Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryanb9
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.
http://www.skeptiko.com/eeg-expert-o...th-experience/
"“It’s very unlikely that a hypoperfused brain [someone with no blood flow to the brain], with no evidence of electrical activity could generate NDEs. Human studies as well as animal studies have typically shown very little brain perfusion [blood flow] or glucose utilization when the EEG is flat. There are deep brain areas involved in generating memories that might still operate at some very reduced level during cardiac arrest, but of course any subcortically generated activity can’t be brought to consciousness without at least one functioning cerebral hemisphere. So even if there were some way that NDEs were generated during the hypoxic state [while the brain is shut off from oxygen], you would not experience them until reperfusion [blood flow] allowed you to dream them or wake up and talk about them”, Greenfield stated."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryanb9
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.
from the same link as above:
"“For the people who had a near-death experience and out of body experience [their recollection of resuscitation] was really quite accurate and I decided then to ask the control group, the people who’d had a cardiac arrest but had no recollection of anything at all. I asked them if they would reenact their resuscitation scenario and tell me what they thought that we had done to resuscitate them. And what I found is that many of the patients couldn’t even guess as to what we’d done. They had no idea at all. And then some of them did make guesses, but these were based on TV hospital dramas that they’d seen. I found that what they reported was widely inaccurate. So there was a stark contrast really in the very accurate out of body experiences reported and then the guesses that the control group had made.”, Dr. Sartori reported."