Neuroscientist Has a Near-Death Experience

Enter the light! Enter the Light!

I think we’ve all heard of Near Death Experiences (NDEs), tunnels of light and out of body experiences occurring during medical events in our lives. Well, they don’t just happen in cardiac wards or in the split-seconds between car hitting pedestrian; they’ve been reported and recorded for centuries and happen anywhere at any time of physical or mental crisis.

One of the earliest recorders of such mysterious events was Albert von st. Gallen Heim who reported the experiences of mountain-climbers and soldiers who faced death. They often explained how they had felt a timeless quality and some measure of calmness that was at odds with falling off cliffs or dodging bullets.

More intense, and genuinely mysterious adventures into the unknown, tend to involve being welcomed into a place where we feel truly joyful and meet people we’ve known in life. From suicide leapers to dying infants, survivors come with stories that challenge our ideas of what it means to be alive.

These snips are from 1st hand accounts of NDEs. A couple are from attempted suicide jumpers and the others are from hospital NDEs…



Some of the tales screw with modern conceptions of science and even basic reasoning. After all, how can a consciousness see or hear? With what can it process the information of photons that generate vision? What part of consciousness can vibrate and convert sound waves into coherent voices or sounds? ‘I felt calm’ is an emotional appraisal that asks, once more, how a non-physical *something* like consciousness can analog the enzymes that make us feel sad or happy? Tough questions and very basic – no wonder much of science has a big problem accepting the on-going research into NDEs!

From the basic questions, we’re off into possibilities of telepathy, after-life hierarchies, meaningful life and *GASP,* the chance that physical humanity is not the finished article!

One neuroscientist, Dr Eben Alexander, had a kick-ass attack of rare meningitis that put him in a coma within a couple of hours of striking. Whilst in this coma, he experienced something that challenged his perspectives on everything…he had a coherent NDE:



It sounds pretty interesting doesn’t it? The rest of the interview is available as free podcast or to read at SKEPTIKO - Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander’s Near-Death Experience Defies Medical Model of Consciousness

Dr Alexander describes the experience in this video...



I’m a fairly materialist guy in the way I think that science will have the answers to everything...given enough time, professionalism and funding. I also understand that science doesn’t have all the answers and shouldn’t be afraid to look in places that makes it nervous. Conversely, I doubt that meditating, chanting or hitting the pews every Sunday will lead further than science can take us.

Dr Alexander’s encounter with whatever generated this experience is no more, or less, important than anyone else’s NDEs. What it does is add one more scientist to the small band who are trying to nail down an explanation for NDEs. I'm less impressed with the PayPal buttons on his website, but we live in a material world and there's a heck of a recession on right?!

Further reading and sources:

Grayson - Near Death Experiences and Spirituality

Fenwick - Spirituality and Psychiatry

A 'cascade' of brain activity as people die could explain near death experiences

Grayson NDE Scale

Skeptic's Dictionary of NDEs

D Rosen MD - Suicide Survivors

reply to post by Kandinsky


I've felt a "near death" style feeling many times. It happens when you're not exactly awake, and not exactly a sleep. Feelings of timelessness, somewhat active senses, odd lights. It happens when the alarm clock goes off and you're trying to hit snooze but can't quite find it. Not a new feeling to me.

one thing that always fascinated me about the whole nde thing.. I remember reading somewhere about a hospital that put obscure items on top of cabinets etc (hidden from view from the ground)
I cant remember the exact details but people claiming nde's and floating out of their bodies, were able to describe these objects after being resuscitated..

The part that really baffles the science types is how can a non functioning brain be perceptive. I cant remember his name but a well known scientist teamed up with some researchers and they discovered that consciousness appears to partly exist within the 'quantum world'. Now consider the experiment where we split a particle into two seperate pieces. I think they called the two pieces Negatrons an Positrons. Anyway, if they cause the negatron to flip to a positron the other part(positron) will instantly flip to become a negatron, this happens even if the particles are thousands of miles apart.
Now the research being done by the scientist who's name I cant remember is seriously suspecting that NDE's happen because even though the brain may be technicaly dead the quantum half is still functioning and can exist outside of the body for the same reason as the split particles can react to each other even though they are seperated by thousands of miles.

Hope that makes sense, 24 hours since I slept zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

reply to post by Misterlondon


I think the result of that experiment is due quite soon.

reply to post by Evolutionsend
Me too. I was once sliding down a pitched roof on a 3-story house. I was totally calm and still as the edge of the roof came closer and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I accepted I was going to die and my pulse rate probably didn't even flinch!

reply to post by Misterlondon
The guy was Sam Parnia and the study is on-going. The big problem - 'A' big problem is 'inattentional blindness' where we don't always see everything that's around us. Going to the shops in the car overlooks pedestrians, shop names etc.

*If* we were floating above an operating theatre, would we be checking out the ornaments and bric-a-brac or looking at ourselves on the bed and the all that medical action?

There's a YT video where a gorilla walks past the screen and most people don't notice because they're watching something else happening.

Originally posted by Kandinsky

There's a YT video where a gorilla walks past the screen and most people don't notice because they're watching something else happening.

Yeah that's a UK road safety awareness video. It's to show that something so out of the ordinary can be missed right in plain sight if your concentration is on something else. It's pretty effective video & I missed the Gorilla the 1st time I watched it.

I suggest you watch the TED video of Jill Bolte Taylor, She is also a neuroscientist who had a stroke and experience something amazing.

TED-Jill Bolte Taylor

reply to post by Kandinsky


ty, great input - i got a great ideas while watching it to perform a study to "proof" karma once more =)

but maybe its all just "highness"
ccforum.com...

Thanks for posting that video it was pretty interesting. I have always believed in reincarnation and life after death this kind of info just reaffirms my believes. Very cool video though. S&F for you.

The near death experience is due to a release of '___' or Dimethyltryptamine into the brain. This is a compound that is in almost every living creature and is responsible for making us dream whilst sleeping; it is also the strongest hallucinogenic known to man when extracted from sources like plants.
Its almost like gas masks dropping down from the airplane when your going to crash.. Calm you down in a no where near calm moment.
It’s the bodies natural response to extreme shock.

Originally posted by WakeUpRiseUp
The near death experience is due to a release of '___' or Dimethyltryptamine into the brain. This is a compound that is in almost every living creature and is responsible for making us dream whilst sleeping; it is also the strongest hallucinogenic known to man when extracted from sources like plants.
Its almost like gas masks dropping down from the airplane when your going to crash.. Calm you down in a no where near calm moment.
It’s the bodies natural response to extreme shock.

I find it absolutely fascinating that the '___' experience and the NDE go hand in hand. I've actually just watched the movie '___': The Spirit Molecule and it completely blew me away, to the point of wanting to experience it myself. To completely leave this reality and enter a new reality baffles me. This should be something that is opened up and truly studied by the brightest of minds.

Back to the NDE though...I was 7 years old when I had mine. The last thing I remember in my conscience from that night was looking out the back window of my parents chevy pickup and boom, I was being pulled into this spiraling tunnel, all the while looking down on the mangled mess of a truck that I, my physical body, was still in. There was a tremendous humming noise, and the only way I can explain it is it just wraps around you like a noise blanket. You just give into it, and then you ARE the noise. Then I remember seeing my father scoop me up out of the truck and carry me down the street where I was put into another mans truck and driven to the hospital. My body left inside that truck while I was still suspended over the trees. I was then joined by two blindingly bright lit "things". To this day I have no idea what they were but they were bright bright bright white. The brightest thing you could ever imagine. But I could look at them and communicate with them while they guided me through this tube, tunnel, vortex thing. When I reached what seemed like where they were taking me I suddenly started drifting back. Back through where I just traveled in and suddenly I was in a cat-scan looking up at the rotating mechanism. When they realized I had came to I had asked how long I was out and my father told me I was out for 9 hours.

I was flown to Westchester Medical Center the next morning with a fractured skull, contusion to the brain, broken jaw, collarbone, and facial lacerations.

In similar vein - A neuroscientist has a stroke

Science is supposed to forgo complex answers for simple ones.

This is where science needs to admit and start seriously researching the fact that consciousness is not as firmly attached to and dependent upon the body we normally associate it with in our Human Language Civilization.

Which is simpler? Consciousness is a flexible point that never ceases, only changes what it perceives (and thus these people aren't delusional, including shamanistic description)... or Nothing built matter which built consciousness as the current end result and all of these people are just really dumb?

Of course those who have never had the experiences themselves are clearly in a better position to tell otherse what they experienced wasn't real the way they say it was. Huh.

I've woken up lucidly and my consciousness was attached to a 3D project I was working with, where I literally was the object. I wasn't "feeling as if I was it"... I *WAS* IT as firmly as you know you are you. However I also had the memory of who I was before I was this 3D project. I couldn't place a time frame on how long I had been the project, but once I was aware of my desire to return back to my previous point of awareness I started to sense time again as a strange indescribable fade from the project to my body. I was never not me... however what had changed was what the boundaries that defined me could be... and the barriers I put up between previous boundaries I had explored.

It's the simple answer. Consciousness defines its own boundaries, including boundaries such as the need to eat, breed, sleep, die, etc. Or not. It can remember, or not... because it is eternal and no matter what it does it will always BE. So it might as well be all that it can be... and be Everything... Ever.

Edit: Consider this idea: There is only one photon ever. Every path a photon takes is a thread in the entire fabric of the universe. Including getting trapped and "bundled" up into clumps occasionally. Thus why "God" (the boundary of the entire thread) feels everything, but there can be delay in communication between portions of Tao/The Universe (smaller loci of consciousness sensing the vibrations of the single photon thread only in their boundaries). These boundaries can vibrate their inner portion, which will send out vibrations to the other boundaries... however at no time is the biggest non-boundary (infinity) never not fully aware of what all the smaller boundaries are doing, despite their individual blindness to each other's inner vibrations.

reply to post by Dillon123

I suggest you watch the TED video of Jill Bolte Taylor, She is also a neuroscientist who had a stroke and experience something amazing.

TED-Jill Bolte Taylor

Thanks for the video, it's very interesting and Taylor is an excellent lecturer. I like the way she relates her experience in neurological terms and captures the beauty of existing. Her final message about 'projecting peace' into the world is a frequent one in the after-effects of NDEs.



reply to post by WakeUpRiseUp

The near death experience is due to a release of '___' or Dimethyltryptamine into the brain. This is a compound that is in almost every living creature and is responsible for making us dream whilst sleeping; it is also the strongest hallucinogenic known to man when extracted from sources like plants.
Its almost like gas masks dropping down from the airplane when your going to crash.. Calm you down in a no where near calm moment.
It’s the bodies natural response to extreme shock.

Thanks for your comments. '___' has been studied in connection with NDEs, but it is far from being proven. Researchers and medical practitioners studying NDEs haven't accepted the '___' explanation because it doesn't explain the NDEs where no trauma was felt or the recollections of people claiming OOBEs whilst technically dead.

In this video Dr Jeff Long disagrees with the 'chemical hypothesis' of NDEs in this video. It's a wildly inaccurate title although interesting enough



Dr. Lakhmir Chawla and his team have identified a massive spike of electrical activity preceding death - it's literally off the chart in some cases; machines can't measure it. This is one more avenue of study and I raise it to point out that research is ongoing and nobody has the answers just yet. The researchers and commentators who say it's all understood are making false claims and probably haven't read much of the research.

reply to post by Kandinsky

Not to mention there is no conclusive evidence that '___' is responsible for dreaming or NDEs at all. It's a myth that has been repeated so many times that people think it is science.

Or that '___' is produced in the pineal gland.

"I did my best in the '___' book to differentiate between what is known, and what I was conjecturing about (based upon what is known), regarding certain aspects of '___' dynamics. However, it's amazing how ineffective my efforts seem to have been. So many people write me, or write elsewhere, about '___', and the pineal, assuming that the things I conjecture about are true. When I was writing the book, I thought I was clear enough, and repeating myself would have gotten tedious."

"We don't know whether '___' is made in the pineal. I muster a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting a reason to look long and hard at the pineal, but we do not yet know."

www.erowid.org...
www.erowid.org...

reply to post by mnmcandiez
'___' has been used as a panacea to explain UFOs, NDEs, ghosts, alien abductions and plenty more.

Nothing I've read is as conclusive as '___'-supporters report.

my near death experience was the opposite.

it felt like moments.

one moment i'm in surgery, rudely awoken to the sound of beeps from different machines letting the doctors know they are losing me. I feel the life slip away, and feel a cold you can't even imagine. I become weightless and float into the ceiling as the monotonous beep carries me away.

I wake up the next day in a different hospital with the feeling that I had just died moments ago and was floating in a freezing vaccuum of empty nothing space.



I stress the fact I was still feeling "something" and could still "hear" the beep from the machine.
But from above and all around, not in my body. And I sort of just transferred back into my body.

It's hard to explain. I flew up into the ceiling, but up into my body in the other hospital, if that makes sense.

I have always known that there is a spiritual world.

What amazes me is that so many people do not seem to accept this.

I have known this all my life.

Please do not ask for proof - there is no proof. Take it or leave it.

Originally posted by catwhoknowsplusone
I have always known that there is a spiritual world.

What amazes me is that so many people do not seem to accept this.

I have known this all my life.

Please do not ask for proof - there is no proof. Take it or leave it.

Pics or it didnt happen