I wish a neurologist could explain to my why they suppose that by depriving the brain of oxygen - in other words - taking away the stimulus that makes it function - people (and I am referring to the people in the series Beyond and Back) experience more vivid colors, colors that they have never seen before, more ecstatic feelings (or heightened negative sensations)… When we take drugs, the morphine contained in the drug locks with the endorphins to produce this heightened sensations (I never took drugs, I don’t actually know what people feel, but in a magazine they said that heroin addicts feel 900% more ecstasy when they take the drug). But with a drug, the feelings are caused because there is stimulus, not deprivation. It makes much more sense to me that the heightened sensations is not a chemical affect of the brain, but rather the freeing of consciousness from the physical brain. Also, there have been NDE reports of people that have been under hypothermic cardiac arrest. In that situation doctors affirm that the brain was totally deprived of oxygen, in other words, clinically dead. I have also seen reports of people that where without heart beat for over 30 minutes, which also, by that time, would deprive the brain of all the oxygen. No… the oxygen deprivation argument just doesn’t convince me. Any neurologists in this thread?
I am not a neurologist, but I have experienced hypoxia in an unpressurized small plane at 16,0000 feet (the pilot had oxygen, but I didn’t). I can assure you that lack of oxygen does indeed cause hallucinations, In my case, it took the form of big red spots blooming in front of my eyes like balloons, and a feeling of euphoria not unlike the effect of alcohol.
I’ve asked you for cites for your various claims before, and I ask for a cite for this one as well.
Well put it this way: when you sleep your brain goes into slower brain wave patterns and there is generally less brain activity, and yet you hallucinate and feel very intense feelings indeed.
The more “primitive” functions of the brain; including emotion, some aspects of memory and some forms of sensation, are near the core of the brain and tend to be preserved during stresses such as oxygen deprivation. Whereas higher-level reasoning, such as “Should I try to establish whether this is a hallucination?” are on the cortex (the surface) and can be diminished under such stresses.
FTR I would love it if there were evidence of an afterlife. But there’s nothing here to explain.
Zombies? That would make it a Far Death Experience, I guess…
Czarcasm, THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM is just one of the many online websites on the subject. I’ve looked at many. Just google it up.
Yet, this does not contradict the idea that a brain that is less physically/neurologically active may gain a higher spiritual awareness. I’m not saying here that all dreams are spiritual experiences, there are various types of dreams, many of which are just a reflection of our anxieties or our unconscious thoughts. But I do think it is possible to have spiritual dreams, as I myself have seen it happen.
"Lack of Oxygen Theory
Other possible explanations are a lack of oxygen in the brain, or too much carbon dioxide. But these would not explain why some patients are able to give full and cogent reports of things that went on around them during their NDE. Cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom has reported one patient who, while having a NDE, watched his doctor perform a blood test that revealed both high oxygen and low carbon dioxide. Comparisons between NDEs and hallucinations produced by an oxygen-starved brain show that the latter are chaotic and much more similar to psychotic hallucinations. Confusion, disorientation, and fear are the typical characteristics, compared with the tranquility, calm, and sense of order of a NDE. There are some features in common: a sense of well-being and power, and themes of death and dying. But people who have experienced both at different times say that there is an unmistakable difference.
Hallucinations, whether deliberately drug-induced, the result of medication, or caused by oxygen deprivation, almost always take place while the subject is awake and conscious, whereas NDEs happen during unconsciousness, sometimes when the subject is so close to death that no record of brain activity is recorded on an electroencephalograph, the machine that monitors brain waves. Also, the medical conditions that take subjects to the brink of death, and to having a NDE, do not necessarily include oxygen-deprivation, or any medication. This is particularly true of accident victims. NDEs appear to occur at the moment when the threat of death occurs, not necessarily at the time, maybe hours later, when death is close enough to be starving the brain of oxygen."
This was taken from here
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/experts01.html#theory4
The thing is that modern science doesn’t credit evidence, it credits proof. There is a lot of evidence that consciousness exists outside the physical body. If you just watch the series I Survived - Beyond and Back, it is right there a whole bunch of evidence. But there is no scientific proof, hence there are skeptics.
In your opinion, what is the difference between evidence and scientific proof?
My name isn’t Modern Science-it’s Czarcasm, I know what I asked for, and when asked for a cite it is proper to give one that directly addresses a particular claim made.
Edited to add: Anecdotes are definitely not evidence by and of themselves if what is being claimed flies in the face of our current understanding of science.
Anecdotes, in it’s original meaning, is a story of a real incident or person. Over time it came to mean fictional pieces. (source Wikipedia) Which of these is your interpretation of the word?
Is it not possible that science is lacking in tools to explain certain aspects of reality? We have seen throughout history that many things that we now know to be real could not have been proven ages ago because science was lacking. Example: we know that large vehicles can fly us across the sky. Leonardo da Vinci predicted this and even made the first sketch of a helicopter. If you lived at the time o Leonardo da Vinci and applied your logic, the reality of being able to fly a helicopter is not real because science cannot prove it! Are you fully, definitely certified that science has reached it’s fullest potential and that anything that it can’t explain, therefore, is false? I surely hope not, otherwise we won’t be able to solve any of the pending mysteries of the universe.
In this case I believe evidence is what suggests an assumption to be true. Proof, in my opinion, is obtained when the evidence is so direct that there is no doubt that the assumption is true. What I find interesting about this subject is that the both arguments (NDE is consciousness outside the body and NDE is chemical reaction of the brain) are far from convincing each other. I really hope some direct evidence (proof) that is scientifically accepted is finally obtained.
So, the only difference between a believer and a skeptic is, believers have lower standards for evidence.
Are there any supernatural beliefs that do not rise to your level of evidence of truth?
Cite? As far as I know, “anecdote” means “story”, period. If the person telling the anecdote is anonymous or otherwise unknown to me I tend to disregard the story, and if the anecdote being told defies known science I tend to disbelieve the story. In this time of The Internet it takes almost no effort to collect hundreds of stories from anonymous people telling tales that would make Baron Munchausen shake his head in disbelief, so showing me a collection of science-defying anecdotes doesn’t impress me in the least. One good cite that can be checked out is what is needed here.
If you believe that NDEs are purely neurological and I am skeptic that it is so than you have a lower standard of evidence? You are just playing semantics. Both parts can believe their view and be skeptical of the opposite view. They thing is that the one on the opposite side feels it easier to discredit the other one’s evidence. They both are logical.
You disbelieve everyone’s story then? Calling everyone a liar is like waving a white flag to any intellectual effort. You many then argue that to believe everyone is naive. Yes, there may be those who lie about their experience. Yet the existence of liars does not make the stories of those who told the truth a lie.
I am not Czarcasm, but I cannot let this just sit unanswered. Disbelieving a story is NOT the same as calling it a lie. The person may well be telling what is their honest interpretation of events AND be mistaken.
How is my standard lower if I demand more than anecdotes as evidence of NDEs? Your false equivalence of NDE believers and skeptics is unpersuasive. You are the one making the extraordinary claim; the burden is on you to support it. I don’t have to prove there are no invisible spirits.
If there are no invisible spirits, then what have I been drinking?
And how is my standard lower if I demand more scientific proof that a chemically altered brain does not open the conscious to a spiritual perception? I still think the comparison is valid and we can throw the burned of poof to each other like a hot potato.