The big remaining question, she wrote in an e-mail, is this:. It would also help us understand why NDEs have such a profound effect on those who experience them. One of the speakers at the conference, Alana Karran, an executive coach who led a guided meditation that retraced the steps of a typical NDE, helped me understand the significance of that sequence.
The quest underlies just about every form of storytelling, from religious myth to Greek epic to Hollywood blockbuster to personal memoir. In this structure, a protagonist is shaken out of his normal way of life by some disturbance and—often reluctantly at first, but at the urging of some kind of mentor or wise figure—strikes out on a journey to an unfamiliar realm. There he faces tests, battles enemies, questions the loyalty of friends and allies, withstands a climactic ordeal, teeters on the brink of failure or death, and ultimately returns to where he began, victorious but in some way transformed.
Many of the NDEs people relate follow some version of this structure. After spending some time going back and forth between the two realms, he descends one last time into the dark place where he began, only this time the grotesque creatures have been replaced by the faces of people praying for him.
It offers the possibility of an escape from something that holds you back, and a transformation into something better. Nobody at the conference better personified the hope for redemption and transformation than Jeff Olsen, one of the two keynote speakers.
Lying in the wreckage with his back broken, one arm nearly torn off, and one leg destroyed, he was for a while conscious enough to register that his 7-year-old son was crying but his wife and infant son were silent.
He seemed to find himself in a room with a crib, holding the son who had been killed. This is key to what makes near-death experiences so powerful, and why people cling so strongly to them regardless of the scientific evidence.
Whether you actually saw a divine being or your brain was merely pumping out chemicals like never before, the experience is so intense and new that it forces you to rethink your place on Earth. If the NDE happened during a tragedy, it provides a way to make sense of that tragedy and rebuild your life. If your life has been a struggle with illness or doubt, an NDE sets you in a different direction: you nearly died, so something has to change.
There appeared to be nobody at the conference who thought that near-death experiences are just a product of physical processes in the brain.
But there were several people whose talks promised to address the science of NDEs. Alan Hugenot is a middle-aged mechanical engineer who walks and talks with a kinetic intensity, as if he can barely keep himself from ricocheting off the walls. But what makes them scientists is that they know and maintain the distinction between scientific theories, which must be testable against observable evidence, and mysticism or speculation.
This, Mays said, is the explanation that resolves both the problem of how a series of electrical impulses in the brain becomes the sensation of consciousness and the mystery of near-death experiences. Mays, at least, was extremely specific about which brain cells he thinks the mind entity interacts with in order to control the brain. For all their differences in style and subject matter, Mays, Hugenot, and others are offering similar visions: large, all-encompassing explanations that link things people know to be true with things they would like to be true and that bring a sense of order to the universe.
It makes sense that NDErs would find such stuff compelling. But why was there so much resistance at the conference to real, solid science? At my breakfast with Diane Corcoran, I asked her why nobody at the conference seemed to be discussing the materialist position.
Most people who do that have not investigated the field in any serious way. At some level, I find this reasonable. A lot of writing about NDEs does not merely question experiencers but ridicules them. Nonetheless, at the conference I encountered not just resistance to but a great many misconceptions about science. In the hotel corridors, I ran into Hugenot.
The whole point of scientific theories, I said, is that they have to be testable. Testable means falsifiable: you have to be able in principle to do an experiment that might show a theory to be wrong. Every time the theory survives such a test, our confidence in it increases. So how, I asked, is a conscious universe testable? But which way is down? If you change perspective and imagine the ground above us, maybe down is up. I moved to hold the cup up over his head and offered to test that theory.
He laughed loudly and nervously. By the third day of the conference, I was starting to despair of finding a voice of reason. Everyone seemed to be on a spectrum ranging from pseudoscience to full-blown mysticism, with a lot of sheer ignorance in the middle. Liester, a tall, craggily handsome psychiatrist who trained at the University of Colorado and the University of California at Irvine, has a gentle, accepting manner that makes you want to tell him everything.
His medical training made him skeptical about near-death experiences, he told me. But while he was in school his grandfather had one, and then he kept on meeting other experiencers—not always patients. So, I asked him, where does he himself stand on the idea that mind and body are separate?
Is there a middle ground, I asked, between the spiritualists and the materialists? Every Monday, Liester has breakfast with a small, eclectic group. It includes a physicist, a materials scientist, an artist, a chaplain with a philosophy degree, and a hospice counselor who is also a Native American sun dancer.
They talk about how to take NDE research forward with a rigorous scientific attitude but an open mind. In our conversation and in a subsequent e-mail, Liester outlined a few areas that researchers might pursue more deeply. They could study people who claim special spiritual powers, such as shamans.
They could try to probe the nature of the memories formed during NDEs, and how they differ from ordinary memories Liester is working on this. They could devise experimentally sound ways to test the claims of people who say they have become sensitive to electromagnetic fields or can interfere with electronic devices.
They could do more research into the death spike that the University of Michigan researchers found in rats, and perhaps even attempt to isolate it in human patients. Even if research ultimately shows —as most scientists assume it will—that NDEs are nothing more than the product of spasms in a dying brain, there is a good reason to pursue the investigation, which is that they pose a challenge to our understanding of one of the most mysterious issues in science: consciousness.
The boundary between life and death, which used to be thought sharp, has grown ever fuzzier. Brain cells deprived of oxygen can take many hours to decay to the point of no return, especially if kept cold—hence the cases of people reviving after being buried in snowdrifts or falling into freezing lakes.
To some people, this is simply further evidence that the mind must be able to exist independently of the body—or else where does it go when the brain is dead? Rather, it shows that the mind and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain, knitted together somehow by all the physical and chemical processes in our nervous system. But if so, then how does that knitting occur? This is the crucial question for consciousness studies. George A.
Mashour, one of the co-authors of the University of Michigan study on rats, is firmly in the materialist camp. If we could establish that spikes in neural activity occur in a dying human brain like the ones Mashour and his colleagues saw in rats, that could both help explain near-death experiences and give us some clues about the neurobiological nature of consciousness.
The question of how consciousness emerges is in fact likely to be one of the defining problems of the 21st century, when we might first be able to create machines as complex as the human brain. Ketamine produces these effects by acting at N-methyl-D-aspartate NMDA receptors, the same receptors utilized by other recreational drugs, such as amphetamines.
When an animal is under extreme stress , dopamine and opioid pathways are known to trigger. These reward pathways seem to come into play during traumatic events; although we do not know exactly why this should be, they no doubt evolved to be of assistance in times of extreme danger. A brain in shock, being flooded by natural opioids, can go some of the way to explaining the intense feelings of quiet and calm. Possibly the most well-known facet of an NDE is the feeling of being drawn into a long tunnel with a bright light at the end.
Some researchers believe that this phenomenon can be explained by retinal ischemia lack of oxygen to the retina. The theory goes that, as the retina is starved of oxygen, peripheral vision slowly decays and only the center of the visual field can be seen.
Tunnel vision is a symptom of both extreme fear and oxygen loss hypoxia , both of which are often present during the process of dying. No doubt, NDEs are a complex phenomenon with a myriad of mechanisms behind them.
From a lack of oxygen affecting the visual system to a brain struggling to make sense of strange emotions; from the drug-like triggering of reward pathways and a host of cultural expectations. Being close to death or believing that you are is a unique physiological and psychological experience.
It is little wonder that it produces such a confusion of sights and sounds. The precise nature of each NDE will not be unraveled for many years.
One thing is for sure, NDEs are fascinating and are probably nothing to do with the afterlife. Hand massage devices may help relieve pain and improve flexibility. Learn more here. A new study showed that virtual reality-guided breathing led to a similar increase in the ability to withstand pain as traditional mindful breathing. TENS units may help treat pain by sending small electrical impulses through the nervous system.
Here we look at 7 of the best units. New research finds that people with widespread pain had a higher risk of all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and stroke. A study finds that the distribution of pain in a person's body is sufficient to predict whether pain and physical function will improve 3 months later.
Near-death experiences: Fact or fantasy? Written by Tim Newman on April 27, Share on Pinterest Near-death experiences: not as paranormal as they sound? What do NDEs consist of? Cultural flexibility in NDEs. What is behind NDEs? Share on Pinterest Ghostly apparitions are not necessarily rooted in another dimension. Exposure to air pollutants may amplify risk for depression in healthy individuals. Assuming from the start that these awkward experiences are only worthless epiphenomena of brain circuitry may be misleading because all products of the mind are of the same nature, including science itself, while their conceivability and plausibility depend on the paradigm adopted and, more generally, on the Zeitgeist.
Figure 1. Physiological and pathological contexts giving rise to NDEs, NDE-like experiences, and non-ordinary experiences of transcendental tone.
These experiences might involve the same brain areas and neurotransmitters an example of which is given here , and their dysfunctions seem to be understood rather better than their physiology. The latter belongs to the world of spirituality and the highest expressions of the human mind and culture, and the meaning of these experiences cannot be reduced a priori to a mere brain circuitry dysfunction simply because they look awkward from a materialistic perspective. Other transcendent experiences that have nothing to do with NDEs might rate highly on the Greyson scale.
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