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The Day I Died - A BBC documentary on NDE
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
The documentary focuses on medical researchers and a few strong anecdotal stories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zD9jigzzuas#!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zD9jigzzuas#!
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The people who believe who died, went to haven and came back are spewing bull shit because they DIDN'T DIE.
Hey, Mountains, check it out--it says anesthesia is at the forefront of consciousness studies! You're our man on the scene, with a front row seat at the consciousness show. :om: :om: :om: :om: :om: :om: :om:
The one comment I'll make about the doc who was catagloguing NDE's and had a check list of symptoms by which to diagnose NDE's, is that his list only reflected symptoms of positive experiences. Not all NDE's are positive, a small percentage are scary and upsetting, according to Moody's studies. The one thing I didn't understand is, if the woman whose brain they were operating on was dead by all measures, why were they operating on her? It sounded like, in order to save the patient, they had to kill her first, drain her brain of blood, etc., everything was flatlined. They said the operation would take an hour, so clearly they expected her to revive from the dead after an hour. ??! :wtf:
Standing ovation, person!
"Today, where a definition of the moment of death is required, doctors and coroners usually turn to "brain death" or "biological death" to define a person as being clinically dead; people are considered dead when the electrical activity in their brain ceases. It is presumed that an end of electrical activity indicates the end of consciousness. However, suspension of consciousness must be permanent, and not transient, as occurs during certain sleep stages, and especially a coma. In the case of sleep, EEGs can easily tell the difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Problems_of_definition
"
People like this kid:
We gotta believe this kid dead and went to heaven. Yet in realty, he had these vision of heaven under anesthesia. He told his Evangelical father pastor about these experiences. They all assume it was heaven!!
I love the originality of these death stories.
Also people CAN get a NDE while suffering the effects of G-forces.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/spirited-atheist/post/heaven-is-for-real-and-the-immature-american-mind/2011/03/30/AFhr112B_blog.html
Where's that video @Leon posted about the neuroscientist who had an NDE himself? We need to re-run that on this thread.
I've had general anesthesia. I shut my eyes and the next instant I opened them and it was 2 days later.
Under general anesthesia and in deep sleep there is still brain activity even though there is no concious experience. In NDE there doesn't seem to be any brain activity, though like the video talked about they still needed to confirm in a study when the NDE actually occurs. Though in a couple of the anecdotes there was pretty strong indication that the person had concious experience while the brain was inactive.
I just had a weird dream again. I don’t think I left my body though.
NDE is a weird experience which very, very likely occurs in the brain where all the other weird experiences are based.
Under extreme circumstances this brain can do strange things; that’s not very surprising when you think about it.
For claims about an afterlife or about psychic phenomena there’s no real evidence. Just anecdotes which get better and better.
Sorry to say there’s not going to be a very solid research on the subject. It would be unethical to (nearly) kill people in a laboratory and have them doing tests.
The problem, in my opinion, with defaulting to skepticism regarding every strange phenomenon is one can't truly be objective about it. The truth is we don't know, matter-of-factly, what happens. And to rule out any explanation that can't be measured, pinned down, or explained away through material causes is to automatically limit the range of possibilities.
http://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Afterlife-Science-Near-Death-Experiences/dp/0061452556/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259790382&sr=8-1
I’ll bet they can’t though, but I’m curious.
Just think about it. When we don’t really need our eyes to be able to see; what’s the point of having eyes? Why are there blind people?
If I can visit the kids lying on the couch, why would I bother to drive my car across the country?
It is kind of absurd to be human when we are “free spirits” really.
People also get very close to death, but survive, also every day.
People who remember such experience may have an issue with their experience and wish to compare notes with others who have had the experience,
but why do people who have not experienced such things argue over this issue?
What do they seek to "prove" or "disprove"?
What is there to prove?
There is nothing to prove!
People die every day.
It is an observable truth of the natural world!
People also get very close to death, but survive, also every day.
It is an observable truth of the natural world!
What other proof does anyone need of the necessity of
living life like it means something?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v158wh38kk374025/
http://etd.fcla.edu/SF/SFE0000331/Thesis.pdf
Dimethyltryptamine and it's affects on a possible NDE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
Well, apparently you weren't making it up. Some have put forward that hypothesis. I apologize.
The first link only had a basic abstract and unless I spend $35 I can't actually read any of the ideas. It did sound like just an hypothesis and didn't seem to be a research study.
The second link was very informative and had a part that explained the reptilian brain hypothesis. Though overall the paper was a broad look at all explanations for NDE, 4 biological and 2 spiritual.
In fact it seemed to come down on the side of spiritual explanations at least in the sense of veridical information.
"...yet, one facet of the NDE stands out as the crucible of NDE models: veridical evidence. Veridical evidence refers to any of a broad type of phenomena reported by NDErs which lends credibility to their experience. For instance, NDErs might claim to have seen people or objects that they could not have possibly seen from the position and condition of their physical bodies during the NDE. My thesis is that only spiritual models have no difficulty accommodating veridical evidence."
The reptilian brain hypothesis also had no research to back it up and was a reasoned biological explanation.
I'm not sure what DMT has to do with NDE. Are you suggesting the body produces enough in a traumatic event to produce hallucinations? What backs that up? Why don't people taking DMT have life altering changes in attitude?
Also from that second link:
"Yet, one characteristic of the NDE is virtually undisputed by NDE researchers: the life-changing influence they exert on those who have them."
There are some biological explanations that work in part but they also don't have any research backing them up. To cling to them also seems like finding evidence to back up an already drawn conclusion.
http://www.justenergyradio.com/archive-pages/jhawkes.htm
@Dandelion asked on another thread if there are scary or hellish NDE's: (Oprah! and Dr.Morse,NDE researcher)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyECO9=T_Sw
Most of the spiritual explanations come down to veridical evidence.
Most of the biological explanations depend on the unproven assumption that the brain is entirely responsible for qualia.
There's anecdotal evidence for both but nothing concrete. Neither position is a settled one.
My default position is the spiritual one because I've had experiences that I can't explain through physical processes. Both personal and as I said in another of my posts that dropped like a rock, meeting an enlightened master whose presence of peace and love was palpable and not just by me. So I have personal reasons other than NDE to believe in phenomena outside our physical world. Also enough of the other Buddhist teachings have proven their truth to me that I'm willing to put trust in the others (the trust but verify kind). I feel like I'm willing to hold an open position on the matter, I do argue against a closed, settled position on the other side though. Give me some hard evidence that the brain produces qualia and that the personal experience of my life is a delusion and I'll change my mind.
Can people be uncritical of unusual experiences, sure. Buddhism asks us to be critical of our subjective experience and seek to understand it through meditation.
Buddha said the mind and the body support each other.
The Buddha was often asked a set of questions known as the 'undetermined (avyakata) questions' which included 'is the life-principle the same as the mortal body' and 'is the life-principle different from the mortal body?'. The questions are said to be 'undetermined' because the Buddha did not accept any of the views expressed in the questions. He 'set aside' the questions as timewasting and misconstrued. The crucial reason that he saw them as misconstrued was that he saw them as asking about a permanent Self (S. IV. 395). In the case of the above questions: how is a permanent Self/life-principle related to the mortal body? As he did not accept such a Self, he could not accept any view on how it was related to the body! Apart from this, he also seems not to have accepted either view because he saw body and that which enlivened it as neither identical nor totally distinct. That is, while he did not accept a permanent life-principle, he accepted a changing, empirical life-principle. This life-principle was partly dependent on the mortal physical body, but not in such a way that the death of the body destroyed it; this would be to deny rebirth. The life-principle is normally sustained by (and sustains) the body, but it can be sustained without it, too.
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebdha205.htm
So certainly the physical process of dying will have an effect on our mental experience. The people who black out in centrifuge only experience some of the NDE experience. The feeling of disembodiment and sometimes a tunnel. There's no life review and no decision to return, I don't know about a feeling of peace and love.
1. Maria, who was visiting her friends in Seattle for the first time, suffered a cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital. After she was revived, she reported having an OBE and seeing the medical team work on her body. Then, she claimed that she went up through the ceiling onto the roof of the hospital. One of the things she saw during this experience was a single tennis shoe on the ledge of a third-floor window. Maria described the shoe in great detail, mentioning a worn patch over the little toe and one shoelace tucked under the heel. When a nurse, Kimberly Clark, came in to check on her the next day, Maria recounted her experience. Clark was skeptical, but also curious, so when Maria asked her to check if there was such a shoe at that spot, Clark agreed to go. To her amazement, Clark found the shoe on a third-floor window ledge exactly as Maria had described it. Ring summarizes the force of this account:
…what is the probability that a migrant worker [Maria] visiting a large city for the first time, who suffers a heart attack and is rushed to a hospital at night would, while having a cardiac arrest, simply ‘hallucinate’ seeing a tennis shoe – with very specific and unusual features – on a ledge of a floor higher than her physical location in the hospital? (1998, p.66)
Ring concludes, “Not bloody likely!” (ibid, p.66)
2. She described an instance in which a 44-year-old man was brought into the coronary care unit who was cyanotic and comatose. She was one of the nurses on duty, and while attempting to intubate him during the resuscitation process, she found that he was wearing upper dentures. She removed the dentures and put them in the drawer of the medical cart. The patient was moved to another area after stable respiration and heart rhythms had been achieved, though he was still in a coma.
The nurse saw the patient again one week later while he was recovering in the coronary unit. As soon as he saw her he exclaimed that she was the nurse who knew where his teeth were. He then proceeded to explain that he had seen his resuscitation from out of his body. He said that he had seen her remove the dentures, and he accurately described, in detail, the medical cart into which she put the dentures, even noting that she had put them in the top drawer. Additionally, he gave a detailed account of the room in which he was resuscitated and the people present. The nurse was very impressed with this account because of its veracity, and because of the fact that he entered the hospital in a coma and left the resuscitation room while still comatose.
3. This is the case of Pam Reynolds (pseudonym), a person who underwent a radical surgical procedure to remove an aneurysm from her brain. Ms. Reynold’s physical state during her operation is described as follows: At the time the aneurysm was removed, Ms. Reynold’s core body temperature was 60 degrees Fahrenheit, her heart was stopped, and electroencephalogram (EEG) showed no brain wave activity, there was no brain stem (including auditory) response, and all blood had been drained from her brain. (p.517)
After the procedure, Ms. Reynolds reported a NDE. She experienced common elements such as an OBE, a tunnel, a light, and seeing several deceased loved ones who sent her back to her body. What is truly incredible is that during her OBE, Ms. Reynolds claimed to be able to observe the surgery from outside her body. She was able to accurately describe the unusual bone saw used during the procedure and she recounted some remarks made by the surgeon. The veracity of both the remarks and the description of the bone saw were later confirmed by the physicians.
The second and third were presented in the OP video and of course are only anecdotal but still unexplained.
In this way, Wettach attempts to account for NDE phenomenon using only biological factors. He writes of his own theory: “This paper suggests that physiological explanations for NDEs are possible, particularly if creative, speculative, scientific fantasy is also allowed” (p.88).
So sure, its a possibility and allowed but doesn't there need to be actual tested evidence too?
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence02.html
NDE's may not be proof that consciousness is leaving the body, and aren't proof that there's a heaven with a Divine Light, but they point scientists toward phenomena that need to be researched.