The brain is not dead when the cortex is dead.

And the answer to that is early and cautious... but yes, Borjigin's study finds such patterns using iEEG within a rodents cortex during cardiac arrest, crucially... it's beyond the 20 second mark.

Do we have the technology necessary to go further than Borjigins crude tests.. no we don't... not at present. Neither temporally, nor spatially.
Ok - yes 35 sec is longer than 20 seconds. What has this 15 secs bought you in your argument? Nothing like a match to the amount of bits to have an extended experience. No measurements are made in this area only an allusion that the frequencies could be right.

Theta oscillations are important for synaptic plasticity, information coding, and working memory. - ibid
OK no shit. - so does the 10 or 15 secs of a theta discharge logically show rats with a experience linking to deep meaning of rat life? Get otta town NO.

If you extrapolate that a rats life's is shorter in quantity and quality - then the corresponding burst in humans should be much longer to communicate a life of experience. Has this been found? - no. Is the range of signal even equal to normal awareness. No, the data chart clearly shows about half the amplitude range of about 100 Hz as a baseline for rats.

Borjigin et al have found and recorded some very interesting data
. That it answers the questions of deep-meaning of human NDE is a just so story! It is just as easy to say - that it is just a starter signal for the brains of mammals to enable fuller consciousness beyond the 5 senses (whatever it is) to kick-in.

That's why we measure all the parameters. This is like Weismann cutting off some rats tails; and saying it proves that living things don't inherit acquired traits!

First, it is impossible to establish what, if anything, the rats were experiencing during the postarrest period of the surge.

Second, the activity observed following cardiac arrest represents a tiny fraction of the total neuroelectric power present just before arrest (as indicated in figures 1 and 2 of Borjigin et al.), and thus it is misleading to describe these rat brains as being “hyperaroused.” All that can be concluded is that activity of unknown functional significance occurred at a few places in the EEG frequency spectrum in the context of near-total obliteration of activity accompanying the waking state. The pertinent question here is not whether there is any brain electrical activity at all after cardiac arrest, but whether there is activity of the type currently thought to be necessary for conscious experience.

Third, the relevance of these findings in rats to human brain physiology is unclear. Monitoring of cortical electrical activity in humans during cardiac arrest has documented a slowing and attenuation of EEG activity in humans detected an average of 6.5 s after cardiac arrest, progressing to isoelectricity and absence of evoked potentials within 10–20 s (2).

Fourth, many reports of near-death experiences include verifiable perceptions by the experiencer that are anchored to specific time periods far longer than 30 s after cardiac arrest (3), the duration of the electrical surge in this study.

Fifth, many near-death experiences occur under conditions that do not involve cardiac arrest or decreased cerebral perfusion (4).

Sixth, about a quarter of reported near-death experiences occur under general anesthesia (5), but the rats in the study by Borjigin et al. did not show the observed postarrest EEG patterns under anesthesia.

Seventh, all of the rats exhibited the same stereotyped pattern of high-frequency EEG activity following cardiac arrest, but only 10–20% of humans undergoing cardiac arrest report near-death experiences (4).
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/47/E4405.long
  1. Bruce Greyson1,
  2. Edward F. Kelly, and
  3. W. J. Ross Dunseath
 
Ok - yes 35 sec is longer than 20 seconds. What has this 15 secs bought you in your argument? Nothing like a match to the amount of bits to have an extended experience. No measurements are made in this area only an allusion that the frequencies could be right.

OK no shit. - so does the 10 or 15 secs of a theta discharge logically show rats with a experience linking to deep meaning of rat life? Get otta town NO.

If you extrapolate that a rats life's is shorter in quantity and quality - then the corresponding burst in humans should be much longer to communicate a life of experience. Has this been found? - no. Is the range of signal even equal to normal awareness. No, the data chart clearly shows about half the amplitude range of about 100 Hz as a baseline for rats.

Borjigin et al have found and recorded some very interesting data
. That it answers the questions of deep-meaning of human NDE is a just so story! It is just as easy to say - that it is just a starter signal for the brains of mammals to enable fuller consciousness beyond the 5 senses (whatever it is) to kick-in.

That's why we measure all the parameters. This is like Weismann cutting off some rats tails; and saying it proves that living things don't inherit acquired traits!


http://www.pnas.org/content/110/47/E4405.long
  1. Bruce Greyson1,
  2. Edward F. Kelly, and
  3. W. J. Ross Dunseath

The point of referring to Borjigin's paper, was to show that Borjigin had found not some random electrical patterns (the odd patch clamped neuron etc), but some highly synchronous activity beyond the 20s mark. More synchronous than when the rodent was wakeful. And that she was able to do so by placing electrodes directly onto the surface of the rats brain, using some very specialist equipment, and shielding the rat in a Faraday cage etc. This is all the research stuff they can't do with the equipment in a hospital resuscitation room, and when fighting for the life of a patient. The interesting activity was recorded well before the rats brain cells should have reached their Donnan equilibrium, so I think we can rule out spreading depressions etc. as the cause of the synchronous and highly coherent activity recorded.

I didn't raise Borjigins paper to suggest she had found the cause of the NDE, not at all... but I suspect she may have found a clue about the OBE. Her claims that the measurements they recorded, looked more like a wakeful humans measurements when undertaking a visual task seem sound to me, and they are intriguing.
 
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