I saw a debate in which a proponent of materialism claimed that the brain kind of manufactures these experiences afterwards, because it doesn't "like" empty spaces in the memory. For anyone who has been under anesthesia, this theory doesn't seem to hold up. When waking up, it simply seems like no time has passed, so the brain doesn't need to "fill in" anything.
And in any case it is a speculative claim. Also, it seems rather improbable that the brain manufactured a story that matches the actual events to the degree described in the study (although that is probably debatable).
If you add the idea that genuine ESP exists and the other idea that living brains can use ESP especially in certain dissociative states (Radin, Braude, etc) THEN one can say that, in this case, the brain used ESP to construct its imagery - either (a) in real time or (b) after the fact as a ESP mixed with hallucinatory imagery to fill in the gaps. Finally, recent deep brain data have shown that there actually IS a BURST in relevant electrical activity 30 seconds after onset of cardiac arrest in some humans and animals. Please ask me for references (can’t add now, but hoping to edit later w refs) I think one can STILL make a case for the survivalist interpretation being more plausible.
@@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns So sceptics would have to make "concessions" that involve parapsychology. That's funny. So this "burst" of electrical activity, short lived I assume, must be different than the activity that people under general anesthesia have, a condition that apparently doesn't create any vivid memories.
@@gustav4539 On end of life surges: a) Borjigin et al (2013) Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 110, issue 35, pp 14432-14437. (b) Chawla, L. Seneff, MG (2013) End-of-life electrical surges. Proc Natl Acad Sci, vol 110issue 44, p 4123. (c) Borjigin et al. (2013) Reply to Chawla and Seneff: Near-death electrical brain activity in humans and animals requires additional studies. Proc Natl Acad Sci vol 110, issue 44), p 4124. (d) Borjigin et al (2013) Reply to Greyson et al.: Experimental evidence lays a foundation for a rational understanding of near-death experiences. Proc Natl Acad Sci, vol 110, issue 47, p 4406. (e) Chawla et al (2017). Characterization of end-of-life electroencephalographic surges in critically ill patients. Death Studies, vol 41, issue 6, pp 385-392.
I fell in a coma after a car accident in 2005. The right hemisphere of my brain got destroyed and the left hemisphere was badly damaged. The doc told my dad I was a goner. I was comatose for 21 days. During this time, I lived my best life ever. My consciousness was on overdrive. I envisioned 11 months of my best life before waking up a quadriplegic. But having envisioned something when it was not possible according to Science gave me the courage to recover completely, something no doctor has been able to explain to this date.
Darryl, that's far beyond amazing. I don't know if you're so inclined,but IANDS seems to really be up your alley. I'd love to hear the details of your story.🕯️
@@fretnesbutke3233 here it goes, Start of my 2nd year of university. The first class bash just got done and I was heading home with friends. It was late so I was asleep in the back seat. Turns out the driver was drunk. He makes a wrong turn into a ditch at over 100 km/h. The car proceeds to flip over 3 times. Being asleep, I fly forward, hit my head on the roof of the car and fall comatose immediately. I still don't remember any of the accident. What I know is from friends who were in the accident too.
If you mentioned this point and I missed it, apologies. But arguably the most important element about the case of Mr A in the Aware study, is that he somehow heard the automated command to "shock the patient". This is actually impossible, as in order for the machine to issue that instruction, it has had to go through the process of analysing the patient's heart rhythm, in this case ventricular fibrillation which is heart stoppage, meaning zero blood flow into the brain. Without blood flow into the brain, consciousness is lost immediately and the global electrical activity of the brain (and brain stem) disappears completely within 10 to 20 seconds. The machine can't make a mistake and you can't hear and remember anything without a functioning brain, so it is indeed impossible that Mr A heard this instruction (and he actually heard it twice which is even more incredible). His other observations from a position across/up in the corner of the room, were also remarkable, as his bodily vision (the potential to see with his physical eyes) was blindsighted by a raised curtain at his upper chest level which had been placed there to prevent him from seeing the registrar inserting the catheter into his groin (cardiac catherterisation). So he should not have been able to see the bald 'chunky fella' with a shaved head and a blue scrub hat at all, let alone from the back of him (he reported seeing the registrar's back, not his face). This man very likely came from an ethnic minority background (in the UK) and was not religious and his family assumed it was the effects of the drugs etc (he wasn't given any drugs except something to neutralise the feeling in his groin). So, altogether an exceptional case but there are hundreds of these now. Materialist sceptics have done everything they can to either ignore them, or write them off as the product of some narrow functioning of the brain or drugs or wishful psychology, but there's simply far too many cases now.
Thanks for the additional information on the case - I mainly know the case from what is described in the paper, so interesting to hear the extra details! Yes, it is indeed an exceptional case - you are right, there are many cases like it - what makes this one particularly interesting is that it is a part of a prospective study and is published in a peer reviewed academic journal (which is a recognition of the methodology used, despite the (in the academic world) rather controversial outcome). And you are right, for a materialist sceptic, it is an unwelcome case - as you note, it should be impossible to hear and see anything (and remember it afterwards) when the brain is shut down, according to that position. Interesting point that the auditory input is an extra supporting factor since the machine could only have issued the instruction after having analyzed the heart rhythm. Thanks!
AWARE 2 data came out a few months back. It showed that brain activity is actually heightened up to one hour after cardiac arrest when previously it was thought that there were no brain waves during a cardiac arrest . Beta and gamma waves actually were found to spike during cardiac arrest. Aware 2 was the first study to measure brain waves of those experiencing cardiac arrest as previously brain waves were only measured in animals experiencing cardiac arrests. This may not be good news for those that believe ndes are real experiences of an afterlife.
@@briansmith2836 Brainwaves do not automaticaly equal NDE. You have brainwaves now, are you having a near death experience ? There is nothing at all surprising about brainwaves eventually apearing in patients they are trying to bring back to life. You are misunderstanding Parnia's words but don't worry, most people do.
@@tim59ism no, before this experiment it was thought during cardiac arrest there was no brain activity but the exact opposite is the case. I don't think you understand what the means.
@@tim59ism large spikes in brainwaves are found near death. They are much greater than brainwaves found in normal brain states. These results look bad for Parnia as he was convinced consciousness survives death. Can't wait to year how Parnia and people like you spin these results.
Pam Reynolds had brain surgery during which her awareness left her body and went to the roof of the hospital where she saw a red shoe. Later they found the red shoe on the roof. She had left her body during the surgery. She “remembered” details that she could not have known unless she really was outside her body watching.
Yes, Pam Reynolds is another very interesting example - these are both examples of (some kind of) verified experience occuring at a time where brain activity was monitored to be absent (the only two examples on that I know of), which makes them extraordinarily intersting.
Physicalists always seem to be just fishing around for explanations to justify their preconceived notions. It is better to just assume that we cannot, and will not ever truly understand the nature of reality. The nature of reality is not only stranger than we imagine, but it is almost certainly stranger than we CAN imagine.
My dilemma is where/how do memories get stored. Ever thought about that. You remember Films, Video's, smell, touches, sounds etc. We say they are stored in the brain. But then I ask myself how, we do not have a Chip so do we store them in suger molecules, fat molecules, proteins or any other substance available in the brain cells. This means we should be able to extract them from the brain when he or she dies! This leaves me with the thesis that our soul is in the "cloud" (with that our memories on some kind of external harddrive) and our brain is the antenna/interface between our body and this external drive! This would support the believe that awareness or a soul is forever and not depending on a body
Think about 100000 penguins coming back to land after many weeks at sea. A mass of 100000 penguins, most with chicks, has been waiting. 200000 birds vocalizing at once. Somehow the couples find each other. This happens every year in Antarctica. Recognition. Re. Cognition.
Physicalism and materialism are not necessarily the same thing. According to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory of the physicist Roger Penrose and Professor Stuart Hameroff, consciousness is quantum information in the brain, and according to Hameroff, it may not be destroyed when the brain dies, and may persist as a "soul". According to Orch OR, consciousness is physical but not material. That is, it can be described in terms of physical laws but it is not "made of matter".
Interesting concept :) Yes, the terms do have slightly different meaning. Traditionally 'materialism' probably pointed towards matter, as you mention, but I think that the modern notion of materialism is more oriented towards 'the physical' in a more general sense (the idea of 'matter' is largely abandoned in modern physics, I think). 'Materialism' is often used to describe the metaphysical position that nothing but 'the physical' (in a broad sense) exists independently, while 'physicalism' is a slighlty narrower position, accoridng to which everything is reducible to the physical (i.e., can be described in terms of physical laws (at least in principle), as you mention)
W/ all due respect to Sir Roger and Stuart Hameroff, the problem w/ Orch OR is that it's still depending on the premise that consciousness could ever be produced by decidedly unconscious physical matter. To the best of our knowledge, not a single human in all of history has ever demonstrated and/or observed that this is even possible in the first place.
@@ryanashfyre464 I think Penrose and Hameroff are going beyond matter. There is a broader definition of "physical" that includes matter but is not synonymous with it. Space and time are physical but they are not matter. In fact Hameroff has described consciousness as "fluctuations in space-time geometry".
@@johnnyb8825 Insofar as Penrose and Hameroff are still limiting themselves to mere space-time, they're going to end up confused. There's nothing there with which to create conscious experience. That said, and w/ all due respect to Sir Roger, I do believe he's on the right path when he says that consciousness isn't computational. That's a good first step, but he needs to step outside space-time itself.
@@ryanashfyre464 I think they're saying that these fluctuations in space-time _are_ what consciousness is, i.e. they don't "produce" consciousness but _are_ consciousness, albeit in a very basic and primitive form. Hameroff compared it to the random notes of an orchestra tuning their instruments before a concert. When these random fluctuations become _orchestrated_ you get full-blown consciousness of the type that most people think of when you say the word "consciousness". Hameroff is suggesting that after the death of the brain and body, this orchestrated consciousness might remain orchestrated through quantum entanglement, hence survival of the "soul" after death.
The shelf idea as an experiment for validity is great. Even though lots of other people have verified experiencers have seen but maybe if it was a science experiment it would shut materialists up
Yes, objective experimential data would provide a strong argument. It is hard to get, though - these kind of experiences are difficult to examine in controlled scientific experiments. The AWARE study continued, though. A research paper on the second batch of results is about to be published, I think.
I was looking for documented cases where the person, for example dies of a heart attack during surgery and comes out of their body and witnesses things, people's conversations in other parts of the hospital and other things that can be verified and were verified by others. I've talked to two people I knew and they described things that happened while they were technically dead they could not possibly have known. Like conversations and exactly what people were saying at the time that person was on the operating table, dead or near death. It's not possible to hear conversations of people in other parts of the hospital.
Yes, such cases are very interesting indeed and does point towards plausibility of the view that there is actually something about the notion of a continued existence after physical death. Research have been done for several decades, but is is hard to obtain data under controlled scientific conditions (although modern studies such as the AWARE study do seem able to provide such data).
@@thenatureofreality2100 You don't need controlled scientific conditions, there are far too many real life experiences that are already documented. People seeing things that actually happened and hearing people say things that actually happened that are impossible in our existence.
@@robertbrown7470 LOL of course you need controlled scientific conditions, or you simply accept anything anybody says? That's why "hearsay" is not allowed in a court of law, because it can't be verified, just like these cases.
Science has a way to go before explaining consciousness. I am interested in why only a small portion of flatline survivors have any recollection of out of body consciousness, the majority don't remember anything.
Near death experiences don't necessarily defy physicalism. If consciousness can survive death then it could simply mean that we have physics all wrong. Perhaps time is just an illusion, and our true perspective ( as actually described in many NDEs ) is actually a timeless one. From the vantage point of a timeless being there is no before or after death...just an eternal 'now'. In fact I could entirely envisage a timeless entity still using the brain long 'after' death and the dissolution of the body.
Yes, you are right that it depends on what one means by 'physicalism'. I simply use the term in the fairly straightforward way that everything is reducible to space-time objects, events, etc., with the overall framework being roughly contemporary physics and neuroscience. But indeed, if physics turn out to be entirely different from what we think, it is possible that the physical is fundamental after all, even if conscious experience continues after death. Interesting thought :)
You're right about NDEs not necessarily defying physicalism, but I'd submit that other advances in physics make a very strong case to do so. For example, the work of Nima-Arkani Hamed at Princeton in discovering structures existing outside of conventional space-time ("Spacetime is Doomed: ruclips.net/video/qTx98PUW6lE/видео.html&ab_channel=PSWScience) seems very significant. If true, then this development tells us something quite extraordinary: that physical objects, like neurons in our brains and even our brains themselves, don't actually posses any real causal powers in and of themselves. It ceases to be a question of whether NDEs are caused by neural activity in our brain and more an outright impossibility. After all, if physical objects don't have independent existence (as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics seems to say), then it simply can't be the case that they could cause anything, NDE or otherwise. And yet it remains that NDEs, whatever your opinion of them, do in fact happen to people. So if we take away the brain as a potential culprit, what do we look at next?
@@ryanashfyre464 Spacetime has always been doomed, because our experience of space and time are every bit as much qualia as the blue of the sky or the smell of a rose. It is ironic that the very science that these days decries any hint of naive realism ( the belief that the world literally exists as experienced ) actually depends on naive realism to convey a literal space and time existing 'out there'. This is the ultimate conundrum for science. Kant noticed this dilemma 250 years ago...and these days Donald Hoffman points out the dilemma too. The more scientists argue that conscious experience is an illusion.....the more they remove any handle on 'the real world'. Science has become like a man sitting on a branch while sawing it off the tree.
@@peterstanbury3833 I don't disagree w/ you, although I'd add that the idea that consciousness is an illusion is a self-refuting contradiction. As Bernardo Kastrup, John Vervaeke & others have pointed out - an illusion *is* a conscious experience, so to say that consciousness itself is an illusion is, of course, to presuppose the consciousness that would have to exist in order to be under said illusion. In fairness, others like Dan Dennett may wish to retort that what they *really* mean is that consciousness isn't what it appears to be - but that doesn't solve the problem. The issue isn't our theoretical grasp of what consciousness *is* (which I don't believe science should be in the business of doing anyway), but rather that we have experience at all. Insofar as that holds true (and it does), the problem's still there. That aside, w/ respect to space-time's doom - as unconvincing as it's always been (which you're correct about), it still makes it easier for the likes of Hoffman, Kastrup & others to be able to point to things like Nima-Arkani Hamed's work and disproving local realism to make their case. It may take a while, but we're getting there & that's a very good thing both for ourselves and for science.
@@ryanashfyre464 Science is coming to a dilemma that Kant pointed out several centuries ago. The dilemma being that science negates naive realism, and yet science itself has to speak in naive realism terms to convey any 'out there'. Dennett often faces this issue. He tries to wiggle out of consciousness being 'an illusion' by arguing that it is simply ' not what it appears to be'.....but the problem is that 'what it appears to be' is precisely what we are trying to define in the first place and if we don't know what that is then we cannot logically say it is not that. Every construct that consciousness might appear to be is itself a product of consciousness. Kant pointed this out 250 years ago....and science is only just getting round to facing the conundrum.
If the brain "patches" together lost event after the fact, viz during the waking up phase, why does this not happen every morning in order to explain where we have been during the night? And, this doesn't explain how the brain is able to "patch" events in that it could not have possibly witnessed during flat lined activity!
Thank you for doing this video -- such an important subject. Just a heads up that a better mic / audio setup would help you out. Good information people should hear. Audio quality is the easiest way to improve vids. Also your lighting is too hot and kinda casting a shadow. Get something a little warmer in color and maybe a simple key light. Excellent otherwise. Only helping people that are sharing good info...best!
You are referring to psychology professor John Martin from California. He is an NDE sceptic basically and what you've written there is probably one of his "explanations" for a particular veridical case.
Don't know that particular case. Principally, fraud is a possibility. I don't think it is very likely, though - the methodology of the studies is very strict (otherwise such a controversial study wouldn't be accepted for publishing in a peer reviewed journal).
@@thenatureofreality2100 This is the case which has not been debunked. A woman was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital, but the medical team restored her heartbeat. She later awoke from her coma claiming to have floated over her body while the staff revived her. Nurse Norma Bowe had heard it many times before, dismissing such stories as dreams, brain malfunctions, or drug reactions. This patient, though, had a habit of memorizing numbers because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, and she told Norma the 12-digit serial number she saw atop the respirator during her out-of-body experience. Norma indulged her, writing it down. The machine was seven feet high, so it required a maintenance guy and a ladder to check it out. Yes, there was a number up there, he said. Can you read it off to us? Sure, 12 digits-the exact number the patient had given to Norma.
There are many liberties taken with these assertions. V-Fib id NOT equivalent to cardiac arrest and NO, brain wave activity most certainly does not cease immediately upon arrest. Likewise total unawareness is not necessarily absolute. The death process is not like turning off a light and many phenomena described might simply be physiologically normal and cannot be simply attributed to confirming life after death and the continuance in some other state. So far there is yet any substantial proof that anything here is going on other than those processes that accompany the cessation of life and then oblivion.
You could be right maybe what we call hallucinations are more varied in scope. And that NDE are the same. I do wounder if these OBE experiences are part fabricated memories and part dreams.
That is as likely the case. In those initial stages of death, the body is responding and cell death most certain in not immediate. Likewise the brain will be responding is a manner that ease the process, even make it quasi-enjoyable, or at least not so traumatic.@@restorationofidentity
This doesn’t explain all the accounts of nde’s that experiences during the nde that can be verified, even from outside the room the body was in, that the person had absolutely no way of knowing. Is every single one of these claimed experiences a hoax? Only a single one needs to be real to negate the idea that consciousness originates from the brain and is dependent on it completely.
Frankly, the vast majority can be attributed to the body's processes and the manufactured memory. Very, Very few if any of these NDE accounts can be validated as actual. If anything they are the physiological process of death itself and the endorphin rush to ease those final moments. Likewise, time and time again, anecdote is not proof, and just as eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable in court, memory too is fickle and largely fabrication.@@CampingforCool41
Yes, I have recently lost my grandmother. I wd like to know is there any life or anything else after death? Will I meet with her again? Is astral projection true', And many more questions I have If u patiently help me to get out this answer it will be helpful for me. Thanks in advance. Love from India ❤
From a physical perspective, could it be that after clinical death, though MEASURABLE brain activity ceases, but an undetectable miniscule level activity might be firing in the brain cells still in process of decaying and may completely cease once brain cells turn to a mush? Meaning thoughts, images, feelings might just be due to the residual dying brain cells activity which is undetectable on eeg but ceases in an hour or so?
@@farhannaseer9245 Yes, it is possible (at least in principle) - technically, it is not brain activity itself that is measured, but the oxygen flow to the brain, iirc. The (probably well-documented) assumption is that cells can't work properly without oxygen. The authors briefly touch upon the possibility that it is decaying brain cells that are causing hallucinations. A couple of things go against that hypotheses: usually such hallucinations are not vivid like the perception reported in the paper, but on the contrary 'tunnel-like', iirc. Also, it would be quite a coincidence that the hallucinations matched actual events (unless a product of sense input in some way - I don't remember if it is mentioned whether the patient had closed eyes or not, but I assume that he probably had). But it might be possible, even though there apparently is no empirical support for such unmeasurable activity.
The problem w/ that idea is that a key trend in NDEs is that people routinely describe the experience as a number of things: - A sensation of it being *more real* than this world - Existing in a world of timelessness (NDErs generally don't know how to explain knowing this so much as just being aware of it) - Clear, precise recollection of the event even decades after it occurred (a key difference w/ a hallucination where people tend to forget very quickly) - Acquiring information that they couldn't possibly have had any means of knowing prior to the NDE (Dr. Bruce Greyson has spent decades researching such cases) There's more of course, but this kind of experience just isn't compatible w/ the last gasps of a dying brain.
No, this is absurd, any residual activity in the brain cells would first generate lower lying reflexes: gag reflex, pupil reflex etc. Cardiac Arrest is characterised by absence of those reflexes (otherwise it means there is no full cardiac arrest and heart still able to generate some blood pressure and flow of oxygen to the brain), meaning all deeper, lower functions are disabled and cut out - any thoughts or thinking producing process is by definition higher function that requires those reflexes to be “turned on” if we accept our self - conciseness is produced only by brain, so it cannot happen. Period. This is the paradox of NDE - clear and structural mental process (that is not hallucinations) in absolute absence of more fundamental neurological functions. This directly indicates that mental process is somehow independent from brain cells. This is not proven but clearly indicative of a such possibility.
The naturalist view of consciousness and thought, is that it is emergent from complexity of the brain. So, a minimal brain activity shouldn't be expected to produce complex thoughts, much less thoughts that are considered to be "more real". Even still, accuracy is what makes the an account believable.
@ about 10:57 " No brain activity." What you should say is No *MEASURABLE* brain activity based on current levels of instrument sensitivity. Isn't it possible there is yet some activity which cannot as of now be measured ??? Just asking. Your assumption is medical science has achieved the optimal level of sophistication and technical knowledge regarding the subject of brain activity near death. Clearly it has not.
Yes, you are right, that is possible. :) Indeed, it seems that there might be some kind of brain activity quite a long time after the heart has stopped beating, according to the latest AWARE 2 study results - they will probably be published fairly soon, so will be interesting to read.
I fell in a coma after a car accident in 2005. The right hemisphere of my brain got destroyed and the left hemisphere was badly damaged. The doc told my dad I was a goner. I was comatose for 21 days. During this time, I lived my best life ever. My consciousness was on overdrive. I envisioned 11 months of my best life before waking up a quadriplegic. But having envisioned something when it was not possible according to Science gave me the courage to recover completely, something no doctor has been able to explain to this date.
quaz imode (love the name) You can't rewrite/change neuroscientific principles just to preserve a belief. The brain doesn't work like that, it has to be fully powered up with oxygenated blood and glucose (apparently)
According to the descriptions of the NDE accounts, the NDE experiences are extraordinary meaningful, rich and vivid. How is that possible that such weak brain activity below the ECG detectability threshold could produce such vivid and rich conscious experiences? Another fact to consider: the amount of recorded NDE experiences are enormous and now can be counted in tens of thousands (IANDS. nderf database, huge amount or first-person stories on YT), and, unlike the dreams and drug-induced experienced that are always random and never repeatable and consistent, the NDE experiences a lot of consistent features (tunnel, life review, meeting with deceased relatives, meeting beings of light, 360-degree view, flying-moving through space etc). Many of them from people who never heard of NDE experiences before. It would be a ridiculous conspiracy theory to assume that all these accounts are made up fantasies.
Interesting point and a good question. If one were to attempt to answer it within a materialist framework, perhaps simply because their focus was on visual and auditory senses - it is indeed noteworthy that the feeling of pain seems to dissapear, though. Within a non-materialist framework (actual separation of consciousness and body) perhaps the latter are closely tied to bodily functions while sensory experience is not. Just speculating, though :)
@@thenatureofreality2100 Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It seems that clinically dead people have very short time frame to communicate with living people on earth, not always they are able to communicate with anyone, but when they succeed, it is always around the time before they were buried(except from the cases when they return from the sudden cardiac arrest or coma event of course). and I know it from my own personal experience(I had contact with clinically dead person) and from all others that had this paranormal experience around the globe
Yes, there are quite a number of reports of such communication. If the mind or 'soul' does travel to some other place, as NDEs often claim, then the time frame for communication seems to be rather short.
Things like hunger, thirst, sex drive only matter if you have a physical body though, so why would they experience those things if they separated from their body? Things like sight and hearing have relevance to the functioning of consciousness rather than just our body. Plus many people report their sense of sight and hearing to be vastly superior during the nde, often describing 360 degree vision.
The latest AWARE study results came out a few months ago. It showed that the brain exhibits heightened brain activity even one hour into cardiac arrest. Beta and gamma waves spiked during cardiac arrest. This could explain why people experience ndes, especially life reviews as the heightened brain activity could be inducing memories of one's life. Prior to this study it was believed there was no brain activity during cardiac arrest so perhaps these results do not support the belief that consciousness survives when one is dying or dead. Thoughts?
@@thenatureofreality2100 Perhaps you can comment after reading- I would be interested to know your thoughts. Something else interesting about ndes is that there are only a very small number of reported ndes in non- Western cultures that include life reviews Dr Gregory Shushan has been studying ndes across cultures and time periods and he mentions this fact). If ndes were experiences of an afterlife one would expect life reviews to be noted across cultures but, for the most part, they are not found in non-Western reports of ndes.
@@briansmith2836 Just watched the video where Parnia did a presentation at an acedemic conference. Quite extraordinary that they found wave spikes during a time when there wasn't supposed to be any. Also, it seems that in one case there was verified auditory experience (although he wasn't explicite about that). The results will probably be published in a paper before long (I don't think they have been yet), and that will allow for taking a more detailed look at it. Yes, I will definitaley comment when the results are published :) (if there is enough new substantial stuff in the paper, perhaps in the form of a video) Interesting with the life reviews distribution across cultures. I was under the impression that the content of NDEs was roughly the same across cultures - but the life reviews might be an exception here. Took a quick look at Shushan's published work - none of his main articles seem to focus on that aspect in particular, it is probably in his book "Near-death experience in indigenous religions", or perhaps "The Next World". His general focus does seem to be on cultural and historical contexts, though. And an interesting thesis he advocates, that religions are grounded in NDEs (rather than being socio-cultural constructs, for example).
@@thenatureofreality2100 thanks for your response. Tomorrow I will find a recent video ( few months old) from Dr Shushan and and tell you how to find it as he talks about how he has only come across an extremely small number of non Western accounts mentioning life reviews and a hypothesis for why this may be the case. When one reads accounts from Western MDs and scientists studying ndes one would come to the incorrect conclusion that all cultures have numerous accounts of life reviews. Western media and those studying ndes tend to emphasize how life reviews are very common but, based on Dr Shusan's work, this is not the case. I was disappointed by Parnias's recentl results given that ndes being real experiences would be more likely if there was no measurable brain activity during cardiac arrest (If I recall correctly now, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel has for very many years argued that cardiac arrest patients have no brain activity but that was because, until Parnia's study, it was not possible to try to measure such such activity in patients).
I should mention my friend is professor of electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University where h mostly focuses on biomedical engineering research. He and I just completed a remote viewing experiment with interesting results. There are 10 people ( some PhDs) now scoring each target for accuracy ( the two of us scored the 100 targets but of course we wanted objective scorers to follow up). I should also mention that my mom in 1952, with her brother ( aged 10 and 13 respectively) simultaneously witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary when home alone one evening in Lithuania ( my mom came from a Catholic family but they were not practicing Catholics). They witnessed the apparition from a few feet (my mom says it was like looking at a person from a few feet away, it was so clear, there was nothing blury or fuzzy- tge apparition had white veil on, hands in prayer as she floated across a wall and then disappeared). My mom is 81 and recalls it as if it happened yesterday. She says had she been alone she would have thought she hallucinated or dreamt the event. I know a psychiatrist here in Canada who is professor of psychiatry and he interviewed my mom ( my mom was reluctant to meet with him as does not talk much about it with other people as she knows it sounds crazy ) as he has interest in Marian apparitions given that he is Catholic. I tried to find rational explanations for her experience ( eg light reflection or older brother influencing her into thinking she was seeing something not there, etc) but i cannot find a rational explanation. Lots of strange things happen in this world and I wonder if every paranormal account can be dismissed as being hallucinations, dreams, mistaken identity, etc.
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I saw a debate in which a proponent of materialism claimed that the brain kind of manufactures these experiences afterwards, because it doesn't "like" empty spaces in the memory. For anyone who has been under anesthesia, this theory doesn't seem to hold up. When waking up, it simply seems like no time has passed, so the brain doesn't need to "fill in" anything.
And in any case it is a speculative claim. Also, it seems rather improbable that the brain manufactured a story that matches the actual events to the degree described in the study (although that is probably debatable).
@@thenatureofreality2100
The veridical NDE is definitely the nail in the coffin of materialism.
If you add the idea that genuine ESP exists and the other idea that living brains can use ESP especially in certain dissociative states (Radin, Braude, etc)
THEN one can say that, in this case, the brain used ESP to construct its imagery - either (a) in real time or (b) after the fact as a ESP mixed with hallucinatory imagery to fill in the gaps.
Finally, recent deep brain data have shown that there actually IS a BURST in relevant electrical activity 30 seconds after onset of cardiac arrest in some humans and animals. Please ask me for references (can’t add now, but hoping to edit later w refs)
I think one can STILL make a case for the survivalist interpretation being more plausible.
@@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns So sceptics would have to make "concessions" that involve parapsychology. That's funny.
So this "burst" of electrical activity, short lived I assume, must be different than the activity that people under general anesthesia have, a condition that apparently doesn't create any vivid memories.
@@gustav4539
On end of life surges:
a) Borjigin et al (2013) Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 110, issue 35, pp 14432-14437.
(b) Chawla, L. Seneff, MG (2013) End-of-life electrical surges. Proc Natl Acad Sci, vol 110issue 44, p 4123.
(c) Borjigin et al. (2013) Reply to Chawla and Seneff: Near-death electrical brain activity in humans and animals requires additional studies. Proc Natl Acad Sci vol 110, issue 44), p 4124.
(d) Borjigin et al (2013) Reply to Greyson et al.: Experimental evidence lays a foundation for a rational understanding of near-death experiences. Proc Natl Acad Sci, vol 110, issue 47, p 4406.
(e) Chawla et al (2017). Characterization of end-of-life electroencephalographic surges in critically ill patients. Death Studies, vol 41, issue 6, pp 385-392.
I fell in a coma after a car accident in 2005. The right hemisphere of my brain got destroyed and the left hemisphere was badly damaged. The doc told my dad I was a goner. I was comatose for 21 days. During this time, I lived my best life ever. My consciousness was on overdrive. I envisioned 11 months of my best life before waking up a quadriplegic.
But having envisioned something when it was not possible according to Science gave me the courage to recover completely, something no doctor has been able to explain to this date.
Darryl, that's far beyond amazing. I don't know if you're so inclined,but IANDS seems to really be up your alley. I'd love to hear the details of your story.🕯️
@@fretnesbutke3233 here it goes,
Start of my 2nd year of university. The first class bash just got done and I was heading home with friends. It was late so I was asleep in the back seat. Turns out the driver was drunk. He makes a wrong turn into a ditch at over 100 km/h. The car proceeds to flip over 3 times. Being asleep, I fly forward, hit my head on the roof of the car and fall comatose immediately. I still don't remember any of the accident. What I know is from friends who were in the accident too.
You have a very strong will to live!! I admire that.
Using lucid dreaming like an athlete! Congrats.
I am glad that you survived which sounds like an awful accident. Thank you so much for sharing your personal story.
If you mentioned this point and I missed it, apologies. But arguably the most important element about the case of Mr A in the Aware study, is that he somehow heard the automated command to "shock the patient". This is actually impossible, as in order for the machine to issue that instruction, it has had to go through the process of analysing the patient's heart rhythm, in this case ventricular fibrillation which is heart stoppage, meaning zero blood flow into the brain. Without blood flow into the brain, consciousness is lost immediately and the global electrical activity of the brain (and brain stem) disappears completely within 10 to 20 seconds.
The machine can't make a mistake and you can't hear and remember anything without a functioning brain, so it is indeed impossible that Mr A heard this instruction (and he actually heard it twice which is even more incredible). His other observations from a position across/up in the corner of the room, were also remarkable, as his bodily vision (the potential to see with his physical eyes) was blindsighted by a raised curtain at his upper chest level which had been placed there to prevent him from seeing the registrar inserting the catheter into his groin (cardiac catherterisation). So he should not have been able to see the bald 'chunky fella' with a shaved head and a blue scrub hat at all, let alone from the back of him (he reported seeing the registrar's back, not his face).
This man very likely came from an ethnic minority background (in the UK) and was not religious and his family assumed it was the effects of the drugs etc (he wasn't given any drugs except something to neutralise the feeling in his groin). So, altogether an exceptional case but there are hundreds of these now. Materialist sceptics have done everything they can to either ignore them, or write them off as the product of some narrow functioning of the brain or drugs or wishful psychology, but there's simply far too many cases now.
Thanks for the additional information on the case - I mainly know the case from what is described in the paper, so interesting to hear the extra details!
Yes, it is indeed an exceptional case - you are right, there are many cases like it - what makes this one particularly interesting is that it is a part of a prospective study and is published in a peer reviewed academic journal (which is a recognition of the methodology used, despite the (in the academic world) rather controversial outcome). And you are right, for a materialist sceptic, it is an unwelcome case - as you note, it should be impossible to hear and see anything (and remember it afterwards) when the brain is shut down, according to that position.
Interesting point that the auditory input is an extra supporting factor since the machine could only have issued the instruction after having analyzed the heart rhythm.
Thanks!
AWARE 2 data came out a few months back. It showed that brain activity is actually heightened up to one hour after cardiac arrest when previously it was thought that there were no brain waves during a cardiac arrest . Beta and gamma waves actually were found to spike during cardiac arrest. Aware 2 was the first study to measure brain waves of those experiencing cardiac arrest as previously brain waves were only measured in animals experiencing cardiac arrests.
This may not be good news for those that believe ndes are real experiences of an afterlife.
@@briansmith2836 Brainwaves do not automaticaly equal NDE. You have brainwaves now, are you having a near death experience ? There is nothing at all surprising about brainwaves eventually apearing in patients they are trying to bring back to life. You are misunderstanding Parnia's words but don't worry, most people do.
@@tim59ism no, before this experiment it was thought during cardiac arrest there was no brain activity but the exact opposite is the case. I don't think you understand what the means.
@@tim59ism large spikes in brainwaves are found near death. They are much greater than brainwaves found in normal brain states. These results look bad for Parnia as he was convinced consciousness survives death. Can't wait to year how Parnia and people like you spin these results.
Pam Reynolds had brain surgery during which her awareness left her body and went to the roof of the hospital where she saw a red shoe. Later they found the red shoe on the roof. She had left her body during the surgery. She “remembered” details that she could not have known unless she really was outside her body watching.
Yes, Pam Reynolds is another very interesting example - these are both examples of (some kind of) verified experience occuring at a time where brain activity was monitored to be absent (the only two examples on that I know of), which makes them extraordinarily intersting.
Physicalists always seem to be just fishing around for explanations to justify their preconceived notions. It is better to just assume that we cannot, and will not ever truly understand the nature of reality. The nature of reality is not only stranger than we imagine, but it is almost certainly stranger than we CAN imagine.
Yes, that is indeed a possibility :)
My dilemma is where/how do memories get stored. Ever thought about that.
You remember Films, Video's, smell, touches, sounds etc. We say they are stored in the brain. But then I ask myself how, we do not have a Chip so do we store them in suger molecules, fat molecules, proteins or any other substance available in the brain cells.
This means we should be able to extract them from the brain when he or she dies!
This leaves me with the thesis that our soul is in the "cloud" (with that our memories on some kind of external harddrive) and our brain is the antenna/interface between our body and this external drive!
This would support the believe that awareness or a soul is forever and not depending on a body
Think about 100000 penguins coming back to land after many weeks at sea. A mass of 100000 penguins, most with chicks, has been waiting. 200000 birds vocalizing at once. Somehow the couples find each other. This happens every year in Antarctica. Recognition. Re. Cognition.
I have heard it said that the brain is not a generator, it is an interface.
Thank you Dr Petersen
Thanks - you are very welcome :)
Physicalism and materialism are not necessarily the same thing. According to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory of the physicist Roger Penrose and Professor Stuart Hameroff, consciousness is quantum information in the brain, and according to Hameroff, it may not be destroyed when the brain dies, and may persist as a "soul". According to Orch OR, consciousness is physical but not material. That is, it can be described in terms of physical laws but it is not "made of matter".
Interesting concept :)
Yes, the terms do have slightly different meaning. Traditionally 'materialism' probably pointed towards matter, as you mention, but I think that the modern notion of materialism is more oriented towards 'the physical' in a more general sense (the idea of 'matter' is largely abandoned in modern physics, I think).
'Materialism' is often used to describe the metaphysical position that nothing but 'the physical' (in a broad sense) exists independently, while 'physicalism' is a slighlty narrower position, accoridng to which everything is reducible to the physical (i.e., can be described in terms of physical laws (at least in principle), as you mention)
W/ all due respect to Sir Roger and Stuart Hameroff, the problem w/ Orch OR is that it's still depending on the premise that consciousness could ever be produced by decidedly unconscious physical matter. To the best of our knowledge, not a single human in all of history has ever demonstrated and/or observed that this is even possible in the first place.
@@ryanashfyre464 I think Penrose and Hameroff are going beyond matter. There is a broader definition of "physical" that includes matter but is not synonymous with it. Space and time are physical but they are not matter. In fact Hameroff has described consciousness as "fluctuations in space-time geometry".
@@johnnyb8825 Insofar as Penrose and Hameroff are still limiting themselves to mere space-time, they're going to end up confused. There's nothing there with which to create conscious experience.
That said, and w/ all due respect to Sir Roger, I do believe he's on the right path when he says that consciousness isn't computational. That's a good first step, but he needs to step outside space-time itself.
@@ryanashfyre464 I think they're saying that these fluctuations in space-time _are_ what consciousness is, i.e. they don't "produce" consciousness but _are_ consciousness, albeit in a very basic and primitive form. Hameroff compared it to the random notes of an orchestra tuning their instruments before a concert. When these random fluctuations become _orchestrated_ you get full-blown consciousness of the type that most people think of when you say the word "consciousness". Hameroff is suggesting that after the death of the brain and body, this orchestrated consciousness might remain orchestrated through quantum entanglement, hence survival of the "soul" after death.
Congratulations on the clarity and impartiality of the presentation
Thanks :)
The shelf idea as an experiment for validity is great. Even though lots of other people have verified experiencers have seen but maybe if it was a science experiment it would shut materialists up
Yes, objective experimential data would provide a strong argument. It is hard to get, though - these kind of experiences are difficult to examine in controlled scientific experiments. The AWARE study continued, though. A research paper on the second batch of results is about to be published, I think.
@@thenatureofreality2100 yeah... n nice!
I was looking for documented cases where the person, for example dies of a heart attack during surgery and comes out of their body and witnesses things, people's conversations in other parts of the hospital and other things that can be verified and were verified by others. I've talked to two people I knew and they described things that happened while they were technically dead they could not possibly have known. Like conversations and exactly what people were saying at the time that person was on the operating table, dead or near death. It's not possible to hear conversations of people in other parts of the hospital.
Yes, such cases are very interesting indeed and does point towards plausibility of the view that there is actually something about the notion of a continued existence after physical death. Research have been done for several decades, but is is hard to obtain data under controlled scientific conditions (although modern studies such as the AWARE study do seem able to provide such data).
@@thenatureofreality2100 You don't need controlled scientific conditions, there are far too many real life experiences that are already documented. People seeing things that actually happened and hearing people say things that actually happened that are impossible in our existence.
@@thenatureofreality2100 Yes, it does.
@@robertbrown7470 LOL of course you need controlled scientific conditions, or you simply accept anything anybody says? That's why "hearsay" is not allowed in a court of law, because it can't be verified, just like these cases.
Thank you very much!
You probably remember everything you've ever seen but can not recall until during nde.
Yes, if the NDEs are taken to express actual reality they seem to indicate that.
Science has a way to go before explaining consciousness. I am interested in why only a small portion of flatline survivors have any recollection of out of body consciousness, the majority don't remember anything.
Yes, that is quite interesting. It could indicate either no experience or just no memory of it.
Near death experiences don't necessarily defy physicalism. If consciousness can survive death then it could simply mean that we have physics all wrong. Perhaps time is just an illusion, and our true perspective ( as actually described in many NDEs ) is actually a timeless one. From the vantage point of a timeless being there is no before or after death...just an eternal 'now'. In fact I could entirely envisage a timeless entity still using the brain long 'after' death and the dissolution of the body.
Yes, you are right that it depends on what one means by 'physicalism'. I simply use the term in the fairly straightforward way that everything is reducible to space-time objects, events, etc., with the overall framework being roughly contemporary physics and neuroscience. But indeed, if physics turn out to be entirely different from what we think, it is possible that the physical is fundamental after all, even if conscious experience continues after death. Interesting thought :)
You're right about NDEs not necessarily defying physicalism, but I'd submit that other advances in physics make a very strong case to do so.
For example, the work of Nima-Arkani Hamed at Princeton in discovering structures existing outside of conventional space-time ("Spacetime is Doomed: ruclips.net/video/qTx98PUW6lE/видео.html&ab_channel=PSWScience) seems very significant. If true, then this development tells us something quite extraordinary: that physical objects, like neurons in our brains and even our brains themselves, don't actually posses any real causal powers in and of themselves. It ceases to be a question of whether NDEs are caused by neural activity in our brain and more an outright impossibility. After all, if physical objects don't have independent existence (as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics seems to say), then it simply can't be the case that they could cause anything, NDE or otherwise.
And yet it remains that NDEs, whatever your opinion of them, do in fact happen to people. So if we take away the brain as a potential culprit, what do we look at next?
@@ryanashfyre464 Spacetime has always been doomed, because our experience of space and time are every bit as much qualia as the blue of the sky or the smell of a rose. It is ironic that the very science that these days decries any hint of naive realism ( the belief that the world literally exists as experienced ) actually depends on naive realism to convey a literal space and time existing 'out there'. This is the ultimate conundrum for science. Kant noticed this dilemma 250 years ago...and these days Donald Hoffman points out the dilemma too. The more scientists argue that conscious experience is an illusion.....the more they remove any handle on 'the real world'. Science has become like a man sitting on a branch while sawing it off the tree.
@@peterstanbury3833 I don't disagree w/ you, although I'd add that the idea that consciousness is an illusion is a self-refuting contradiction. As Bernardo Kastrup, John Vervaeke & others have pointed out - an illusion *is* a conscious experience, so to say that consciousness itself is an illusion is, of course, to presuppose the consciousness that would have to exist in order to be under said illusion.
In fairness, others like Dan Dennett may wish to retort that what they *really* mean is that consciousness isn't what it appears to be - but that doesn't solve the problem. The issue isn't our theoretical grasp of what consciousness *is* (which I don't believe science should be in the business of doing anyway), but rather that we have experience at all. Insofar as that holds true (and it does), the problem's still there.
That aside, w/ respect to space-time's doom - as unconvincing as it's always been (which you're correct about), it still makes it easier for the likes of Hoffman, Kastrup & others to be able to point to things like Nima-Arkani Hamed's work and disproving local realism to make their case.
It may take a while, but we're getting there & that's a very good thing both for ourselves and for science.
@@ryanashfyre464 Science is coming to a dilemma that Kant pointed out several centuries ago. The dilemma being that science negates naive realism, and yet science itself has to speak in naive realism terms to convey any 'out there'. Dennett often faces this issue. He tries to wiggle out of consciousness being 'an illusion' by arguing that it is simply ' not what it appears to be'.....but the problem is that 'what it appears to be' is precisely what we are trying to define in the first place and if we don't know what that is then we cannot logically say it is not that. Every construct that consciousness might appear to be is itself a product of consciousness. Kant pointed this out 250 years ago....and science is only just getting round to facing the conundrum.
If the brain "patches" together lost event after the fact, viz during the waking up phase, why does this not happen every morning in order to explain where we have been during the night? And, this doesn't explain how the brain is able to "patch" events in that it could not have possibly witnessed during flat lined activity!
Yes, it does indeed seems like a rather improbable explanation.
Thank you for doing this video -- such an important subject. Just a heads up that a better mic / audio setup would help you out. Good information people should hear. Audio quality is the easiest way to improve vids. Also your lighting is too hot and kinda casting a shadow. Get something a little warmer in color and maybe a simple key light. Excellent otherwise. Only helping people that are sharing good info...best!
Yeah, the technical side is perhaps somewhat lacking - thanks for the input :)
John Martin claimed that the nurse disclosed the numbers to them before they were presented with the question, what do you have to say about it?
Not sure what you are referring to here? :)
You are referring to psychology professor John Martin from California. He is an NDE sceptic basically and what you've written there is probably one of his "explanations" for a particular veridical case.
@@tim59ism
Thanks.
Don't know that particular case. Principally, fraud is a possibility. I don't think it is very likely, though - the methodology of the studies is very strict (otherwise such a controversial study wouldn't be accepted for publishing in a peer reviewed journal).
@@thenatureofreality2100 This is the case which has not been debunked. A woman was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital, but the medical team restored her heartbeat. She later awoke from her coma claiming to have floated over her body while the staff revived her. Nurse Norma Bowe had heard it many times before, dismissing such stories as dreams, brain malfunctions, or drug reactions.
This patient, though, had a habit of memorizing numbers because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, and she told Norma the 12-digit serial number she saw atop the respirator during her out-of-body experience. Norma indulged her, writing it down.
The machine was seven feet high, so it required a maintenance guy and a ladder to check it out. Yes, there was a number up there, he said. Can you read it off to us? Sure, 12 digits-the exact number the patient had given to Norma.
Very interesting.
Other very convincing cases are in NDE - The Day I Died - BBC Documentary
🐇🕯When you throw your hands around its so distracting...Tku for the commentary..🌺🌺
Haha, thanks for the info. And thanks for the thank you :)
@@thenatureofreality2100 ❤😊
There are many liberties taken with these assertions. V-Fib id NOT equivalent to cardiac arrest and NO, brain wave activity most certainly does not cease immediately upon arrest. Likewise total unawareness is not necessarily absolute. The death process is not like turning off a light and many phenomena described might simply be physiologically normal and cannot be simply attributed to confirming life after death and the continuance in some other state. So far there is yet any substantial proof that anything here is going on other than those processes that accompany the cessation of life and then oblivion.
You could be right maybe what we call hallucinations are more varied in scope. And that NDE are the same. I do wounder if these OBE experiences are part fabricated memories and part dreams.
That is as likely the case. In those initial stages of death, the body is responding and cell death most certain in not immediate. Likewise the brain will be responding is a manner that ease the process, even make it quasi-enjoyable, or at least not so traumatic.@@restorationofidentity
This doesn’t explain all the accounts of nde’s that experiences during the nde that can be verified, even from outside the room the body was in, that the person had absolutely no way of knowing. Is every single one of these claimed experiences a hoax? Only a single one needs to be real to negate the idea that consciousness originates from the brain and is dependent on it completely.
Frankly, the vast majority can be attributed to the body's processes and the manufactured memory. Very, Very few if any of these NDE accounts can be validated as actual. If anything they are the physiological process of death itself and the endorphin rush to ease those final moments. Likewise, time and time again, anecdote is not proof, and just as eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable in court, memory too is fickle and largely fabrication.@@CampingforCool41
Hi, I m from India , I am interested in this matter, would you like to help me ? Can I get a call from you?
Do you have any particular questions that you would like answered? :)
Yes, I have recently lost my grandmother.
I wd like to know is there any life or anything else after death?
Will I meet with her again?
Is astral projection true',
And many more questions I have
If u patiently help me to get out this answer it will be helpful for me.
Thanks in advance.
Love from India ❤
From a physical perspective, could it be that after clinical death, though MEASURABLE brain activity ceases, but an undetectable miniscule level activity might be firing in the brain cells still in process of decaying and may completely cease once brain cells turn to a mush? Meaning thoughts, images, feelings might just be due to the residual dying brain cells activity which is undetectable on eeg but ceases in an hour or so?
After all, some blood, some oxygen and some ion channels might still remain inside brain as a residue after clinical death
@@farhannaseer9245 Yes, it is possible (at least in principle) - technically, it is not brain activity itself that is measured, but the oxygen flow to the brain, iirc. The (probably well-documented) assumption is that cells can't work properly without oxygen.
The authors briefly touch upon the possibility that it is decaying brain cells that are causing hallucinations. A couple of things go against that hypotheses: usually such hallucinations are not vivid like the perception reported in the paper, but on the contrary 'tunnel-like', iirc. Also, it would be quite a coincidence that the hallucinations matched actual events (unless a product of sense input in some way - I don't remember if it is mentioned whether the patient had closed eyes or not, but I assume that he probably had).
But it might be possible, even though there apparently is no empirical support for such unmeasurable activity.
The problem w/ that idea is that a key trend in NDEs is that people routinely describe the experience as a number of things:
- A sensation of it being *more real* than this world
- Existing in a world of timelessness (NDErs generally don't know how to explain knowing this so much as just being aware of it)
- Clear, precise recollection of the event even decades after it occurred (a key difference w/ a hallucination where people tend to forget very quickly)
- Acquiring information that they couldn't possibly have had any means of knowing prior to the NDE (Dr. Bruce Greyson has spent decades researching such cases)
There's more of course, but this kind of experience just isn't compatible w/ the last gasps of a dying brain.
No, this is absurd, any residual activity in the brain cells would first generate lower lying reflexes: gag reflex, pupil reflex etc.
Cardiac Arrest is characterised by absence of those reflexes (otherwise it means there is no full cardiac arrest and heart still able to generate some blood pressure and flow of oxygen to the brain), meaning all deeper, lower functions are disabled and cut out - any thoughts or thinking producing process is by definition higher function that requires those reflexes to be “turned on” if we accept our self - conciseness is produced only by brain, so it cannot happen. Period.
This is the paradox of NDE - clear and structural mental process (that is not hallucinations) in absolute absence of more fundamental neurological functions. This directly indicates that mental process is somehow independent from brain cells. This is not proven but clearly indicative of a such possibility.
The naturalist view of consciousness and thought, is that it is emergent from complexity of the brain. So, a minimal brain activity shouldn't be expected to produce complex thoughts, much less thoughts that are considered to be "more real". Even still, accuracy is what makes the an account believable.
@ about 10:57 " No brain activity." What you should say is No *MEASURABLE* brain activity based on current levels of instrument sensitivity. Isn't it possible there is yet some activity which cannot as of now be measured ??? Just asking. Your assumption is medical science has achieved the optimal level of sophistication and technical knowledge regarding the subject of brain activity near death. Clearly it has not.
Yes, you are right, that is possible. :) Indeed, it seems that there might be some kind of brain activity quite a long time after the heart has stopped beating, according to the latest AWARE 2 study results - they will probably be published fairly soon, so will be interesting to read.
I fell in a coma after a car accident in 2005. The right hemisphere of my brain got destroyed and the left hemisphere was badly damaged. The doc told my dad I was a goner. I was comatose for 21 days. During this time, I lived my best life ever. My consciousness was on overdrive. I envisioned 11 months of my best life before waking up a quadriplegic.
But having envisioned something when it was not possible according to Science gave me the courage to recover completely, something no doctor has been able to explain to this date.
quaz imode (love the name) You can't rewrite/change neuroscientific principles just to preserve a belief. The brain doesn't work like that, it has to be fully powered up with oxygenated blood and glucose (apparently)
According to the descriptions of the NDE accounts, the NDE experiences are extraordinary meaningful, rich and vivid. How is that possible that such weak brain activity below the ECG detectability threshold could produce such vivid and rich conscious experiences?
Another fact to consider: the amount of recorded NDE experiences are enormous and now can be counted in tens of thousands (IANDS. nderf database, huge amount or first-person stories on YT), and, unlike the dreams and drug-induced experienced that are always random and never repeatable and consistent, the NDE experiences a lot of consistent features (tunnel, life review, meeting with deceased relatives, meeting beings of light, 360-degree view, flying-moving through space etc). Many of them from people who never heard of NDE experiences before. It would be a ridiculous conspiracy theory to assume that all these accounts are made up fantasies.
It doesn't make sense, why should they have visual or auditory senses, but not other senses such as hunger, thirst, sex drive, pain, etc
Interesting point and a good question. If one were to attempt to answer it within a materialist framework, perhaps simply because their focus was on visual and auditory senses - it is indeed noteworthy that the feeling of pain seems to dissapear, though. Within a non-materialist framework (actual separation of consciousness and body) perhaps the latter are closely tied to bodily functions while sensory experience is not. Just speculating, though :)
@@thenatureofreality2100
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
It seems that clinically dead people have very short time frame to communicate with living people on earth, not always they are able to communicate with anyone, but when they succeed, it is always around the time before they were buried(except from the cases when they return from the sudden cardiac arrest or coma event of course).
and I know it from my own personal experience(I had contact with clinically dead person) and from all others that had this paranormal experience around the globe
Yes, there are quite a number of reports of such communication. If the mind or 'soul' does travel to some other place, as NDEs often claim, then the time frame for communication seems to be rather short.
Things like hunger, thirst, sex drive only matter if you have a physical body though, so why would they experience those things if they separated from their body? Things like sight and hearing have relevance to the functioning of consciousness rather than just our body. Plus many people report their sense of sight and hearing to be vastly superior during the nde, often describing 360 degree vision.
The latest AWARE study results came out a few months ago. It showed that the brain exhibits heightened brain activity even one hour into cardiac arrest. Beta and gamma waves spiked during cardiac arrest. This could explain why people experience ndes, especially life reviews as the heightened brain activity could be inducing memories of one's life. Prior to this study it was believed there was no brain activity during cardiac arrest so perhaps these results do not support the belief that consciousness survives when one is dying or dead. Thoughts?
Thanks! (They weren't released yet when I did the video - it will be interesting to read them)
@@thenatureofreality2100 Perhaps you can comment after reading- I would be interested to know your thoughts. Something else interesting about ndes is that there are only a very small number of reported ndes in non- Western cultures that include life reviews Dr Gregory Shushan has been studying ndes across cultures and time periods and he mentions this fact). If ndes were experiences of an afterlife one would expect life reviews to be noted across cultures but, for the most part, they are not found in non-Western reports of ndes.
@@briansmith2836 Just watched the video where Parnia did a presentation at an acedemic conference. Quite extraordinary that they found wave spikes during a time when there wasn't supposed to be any. Also, it seems that in one case there was verified auditory experience (although he wasn't explicite about that). The results will probably be published in a paper before long (I don't think they have been yet), and that will allow for taking a more detailed look at it.
Yes, I will definitaley comment when the results are published :) (if there is enough new substantial stuff in the paper, perhaps in the form of a video)
Interesting with the life reviews distribution across cultures. I was under the impression that the content of NDEs was roughly the same across cultures - but the life reviews might be an exception here. Took a quick look at Shushan's published work - none of his main articles seem to focus on that aspect in particular, it is probably in his book "Near-death experience in indigenous religions", or perhaps "The Next World". His general focus does seem to be on cultural and historical contexts, though. And an interesting thesis he advocates, that religions are grounded in NDEs (rather than being socio-cultural constructs, for example).
@@thenatureofreality2100 thanks for your response. Tomorrow I will find a recent video ( few months old) from Dr Shushan and and tell you how to find it as he talks about how he has only come across an extremely small number of non Western accounts mentioning life reviews and a hypothesis for why this may be the case. When one reads accounts from Western MDs and scientists studying ndes one would come to the incorrect conclusion that all cultures have numerous accounts of life reviews. Western media and those studying ndes tend to emphasize how life reviews are very common but, based on Dr Shusan's work, this is not the case. I was disappointed by Parnias's recentl results given that ndes being real experiences would be more likely if there was no measurable brain activity during cardiac arrest (If I recall correctly now, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel has for very many years argued that cardiac arrest patients have no brain activity but that was because, until Parnia's study, it was not possible to try to measure such such activity in patients).
I should mention my friend is professor of electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University where h mostly focuses on biomedical engineering research. He and I just completed a remote viewing experiment with interesting results. There are 10 people ( some PhDs) now scoring each target for accuracy ( the two of us scored the 100 targets but of course we wanted objective scorers to follow up). I should also mention that my mom in 1952, with her brother ( aged 10 and 13 respectively) simultaneously witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary when home alone one evening in Lithuania ( my mom came from a Catholic family but they were not practicing Catholics). They witnessed the apparition from a few feet (my mom says it was like looking at a person from a few feet away, it was so clear, there was nothing blury or fuzzy- tge apparition had white veil on, hands in prayer as she floated across a wall and then disappeared). My mom is 81 and recalls it as if it happened yesterday. She says had she been alone she would have thought she hallucinated or dreamt the event. I know a psychiatrist here in Canada who is professor of psychiatry and he interviewed my mom ( my mom was reluctant to meet with him as does not talk much about it with other people as she knows it sounds crazy ) as he has interest in Marian apparitions given that he is Catholic. I tried to find rational explanations for her experience ( eg light reflection or older brother influencing her into thinking she was seeing something not there, etc) but i cannot find a rational explanation. Lots of strange things happen in this world and I wonder if every paranormal account can be dismissed as being hallucinations, dreams, mistaken identity, etc.
Have you had a near death experience or you just going on studys😎
Just going on studies :) Haven't had any such experience myself.