Near-death experiences and consciousness

randman,I agree with the other posters. It IS anecdotal. The question is just, what do we do with it. Where does it fit in with the research and hypotheses that we have?Those are always the questions you ask. If you struggle to fit it in, then you ask, DOES it fit in? If not, how do we proceed? In some sense, I don't see any problem of bias. NDE is very anecdotal. So are other interesting things, like missing limbs, etc. Some people get really interested to study them, and if they come up with well-reasoned, well-supported hypotheses that are useful beyond their own domain, other people start to listen. Ramachandran makes a living off of this stuff; he's great.NDE are interesting, but hard to study and anecdotal. Most people avoid such subjects because... the scientific methodology just doesn't work without ways to gather reliable evidence....On the other hand, of course science is always going to be biased to finding hypotheses that operate within the natural world. That's the way the method works. "Can I explain this phenomenon naturalistically?"Faith hosted a thread which was all about the statement "Just because you can explain it naturalistically doesn't mean you're right." I'm sympathetic to that claim. There's an infinite number of theories that can explain any set of phenomena. As you can see from other threads, I tend to take science as an exploration in finding the most "useful" theories.I think further discussion of this kind of topic is best taken somewhere else. I wanted to at least answer your complaint, so that we can proceed in this thread in good faith.Ben

How? We have a peer-reviewed study in a prestigious scientific journal claiming otherwise, and we have your statement with no data given to back it up.The evidence strongly suggests that NDEs can occur when the brain is not active because there are observed examples of this occuring.

Simple. Some of the reports of NDEs conform to independently confirmed real world events such which nurses did what, and other facts not observed by the patient's brain.That's what the doctor is claiming in the study and in the quotes from the magazine article.Exactly why do you think Lancelet published the study?

This is the doctors claims, and the published study was submitted to back up those claims. Let's look at what he is saying. He is clearly stating that in these experiences there is an increase in thought clarity, insight, speed, awareness, empathy, etc,....when "the brain shows no activity at all!".So how is this increased level of awareness and consciousness happening when the brain is inactive? Even if you claim the brain is somehow active but we just don't observe it, that doesn't explain how such an increase in what we normally think of as mental awareness, ability, etc,..can occur when the organ that suppossed to produce it is seemingly totally inactive, and if active in an unknown way, is reasonably far less active than normal and being deprived of what it needs to function properly.So let's hear some real arguments fo the doctor's claims. This message has been edited by randman, 11-30-2005 01:29 AM

Not to do cut and paste but no one seems to be addressing this. On the subject of perceptions without brain activity of events, conversations, etc,..in the real world. About Near-Death Experiencessome interesting accounts, some better than othersPage not found - Near-Death Experiences and the AfterlifeThis message has been edited by randman, 11-30-2005 01:42 AM

The article appears to mainly be reporting statistics on the frequency of occurence and reported effects. These are interesting, because such data had not been previously gathered. But they don't provide any evidence that ndes are caused by other than neural activity.There is one anecdotal report of an OBE. Such anecdotal reports are poor evidence. I don't see any basis for that conclusion.

Well, obviously the author of the study feels otherwise, and I do as well. We aren't going to start killing off people and reviving them just to test this out. So the studies have to rely on events and what the data from machines and people's accounts record. That's not that unusual when looking at medical issues.Maybe more funding will enable more studies with more imaginative ways to assess NDEs, but to date, all the evidence suggests that NDEs include perceptions beyond the brain. It is true that they also can be linked to neaural activity, but they do not appear limited by that.

I retyped the listed findings in that paper

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Findings 62 patients (18%) reported NDE, of whom 41 (12%) described a core experience. Occurrence of the experience was not associated with duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, medication, or fear of death before cardiac arrest. Frequency of NDE was affected by how we defined NDE, the prospective nature of the research in older cardiac patients, age, surviving cardiac arrest in older cardiac patients, age, survivig cardiac arrest in first myocardial infarction, more than one cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) during stay in hospital, previouse NDE, and memory problems after prolonged CPR. Depth of the experience was affected by sex, surviving CPR outside hostpital, and fear before cardiac arrest. Significanatly more patients who had an NDE, especially a deep experience, died within 30 days of CPR (p<0.0001). The process of transformation after NDE took several years, and differed from those of patients who survived cardiac arrest without NDE.

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I don't see anything in those findings that would indicate the NDE occurs when the brain is not active.

The peer-reviewed paper lists 2 examples with details of events remembered that were verified by others present, and more or less does not go into depth with all of the patients' experiences in that area. The magazine article in the OP states the doctor worked hard to get the study published, and one reason was to show that consciousness appears to increase in levels of thought and awareness among some people with a decrease and flat-lining of EEGs. So even though the study does not include a lot of instances verifying patients observing things when their brain was not functioning, it does give some, and certainly verifies conscious activity when the brain was not active.If you want to claim all that activity occurs prior to the brain going inactive, the instances mentioned where patients observed events and items after that period of time suggests that NDEs are on-going long after brain activity ceases. You can claim the evidence is weak or whatever, but that's an argument from incredulity. All of the evidence thus far agrees with the doctor's analysis.Moreover, the peer-reviewed paper is not the whole of the claims or the doctor's work, and in the OP, he clearly asserts it is a fact that NDEs occur when brain activity has ceased.So let's don't quibble about the peer-reviewed paper, but discuss the data and how it apparently indicates consciousness occurs and can even heighten without brain activity.

Well the studies authors claim that their research shows this, on the grounds that only a few patients recalled having an NDE while if it was a purely physiological effect of the lack of oxygen they contend that everyone should have had one. Of course patients may have had them and not remembered.It might be interesting to find out how the proportion reportinf NDEs compares to the usual proportions of recollection of dreams upon waking, or whether those who experienced NDEs were more prone than others to recalling their dreams.TTFN,WK

Could you try and get the journal's name right! It is called 'The Lancet'. A lancet is a surgical instrument while a lancelet is a cephalochordate.Not even getting the name right doesn't bode well for your grasp of the details of the research.TTFN,WK

Eh? What is this supposed to mean? They don't go into any of the patients experiences in that are, that are being veridical accounts of events ocurring during the time their EEG was flatlined. The only account in the paper is an anecdotal account from a nurse, it isn't even clear whether or not the patient in question was one who was part of the study. The only other example is merely a reference, which hardly counts as detailed.The fact that you claim this suggests that you have only read other peoples posts about this rather than having read the whole article yourself. No it doesn't, please quote any evidence of this from the article which isn't from the nurses anecdote. So if I assert something as a fact it suddenly stops being an assertion, cool. I assert as a fact that you are failing to discuss the data at all because the data to support your claims simply isn't in the paper. There are no data relating to the timing of the experiences or localising the experiences during the period of flat EEG other than the anecdotal account of the nurse.TTFN,WK

Just look at that part of the article.. can you see where the one anecdotal instance in the paper has suddenly become 'They', one patient has become a 'they', and this isn't even based on the patients account but on an account of one of the nurses who attended them.The anecdote also doesn't give us any reason to suppose the patient was flatlined. The doctors were performing CPR and ventilating the patient for one and a half hours presumably this treatment was itself aerating the brain, otherwise the patient's brain would have died due to the lack of oxygen. All you can really say is that the patient appeared comatose, you don't know what state his brain activity was in.TTFN,WK

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I'm not familiar with research in this area. Mind if I ask for more links?

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Aw, hell.

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Can you provide some links to the kind of research you have in mind for "filling in" ?

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I can't vouchfor arach's claims regarding when the brain needs to be active. However, it is pretty well esablished in the literature that memory is a reconstruction. As such, we do fill in the gaps in our memories with what our brain considers appropriate details.That is why false memories are so easy to construct and implant.

Sure, thanks schraf. I am aware that, well really, all of cognition is constructive. Right. As far as I know, usually this happens on a much smaller scale than what's being reported here. It depends how you define "easy". I read a summary of Loftus' work, and the method of choice there was basically using family cohorts to convince someone that something was true. Even then, the percent of people who were able to "swallow the lie" varied greatly with the actual false memory.It's a possibility that NDE are simply highly constructed memories (in the sense that there was very little "original" processing), but by no means does it seem to be a slam dunk to me. That's a pretty big hole, a lot of information. And seems like there's a fair number of claims that suggest there's sensory data for the time of the NDE being incorporated. It's possible that it's the incorporation of generic knowledge, pre/post NDE knowledge, or something like that. But again, that's only a possibility.Without more compelling information about memory reconstruction or evidence from NDE studies, I think it's dismissive to suggest that no conscious processes are happening during a flat EEG. I think the best we can do is to say, "yes, we don't know. Not enough data to find an adequate explanation."