Originally posted by eveshi
I noticed that Dr. Sam Parnia's name has been dropped by NDE believers and to prove that I am not all "bad guy", I have bad news to report. Bad for proponents anyway.

Dr. Parnia's NDE research is a highly well hidden skeptics dream-soon-to-come-through and here is why.

Parnia's methodologies are purposefully and fatally flawed to skew the outcome to the NDE=brain function POV. He is relying on placing signs on out-of-normal-sight places inside operating rooms in the hope, and hope it is, that these signs will be seen by NDErs. This presupposes that NDErs will see the signs. Why in the world should they? Do you think sign reading will be important to a NDEr?

Mark this down. Parnia is playing quite a game and proponents, when he releases next summer, will be shocked, startled and permanently smacked down as Parnia will claim that NDErs did not see his signs. duh, ya' think?

You heard it here and if you wish to spread the word, please not it came for a great and proven skeptic.

Me.

There's an issue I see with that IMO. Just because they put some signs doesn't prove anything to me. How many times have I been at an area but don't notice a certain sign, photo, landmark, or billboard even lol. I feel like if you were out of your body you could be too focused on something to even care to look around. Some people look around but it doesn't mean they'll see it. I've heard of this before.

Originally posted by chelle21689

There's an issue I see with that IMO. Just because they {Dr. Parnia and team}put some signs doesn't prove anything to me. How many times have I been at an area but don't notice a certain sign, photo, landmark, or billboard even lol. I feel like if you were out of your body you could be too focused on something to even care to look around. Some people look around but it doesn't mean they'll see it. I've heard of this before.

Let's not forget that Parnia before he decided to play pseudo-believer was a severe skeptic. He called NDEs, rightly, illusions.

From Parnia:

“And so if we get say 500 people who all supposedly die and come back and all that sort of stuff, and they call claim they saw Dr. Smith and they have all these incredible stories and they can describe what was happening, and we can demonstrate that it was happening when they’re going through cardiac arrest and the brain is shut down, then supposedly, if they really are out of body, they should see that picture".

rofl

Who says? Well Parnia says and he is getting hyooge press for his AWARE studies becoming, purposefully, to become the NDE guru. Then wait until he drops the shoe and blows NDEs righr out of the water.

Look, there is no reason for this kind of scam and as a skeptic, I think it stinks but that is nonevermind; in the end all, Parnia will destroy NDE just not the way it should be.

Of course, I could be wrong but it is rare when I am.

Rare appears to have happened, eveshi my non-scholarly non-friend.

May I quote the good Doctor? Thanks!

All I can say is what I have observed from my work. It seems that when consciousness shuts down in death, psyche, or soul – by which I don't mean ghosts, I mean your individual self – persists for a least those hours before you are resuscitated. From which we might justifiably begin to conclude that the brain is acting as an intermediary to manifest your idea of soul or self but it may not be the source or originator of it… I think that the evidence is beginning to suggest that we should keep open our minds to the possibility that memory, while obviously a scientific entity of some kind – I'm not saying it is magic or anything like that – is not neuronal."

Clearly if the brain isn't functioning and a person has an NDE that has been compared to a dream by skeptic debunkers, then the question is why this should even happen at all. Nobody dreams of having an NDE, nobody dreams of meeting God, and nobody has glitches of memory in an NDE.

I see no reason to take debunkers seriously based on the above facts, eveshi my debunking cumquat.

He must be saying this because people are reporting OBEs while their brains are flatlined. What else could it be? It is a valid inference to make, by the way, since the entirety of the NDE phenomenon includes many features which seem to go against the idea that the experience is amnesiac based.

It's too easy to say that amnesia or glitches of memory account for all the effects of an NDE.

Also, people have NDEs while falling from great heights and subsequently surviving. Do you believe that to be a memory glitch too, my dearest cumquat eveshi?

I'm reading the Parnia book now myself. Very interesting just on the resuscitation science side of things to start with. And he's quite explicit: they're "actual death experiences" (I always thought the same when it's cardiac arrest).

Yes, it's all so painfully obvious, eveshi. I don't see any merit debating this topic with the "pseudoskeptics" anymore, and I won't including foremost a firstmost...you.

Read the book. He's for real and hated the name of his book, forced on him by his publisher, in that it provides neither "Proof" nor a "heaven". His NDE provides excellent testimony that there is an afterlife and that the soul/spirit continues after physical death.

Originally posted by moniesisfun
Really though, it's because it's just a funky brain experience. I think it does serve a purpose. It creates an illusion of a greater reality...those who "come back" can help us to be more at ease with existence, and our inevitable demise. The groups who had these experiences could cope better, and be more resilient to stress...giving them an evolutionary advantage.

I'm not religious at all, so don't get me wrong, but...

If our brain evolved the ability to have NDEs, that means it would have happened a long time ago when the human brain was in the earlier stages of evolution. Therefore it would not have benefited groups, because the people who experienced this most likely would not have had the linguistic skills to relay it to the others in the group. Like I said, don't get me wrong, I'm a skeptic too, but I don't think something like that would just happen to evolve over time.

>group is out hunting
>a few of them get mauled by lions
>most die but one happens to come back
>"omg guys guess what happened to me, I went somewhere else and we don't actually die after death!"
>group is happier because death doesn't necessitate finality
>NDE guy humps a few women and gets them pregnant
>NDE gene gets passed on
>thousands upon thousands of years later NDE cases reported all over the world because of horny NDE guy and his prolific NDE genes

In all honesty, that theory in some ways seems more absurd than what the spiritual people are saying. Not only because it's far fetched, but think of it this way too --- wouldn't that particular group end up fearing death less because of what they were told? If they feared death less, they would actually be less likely to survive and those ubiquitous NDE genes wouldn't have gone as far.

This is like asking: "Why do some people get cancer?"

Why do certain things happen to certain people? Random chance, destiny, take your pick..

Originally posted by TheLaughingGod
This is like asking: "Why do some people get cancer?"

Why do certain things happen to certain people? Random chance, destiny, pre-birth planning take your pick..

fyp

The last one.

Originally posted by Xaphan

Originally posted by Cyprex
I saw a documentary on this a few years back, here is one source.

It is believed that a massive release of '___' from the pineal gland prior to death or near-death is the cause of the near-death experience phenomenon.

There is no hard scientific evidence that '___' is released upon death, nor is there any evidence that '___' is even produced in the pineal gland. So far it's just a hypothesis.

lmao just realized that the mods are now blocking a three letter acronym because it's associated with a street drug... even though I was referring to a brain chemical.

Sorry if the scientific terms are offensive. Shall I go ahead and just call it "NDE brain juice" from now on?

Originally posted by chelle21689
Just curious for your explanation. I don't know if you watched the video or not...but if it is a hallucination how was Pam able to describe the details of how the odd surgical tools looked without it ever being out of its package, her eyes taped shut, and the ticking things in her ear? How was she able to recall the conversation and them moving down to cut her leg in detail as if she were awake when she was knocked out? Surely she couldn't have felt it if she was numb and like I said unconscious?

Some patients have actually regained consciousness while being operated upon - mainly towards the middle of the surgery - they have felt the pain of the scalpel incision and heard what the surgeons were saying. When they confronted the nurses with this knowledge, the medical staff ran screaming out of the room

I once crashed out while getting a blood test done - had to dash across to the other side of downtown (where the hospital was) at morning rush-hour without breakfast or eating the previous night. Then the nurses started to poke about my arms trying to find a vein. Needless to say, I passed out - but the funny thing I was still very much conscious. Though all I could really perceive was what looked like a wireframe drawn world (like Tron) with edges in green/purple lines. Mainly doors, walls, lightswitches and fingerprints around them. In this dream-world, I trailed some person who was running away from me along a J shaped path, only to double back on me, and then when I caught up with them again, I regained consciousness and there were two nurses looking at me.

I do wonder whether it could simply be that the light receptors in our retinas could have some response to the wavelengths of light that could pass through eyelids (infra-red, ultra-violet).

i think some people just dont remember them for a while. ive read some cases where it took like 20 or more years to remember what happened.

and i dont know if it was mentioned but its '___' thats released supposedly when you die in large amounts.