Top Ten NDE Myths

Hello Haruhi. I am well acquainted with NDE research and once had an article published in the Journal of Near Death Studies. Veridical experiences, lucidity, etc, are evidence of a state, not a culture.

Kay, you had once an article published in JNDS? Just tell me: which one and under what name? I have virtually all issues from the early eighties onwards, so I can check it out

Question - if you are so well acquainted with the NDE, then why are you so negative about them? Why are you trying - in a "friendly" way, so it seems - to explain them away? Why do you play down those encounters with dead relatives, even if there are many cases of relatives the NDE'r in question had never heard of?

Your stance is a big enigma to me, Kay. I hope that friendly face of yours is not of someone who is playing the typical wolf in sheep clothing...;)
 
It becomes difficult to see what they are interested in then. Again, it's the problem of Einstein suddenly losing all interest in physics and maths and yet still being Einstein in any meaningful way. As to the dead being more interested in "spiritual things"...what are those exactly?
Well we can be pretty sure they're not interested in solving problems with physical consequences, because they have no need for them. Einstein is unlikely to stop being himself because he understands the answers to problems that interested him in the physical realm. Perhaps souls are happy to be enlightened, and see the neurotic pursuits of mortality in context, as compulsions they're glad to be released from?
 
The conclusion I have developped over the time is that NDEs are highly symbolic. I doubt that the entities encountered there are “real“ for how can it be assumed that dead friends are real, possibly angels as well, but that people who encounter living people or the rather fierce lord Yama (who has not much in common with the loving light of Western NEDs) are deluded or get it plain wrong? Please don't get me wrong. I think NDEs are significant experiences and are worth bein studied. But I think it also needs to ne acknowledged that they do possess hallicunatory features. I do not imply they are just hallucinations but point to the fact that they might not present an “absolute“ reality. By the way how did Dr. Sartori explain the features discussed here (living persons etc.)? As it is relevant she possibly formulated an opinion?
 
I wasn't aware that alcohol caused visual hallucinations, but then, I've only ever gotten so drunk in my life.

Use "intoxication" then and substitute whatever substance/condition you think would suit.

To be serious - is your heart beating regularly while you're drunk? Is there anything that would impair the ability off your brain to perform basic functions? Of course the context matters.

But that context is about distinguishing between what sorts of brain states may be present. I was talking about whether the experiences (the results of those brain states) could be distinguished (in the absence of knowing anything about the brain states).

Linda
 
What indeed does make NDEs special is the fact that they usually include a spiritual afterlife realm. I do not know of further examples that are similar to the “business trip case“ above. Evem the “weirder“ ones on the nderf website revolve around an afterlife theme. If they were simple hallucinations I'd expect more sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. And I assume that in cases of spontaneous life threatening events, where people cannot think a lot before falling unconsciousness, there is little reason to assume they have enough unconscious resources to create a coherent experience in an afterlife realm. So I can imagine that NDEs happen in a place/condition were individual consciousness meets the shared unconsciousness and therefore uses a language of symbols, images and archetypes. Survivalist or skeptiks, I think it needs to be recognized that NDEs are an experience of the mind and therefore work in a more unreliable way than “objective“reality...
 
A "state" is not a life unless we are talking about a kind of trance. I guess a non-mortal state might be a kind of trance. But this is what I mean when I say it's not evidence of "life." To call our own condition a "life before death" if it JUST consisted of "the waking state" and nothing else, would clearly be nonsense.

I do not understand, you entangled in theoretical considerations and you do not notice the evidence.
 
It's exactly the same as saying that the dead already have the secret to antigravity and the cure for cancer and the blueprint for the teleportation machine, but they don't want to share it with us because it will spoil our spiritual evolution (fragile bunnies that we are). I mean, what DO you say to something like that? All I can say is...there is a simpler explanation that actually makes use of empirics.

I told you that the spirits of the deceased do not have to know all those things. You stop to hold theoreticians assumptions and examine the evidence itself. Besides the hypothesis of postmortem communication is simpler than the super-psi hypothesis in the sense that psi is manifested most strongly just a survivalist context, the source of the information only needs to be an individual, the deceased, not a myriad of persons or things, etc.
 
Should the links below support your thesis?

Yes, in that they measure the frequency of the OBE, and in some cases distinguish between what we are interested in (the body and other scenes described from an out of body perspective) and sensations which we are less interested in (such as dissociative or floating sensations).

I ask because they don't and I am wondering if you are attaching references at random, or what else should they represent?

The study mentions the "loss of awareness of the body" in the features of the patient's experience but in the discussion the researchers clearly state: In this study, no out of body experiences occurred.

That's a good example of what I want to draw attention to. Some researchers will call any positive responses in the "did you feel separated from your body" section an OBE. The second link is an example of this (Table 2). This means that were those researchers looking at the Parnia et. al. study, they would report the incidence of OBE as 50% (similar to your original claim). But we are more interested in the out of body perspective when calling something an OBE, so some of the researchers refer to viewing the body from an external perspective as an OBE and not "loss of awareness" (e.g. Parnia et. al. and Sartori).

Again OBE is not described as simply: "lost awareness of the body". Instead:

(2) a sense of de- tachment from the physical body or sensation of floating out of the body, in which experiencers may find themselves looking down on their phys- ical
body and surroundings and perceive themselves as dying or being dead​
There is lost awareness, detachment, motion, perception of the surroundings, sight of the detached physical body

In terms of the sense of movement during the NDE, 5 patients (45 per- cent) reported floating, 3 (27 percent) reported moving without the body, 1 (9 percent) reported walking, and 1 (9 percent) reported dreamlike movement.None of the NDErs reported running, flying, or echoic move- ments. Five NDErs (45 percent) reported feeling peaceful on moving;

In regard to a sense of bodily separation, 10 NDErs (90 percent) reported feeling detached from the body but did not see it, whereas 2 (18 percent) reported being able to view their bodies.​

As you can see, a variety of sensations have the potential to be regarded as "did you feel separated from your body", but it is a relatively small portion of those which represent are what we are interested in (your (2) from above). So when you are looking to the research, it becomes important to look at the details. When there is a report of "Out-of-body experience...90%" does it really mean that 90% of the people had "a sense of de- tachment from the physical body or sensation of floating out of the body, in which experiencers may find themselves looking down on their physical body and surroundings and perceive themselves as dying or being dead" or was it 18%?

I'll try to get a loan from the bank to buy this one :)

Yeah, the availability of this information really sucks. It's a shame.​


How do you propose to improve this?

Make sure the interviewers ask questions which distinguish those experiences which represent the kind of out of body perspective of interest (which they do, as far as I can tell). A self-administered questionnaire could include a better description of an external perspective.

Linda
 
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What indeed does make NDEs special is the fact that they usually include a spiritual afterlife realm. I do not know of further examples that are similar to the “business trip case“ above.

You don't know about them because they don't get mentioned in the NDE literature. There are many of these kinds of descriptions among the descriptions of auditory and/or visual experiences. But since they aren't related to survival or transcendence, they aren't treated as relevant. It isn't that there aren't "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" experiences. It's that those experiences aren't called NDEs. You don't find out about them until you get someone who publishes all the transcripts from all the experiences.

Linda
 
Survivalist or skeptiks, I think it needs to be recognized that NDEs are an experience of the mind and therefore work in a more unreliable way than “objective“reality...
You'd have to explain how a non-working mind conjures more lucid and meaningful conclusions than a fully functioning one. You've simply removed the body of evidence you don't like the sound of, for the bits that fit your belief system.
 
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Yes, in that they measure the frequency of the OBE, and in some cases distinguish between what we are interested in (the body and other scenes described from an out of body perspective) and sensations which we are less interested in (such as dissociative or floating sensations).

1) Here's the wikipedia's definition of out of body experience:

An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside one's body (autoscopy).

2) You can very well see that NDE researchers go deeper than that and try to recognize different aspects of an OBE, including so called "veridical OBEs" which are the most interesting (and rare) anomalies.

Your argument doesn't hold water.
 
You don't know about them because they don't get mentioned in the NDE literature.
How do you know they don't if they are not there to begin with?
Come on Linda, you're from the side of those waving pink unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters! :D
Throwing one or two lines out of context from cherry picked study to prove your point is at least disingenuous.

Seriously, instead of wasting time coming up with unsubstantiated claims, go ahead and produce a well researched study about this ground breaking discovery of yours. You will revolutionize NDE research and be credited for an innovative perspective on a unsolved mystery.
 
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Survivalist or skeptiks, I think it needs to be recognized that NDEs are an experience of the mind and therefore work in a more unreliable way than “objective“reality...

I'm OK with that, but I find I can't go half-way, as I'm then forced to consider the nature of perception in all different states of consciousness. In general, I've accepted that 'indirect perception' theories fit best (although they are still incredibly strange), and it's therefore hard for me to justify any 'qualitative' difference in our perceptions, even though there may be an 'objective' difference.

I think Gabriel is right too, I then have to explain how the dysfunction brain "...conjures more lucid and meaningful conclusions..." than a normally functioning one. But I don't think that's an impossible task, once I consider that normal energy-intensive 'neuronal' firing (measured with EEG) might only indicate the normal functioning of our sensory input/outputs, and that another undiscovered energy-efficient structure in the brain does the actual reading and processing.

Think of neuronal firing a bit like the 'write' head on a hard disk, and this undiscovered energy-efficient mechanism as the 'read' head, and that both operate together in a feedback loop. Sure it's highly speculative, but my research indicates that there are many good reasons to consider something like it.
 
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1) Here's the wikipedia's definition of out of body experience:

An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside one's body (autoscopy).

2) You can very well see that NDE researchers go deeper than that and try to recognize different aspects of an OBE, including so called "veridical OBEs" which are the most interesting (and rare) anomalies.

Your argument doesn't hold water.

I'm not arguing against that (I'm arguing for it). My point is that these are the kinds of out of body experiences which are of interest. So you have to be careful to look at whether the research includes sensations which don't represent perceiving one's body from a place outside one's body under the heading "OBE", before you start throwing around statistics about how frequent the OBE experience is in the NDE.

Linda
 
How do you know they they don't if they are not there to begin with?

By having the opportunity to read the transcripts from the interviews of patients who did not make the cut (as an NDE) and the complete interviews of patients who did, outside of what makes it into the published papers.

Come on Linda, you're from the side of those waving pink unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters! :D
Throwing one or two lines out of context from cherry picked study to prove your point is at least disingenuous.

Seriously, instead of wasting time coming up with unsubstantiated claims, go ahead and produce a well researched study about this ground breaking discovery of yours. You will revolutionize NDE research and be credited for an innovative perspective on a unsolved mystery.

I don't have to do any of this, as it has been done already. Rather than suggesting that I tread over well-worn ground, maybe you should be suggesting that NDE researchers start including all of the reports in their published studies, not just the ones which are perceived as relevant to survivalism and transcendence. Why do you think it matters whether there is sex, drugs, and rock and roll in addition to My Little Pony rainbows and glitter?

Linda
 
You'd have to explain how a non-working mind conjures more lucid and meaningful conclusions than a fully functioning one. You've simply removed the body of evidence you don't like the sound of, for the bits that fit your belief system.
I think you misunderstood my point. I tend to be a “survivalist“. And still, NDEs present themselves in a diverse way that makes it hard to draw definit conclusions...
 
I think you misunderstood my point. I tend to be a “survivalist“. And still, NDEs present themselves in a diverse way that makes it hard to draw definit conclusions...
Yes, I totally agree. At best NDEs are highly suggestive of non-localised consciousness. Beyond that, NDE testimonies have some features in common and some that diverge. I think they point to survival, but what subsequent states might be for a given individual is guess work and belief. The brain playing tricks explanation is not one I find convincing from NDE data as a whole.
 
I just told you to keep in mind that the same kind of experience is found in non life threatening situations. Are you paying attention?
The examples you have cited don't even match with your speculation. Unusual athletic ability and superior hand-eye coordination aren't hidden "psychodynamic agencies"...

Most importantly none of the well known survival mechanism come bundled with spiritual messages, life reviews, hyperreal perceptions, overwhelming love and compassion etc... .It is pretty unsophisticated to take such a complex phenomena and hastily explain it away in these simplistic terms.

There is nothing special about psychodynamics v physiodynamics when it comes to offering survival value, so this is a straw man. So is the idea that they sometimes happen in "non life threatening circumstances." All that is needed for an advantage to take root in evolutionary terms is for it to give the slightest reproductive advantage over other variations, or over its absence. On evolutionary scale, which many people find difficult to conceptualize accurately in the first place, this could be that you are 0.00000001% more likely to survive or live longer with the adaptation than without.
 
Kay, you had once an article published in JNDS? Just tell me: which one and under what name? I have virtually all issues from the early eighties onwards, so I can check it out

Question - if you are so well acquainted with the NDE, then why are you so negative about them? Why are you trying - in a "friendly" way, so it seems - to explain them away? Why do you play down those encounters with dead relatives, even if there are many cases of relatives the NDE'r in question had never heard of?

Your stance is a big enigma to me, Kay. I hope that friendly face of yours is not of someone who is playing the typical wolf in sheep clothing...;)

Hello. I am Kai, not Kay, but I can assure you that I genuinely want to know what is happening in NDEs. I don't "play them down" - I express doubts that I genuinely have and the reasons that I have them. I'm not saying there's nothing other than the brain to them (though I don't think it is entirely possible to dismiss that either)...but I have big problems with the standard story that they represent a "glimpse of a life after death." In my opinion, and I have my reasons for saying this, the MOST LIKELY thing to happen post mortem is that nature, represented in us, returns to a state of passive potential or pre-conscious "unconsciousness."
 
Well we can be pretty sure they're not interested in solving problems with physical consequences, because they have no need for them. Einstein is unlikely to stop being himself because he understands the answers to problems that interested him in the physical realm. Perhaps souls are happy to be enlightened, and see the neurotic pursuits of mortality in context, as compulsions they're glad to be released from?

They do nothing then? Don't you see the problem? It's just not a real situation.
 
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