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Neurologists Shine Light On Near-Death Experiences
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mainstream science has long considered the brain to be inactive during the period known to doctors as clinical death. However, survivors regularly report having powerful experiences when they come close to dying, often saying they had an overwhelming feeling of peace and serenity. Frequently they describe being in a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end, and many report meeting long-lost loved ones. 'Many of them think it's evidence they actually went to heaven — perhaps even spoke with God,' says Jimo Borjigin. Now scientists at the University of Michigan have found that the brain keeps on working for up to 30 seconds after blood flow stops, possibly providing a scientific explanation for the vivid near-death experiences that some people report after surviving a heart attack. In the study, lab rats were anesthetized, then subjected to induced cardiac arrest as part of the experiment while researchers analyzed changes in power density, coherence, directed connectivity, and cross-frequency coupling. In the first 30 seconds after their hearts were stopped, they all showed a surge of brain activity, observed in electroencephalograms (EEGs) that indicated highly aroused mental states. 'We were surprised by the high levels of activity,' says George Mashour. 'In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death.' Borjigan thinks the phenomenon is really just the brain going on hyperalert to survive while at the same time trying to make sense of all those neurons firing and it's like a more intense version of dreaming. 'The near-death experience is perhaps really the byproduct of the brain's attempt to save itself,' says Borjigan"
While interesting, it's important to remind ourselves that this research is not conclusive: "Borjigin and Mashour hesitate to state a direct connection between their findings and near-death experiences. The links are merely speculative at this point and provide a framework for a human study, Borjigin said."
... of rats.
Instead of "come towards the light!", it's "come towards the cheese!"
#DeleteChrome
While this can possibly explain the tunnel and the white light, how can this explain people seeing things even when their eyes were closed?
This is rather unpleasant but what does this research mean for people that have been decapitated (quick and clean) - will they also be aware for another 30 seconds? Old reports of victims turning their eyes and looking at people were always brushed off as nonsense "because the brain dies right away" but this research, though not directly to do with decapitation, seems to refute that... even if consciousness lasts for another 10 seconds instead of 30.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
After being resurrected the lab rats reported all kinds of experiences about their near rat death experience, how they went to cheese heaven and flew above large blocks of mozzarella with a fresh hit of rot in the air, how they saw the rat goddess herself in the distance, how she was surrounded by a white tunnel that was pulling them onward to the wonderful tunnel of forever and ever and even more cheese (much like this comment). A few rats however spoke of a dark and foreboding place devoid of cheese where the fondue fires had melted it all and ultra fat rats sat all day mainlining the cheese directly into their rat guts. For some reason though the scientists didn't understand these near death experiences of the Rats and where more interested in their instruments of Rat torture. One day the "truth" will come out about rat near death experiences and the torture that prevents all rats from knowing about the cheesy Rat Heaven and Rat Indulgent Hell Yeah bring it on! To Rat Truthers everywhere!
The higher level of brain activity could be an upload in progress.
It's interesting that you're willing to draw a significantly stronger conclusion that the authors of the study.
Required reading for internet skeptics
SQUEAK.
Eat shit and die.
No, that's for the fruit flies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How does that make you feel?
Really, which of the following two statements is more likely to be true?
Short of some incontrovertible physical evidence for God being involved in the process, me, I'm sticking with option #1 -- and I suspect anybody looking for a scientific answer to this is more likely to buy into random brain activity.
Quite frankly, anybody studying neuroscience will likely as well. The God hypothesis, last I checked, was entirely outside of objective science and therefore not something science can credibly ponder.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I had a heart attack on Mar. 1, 2010. I stayed conscious, although in heavy pain. Got stents put in, was sent home on Mar. 4... and had congestive heart failure about 6 hours after I was out of the hospital. This time, my heart just plain stopped. I was dead. EMS dudes shocked me back to life and got me to the hospital where I was treated. I obviously survived.
But I was dead for between 3 and 4 minutes before the EMS crew got to me. No breathing, no heartbeat.
White lights and tunnels? No. Everything faded to black. That was it. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. No gods or angels. Just... nothing.
I enjoy this kind of research. It's always interesting to further our understanding of the complexity of life, and all the weird, nigh inexplicable stuff it entails.
However, it seems a lot of readers are jumping to conclusions not even the researchers have come to; We still have, essentially, no understanding of what consciousness is, where it come from, or where it goes during these sorts of episodes. Hopefully we'll figure it out one day, and have an even greater understanding of our universe.
I usually try to stay out of these metaphysical-themed debates; having personally experienced a fair amount of strange shit that current scientific knowledge cannot explain, my thoughts in this arena tend to be less than popular... something I've always found ironic, and a bit sad. I mean, if we're supposed to be a community who believes in science, why would anyone dismiss a hypothesis or concept out-of-hand, without proper experimentation and research?
Oh, well, I went and said it anyway. Let fly with the down-mods, Philistines and Hypocrites, as I've broached topics you refuse to even consider, let alone debate intellectually.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Discover magazine had something similar, where they studied nematodes and found that some sort of signal propagated through the gut that would tell all of the cells to shut the whole thing down.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612587/
More interestingly, they were looking at ways to block or delay that signal. So then even if part of a multi-cellular organism died, the rest of it wouldn't know about it and keep going in a zombielike state.
But yeah, the cellular shutdown mechanism had something to do with the mitochondria, and it did release visible light in the brain cells as it was propagating through that area of the nematodes they were studying. So the bright light at the end of the tunnel is probably just the mitochondria of nearby cells in your optical cortex exploding.
I was honored to be able to hold my father's hand when he passed away from stage IV lung cancer a few years back. One can never really say they are ready for a loved one to pass, but I was resigned to the fact, and therefore there weren't many emotions going through my head while telling my dad it was ok to let go. (I had read in a couple of places that scientists believe hearing might be one of the last senses to shut down immediately prior to death, so I figured I could do no harm telling him everything would be ok.)
One thing I did notice, and will probably never forget: In the moments up to his final breaths, while his BP was dropping, his eyes never stopped moving, It could have been involuntary movements, but they would stop for an instant as if to focus on something, then move again. He never acknowledged me while I was with him the last few hours, but his eyes: They would flick around the room as if he was looking for something, or maybe seeing something only he could see. The doctor said it was likely his vision had already shut down at that point, which made it all the more impactful on me. Even as his BP dwindled away to 0/0, after his breathing had stopped (no death rattle, just shallower and shallower, with increasing apnea gaps, until it simply stopped), his eyes made a few last furtive movements, then were still.
Who knows what my dad was seeing in his final moments? Obviously he didn't live to tell me about it. But the scientific part of my brain tells me something was going on his brain right up to the moment that he no longer had blood flowing through his brain.
NDEs are something that only a small percentage of the population experience. Most people just black out. Same deal with blood loss in the brain due to a centrifuge or the like. The government has studied it on military pilots and while most black out, some have NDE like experiences. At this point, we don't know why only some people experience it.
> ...of rats
No, no! They were speaking euphamistically. They were testing on politicians.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
More interestingly, they were looking at ways to block or delay that signal. So then even if part of a multi-cellular organism died, the rest of it wouldn't know about it and keep going in a zombielike state.
What could possibly go wrong?
Where to begin...
1) the link between what they saw in rat's brains and any experience the rat may or may not have been having is merely inferred. All they actually have is an increase in activity, that's all. How or if that translates into the rat experiencing something specific and what it might be is pure conjecture. It is possible that the brain activates but the rat's consciousness or conscious awareness remains unawares. It may as well be terror the rat feels. We just don't know.
2) the link between this rat brain electrical activity and a specific human experience whose experiencers claim is not chaotic but has semantic meaning is the purest of pure conjecture. There is nothing, no-thing, linking these findings and this specific human experience but the sheerest of sheer conjecture, teetering daintily on the flimisiest of extrapolations.
3) it dodges the entire issue of what consciousness, conscious experience as opposed to things bumping into each other or chemically reacting, is. We don't suppose other compositions of matter - chairs, light switches, my computer- possess it, yet there it appears to be.
Thinking that consciousness is worth thinking about about goes in and out of fashion in academic and scientific circles.The glib answer offered up from some interpretations of materialism is- it's an epiphenomena of brains and nervous systems, on whom it appears to depend (how do we know that?).
The problem with that answer is it's a form of hand waving , of assuming the consequent (all consciousness "needs" matter), a defining away with words or in this case, referencing a process- neural activity. Instead of telling us what the thing is, it "explains" it away.
The real spooky implication of materialism is that consciousness may be omnipresent or exists sui generis in the universe. It's possible that it is the first among things and somehow gives rise to material in ways which are unknown.
We're stuck as a species of implicitly paradoxical materialists, who not only know for a fact that know we have conscious experience and thought but know further that this conscious experience and thought is the only means we have at discerning the material scientific truth about the world.
Chairs and tables which lack this also know nothing, or at least it seems that way.
I assert that the fact of conscious experience is the final frontier. Hypotheses non fingo. However, only someone with no scientific imagination supposes that the concepts and scientific frameworks known to her at the time she lives necessarily contain within them all the ideas needed to explain everything in the world, that there's not something which will come only later with the power to encompass all previous explanations, and extend them in a direction unimaginable by previous centuries of scientists, even into the realm of science fiction of "spirituality" .
Occam's razor is a proper thinking tool to decide between competing explanations, not defining ultimate scientific horizons.
People who have these experiences insist their nature is essentially *knowetic*, that they bear *meaning* and reveal a factual aspect of reality which was previously hidden.
This is the same "meaning" by the way that all semantic-bearing constructs in our environs - pictures, symbols, words, x-rays, scientific theories- are said to convey.
Many scientists equate these experiences with hallucinations. I submit that anyone making this certain, authoritative categorization is indulging in the priggish, short-sighted, self-satisfied kind of thinking that amuses us about long distant generations of 'scientists" and "doctors" with their clever, but technically constricted and ultimately wrong-headed theories of "stuff".
Do you imagine that the human brain behaves much differently during death than rat brains?
I think it might, depending on how much our self-consciousness contributes to the interpretation of the sensations.
I came close to bleeding to death once when I was living in a remote site. After a motorbike accident, I was in the back seat of a car being driven cross-country towards a hospital a few hours away, and gradually lost enough blood to pass out. I was revived with a blood transfusion in an ambulance that had driven out to the main road to meet us, but would have died without waking if they hadn't got there in time.
I mostly remember being very very cold and asking for blankets, despite it being a 35c day. My vision faded in and out, not by getting dark but by losing contrast. Even when I could see clearly, my mind would drift and not grasp anything I was seeing. There was whiteness, like light, but washed out from fading colour, not a bright source, Sound faded in and out in a similar way, and I strongly remember a woman sobbing, but little else, though the friends who were in the car tell me they were talking to me, and I sometimes responded.
Apart from the cold, and a sense of sadness that might have come from my crying friend, it was not at all distressing. Quite tranquil in fact, but for me, it was not mystical at all. I have no belief in gods or afterlifes, but I imagine someone from a religious background would have interpreted the physical experiences very differently. .
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."