RichardRoe
New
Parnia did make it fairly clear back in 2010 that he thought these experiences were probably "an illusion" but that he was open minded enough to find out what the experimental results were. And I think that was an honorable position to take, and that he didn't deserve the lambasting he got for it from various sources.
I don't really think it's an accident, however, that we've barely heard a peep out of the man since those results finally came in. When you combine these findings with the Olaf Blanke data, it's really a pretty strong case, in data, that would now need to be overturned for this *not* to be a form of perceptual illusion.
Parnia did make it fairly clear back in 2013 and now in 2014:
"The point that goes against the experiences happening afterwards, or before the brain shut down, is that many people describe very specific details of what happened to them during cardiac arrest. They describe conversations people had, clothes people wore, events that went on 10 or 20 minutes into resuscitation. That is not compatible with brain activity.
It may be that some people receive better-quality resuscitation, and that — though there’s no evidence to support it — they did have brain activity. Or it could indicate that human consciousness, the psyche, the soul, the self, continued to function."
"the brain is more like a RAM than a hard drive, so that “memories can be stored in our consciousness, psyche, or soul even in the absence of brain function."
"
When you die, there’s no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can’t have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there’s somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn’t working.
"These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don’t go on after death"
To all that must be added the numerous reports of people in NDEs accurately recalling specific conversations and events that occurred—in and sometimes out of their operating rooms—while they had no brain function. Parnia recounts one case where a new doctor, dealing with a patient in a prolonged cardiac arrest, ate the patient’s lunch. After recovery, the patient described to the doctor a detailed NDE, and finished with: “And you ate my lunch!”
" All we can say now is that the data suggests that consciousness is not annihilated."
Olaf Blanke?....
As Pim van Lommel noted, the abnormal bodily experiences described by Blanke and colleagues entail a false sense of reality. Typical OBEs, in contrast, implicate a verifiable perception (from a position above or outside of the body) of events, such as their own resuscitation or a traffic accident, and the surroundings in which the events took place.
The "OBE's" found there included distortion of body image and illusion of bodily movement.
http://www.wired.com/2013/04/consciousness-after-death/all/
https://iands.org/research/importan...y-experiences-all-in-the-brain.html?showall=1
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/0...s-where-the-field-is-leading/?singlepage=true