Do near-death experiences give good evidence for life after death?

[Unicorny]

Moderator Action: Split off from this thread.

On an unrelated topic, have you guys heard of NDE?

It irrefutably provides more evidence that God, soul, and an after-life exists. Only for those that are interested in the truth with an open mind:


Link to video.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Wow your information on the plausibility of an afterlife is WAY outdated if you're relying on NDE's to prove the point. Your brain hallucinates when it's under extreme stress. Unless you think that astronauts that are spun around at high speeds are getting closer to the afterlife the faster they go? Because many of them report what are undeniably NDE's while being spun around as part of their training.

 

[Unicorny]

Wow your information on the plausibility of an afterlife is WAY outdated if you're relying on NDE's to prove the point. Your brain hallucinates when it's under extreme stress. Unless you think that astronauts that are spun around at high speeds are getting closer to the afterlife the faster they go? Because many of them report what are undeniably NDE's while being spun around as part of their training.

Could not be any more wrong. Provide sources and evidence to backup your claims as a starting point.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

Science is helpless when it comes to providing an explanation for NDEs as the subject matter transcends the matrial world. Human science is severely flawed in that sense.

NDEs experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper decided to undertake a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind. They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to report on verifiable events that took place when they were clinically dead, that would mean something real was occurring. They interviewed 31 individuals, of whom 14 were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the participants had had an NDE; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly, the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern, whether they were born blind or had lost their sight in later life. The results of the study were published in 1997. Based on all the cases they investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on the senses of the physical body.

So critical questions

1) How exactly are clinically dead people able to perceive everything around them while describing the experience as floating above their bodies after being pronounced dead?

2) How exactly are blind people from birth able to perceive reality in such a state and describe everything around them?

Bonus question:

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.

Why the shared and almost identical sequence of event by people from all backgrounds and sorts of life?

The evidence is overwhelming. Get your head out of the sand.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Could not be any more wrong. Provide sources and evidence to backup your claims as a starting point.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

Science is helpless when it comes to providing an explanation for NDEs as the subject matter transcends the matrial world. Human science is severely flawed in that sense.

NDEs experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper decided to undertake a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind. They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to report on verifiable events that took place when they were clinically dead, that would mean something real was occurring. They interviewed 31 individuals, of whom 14 were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the participants had had an NDE; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly, the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern, whether they were born blind or had lost their sight in later life. The results of the study were published in 1997. Based on all the cases they investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on the senses of the physical body.

So critical questions

1) How exactly are clinically dead people able to perceive everything around them while describing the experience as floating above their bodies after being pronounced dead?

2) How exactly are blind people from birth able to perceive reality in such a state and describe everything around them?

Bonus question:

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.

Why the shared and almost identical sequence of event by people from all backgrounds and sorts of life?

The evidence is overwhelming. Get your head out of the sand.

I'm not going to go in depth on this because it's a well understood phenomenon in science already and I'm hardly an expert in any case. But it's easy enough to search Google and come back with some information. For example:

They can use drugs to perfectly replicate near death experiences. Commonly reported features of an NDE include out of body experiences, seeing a bright light, and a sensation of moving through a tunnel before emerging into the light. Injecting people with ketamine produces exactly those same hallucinations. This was published nearly 20 years ago, incidentally, not exactly breaking news.

Astronauts in training are put into giant centrifuges to test the effects of high G forces on their body. Turns out that when subjected to high G forces, they tend to black out and report, you guessed it, near death experiences upon waking.

That's as far as I'm willing to go into this particular subject, I think. All of the commonly reported aspects of an NDE can be induced in people who are not near death at all, whether with physical stresses (high g forces) or with drugs. There's nothing mystical about them, it's just one of the ways our brains, with their complicated chemistry, respond to being put into stressful situations.

 

[Plotinus]

The obvious problem with using near-death experiences as evidence for life after death is that the people who have these experiences don't actually die. They just come near death! So how is this evidence for what happens after death? This is like looking at what happens to your body when you nearly break a bone, and using it as evidence for what happens when you do.

The claims about perceptions of the operating rooms and all the other things that people who have these experiences sometimes report are, by their very nature, anecdotal. They haven't been (and obviously cannot be) examined scientifically under laboratory conditions. That doesn't make them worthless as evidence, but it does make them less valuable.

Even if we accept that all these anecdotes are perfectly true, other explanations are possible. For example, maybe there is some form of subconscious ESP or psychic communication, and the patients are "picking up" the descriptions of other rooms from the minds of the doctors interviewing them. Now I'll grant that this would be an extraordinary thing and seems unlikely. However, it's less extraordinary, and less unlikely, than the suggestion that the patients' souls floated out of their bodies and went exploring. Psychic abilities haven't been confirmed by science either (even though it ought to be easier to do), but if they were real, they would, I think, be less inconsistent with what we know about the world than immortal souls would be.

BTW, videos aren't really a good way of communicating your points here, because they take quite a lot of time investment to watch, especially ones like that. No-one really cares to sit through seven entire minutes of someone describing, very very very slowly, a medical procedure, before we get to the actual point. Written sources are far more effective because they can be taken in much more quickly and in more detail.

 

[Domen]

A very interesting case of an NDE was that of Pam Reynolds in 1991:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNbdUEqDB-k

 

[bhavv]

Linking NDEs to what happens after death is an oxymoronic thing that idiots usually do. Such people should also be executed.

Oh sorry, RD tag ... But its stupid moron level stuff.

 

[El_Machinae]

Out of Body experiences are certainly evidence that the mind can be independent of the brain. But 'evidence' is a loose term. It's obviously not evidence of post-death existence or of God, but if confirmed they'd be a reason to think there's a post-death existence (if consciousness can be dissociated from a brain).

The simplest explanation is, of course, that the brain is hallucinating memories for itself as it recovers. The closest example would be dreaming, so we know the phenomenon exists. An extended clinical trial, using proper scientific controls, is socially nigh-impossible. The best we can do is collect case studies, and then here you get a selection-effect. IF a specific story can be explained merely by luck, it's vastly more likely to make it into the case-study reports than OBEs that are clearly hallucinations.

Clinical death is, of course, not actual death, so sometimes the ability to investigate too deeply are lost. We have a technology, TransCranial Magnetic Stimulation, that effectively shuts down portions of the brain. Theoretically, if people can figure out which part of the brain needs to be 'shut down' to cause astral projection, the science could then move forwards very quickly.

If one wants to scientifically prove NDEs, donating to medical charities that will research this TMS technology will go on to create more tools and data. OBEs then become a more and more answerable scientific question.

In other words, if you think that there's partial scientific evidence available 'out there', then it's a good idea to be pro-active in creating more (and better) scientific tools that will make OBE's future discovery easier.

 

[Unicorny]

There's a lot of misconceptions about NDE's already on this thread. Replicating an NDE experience through drugs is not enough to dismiss key actual facts that have been experienced by a multitude of patients who were clinically pronounced dead for a prolonged period of time - think hours. They had no brain or heart activity.

And yet, despite being clinically dead, they were able to recall and describe everything that was happening around them, often in detail. Even blind from birth subjects were able to witness and describe their surroundings and the actions that there taken place while being clinically dead.

So the question arises: how is it possible for a clinically dead person to know what was going around them? The experiences are consistent regardless of the subject's background, religion, gender, age, etc.

Recollections in relation to death, so-called out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs), are an often spoken about phenomenon which have frequently been considered hallucinatory or illusory in nature; however, objective studies on these experiences are limited.
In 2008, a large-scale study involving 2060 patients from 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria was launched. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK, examined the broad range of mental experiences in relation to death. Researchers also tested the validity of conscious experiences using objective markers for the first time in a large study to determine whether claims of awareness compatible with out-of-body experiences correspond with real or hallucinatory events.

Results of the study have been published in the journal Resuscitation.

Dr Sam Parnia, Assistant Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Director of Resuscitation Research at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, and the study's lead author, explained: "Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as 'cardiac arrest'; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called 'death'. In this study we wanted to go beyond the emotionally charged yet poorly defined term of NDEs to explore objectively what happens when we die."
Thirty-nine per cent of patients who survived cardiac arrest and were able to undergo structured interviews described a perception of awareness, but interestingly did not have any explicit recall of events.

"This suggests more people may have mental activity initially but then lose their memories after recovery, either due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory recall," explained Dr Parnia, who was an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton when he started the AWARE study.

Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE's. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE's with explicit recall of 'seeing' and 'hearing' events.

One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest. Dr Parnia concluded: "This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with 'real' events when the heart isn't beating. In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn't resume again until the heart has been restarted. Furthermore, the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.

"Thus, while it was not possible to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients' experiences and claims of awareness, (due to the very low incidence (2 per cent) of explicit recall of visual awareness or so called OBE's), it was impossible to disclaim them either and more work is needed in this area. Clearly, the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice."

Further studies are also needed to explore whether awareness (explicit or implicit) may lead to long term adverse psychological outcomes including post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dr Jerry Nolan, Editor-in-Chief of Resuscitation, stated: "The AWARE study researchers are to be congratulated on the completion of a fascinating study that will open the door to more extensive research into what happens when we die."

This proves that conciseness transcends your body and therefore a soul exists, and that death is only a transition.

 

[Borachio]

Out of Body experiences are certainly evidence that the mind can be independent of the brain.

I don't think they're even that.

It would be if someone who's had an out of body experience could report something that they couldn't possibly know if they'd been in their body the whole time.

But as far as I know, everyone involved in researching this issue has come up with a big zero.

I think the out of body experience is just something to do with proprioception. And dreaming. Remarkable though both of these experiences are, I don't think they show evidence that the mind can be independent of the brain at all. The mind, I suggest, is just an emergent property of the brain.

No brain, no mind: is the hard materialist viewpoint. I remain to be convinced that this isn't so.

 

[Unicorny]

Some skeptics legitimately argue that the main problem with reports of OBE perceptions is that they often rest uniquely on the NDEr’s testimony—there is no independent corroboration. From a scientific perspective, such self-reports remain inconclusive. But during the last few decades, some self-reports of NDErs have been independently corroborated by witnesses, such as that of Pam Reynolds. One of the best known of these corroborated veridical NDE perceptions—perceptions that can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark.

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

Your consciousness transcends your body, mind, brain, and dead heart, i.e the soul. Even more evidence for the skeptic naysayer.

 

[Borachio]

So, what you have there is one anecdotal account.

But let's go with supposition that the mind can exist independently from the brain. Just for a moment.

How does it then interact with the physical body and vice versa? It surely must, mustn't it? Else you couldn't move around at will. And your hormones wouldn't be able to affect your mood.

But how does an immaterial mind cause an effect on something physical? And how does a physical body have any effect on an immaterial mind?

Explain it to me in simple terms, please.

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't think they're even that.

It would be if someone who's had an out of body experience could report something that they couldn't possibly know if they'd been in their body the whole time.

But as far as I know, everyone involved in researching this issue has come up with a big zero.

I think the out of body experience is just something to do with proprioception. And dreaming. Remarkable though both of these experiences are, I don't think they show evidence that the mind can be independent of the brain at all. The mind, I suggest, is just an emergent property of the brain.

No brain, no mind: is the hard materialist viewpoint. I remain to be convinced that this isn't so.

Sorry, yes. It's evidence if they know something they "should not have" known. Now, I didn't say it's proof. It's merely evidence.

A major problem with this collected evidence is the nature by which it's collected. IF you only collect the exceptional examples, then the entire process seems exceptional. But, at some scales, such things can actually be due to luck. A million hallucinations on a million typewriters eventually read all the books of Shakespeare. Or something.

This is why proponents should devote an increasing portion of their efforts to furthering neuroscience (however obliquely). IF you can generate OBEs by shutting down portions of the brain, then it will be medical neuroscience research that discovers this technology. THEN the ability to generate real scientific data will be around.

 

[warpus]

Let's see some peer reviewed studies that verify that near death experiences are people travelling to heaven and back.

NDE's used to fascinate me, but as far as I know we haven't figured out any new stuff about them in the last 20 years. As such, we have no choice but to file it under "interesting, but sorry, no heaven involved"

 

[Borachio]

Sorry, yes. It's evidence if they know something they "should not have" known. Now, I didn't say it's proof. It's merely evidence.

A major problem with this collected evidence is the nature by which it's collected. IF you only collect the exceptional examples, then the entire process seems exceptional. But, at some scales, such things can actually be due to luck. A million hallucinations on a million typewriters eventually read all the books of Shakespeare. Or something.

This is why proponents should devote an increasing portion of their efforts to furthering neuroscience (however obliquely). IF you can generate OBEs by shutting down portions of the brain, then it will be medical neuroscience research that discovers this technology. THEN the ability to generate real scientific data will be around.

It's not actually an unusual experience. Around 20%, iirc, of people experience them quite naturally.

And as far as I've been able to determine, it's practically the same experience as lucid dreaming.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yeah, it's a very common experience. Running a proper scientific study, though, is very hard. You'd need to hire someone to place an "unknown" in the emergency room who then interviews the NDEer for what they experienced.

If they were real, it would be one of the greater scientific discoveries of our time. It would quantum leap both neuroscience research and probably theoretical physics.

 

[Borachio]

You'd need to hire someone to place an "unknown" in the emergency room who then interviews the NDEer for what they experienced.

I think that's been tried on numerous occasions and found not to work. And why does an object, or a piece of paper with writing on it, have to be in the same room?

 

[Funky]

For anyone interested, this debate on the topic is not only informative, it's also quite entertaining.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I don't think they're even that.

It would be if someone who's had an out of body experience could report something that they couldn't possibly know if they'd been in their body the whole time.

But as far as I know, everyone involved in researching this issue has come up with a big zero.

That's the real issue. If people came out of situations like that describing things they could not possibly have known any other way, it would be interesting. It would not be proof of life after death, but it would be something. But they don't, they come out of it describing things in very general, vague terms. Saying that they saw people performing very common CPR routines on their body is not compelling.

Here's an interesting case. A group of people decided to run an experiment. They set up special shelving in a hospital that contained pictures pointing upwards. The pictures could not be seen from the ground. The plan was to quiz people who reported an NDE to see if they could describe the pictures on top of the shelves.

They finally published their results years later. But what's this? There's no mention all of a sudden of the hidden pictures that they were supposed to be using to verify the claims of the cardiac arrest patients they interviewed. What gives? Well, it turns out that the study was being run by someone who already believes in NDE's. Dr. Sam Parnia, they guy in charge of the study, already believed before doing the study that the mind, or consciousness, is separate from the brain and can survive even after the brain has died. We can presume based on this information that the final study not mentioning the hidden pictures is because none of his patients were able to report what the pictures were. If they had, it would have been strong evidence that his preexisting belief is right, and he certainly would have been announcing those results as loudly as possible.

People have run other similar experiments in the past and every one has come back negative. Nobody is ever able to report any information that they couldn't have known about before hand. This is a very easy thing to test, and anybody who could get results that indicated that our consciousness is not a strictly physical phenomenon would certainly win a Nobel Prize, it would be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs ever. It hasn't happened. It's all been negative.

 

[warpus]

People have run other similar experiments in the past and every one has come back negative. Nobody is ever able to report any information that they couldn't have known about before hand. This is a very easy thing to test, and anybody who could get results that indicated that our consciousness is not a strictly physical phenomenon would certainly win a Nobel Prize, it would be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs ever. It hasn't happened. It's all been negative.

Yeah, basically.

Near death experiences pretty much only give us evidence that near death experiences exist. And that's it. Right now, anyway.