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Near-Death & Out-Of-Body Experiences

Near death, explained
New science is shedding light on what really happens during out-of-body experiences -- with shocking results.


In 1991, Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds felt extremely dizzy, lost her ability to speak, and had difficulty moving her body. A CAT scan showed that she had a giant artery aneurysm—a grossly swollen blood vessel in the wall of her basilar artery, close to the brain stem. If it burst, which could happen at any moment, it would kill her. But the standard surgery to drain and repair it might kill her too.

With no other options, Pam turned to a last, desperate measure offered by neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Spetzler was a specialist and pioneer in hypothermic cardiac arrest—a daring surgical procedure nicknamed “Operation Standstill.” Spetzler would bring Pam’s body down to a temperature so low that she was essentially dead. Her brain would not function, but it would be able to survive longer without oxygen at this temperature. The low temperature would also soften the swollen blood vessels, allowing them to be operated on with less risk of bursting. When the procedure was complete, the surgical team would bring her back to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in.

Essentially, Pam agreed to die in order to save her life—and in the process had what is perhaps the most famous case of independent corroboration of out of body experience (OBE) perceptions on record. This case is especially important because cardiologist Michael Sabom was able to obtain verification from medical personnel regarding crucial details of the surgical intervention that Pam reported. Here’s what happened.

Pam was brought into the operating room at 7:15 a.m., she was given general anesthesia, and she quickly lost conscious awareness. At this point, Spetzler and his team of more than 20 physicians, nurses, and technicians went to work. They lubricated Pam’s eyes to prevent drying, and taped them shut. They attached EEG electrodes to monitor the electrical activity of her cerebral cortex. They inserted small, molded speakers into her ears and secured them with gauze and tape. The speakers would emit repeated 100-decibel clicks—approximately the noise produced by a speeding express train—eliminating outside sounds and measuring the activity of her brainstem.

At 8:40 a.m., the tray of surgical instruments was uncovered, and Robert Spetzler began cutting through Pam’s skull with a special surgical saw that produced a noise similar to a dental drill. At this moment, Pam later said, she felt herself “pop” out of her body and hover above it, watching as doctors worked on her body.

Although she no longer had use of her eyes and ears, she described her observations in terms of her senses and perceptions. “I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar,” she said. “I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not.” She also described the Midas Rex bone saw (“The saw thing that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it … ”) and the dental-drill sound it made with considerable accuracy.

Meanwhile, Spetzler was removing the outermost membrane of Pamela’s brain, cutting it open with scissors. At about the same time, a female cardiac surgeon was attempting to locate the femoral artery in Pam’s right groin. Remarkably, Pam later claimed to remember a female voice saying, “We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.” And then a male voice: “Try the other side.” Medical records confirm this conversation, yet Pam could not have heard them.

The cardiac surgeon was right—Pam’s blood vessels were indeed too small to accept the abundant blood flow requested by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, so at 10:50 a.m., a tube was inserted into Pam’s left femoral artery and connected to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. The warm blood circulated from the artery into the cylinders of the bypass machine, where it was cooled down before being returned to her body. Her body temperature began to fall, and at 11:05 a.m. Pam’s heart stopped. Her EEG brain waves flattened into total silence. A few minutes later, her brain stem became totally unresponsive, and her body temperature fell to a sepulchral 60 degrees Fahrenheit. At 11:25 a.m., the team tilted up the head of the operating table, turned off the bypass machine, and drained the blood from her body. Pamela Reynolds was clinically dead.

At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”

Meanwhile, in the operating room, the surgery had come to an end. When all the blood had drained from Pam’s brain, the aneurysm simply collapsed and Spetzler clipped it off. Soon, the bypass machine was turned on and warm blood was pumped back into her body. As her body temperature started to increase, her brainsteam began to respond to the clicking speakers in her ears and the EEG recorded electrical activity in the cortex. The bypass machine was turned off at 12:32 p.m. Pam’s life had been restored, and she was taken to the recovery room in stable condition at 2:10 p.m.

Tales of otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975 by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular book Life After Life. He presented more than 100 case studies of people who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during “clinical death” and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term NDE to refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and consciousness.

NDEs are the vivid, realistic, and often deeply life-changing experiences of men, women, and children who have been physiologically or psychologically close to death. They can be evoked by cardiac arrest and coma caused by brain damage, intoxication, or asphyxia. They can also happen following such events as electrocution, complications from surgery, or severe blood loss during or after a delivery. They can even occur as the result of accidents or illnesses in which individuals genuinely fear they might die. Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.

The effects of NDEs on the experience are intense, overwhelming, and real. A number of studies conducted in United States, Western European countries, and Australia have shown that most NDErs are profoundly and positively transformed by the experience. One woman says, “I was completely altered after the accident. I was another person, according to those who lived near me. I was happy, laughing, appreciated little things, joked, smiled a lot, became friends with everyone … so completely different than I was before!”

However different their personalities before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar psychological profile after the NDE. Indeed, their beliefs, values, behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. Importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination. And, as noted NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated, these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.

Some skeptics legitimately argue that the main problem with reports of OBE perceptions is that they often rest uniquely on the NDEr’s testimony—there is no independent corroboration. From a scientific perspective, such self-reports remain inconclusive. But during the last few decades, some self-reports of NDErs have been independently corroborated by witnesses, such as that of Pam Reynolds. One of the best known of these corroborated veridical NDE perceptions—perceptions that can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

NDEs experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper decided to undertake a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind. They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to report on verifiable events that took place when they were clinically dead, that would mean something real was occurring. They interviewed 31 individuals, of whom 14 were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the participants had had an NDE; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly, the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern, whether they were born blind or had lost their sight in later life. The results of the study were published in 1997. Based on all the cases they investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on the senses of the physical body. They proposed to call this other mode of perception mindsight.

Despite corroborated reports, many materialist scientists cling to the notion that OBEs and NDEs are located in the brain. In 2002, neurologist Olaf Blanke and colleagues at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland described in the prestigious scientific journal Nature the strange occurrence that happened to a 43-year-old female patient with epilepsy. Because her seizures could not be controlled by medication alone, neurosurgery was being considered as the next step. The researchers implanted electrodes in her right temporal lobe to provide information about the localization and extent of the epileptogenic zone—the area of the brain that was causing the seizures—which had to be surgically removed. Other electrodes were implanted to identify and localize, by means of electrical stimulation, the areas of the brain that—if removed—would result in loss of sensory capacities, linguistic ability, or even paralysis. Such a procedure is particularly critical to spare important brain areas that are adjacent to the epileptogenic zone.

When they stimulated the angular gyrus—a region of the brain in the parietal lobe that is thought to integrate sensory information related to vision, touch, and balance to give us a perception of our own bodies—the patient reported seeing herself “lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” She described herself as “floating” near the ceiling. She also reported seeing her legs “becoming shorter.”

The article received global press coverage and created quite a commotion. The editors of Nature went so far as to declare triumphantly that as a result of this one study—which involved only one patient—the part of the brain that can induce OBEs had been located.

“It’s another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain,” said psychologist Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, which seeks to debunk all kinds of paranormal claims. “In reality, all experience is derived from the brain.”

In another article published in 2004, Blanke and co-workers described six patients, of whom three had experienced an atypical and incomplete OBE. Four patients reported an autoscopy—that is, they saw their own double from the vantage point of their own body. In this paper, the researchers describe an OBE as a temporary dysfunction of the junction of the temporal and parietal cortex. But, as Pim van Lommel noted, the abnormal bodily experiences described by Blanke and colleagues entail a false sense of reality. Typical OBEs, in contrast, implicate a verifiable perception (from a position above or outside of the body) of events, such as their own resuscitation or a traffic accident, and the surroundings in which the events took place. Along the same lines, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia commented that “We cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions.”

Materialistic scientists have proposed a number of physiological explanations to account for the various features of NDEs. British psychologist Susan Blackmore has propounded the “dying brain” hypothesis: that a lack of oxygen (or anoxia) during the dying process might induce abnormal firing of neurons in brain areas responsible for vision, and that such an abnormal firing would lead to the illusion of seeing a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Would it? Van Lommel and colleagues objected that if anoxia plays a central role in the production of NDEs, most cardiac arrest patients would report an NDE. Studies show that this is clearly not the case. Another problem with this view is that reports of a tunnel are absent from several accounts of NDErs. As pointed out by renowned NDE researcher Sam Parnia, some individuals have reported an NDE when they had not been terminally ill and so would have had normal levels of oxygen in their brains.

Parnia raises another problem: When oxygen levels decrease markedly, patients whose lungs or hearts do not work properly experience an “acute confusional state,” during which they are highly confused and agitated and have little or no memory recall. In stark contrast, during NDEs people experience lucid consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning. They also have an excellent memory of the NDE, which usually stays with them for several decades. In other respects, Parnia argues that if this hypothesis is correct, then the illusion of seeing a light and tunnel would progressively develop as the patient’s blood oxygen level drops. Medical observations, however, indicate that patients with low oxygen levels do not report seeing a light, a tunnel, or any of the common features of an NDE we discussed earlier.

During the 1990s, more research indicated that the anoxia theory of NDEs was on the wrong track. James Whinnery, a chemistry professor with West Texas A&M, was involved with studies simulating the extreme conditions that can occur during aerial combat maneuvers. In these studies, fighter pilots were subjected to extreme gravitational forces in a giant centrifuge. Such rapid acceleration decreases blood flow and, consequently, delivery of oxygen to the brain. In so doing, it induces brief periods of unconsciousness that Whinnery calls “dreamlets.” Whinnery hypothesized that although some of the core features of NDEs are found during dreamlets, the main characteristics of dreamlets are impaired memory for events just prior to the onset of unconsciousness, confusion, and disorientation upon awakening. These symptoms are not typically associated with NDEs. In addition, life transformations are never reported following dreamlets.

So, if the “dying brain” is not responsible for NDEs, could they simply be hallucinations? In my opinion, the answer is no. Let’s look at the example of hallucinations that can result from ingesting ketamine, a veterinary drug that is sometimes used recreationally, and often at great cost to the user.

At small doses, the anesthetic agent ketamine can induce hallucinations and feelings of being out of the body. Ketamine is thought to act primarily by inhibiting N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors, which normally open in response to binding of glutamate, the most abundant excitatory chemical messenger in the human brain. Psychiatrist Karl Jensen has speculated that the blockade of NMDA receptors may induce an NDE. But ketamine experiences are often frightening, producing weird images; and most ketamine users realize that the experiences produced by this drug are illusory. In contrast, NDErs are strongly convinced of the reality of what they experienced. Furthermore, many of the central features of NDEs are not reported with ketamine. That being said, we cannot rule out that the blockade of NMDA receptors may be involved in some NDEs.

Neuroscientist Michael Persinger has claimed that he and his colleagues have produced all the major features of the NDE by using weak transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the temporal lobes. Persinger’s work is based on the premise that abnormal activity in the temporal lobe may trigger an NDE. A review of the literature on epilepsy, however, indicates that the classical features of NDEs are not associated with epileptic seizures located in the temporal lobes. Moreover, as Bruce Greyson and his collaborators have correctly emphasized, the experiences reported by participants in Persinger’s TMS studies bear little resemblance with the typical features of NDEs.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire verhttp://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near ... ned/idical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

Excerpted with permission from “The Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives.” Courtesy of HarperOne.

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/
 
Heart surgeon gives account of patient's NDE

This is fascinating, if a little long. He's a bit of a rambler when it comes to the story telling so the preamble has a lot of cuts and jumps to make him get of with it. But...


When you see written accounts of these things there's a cold distance from them, and the sceptic and believer can argue over the wording and what was really said. So its interesting and different to hear a senior cardiac surgeon actually and cheerfully giving his own eyewitness testimony of what happened when one of his patients had a Near Death Experience...


http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=JL1oDuvQR08
 
Excellent post; it's good to hear a medical professional's view of this absorbing phenomenon.

I recently spent some time trawling through a forum for nurses (may even have been from a link on the FTMB), a good 80% of which reported similar experiences - very interesting and not as easily explained in physiological terms as Susan Blackmore would like to think, methinks.
 
Afterlife exists says top brain surgeon
A prominent scientist who had previously dismissed the possibility of the afterlife says he has reconsidered his belief after experiencing an out of body experience which has convinced him that heaven exists.
By Mark Hughes, New York
7:52PM BST 09 Oct 2012

Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, fell into a coma for seven days in 2008 after contracting meningitis.
During his illness Dr Alexander says that the part of his brain which controls human thought and emotion "shut down" and that he then experienced "something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death." In an essay for American magazine Newsweek, which he wrote to promote his book Proof of Heaven, Dr Alexander says he was met by a beautiful blue-eyed woman in a "place of clouds, big fluffy pink-white ones" and "shimmering beings".

He continues: "Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms." The doctor adds that a "huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. the sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you wet."

Dr Alexander says he had heard stories from patients who spoke of outer [sic!] body experiences but had disregarded them as "wishful thinking" but has reconsidered his opinion following his own experience.

He added: "I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone even a doctor told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion.

"But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons." He added: "I've spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigous medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold as I myself did to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us.

"But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... rgeon.html
 
...and the inevitable sceptical response:

Is the afterlife full of fluffy clouds and angels?
What does the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore make of an American neurosurgeon’s account of the afterlife?
By Colin Blakemore
8:47PM BST 10 Oct 2012

Have you ever noticed that more people come back from Heaven than from Hell? We have all read those astonishing reports of near-death experiences (NDEs, as the aficionados call them) – the things that people say have happened to them when they almost, but don’t quite, shuffle off the coil.

They are nearly always pleasant and deeply reassuring in a saccharin-soaked way. Lots of spinning down warm, dark tunnels to the sound of celestial music; lots of trips along country lanes lined with hedges, towards the light of a welcoming cottage at the end of the road; lots of tumbling down Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit holes, but without the damaging effects of gravity.

True, Dr Maurice S Rawlings Jr, MD, heart surgeon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and author of To Hell and Back, did have patients who reported very nasty NDEs after they came back on his operating table. Booming noises; licking flames and all that Mephistophelian stuff. But perhaps that tells us more about the challenges of living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, than about the metaphysics of life after death.

Predictably, the amazingly consistent, remarkably heaven-like experiences recounted by the majority of NDE-ers (yes, that really is what the experts call them) have been summarily dismissed by materialist sceptics – like me. Of course the brain does funny things when it’s running out of oxygen. The odd perceptions are just the consequences of confused activity in the temporal lobes.

But NDEs have taken on a new cloak of respectability with a book by a Harvard doctor. Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, will make your toes wiggle or curl, depending on your prejudices. What’s special about his account of being dead is that he’s a neurosurgeon. At least that’s what the publicity is telling us. It’s a cover story in Newsweek magazine, with a screaming headline: “Heaven is Real: a doctor’s account of the afterlife”.

Just as you’d expect from a doctor, his account is precise and detailed. In the autumn of 2008, he contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that he says made his brain “shut down” and put his “higher-order brain functions totally offline”. The soup-like state of Dr Alexander’s brain was, he writes, “documented by CT scans” (although CT scans don’t say anything about the activity of the brain) and “neurological examinations”.

Although the neurons of his cortex were “stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria”, his conscious self journeyed into another world. There was wonderful music and light. There were clouds, “big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky”. And there were angels (well, perhaps birds): “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings”.

But then it gets really weird. It turns out that he wasn’t alone. “For most of my journey, someone was with me. A woman.” She had a lovely face and golden brown tresses, and she was dressed appropriately for a Cecil B DeMille movie, in peasant costume, in subtle shades of “powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach”. She was quite a stunner. She looked at Dr Alexander “with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far”. It was a look “beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth”.

Well, many of us, after a couple of pints in the pub with our chums, might say that we’ve had that kind of experience; but not with a woman flying on a butterfly wing, as Dr Alexander’s companion was. Although he “still had little language function” he was able to chat with the peasant lady, asking (understandably) where he was and why he was there. He was overwhelmed by the answers, which “came instantly in an explosion of light, colour, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave”.

After the clouds and the angels and the peasant lady, Dr Alexander went on to a “pitch-black” void, “brimming with light” from a “brilliant orb” that acted as an interpreter, explaining that the “universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb”.

You might have sensed a subtle hint of scepticism in my account. As Eben Alexander says, he considers himself a faithful Christian, and it’s therefore not surprising that he interpreted the chaos in his brain when he was almost dying in terms of his model of the afterlife.

His, and the multitude of other memories reported by people who have been close to death, have to be seen first through the prism of hard science. The crucial question is not whether such astounding experiences should lead us to abandon materialist accounts of brain function, but whether materialist accounts can possibly explain them.

Dr Peter Fenwick, senior lecturer at King’s College, London, consultant at the Institute of Psychiatry, and president of the British branch of The International Association for Near Death Studies, acknowledges that there are deep problems in interpreting first-person memories of experiences that are supposed to have happened when the brain was out of action. Since the lucky survivor can only tell you about them after the event, how can we be sure that these things were perceived and felt at the time that their brains were messed up, rather than being invented afterwards?

The same problem applies to dreams, indeed to any memory. Memory is notoriously fallible, and is treacherously easily misled by expectation. The cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done brilliant experiments showing how the recall of real experiences can be transformed by what people think should have happened, and by what they are told might have happened.

In 150 years the science of perception has taught us that the way we appreciate the world around us is as much dependent on our expectations, our experiences, our inferences, as it is on the hard evidence of images on our retinas or vibrations in our ears. Remember the occasions when you have seen a face in the flickering flames of a fire, or been certain that you saw a person in the distance as you walked along at night – only to discover that the face in the fire disappears with the next burst of flame and the person in the dark is just a letterbox.

Is it not significant that the NDEs of Christians are full of Biblical metaphor? Either this confirms the correctness of their particular faith or it says that NDEs, like normal perception and memory, are redolent of culture, personal prejudice and past experience. Perhaps if Eben Alexander were a Muslim, there would have been the mythical 72 virgins on the butterfly wing, rather than the bucolic one. If he were a Buddhist he would be called a de-lok, a person who has seemingly died, but who travels into bardo – an afterlife state – guided by a Buddhist deity.

What Dr Alexander and his PR people claim is that his description of the afterlife is more authentic because he is a neurosurgeon. But when there is no evidence except the word of the beholder, a scientist’s accounts are no more reliable than those of anyone else. Would we literally believe the contents of a scientist’s dream because he or she has a PhD? If a scientist sees the lines of a visual illusion as wonky, should we believe that they really are wonky?

Science has progressed by challenge and disagreement. But what is needed to consider seriously the kinds of claims made by Dr Alexander is not flowery prose and hyperbolic headlines. It’s hard evidence.

But I am trying (not very convincingly, I know) to keep an open mind. I remember the story of the nobleman who asked the Zen Master Hakuin, “What happens to the enlightened man at death?”
“Why ask me?” said Hakuin.
“Because you’re a Zen master.”
“Yes, but not a dead one.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9598 ... ngels.html
 
I was just about to post this. But - are "we" buying into it?
 
I don't buy into Blakemore's critique:
You might have sensed a subtle hint of scepticism in my account. As Eben Alexander says, he considers himself a faithful Christian, and it’s therefore not surprising that he interpreted the chaos in his brain when he was almost dying in terms of his model of the afterlife.
Christianity actually has very little to say about the after-life. I don't remember any descriptions of clouds, “big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky” in the Bible, for example!
 
I was just reading this paragraph;

"They are nearly always pleasant and deeply reassuring in a saccharin-soaked way. Lots of spinning down warm, dark tunnels to the sound of celestial music; lots of trips along country lanes lined with hedges, towards the light of a welcoming cottage at the end of the road; lots of tumbling down Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit holes, but without the damaging effects of gravity"

when the Largo from Dvorak's New world Symphony came up on my playlist.

Which was nice!
 
rynner2 said:
... Christianity actually has very little to say about the after-life. I don't remember any descriptions of clouds, “big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky” in the Bible, for example!

Formal Christian _doctrine_ (including the Bible) has little to say about the afterlife. On this much I agree ...

However, Christian _culture_ - particularly in popularized form - has developed elaborate, persistent, and widely-disseminated descriptions for afterlife features and scenarios that are nowhere supported within doctrine or the Bible.

By Alexander's own account, he is not a Biblical scholar or theologian. He is a lay Christian whose participation in the church was casual (at best) by the time of his medical crisis. The fact that the details of his perceived experience don't directly map into the Bible doesn't mean his description of that experience isn't 'Christianized' - it only means it's Christianized on the basis of popularized cultural elements rather than formal / scholarly ones.

He'd undoubtedly been exposed to such popular characterizations of afterlife scenarios all his life - in everything from cartoons to conversational metaphors to at least some reports of purported NDE's with which he seems to indicate he was already familiar by the time of his own experience.

IMHO his report would have been more compelling if he'd framed it as a scrupulous account of the experiences per se rather than a sales-job for validating the cultural elements his interpretation of those experiences pretty clearly adopted. His account repeatedly alludes to his profession (neurosurgeon) as if this somehow materially validates his report. His conclusion (which is foreshadowed from the beginning ...) is not that of a neurosurgeon who happens to have a Christian background in an markedly-Christianized cultural milieu - it's that of a recently upgraded Christian believer who happens to be a neurosurgeon. This is nowhere more evident than in his choice of book title - _Proof of Heaven_.
 
And, while I'm at it, a couple of other points ...

(1) Alexander is a neurosurgeon. He works on brains. He's been professionally trained to open a skull, mess with the grey matter, and get out again without necessarily killing the patient.

This doesn't mean he's an expert in (e.g.) neural function, mind / consciousness studies, cognition, psychology, etc., etc. - any more than being an experienced auto mechanic automatically qualifies one as an expert in theoretical physics or rally driving.

(2) Alexander's account relies on his claim his brain (specifically the cortex) was 'dead' ('inactive', whatever ...). There's nothing in his _Newsweek_ article that specifies the basis for this claim. He mentions scans / images seemingly indicative of physical degradation in the brain mass, but nothing about data indicative of brain function per se. He doesn't even claim he'd been evaluated as clinically 'brain dead'.
 
Blakemore also rolls out this old chestnut:
"Of course the brain does funny things when it’s running out of oxygen."

Now a lot of research has been done into anoxia (because of its importance to pilots, etc), but one thing the brain does not appear to do under these conditions is create visions of an afterlife.

(I don't have time now to look for references, but this might have already been mentioned on this thread.)
 
Anoxia is discussed in this long post:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 87#1207687
British psychologist Susan Blackmore has propounded the “dying brain” hypothesis: that a lack of oxygen (or anoxia) during the dying process might induce abnormal firing of neurons in brain areas responsible for vision, and that such an abnormal firing would lead to the illusion of seeing a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Would it? Van Lommel and colleagues objected that if anoxia plays a central role in the production of NDEs, most cardiac arrest patients would report an NDE. Studies show that this is clearly not the case. Another problem with this view is that reports of a tunnel are absent from several accounts of NDErs. As pointed out by renowned NDE researcher Sam Parnia, some individuals have reported an NDE when they had not been terminally ill and so would have had normal levels of oxygen in their brains.

Parnia raises another problem: When oxygen levels decrease markedly, patients whose lungs or hearts do not work properly experience an “acute confusional state,” during which they are highly confused and agitated and have little or no memory recall. In stark contrast, during NDEs people experience lucid consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning. They also have an excellent memory of the NDE, which usually stays with them for several decades. In other respects, Parnia argues that if this hypothesis is correct, then the illusion of seeing a light and tunnel would progressively develop as the patient’s blood oxygen level drops. Medical observations, however, indicate that patients with low oxygen levels do not report seeing a light, a tunnel, or any of the common features of an NDE we discussed earlier.
 
The out-of-body experiences are probably concocted by the brain after the event, during the recovery process. That would explain why they don't match with anoxia experiences, although the anoxia/tunnel vision thing (which is real, and quite commonplace) might be the inspiration for the hallucination.

I'm not particularly convinced by sneakers on the roof, either. An anecdote with little experimental rigour.

Some experimenters are placing images or messages on top of cupboards in the operating room; have any NDE witnesses succeeded in seeing these yet?
 
I have some very early memories of being conscious and aware that make me think that there is more to the consciousness malarky than scientists are willing to concede. Anecdotal, or not, it's in the nature of consciousness to be a tricksy and necessary factor in being aware.

It might be better to give some thought as to why, for some scientists, it is so important to prove that consciousness is nothing more than an illusion and that really we are all zombies, at the mercy of a series of interrelated autonomous subroutines.

Like I say, some scientists still seem to think that if they turn around fast enough they'll be able to catch a glimpse of the back of their necks in the mirror. :lol:
 
I don’t buy into Alexander’s account but come on.

What Dr Alexander and his PR people claim is that his description of the afterlife is more authentic because he is a neurosurgeon

And the deep hypocrisy of this is Blakemore and the telegraph’s editor expecting his dismissal of Alexander’s experience to be more authentic because he is a famous scientist. A nuts-and-bolts neuroscientist as I would describe it, NOTE not a psychologist. Which leads me nicely on to...

But when there is no evidence except the word of the beholder, a scientist’s accounts are no more reliable than those of anyone else.

A bit like when you talk publicly about a subject you aren’t actually trained in, your opinions and interpretations are no more reliable than those of anyone else, regardless of your long list of glittering qualifications, or how big your mouth is, or if you are a luvvie at the Telegraph.

I’m wondering what Blakemore is up to here-perhaps he's setting himself up as a sort of Dickie Dawkins II. He’ll have to try harder than that dismal attempt anyway.
 
eburacum said:
... Some experimenters are placing images or messages on top of cupboards in the operating room; have any NDE witnesses succeeded in seeing these yet?

Good point! I recall reading of such 'installed test materials' some years ago, but I don't recall hearing anything about them since ...
 
Found one instance of the 'hidden test signs' ...

Penny Sartori (then a nurse in Wales) conducted a five-year study of NDE experiences in an intensive care unit. Among other things, she put a hidden symbol in the patient's room, situated so that it could only be seen from above.

The most striking NDE case arising during the study provided a number of interesting results, but they did not include a report of the hidden symbol. To the fair, the patient (once recovered / resuscitated) said he hadn't looked back in the direction of where the symbol had been place. The publication focusing on this case is available online at:

http://inicia.es/de/luisfountain/archiv ... ed-nde.pdf

Sartori (who's since earned her PhD for her NDE research) has a website:

http://www.drpennysartori.com
 
Follow-up note ...

It appears that (in the broader context of the study; beyond the single case cited above) Sartori also placed playing cards in positions (e.g., atop cabinets) where they could only be seen from above.

Apparently none of the patients reporting OBE-style NDE's reported having seen the hidden cards.
 
drbastard said:
But when there is no evidence except the word of the beholder, a scientist’s accounts are no more reliable than those of anyone else.

A bit like when you talk publicly about a subject you aren’t actually trained in, your opinions and interpretations are no more reliable than those of anyone else, regardless of your long list of glittering qualifications, or how big your mouth is, or if you are a luvvie at the Telegraph.
Isn't Blakemore a neuroscientist then? Not that it makes much difference; even neuroscientists are quite a long way from understanding consciousness. But I think that consciousness will be understood in the long run - then we'll see some weird stuff- just wait till every damn appliance in your home is hooked up to some sort of conscious gadget.

One reason to doubt Dr Alexander's account is that he believes in it so strongly; this sort of inordinate belief seems to be a symptom of certain types of NDE, and this could be a neurological phenomenon in itself.
 
Let’s not be shy about the afterlife
Why are we so wary about investigating the premonitions and spiritual experiences that surround death?
By Jenny McCartney
7:00PM BST 13 Oct 2012

I’ve noticed that the first time small children get a whiff of the concept of death, they can’t stop talking about it. Suddenly they’re like junior barristers, and their questions are notably to the point. Does it hurt? Where do you go? Can you come back?

If you start, hesitantly, to reply – in what must seem a maddeningly vague way, given the whopping impact of your initial news – that after you die you carry on somewhere else (Dawkins, if you’re reading this, back off for a minute) the children are straight into the practicalities. What do you get to eat? Who’s there? Can the people here see you?

I can’t say I blame them, really. Revelations don’t come much bigger than the one saying that on some as yet unknown day each of us is going to depart this world, and no one will see us again in this life. I’ve had over 40 years to get used to it and it still shocks me. And yet, in contrast to the pleasingly direct, investigative approach taken by children towards the matter, most adults spend their time ignoring it and hushing it up.

Our modern Western culture is largely taken up with the prolongation of life and the avoidance of death. That’s a very reasonable notion to some extent, since most of us enjoy life and would like to have as much of it as possible. But a by-product is that the worried dance of denial about our own mortality makes the final stage of life much harder, bleaker and lonelier for dying people and their families.

We treat the deaths of others either as a piece of gross personal negligence or an outlandish case of bad luck. That is perhaps why I found the recent Newsweek essay by Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon who does not seem noticeably wacky, to be rather cheering. Dr Alexander contracted a very rare form of bacterial meningitis, which put him in a coma for seven days and effectively shut down his brain. When he recovered he described an experience which had apparently convinced him that an afterlife existed. It was of the lavishly conventional kind, with fluffy clouds, shimmering beings, and a beautiful blue-eyed guide – which has come as a gift to those who are predisposed to mock Dr Alexander as some kind of nut. Presumably they would have respected his account more if his vision had been less baroque.

In any case, we can probably all agree that a professionally well-respected man, who was not normally delusional, somehow had – while at death’s door – an overwhelmingly positive experience which profoundly altered his view of the afterlife. Why that occurred, or what it might signify for anyone else, is of course open to heavy debate.

Yet if one listens to the lectures and discussions of Dr Peter Fenwick, it becomes apparent that Dr Alexander’s is not an isolated experience. Dr Fenwick is a leading neuropsychiatrist who is an authority on near-death experiences, and has written a book called The Art of Dying which advocates the importance of “a good death”. Studies led him to conclude that near-death experiences occurred in a percentage of patients who had undergone cardiac arrest and had no pulse rate, heart rate or brainstem reflexes prior to their resuscitation. He described the discovery “that people have mental states which are present in the absence of brain function” as of “astonishing” importance to science. It has, he says, opened up a discussion on the nature of consciousness and even “the potential for a continuation of life after death”.

I listened late at night to one of Dr Fenwick’s online interviews. He seemed eminently serious: scholarly, articulate and not prone to stating exaggerated conclusions. Dr Fenwick had expended much professional time and thought collecting data from the dying, and examining their experiences and those of their loved ones. He spoke with confidence about certain phenomena which quite commonly occurred around death, such as “premonitions” by an individual or someone close to them that their death is approaching, or a dying person reporting the vision of a dead relative or spouse coming to collect them. (Interestingly, the “guide” figure varies according to one’s culture.)

I have no idea why such phenomena might happen, or indeed whether they might have a physical or psychological explanation. The fact is, however, that many people are aware of them, but are almost embarrassed to discuss them in case they are dismissed as crazy: they speak of them privately, to friends. We are taught that such things belong to the slippery, shameful realm of unreason. Yet while superstition is a deep, dark bog, science has sometimes assumed a rather blinkered resistance to lines of inquiry that might conceivably collide with spirituality: Dr Fenwick is in a minority. We are still in the dark about death, and it’s the biggest thing that happens to us. Why, unlike our children, are we not brave enough to ask it many more questions?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... rlife.html
 
Scientists: NDE experience is soul returning to universe

A very interesting story. Two eminent scientists have claimed, after studying the experience of Near Death Experience, that what is actually happening is the soul leaving the physical body and returning to the universe as a whole...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... death.html
 
I suspect that there may be more people who, like me, find this interesting but who are not well read enough in quantum physics to be able to have an informed opinion.

I read that Hameroff and the other bloke claimed that something, at a quantum level, continues to exist after the death of the body. Is this his theory or does it have some basis in fact? Would such a thing be compatible with quantum theories?
 
Their account sounds like a quite confused muddle of theories trying to explain an inexplicable empirical reality.

The Penrose Theory is a bit flakey, but the idea that the Mind is an algorthem in the brain is quite standard, not sure how its supposed to go back into the Universe though other than via the fact there doesnt appear there'e anywhere else for it to go.

Conciousness is certainly regarded as physically irreducible by most clued up philosophers of mind these days.
 
A universe where people walk around on clouds in toga attire and meet their dead relatives?

Sounds too much like what people expect to find.
 
SameOldVardoger said:
A universe where people walk around on clouds in toga attire and meet their dead relatives?

Sounds too much like what people expect to find.
I expect my relatives to have different taste in clothes, unless wearing togas is a family secret no one's told me about. :lol:
 
kamalktk said:
SameOldVardoger said:
A universe where people walk around on clouds in toga attire and meet their dead relatives?

Sounds too much like what people expect to find.
I expect my relatives to have different taste in clothes, unless wearing togas is a family secret no one's told me about. :lol:

Guess togas has been used too much in american movies too be taken seriously (and no, I'm not talking about Animal House). :lol:

snuggie.jpg
 
Near death experiences could be surge in electrical activity

Near death experiences in which people report “seeing the light” could be explained by increases in electrical activity in the brain after the heart stops, scientists have found.

The first study to examine the neurophysiological state of the dying brain in animals has identified surges in activity, which suggest a level of consciousness after “clinical death” – when the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain.

Researchers analyzed the recordings of brain activity using electroencephalograms (EEGs) from nine anesthetized rats undergoing experimentally induced cardiac arrest.

Within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all of the rats displayed a widespread, transient surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with a highly aroused and conscious brain.

Almost identical patterns were found in the dying brains of rats undergoing asphyxiation, according to the research by the University of Michigan, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated.

Approximately 20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report having had a near-death experience during clinical death.

The study found that after clinical death, the rats display brain activity patterns which were characteristic of conscious perception.

Lead study author Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., associate professor of molecular and integrative physiology and associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School, said: "We reasoned that if near-death experience stems from brain activity, neural correlates of consciousness should be identifiable in humans or animals even after the cessation of cerebral blood flow.”

She added: "This study tells us that reduction of oxygen or both oxygen and glucose during cardiac arrest can stimulate brain activity that is characteristic of conscious processing. It also provides the first scientific framework for the near-death experiences reported by many cardiac arrest survivors."

Researchers said the prediction that they would find some signs of conscious activity in the brain during cardiac arrest was confirmed, but they were surprised by the high levels of activity.

Senior author anaesthesiologist George Mashour, assistant professor of anesthesiology and neurosurgery at the University said: "In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... ivity.html
 
sherbetbizarre said:
Near death experiences could be surge in electrical activity

Near death experiences in which people report “seeing the light” could be explained by increases in electrical activity in the brain after the heart stops, scientists have found.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... ivity.html
I've been thinking about this research.

I was always impressed by the consistency of NDE experiencers' reports, and crtical of some scientists who tried to debunk the whole idea with poor science.

But now, it seems, science has proved that something does go on in the brain after 'death'.

What's more,
Researchers said the prediction that they would find some signs of conscious activity in the brain during cardiac arrest was confirmed, but they were surprised by the high levels of activity.

Senior author anaesthesiologist George Mashour, assistant professor of anesthesiology and neurosurgery at the University said: "In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death."
This is quite astounding! If you're dying, then this "well-organized electrical activity" would seem to have no purpose. In fact, looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, there seems no possible reason for this aroused state to arise. Natural selection is only interested in enhancing traits that lead to more succesful reproduction. What happens to you after your breeding years are over is mainly irrelevent to evolution, let alone what happens to you in your last few seconds of life.

So perhaps something else is happening. Perhaps your consciousness, personality, memories, etc, realise that this old carcass is done for, and it's time to move on elsewhere. In old-fashioned language, your soul uses the last of your brain's energy to move on to another 'place'. It 'launches the lifeboat', or 'activates the escape pod'.

This is of course speculation, but I have many decades experience of studying science, and reading science-fiction, so I'll extend my speculation even further. This is in fact an idea I've mentioned before: modern science believes that the universe exists in more than the 3 dimensions of space, and 1 of time that we normally experience. Maybe there are 11 dimensions, maybe 26, maybe eleventy one, who knows? But the point is that these other dimensions might provide room for some form of continued existence, but free of our mortal bodies.

The speculation could go further, but I'll leave it there for now, and just suggest that this extra brain activity at death is the soul preparing to jump into hyperspace. I like to think that H2G2's dolphins leaving Earth before it is destroyed by the Vogons is a little visualisation of this process! 8)

At my age, I may find out first-hand sooner rather than later what the truth is, but I make no promises about sending messages back from the other side! ;)
 
I thought about this today and wondered if it was actually a survival tactic.

What do I mean?

It may be that the brain sends all stored memories and thoughts to all parts of the brain simultaneously. Kind of like a computer backup system.

This may have evolved because a person who is close to death may sustain some brain damage. If they live, some part of that person and their memories may still remain because the memories have been 'backed up' all over the brain.
 
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