'Near death' experiences the result of a spike in brain activity
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  'Near death' experiences the result of a spike in brain activity
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Author Topic: 'Near death' experiences the result of a spike in brain activity  (Read 1475 times)
afleitch
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« on: August 13, 2013, 05:58:40 AM »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2390236/Near-death-experiences-explained-Surge-brain-activity-trigger-paranormal-visions.html

Sort of confirms what was expected, but it's certainly a wonderful discovery.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2013, 04:15:33 AM »


Mostly a confirmation of your biases.  Assuming there is any validity to paranormal visions, it is not at all unexpected that they would be accompanied by heightened brain activity.  So while interesting, I see nothing here that could be said to confirm any theory about the validity of near death experiences.
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Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck
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« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2013, 09:02:49 AM »
« Edited: August 14, 2013, 09:06:35 AM by HockeyDude »


Not towards you, but to the article's author...



Why did this need a study?  I could've told you this when I was 12.  It makes perfect sense that completely abnormal things would be happening to the body on the brink of death.  Synapses break down.  Blood rushes.  The body makes a last ditch effort to keep running. 

It's sad when people wake from these experiences and start praising and thanking "god", when there's a doctor standing right there who REALLY saved their lives basically getting crapped on. 
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Blue3
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« Reply #3 on: August 14, 2013, 07:33:11 PM »

This study doesn't have any new information, and it certainly doesn't "confirm" or "discover" anything. Even the language of the article isn't that strong.
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The world will shine with light in our nightmare
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« Reply #4 on: August 14, 2013, 08:34:29 PM »

Even one of the scientists doesn't think a link can be drawn between a surge of neural activity and consciousness because 1) they don't know to what extent rats experience consciousness at all, and 2) even if they are, "to conclude from their brain activity alone that these bursts of activity reflect consciousness would be a logical fallacy known as reverse inference."

But no, only theists are capable of jumping to conclusions they don't have. Roll Eyes
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barfbag
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« Reply #5 on: August 15, 2013, 12:15:10 AM »

Near death experiences are caused by chemical reactions in the brain as it shuts down. It's not surprising the heaven or an afterlife would be on one's mind at this time and therefore be part of the thoughts during these chemical reactions.
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afleitch
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« Reply #6 on: August 15, 2013, 06:13:56 AM »

Most people in their day to day lives don’t encounter the ‘paranormal’ (or for want of a better description; normality with a dramatic interpretation by the person experiencing it) except people who claim to see ghosts etc and usually have a book or a show to promote. In either event the status quo for most people is a lack of the ‘paranormal.’ When your body starts to shut down which then causes a spike in brain then you are flooded with colours, noises etc which some claim to be ‘paranormal’ but are simply an internal response. As a boy I suffered frequent fainting episodes sometimes up to one per week. Everything I saw became muffled and distorted and as I hit the ground and when lost consciousness I got a kaleidoscope of colours and noises. I saw people, strange creatures and even experienced whole events even though I was only passed out for a minute or so. Sometimes I composed myself before I collapsed and was able to get out of it. Was this ‘paranormal’; no of course it wasn’t. The world is not inhabited by strange creatures I can only see when I felt drowsy (When I was tested, as of course I was, it turned out it was my glucose levels were to blame which is curiously mentioned in this research as a pre-requisite for the stimulation of said brain activity) When I had a bad case of the flu a few years ago my bedroom ceiling was not the Amazon (even though it looked like it to me) my brain simply went into overdrive.

The problem I have is people jumping to attribute a paranormal causation for what are essentially measurable and explainable stimuli.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #7 on: August 15, 2013, 06:15:10 AM »

Reversion of cause and effect in the thread title, I think.
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Grumpier Than Uncle Joe
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« Reply #8 on: August 15, 2013, 07:57:01 AM »

Having been very near death, I have no experienes to report.....maybe I wasn't close enough.
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #9 on: August 18, 2013, 02:01:27 PM »

I had a friend who helped conduct a study for an atheist group that looked into near death experiences. The group's aim was to dispel claims of the patient seeing himself or herself from above at some point during these experiences by placing objects in the room in positions that could only be seen from above and repeating random words to determine if they had hearing. AFAIK the study was unable to actually find someone with a near death experience.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #10 on: August 18, 2013, 04:40:04 PM »

I had a friend who helped conduct a study for an atheist group that looked into near death experiences. The group's aim was to dispel claims of the patient seeing himself or herself from above at some point during these experiences by placing objects in the room in positions that could only be seen from above and repeating random words to determine if they had hearing. AFAIK the study was unable to actually find someone with a near death experience.

Yeah, I remember hearing about such a study on the radio, tho it might have been a different one.  Part of the problem is that the situations under which near death experiences happen and then the patient recovers enough to report on it are rare to begin with, and then not everyone who experiences them reports having such experiences, let alone the hovering version. Add to that the difficulty of having the difficulty of having all this happen where they re ready to conduct such a test, it is no wonder they've had a time just getting the conditions to test the phenomenon be done.
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DemPGH
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« Reply #11 on: August 18, 2013, 06:57:31 PM »

If the brain can hallucinate, which it can, then it can certainly provide a "near death experience." Unless there is direct evidence to the contrary it has to be surmised that these experiences are the results of brain activity. End of story. But that doesn't mean the tests can't reveal interesting things about how the brain works.

As to out of body experiences, they've been testing those for years and decades and never confirmed one. An out of body experience is easier to test than a near death experience, of course, but it's really only a lucid dream or a hallucination. And of course people will see all kinds of crazy stuff.

Assuming the test subject would not cheat, Carl Sagan had proposed years and years ago a standing test: place an object or even the title of a book or a coin in a high back corner shelf, for instance, or a high place, and then at some point when the person has an out of body experience, go check to see what the object is. It would require an honest subject, though. Wink Some folks have some real wild out of body stories, so it shouldn't be too hard to go check what's on the shelf.
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Kitteh
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« Reply #12 on: August 18, 2013, 07:54:07 PM »

Unless there is direct evidence to the contrary it has to be surmised that these experiences are the results of brain activity. End of story.

That seems like a pretty weak argument. Actually, it sounds kind of like when religious people insist that science "disprove god" or something. If you want to argue against NDE's being "paranormal", much better to fall back on good old things like Occam's Razor and Russell's Teapot, i.e. that if no evidence can be provided that there is a paranormal force causing these experiences and the resulting brain activity, then the it makes more sense to accept that there isn't any paranormal cause. No need to overreach and demand that people disprove your position. 

As for out-of-body experiences, a lot of the discussion of them is muddled by not having a clear definition of what the term actually means. There's the most popular and familiar understanding of them; the kind of new agey "astral projection" stuff that most people probably think of. Then there's the sense of ego death, as is reached via some types of intense meditation or through certain frequently entheogenic psychadelics like DMT or salvia divinorum, dissociatives like ketamine or DXM, or sometimes high doses of psylobicin mushrooms or LSD. The latter experience isn't really about your spirit floating out of your body and flying around the room or whatever, but about a dissolution of the sense of self or of a separate and individual entity that I call "me". That's an entirely different thing than people who want to use what they call "out of body experiences" to prove the existence of a spirit or soul separate from the body, and more of a psychological or philosophical experience than a spiritual or religious one. Actually, the first type of experience is directly contrary to the second; the existence of an individual "soul" separate from both the physical world and from other "souls" is the antithesis of ego death in a lot of ways. Things get confused when, for example, the work of John C. Lilly, especially his famous experiments with ketamine and sensory deprivation tanks, is used by people discussing all different kinds of "out of body experiences" with all kinds of religious and other agendas.

tl;dr "out of body experiences" can refer to a lot of things, not all of them religious or paranormal, and many directly opposed to one another
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barfbag
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« Reply #13 on: August 18, 2013, 08:20:25 PM »

If the brain can hallucinate, which it can, then it can certainly provide a "near death experience." Unless there is direct evidence to the contrary it has to be surmised that these experiences are the results of brain activity. End of story. But that doesn't mean the tests can't reveal interesting things about how the brain works.

As to out of body experiences, they've been testing those for years and decades and never confirmed one. An out of body experience is easier to test than a near death experience, of course, but it's really only a lucid dream or a hallucination. And of course people will see all kinds of crazy stuff.

Assuming the test subject would not cheat, Carl Sagan had proposed years and years ago a standing test: place an object or even the title of a book or a coin in a high back corner shelf, for instance, or a high place, and then at some point when the person has an out of body experience, go check to see what the object is. It would require an honest subject, though. Wink Some folks have some real wild out of body stories, so it shouldn't be too hard to go check what's on the shelf.

Drugs would help people have out of body experiences and hallucinations.
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Kitteh
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« Reply #14 on: August 18, 2013, 08:38:59 PM »

Another interesting thing is that one of the drugs most well-known for OBEs during trips, DMT, is possibly present in the human brain naturally (as well as in other mammals). AFAIK there hasn't been any proven direct link to psychoactive effects from this (it's a relatively new theory in research terms), but very interesting w/r/t this discussion. 
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DemPGH
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« Reply #15 on: August 19, 2013, 02:49:08 PM »

Sure, drugs and plants can cause people to hallucinate and have all sorts of experiences - which has always been misunderstood in various cultures as a religious experience. It's not.

Related, medication can do the same. Alzheimer's / dementia medication can cause problems like that.

@Kitteh: That's interesting, but my contention is this: let's say we offer two explanations for a thunderstorm. 1) Rising warm air mixing with cool air; 2) Zeus lobbing thunderbolts from his extra dimensional rift. Well, that's kind of what I'm talking about, and I don't have to answer that question. Science works in the physical, and the physical is all there is proof of. So we have a marvelously complex organ in the brain that does all sorts of things, so we have to say that if someone hallucinates, near death or not, the cause is physical / cerebral unless we have proof of Zeus or some other causal agent.

Vaguely related, it seems really strange to me as well that religious / spiritual people think that God would offer someone as sort of an ultimate prize a fleeting image of Himself as a beam of light or whatever, or maybe a glimpse at departed loved ones in their youth, rather than something constructive - an insight, new intelligence, etc. I mean, if God or whatever is going to do one, why not the other as well!? There's got to be something psychological about that.
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Kitteh
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« Reply #16 on: August 19, 2013, 06:20:07 PM »

@Kitteh: That's interesting, but my contention is this: let's say we offer two explanations for a thunderstorm. 1) Rising warm air mixing with cool air; 2) Zeus lobbing thunderbolts from his extra dimensional rift. Well, that's kind of what I'm talking about, and I don't have to answer that question. Science works in the physical, and the physical is all there is proof of. So we have a marvelously complex organ in the brain that does all sorts of things, so we have to say that if someone hallucinates, near death or not, the cause is physical / cerebral unless we have proof of Zeus or some other causal agent.

I think we're basically saying the same here Tongue Smiley
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