Neurologists Shine Light On Near-Death Experiences 351
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mainstream science has long considered the brain to be inactive during the period known to doctors as clinical death. However, survivors regularly report having powerful experiences when they come close to dying, often saying they had an overwhelming feeling of peace and serenity. Frequently they describe being in a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end, and many report meeting long-lost loved ones. 'Many of them think it's evidence they actually went to heaven — perhaps even spoke with God,' says Jimo Borjigin. Now scientists at the University of Michigan have found that the brain keeps on working for up to 30 seconds after blood flow stops, possibly providing a scientific explanation for the vivid near-death experiences that some people report after surviving a heart attack. In the study, lab rats were anesthetized, then subjected to induced cardiac arrest as part of the experiment while researchers analyzed changes in power density, coherence, directed connectivity, and cross-frequency coupling. In the first 30 seconds after their hearts were stopped, they all showed a surge of brain activity, observed in electroencephalograms (EEGs) that indicated highly aroused mental states. 'We were surprised by the high levels of activity,' says George Mashour. 'In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death.' Borjigan thinks the phenomenon is really just the brain going on hyperalert to survive while at the same time trying to make sense of all those neurons firing and it's like a more intense version of dreaming. 'The near-death experience is perhaps really the byproduct of the brain's attempt to save itself,' says Borjigan"
While interesting, it's important to remind ourselves that this research is not conclusive: "Borjigin and Mashour hesitate to state a direct connection between their findings and near-death experiences. The links are merely speculative at this point and provide a framework for a human study, Borjigin said."
Guillotine (Score:5, Interesting)
Upload in progress (Score:5, Interesting)
I died and was brought back to life (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a heart attack on Mar. 1, 2010. I stayed conscious, although in heavy pain. Got stents put in, was sent home on Mar. 4... and had congestive heart failure about 6 hours after I was out of the hospital. This time, my heart just plain stopped. I was dead. EMS dudes shocked me back to life and got me to the hospital where I was treated. I obviously survived.
But I was dead for between 3 and 4 minutes before the EMS crew got to me. No breathing, no heartbeat.
White lights and tunnels? No. Everything faded to black. That was it. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. No gods or angels. Just... nothing.
Re:Guillotine (Score:2, Interesting)
The catastrophic loss of blood pressure (from both neck arteries being severed) should cause instant unconsciousness.
Re:Neurologists Shine Light On Near-Death Experien (Score:5, Interesting)
Discover magazine had something similar, where they studied nematodes and found that some sort of signal propagated through the gut that would tell all of the cells to shut the whole thing down.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612587/ [nih.gov]
More interestingly, they were looking at ways to block or delay that signal. So then even if part of a multi-cellular organism died, the rest of it wouldn't know about it and keep going in a zombielike state.
But yeah, the cellular shutdown mechanism had something to do with the mitochondria, and it did release visible light in the brain cells as it was propagating through that area of the nematodes they were studying. So the bright light at the end of the tunnel is probably just the mitochondria of nearby cells in your optical cortex exploding.
Re:Out of Body? (Score:2, Interesting)
You already get improved memory and a sense of time slowing (really just improved memory and faster reaction time) in times of sudden, life threatening or high stress events. I've had the experience when hit by a car. It's not a hard stretch to assume that your brain, triggering everything in an attempt to find a way to stay alive, would have significant increase in memory details and non-failed sensors (hearing, sight, touch). Which of those people never had their eyes open anytime during the events? Which of those people couldn't hear others around them? Even with normal hearing I can get a vague sense of where everyone is around me and what they're doing, especially when they say things like "bring that stretcher over here". I don't have to see that to be able to envision the view and remember it. Your senses don't stop working just because you're unconscious.
The brain is a hyper mode trying to figure everything out. It needs to create a view of everything going on around it, not just from the view of the person's eyes. If you're thinking about everything you remember everything. We don't store video feeds in our brain but reconstruct our views from whatever is in memory and from past experiences. I find it easy to believe people's reconstructed memories include more than just a view from their eyes.
I can appreciate this as I watched my father die (Score:5, Interesting)
I was honored to be able to hold my father's hand when he passed away from stage IV lung cancer a few years back. One can never really say they are ready for a loved one to pass, but I was resigned to the fact, and therefore there weren't many emotions going through my head while telling my dad it was ok to let go. (I had read in a couple of places that scientists believe hearing might be one of the last senses to shut down immediately prior to death, so I figured I could do no harm telling him everything would be ok.)
One thing I did notice, and will probably never forget: In the moments up to his final breaths, while his BP was dropping, his eyes never stopped moving, It could have been involuntary movements, but they would stop for an instant as if to focus on something, then move again. He never acknowledged me while I was with him the last few hours, but his eyes: They would flick around the room as if he was looking for something, or maybe seeing something only he could see. The doctor said it was likely his vision had already shut down at that point, which made it all the more impactful on me. Even as his BP dwindled away to 0/0, after his breathing had stopped (no death rattle, just shallower and shallower, with increasing apnea gaps, until it simply stopped), his eyes made a few last furtive movements, then were still.
Who knows what my dad was seeing in his final moments? Obviously he didn't live to tell me about it. But the scientific part of my brain tells me something was going on his brain right up to the moment that he no longer had blood flowing through his brain.
That's what happens with most people (Score:5, Interesting)
NDEs are something that only a small percentage of the population experience. Most people just black out. Same deal with blood loss in the brain due to a centrifuge or the like. The government has studied it on military pilots and while most black out, some have NDE like experiences. At this point, we don't know why only some people experience it.
Re:Out of Body? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is frequently reported. Sometimes there seems to be evidence for the patient having visual knowledge not explainable by hallucinations.
There *IS* an explanation for the observation out there, but denying the observation because you don't know what that explanation is is rarely a path to knowledge.
Re:I can appreciate this as I watched my father di (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't have much to say in regards to conjecture about what he saw (or did not see) but I am sorry for your loss, and it is good that you were there to be with him for it and I thank you for not (based on what you said anyway) being selfish and refusing to let go. If only more people could do that.
I watched my grandfather refuse to let my grandmother go. Her passing took a full week, and it was painful. If he had let her go, it would have been quick and quiet.
Re:Out of Body? (Score:5, Interesting)
Near Death experiences provoke a lot of 'expert opinions' from people who are grossly ignorant. The best estimate of how many now still living people have reported a near death experience under clinical conditions alone is a seven or even eight digit number (well over a million people, and possibly over ten million, that is). I have been at conferences on this and heard professional speakers from the "scientific, it's just a brain state, in many ways like dreaming or halucinating" side of debates refer to the 'handful of documented cases' each year. Yet if you phoned your local hospital and asked them if anyone had ever reported a near death experience at that hospital, they would likely tell you they had a dozen cases just last year or similar figures.
I've asked experts just how many cases are reported each year, and had some, unfortunately way too many of them, say things such as "I'm not sure if they happen often enough that there is one in the west every single year." or "a few dozen or less".
It's pretty damned simple - make up your own mind on whether there's anything supernatural or not, or whether there's any connection between what's reported and 'life after death', 'heaven' and anything else, but don't let any 'expert' who comes up with a number less than 100,000 per year influence you. If you were having to make decisions about expanding existing air bag laws, and somebody who was billed as a transportation safety engineer said there were nearly three dozen automotive fatalities in the US last year, would you let him influence your judgement any further? If you were arguing one way or another on Obamacare, and somebody kept insisting the average cost of open heart surgery was $1.49, would you defer any further to his judgement? Or do you inform such people they are obviously not qualified to have an opinion and should let everybody who knows at least a few facts speak instead.
It may be very difficult to test who knows something meaningful about near death experiences. The number of new age gurus and such on one side of the debate turns many rationalists off to that side. But try asking a simple question in a manner designed to maximize the evidence based, rational analysis of the claim, like "How many NDEs are reported in hospital settings in a given year?", and you can at least clearly detect that some people have an extreme axe to grind.
"Hi! I'm off by six orders of magnetude!" is not a good introduction for a real working scientist.
Re:Guillotine (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, despite our "perception" of reflexes, will, and impulse, we may not actually "experience" anything until minutes or hours after the brain has time to digest it. Just because you feel like you thought and participated interactively does not mean you actually did -- all our actions could be some analogue of autonomous.
To wit some people surviving accidental/terrifying falls from heights often have no memory of the actual fall. Whether they "experienced" the fall and then just refuse to remember it because it is too traumatic, or whether they never experience it unless they remember it, is an open question,
Just another thing to ponder after you get bored with the "entire universe in an atom on my thumb" thing.
Re:Cool, But... (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't. This is selection bias on the part of many (less than rigorous) researchers.
Many people who are revived after near-death have no experiences at all. Many report dreams similar to those that occur during normal periods of unconsciousness.
I've always wondered if there are any studies comparing / contrasting NDE's for people of various cultural / religious backgrounds. It seems that researchers are typically only interested in the North American Christian perspective (or the odd atheist / agnostic when it suits their data points).
Re:Cool, But... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. Not popular to go against the herd, but having read numerous books on NDEs, there are people who met people they did not in any way know. Only later, to have a parent or relative bring over a box of photographs they dug out of the attic and find out the person in the NDE was actually a long dead relative that had died before they were born.
In one case, the person met in a NDE was a twin that they never knew they had. It turns out that the person did have a twin that died, but had never been told of it.
> We have a built-in need to figure out patterns
Yes, even when it would have been impossible to work out an unknown pattern!
Re:Out of Body? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's far rarer than dreaming; but 'Anton-Babinski Syndrome' provides some examples of a strange situation where a person is blind; but remains unaware of, and in denial of, that fact. If pressed for visual details, they will readily (but no more correctly than any other blind person taking an educated guess) confabulate descriptions of what the are 'seeing'. Very curious.
Then you've got the odd case of 'blindsight', where the is blind (they no longer 'see' consciously); but the eyes and some aspects of the visual system are intact, so they, despite being incapable of describing the scene and performing other tasks we associate with sight, are capable of performing well above chance on certain tests that rely on visual stimuli. It feels like guessing; but they are substantially better than ordinary blind people (who guess at chance, as one would expect) on those tests.
Yeah.... horseshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Where to begin...
1) the link between what they saw in rat's brains and any experience the rat may or may not have been having is merely inferred. All they actually have is an increase in activity, that's all. How or if that translates into the rat experiencing something specific and what it might be is pure conjecture. It is possible that the brain activates but the rat's consciousness or conscious awareness remains unawares. It may as well be terror the rat feels. We just don't know.
2) the link between this rat brain electrical activity and a specific human experience whose experiencers claim is not chaotic but has semantic meaning is the purest of pure conjecture. There is nothing, no-thing, linking these findings and this specific human experience but the sheerest of sheer conjecture, teetering daintily on the flimisiest of extrapolations.
3) it dodges the entire issue of what consciousness, conscious experience as opposed to things bumping into each other or chemically reacting, is. We don't suppose other compositions of matter - chairs, light switches, my computer- possess it, yet there it appears to be.
Thinking that consciousness is worth thinking about about goes in and out of fashion in academic and scientific circles.The glib answer offered up from some interpretations of materialism is- it's an epiphenomena of brains and nervous systems, on whom it appears to depend (how do we know that?).
The problem with that answer is it's a form of hand waving , of assuming the consequent (all consciousness "needs" matter), a defining away with words or in this case, referencing a process- neural activity. Instead of telling us what the thing is, it "explains" it away.
The real spooky implication of materialism is that consciousness may be omnipresent or exists sui generis in the universe. It's possible that it is the first among things and somehow gives rise to material in ways which are unknown.
We're stuck as a species of implicitly paradoxical materialists, who not only know for a fact that know we have conscious experience and thought but know further that this conscious experience and thought is the only means we have at discerning the material scientific truth about the world.
Chairs and tables which lack this also know nothing, or at least it seems that way.
I assert that the fact of conscious experience is the final frontier. Hypotheses non fingo. However, only someone with no scientific imagination supposes that the concepts and scientific frameworks known to her at the time she lives necessarily contain within them all the ideas needed to explain everything in the world, that there's not something which will come only later with the power to encompass all previous explanations, and extend them in a direction unimaginable by previous centuries of scientists, even into the realm of science fiction of "spirituality" .
Occam's razor is a proper thinking tool to decide between competing explanations, not defining ultimate scientific horizons.
People who have these experiences insist their nature is essentially *knowetic*, that they bear *meaning* and reveal a factual aspect of reality which was previously hidden.
This is the same "meaning" by the way that all semantic-bearing constructs in our environs - pictures, symbols, words, x-rays, scientific theories- are said to convey.
Many scientists equate these experiences with hallucinations. I submit that anyone making this certain, authoritative categorization is indulging in the priggish, short-sighted, self-satisfied kind of thinking that amuses us about long distant generations of 'scientists" and "doctors" with their clever, but technically constricted and ultimately wrong-headed theories of "stuff".
Re:Out of Body? (Score:4, Interesting)
I heard the same story, but everyone he asked could describe the poster in detail. And I heard he had a number written on top of one of the machines, and that was visible as well...
Or maybe I didn't, I don't rightly remember.
One this is for sure. I sincerely doubt there would be a poster of any sort permanently affixed in a sterile room.
Re:Neurologists Shine Light On Near-Death Experien (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you imagine that the human brain behaves much differently during death than rat brains?
I think it might, depending on how much our self-consciousness contributes to the interpretation of the sensations.
I came close to bleeding to death once when I was living in a remote site. After a motorbike accident, I was in the back seat of a car being driven cross-country towards a hospital a few hours away, and gradually lost enough blood to pass out. I was revived with a blood transfusion in an ambulance that had driven out to the main road to meet us, but would have died without waking if they hadn't got there in time.
I mostly remember being very very cold and asking for blankets, despite it being a 35c day. My vision faded in and out, not by getting dark but by losing contrast. Even when I could see clearly, my mind would drift and not grasp anything I was seeing. There was whiteness, like light, but washed out from fading colour, not a bright source, Sound faded in and out in a similar way, and I strongly remember a woman sobbing, but little else, though the friends who were in the car tell me they were talking to me, and I sometimes responded.
Apart from the cold, and a sense of sadness that might have come from my crying friend, it was not at all distressing. Quite tranquil in fact, but for me, it was not mystical at all. I have no belief in gods or afterlifes, but I imagine someone from a religious background would have interpreted the physical experiences very differently. .
Re:Out of Body? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, indeed.
An academic neurosurgeon called Eben Alexander contracted a severe case of bacterial meningitis. After he recovered, he could not, from what he knew of the brain, explain where in the brain he could have been creating the rich experiences he had. The hallucination would have had to happen somewhere in the brain, and he recalls they were very rich, cognitively sophisticated, highly structured experiences.
But those parts of his brain which are normally said to be responsible for rich experience were in a soup of pus, bacteria, and comatose.
Anyway, if one can stomach the book title ("Proof of Heaven") and get past that obvious religious selling point, the actual story he tells is interesting. He could be wrong of course about where in the brain his experiences were happening, or when they were happening, but as he says, when he was operating on people, if they reported anything unusual, he'd just tell them that they had been very sick. Now that he's experienced it himself, he doesn't see how that amount of rich detailed and structured experience could have been generated by a sick brain.
Basically, we don't understand much about the brain, or how it relates to consciousness. The parts of his brain that are known to create rich experience were not available at the time of the sickness. So there's a lot that's not known.
Just to restate for clarity's sake: if the experience he had were really created by the brain, then most of what is known about the brain is wrong.