Life after Death? (Near death experience)

Great Debates
1

I really want life after death. I really, really do. But…but…sigh.

I saw a program last week that posed a very interesting question. We’ve all heard about near death experience, the white light, viewing self, etc. And I’m sure that we’ve all heard about the brain bathing in chemicals, synpses firing…all the scientific speculation about what’s happening.

But this program showed one incident that really made me think like no other ever had. The woman involved reported the standard story, including rising up out of her body and observing the scene.

But here’s the good part: they were operating on an artery in her brain. In order to do so, they had stopped her heart, chilled her body down to 58 degrees, and waited until her EEG showed NO ACTIVITY AT ALL. I don’t recall how long she was in this condition, but it quite awhile, relatively speaking.

The doctor who did this to her posed the same question I have: where was she during this period of time? She reported being outside her body, observing the scene and moving toward a bright light. Was she? And if the EEG showed NO activity, how could her experience have been her brain doing all these things?

Discuss. (And make me believe it ain’t over when it’s over…cuz that bums me out SO damn much…)

stoid

2

Sounds like another argument in favor of the notion of Mind/Body Dualism. If the mind resides as a separate entity from the body, yet RESIDES in the body, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume that when the body dies, the mind goes elsewhere (Heaven? Hell? Pittsburgh?).

I guess when a body enters a state of being (ahem) “mostly dead”, the mind is caught between the last spark of life existing in the body, and the “other place”, whatever the heck that may be.

Kinda like what people do after an earthquake… if it’s not too bad, they run outside and hover around for a while, then go back inside when it’s safe. If it’s REALLY bad, they move to another city.

3

One thing is that there’s no real way for the woman (or anyone else) to judge exactly when she had the NDE. Was it actually taking place when her brain reportedly had no electrical activity at all? Or did it actually happen as her brain was being taken to that state, or coming back up to normal activity from that state?

Of course, if she “observed the scene”, and the doctors were able to transmit some message to her during the period when she had zero EEG–if in other words, during the “flatline” part of the operation they put up a chalkboard in the operating room with some sentence like “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy red dog” or “See Spot run. Run Spot, run!” and the patient was able to accurately report this (with the usual caveats that she didn’t say “It was—ummm—some kind of sentence” “Like maybe a typing sort of thing?” “Yeah, that was it! Qwerty!” “Are you sure it was ‘qwerty’?” “Ummm…maybe it was that one about the fox and the dog.”) then that would be interesting.

4

Have you ever had a dream? Do you remember things you had when you were dreaming?

Just because somebody said they “observed the scene”, that doesn’t mean that there was a single, definitive point that they were observing from.

Although, it WOULD be an interesting experiment… if doctors began posting up a sign somewhere in the operating room. Then again, you’d need to get thousands upon thousands of tries in the operating room just to find one of those random, rare instances of NDE.

5

MEBuckner is right – there is no way to know when she really had the “NDE.”

For example, I know I’ve had experiences in which I had what I thought to be very long dreams – but it turned out that they happened in the 9 minutes between my alarm going off after I’d hit the snooze button.

6

I’d be interested to hear if a person who does not believe in the afterlife ever had an NDE.

7

Oh sure, my assumption is that NDE’s are simply something akin to dreams, and are entirely subjective/internal experiences. But I do try to be a genuine skeptic (as opposed to a straw-man skeptic); Stoidela’s description of the operation made it sound as if the possibility of an NDE could have been anticipated (as opposed to some emergency situation where someone goes into cardiac arrest in the middle of an appendectomy or something). That being the case, it would be sort of interesting if the doctors made a little habit of putting up a sign on a whiteboard or something whenever they had an operation like that. Then, when someone reported having an NDE, they could ask them “Did you happen to see the message we put on the whiteboard?” The main problem I would see with this is that the experiment might wind up not being very well controlled, and as Stoidela indicated, the “will to believe” on this subject is pretty high, even among those of us who tend to disbelief about the whole thing.

[Homer Simpson]Mmmmmmm…eternal life![/Homer Simpson]

8

I saw a TV program on NDEs once that included a segment about a trauma ward where the doctors got really interested in the pheonomenon. Working with an investigative group (a fairly skeptical one, IIRC) they devised an experiment. The investigators made a simple sign–I forget if it had a word or a simple picture, but something like that–and they concealed it somewhere in the operating theater that couldn’t be seen by someone standing on the floor or lying on a gurney, like on top of a light fixture or a cabinet. They didn’t tell the staff where it was so that they couldn’t unconsciously give hints to any patients (nor did they reveal its location on the tv program.) Anyone who experienced an NDE and reported rising up out of their body was to be asked about the sign. At the time that the program was recorded, no one had yet reported the sign.

An interesting exercise, eh?

9

I recall reading of a woman who was an atheist before her NDE and remained an atheist afterwards. The account should be in one of the books I’ve got around my apartment. If I get a little time, I may try to find the exact reference, but no promises.

10

Here’s a very long report that includes references to atheists and agnostics who have had NDEs:

http://rrzs15.rz.uni-regensburg.de/lektuere/texte/hoegl/english/ndebook.html

Of course, one can also find numerous “I was an atheist until my NDE” testimonials.

Most sources I’ve seen agree that NDEs are a universal human experience.

11

Now hold on. Did she describe anything that happened in the room that can be confirmed by someone who can verify both the reported incident and the fact that it ocurred after the time of her flatline?

12

Stoidela and others: you might be interested in reading report here Ketamine/NDEs.

Basically, NDEs can be reproduced in fully alive, healthy, normal humans with the proper dosage of ketamine, a popular anesthetic. No one is sure of the exact mechanism by which ketamine produces this experience, but this paper was published in 1996, so there may be some new info I’ve not seen yet. For those who don’t know, ketamine is a very seriously abused drug, commonly known as ‘Special K’, valued for its overall safety and fascinating hallucinatory experience. Ketamine is a congener of phencyclidine (PCP), if that rings any bells.

Ketamine has been a very popular veterinary anesthetic, especially for cats (for whom we have very few safe and effective drugs). However, cats anesthetized with ketamine usually have a VERY rough recovery, and 20% of these cats will have seizures following ketamine use. My own veterinarian switched to Telazol as an induction agent after two of my kittens suffered an extreme ketamine reaction that included attempts to rip their faces off. :frowning:

Anyway, since NDEs can be induced through ketamine use alone, I see no basis for assigning any spiritual or mystical significance to NDEs that occur otherwise. There is obviously a natural, normal, chemical basis for the experience. One theory points to the fact that ketamine/PCP binds to a site that, when blocked, prevents neuronal cell death due to excitotoxicity in conditions of low blood oxygen, low blood sugar, etc. NDEs may simply be the result of the body’s attempt to prevent brain damage.
I’m adding here some pertinent quotes from the above referenced paper:

“The intravenous administration of 50 - 100mg of ketamine can reproduce all of the features which have commonly been associated with NDE’s.”

“Mounting evidence suggests that the reproduction/induction of NDE’s by ketamine is not simply an interesting coincidence. Exciting new discoveries include the major binding site for ketamine on brain cells, known as the phencyclidine (PCP) binding site of the NMDA receptor . . .”

“The present author has experienced several NDE’s and has also been administered ketamine as an anesthetic and within experimental paradigms. The NDE’s and ketamine experiences were clearly the same type of altered state of consciousness. Ketamine repeatedly produced effects which were like the NDE’s described by Moody (1975), Noyes and Kletti (1976a), Greyson and Stevenson (1980), Ring (1980), Sabom (1982), and Morse et al., (1985). Ketamine reproduced travel through a tunnel (sometimes described as ‘the plumbing of the world’ or in mundane terms such as ‘like being on a subway train’), emergence into the light, and a ‘telepathic’ exchange with an entity which could be described as ‘God’. Neither the NDE’s nor the ketamine experiences bore any resemblance to the effects of psychedelic drugs such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT; also administered to the author in experimental paradigms) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).”

“Much has been made of the apparent mystery surrounding the occasional ability of cardiac arrest survivors to describe the resuscitation in detail (Saborn, 1982). It is worth noting that ketamine can permit sufficient sensory input to allow accounts of procedures during which the patient appeared wholly unconscious (Siegal,1981; Hejja and Galloon, 1975). These reports are not regarded by anaesthetists as particularly mysterious.”

13

Fascinating, coosa! I was going to ask if anyone has any theories on just what function ketamine/PCP (or whatever brain chemical they resemble) performs when binding to those receptors, but I see you’ve already taken at least a speculative stab at that:

So, the whole NDE experience might be a side effect of the brain going into Emergency Protect Mode?

14

Kind of like a horoscope? You expect something to happen, and it happens?

I’ve had moments of extreme fatigue while performing “strenuous activity”… your eyes close, and you feel like you’re “separate” from the whole world. Perhaps anesthesia produces a similar effect, and somewhere in the person’s cloudy mind, they think “Near Death Experience!” Then, as they recover, their imagination fills in the gaps, until a simple wave of dizziness has become a chorus of angels and a “hovering over the scene”.

And also very unmedical. “Hey, this dude’s going under the knife, let’s screw with his head…” While I have no problem with such notions going on, I have no doubt that some people might take offense, and then the good doctors have a lawsuit…

15

Yup, I saw the show in which they placed the sign on top of some equipment in the hospital room to see if anyone would indicate its existence during an NDE. Clever, I thought.

Also - do we have a cite or something for the woman having absolutely no brain activity? Even if her higher brain functions had ceased, it seems there would still be some activity in the primitive areas of the brain. I’m no doctor, and I could be wrong - but it seems kind of out there to me.

Lastly - people who have NDEs are able to talk about what they saw in the room, what they felt, their location in space, what they heard, etc. Last time I checked, everyone of the senses they just described involved the physical body, including the sense organs and the brain. If the “spirit” or whatever is capable of doing all this on its own, I guess we’ll just chalk up those ears, eyes, noses, tongues, and nerve endings to window dressing eh?

Sorry - I don’t buy that the NDE is anything other than a very intense, very real hallucination. Although, I’d be happy to see any controlled studies to the contrary.

16

The only problem with the theory that NDEs are a purely chemical reaction duplicated by ketamine is that not all NDEs fit the “classic” mold. A large number of people seem to have NDEs where they claim to experience the torments of Hell instead. Often, these are people who have attempted suicide, but it happens to other people as well. If the same chemical reactions are happening in the brain, why do they have such radically different effects on some people?

17

in the case I saw on TV was that this woman had NO detectable brain activity. That was the goal of the surgery. And if the brain has no detectable activity, how can it be creating the NDE experience?

I really wish I had written down more info about the program. It was fascinating. It was on the Learning Channel or Discovery.

As for the chalkboards with writing or whatever… I dunno, I haven’t had an NDE, but imagining the experience I can’t see that I would be bothering to focus on that kind of thing in the room. My attention would be on my body, activities around my body and any possible “white light/dead friends calling to me” stuff, ya know? So that doesn’t seem to me to be much proof of anything.

Also, I’ve been under anesthesia a couple of times, and neither time did I have any awareness of the passage of time, in the way that you do when you sleep. There was no dreaming or anything of that sort, much less lengthy hallucinations. Anesthesia induces a state of “non” ness, for lack of a better term. You are checked out - one second they are telling you to count backwards, the next second (it seems) they are telling you to wake up. So it seems weird to me that if you died or your heart stopped or whatever, that your brain would "wake up’ enough to give you a dream/hallucination, and then go back to being dark.

(remember, I don’t fundamentally believe in life after death, I just want to. I’m just sharing what seems logical to me)

stoid

18

Another question - if the senses take in information and it is then stored in the brain as memory, how exactly is it that these people are remembering these experiences if the brain wasn’t humming right along to record it all? And if the mind/spirit is the repository of experiences, why does getting whacked on the head or having a portion of the brain destroyed alter or erase memories? I suppose you could say that it only affects the ability to act as a conduit between the spirit and the remembrance of things, but it seems to be me then you’re positing an entity (this “spirit”) which has not been shown to be necessary.

(Oh, and here’s a link to the story I think you’re discussing: http://www.near-death.com/reynolds.html )

However, in reading the story, I see nothing which would indicate information that she could not have come to by a) previous knowledge, b) seeing things in the OR before being put under and c) hearing people speak while she was being put under and being revived.

19

and the name sounds familiar. The story is precisely the same, definitely the surgery.

The only thing about her description that doesn’t jibe is that she would have heard the saw. She would certainly not have been flatlined at the point when they were opening her skull, so when did she hear that? Even to hear it under anesthesia is hard to believe…

Speaking of which. so long as we are on the topic of anesthesia, let me offer you all a caution: it is possible that when you go under for your next surgery that your brain will awaken before it is over. Your body will still be paralyzed and the doctors and nurses will not know that you are conscious. Depending on the point at which this happens and and what they are doing to you, this will be the most completely horrifying thing that you are likely to experience in this life.

How do I know? It happened to me. Thank god the surgery was very minor and nearly over…but it was *** pure hell* **.

stoid

20

Well, I only know what those kinds of instruments sound like/look like courtesy of shows like those found on the Discovery Channel. :slight_smile: …or many other shows, really, in which they show surgeries. Maybe I’m being a bone-headed idiot, but I just don’t see anything yet to convince me - additionally, what about all the people who have them before their brains go out? Are they lying? Do you die and float off to the great beyond before the body dies - hardly seems fair.

And, oooh, I’ve read about people who wake up during surgery - I think they said they give you 3 varieties of drugs - one to block short term memory (hopefully), one to keep you immobilized, and one to keep you from feeling pain. I saw a story where one woman woke up during open-abdomen surgery and the only thing left at a good level was the immobilization drug (her anesthesiologist had fallen asleep at the wheel so to speak). So, she got to endure the pain of surgery, being fully aware and with total recall, and couldn’t do anything about it. I think she now has the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder and sued for megabucks.

As for me, I was having surgery on my nose (skin cancer, not a nose job) and woke up as they were sewing it up - I could see them doing it, and hear the vibrations of the stitches being pulled across the bridge of my nose… but couldn’t feel a thing. They promptly upped the drugs and I was out again. :slight_smile: