Near Death Studies - Consciousness After Death

Ms Music said:

I don't think it is bogus. I myself had a near death experience, and would love to see scientific studies done to gather evidence. We don't know what consciousness IS, and it could be a huge leap for man to understand that.

According to Susan Blackmore, vision researcher Dr. Tomasz S. Troscianko of the University of Bristol speculated:

If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer...the tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger...If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light. (Blackmore 1993: 85)

Blackmore attributes the feelings of extreme peacefulness of the NDE to the release of endorphins in response to the extreme stress of the situation. The buzzing or ringing sound is attributed to cerebral anoxia and consequent effects upon the connections between brain cells (op. cit., 64).
Blackmore, Susan J. Dying to Live: Near-death Experiences, (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1993).
Dr. Karl Jansen has reproduced NDEs with ketamine, a short-acting hallucinogenic, dissociative anaesthetic.

The anaesthesia is the result of the patient being so 'dissociated' and 'removed from their body' that it is possible to carry out surgical procedures. This is wholly different from the 'unconsciousness' produced by conventional anesthetics, although ketamine is also an excellent analgesic (pain killer) by a different route (i.e. not due to dissociation). Ketamine is related to phencyclidine (PCP). Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines - they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, is much shorter acting, is an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anaesthetic for children in industrialised countries and all ages in the third world as it is cheap and easy to use. Anaesthetists prevent patients from having NDE's ('emergence phenomena') by the co-administration of sedatives which produce 'true' unconsciousness rather than dissociation.*

According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.

And yet, neurophysiological processes must play some part in NDE, because NDE-like experiences can be induced through electrical “stimulation” of some parts of the cortex in patients with epilepsy,8 with high carbon dioxide levels (hypercarbia)9 and in decreased cerebral perfusion resulting in local cerebral hypoxia, as in rapid acceleration during training of fighter pilots,10 or as in hyperventilation followed by Valsalva maneuver.11 Also NDE-like experiences have been reported after the use of drugs like ketamine,12 LSD,13 or mushrooms.14 These induced experiences can sometimes result in a period of unconsciousness, but can at the same time also consist of out-of-body experiences, perception of sound, light or flashes of recollections from the past. These recollections, however, consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE. Further, transformational processes are rarely reported after induced experiences. Thus, induced experiences are not identical to NDE.

Ms Music said:

... And I think it is possible that if remote viewing is REAL, (well, a few governments have definitely done a LOT of testing on it, that says something to its validity) that these people are capable of "pushing their own button" to make the soul leave the body. Can anything like that EVER be proved? I have no idea. But I would like to see science try.

CEL said:

The fact that governments would expend taxpayers money in something says nothing about the validity of the idea.

CEL said:

Experiences made with astronauts and people inside nuclear submarines under the arctic ice revealed results not very different than those due to chance.

Several speculative and as yet untested hypotheses suggest that endogenous DMT, produced in the human brain, is involved in certain psychological and neurological states. As DMT is naturally produced in small amounts in the brains and other tissues of humans, and other mammals, some believe it plays a role in promoting the visual effects of natural dreaming, and also near-death experiences and other mystical states. A biochemical mechanism for this was proposed by the medical researcher J. C. Callaway, who suggested in 1988 that DMT might be connected with visual dream phenomena, where brain DMT levels are periodically elevated to induce visual dreaming and possibly other natural states of mind.[11]

Dr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon. Several of his test subjects reported NDE-like audio or visual hallucinations. His explanation for this was the possible lack of panic involved in the clinical setting and possible dosage differences between those administered and those encountered in actual NDE cases.

Ethical concerns do not allow for the testing of this hypothesis in humans, as the biological samples must come from the living human brain.

Ivan Seeking said:

Conclusion: It ain't heaven if you can't see grandma naked?

Why would you even see bodies? Why would you see? Even if we assume that the mind somehow exists beyond the brain and after death, anything that you experience would by definition all be in your mind.

Schrodinger's Dog said:

I attended a lecture by a guy doing research into this at Cambridge. He said he had managed to achieve the same in patients as NDE by using various tranquillisers.Pity it was about 10 years ago and I can't remember most of it. Suffice to say he speculated that this was nothing more than a state readily achievable given certain stimuli conditions or lack there of.

Probably the fact that it relates to our images of death is some sort of coincidence, but I can see how not fearing death would be a comfort to people anyway.

CEL said:

Would he be Dr. Karl Jansen, that I mentioned in my previous post?

CEL said:

From skepdic.com

moonstroller said:

I've heard that deaf people have had NDE. How would the noise figure into their experience?

CEL said:

The noise in the neurons is visual, not auditive.

moonstroller said:

Some documentation of this NDE phenomona show people leaving the body, traveling to another location and seeing events that were later verified. If the effect is local to the brain, how were these people able to reveal information that exists in another location?

moonstroller said:

I have tinnitus. I hear noise not see it.

moonstroller said:

Some documentation of this NDE phenomona show people leaving the body, traveling to another location and seeing events that were later verified. If the effect is local to the brain, how were these people able to reveal information that exists in another location?

One way to avoid contamination of stories has been developed by University of North Texas professor Dr. Jan Holden.* She designed an experiment in which a laptop computer that opens flat hangs from the ceiling with the screen facing away from the floor. Her husband developed a software program that produces a series of animations. If a patient claims to have been floating above her body on the operating table, then she ought to have seen the computer screen and be able to report on what she saw. Dr. Bruce Greyson has apparently been using this protocol for a few years but so far has not reported anything of interest.

Ms Music said:

Just out of curiosity, do you guys believe quantum mechanics? That matter has particle and wave properties?

Ivan Seeking said:

Strictly speaking, interpretations are not a part of the model.

Ivan Seeking said:

Quantum mechanics is not a matter for belief or not; it is a scientific model for the quantum world that correctly predicts the dynamics observed at very small scales. And yes, matter can act like either particles or waves; that is a fact.

How is this related to the discussion?

Ms Music said:

That possibly the wave nature of a particle is the same (in a way) as the consciousness is of a human. I think that analogy was even made in one of the articles listed by the OP. I think the thought of a human having a soul is too often seen as having religious connotations, so not accepted as a posibility in the scientific world.