Dean Radin, Quantum Consciousness Experiments |545|
by
Alex Tsakiris | Mar 22 |
Consciousness Science
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Dr. Dean Radin has shattered the quantum consciousness link question, but where will it lead?
In the latter portion of the interview, Dean Radin mentions an article that seems to be another attempt at a materialist explanation for NDE’s.
After sniffing this out, I wrote to Dr. Pim Van Lommel, one of the worlds leading NDE Researchers, and asked for his response since I felt the article was being “sneaky” with some of the wording and lack of specifics. To my surprise, he furnished an extremely thorough response, and wanted to share it with everyone here on the forum.
He also furnished three attachments which I'm sharing for those who want to really dive deep into this issue:
"Dear Mark,
There have been a lot of questions from all over the world about this article, which had a lot of attention in the popular press.
In this article, the brain activity is described in a dying patient with already severe brain damage. The authors describe a short increase in gamma waves at the moment that according to théir criteria the patient has a cardiac arrest. They define the cardiac arrest as ‘the abrupt loss of heart function measured by the inability to obtain pulse activity in the EKG’. They write that the patient developed a ventricular tachycardia with apneustic respirations and a
clinical cardiorespiratory arrest. However, in figure 2A still, electrical activity in the EKG is monitored beyond the moment that in the figure is described that the patient has a cardiac arrest!
According to worldwide accepted cardiological criteria: a cardiac arrest in a patient with an acute myocardial infarction is caused by ventricular fibrillation (VF) or by asystole (a flatline on the EKG). This is called ‘clinical death’, and this period of unconsciousness is reversible if adequate CPR with defibrillation or pacemaker is initiated within 5 – 10 minutes after the onset of cardiac arrest. If not, all patients with cardiac arrest will die due to irreversible damage to the brain. Clinical death is the first stage of the process of dying. A cardiac arrest by VF causes
anoxia of the brain, which is a total lack of oxygen (no flow).
However, the patient in this article was shown to have a
ventricular tachycardia (
not VF or asystole). And the patient developed very low blood pressure by this ventricular tachycardia. In this situation, there is often no palpable pulse, in combination with the loss of consciousness, but in the brain, there is
hypoxia, a lack of oxygen (low flow), and
not anoxia as in VF. When no CPR is initiated (electrical cardioversion) the ventricular tachycardia will after some time change into VF, and the patient will die.
The authors write that an increase in gamma waves in the EEG is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in
healthy subjects and that it is
intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall’ that may take place in the near-death state
.
However, they also write that there are
seven important caveats that must be considered
before generalizing these findings to understand
the typical patterns of brain activity during death.
These caveats are 1) the fact that the described patient had a posttraumatic brain that suffered from hemorrhage, swelling, and seizures, 2) anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness can alter neuronal oscillations, 3) dissociative events and drugs can cause an increase in gamma activity, 4) the patient had been placed on significant doses of anticonvulsant medication, which could directly affect the neuronal network activity, 5) asphyxia and hypercapnia can enhance cortical connectivity, and in this patient hypercapnia and resulting acidosis may have stimulated gap-junction activity, that is critical for gamma oscillations, 6) in this patient no normal activity was recorded in the EEG that can serve as a true baseline for comparison, 7) stereotyped neuronal activity patterns are conserved during daily behavioral tasks, but systematic research about brain activity during the process of dying has never been done.
See my detailed comments and quotes in the attachment.
The authors write: We do not anticipate death in healthy subjects (NB.
Van Lommel : like in patients in acute cardiac arrest during myocardial infarction) and therefore could not obtain uninterrupted recordings in the near-death phase in anything other than from circumstances involving
pathological conditions in acute care hospital settings.
It is well established what happens in the EEG in a patient with an acute cardiac arrest, and who was healthy until that moment. The EEG changes after about 8 seconds after the onset of cardiac arrest and becomes a flatline EEG after 18 seconds. See the attachment with some paragraphs from my latest article ‘
The continuity of Consciousness’.
Summarizing: What the ‘general press’ writes about the content and conclusions of the already frequently quoted article is incomplete and mostly wrong and seems to be used to find a materialist explanation for the cause of an NDE.
There have been some very critical comments about the interpretation of the EEG registrations in this article as well.
A commentary will follow in the JNDS.
Kind regards,
Pim van Lommel"
On a side note, I recently conducted an interview with Dr. Van Lommel for the Helping Parents Heal Organization (a group for bereaved parents). Here’s a link to the recording of the interview for those who might be interested:
And here are links to two versions of the article in question for those who've not yet read it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...-flashes-before-our-eyes-upon-death-180979647
https://bgr.com/science/the-brain-activity-of-a-dying-person-was-recorded-for-the-first-time-ever
Mark