Can Near-Death Experiences Prove the Existence of Out of Body Consciousness?

[Art]

Here's a cool experiment about to start to study if people's out of body experiences are real or not.

Study into near-death experiences
By Jane Dreaper
Health correspondent, BBC News

A large study is to examine near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients.

Doctors at 25 UK and US hospitals will study 1,500 survivors to see if people with no heartbeat or brain activity can have "out of body" experiences.

Some people report seeing a tunnel or bright light, others recall looking down from the ceiling at medical staff.

The study, due to take three years and co-ordinated by Southampton University, will include placing on shelves images that could only be seen from above.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7621608.stm

Anybody here ever had one themselves or known anyone who claims such an experience?

I wonder what the ramifications would be if it is found the consciousness is a separate entity to the body? No doubt somebody will quickly find some way to weaponise it

 

[Vid]

What qualifies an out of body experience as real? No one is actually leaving their body, it's a hallucination whether or not its from something traumatic or from a handful of drugs. The entire experiment is rather pointless, but since it pretty much runs itself why not.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

What qualifies an out of body experience as real? No one is actually leaving their body, it's a hallucination whether or not its from something traumatic or from a handful of drugs. The entire experiment is rather pointless, but since it pretty much runs itself why not.

They are testing a claim. If we take the scientific explanation on faith, then it is faith and not science; esp in the eyes of someone who believes that they have had an out of body experience.

 

[Vid]

When the study is over and no one saw the pictures, nothing will be different. They still can't say "real" OBEs don't happen just that they didn't happen to the people in their study. I'm not saying take science on faith, but rather that there have to be better ways to study what the brain goes through in an OBE than to delve into questions of conscience and metaphysics. But then again maybe not, I'm no scientist.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There is nothing wrong with testing claims directly. Obviously we wouldn't want to run around testing every wild claim, but this one goes back perhaps thousands of years and is relatively common. And most important of all, it is an extremely easy test to do. I would think basic integrity demands it.

The idea that it wouldn't change anything is a leap of faith. It isn't a difficult test to understand, and over time it will become clear that no one has ever produced a correct answer. This sort of thing tends to get around, esp around here.

Of course, if someone did produce a correct answer, then the skeptics would assume fraud, or coincidence.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

I'm having an out of mind experience right now.

 

[hypatia]

Get back in there!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/24body.html

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Hey hypatia, I can't read the sign in your picture. What does it say?

 

[hypatia]

Caution water on road during rain.

 

[LightbulbSun]

They can already stimulate an out of body experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCVzz96zKA0"

 

[Moonbear]

When the study is over and no one saw the pictures, nothing will be different. They still can't say "real" OBEs don't happen just that they didn't happen to the people in their study. I'm not saying take science on faith, but rather that there have to be better ways to study what the brain goes through in an OBE than to delve into questions of conscience and metaphysics. But then again maybe not, I'm no scientist.

This experiment addresses that question pretty clearly. If an OBE is really and OBE and not some other form of hallucination or dream, those who claim to have had them will have seen the pictures. If nobody claiming to experience an OBE has seen the pictures, then they have pretty strong evidence that what we all expect to be true really is the case, that it is a hallucination or dream. This is the first step of scientific method. One cannot study the mechanism of the hallucinations leading to perception of such an experience unless one has first demonstrated it is an hallucination and not something else.

 

[out of whack]

I've only ever had out of whack experiences...

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I have a friend who said he had an NDE. He was dead on the operating table for several minutes. He never saw anything in the room he was in though. He had one of those going towards the light sort of experiences.

I remember hearing that they had done something similar to this before. Apparently they put a picture of a clock on the floor of the emergency operating room. I all I heard about the results was that they were deemed inconclusive.

There has also been a woman on Coast to Coast who under went an experimental surgery that required she flat line completely including brain functions. She apparently had a rather vivid OBE/NDE that included knowing what happened in the room while she was supposedly brain dead. With out brain activity she should not have remembered so much as a dream. Some people think that there was some brain activity but that it was just too miniscule to be picked up by the monitors.

 

[Evo]

NDE's are pretty much unique to western cultures, specifically people exposed to Christian beliefs of a "heaven" or afterlife. That doesn't mean that the person is religious. You don't find NDE's in religions that don't have a heavenly afterlife.

 

[lisab]

NDE's are pretty much unique to western cultures, specifically people exposed to Christian beliefs of a "heaven" or afterlife. That doesn't mean that the person is religious. You don't find NDE's in religions that don't have a heavenly afterlife.

Wow, that says a lot about this phenomenon.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

NDE's are pretty much unique to western cultures, specifically people exposed to Christian beliefs of a "heaven" or afterlife. That doesn't mean that the person is religious. You don't find NDE's in religions that don't have a heavenly afterlife.

Most religions involve ideas of an afterlife including eastern religions. Differences regarding the frequency of NDEs I think likely revolve around a difference in perspective regarding such a phenomenon. It would seem far more normal in many cultures to have visions during a near death experience and they may not necessarily believe that they passed over but only that they had been touched by god or received strength to return to life from deceased ancestors. Christianity is far more a death cult than most other religions though and probably programs more people to want to leave this world and go to heaven which would explain why more christian people think that is what is happening to them.
My friend who had his NDE was a catholic and afterward spiraled into a deep depression wishing he could return to the after life. It took him several years to be able to start taking care of himself again and not just wishing he could die.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

...According to a 1991 Gallup Poll estimate, 13 million Americans, 5% of the population, have reported that they have had a near-death experience (Greyson, 1992). Research has demonstrated that near-death experiences are no more likely to affect the devoutly religious than the agnostic or atheist. Near-death experiences can be experienced by anyone (Moody, 1975, 1977, 1980, Morse, 1990; Ring, 1980, 1985). According to Talbot (1991), near-death experiences appear to have no relationship to "a person's age, sex, marital status, race, religion and/or spiritual beliefs, social class, educational level, income, frequency of church attendance, size of home community, or area of residence" (p. 240).

Near-death experiences have been recorded in folklore, religious, and social writings throughout the world. Reports have been recorded from societies such as Native American, Tibet, Japan, Melanesia, Micronesia, Egypt, China, India, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the United States (Greyson, 1992; Mauro, 1992). According to Ring (1980), there does not appear to be any relationship between, on one hand, an individual's spirituality and religious practices, and on the other hand, the likelihood of experiencing a near-death experience or the depth of the ensuing experience...

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/articles013.html

 

[Leah]

Well I consider some of my dreams as out-of-body experiences. I lay in the bed knowing where I am and then start to feel a fuzzy feeling and start hearing voices, then real entities show up. Alot of times it is sex related, but it feels as if these entities are really there. I feel and hear them. I'm usually in a room I don't know, but I can fly around the room at times. I cannot explain these episodes, but they seem real.

 

[i_like_guitar]

i had several involuntary out of body experiences as a child in daycare. i would be lying in the bed and it felt like i was moving back and forth really fast. next thing i knew i would be floating above my body, looking down i could see myself, the children lying in their beds and watch the teachers walking around interacting with things (giving back rubs to some kids, talking to one another, doing things teachers do). i never felt any fear or anything it just felt natural. i would fly down through my body and into the floor a little, then float around observing things with amazement. i also have had a memory since birth of being a ball of light with another ball of light and we were both above the earth, i could look down and see the planet. (if i was born when people thought the Earth was flat i would have said no it is more like a round ball and they would have burned me for being a witch). this ball of light told me that i was going to be born on the planet, and when he said this (i don't know how i call a ball of light "he" i just "knew" it was a masculine presence) i got very frightened because i sensed great change. i replied "i'm scared, why can't i just stay here with you"? and he said "you'll find out when you go there". so i agreed to be born on the Earth and my memory ends. for 18 years of my life i kept this to myself until i found out other people have made similar claims of having a memory of being a ball of light and being escorted to this planet to be born on it. reading that really scared me... is there an explanation for this? and i think that electronically stimulating the brain to reproduce the feeling of being out of body produces the same result of electronically stimulating the brain to reproduce the feeling of being cold. electronically stimulating the brain produces artificial results of something natural.

 

[Ms Music]

NDE's are pretty much unique to western cultures, specifically people exposed to Christian beliefs of a "heaven" or afterlife. That doesn't mean that the person is religious. You don't find NDE's in religions that don't have a heavenly afterlife.

I have never heard that before. I thought it was pretty much global? THAT would be interesting to look into if some cultures have none.

I remember hearing about the hidden clock in the OR study when I took psych. I think I remember that some people did report seeing the clock, but most didn't. But then if someone claims to have been "in the tunnel" or saw people who had all ready passed away, how could you verify that? I think if you took the percentages of categories of NDE/OBE experiences by "went to heaven", "was in the tunnel going towards the light", and "floated above my body", the 3rd category would be pretty small, as would the 1st category. And I am in the 2nd category... I had an OBE at age 12, but no way to prove if I had briefly "died" or just had a hallucination from getting knocked out cold.

 

[Evo]

Here is a good compilation of NDE's, showing that what you "experience" is based on what you, on some level, believe will happen.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence06.html

I will try to get the studies that show that religions with no heavenly afterlife, such a a belief in reincarnation, do not have NDE's, or rather not we recognize as NDE's, because it would go against their beliefs. It's harder and harder to find them since there is so much popular fluff being propagated that's cluttering up the searches.

 

[Evo]

Good article on NDE's.

That's a point the University of Virginia's Greyson wanted to settle. Are NDErs up there on the ceiling or aren't they? In 2004, he began a study that he hoped would provide the answer. At the university's electrophysiology clinic, surgeons implant cardioverter-defibrillators in patients at high risk of sudden death. In the process, cardiac arrest is induced. Greyson arranged for a laptop computer, displaying a series of images, to be stationed near the ceiling, where only an elevated being could see the screen. As ingenious as it was, the investigation flopped. Greyson and his team reported last December that while cardiac arrest had been induced in 52 patients, none reported leaving his or her body.

Considering the incidence of NDEs, the result surprised Greyson. "But we can still learn from that failure," he says. "Unexpected findings like those tell us we don't understand NDEs as well as we thought, and that increases my enthusiasm for studying them."

What science has lacked until recently is an overarching theory that might explain why NDEs seem so coherent. In two articles published in Neurology, the second in March, a team of University of Kentucky researchers led by Nelson proposed that NDEs occur in a dream-like state brought on when crisis in the brain trips a predisposition to a type of sleep disorder. It's an hypothesis that's quickly gathered heavyweight support: "I think Dr. Nelson's REM-intrusion theory to explain NDEs is the actual physiologic explanation," says Minnesota sleep expert Mahowald.

His what theory? REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is the relatively active brain state in which most dreaming is thought to occur. REM intrusion is a disorder in which the sleeping person's mind wakes up before his body does. He feels awake, yet the muscle paralysis of REM can remain; he may also hallucinate until mind and body get back in sync. "Lay people think you're either awake or asleep," says Nelson, "but you needn't go directly from one to the other."

Some years ago, while studying first-hand accounts of NDEs, Nelson read the story of a woman whom medical staff had written off as dead and whose attempts to protest were thwarted by paralysis. Paralysis? As happens in REM intrusion! The seed of a new theory — that there was a link between REM and NDEs — grew in Nelson's mind.

He tested it by comparing the frequency of REM intrusion in 55 people who'd had NDEs with 55 controls. The results were striking: 60% of the first group reported some history of REM intrusion; 24% of the second. Nelson postulates that both REM intrusion and NDE involve a glitch in the arousal system that causes some people to experience blended states of consciousness. He stresses that he doesn't consider NDEs to be dreams, rather that the NDEr "engages through the REM mechanism regions of the brain that are also engaged during dreaming" — regions that infuse both dreams and NDEs with emotion, memories and images.

Nelson's theory goes some way toward explaining how NDEs can seem to occur when the brain is down. The sleep/wake switch is in the brainstem, which helps control the body's most basic functions and stays active for longer than the higher brain in cardiac arrest. "It's likely that the transition to brain death is, in fact, gradual," says Mahowald, "and NDEs occur during this transition." As for people reporting accurately on events that went on around them while they were apparently unconscious, Nelson says "they may be seemingly out of it but still processing in a very aberrant way."

Nelson's theory has been picked apart by two veterans of the field who could be said to favor a more spiritual view of NDEs. In a recent issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Americans Jeffrey Long and Janice Miner Holden argue that since 40% of NDErs in Nelson's study denied ever having had an episode of REM intrusion, the idea that it underlies NDEs "seems questionable at best."

Happy to concede that "the brain deals with crisis in ways we don't fully understand," Nelson is keen to test his theory some more. He won't go into details, but it's believed he wants to monitor REM activity in subjects he would expect to have NDE-like symptoms in certain conditions.

Other researchers have their own ideas about how to solve the puzzle. Neuroscientist Blanke calls for "more work with imaging to investigate the brain functioning of large numbers of people who've had an NDE." Says Jansen, who'll soon release work comparing accounts of spontaneous NDEs with ketamine-induced ones: "We're moving on an exciting path. But nobody knows if we've made huge progress or just a little."

On balance, it's almost certain that NDEs happen in the theater of one's mind, and that in the absence of resuscitation, it's the brain's final sound and light show, followed by oblivion. Nonetheless, there's still no definitive explanation. There mightn't be a ghost in the machine. But it's a machine whose complexities remain well beyond our grasp.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1657919-3,00.html

 

[i_like_guitar]

NDE's are pretty much unique to western cultures, specifically people exposed to Christian beliefs of a "heaven" or afterlife. That doesn't mean that the person is religious. You don't find NDE's in religions that don't have a heavenly afterlife.

The problem with that approach is that NDEs hardly resemble notions of Christian or Jewish heaven. Saint Peter, Christ, Moses, pearly gates, harp music, and angels with wings are entirely absent other than the few that say they believe that the being of light they see is Christ or some other religious figure despite the fact it has no similar characteristics. Perhaps most people who have NDE's are in the west because we are able to better resuscitate patients undergoing cardiac arrest due to improved medical sciences over many other parts of the world?

 

[Art]

The problem with that approach is that NDEs hardly resemble notions of Christian or Jewish heaven. Saint Peter, Christ, Moses, pearly gates, harp music, and angels with wings are entirely absent other than the few that say they believe that the being of light they see is Christ or some other religious figure despite the fact it has no similar characteristics. Perhaps most people who have NDE's are in the west because we are able to better resuscitate patients undergoing cardiac arrest due to improved medical sciences over many other parts of the world?

Good point!

 

[wildman]

Here is a good compilation of NDE's, showing that what you "experience" is based on what you, on some level, believe will happen.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence06.html

I will try to get the studies that show that religions with no heavenly afterlife, such a a belief in reincarnation, do not have NDE's, or rather not we recognize as NDE's, because it would go against their beliefs. It's harder and harder to find them since there is so much popular fluff being propagated that's cluttering up the searches.

Your link is quite interesting. The atheist and Christians were the most a like. Did you notice that? Could it be that an atheist is closer to a Christian than an agnostic or a member of some other religion?

 

[i_like_guitar]

an interesting site http://www.nderf.org/