Near Death Experiences occur while the brain is functioning. There is no evidence that the brain is dead during an NDE.
Most people don’t meet Jesus. They usually see a tunnel, etc. They might have a spiritual experience, but that experience depends on their culture. Muslims don’t see Jesus.
This is in line with with other spiritual experiences you might have when taking LSD or just before a seizure. It has to do with an altered brain, but not a brain that is dead.
I’m not aware of any “impossible to know information”. I would be interested in any well-documented evidence of anything psychic or magical.
Don’t get me wrong, “A person is dead when their brain is dead” is a very rational assumption, but there isn’t any way to prove it.
The most obvious evidence that a person is their mind is when something happens to the brain, and the person inside changes.
I’m just looking around for whatever I can find at the moment…
Leslie Kean, a journalist who has written extensively about near-death experiences, says there is evidence that human consciousness exists independently of the body and that it survives physical death. In many NDE’s, similar to Brinkley’s, she writes, people are able to accurately describe what was happening while their brains were dead, when they had no ability to see or hear anything. “There are many cases in which the cardiac arrest is happening with a doctor present. They’re documenting the fact that there’s no brain activity,” Kean [told Mystery Wire] in an earlier interview. “The case of Pam Reynolds is another extraordinary one, where they can’t possibly have consciousness, and yet they do have consciousness, they’re able to go out and report back things that were happening in the environment, things that they heard things that they saw in the environment, when they had absolutely no brain activity.”
The study reported in Lancet looked at 344 patients in the Netherlands who were successfully resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest in 10 Dutch hospitals.
Rather than using data from people reporting past near-death experiences, researchers talked to patients within a week after they had suffered clinical deaths and been resuscitated. (Clincical death was defined as a period of unconsciousness caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain.)
About 18 percent of the patients in the study reported being able to recall some portion of what happened when they were clinically dead; and 8 to 12 percent reported going through “near-death” experiences, such as seeing lights at the end of tunnels, or being able to speak to dead relatives or friends. Most had excellent recall of the events, which undermines the theory that the memories are false, the study said.
If I have a stroke, I may have trouble talking. But it may still be the same me inside, despite my inability to communicate. Not exactly sure what you mean by “the person inside changes”, how we know that to be true. But you can still observe people living, I don’t see how that validates anything about death?
I’m reading that there is brain activity at 5 weeks, although to your later point certainly not what we’d consider a personality.
Heartbeats are detectable (using current technology) around 6 weeks and while IANAD, my understanding is that the brain is telling the heart to beat, so a beating heart would also indicate some level of brain activity.
By 10 weeks the fetus is yawning, stretching, grasping and sucking its thumb, among other things… stuff that I would say is indicative of a personality.
We can observe that damage to the brain also damages personality.
More physical damage tends to leave less of the person.
It is a reasonable extrapolation that complete damage completely destroys the person.
I don’t know how it is possible to match a moment of near death consciousness with a moment in time that it is impossible for a person to be conscious. How do we know the person’s memory isn’t simply reconstructing events that way, and imagining consciousness at that moment?
More generally, how does the person remember the experience of the brain was not functioning? It would seem to need to involve some kind of new physics or similar. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but to support such a claim would require very strong evidence.
I checked your examples. Similar to other phenomenon like ghosts or ESP, the experiences are interesting but the key points are not convincing. I appreciate the thought though.
Seeing ongoing events from a location apart from the physical body while unconscious (out-of-body experience)
A common characteristic of near-death experiences is an out-of-body experience. An out-of-body experience (OBE) is the apparent separation of consciousness from the body. About 45% of near-death experiencers report OBEs which involves them seeing and often hearing ongoing earthly events from a perspective that is apart, and usually above, their physical bodies. Following cardiac arrest, NDErs may see, and later accurately describe, their own resuscitation.
The first prospective study of the accuracy of out-of-body observations during near-death experiences was by Dr. Michael Sabom.8 This study investigated a group of patients who had cardiac arrests with NDEs that included OBEs, and compared them with a control group of patients who experienced cardiac crises but did not have NDEs. Both groups of patients were asked to describe their own resuscitation as best they could. Sabom found that the group of NDE patients were much more accurate than the control group in describing their own resuscitations.
Another prospective study of out-of-body observations during near-death experiences with similar methodology to Sabom’s study was published by Dr. Penny Sartori.9 This study also found that near-death experiencers were often remarkably accurate in describing details of their own resuscitations. The control group that did not have NDEs was highly inaccurate and often could only guess at what occurred during their resuscitations.
There have been a few case reports of near-death experiences in the blind. The largest study of this was by Dr. Kenneth Ring.15 This Investigation included 31 blind or substantially visually impaired individuals who had NDEs or out-of-body experiences. Of the 31 individuals in the study, 10 were not facing life-threatening events at the time of their experiences, and thus their experiences were not NDEs. There were 14 individuals who were blind from birth in this study, and nine of them described vision during their experiences. This investigation presented case reports of those born totally blind that described in NDEs that were highly visual with content consistent with typical NDEs.
Seems like a weirdly benign example. There are endless psychological disorders caused by brain function that dramatically shape people’s thoughts, experiences, emotions, memories, beliefs, relationships, and personality.
I think human beings are important even without believing in a soul, in the religious sense of the word. I think other people’s lives and welfare have a lot of moral value.
I think a human embryo has some moral value, too. Just not nearly as much as a human being. Maybe more like a dog or a mature tree. That was a decent example.
This is the right direction, however it doesn’t offer much useful evidence. If we assume the NDEs really are aware of their resuscitation, it could just be because they are alive and listening in.
The first thing to prove is that the brain is dead, and not just dying. Unfortunately our ability to see into the brain is limited, but an EEG would be a good start.
The second, more magical thing would be to prove that they can see things that they wouldn’t be able to hear or guess at. Really that applies to any vision, dream, esp, or out of body experience.
If we could get at something like that, then we could start down a review of magical explanations.
I realize that’s a somewhat tall order, but presumably millions of NDEs are recorded on video and with lots of medical diagnostic equipment. Just need to gather the data. And if it would prove something as special as a soul or spirit, it would be absolutely worth it.
People that are blind having NDE’s temporarily becoming able to see and describe the situation as if they could see. Obviously they weren’t getting this faculty from their existing body. That isn’t useful evidednce?
I don’t have much to add other than my recollection of this podcast was that the experience is fairly similar for all cultures and religions. None of which necessarily point to the truth of any specific religion. He also shares some stories of people learning things in these vision they couldn’t have possibly known.
It was a pretty good interview (as most AoM podcasts are) and may be a place to start if you are interested in exploring the topic further.
No. Not unless they prove that they can see. That would be interesting, though not really any more interesting than any other NDE that is able to see while lying unconscious with their eyes closed.
Far from the topic of NDE, but related to the brain seeing stuff …
My mom had macular degeneration. Extremely frustrating, she couldn’t see anything she looked at, but always had some peripheral vision. After a while, she started seeing stuff. Like “There’s a blonde girl sitting on the back of the couch with a frilly yellow dress and bare feet, doing something with her hands.” My mom thought she was “going crazy”. Fortunately, I found Charles Bonnet syndrome - Macular Society…
Made my mom feel a lot better and convinced me that brains can create surprisingly detailed images out of nothing.