http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23672150

My alma mater, UMich-AA, studied death in rats. The researchers "monitored nine rats as they were dying. In the 30-second period after the animal's hearts stopped beating, they measured a sharp increase in high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations.
These pulses are one of the neuronal features that are thought to underpin consciousness in humans, especially when they help to "link" information from different parts of the brain. In the rats, these electrical pulses were found at even higher levels just after the cardiac arrest than when animals were awake and well."

So a 30 second period of hyper conciousness at death.

" Like 'fire raging through the brain', activity can surge through brain areas involved in conscious experience, furnishing all resultant perceptions with realer-than-real feelings and emotions."

Very interesting and something that scientists have suspected for a long time. I would suspect also that even though this heightened state of consciousness only lasts for a very short period, that time might take on a whole different meaning, or no meaning at all, and therefore can seem to last much longer to the individual experiencing it.

I haven't done a ton of research on this subject, but I would be curious to know how experiences compare between muslims, christians, jews, buddhists and others, in particular, those within different religious groups or philosophies that are for the most part unaware of differing belief systems. In other words, do those who see family members on the other side exclusively come from experiences of individuals that believe in religion that says that we may see loved ones after we die? How would a buddhist or taoist relate their experience with an entirely different understanding than say theists of what happens after death?

Here is an interesting paper on NDE in Melanesia;

http://anthropology.uwaterloo.ca/WNB/NearDeath.html

The NDE appears to be very much a product of cultural belief.

I get that you don't want to study this issue with an open mind. I don't know why, but apparently that is how you want to approach it. A 30 second burst of gamma oscillations does nothing to explain how some people see loved ones far away at the time of death, doing things, and then reporting it. There are books and books on this subject with story after story that are in no way dismissable with 30 second bursts of gamma oscillations. Maybe a serious interest in your part on disproving specific cases that have no other explanation may cause me to sit up an listen...(it's a challenge to you)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 10:30AM by elciz.

Perhaps I haven't seen the data on controlled experiments where a dying person does remote viewing of remote subjects. The little I have seen about these kind of studies indicates that remote viewing experiences are vague enough and/or pre-collaborated between subjects (the dying person and remote loved ones) before the research can establish controls.

But I admit, I don't study this vigorously.

You're not likely to get a "controlled experiment" when a person is dying. I've read quite a few books on the subject, with an open mind, and I've concluded that it would be delusional for me to dismiss them all as random lightening streaks of current hitting neurons in the brain as it is deprived of oxygen, or whatever the latest pet theory is. The evidence is almost overwhelming, to one with an open mind. The idea that a realistic person should take is to look at the best books, the best cases, and try to poke holes in them, to explain away pieces of information that these people have that can't simply be explained away with a wave of a hand. I mean, how could a person under deep anethesia see and describe what a doctor is doing doing complicated brain surgery? Or an aunt in a distant city?

To me, the interesting thing in all this is why smart people would be so dismissive of stuff that is not easily dismissable. Now that is the mystery that I'd like to get to the bottom of. Perhaps you don't want there to be an after life. Why? Because then you'd have to re-think all the bountious riddicule you heap on anybody who believes anything? Or you'd have to change some behaviour that might be embarrassing or that might now "matter" if our lives are more than random beginnings and a final end when we die? For what it's worth, in my opinion, you don't have anything to worry about. What I believe tells me we're here as part of a growth experience that will continue as long as we need it to continue. There is no hokey hell or a bearded guy judging us all. It's not that way. But that is all beside the point. I read on here almost every week some posting of a person who wants to debunk these things, while ignoring all that has already been written. Now some, maybe alot, of what is written has an "agenda". Somebody is a Jesus freak and zaps his heart accidentally while brewing his beer and then gets it re-started and tells a story about Jesus appearing to him and he gets a round of beers from his buddies for the story. OK, that happens,for sure. But alot of these people,they don't even want to tell the story, BECAUSE of the reaction from people like you. People who were not there, did not experience it,and who are willing to dismiss it from afar, for a reason that is known only to them. Take UFOs. I think MOST of the stories are balogna. But there are some I can't find an explanation for, so for now, I would say there needs to be more investigation into this. Perhaps, there is "more to the world/universe than I currently am aware of. I'll keep an open mind for now. But honestly, that is NOT what you guys/gals are doing. You pride yourself on your intellect, and good for you, you're certainly smart people, I can see that. But smart people have blind spots, well, we all do. Some place or thing we are not willing to go to. I find it fascinating that you all won't go to this place, you won't look at some of the very best accounts of people who've had some sort of experience, and have details in it that can not have been made up. I guess I'm latching on because I can see this blind spot in you all, and I'm weirded out by it. I know you can't see it, you'll deny it, but it is there. The information is already out there, you could look at it, just like I have.

But I don't think you will.

I work in science and technology, so I probably have a higher threshold of what counts as "almost overwhelming evidence". You trying to assign bad motives to me ("behaviour" or "riddicule" or "don't want an afterlife") is not productive. My motives are not relevant when it comes to examining the evidence.

But just because... I actually would like there to be an afterlife. I'm not afraid of it at all. I actually think the possibility of a singularitarian type "immortality" (conscious copying) is more likely than a dualist approach to continued consciousness. I would advocate for the former because I, as a technologist, can see the possibility for that to be actual reality. However, I don't bank on any of it in the lack of evidence for either of these paths.

what I don't like is how religions exploit the desire for an afterlife to bilk people for tithing and attention. For this reason, I think we need to set a high standard about such afterlife claims. Otherwise, people are going to get exploited.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:08PM by Jesus Smith.

"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

(Carl Sagan, "Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium")



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:20PM by steve benson.

"I mean, how could a person under deep anethesia see and describe what a doctor is doing doing complicated brain surgery? Or an aunt in a distant city?"

People sometimes wake up under anesthesia and can hear/feel what is going on and are unable to move. In a state of heightened consciousness they might see the scene as a movie and themselves detached from it.

Someone might say: "I saw my aunt crying in a distant city" the aunt might then say "I was in Atlanta!" They later both become certain that the dying person said that they saw their aunt in Atlanta crying at the exact moment of the NDE. This stuff happens all the time. It's how fortune telling works.

People are actually awake during brain surgery, because they don't feel pain when they mess around in there. They do experiments on then to find out how the brain works. They even have the patients respond back to then when they get shocked and the patient will tell them what is going on.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 02:02PM by quiz.

So elciz, you don't really seem to have an open mind to the possibility that NDE's could related to 30 second gamma oscillations. Just because your paradigm is different than Jesus Smiths, does not mean that you are automatically open minded and he is not.

I would be interested to see, if as you mention, there have been cases of OBE's where people were able to witness actual physical events at other locations with absolutely no way of knowing what could have been happening in those locations, and then come back to report on it. I could see how stories like this would be told but not necessarily verifiable. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but could a person going through an NDE go to the pentagon or White House and listen in on top secret conversations and report back? I realize that this sort of search for evidence makes me look like a sign seeker and may just not be how things work in the afterlife, but something along those lines.

I keep an open mind on this subject and also recognize that the possibility of life after death is not synonymous with religious belief. However, it's clear that in the world we live in, we can't simply go by what people say they experienced as there could be other explanations for it, such as gamma oscillations (or whatever they're called).

Mostly, I'd be curious to see if religious biases come in to play with respect to what is experienced, or if a person can have an NDE that is completely contradictory to the only religious belief with which they have become acquainted.

I guess my point being is, if there were in fact a way to physically separate from the body and witness physical events in other locations, what would stop the government from militarising this capability and exploiting NDE's as a method of spying on the enemy to gather intelligence. Or maybe they already do and it's top secret.

Dr. Sam Parnia, apparently an advocate of out of body explanation of NDEs, leads an effort to try to validate remote OBE viewing.

From:
http://www.horizonresearch.org/main_page.php?cat_id=212

As part of the experiment, "The verification of memories relating to the resuscitation events or “veridical perception” includes the use of hidden objects that are normally not visible from a patient’s or their caregiver’s perspective unless viewed from a vantage point above. Typically these are images placed on a support hanging from the ceiling in a hospital ward, in a way that the images face upward, towards the ceiling. These objects will provide an independent objective marker of the claims of being able to “see” during cardiac arrest because they will only be visible by “someone” observing them from above."

The experiments started in late 2008, and they will finally release some of the results in October 2013.

http://www.horizonresearch.org/main_page.php?cat_id=279

So I guess we shall see. However, I think if they had had evidence supporting remote viewing, they would have leaked it before now.

. . . be viewed from above has not resulted in people claiming to have experienced so-called OBEs reporting back that they actually saw the signs. Hmmmmm. Temporary blindness of their floating spirit bodies, one presumes?

"One attempt to gather objective evidence of this sort, rather than the usual anecdotal, after-the-fact accounts, has been initiated by the British psychiatrist, Peter Fenwick . . . . . He has had messages placed on ledges, above eye level, in the operating theaters of the hospital where he works.

"If a surgical patient should have an NDE/OBE, then his or her free-floating mind should be able to read the otherwise inaccessible message and recall it upon re-awakening.

"As yet, no one has been able to provide this kind of objective evidence, which would admittedly create serious problems for the materialist view of mind. In the absence of such strong proof, the spiritually-inclined must fall back on the next best thing: those cases where it seems highly unlikely that the revived person could have known certain things unless his or her fully-conscious spiritual self had been observing from outside the body."

(Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry L. Beverstein "Maria's Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop," pp. 1-4, 12; reprinted in "Skeptical Inquirer," Vol. 20, No. 4, July/August 1996, at: http://records.viu.ca/www/ipp/pdf/NDE.pdf)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 12:58PM by steve benson.

I agree. The evidence is not supportive. Hence my skepticism.

Anecdotal stories of visiting and hearing loved ones notwithstanding, without controls, stories are just that...faith promoting rumors of NDEs.

.... where, in the midst of other inner-cranial reactions, people "see" loved ones and tunnels of light. These situations have been empirically tested, observed and replicated. Sorry to burst anyone's afterlife bubble, but nothing to write Kolob about.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:02PM by steve benson.

Perhaps Elciz doesn't give a rats ass about scientific research on the subject

Sorry Elciz, but you sound exactly like a TBM talking to an exmo:

"I get that you don't want to study this issue with an open mind. I don't know why, but apparently that is how you want to approach it. Dopamine does nothing to explain how some people have been led by the spirit to intervene when others needed it the most. There are books and books on this subject with story after story that are in no way dismissable with dopamine producing warm fuzzy feelings. Maybe a serious interest in your part on disproving specific cases that have no other explanation may cause me to sit up an listen...(it's a challenge to you)"

. . . written about them, then that must mean the Mormon Church is true 'cuz TBMs have written lots of books about it, too.

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:53PM by steve benson.

And I'll be trying to get my kids into Hogwarts.

That IS a (legitimate) NDE in rats!

One that then, I am assuming the rats actually died soon after, trailed off into actual death.

If the rats had come back to life, and then claimed to have met Jesus, either in human or rat form, while in the dying process, that would certainly be a load of garbage.

Full of holes.

. . . seen the Queen Roach and then returned and reported? It would be amazing if they had because in the TV commercial it says they can check in but they can't check out--unless, of course, maybe it wasn't their time yet and they have returned from the light:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:47PM by steve benson.

Elciz is one of those people who think the plural of "anecdote" is "data.."

Here is an idea for an experiment that would prove the existence of an afterlife: have one person pass a message on to a loved one in the afterlife. Then have another person with the same loved one have an NDE and ask what the message was. If the second person received the correct message then we all go back to church. If the message is not passed on correctly then we dismiss the possibility of an afterlife and find something else to argue about. Does that sound fair?

Not really. Proving that two people have some sort of connection that seems to be supernatural doesn't make Mormonism any less false.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 01:56PM by steve benson.

It's like claiming one totally dark room is less dark than another.

Thanks for this, JS: Here are some comments:

First, it should be noted that gamma waves in humans is not uncommon, and is associated with conscious experience itself, including dreaming. Moreover, surges can be induced by drugs. The view that such waves cause consciousness (let alone near-death experiences) is highly controversial, and is certainly the minority view. But in any event, the existence of gamma waves at death, or near death, however interesting, definitely does not provide any evidence of the cause of near-death experiences. Otherwise, it is likely that such experiences, including their detailed patterns, could consistently be induced by drugs that spike such waves.

What is relevant in the context of near-death experiences is not just the role of gamma waves, but the specific and consistent effect such waves have on neuronal patterns at death or near death. After all, the substance of any such near-death experiences are products not just of general brain activity, however intense, but the specific neural firing components generated by such activity, if any.

Also, it seems highly unlikely that a 30 second spike in gamma waves of itself could produce the much longer and elaborate near-death experiences.

That said, a spike in gamma waves certainly could be an important component of such experiences, and suggests an important research program for further study.

You know, like a car engine sputtering and sparking before it gives up the ghost, so to speak. Simple as that. Science is a beautiful thing; no need to gum it up with the engine-oil sludge of religious make-believe.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 02:12PM by steve benson.