bringing you a talk by Alex Gomez-Marín on what near-death experiences may reveal about the nature of the brain and consciousness. Alex is a theoretical physicist and neuroscientist, and is an associate professor at the Institute of Neuroscience Alicante, and director of the Pari Center in Italy. In this very eclectic talk, Alex interweaves his personal experience as he lay critically ill in hospital, a whistle-stop tour of how science has historically prioritized that which can be demonstrated mathematically, and what the growing study of near-death experiences may mean for how we understand the brain's relationship with consciousness. I am probably obliged to say that this talk does contain some colorful language and a lot of energy. But without further ado, this is The Brain Filters Consciousness with Alex Gómez-Marín.

I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Not only because of the content, but also the format. It's really amazing. My first time here, and I'm very happy you're here. So briefly, my credentials. I'm a theoretical physicist. I did a PhD more than 20 years ago. I need to renew my physics license because that's back in the future. Then I turned a neuroscientist by chance. I'm also a father and a husband. I'm an activist. As you'll see, and a little bit of a clown. So it's good that we are in this tent. I'll tell you two stories today. First, briefly, my own. But don't worry, it's not going to be too autobiographical. And then I'll dare to tell you the story of science, maybe in 10 minutes. And then we'll go into crazy shit. So that's the plan. That's the plan. I'll probably lose you because my mind works like you're going to hear. But don't worry, I'll just carry around and pick you up along the way. And if you get lost, enjoy as well. Okay, so 4 years ago I almost died. So I had a stomach leak, I didn't know where it was coming from. I went to the hospital and I spent there many days and I was bleeding away slowly, and they were trying to figure out where it was coming from, and I was getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And one Thursday night, the following day was my wife's birthday. She was going to turn 40. And I was saying to myself, don't die today. Or— this is not funny. I was saying, don't die today or tomorrow. And then I had this vision, dream, hallucination. We'll see. We'll see what people say that was. But I was in this tunnel, which wasn't a tunnel really. It was a well. And I was looking upwards. And there was this yellow light coming. And there were these 3 figures at the end of the tunnel. I know who they were. I don't say who they are. Maybe if you ask me then in private, I'll tell you. But I know who they were. And they were waiting for me. And I knew— and this is important— I didn't think that, I didn't feel that, I didn't believe that. I knew that if I would accept their help, I would die. And as you would say in Britain— I'm from Spain, we're rougher— but in Britain, I would say, I'd rather not to. So I came back. I decided to come back. And I was back in the room. I also had another dream/vision/hallucination that I normally don't explain, but it's relevant. I was in this old town. And there was these huge animals, like 5 meters tall. And they were hybrid, like a giraffe with a neck of a lion and a polar bear with a head of a cocodrile and they had fire in their head. And they were coming on top of me without squashing me. And they were bending their head onto my head one after the other. And then they became flying carpets and went to the mountains. And no, I didn't have psychedelics while being in the hospital. And no, I didn't have weird medication. All right. That's my story. So then I have surgery. I have a big reminder here. They saved my life in the hospital. I was in the ICU for a couple of days. I lost 13 kilos in a couple of weeks. So yeah. And then I had to just recover. So far, so good. And then I had to integrate that experience personally, as you would all do. So far, so good. The only slightly different thing, and maybe that's why I'm here today, is that I decided to integrate that experience professionally. So I'm a physicist, one leg. I'm a neuroscientist, another leg. So I say, hey guys, physics, what do you tell me about what just happened? Neuroscience, what do you tell me about what just happened? So I'm going to tell you what they say. Physics says, I don't know. You know, we work on theories of everything, everything except what really matters. Pain, love, death, smell of cappuccino, and all of that, right? And I'm a physicist. I still am. And I know what they're doing, but nothing to say. Neuroscience. What's that? Hallucination. Your brain is malfunctioning and you have this weird stuff. Come on. Carryover. But no. So I scratched a bit. And I'm going to tell you what I think is going on. So that's why I think this is called the future of consciousness. Now, this was the autobiographical part. Now we're going to move into a historical part. So we're going to do a little bit of biography. You just heard it. History, empirical stuff, theory, and at the end, social politics. So it's like a little bit of everything like we have here. OK, are you ready? Yeah, OK. I need to be quick because there's a lot I want to tell you. So the history of science in 5 minutes. Why science didn't have anything to do, particularly physics, about what happened to me. OK, then I went back to Galileo. 1623, he wrote a book called the Assayer. It was a long letter. He sent it to the Pope. It's amazing. I don't have time to tell you about it. Go and read it. Go and read it. Read Galileo. All right. In that book, he has 3 great things, 3 jewels. The first one, nature is a book whose language is the language of mathematics. So if you want to understand nature, learn mathematics. That's what we physicists believe to the core. If you know the language, you'll know the secret. If you don't know the language, good luck. Somebody will need to translate it for you. OK. The second thing he said, I don't care what 1,000 birds, starlings, say. The phoenix or the eagle goes, does the experiment, And that's what really counts. Science is not a democracy, unfortunately or fortunately. And the third thing, if those two weren't great enough, it's what's really important to understand why science hasn't studied consciousness until very, very, very recently. And he was talking about— well, the book was about the controversy between the nature of some lights in the sky. Are they comets, physical objects, or illusions? He was wrong. But in any case, what he said at the end of the book in passing is key. And I paraphrase as if I was in a theater. I am, right? Galileo says, well, there are things in nature that travel in first class, and there are things that travel in second class. And we're going to start this business we call science, studying what lends itself to measurement and mathematization first. These are the things that travel in first class. Contact, the things that move, how things fall, right? So that's when physics starts. And it's such a great business. Then we just go on and on and on. And then chemistry comes. And then biology comes. And we all kind of use what our grand-grand-grandfather said, Galileo. Just use the language of mathematics to ask nature its secrets and study those things that let you do these amazing mysterious things. We can measure them. OK, now we travel. And the business is going great. Now we move— I need to be quick. I could be slower, but we need to be quick. We arrive at the end of the 19th century, 250 years of great progress. And then psychology, psychologists have the chance to revisit what Galileo had left for later. But we forgot because the business was going so great. Let's do more. Let's do more. Let's do more. But what about psiche logos? Psychology, psiche, the soul, logos, knowing about, or the science of the soul. But psychologists copied the big brother, which was physics. And so they said, well, how do we measure and mathematize the soul? Oh, we can't. So we'll say it doesn't exist. And so psychology became behaviorist. And that was good enough for a few years. And then we enter into the 20th century. And I need to fast forward. And then we have world wars. Behaviorism becomes cognitivism. Because beings not only behave outwardly, but they also seem to think and have perception, intention, memory, and so on. OK, I'm rushing because I have a lot to tell you. And so we go through this desert until the '90s, the 1990s. And a Nobel laureate, Francis Crick, comes and blesses the field of consciousness and says, well, you know, guys, consciousness used to be a taboo, but now we're going to study it scientifically. Now this is allowed. And so now there start to be laboratories doing it and grants and students and journals. And this is the only 30 years. So you got the perspective— 400 years, but literally a science of consciousness Properly done and intensively done, 30 years. OK. I can tell you more things about that. But to summarize, where are we now for a science of consciousness? We had zero. Then when it started, it could only start in one way, which is in a materialistic, reductionistic, mechanistic way. Because that's how the orthodoxy would get on with it. OK, it's going to be something that the brain produces. We just need to look into the brain. If we're clever enough, have enough time and enough money, This is promissory materialism. OK? Just give us more years, we'll figure it out. We'll crack the problem. That's what we do. We crack problems. Where are we today? From 0 to 1 to 2. Materialists always offer you a 2-alternative forced choice between my way or the highway. Meaning materialism or dualism. And of course, dualism is for stupid people. So you're going to keep that. So we go from 0. To one, to this kind of streak of two, today we have more than 300 theories of consciousness. Robert Lawrence Kuhn mapped them last year in a paper. And now I've helped him with others to have a website. It's like the Wikipedia of consciousness. You can go and check it, A Landscape of Consciousness. And he has mapped more than 300 theories. There's this other joke, and I don't have it with me. Theories of consciousness are like toothbrushes. Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use one another's. So that's where we are. And more seriously, many other things are going on. So you have a sense. Nothing for nearly 400 years and now the Wild West. Consciousness studies today, it's in its adolescence phase, I would say. So there are tribes and there are conflicts. And I don't have time to get into them because I want to tell you more interesting things. OK, so now we understand a little bit why it is taking us so long. These theories of consciousness, half of them are materialist. Materialism, by the way, is the philosophical idea, belief if you want, that the only really real thing is matter. If you find a card-carrying materialist, ask him or her what matter is. And they'll say, like, oh, um, I don't know. Everything is really made of matter, right? The other half of the table are non-materialist theories. Why are these important? Let's go back to my near-death experience. And they are important because now— and that's where you're going to lose— I'm going to lose you because I go back and forth. Now we rewind 100 years to William James. William James, end of the 19th century, 1898. He wrote a paper or an article or a piece, an essay called On Human immortality, a topic we all care about in a way, right? And he said, there's no doubt that the brain plays— and you can add the verb and the adverb and the adjective you want— a key role in thought, he said. But the key question is not that. The key question is, what's the nature of that function? So my main idea for today, William James's idea, for you is this one. There are two big ways we can think about our brain. Two Ps. In Spanish, this works better because there's the left-wing political party. It's called PP. So I say, well, remember, I'm going to talk to you about the PP. And so the first P is the brain is a productive organ. Brain produces everything. Everything. Perceptions, intention, consciousness, memories are stored in it. The second P is permissive organ. Permissive organ. So when I read James, I said, ha! If the brain is not what they've told me as a neuroscientist— because 99% of neuroscientists are convinced that the brain is productive. They may not even know that there's an alternative. But if the brain is permissive, then the crazy shit I'll tell you in a minute is not only possible, it's perhaps likely. Okay? Okay. So now we go into near-death experiences, and we'll go back to the brain in a minute. So 50 years ago— Alex, relax. Voices talk to me. I'll tell you about Gollum and Schmigel in a moment. 50 years ago, Raymond Moody wrote a book that started the science of near-death experiences. And the move was amazing. And it was due to two factors. One, there was technology to resuscitate people who were clinically dead. Your brain has stopped. You don't breathe for seconds or minutes. But they bring you back. OK, that's one thing— technology. The second thing was a human, I would say, advanced Some doctors discovered that they have two ears and one mouth. So they shut up and listen. And they listen to the crazy stories their patients were telling them. You see, doctor, when you were doing surgery on me and I was clinically dead, I would see you from above. And I saw what you were telling to your partner. And I even flew outside the room and I saw what was going on there. There are some cases of people even looking at things that are at the ceiling. And I also saw beings of light and so on. What do you do with that, right? Well, some people were brave enough to tell it. And some doctors and then scientists were brave enough to start annotating that. And so these anecdotes, when they were piling up and being organized, they become data. So as signs of near-death experiences, experiences started 50 years ago. OK. A lot to say about that as well. We know now because of certain people like Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia or Pim van Lommel and others, we know what kinds of experiences people have, what do they tell, whether they're conserved or not, whether they change according to gender or cultural background or even age. And there are aspects of those experiences that are conserved. So you can start to do a science of it. Now, there are also other kinds of studies which are really hard to do because people die. They need to be brought back. They need to be willing to tell you the story, right? And then those stories have different degrees of objectivity, you could say, from, you know, I was in heaven to I saw exactly that movement that the surgeon did when I was my brain was probably off, right? There are all these experiences now. And they're also— when you're there, in some cases they can go quick enough and place in the person that's clinically dead an EEG, an electroencephalogram, and see at least at the surface of the brain whether the brain is flat or not. So that's really the edge. And then some people have put, like, Sam Parnia tablets on the ceiling to see if there's an out-of-body experience that's veridical, meaning it has a correlate with the objective world, Well, if we could find that needle in the haystack where the person remembers something that's very difficult and the EEG is flat, well, we're getting closer, maybe not to proving, but to bring evidence that two things— minds don't die, maybe, when brains die, and maybe that there's life after death. Now, now. I'll come back to this, but do you hear the word? Pseudoscience. Pseudoscience. Right? So is it pseudoscience? Is it supernatural? Is it paranormal? Is it extraordinary? Fucking prefixes, you know? They just kill our ability to ask these questions. Science— and I'm not a scientist, I'm not scientific— but science in principle should be able to study anything as long as it's well done. Now, why did I tell you about William James? Because— and this is really key— if you think that the brain is a productive organ, all of those stories are simply hallucinations at best. Nonsense. The world is impossible. If the brain is a permissive organ, yeah, it makes sense. It's kind of a filter. And so it's filtering the light of consciousness, if you want, metaphorically. And even when the brain dies, mind could be still going on, or consciousness. OK. There are other phenomena, by the way. So we don't need to bet it all on near-death experiences. For some reason, near-death experiences are very popular now in Spain. And you know, this happens. I sometimes try to be funny, but when I don't try to be funny— yes. So near-death experiences are one of many amazing phenomena. I call it the science of the impossible to cheer me up, right? So there's also terminal lucidity. Typically, an old person who's had a long neurodegenerative disease, maybe the brain is not functioning well for years, right? Alzheimer's, for instance, right? Doesn't talk, doesn't remember. And then one day, Grandpa is so talkative and even handsome, and he's talking to everyone, and then he dies. Well, this happens a lot, a lot. And people know it, and nurses know it more than anyone. Now, if you do a science of that, Then you wonder, well, the productive hypothesis, if we think it's a hypothesis— if it's a dogma, the science has finished before we started. But if it's a hypothesis, well, the productive hypothesis doesn't work very well because when the brain is broken right before it dies, now it has this surge of clarity. That's why it's called terminal lucidity. But if you look at the other hypothesis, well, it makes sense. Now the filter lets more mind in, if you want. OK. So near-death experiences, a big island. Terminal lucidity, another one. OK, we'll get into the woo-woo zone. Are you ready? Yeah. OK. And don't poo-poo, please. This is not only about what happens in the brain when you're dying, dead, kind of dead, half dead, half alive like Schrödinger's cat, which is a great field of study. OK. There's this work of Ian Stevenson, University of Virginia. For more than 5 decades, he studied children who remember previous lives. One anecdote, two anecdotes, 1,000. OK. And see, you can rank them. And then there are these cases of these kids who could enumerate sometimes up to 40 items about their previous life, whether they were male or female, whether they had an affair or not, where they would hide their gun, how was their town, and so on. And they matched, right? It's really hard to do that science, but this seems to point that this idea of reincarnation maybe holds some scientific merit, right? And then there's what happens— so that's what happens when you come back, right? So you— when you die, when you come back. And then there's something in between that's even harder. So I'm, I'm just cranking up your Overtone window, right? And I'm fine if at some point you're like, oh, shit. Why am I here? I thought I was going to be proper talk about consciousness. Then there's mediumship. Oy, oy, oy, oy, oy. By the way, not all Spaniards are like me. OK, mediumship, mediumship. I was invited to a TV program in Spain to speak about near-death experiences. And I said, well, I want to talk about— I call it the four seasons. Right? Like when we're dying, when we're there, when we come back, and all the rest. And saying, well, no, by contract, you can talk about mediumships. No, we cannot have mediums on. And I get it, 2 AM, yeah, yeah, your job is going to be— no. But there are also serious studies happening about that. OK, if that wasn't enough, that suggests perhaps that minds can Velcro. Oh, that was a good sound effect. They can detach from brains. All right. You don't need to die to experience that. That's the next thing I realized. Because there are many things in our daily life that feel like that, synchronicities. And I don't mean just coincidences. I mean, take them seriously like Carl Jung, a causal order where the objective and the subjective meet in a very meaningful way. I mean, these things can be done very well, right? OK, synchronicities. People have precognitive dreams, whether you like it or not. They have them. They have them. Coincidence? Maybe. Shall we study it? Right. Then there's the whole field of psychical phenomena. And there are papers and journals. So I'm into all of that. Why? Because this is telling us something, I think, important about consciousness, about us humans. I don't have time to talk about— extrasensory perception or mind-to-matter interactions. But you see, it all falls within this category of what I call the edges of consciousness. The edges of consciousness. Edges because they're frontier knowledge and also because they're marginalized. OK. Now I need to tell you two more stories. I want to go back and do another story about the mind, the story about the extended mind. Because probably mind is everywhere. By the way, I didn't say much about the theories of consciousness, but there's materialism, idealism, dualism, quantum theories. There are many, right? And those that are not materialist seem to allow for minds to be, as I think Santayana put it, extended on the breadth of matter. Because whether you like it or not, again, we are dualists. We are Cartesians. We have Galileo's grandfather, but also Descartes. So we always tend to think in terms of mind and matter, objective, subjective. OK, the mind used to be nowhere. And then some people place it in the pineal gland. It's a good place. It's the throne. Then we extended it within the brain. Then there are the enactivists who say, well, it's not just in the brain. Your brain is talking to your gut and to your lungs. So it's organs, other organs, not just the organ king. It's everywhere. In your flesh, and they say it's even in the world. So we're just extending the mind to even take literally the idea that minds are extended beyond our brains. Okay, another thing to add here, because I have more crazy shit to at least mention, right? Okay, so our minds may be detached from our brains occasionally, and when we die, we We may survive. Well, what about other kinds of minds? This is very interesting. You know, what about plants? They don't have brains. They behave, yes. Some people say they have cognitive abilities. Well, do they have consciousness? I think it's quite likely. What about other kingdoms of life, like fungi? People didn't know they existed, and they are all over the place now. So what about these other kingdoms? And what about other queendoms? I made up this word. So have you heard about the UAP stuff? I mean, I'm all in tonight. I don't have time for— there's no time to lose. UAP stuff. What if there are other conscious entities? I mean, if you're in another tent and we're talking about physics, I can start talking about 13 dimensions and everybody's like, oh, clever guy. Could be. Well, what if angels and demons and elementals and things like these are real, right? Maybe we can study them scientifically, maybe not, right? So we have anomalous minds, altered minds— I didn't speak about psychedelics, right? Alien minds and— If it wasn't enough, artificial minds, right? AI is an algorithmic invasion of fascinating, dangerous bullshit. So I could just explain all of those— algorithmic invasion, fascinating, dangerous bullshit. I'm more concerned about the dangerous one, right? I'll leave it at that. To end. To end, because I need to end. And I haven't even begun. Science stands on a stool. Three legs. We need data, sure. We need theories. And we need this other thing, which is a sociopolitical context as well. Right? So all these isms, not only materialism, which is my dead horse, but also skepticism. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right? Come on. Extraordinary for you, not for me. And no matter how much extraordinary evidence I bring, you won't believe it. So why am I talking to you? And why is everybody listening to you? So now when I talk about these things, at least in Spain, I don't know what's going to happen here, people come back and tell me all those stories that happened to them. And I'm sure you all have one that you haven't shared with anyone. So I think science— yeah. So science— and with this I'll finish— science 2.0, the science of consciousness of the future, yes, we need to look at the brain. But we need to be in service of humanity to make room for these experiences, not just wave them off and tell to people, you're stupid or crazy or alone. Because you're not stupid, you're not crazy, and you're not alone. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. What do you think? Are we right to question the consensus amongst neuroscientists that the brain is productive? Should we be taking reports of near-death experiences seriously? This is a topic which never fails to spark debate, so I'd love to hear what you all think. Have you ever had a personal experience which has made you question the role of the brain in consciousness, be it a near-death experience or witnessing terminal lucidity in someone else? You can get in touch through the email address in the show notes or by leaving a comment on the platform of your choice. And if you'd like to hear more, please like and subscribe and head over to our website, IEI TV, for thousands more debates, talks, and interviews from the world's leading thinkers. Bye.

You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet: drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary.