New study linking brain activity to NDE's

Fair enough. I wasnt talking about a separation during the perception, i meant a difference in general. I cant say anything about a differentiation during perception, since i e.g. never experienced serious hallucinations or anything like that.

Sure you do... Obvious examples are every time you look at an optical illusion, or, every time you spin around and then stop, and the world keeps turning.
 
Das said > "I don't see how this theory would be so absurd that there's no chance for it being true at all. Haven't seen that many rebuttals to it."

Okay.

1. Studies in other animals and humans have revealed that after 10-20 seconds of cardiac arrest, the electrical activity in the brain is lost. In cardiac arrest, consciousness (at least normal waking consciousness ) is lost immediately. I've seen this myself, actually seen someone drop dead in front of me. Their consciousness is gone ...hell it even goes in a simple faint, immediately. So if something starts occurring deep in the brain ie a few cells firing, brain based consciousness is not just going to magically relocate to a new part of the brain !

But that was one of the main reasons behind AWARE. People look behaviourally unconsious, but it seems consiousness can continue. It appears input/output from the brain has been disrupted, thus people can look behaviourally unconsious, and have a massive reduction in EM power as measured by EEG, but it does appear processing in the brain can continue.

Why would it, we need our cortex to think and form memories, the top part of the brain, not the bottom.

2. Just because Borjigin has detected some form of deep activity 40 seconds after the heart stops (in rats) it doesn't mean she can then correlate it to a human near death experience. Has a rat reported a near death experience ? We don't even know what it feels like to be a rat. What evolutionary purpose would it serve for a rat to have the classic NDE experience while it was lying flat out on the grass ? A bird of prey would swoop down and scoop it up, it makes no sense even if you postulate that a rat's consciousness CAN somehow relocate to somewhere deep in it's brain structure.

Your thinking about it back to front. Neurons appear to be a later evolutionary development, and all they do is relay information around the organism. When the rat/human is energy compromised, and EEG power drops, some earlier evolutionary mechanism can keep processing... hence the existance of early organisms which can function/process without any neurons at all.


3. What does some tiny electrical activity deep in the brain tell us about veridical OBE's ? Can the rat see what is going on around it and in the next room
while it is having this last surge of whatever ?

4. If you could actually ask the rat (upon revival) if it had really HAD an out of body experience and the rat was able to accurately describe events that occurred while it was "dead" ...do you think that Linda would accept the rat's testimony ? No, she would start coming up with alternative ways that the rat
could have got the information, just like she always does and always will do.

5.The reason why there haven't been any official rebuttals is because it's a load of bollocks, total and utter, not worth even considering.

You can ignore some of Borgijin's conclusions, but not the factual stuff she has discovered in the study.
 
But that was one of the main reasons behind AWARE. People look behaviourally unconsious, but it seems consiousness can continue. It appears input/output from the brain has been disrupted, thus people can look behaviourally unconsious, and have a massive reduction in EM power as measured by EEG, but it does appear processing in the brain can continue.



Your thinking about it back to front. Neurons appear to be a later evolutionary development, and all they do is relay information around the organism. When the rat/human is energy compromised, and EEG power drops, some earlier evolutionary mechanism can keep processing... hence the existance of early organisms which can function/process without any neurons at all.




You can ignore some of Borgijin's conclusions, but not the factual stuff she has discovered in the study.

Max, it's a study on nine rodents. It's not even been replicated yet by somebody else. It explains nothing about the important aspects of NDE's. Chawla's study is more relevant but even that failed to draw much serious comment from NDE researchers. I'm not interested in it and I want to stop commenting on it, personally.
Feel free yourself of course and I do actually admire your staying power.
 
There is not ONE sceptical proposal that adequately explains any part of the series of events that constitute the average NDE. There are some proposals that have overlap and seem similar but when scrutinized they never stand up... and that is why we are still searching for a solution, a brain based one that is.
Continuing the search sounds like a good plan.

It's no good a proponent like myself trying to discuss heaven and hell with you, Paul. You know that. Lets stick to the veridical OBE's during cardiac arrest, then we know the criteria are consistent.
We won't agree on the supposedly veridical OBEs, either.

~~Paul
 
What sort are you talking about? ...and why do you think they are different?

We were talking about hallucinations that are just barely connected to reality or not at all. Optical illusions are closely connected to reality as we percieve it. Is that really that important? I dont understand why that would matter here. I stated that i dont know if i can make a difference between different states of perception during the perception itself because of a lack of experiences related to that topic. That was the original point that i tried to explain. There was no intent there to explain in lengths if theres a difference between several kinds of hallucinations. Therefore i wont, sorry.
 
Das said > "I don't see how this theory would be so absurd that there's no chance for it being true at all. Haven't seen that many rebuttals to it."

Okay.

1. Studies in other animals and humans have revealed that after 10-20 seconds of cardiac arrest, the electrical activity in the brain is lost. In cardiac arrest, consciousness (at least normal waking consciousness ) is lost immediately. I've seen this myself, actually seen someone drop dead in front of me. Their consciousness is gone ...hell it even goes in a simple faint, immediately. So if something starts occurring deep in the brain ie a few cells firing, brain based consciousness is not just going to magically relocate to a new part of the brain !

Why would it, we need our cortex to think and form memories, the top part of the brain, not the bottom.

2. Just because Borjigin has detected some form of deep activity 40 seconds after the heart stops (in rats) it doesn't mean she can then correlate it to a human near death experience. Has a rat reported a near death experience ? We don't even know what it feels like to be a rat. What evolutionary purpose would it serve for a rat to have the classic NDE experience while it was lying flat out on the grass ? A bird of prey would swoop down and scoop it up, it makes no sense even if you postulate that a rat's consciousness CAN somehow relocate to somewhere deep in it's brain structure.

3. What does some tiny electrical activity deep in the brain tell us about veridical OBE's ? Can the rat see what is going on around it and in the next room
while it is having this last surge of whatever ?

4. If you could actually ask the rat (upon revival) if it had really HAD an out of body experience and the rat was able to accurately describe events that occurred while it was "dead" ...do you think that Linda would accept the rat's testimony ? No, she would start coming up with alternative ways that the rat
could have got the information, just like she always does and always will do.

5.The reason why there haven't been any official rebuttals is because it's a load of bollocks, total and utter, not worth even considering.

1.Would it be reallocating then? Since we dont know exactly which parts of the brain are all involved with consciousness, maybe some parts of the inner brain are heavily involved there all the time? Im no neuroscientist, i wouldnt know. It is true though, experiences like NDE's require consciousness to work, otherwise there wouldnt be any experience.

2. Well idk what i should think about it, but according to the theory that linda stated NDE's might have no evolutionary purpose because they are just a side effect.

3. Veridical OBE's are intriguing. Got my doubts about them since the AWARE study didnt succeed with them (although i heard why the chance for that was pretty low anyways...). Have to admit though, i barely know anything about them.

4. Well, i cant answer for her, but there are are always ways to wiggle yourself out of those kind of situations, right?

5. I cant agree with that. The authors of the study brought in some results and interpreted them. The scientific community out there will take that seriously. One could interpret the lack of reaction as admitting that theres something to that what the authors wrote. If NDE research wants to be taken seriously, especially that what people like Greyson do (i know, he actually did respond to the study), they need to react to studies like that and engage with it.
 
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We were talking about hallucinations that are just barely connected to reality or not at all. Optical illusions are closely connected to reality as we percieve it. Is that really that important? I dont understand why that would matter here. I stated that i dont know if i can make a difference between different states of perception during the perception itself because of a lack of experiences related to that topic. That was the original point that i tried to explain. There was no intent there to explain in lengths if theres a difference between several kinds of hallucinations. Therefore i wont, sorry.

I was just pointing out that we all have experience of hallucinations...
 
1.Would it be reallocating then? Since we dont know exactly which parts of the brain are all involved with consciousness, maybe some parts of the inner brain are heavily involved there all the time? Im no neuroscientist, i wouldnt know. It is true though, experiences like NDE's require consciousness to work, otherwise there wouldnt be any experience.

2. Well idk what i should think about it, but according to the theory that linda stated NDE's might have no evolutionary purpose because they are just a side effect.

3. Veridical OBE's are intriguing. Got my doubts about them since the AWARE study didnt succeed with them (although i heard why the chance for that was pretty low anyways...). Have to admit though, i barely know anything about them.

4. Well, i cant answer for her, but there are are always ways to wiggle yourself out of those kind of situations, right?

5. I cant agree with that. The authors of the study brought in some results and interpreted them. The scientific community out there will take that seriously. One could interpret the lack of reaction as admitting that theres something to that what the authors wrote. If NDE research wants to be taken seriously, especially that what people like Greyson do (i know, he actually did respond to the study), they need to react to studies like that and engage with it.


Das said > "Since we dont know exactly which parts of the brain are all involved with consciousness,"

It's the cortex, Das the top part of your brain that is responsible for consciousness. That's a medical fact.

ONE study on nine rodents is completely irrelevant to NDE research. When they have asked the rats if they had an NDE, when they have set up control groups on rats that didn't have an NDE, when they have taken sex, occupation, previous religious persuasion and beliefs into account from the rats, when they have done a dozen more rat studies and replicated the results of the first proper rat study.......

THEN I might be interested, Das.
 
Remember this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17475053/

But I completely agree on the second part. Also if this was a 9/9 physiological reaction, there is still no explanation why NDEs are only experienced by 1/10.

I don't remember the paper but there are other examples of people without brains being conscious, Lorber's subjects for instance who only had a smearing of brain tissue inside the skull.

There's always an anomaly somewhere but I think at least as far as medical science currently thinks, we need a cortex to put together our world.

Personally after reading thousands of testimonies from OBE'rs during NDE I personally believe that lurking unseen within the neurons and atoms of a human there is a perfectly complete etheric body/person waiting to exit although this obviously will produce much merriment from the sensible sceptics.
 
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