Although DivisionTheory provides a consistent and seemingly logical explanation for most of the afterlife phenomena being reported today, it is not readily accepted by many NDErs, largely, I feel, because it postulates the occurrence of a cognitive illusion during the NDE.

What is this "cognitive illusion" ? Because NDErs declare almost unanimously that they experienced no division of consciousness during their NDE, DivisionTheory's ability to explain all the other details of their reports is thus forced to depend on the seemingly untenable argument that they did experience such a division, but did not recognize it as such, neither as it was occurring, nor after the fact. Their minds, DivisionTheory insists, produced an illusion that masked this division.

DivisionTheory is forced to postulate that, after the fact, NDErs' minds raced to interpret the alien and unfamiliar NDE experience in the "terms", or cognitive models, most familiar to those minds, even though those "terms" were in fact entirely incorrect and inappropriate to the situation. Having in reality been divided into two entirely separate streams of experience, the NDEr's mind, it is postulated, interprets this bizarre and entirely unfamiliar NDE experience the only way it knows to interpret it, the only way it would make any sense at all to that mind's accustomed way of looking at reality - as having been a single unbroken stream of experience all along, thus creating the cognitive illusion of having had an unbroken and nondivided experience when in fact the experience was nothing of the kind.

This is the bizarre twist of perception that DivisionTheory must assume to be true if all its other logical correlations to afterlife phenomena are to be credited as anything more than mysterious coincidence. But this postulation is asking a lot, and little if any direct evidence seems to be pointing in its direction. Besides the few-and-far-between NDErs who claim to personally recall having experienced the sort of division predicted by DivisionTheory, and besides the ability of DivisionTheory to otherwise account for the rest of the NDE phenomena, the division itself seems to lack any direct "smoking gun" evidence.

Nonetheless, for DivisionTheory to be correct, a cognitive illusion such as that described above must have occurred, an illusion which masked the occurrence of the division itself. Without such an illusion, DivisionTheory's otherwise quite compelling ability to logically account for all the other aspects of modern afterlife reports becomes a meaningless if intriguing curiosity.

NDErs usually reject all of this, claiming to have experienced no division at all. What DivisionTheory interprets as two independent streams of consciousness simultaneously experiencing two independent streams of thought (one part of the mind experiencing the dark void or tunnel, while an entirely different part of the mind simultaneously experiences the Realm of Light), the NDEr interprets as a simple "before and after" sequence of events, with the dark tunnel experience being experienced by the very same mind that later experiences the Realm of Light.

Of course, if there was an illusion, and it was a successful illusion, it would not be recognized AS an illusion ("the victims of the best con men never realize they have been conned"). So if NDErs did experience this illusion during their NDEs, they could not be expected to be aware of it. But how can we tell when an illusion exists? What are the earmarks of a cognitive illusion? What clues us in to the fact that we have been stumbling around inside an erroneous assumption?

When one's perception of reality (one's model or interpretation of reality) conflicts with or contradicts another established bit of evidence, one can be pretty sure that one's mental constructs are "off the mark" somewhere along the line, and that's precisely what we encounter when we compare (1) NDErs' descriptions of the "before and after" sequence of the dark and light stages with (2) NDErs' reports of the absence of time in the other world.

The virtually unanimous NDEr report that there was a "before and after" sequence to the dark and light stages completely contradicts other, equally unanimous reports by NDErs that time does not exist during NDEs. If this is true, if time is not experienced during NDEs, then all that occurs during these inner experiences occurs AT THE SAME TIME, making it impossible for any "before and after"sequence of events to occur, thereby ruling out the familiar interpretation of the NDE as "first came the dark tunnel, and then came the Realm of Light".

There's no way around it - either the time report is mistaken, or the sequence report is mistaken. It doesn't matter at all that the majority of NDErs include both in their reports; no matter how many people are under the impression that two plus two equal five, it doesn't, and it never will. Logic rules the universe in a way that even God does not; even God cannot make two plus two equal five.

I have been intrigued by this contradiction in NDE reports, and so have been studying cognitive illusions, a branch of an exciting new field known as cognitive science. Inconsistencies in cognitive models, such as the NDErs' "sequence/no time" contradiction, are often the only clues we have to help us discover these cognitive illusions. Cognitive illusions are very common, and are, in a nutshell, the by-products of the mind trying to make sense of the data it is encountering when that data is somehow inconsistent with its previous experiences, or simply when that data triggers pre-existing programming in the mind. The simplest cognitive illusions are when the mind finds itself spontaneously "making out" faces in random patterns, such as clouds, rumpled bedding, or whatever.

But the two most interesting things to me about cognitive illusions is that (1) they are often very strong and difficult to overcome, and (2) they are products of the UNCONSCIOUS MIND'S way of thinking, its rather compulsive, automatic, and simpleminded way of jumping to conclusions when it is organizing raw data into patterns and models. Cognitive illusions are often so strong, in fact, that even when the rational mind realizes the pattern it thought it was seeing is really just an illusion, that illusion often still stubbornly persists, continuing to be generated by the unconscious mind. One finds (s)he cannot easily stop "seeing" the pattern, even though (s)he realizes it is an incorrect interpretation of the data and is consciously "willing" him/herself to stop "seeing" it.

In Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's 1994 book "Inevitable illusions : how mistakes of reason rule our minds" (New York, NY : John Wiley & sons, Inc.), we find written:

"First of all, we have to realize that a genuine illusion is not just an extravagance, an absurdity; it is something that always has some very plausible aspects. Likewise, a cognitive illusion is not an ordinary blunder; it does not originate in guesswork but from the formulation of a potent although mistaken intuitive judgment that, at least at first sight, convinces us within ourselves. It convinces us, but it also enters into conflict with other facts or other judgment, that are also compelling.

Another element crucial to every illusion is the weakness of our will. We may know perfectly well that the two lines in the Muller-Lyer figure are of equal length, but even after we've measured them one line continues to appear longer than the other. We may know perfectly well that the St. Louis Arch is exactly as broad as it is high. Yet, the truth is that our will does not control our eye; rational knowledge does not enter into our sense of visual organization. An optical illusion is the product of a low-level mental process, of the kind that is simple, rigid, stupid, specialized, and totally impervious to any intervention from a higher form of mentation, reason, or knowledge. In this sense, perceptual illusions and, though in a somewhat less striking way, cognitive illusions are a demonstration of what modern cognitive science calls the "modularity" of the mind. To use a somewhat exaggerated example, the cognization of our mental modules more closely resembles the digestion of food than the meticulous preparation of a gourmet dish. In other words, it is more or less mechanical, as a computer is "stupid" for doing only what it's told to do."

- pp. 32-33

These cognitive illusions are compelling. Here's an example sure to generate a lot of discussion :

**Imagine that at a carnival, a game host places a ten dollar bill under one of three boxes, and tells you that if you guess correctly which box it is under, you can keep the ten bucks. After you make your choice, he does not immediately tell you whether you are right or wrong, but instead lifts up one of the two other boxes that you didn't choose, showing you that the ten bucks was not under that particular box. And after doing this, he gives you the opportunity to change your choice if you want to. There are now only two boxes left to choose from, and you know that the ten is under one of them. The question before you now is this - Is it to your advantage to stay with your first choice, or to change your choice to the other box, or does it make no difference?**

Virtually everyone answers immediately that it would make no difference, intuitively "knowing" that there must be a 50-50 chance that either box holds the ten dollars. And everyone who answers this way, surprisingly, is dead wrong.

Why? This can be explained many ways, but the easiest and most direct explanation to grasp goes like this -

When you originally made your choice, you would have had a one-in-three chance of choosing the right box. Now, let's say you DID choose the right box with your original choice, which, of course, you would do 1/3 of the time (one out of every three times you played this game). So if you did originally choose the right box, but then you chose later to CHANGE your original choice, that would be a mistake and you wouldn't get the ten bucks. Thus, we can see that 1/3 of the time, deciding to change your original choice would be a mistake.

OK, now let's say instead that you DIDN'T originally make the right choice. After all, you only had one chance in three to get it right, so 2/3 of the time you are going to have picked the wrong box (two out of every three times you played this game). So, having picked the wrong box, if you then chose later to CHANGE your original choice, you would then end up picking the RIGHT box. Thus, we find that choosing to change your original choice would be the correct choice 2/3 of the time.

So we easily see that choosing to change the original choice would be wrong only 1/3 of the time, and right 2/3 of the time. Surprise, right? Go ahead - try it for yourself. Do it 50 times or 100 times or 200 times. Unless you are psychic, you will find that you will end up with the ten bucks 2/3 of the time when you change your original choice, while you end up with the ten bucks only 1/3 of the time when you don't change your original choice.

But this goes against every natural intuitive sense we have about this, doesn't it? Every fiber in our being (in our unconscious) tells us that it should be a straight 50-50 even-Steven choice. We "KNOW" it has to be 50-50.

But that's just not true, and the mistaken conclusion that virtually all of us originally jump to, the automatic, un-thought-out but intensely believed intuitive assumption that "the 50-50 odds is a correct interpretation of the situation" is (ta-da!) a cognitive illusion.

Cognitive illusions such as this are frightfully strong, and even after they have been logically proven wrong, many people still defend them passionately, which is all the more curious when one realizes how little actual thought went into these conclusions. We jump into them without thinking and then hold to them desperately, like life-preservers in a flood. But the proof is in the pudding, and anyone who bothers to test the above 50 or 100 or 200 times will eventually admit that the 50-50 model was, as right as it seemed to be, just a cognitive illusion.

Cognitive illusions are very real, and we are all subject to them and vulnerable to them. More importantly for our discussion, cognitive illusions such as that described above ALWAYS originate in the intuitive assumptions of the UNCONSCIOUS mind, and they are strong. Even when the conscious mind's rational intelligence proves them to be illusions, they remain persistently persuasive. They are AT ODDS with the conscious kind's analytical logic, and it is precisely this logical conflict which exposes their presence.

Thus, the logical conflict regarding the time sense during NDEs helps to expose the cognitive illusion that the mind resorts to when it is trying to formulate models to explain and interpret the NDE. Now, since we have realized the logical conflict between the "sequence/no time" models, we have been alerted to the possible presence of a cognitive illusion within the NDE interpretation. Does this mean that DivisionTheory is true? Not necessarily, but is brings us one step closer in that direction.

And from the perspective of DivisionTheory, the death experience would be ripe for the appearance of cognitive illusions. Since cognitive illusions are generated by the unconscious, and can even fight, as it were, to perpetuate their erroneous perspective even when the logical rational mind has exposed them for the illusions they are, imagine then how totally persuasive and convincing they would be when that conscious mind's rational intelligence was removed from the picture altogether, such as DivisionTheory postulates. The author above says that the weakness of the will is crutial to cognitive illusions. If the conscious mind, which holds the will, was diminished or absent during an NDE, the field would be ripe for all sorts of totally convincing cognitive illusions to occur. In such a case, we would have no defense against cognitive illusions whatsoever.

- Peter