Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
It all sounds trippy and enjoyable to me as I write it now, but really, it sucked.
"It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing."
I love that the "it" in this sentence could be lots of things, heart surgery, marriage, school, and even life as a whole itself.
Just a words thing
So one time they decided to ask "God" what the meaning of life was and they would write it down to study the next day. The next day all that was written down was "Walls". It felt profound but meant nothing.
That is unless walls is the answer and it is just too blunt for us to understand but that is a question for another day. ;)
People have been writing texts for thousands of years and it's obvious to me that no such word combos exist. If they did, they'd have been discovered and well-known.
So, all that was shown with the walls experiment was that experimental design was flawed. Nothing about whether the person could or could not speak to God on LSD.
I dunno, I'm not high but I can see some plausible depth here. I'm not arguing that your friend talked to god, of course, but as an answer to the meaning of life, "walls“ is pretty excellent.
Although, as a buddhist I like to think of the meaning of life as tearing down walls that never existed anywhere but our own minds. Of realizing interconnectedness. But at the same time I'm always aware that I'm not THAT far from the cringey know-it-all teenager!
Then after some time I had dengue. Well, that made COVID fever experience a walk in a well maintained park. I would not wish dengue on anyone!
The difference of these hallucinations was that it seemed so real. I got to remember what happened and a lot I can remember even now - after months. Characters, people, my connection with them, whys, whats, names, clear faces, places, signs and marks around me from those episodes. While in case regular dreams by the end of an hour so it disintegrates so fast I can barely remember I had a dream and can’t recall much of it.
There are too many sources to list but I think [0] has a good and varied collection of what I consider to be statistically informed thoughts on "cognition" research, see e.g. [1] [2] for a gentle introduction.
(I should like to point out that I recognize the usefulness of brain measurements in medical contexts; I'm just saying that using them to say anything about non-pathological perception or metaphysics has so far been fantastically unsuccessful.)
[0] http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_cognition.html
Have a look at all the historical cynicism that surrounded things like voice tracks in motion pictures or consumer automobiles.
Scurvy killed over two million people until we figured out the solution was simply eating an orange.
We won't know if EEGs and MRIs are core to future technology until we have that breakthrough.
The merits of a scientific methodology cannot possibly depend on the small chance that some hitherto unsuccessful approach might result in an unexpected breakthrough. Aside from the fact that anything might hold the key to the next big thing, such an approach would inevitably end up following whims and fashions more so than robust and sound scientific reasoning. All else being the same, priority should be given to research which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm grasp on statistic.
Agencies like DARPA exist primarily to counter this line of thinking. We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.
I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.
Physics in the years leading up to WWII had reached levels of accuracy and predictive power never before seen, so I think this example supports my argument if anything. Also the team there did not "just kind of make it up;" sure, they followed a relatively unconstrained creative process, but the foundations they were building upon were astoundingly firm.
> I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.
I understand the difference, I was using skull bumps to prove my point by way of contradiction. I also understand the usefulness of MRIs. I'm just saying that they are useful within a certain domain, and cognitive science falls outside of that domain to a large extent (certainly to a much larger extent than sensationalistic pop-sci publications would have you believe).
https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
Maybe
> subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder
That's fascinating and kinda bends my intuition. Can't wait for the paper to be on ***hub (strangely my institution does not have access).
Even if you're right, continuing to invest in EEG/fMRI is tugging at salients near to the problems we want to solve. That's a good thing.
Let's start with where I am in agreement.
EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought.
What I do find interesting is that in the age when we were learning about the movement of fluid and pumps, everything was taken from the understanding of how blood moved through the body and how we "worked" as a result of this fluid moving through our pipes.
As we learned more about electrical activity, we suddenly thought "oh! The pumps are moving necessary biological matter, but it's really the electrical impulses that are the important part. Even when we look at how the heart or any other muscle works, it's all about the electrical now.
So what is the next phase? As we understand more about quantum mechanics, will that be the next state of science that we attach to our understanding of how we work? Will it be something else?
However, the way I see this differently from you is that knowing how the pumps work, or knowing how the electrical systems work does are still valuable to us.
This isn't like the old days where we got sick from "humours".
So don't through the baby out with the bathwater. Understanding the electrical function of the brain is likely important in reaching our next level of understanding.
Now a somewhat unrelated, but tied to your thinking. I think this is what most people miss when they are talking about Nuralink and other implantable BCI. When people talk about "connecting our brains to the internet", we have to realize that we don't really have the ability to directly put information in. We can try to map electrical activity to requests, but I don't believe we have that in a high resolution method.
This doesn't mean BCI isn't valuable. If you have Parkinson's or other medical issue that can be treated with stimulation, it is absolutely valuable. But getting a monkey to play a game is still a long way from getting information in. Plus, a joystick is still easier, cheaper, and probably more fun than just staring at a screen without moving your body....assuming you have a body to move.
To do that, I think we’d need much higher resolution imaging, both in space and in time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_... talks of submillimeter spatial for fMRI while a neuron is about 0.1mm.
It also says temporal resolution can be about a second. Whether that is sufficient isn’t clear to me. I think we know too little of the human brain to make a judgment on that. On the one hand, https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ says a brain neuron, on average, fires less than 2 times a second. On the other hand https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.0023... talks of fast-spiking neurons that fire hundreds of times a second.
The current data is like trying to figure out how a CPU works from recordings that don’t show individual bits, but only show what parts get active when doing floating point calculations, when doing I/O, etc.
The way that the default is presented here is interesting. Interpreting the experiences as hallucinations makes you a "sceptic" - presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife. Whether or not brain activity records of dying people are available, treating these subjective experiences as anything other than naturalistic in origin seems bizarre to me.
Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more.
I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so.
However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
Heat death of the universe?
Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc.
I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer.
I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.
But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.
How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters"?
Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me, taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works, especially how it perceives the world.
I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought processes, but I'd argue that the change was already within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on other people, and certainly not without the recipient having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
> [...] something as simple as deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.
?
Because it seems some people are voting as if you wrote "[...] the only thing that can [...].
If you say it is obvious that everything you ingest affects you, then what about time? Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs. And, of course, it is obvious that time affects our mind and body.
We are not ingesting time, we are in a certain sense creating it. We constantly observe the world and it changes over time but just observing the world alone is not enough to perceive time. You have to memorize the current state of the world as you just perceived it and later compare your new perceptions with the memory in order to determine that the world has changed in between.
Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to observe.
In general it seems like attempting to live in human society without memory is a pretty traumatic experience. Or it would be, if you could remember experiencing it.
It's also very hard on the people around you.
Put another way: all things are not equal when you ingest them.
One chemical change is caused by the brain working as designed, while the other is a deliberate attempt to change the brain directly.
Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric understanding of hallucination are really better to keep distance from science before some study will give a ground to consider more.
You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories. Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the hallucination.
Actually it is the least researched field among the most important, in my humble opinion.
I would rather say that your statements in this particular topic and wise statements per se are separate things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at all.
This essence of "lossy transmission" is simply our reality.
Do you have a pretty diverse range of experiences on psychedelics backing this up?
"The most 'logical' explanation" is very often a function of psychedelic usage (and various other experiences one may have had, or not).
> and as said: I have yet to see even the slightest piece of scientific evidence pointing to something else. Whereas there's enough of science supporting the way I think.
In actual science, an abscence of evidence is not proof of abscence though.
> I remain skeptical of course, though it's more of a 'I want to belive' type of thing.
For both sides!
Not that that’s a negative thing at all. The universe is perfect without any need for magic to arbitrarily insert its fingers into the clockwork.
We can’t see objective reality since all we see and sense have to go through our brains. What we can do is to interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
Regardless, all this this conjecture is invariably happening within the boundaries of our minds, which seems to be composed entirely of physical phenomena.
The universe is a cosmic horror, life emerges and with it untold suffering.
The very notion of perfection is also emergent (not to mention self relative), outside of the conceptual framework of the observer's mind perfection does not even exist.
The universe is beautiful, life emerges and with it all understanding, love and joy.
Two sides of the same emergent coin, the nature of all experience was forged by what it took for our ancestors to survive to the next generation.
The belief was primarily based on a deterministic view of it, with the notion that everything comes from something, and becomes something else.
Every moment has two perfectly balanced sides, with perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe giving you a perfect understanding of all the transformations that took place from one moment into the next.
There is of course the debate over whether it is not deterministic, if the Everettian view is false then possibly not, but more to the heart of the matter, this idea that because a greater and greater understanding of the laws of the universe unravels all its dynamics, all its reasons for being and acting the way that it is. This idea that the fact that there is a reason for everything, an order to everything, is what makes it perfect.
The thing is I have a hunch that an inquiry all the way to the bottom will eventually leave us with a bunch of arbitrary laws and constants, which have no further explanation for their being just so, other than the anthropic principle.
It seems hard to me to ascribe such a scenario the quality of generic "perfection" even solely from the perspective of my biased human mind.
I agree with you that perfection is a notion alien to the objective reality, which simply is, without any judgements or qualifications.
So to go back to my original comment, I think it would be more accurate to simply say that I've seen no reason to believe that anything we experience cannot be explained by physical processes.
Maybe consciousness itself will be the most relevant concept left inexplicable? Not the process of sustaining it, but the actual subjective experience of it. Why not have a universe of automatons processing their worlds and inner minds in all the same ways, but without anyone home? Why are we home, and how are we assigned to our homes?
I don't know that these questions are enough to make me believe in the "supermaterial" or supernatural, my hunch is just that our current awe and inability to begin to approach the subject may simply be due to a lack of understanding of the processes at work, but that's admittedly based on faith.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/science/end-of-universe.h...
Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life after death at all.
Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have similar experiences when dying is probably not so different from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude of ways, across cultures.
You’re the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding human perception and interpretation at large.
Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some white noise in your ears and see god now.
Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The brain is a powerful machine.
Yes. I am not sure about the odds, but you might have been lucky. It’s a good way to end up properly insane.
I’ve never been anywhere near that state but even milder cases can be frightening. I’ve had 2 periods were everything worked, I was so clever and solved everything, and that was wonderful. Except that after that I could not get out of bed for days, had severe burnouts (no true depression though, thank goodness). And it turned out that what I did was so “clever” and complicated as to be almost re-done from scratch, and also contained mistakes hard to spot amongst the cleverness. It turns out that it does not make you a super-human, but mostly feel like one. I wonder if I had been a painter or a musician instead, if those mistakes would not have been seen as strokes of genius. Since then I’ve noticed that I get mentally tired much more quickly, and I need much more sleep.
Anyway, I’m happy for you that you came out of it in one piece and enlightened.
Not OP, but they are describing apophenia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Many things can trigger it, even high doses of caffeine (such as drinking too much coffee).
Or was this the pattern you were primed to see?
I really wish more people would recognize this. I hear so much irrational thinking because people seem to think that random noise is somehow meaningful. Or because people choose to ignore all the information that doesn't match the "pattern", because they've decided what does match is important to them in some way.
It's very similar to being untestable. If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
Is this an accurate and comprehensive description of the situation we have before us though?
> If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
That you can identify one attribute of this nature is no guarantee that all attributes (which is not known) are of this kind.
There might still be a way we can test these hypotheses at some point in the future. It's just that we can't do it now.
But not being able to test it now, is no reason to dismiss it, because then we will never go down the path that might eventually result in it being testable.
Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay.
The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed by the former two.
The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not replicate.
I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the constraints applied to social organisms.
There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the impetus not to harm its relatives in the process.
What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it falls apart.
We observe the world through our senses, which can impact our state of mind. Our state of mind impacts our senses, through which we observe the world.
We are always unreliable narrators.
That’s a good way to put it. Belief systems are fascinating in a way that resists being easily categorized. At least by me. Or such is my belief…
I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it with some other tribal thing like politics.
There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and we've been asking the same questions since as long as philosophers could record their writings.
If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.
I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural.
To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.
On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this?
It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way.
That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.
What is the meaning of magical in this context though?
Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists.
It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should.
Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness.
Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'.
What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not.
Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!
That would never have occurred to me—my reading of the passage is that these are skeptics of near-death experiences actually occurring near death, rather than later during recovery and becoming connected to the earlier experience.
[EDIT] Struck a word that made the tone very slightly confrontational for no reason.
This filtered consciousness forms the "default mode network", which is the construction of ego or separate self. Near death experiences (and psychedelics and Buddhist jhanas) disintegrate the default mode network, allowing us to perceive the consciousness element beyond the brain's filtering mechanism.
*vs commonly held production theory which assumes the brain produces consciousness.
That's what happens when a system designed to fire impulses on a good day is dying on a bad day.
Moreover it's assuming that being a ghost would actually impart some incredible insights, or that the behaviour or experience of being a ghost would necessarily reflect that. Most of what I know about ghosts comes from the movie Casper (1995), and in that ghosts are depicted as beings who can't move on from some trauma from their life. Maybe the incredible insights come later, after moving on; maybe the nature of being a ghost necessitates fixation on the "mundane".
I'm also not sure (nor am I not not sure) that most accounts of interaction with ghosts would even be described as "mumbling on about something mundane". A Christmas Carol (fictional) depicts ghosts as providing life-changing spiritual guidance, for instance.
The best - and only - argument we have against belief in any kind of afterlife is that we have no actual evidence for one. The very idea lies outside of our capacity to know.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/10/26/130829358...
Are there actual, verified instances of this happening?
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Self_Does_Not_Die.h...
There are a few stories in it that left me raising my eyebrows and going "well, that seems improbable."
I've not found any I couldn't construct a reductionist dismissal for (usually of the form "confirmation bias - someone had to eventually have the hallucination that corresponded with reality and we don't hear about the failures" or "the witnesses memories are incorrect"), but that doesn't mean I find the dismissals entirely plausible or fully convincing.
That is: our medical definition of death wouldn’t be what determines freeing a soul from the body. I can’t imagine an “oops, looks like they got your heart beating again - guess it’s time to stuff that pesky soul back in the carcass. See you in a few years” scenario.
However, in my case, that shocking astonishment was not joyful. For me, it was bitter because once I was able to see every moment of my life with all my deeds and intentions packed in a highly-concentrated billboard of information, I realized how miserable my life actually was. I was driven by fear, illusions, money, greed, and selfishness. I was not giving, I was taking. I was not caring, instead I was mostly ignorant. I knew nothing about life and now it's ending and I spent it awfully.
A few moments later, I understood that a natural cycle of life and death was going to repeat itself one more time, so I made a hard promise to do it better next time, if at all.
However, the cycle did not repeat itself, as I received adequate medical help in time. I was able to make a recovery. But that experience changed me forever.
Can you perhaps expand on the sense it wasn’t a unique experience as well? Do you feel you’ve “reversed” the course you saw?
Similarly, I think a lot of skeptics will be surprised when they're dying and realize that the pop culture tropes are fairly accurate. Memories being replayed in vivid detail, a light at the end of a tunnel, etc. Where do you think these ideas are coming from if not first-hand experience?
Woah, they should study this in context of the practice of meditating and fire breathing (hyperventilating?). A popular one is Wim Hoff who has this method where you increase O2 in the blood by breathing techniques and then hold your breath for as long as possible.
It's an EEG not a super high resolution device.
Yes our brain does stuff at the edge of breaking. EEG changes somehow when we put ourself under anesthesia . Still we don't really get it.
And weirdly enough comments here go into afterlife and other esoteric stuff.
We know enough about our brain that we know we are our brain...
We know that you can't survive without a brain. We know that your personality changes if your brain gets damaged.
It's very far fetched to talk about soul as anything else than just fantasy.
Some children can remember exact & verifiable details of their prior life they never could have come to know in this their current child life. These details can be objectively and independently confirmed. Remarkably & quite biologically enigmatic: Some of them have birth marks and birth defects at very same locations as the lethal injury causing their often abrupt and violent past life death. Eg. Born with 5 missing fingers after a prior life accident where they were cut off... Birthmarks at the exact location where they got gunshot wounds in their prior life, which could be confirmed from the autopsy report of their deceased individuality. Furthermore: Some can speak a language they never have learnt in this life (xenoglossy) corresponding to their past life language & nationality. They can in some cases remember names of siblings and other family members in their past life family who they never have met in this life...
Also, I don't believe there's been any incidents of xenoglossy that have withstood any detailed examination.
Story: https://poemuseum.org/the-facts-in-the-case-of-m-valdemar/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_in_the_Case_of_M._Va...
Has anyone tried counting the number of souls per body?
"Why yes, I do currently own this soul, so it's MY soul, but not necessarily the one I was born with"
Nowadays you’d be lucky to die into a fish or bird - most of us are destined bugs, or industrial farm animals.
You can think of it like a mouse is lower form of life and if he works on his karma he can reincarnate as a racoon and then then if the racoon works on himself he can reincarnate as a monkey all the way up until enlightenment.
The animal right before reincarnation as an enlightened being is of course man.
But do you know what being is right before man?
Woman.
True story. Not even joking here. If a woman works on her karma, she supposedly can reincarnate as a man.
funkytown playing in the background
>there is no scientifically admissible evidence supporting any of the alleged instances of xenoglossy
Followed by four separate research citations.
You're peddling obvious pseudoscience quackery.
Have you read his wiki page or other sources?
His methods is wishful thinking.
I'm very curious what gives you the feeling that you would trust that stories.