I have heard quite a bit of talk on this subject by the "believers" and I thought this might be a good read for them. I had no idea such experiences could be replicated by drugs.


Near death experiences (NDEs) have been a favorite topic for the paranormal crowd for some time. If one could prove that consciousness survives the physical death of the body that would go a long way to opening the door to a wide range of paranormal claims. NDEs often occur in the medical setting, and this is partly why a team of doctors from the UK and USA are planning a rigorous study of NDEs.

That NDEs occur is not controversial – many people report remembering experiences around the time of cardiac arrest from which they were revived. Typical experiences include a sense of floating outside of one’s body, even looking down upon oneself and the events going on. Some people report a bright light, and others report “passing over” and being greeted by deceased loved-ones. The experience is often peaceful or euphoric, which contrasts to the way people feel when they eventually wake up. Surviving a cardiac arrest takes its toll and is not a pleasant experience.

The question is not whether or not people have such experiences – the question is how to interpret them. Just as even the most rigorous skeptic does not question that people see UFOs, but rather what the UFOs likely are.

The burden of proof for anyone claiming that NDEs are evidence for the survival of the self beyond the physical function of the brain is to rule out other more prosaic explanations. This burden has not been met.

Neuroscientists are piecing together plausible explanations for each of the components of the NDE. The sensation of floating outside one’s body can be reliably induced by suppressing that part of the brain that makes us feel as if we possess our bodies. The experience is identical to that reported by those who have had an NDE. This experience can be replicated by drugs or magnetic stimulation. There are even reports (I have had one such patient) of people who have a typical NDE experience during seizures. The bright light can be explained as a function of hypoxia (relative lack of oxygen) either to the retina or the visual cortex. Any everything else is simply the culturally appropriate hallucinations of a hypoxic brain.

Critics of such explanation try to argue that during the experience the brain is not active, therefore the brain cannot be the source of the experiences. There are two problems with this argument. First, it has not been established that the brain is not sufficiently active to generate experiences. In all cases people survived the experience (by definition) to report what they remember. That means the brain did not go entirely without oxygen for very long or otherwise it would have been catastrophically damaged. During cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) the cardiac output is about 20-25% normal – enough to delay damage to tissues. So the brain is getting some oxygen. Not enough to be conscious, but enough to have some function – perhaps generate a dream-like hallucination or out-of-body experience.

Second, the argument assumes without justification that the memories reported by those who survive CPR and have an NDE were formed during the CPR or when they were unconscious. It is more likely that some or all of those memories formed when the person was waking up adn their sense of time is as distorted as all their brain function. Unlike in the movies, people do not wake up fully conscious and lucid after having their heart restarted. After minutes of CPR the brain has taken a hit due to the hypoxia. People typically wake from this event slowly – taking hours or even days, depending on the duration and quality of the CPR. They will necessarily pass through a phase where they are what is called encephalopathic (their brain is functioning but not well), which is a type of delirium. It is common to have bizarre thoughts and perceptions, hallucination, and illusions during this period.

When patients then fully wake up to report their experiences, all they have is their memories, which includes the memories of the transition period from unconscious, through a delirious period, and to fully conscious. They have no way of knowing when those memories formed.

The only way to definitively distinguish between memories formed during CPR and those formed during the period of encephalopathy is for the memories to contain specific details that could only have been obtained during the CPR. This claim is often made, but either there is a lack of compelling documentation, or the details are too vague to be definitive. People describing a typical CPR experience, for example, is not specific. Sometimes people after a NDE will claim to recognize the nurse or doctor who worked on them, but they may just be attaching those memories to people they encountered before or after the experience.

This brings us to the proposed study. What Dr. Sam Parnia, the head of the study, wants to do is to place a sign with specific information on it on top of shelving so that it can only be viewed from the ceiling. These will be placed in intensive care units and emergency departments. Patients who experience cardiac arrest and survive will be systematically interviewed at the participating hospitals and asked if they had any NDE and also be asked if they were able to identify the signs on top of the shelves. Assuming no cheating goes on, the only way such patients could have obtained the information would be if there experience of floating above their bodies was an actual experience interacting with the real physical world.

The study is likely to take 2-3 years so we won’t have results for a while.

The purpose of the study explicitly recognizes that the claim that NDEs are a non-physical experience of consciousness requires this type of evidence to distinguish it from a mere hallucination of a hypoxic or encephalopathic brain. I predict that the study will be negative, and that proponents of NDEs as a spiritual experience will be unmoved by this evidence.
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=381


One more nail on the jebus coffin?

We can't even define or pinpoint exactly what the self is. How can proof of something's survival be conclusive when it can't be accurately described?

OP: "the brain is capable of many states and can even be manipulated by Rx"

Splendour: "Yes but why is it limited to us and our manipulations?"

See Don Piper. Pronounced dead by 4 teams of paramedics and EMTs and lying dead under a tarp for close to an hour:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Piper

More about Don: http://www.donpiperministries.com/about_don_piper.asp

If I ever am in a horrible accident and survive I am going to claim that I met the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Oh so your solution to examining someone else's experience objectively is to perpetuate a fraud yourself as an act of protest when life deals you a bad beat. WT???

Shamans and mystics from all cultures and eras have used drugs as a way of inducing altered states of consciousness and perceiving spiritual realities. You might find it interesting to know that electromagnetic fields interacting with the brain can induce NDE-like experiences, and some scientists have built machines to do just that. Works just the same as drugs do.

Even more fascinating is the fact that if you were to inject just the right amount of dimethyltriptamine into your arm you would be very likely to endure a pretty classic alien abduction, an experience which again, can also be induced by tampering with the electromagnetic fields acting on the brain, but again still, can also happen completely out of the blue while you're driving home from a friend's or lying in bed at night.

Two things: firstly, you have erroneously failed to make a distinction between OBEs and NDEs, that is out-of-body-experiences and near-death-experiences. Although loosely overlapping they are different phenomena. Secondly, you are assuming an awful lot by stating that if these experiences were proved to be purely the product of the brain, they would no longer be valid spiritual experiences.

I will come straight out and say it as some people might be confused and wonder what I'm getting at: the fact that we use our brain to experience these phenomena does not negate their validity as transcendental experiences. We may under certain circumstances be using our brain to experience realities equally real but largely distinct from our day-to-day one; realities that we cannot reach out and touch with our physical hands or look upon with our physical eyes, but rather experience directly with our consciousness.

It's fair enough to be intrigued by these phenomena and then write them off the instant they can be shown to be produced by the human brain, but you're probably throwing the baby out with the bathwater and missing out on a much more important point.



H

My parents gave me his book for Christmas. It is complete and utter nonsense.

Except he had 34 operations. Its apparently not about the money.

Huh?

I'm not denying that he almost died. His story about going up to heaven (which is described like something you'd hear in Sunday School) is nonsense.

I would agree that I would expect that if someone actually did go to heaven we would expect their description to be almost nothing like what mainstream currently believes it to be, with the exception of a few core beliefs.

FWIW there are many Christians who reject his story simply because they say it contradicts the Bible.

I don't know his story nor do I know of the objections. If you can remember them I would love to hear.

It doesn't surprise me that christians do this though. IMO the bible is fairly vague on the description of heaven. If he were to say something like "everyone was married and still procreated" then i would agree. But other than that I cannot think of any real description that the bible gives that could be contradicted.

The problem imo, is that many descriptions of things like heaven and hell and the such came out of various points in history, mostly 1100AD and on. Most people don't understand that so much was not believed by the earliest fathers and don't really have much of a biblical grounding.

Very original.... good job mate




NDE's.... I'm not real sure where I stand on those because I do believe that it's happened but not sure how many copy cats have followed.

From a brain stand point.... you have to look at this as the CPU of the human... during something like surgery, the brain is polluted with chemicals and each persons brain reacts differently than another persons. Patient A gets 3 rounds of morphine followed by Dilaudid and goes off to lala land.....wakes up via Narcan and remembers nothing.
Patient B get's the same and claims they heard the surgeons, the nurses, saw mountains... they were sure they were flying and the talked to Jesus.
For 3 minutes on each patient...their BP crashed and they stoped breathing....basically died for a few minutes.
Who do you believe?
I believe both.

I guess the point that I'm trying to get to is this: A person in this state of drug induced half conscious roller coaster.... may see God.
Did he actually see God or did he drug induced dream it? Really doesn't matter in his world... to him... HE SAW GOD.
There's no way to prove otherwise... he is certain he saw God.... ergo... he DID see God. Perception is reality at times.

It's this reason that I don't completely discount rednecks who claim to have been taken by UFO's.

Experience is not truth.

You have only asserted that there are experiences. In order for these to hold value as supporting an explanation such as your given, they must be proven to be truthfull experiences. An experiment such as Ryan posted the outline of, attest in a way to the truth of the experience. This then supports an explanation along the lines of out of body perception/out of body consciousness (presuming its repeatable and cheating does not occur). The description of the experience does not do this by itself.

Counterexamples, supporting a physicalist 'brain-caused experience' explanation, are seen in surgery for epilepsy. Here, when stimulating certain parts of the brain (in order to identify those parts they should avoid when excising), similar experiences can be started and maintained, stopping when the stimulation of this part of the brain stops.
Temporal lobe epileptics are famous for experiencing these types of things. Dostojevsky is an example.

There is then evidence supporting a brain-related explanation (involving altered function of certain brain areas) and nothing as yet supporting an explanation using out of body perception and consciousness.

I don't think scientists believe these NDEs are just drug induced hallucinations. There is something physical going on. As the brain starts to shut down certain things happen in the body. This makes sense and explains why so many NDEs report very similar experiences (that's not to say some of them might not just be drug induced hallucinations, but those people likely weren't really having an NDE).

Science has not yet fully cracked the NDE, but as has been discussed above, re: out of body experiences, science is coming a lot closer. At this stage there just isn't any good reason to attribute NDEs to extra-body sources. What's going on isn't weird enough to not fully expect it to be explained by science at some point.

You are muddling NDEs and OBEs. NDEs do not have to include OBEs.

Also, you are writing off the staggering corelation between the NDE as experienced by a person near death, and the NDE as experienced by a drug user. They are experiencing essentially the same thing, not one a false representation of the other. The part of our brain that creates our reality is apparently being stimulated in similar ways by both. There is "nothing physical going on", per se, other than what is happening to the person's consciousness during such an experience.

I would be interested to know if anyone has ever read DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Rick Strassman MD, or any similar book, and what their thoughts are about it.

If you're interested in any real way in things of this nature, you need to know about the stuff that book deals with.




H

I fail to see how your argument leads to non-physicalism. Unless you are somehow arguing that drugs dont do their work through disrupting/altering brain function.

I was just using OBE as an example. Other things science is figuring out is the tunnel with the light at the end of it, etc.

On reflection, I probably overstated things related to the drugsI have no doubt it affects what's going on. All of these things are chemical. What I was trying to point out that there are things that are common to many NDE's which I suspect are common because the body goes through predictable changes as the brain shuts down.

Tao1, are you familiar with any of the type of material presented in the book I mentioned? Your answer will determine the nature of mine, as such.

Just out of interest.



H

The long dark tunnel is not an objective "thing" that science will ever be able to study or to "crack" as you put it. The long dark tunnel is a "reality" which we perceive as a result of certain processes, including brain activity, which themselves may be studied by science.

As an example, we may be able to use scientific processes to isolate and study the part of the brain that we dream with, but science cannot and will never be able to tackle the area of what our dreams mean, and how they work. We must rely on less than scientific methods to study that, being that we are dealing with something that is non-objective, non-quantifiable, does not exist in external material reality etc.



H

No. And the subtitle makes it unlikely for me to read it. I respond badly to such an appeal to authority. From experience, these sorts of appeals do not do well with truthfullness.

If you have studies from respected groups on this subject I can read them (having acces to medical literature), and will do so with interest and a decent capability of understanding wth its on about.

Off the top of my head I'm not aware of any studies that might fit your bill. The guy who wrote this book apparently had to negotiate a mountain of red-tape and legal issues to clear the risque approach to his experiments: namely injecting willing subjects with varying doses of a highly psycho-active and relatively obscure drug and recording the results. Not only that, but we are dealing with a very fringe subject, what with mystical experiences and NDEs etc. which is not only pretty trippy and eyebrow-raising but also doesn't present any obvious benefit to the medical community, so I wouldn't imagine there is a whole host of works out there to choose from.

The book itself can be read purely to gain an insight into the sorts of experiences the people have under the influence of this drug, and the wider implications (whatever you may perceive them to be); the conclusions reached by the author can be ignored/discarded at your leisure, of course.



H

after clicking this http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-R...ref=pd_sim_b_2 i found this:

http://www.amazon.com/Food-Gods-Orig.../ref=pd_cp_b_1

The author of this book has some rather revolutionary ideas about the evolution wrt history of hallucinogenic drug use among humans.
Apperantly at some point in history some humans decided to start eating hallucinogenic plants found in nature and outcompeted those who didnt.
He then more or less draws the conclusion that since we humans have an innate aptitude for altering our mind in todays society we substitute that need with feeble substitutes such as alcohol,tobacco,sugar,TV, synthetic drugs etc. The solution he claims is to legalize all drugs - an urgent necessity, as he claims. Fascinating

IMO it is at least a plausible theory
and personally i am already leaning strongly towards a pro legalization of all drugs viewpoint.

Not sure I follow you. I've listened to neurologists explain what they thought was going on re: the long dark tunnel. It's not metaphysical, its a fairly predictable experience based on what was going on in the body (I'd have to look it up to try and remember what the explanation was).

The point was the tunnel wasn't a "dream" it was something experienced as a result of other things shutting down.

Dream interpretation is another thing, but for that you need psychologists!

there is no doubt that modern society has fallen way out of sync with a lot of the deeper needs of the human condition, although I'm not sure legalising all drugs is the solution to modern man's woes. sounds interesting tho...



H