EEG and NDE's

jerbear_13

We behold what we are, and we are what we behold
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I recently listened to episode 281 and EEG technology seemed to be a hot topic of conversation. I skimmed through the official thread for episode 281 but didn't find much discussion on it. So my question is, some naturalist scientists say that the EEG is a crude instrument and can't detail if a person is actually dead. Does this change your mind on the concept of NDE's? Does it make you think that because of this, we can't conclude that a person is actually dead during an NDE? Does it support claims of hallucination? Is the EEG actually a good instrument to diagnose death? I was a little put off by this as someone who both believes to a degree and wants to fully believe in NDE's.
 
I recently listened to episode 281 and EEG technology seemed to be a hot topic of conversation. I skimmed through the official thread for episode 281 but didn't find much discussion on it. So my question is, some naturalist scientists say that the EEG is a crude instrument and can't detail if a person is actually dead. Does this change your mind on the concept of NDE's? Does it make you think that because of this, we can't conclude that a person is actually dead during an NDE? Does it support claims of hallucination? Is the EEG actually a good instrument to diagnose death? I was a little put off by this as someone who both believes to a degree and wants to fully believe in NDE's.

I understand . I get doubtful often as well but until they can explain all the veridical evidence, then it’s just another assumption , cherry picking certain issues. To a skeptic, it will be more proof it’s all an illusion and to a believer, it might not even matter but objectively, I don’t think it means much. We already know people have out of body experiences under all sorts of “non clinical death” situations but that doesn’t nullify those who have NDE’s and are clinically dead or near it .
 
I understand . I get doubtful often as well but until they can explain all the veridical evidence, then it’s just another assumption , cherry picking certain issues. To a skeptic, it will be more proof it’s all an illusion and to a believer, it might not even matter but objectively, I don’t think it means much. We already know people have out of body experiences under all sorts of “non clinical death” situations but that doesn’t nullify those who have NDE’s and are clinically dead or near it .

I agree with that. It’s easy to get lost in the cherry picking of my own ideas and knowledge. I often forget the NDE’s are just a small piece of the puzzle of consciousness. Even if they were disproven (which I think would be very hard, if not impossible) I don’t think it would mean much in terms of consciousness be transcendental. Hopefully we are entering an era where more people will actually try to study these things outside of the standard naturalist model.
 
I recently listened to episode 281 and EEG technology seemed to be a hot topic of conversation. I skimmed through the official thread for episode 281 but didn't find much discussion on it. So my question is, some naturalist scientists say that the EEG is a crude instrument and can't detail if a person is actually dead. Does this change your mind on the concept of NDE's? Does it make you think that because of this, we can't conclude that a person is actually dead during an NDE? Does it support claims of hallucination? Is the EEG actually a good instrument to diagnose death? I was a little put off by this as someone who both believes to a degree and wants to fully believe in NDE's.

There are no grounds upon which to argue that a nearly dormant brain can produce an NDE because to make that argument you have to ignore all the evidence used to argue the brain produces consciousness in the first place. And NDE's sometimes occur when the brain is in a normal state not near death - the argument that NDEs are real is supported by but does not depend on the evidence that they occur when the brain is dormant. Some NDEs produce verifiable information that could not be obtained through the patients normal senses even if they were conscious. Sometimes multiple victims share an NDE and sometimes caregivers share an NDE with the patient.

Hallucinations cannot explain nde's:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/07/...-of-ndes-fail.html#nde_explain_hallucinations
Hallucinations:
Hogan
1. Incredibly accurate and verifiable information results from the NDE that would not result from a hallucination.

2. People on drugs who have NDEs actually see fewer deceased relatives when they travel out of body. This suggests that people who do see relatives are clear minded, not hallucinating.

3. People see deceased relatives but not living relatives in their NDEs. In some cases, children see dead relatives whom they had never met or seen pictures of. That could not result from a hallucination.212

...

Turning to the question of whether the NDE was a hallucination (the most common skeptical argument), they [Sabom and Ring] both noted that a hallucination is accompanied by heightened brain activity. But their studies produced data showing that NDEs happened more often when neuroophysiological activity was reduced, not increased. Sabom also found that NDEs were more likely when the person was unconscious for longer than 30 minutes; Ring found that the closer people were to physical death, the more extensive the NDE.213
near-death.com See section below on brain chemicals.
Long
The percentage of time that people encounter deceased relatives is extremely high. It was actually 96% in the NDERF study and only 4% of near-death experiencers met beings who were alive at the time of the near-death experience. That’s actually corroborated by another major scholarly study which found it was 95% of the time that they encountered beings they knew from their earthly life that were deceased.

The important thing is that any other experience of altered consciousness that we experience on earth, dreams, hallucinations, drug experiences, you name it; all of these other types of experiences of altered consciousness, a vastly higher percentage of people are going to be alive at the time of their experience.

You're going to remember the banker that you did business with that day or your family member you said hi to as you were walking into the house. This is what's in the forefront of consciousness. So for people to so consistently encounter deceased relatives is very, very strong evidence that they are, indeed, in an unearthly realm and it certainly points to evidence of an afterlife.

...

People in general, all other hallucinatory events, dreams, all other temporary, transient, even pathological alterations of consciousness are essentially never going to result in that high a percentage of people experiencing them going on and have those types of profound life changes that we see in near-death experiencers.

And moreover, what you see in the life changes of near-death experiencers is markedly consistent. In other words, it’s not just that they have life changes; it’s the consistency of those life changes. The substantial majority, if not overwhelming majority of near-death experiencers believe that there’s an afterlife. They believe that there’s a God. They no longer fear death. They’re less materialistic. They value loving relationships more. The list goes on and on. I consistently observed, not only in the NDERF study but from scores of prior scholarly studies of this phenomenon over 30 years.



None of the materialist attempts to explain NDEs can really explain them. NDEs cannot be explained by: a lack of oxygen, a dying brain, hallucinations, religious expectations, cultural expectations, hearing about medical procedures after the fact, hearing during resuscitation, brain dysfunction, inhibitory network failure, retinal dysfunction causing an image of a tunnel, brain chemicals such as ketamine, endogenous opioids, neurotransmitter imbalances, or hallucinogens including DMT, REM intrusions, epilepsy or seizures, psychopathology, unique personality traits, residual brain activity during unconsciousness, the experience occurring before or after brain activity stopped, brain activity during CPR, evolutionary adaptation, depersonalization, memory of birth, medication, naloxone, defense against dying, partial anesthesia, misuse of anecdotes, or selective reporting.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/07/materialist-explanations-of-ndes-fail.html
 
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There was some electrical activity found in the brain of rats as they died up to 30 seconds after their heart stopped (what Parnia would call Clinical Death)
Here's the skeptic take: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ould-explain-near-death-experiences-28726479/
Sam Parnia's take on the rat study:
“…While some investigators have hypothesized there may be a brief surge of electricity after cardiac standstill, (16) in contrast to anesthesia typically there is no measurable brain function within seconds after cardiac standstill.(17-21)”

“16. Borjigin J, Lee U, Liu T et. al. Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2013;110:14432-7.
“17. Bennett DR, Nord NM, Roberts TS, Mavor H. Prolonged “survival” with flat EEG following CA. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1971:30-94.
“18. Cerchiari EL, Sclabassi RJ, Safar P, Hoel TM. Effects of combined superoxide dismutase and deferoxamine on recovery of brainstem auditory evoked potentials and EEG after asphyxial CA in dogs. Resuscitation 1990; 19:25-40.
“19. Crow HJ, Winter A. Serial electrophysiological studies (EEG, EMG, ERG, evoked responses) in a case of 3 months’ survival with flat EEG following CA. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1969; 27:332-3.
“20. Hughes JR, Uppal H. The EEG changes during CA: a case report. Clin Electroencephalogr 1988; 29:16-8.
“21. Kano T, Hashiguchi A, Sadanaga M. Cardiopulmonary-cerebral resuscitation by using cardiopulmonary bypass through the feral vein and artery in dogs. Resuscitation 1993; 25:265-81.”

the study itself: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/14432

And an absolutely abysmal article written years later to remind us: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...iousness-sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html
 
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While to my knowledge such a pulse has never been found in a human brain many NDE experiences seem to last far longer than just 30 seconds anyways, if anyone could confirm this that would be great.
 
http://www.skeptiko.com/172-melvin-morse-doctors-do-not-listen-to-near-death-experience-accounts/
Dr. Melvin Morse: So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.​
 
I recently listened to episode 281 and EEG technology seemed to be a hot topic of conversation. I skimmed through the official thread for episode 281 but didn't find much discussion on it. So my question is, some naturalist scientists say that the EEG is a crude instrument and can't detail if a person is actually dead. Does this change your mind on the concept of NDE's? Does it make you think that because of this, we can't conclude that a person is actually dead during an NDE? Does it support claims of hallucination? Is the EEG actually a good instrument to diagnose death? I was a little put off by this as someone who both believes to a degree and wants to fully believe in NDE's.

Reasons why the hallucination theory fails horribly

1) Shared Death Experiences


2) The Blind seeing for the first time during NDE's, and the deaf hearing for the first time


3) Veridical NDE's

People floating outside their bodies (often to other rooms) to report conversations and events which later check out as accurate. There are a great deal of these on record


4) These events are life altering. People change permanently. They report a non-existence of time. Those are two (there are many more) rather bizarrely common reportedly themes of NDE's. This doesnt fit the notion that they are Hallucinations, which are disorganized and bizarre and rarely make sense, and generally have no typical after effects. In contrast, NDE's are reported as being more real and clear than everyday real life, and makes every day existence seem like a mere dream.

5) People very frequently encounter dead people. Notice, theyre not meeting living people. Strange coincidence if its a dream that all the people they run into just so happen to be dead. And why are people hallucinating something which is like what we would think the afterlife would be? Why are there profound and intelligent moral lessons which are learned? Why this undescribable state of love expressed during these expriences?

6) Tons of reports of people given information about the future, which eventually came true



7) Miraculous healings which people were told would occur during their NDE's, and actually occur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPmtfW3BIGs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X7b5pc-20k&t=219s

Skeptics like to offer up explanations which (at best) cover about 10 percent of the facts
 
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