A whole lot of seemingly useless science does end up being useful later on in ways we don't imagine. I doubt Mersenne and Fermat envisioned their work being used to secure banking transactions. However, mathematics is typically harmless to animals, so it doesn't really matter if it never ends up being useful. This study was both immediately useless _and_ harmful.

The UofM ethics board must really be a rubber stamp if it approves asphyxiating and shocking to death a bunch of rats just to study near-death experiences.

This reminds of when I read Stiff (an amazing book, by the way) [0], and how scientists in the good old days were weighing bodies before and after death, trying to find a weight of the soul, or any other quantitative values for the soul. I found that funny, but off-putting and disturbing.

My take: people are looking for any proof of the afterlife, holding onto a sliver hope proven by any scientific, factual account. I call the gamble on the afterlife faith, and why it cannot be guaranteed, but hey, that is way out of the scope of this conversation.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...

If you really take the concept of a soul living in some astral dimension seriously, then performing experiments to try to pinpoint its interface with ordinary matter (the body) makes perfect sense.

If you're not interested in getting experimental evidence for your idea, whatever it might be, it could be that you don't even believe there is any. Maybe you actually think the idea isn't even true in the literal sense.

Demanding that research show immediate practicality is a good way to end up doing no meaningful research whatsoever.

Virtually every major discovery in the past hundred years (if not more) stems from research that had no obvious direct application. The biggest benefit of the post-industrial society is being able to spend time on things that aren't immediately useful, but potentially have greater benefits further down the road.

Keep in mind that "All breakthroughs are derived from basic research" (if true) doesn't entail "All basic research leads to breakthroughs".

We still need to judge the merit of basic research; in this case I'm slightly more skeptical as to its potential to unravel, well, anything about the mind at all.

I agree with you on the need to use judgement. In this case though, while the research might not tell us much about the mind, knowing more about the regions of the brain that are active during an NDE could provide more insight into how the brain is physically affected by oxygen starvation. It might also help with designing physical and psychological therapies for the negative consequences [1] of near death experiences for survivors.

It does seen like a lot of the discussion about this subject is (often implicitly) trying to address a religious/afterlife aspect of nde. For example, the article says 'The "near-death experience" reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be grounded in science'. The brain is a physical object that is subject to the laws of physics, so that "grounding" is inevitable whether we know how it works or not. This shouldn't be surprising and there isn't an alternative, short of admitting religion or parapsychology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Effects

I'm not saying that it is - but research for its own sake is worthwhile, even if you don't know beforehand how earthshaking the results will be.

Sure, sometimes you swing and you miss, but if that makes you too scared to swing at all then you're never going to hit anything.

The problem is that there is no way to tell in advance which basic research will be useful later on.

It may be useful to recognize a dying brain from a non-dying one, don't you think?