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Near-Death & Out-Of-Body Experiences

intaglio

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Near Death Experiences - Living proof or not?

There's a lot of text to this article but it and its sister report here make interesting reading. I'm supprised no-one has posted about it before.

Do NDE's really show us survival of awareness after death?

New Scientist quoted in Yahoo News 14/12/01

Medical explanations cannot account for near death experiences (NDEs), according to the results of the biggest prospective study to date of patients who were resuscitated after clinical death. However, patients who reported an NDE were more likely to die soon afterwards.
Pim Van Lommel and his team at Hospital Rijnstate in the Netherlands interviewed 344 patients who were resuscitated after heart failure at 10 hospitals across the country. The patients were questioned as soon as they were well enough.

Eighteen per cent reported an NDE - classed as a memory of "a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings and seeing a tunnel."

But the team found no link between NDEs and drugs used to treat the patients, the duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, or the patients' reports of the degree to which they feared death before the incident.

"This was the surprising thing," van Lommel says. "It's always said that NDEs are just a phenomenon relating to the dying brain and the lack of oxygen to the brain cells. But that's not true. If there was a physiological cause, all the patients should have had an NDE."

Letting go

The patients were mostly elderly, with an average age of 62. Van Lommel found that those that reported an NDE were significantly more likely to die within 30 days.

"There is the idea that people can decide to some extent when they die," says van Lommel. "Perhaps when they had an NDE, their fear of death was over and they could let go."

The team did find that patients who were under 60 and female were more likely to report an NDE. But the causes of the experience remain a mystery, van Lommel says.

His team questioned surviving NDE patients again two years after their resuscitation, and then after eight years. Most of the patients recalled the event in striking detail. And most showed significant psychological changes, the team reports. The 23 NDE patients who were still alive eight years later "had become more emotionally vulnerable and empathic", they write.

Pushing the limit

Van Lommel's team report anecdotal stories of patients recalling events that happened around them during out of body experiences while they were clinically dead. These experiences "push at the limit of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind/brain relationship," Van Lommel says.

Christopher French, at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, London, says the team's paper is "intriguing", though he notes that van Lommel's team failed to contact the patients for corroboration. He points out that NDEs are impossible to objectively verify - and that out of body experiences have not been proved to exist.

But, in a commentary on the research, he writes: "the out of body component of the NDE offers probably the best hope of launching any kind of attack on current concepts of the relationship between consciousness and brain function."

If researchers could prove that clinically dead patients, with no electrical activity in their cortex, can be aware of events around them and form memories, this would suggest that the brain does not generate consciousness, French and Van Lommel think.

Journal reference: The Lancet (vol 358, p 2039)
 
Yes, it's an interesting article. I did think of starting a thread with it, but merely made an oblique reference to it elsewhere.

If these results are corroborated, then there is a big question mark about the generally accepted reductionist viewpoint that the mind is an artefact of the brain. Another 'theory' sometimes touted is that the brain is a 'receiver' for the mind, much as a TV set is a receiver for programmes broadcast from elsewhere.

But it's getting too late on New Year's Eve to get into too much philosophy about this kind of thing!
 
So maybe the reason people get them with lack of oxygen is because they actually die a little.

But as I have said before, I don't think this is the way to find life after death. It will not really show anymore than that we haven't defined death properly.
 
near death experiences...in hell?

yo,
I was wondering if anyone knows of any case that has to do with near death experiences, but instead of the guy going to heaven, he goes to hell? You know how you always hear about guys people at the brink of death and wking up saying that they saw god or a light or something? Well, I was wondering if anyone ever reported going to hell instead of heaven...?
ZERO
 
There was an interview on a show about life after death in which the woman described going to hell. It was a fiery pit...people were being tortured and others were laying on the ground decaying (but still alive). She also said that there were heads impaled on posts.

Spreading cheer,

Quilty
 
It's true that people do have such unpleasant experiences, but they're generally not found in the kind of hopeful, positive-looking NDE books that sell.
There are cases on record, even featured on some paranormal programs. Sightings ran an interview a couple of years back with a guy who was a callous businessman who found himself in a not-very-nice place, where he was clutched at and attacked by hateful creatures in the dark. He 'came back', and his experience so changed him, he became a minister.

It can always be argued that the experience is wish-fulfillment, or a fulfillment of expectation, based on deep-seated conditioning. But the experience also befalls people who expected to find themselves in Heaven, as well as agonistics and atheists, and to persons raised outside of the dominantly Christian circles that might be said to have instilled such a dark vision.
But vision or no (the most persuasive tesimonies would be from those who haven't returned), the experience is real enough to those who go through it. And most react in a manner that they perceive will lessen their chance of returning to that place once they die for real!
Once feature of the NDE, for instance, in the case of would-be suicides - whether the experience is positive or negative - is that the person almost never re-attempts.
 
The "going to hell" theme is mentioned in another thread

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2150&highlight=drill*

(general fortena - drilling into hell), in case the Devil prevents the link from working :)

Personally, I think people see what they expect to see at the moment of death (or at least oxygen starvation to the brain).

Jane.

(probably have to edit this reply later... hard day + beer = incompreshensible)
:)
 
But NDE's are apparently much more culture specific than most would have you believe.
 
Hermes said:
It can always be argued that the experience is wish-fulfillment, or a fulfillment of expectation, based on deep-seated conditioning. But the experience also befalls people who expected to find themselves in Heaven, as well as agonistics and atheists, and to persons raised outside of the dominantly Christian circles that might be said to have instilled such a dark vision.

Maybe these dying visions are simply a biological reaction from a traumatized brain.

Why do so many NDE survivors see tunnels of light and so forth?

I can't say.

Why do so many alcoholics experiencing withdrawal see insects and spiders?

I can't say.

But I'm sure they are related somehow.
 
The light at the end of the tunnel should be something with oxygen depravation making some neurons responsible for sight firing. Jet pilots get the same.
 
Most people with low blood pressure (well, me) get the tunnel effect before we sink gracelessly to the floor. Must be a normal physiological effect.
 
Xanatic said:
The light at the end of the tunnel should be something with oxygen depravation making some neurons responsible for sight firing. Jet pilots get the same.

I have read that pilots (who experience anoxia during their training, so as to be aware of the symptoms) who have experienced NDEs, report that the experiences are totally different - the NDE has a sense or reality and clarity about it that oxygen deficiency doesn't give.
 
I'm pretty sure that there are 'negative' NDE's, and that there is a 'conspiracy' to try overlook them in favour of ones that make people feel happier about their mortality.

I do know that a suprisingly large number of what we might call 'theophanies' - moments where the percipient feels linked to the Divine in some manifestation, are unpleasant, with people feeling they've encountered something balefully inimical, rather than loving. There appears to be no pattern of this being linked to any prior religious belief or absence of belief.
 
rynner said:
I have read that pilots (who experience anoxia during their training, so as to be aware of the symptoms) who have experienced NDEs, report that the experiences are totally different - the NDE has a sense or reality and clarity about it that oxygen deficiency doesn't give.

Quite right. I have on tape (can't recall the source, but could find it if anyone seriously wants to know - but it may take some time) the testimony of a pilot who has experienced both - and he remarked that they're quite different - just as rynner notes.

So many cases occur when the subject's brain is not oxygen-deprived or similarly 'traumatized' that I don't think this is an acceptable explanation at all for an obviously complex subject.
A dying brain - if the object of the hallucinatory set is to calm it into dying quietly and peacefully - is defeated by its own strategy if the experiences are sometimes negative as reported, or totally absent, or even bright and positive - the latter acting in direct opposition to the instinctive reaction to fight when a life-threat is encountered.
Instead it experiences a sharp, lucid, vivid sense of life and energy and saturation that we never achieve in 'real life'. There's nothing like saving the best 'til last, is there? If death is really the end to what may have been a tough life and painful process of dying, then the happy vision right at the end wouldn't be so much a happy cop-out as a cruel final twist, don't you think?
One feature I've noticed in all the NDE and near-death vision cases I've ever read is that they rarely feature living persons. Almost always the visiting loved-ones are the passed-on relatives or friends of the dying person. Again, my comments stand from above, and to point out that it would make more sense, surely, in many cases (although not in the elderly, admittedly) if these 'visions' and encounters involved the living and the familiar instead of oft-encountered 'heavenly' or 'hellish' realms?
 
Hermes said:
If death is really the end to what may have been a tough life and painful process of dying, then the happy vision right at the end wouldn't be so much a happy cop-out as a cruel final twist, don't you think?
Evolution doesn't 'care' about us once we are past our reproductive stage, which is why we get degenerative diseases in old age: our job is done, and we can rot!

So it is difficult to understand how natural selection could have come up with comforting NDEs right at the last gasp, when it didn't do anything about the perhaps chronic pain beforehand.

The reductionist viewpoint (which I don't hold myself) would have to be that the existence of bad NDEs as well shows that the process is random, just hallucinations of a dying brain.

Perhaps the reason some rationalists don't like to believe in an afterlife is that they would then feel pressured to accept the whole kit and caboodle of organised religion, which they have spent a lifetime disparaging!

Me, I believe in nothing, just possibilities.
 
I too once saw a programme on 'Hellish NDEs', it was on This Morning I think! (The daytime tv prog, that is, when Richard and Judy were on it.) During the 'tunnel before the light' phase, one woman said, she saw many distorted faces that made up the tunnel. Scared the poop out of her, she said it was horrible.
There is also a book, called 'Ray of Light' I believe. I'm so sorry, I forget his/the authors name. However, it was turnned into a film (Shown on the cable channel Living of all places!), and also features Ramond Moody. He apparently comes across a woman who tried to commit suicide to escape from her bullying wife beating husband. She had an NDE and described Hellish dogs ripping at her flesh.
That was deffinatly in the film, but I don't think it featured in the book?
 
beakboo said:
Most people with low blood pressure (well, me) get the tunnel effect before we sink gracelessly to the floor. Must be a normal physiological effect.

I can vouch for this personally. Interestingly, I sometimes manage to hang on to a small circle of vision at the center of my visual range. Also, the darkness overtaking my vision is the shifty kind you get from closing your eyes and pressing on them (gently!) for about ten seconds. Could someone interpret this as faces?

Whenever this happens my hearing goes all funny, too, and everything sounds to be very far away.
 
NDE Update: Non Physical Consciousness?

from: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55826,00.html

Two British scientists are seeking £165,000 ($256,000) to carry out a large-scale study to discover if clinically dead people really have out-of-body experiences.
Sam Parnia, senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, and Dr. Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at Oxford University, are both highly respected researchers.
Near-death experiences are the most common experience and include seeing a white light, while out-of-body experiences involve serenely observing one's dead body while medics work frantically to resuscitate it. The researchers have founded a charitable trust, Horizon Research, to promote studies in the field.
Last year Parnia published a study indicating that 10 percent of clinically dead patients who were later resuscitated reported memories while they were lifeless.
Evidence includes patients recognizing hospital staff they had never met but who helped during their resuscitation. Others have recalled conversations between doctors.
According to known medical science, this should be impossible, given the absence of any brain activity.
In the past, the theory has been scorned by the scientific community. Even those who want to believe the truth is out there have turned skeptical.
Susan Blackmore was once the doyenne of British paranormal research. She has since retired, disillusioned, from the field. She concluded in her book about near-death experiences, Dying to Live, that there are scientific explanations for NDEs.
While skepticism remains, scientists are coming to recognize that more research is necessary. In December 2001, a Dutch neurologist, Dr. Pim van Lommel of Hospital Rijnstate in Arnhem, Netherlands, led a team that published an article in The Lancet, the United Kingdom's highly respected journal of medicine. The study showed that 18 percent of clinically dead patients, later resuscitated, recalled near-death experiences years after the event.
Another study, this one conducted in the United States by the father of near-death-experience studies, Kenneth Ring, used blind patients, resuscitated from cardiac arrest, who likewise described seeing their body while clinically dead, although slightly out of focus. The book Mindsight was inspired by this research.
Fenwick and others are not positing life after death per se, merely consciousness after death.
Nevertheless, the implications are enormous. If near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences don't come from the brain, where is consciousness based?
"There are two ways to view the universe," says Fenwick. "Our current world model is that everything is matter."
In other words, everything that we think of as "real" in scientific terms has a physical form that can be perceived by our senses. But this model, which philosophers call "radical materialism," cannot explain the existence of consciousness, which has no physical essence.
So how do we account for consciousness? "There's a little (unexplained) miracle, and consciousness arises," Fenwick says of the current paradigm.
However, another theory proposes that the basic building block of the universe is not matter but instead consciousness itself. This is described as the "transcendent" view, a perspective shared by many of the world's religions.
"This second, transcendent, view of the universe makes it much easier to understand NDEs (near-death experiences)," says Fenwick, who believes that science will eventually replace the material view of the universe with the transcendent one.
The advent of quantum mechanics, which posits that matter can simultaneously have both a physical form and a wave form is a step in that direction, he says.
So are scientific studies of the power of prayer, which suggest that subjects benefit from the prayers of others even when they aren't aware that someone is praying for them.
These studies have been interpreted by some researchers as an indication that consciousness behaves as a field, much like magnetism, which can be affected by other fields. If that's true, then it's possible one person's consciousness could affect another person's.
Now Fenwick and Parnia hope to add new near-death-experience and out-of-body-experience research to these findings. If they can raise the cash, they intend to study 100 reanimated heart-attack victims who had near-death experiences. Research has shown that 30 of them can be expected to have out-of-body experiences. Fenwick and Parnia plan to place cards above the patients' heads that can only be seen from the ceiling, where those who experience out-of-body experiences claim to watch their resuscitation.
So will this convince the skeptics? "No, nothing will, but that's OK," says Fenwick, laughing. "It's how science progresses. Any research that says you have to have a major rethink in your world model is always rejected. But it will prove that consciousness is not in the brain."
Another thing the research proves is that there's life left yet in speculating about the afterlife.




"One age misunderstands another; and an age without vision misunderstands all others in its own nasty way."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
 
Last night's NDE documentary on BBC2

"The Day I died", BBC2 06/02/03 21:00

Not exactly ghosts, but definitely not 'new science' (not enough actual science: see below), and not convinced it's parapsychology either, so here it is in the Ghosts board.

Pretty disappointing I thought. At the start they talked about 'proper scientific studies' into Near Death Experience that eschew 'anecdotal evidence', and then the rest of the entire damn program was ALL anecdotal evidence. :rolleyes:

Even the US songwriter woman, while initially impressive, it became clear upon further inspection that her case too boiled down to nothing better than anecdote. :(

If this program is any indication, NDE investigators are going to need to start monitoring operations as they happen on the 'off chance' that the patient dies on the table and is then resuscitated telling of NDE's while the details (like bone saws that look like electric toothbrushes) can be objectively confirmed at the time.

Anyone else see it?
 
Sorry Zygon, but I'm a little confused by your post. Are you objecting to patients being interviewed or do you want NDE's validated by brain-scans or somesuch?

I thought that the 'big question' behind this programme was whether a type of conscienceness could exist when all neural activity had ceased. The American woman's case was the only one found to support this possibility.

My personal feeling is that our instruments for monitoring brain activity are not sensitive enough. Afterall, when neurones are 'talking' it's just a bit of fancy chemistry. What is there to stop all these chemical reactions? Who knows how long these things carry on for after the the blood supply has been cut-off? I believe that we have not yet determined the true point of brain-death.

Now if we could bring a person back after a fatal dose of cyanide, that could be interesting...
 
Any illusion of that programme being useful/factual mostly ended for me when the woman started going on about "standing in the breath of God". The guy whose life was completely turned around from being a fat cat CEO to becoming a counsellor was interesting, but surely someone who had almost died would value life more even without an NDE.
 
I think when the end comes thats it, I dont think we get reborn, there has never been any definitive evidence of life after death and why do people worry about it, just human nature I guess.
 
I for one am very interested in Roger Penrose's theory of quantum consciousness and the possibility of entanglement - although quite how that allows out-of-body or near-death experience is a bit problematic-

what is the 'soul' supposed to be 'entangled' with?
Thin air?

Now identical, monozygotic twins, yes.
they probly stay entangled all their lives.
Definitely some food for thought,
and a fount for endless Bulls**t.
 
Is There Anybody There? You Just Keep Me Hanging On!

Eburacum45 said:
what is the 'soul' supposed to be 'entangled' with?
Thin air?

Now identical, monozygotic twins, yes.
they probly stay entangled all their lives.
Definitely some food for thought,
and a fount for endless Bulls**t.
Two excellent points, E.

Maybe they mean that the the entanglement factor enables the fine structures in the cells to snatch some part of the beingness of the luminiferous ether and trap it in a physical, material structure. And that on death, that node of personal being, the 'I' is released again. Temporarily to haunt the worldly reality it has come to recognise as home, before entering the greater reality of everythingness through the 'Tunnel of Light?'

Or, maybe not. :p

We Were Raised 1200 miles Apart And We Both Married Pig Farmers called Zebediah!

As to identical twins I think the concept of some sort of quantum entanglement to explain the strange synchronicities, overlaps and apparent esp events between them is a bit more likely than some bizarre genetically programmed dispostion to marry partners with the same jobs and first names. ;)

Oh! Yeah!

I found it interesting the way the programme brought in Dr Susan Blackmore, let her have her say and quickly past on to lusher pastures. As if she was a batty aunt at a wedding reception.

Mind you if they'd taken her too seriously they'd have had a shorter and more boring programme. ;)
 
Buddha put forth the doctrine of Annata, in which he denied the existence of the soul. Indeed, there could be a consciousness that persists throughout several incarnations, but it is only a "bundle" of thoughts, desires, emotions and memories. It's anihillated through enlightenment. So, something to look forward to there.

He did have a good point, though, and one that nags at me. What is the soul? Is it one's body, mind, feelings, senses or consciousness? All of these things are mutable, so how could there be an immutable soul?

Time for second cup of coffee. Transient, but delicious!
 
Mana said:
Sorry Zygon, but I'm a little confused by your post. Are you objecting to patients being interviewed or do you want NDE's validated by brain-scans or somesuch?

I'm objecting to the anecdotes that the patients recount (about their subjective interpretation of their experiences) being accepted as 'evidence' of NDE when there is no more objective corroboration than the vague recollections of what happened from the stressed-out medical staff who were more concerned with trying to revive the patient than with making accurate recordings of their every little action and utterance.

If the resuscitation procedure was, for example, videotaped, it would allow the video record of the events to be compared with the anecdotes told by the NDE subjects about what they think they saw, and might provide solid evidence -one way or the other- for the first time. Or, at the very least, a solid scientific basis for further study.
 
Mana said:
I thought that the 'big question' behind this programme was whether a type of conscienceness could exist when all neural activity had ceased. The American woman's case was the only one found to support this possibility.
That's just my point: her case didn't support the possibility at all. In the end it was just another anecdote, because while the things that she attested to "seeing and hearing" occurring in the OR while she was 'dead' seemed suggestive, it ultimately fell down because the only verification of the details she claimed to have seen and heard was the memories of individuals on the OR team. Even her "knowledge" of the unlikely configuration of the 'electric toothbrush-like' saw they used during the op is no good as evidence because there are probably dozens of reasonable explanations (more likely ones than NDE by the current standard of knowledge) for her description of it matching the way it actually looked.

That was the most annoying thing about the whole damn program IMO: had they recorded the op while it was underway and it had confirmed what the OR team were saying as matching up with her NDE, we'd have proved (to my satisfaction at least) that she was aware of things and accumulating memories after neural activity had ceased, as it is all we have are people's memories of what they said and did during the op, and that's anecdote.
 
I must agree that the doc was short on proof, but even so there were some scientists who seemed very keen on jumping on it as if it were proof.

I have a question - I have to say I found it very surprising that people could be revived after all neurological activity ceased. What is the difference between this and brain death, or are they one and the same? If not, then there is no link between no brain activity and actual death - which means that the whole premise is based upon "if we can't measure brain activity, then it isn't there" which would be incorrect. If they are, then at what point is one actually dead and unrevivable?

I've never been fully convinced by the recollections of the experiencer - despite being under anaesthetic, I still believe it possible the subconcious could hear and retain conversation in the theatre, and I'm pretty sure she's seen a bonesaw before on TV or wherever - whilst not consciously retaining what it looks like, I'm sure the subconcious would.
 
If you definition of being alive is having measurable brain activity this would mean that creatures that are frozen die then come back to life-
one day I anticipate that humans will be freezable too-
probably using nanotech support-
and brain activity will regularly cease while the human body is stored - perhaps during interstellar flight.
After all, it is not necessary to use every neuron and every synapse and every microtubule in the brain at once to complete every thought-
this doesn't mean that the parts that are not used are dead.
 
Eburacum45 said:
and brain activity will regularly cease while the human body is stored - perhaps during interstellar flight.
Or another series of Blind Date.
 
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