The Science of Near-Death Experiences | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Near-Death Experiences

theatlantic.com

40 pointsHooke27 comments

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe DMT can be produced in the pineal gland? I can't read this paper from 1976 but that's what the title says http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.1976....

DMT is hallucinogenic, similar to LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), and these NDEs sound quite similar to the results of medical psilocybin trials http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment. I'm surprised the author didn't mention this aspect (or if they did, it was very brief).

As the author alluded to, the disappointment for me is with this false dichotomy - mystical and wonderful or scientific and mundane. Isn’t the idea that a bunch of neurons can produce these incredible experiences wonderful enough? How great is it that we can produce a drug to make the last moments of our life beautiful? Aren’t we lucky that sometimes we get a second chance, and our brain can rewire so dramatically we change the way we live our life? And just think how it will change our understanding of consciousness when we figure out how all of this happens! I think that’s a much more fulfilling explanation than the intangible mind/soul argument. But maybe that’s just me.

Read the first bit, then scanned some, then read the closing, so fair warning: I may have missed some important parts. (I like The Atlantic, but I do not always have time to consume it)

I think the problem in digesting all of this that the author describes is due to the fact that this is not a science -- it's philosophy. That doesn't make it any less real, it just makes the issues and questions more difficult to grasp.

I would find it odd if people traveled half-way around the world to go to a conference on NDEs and all thought the idea was hokum, so the author may be a little unfair in his observations. If you're looking for falsifiability and reproducibility in something that so far has been intermittant and subjective, then you are using the wrong tool.

What's probably going to happen -- especially with some of the suspended animation stuff going on -- is that we'll start seeing an emerging "science of death". Assuming the suspended animation stuff keeps chugging along, the AI guys start augmenting/transferring small bits of consciousness, and we gain better and better instrumentation to look at what happens at death? We're going to start seeing a really cool field of study open up in another 20-40 years. But we ain't there yet, sadly. Right now it's just a lot of fumbling around in the dark.

Anecdotally speaking, I have had 2 out of body experiences which were extremely vivid. Think about if your consciousness could be ejected outside and above your body somehow and you were looking down at your physical self. One experience was while awake meditating and the other was while sleeping. No drugs involved etc.

While these were not technically NDE's, it definitely opened up for me the possibility that an NDE is potentially possible and that more research should go into this.

About 10 years ago, I had an experience that felt like I was out of my body. It occurred during the night while asleep. I woke up to find myself floating over the bed, just below the ceiling and against the wall opposite the bed.

I remember looking around the room and I could see myself and my wife asleep. It didn't register to me at that time, that I was looking at myself from outside my body. It felt like a dream and I didn't have any desire to try to fly around or through anything, I was content to float there and observe.

About a minute or two into the experience, I noticed something crawling across my pillow, towards my head. As I focused on it, it appeared to be a spider. This made me panic. I think the panic wasn't because of the spider, but that I suddenly realized I was floating in the air and looking at myself. I was overwhelmed with fear and felt myself suddenly fall into my body, at which point I woke up immediately. There was a physical sensation of light pressure when that happened. That experience felt like it lasted only a few minutes.

I jumped out of bed, turned on the some lights and looked all over. I pulled the blankets off the bed, turning over my pillow, etc. I woke up my wife and told her there was a spider on the bed. We spent a few minutes trying to find it, but to no avail. I never had anything like that happen before or since.

I don't know what actually happened, but the experience felt very real. There wasn't any alcohol or drugs involved, but I was in the Air Force at the time, so it could have been aliens. ;-)

> at which point I woke up immediately.

Could the whole thing have been a dream?

Even if you remember waking up before it happened, that doesn't mean that it was not a dream. You can have a dream within a dream, or have two consecutive dreams that make you feel like you dreamed within a dream.

It definitely could have been a dream. It was a strange combination of the physical sensation of floating and falling, but also observing myself in the third person that was very unusual.

An out of body experience occurs when the mind is concentrated and the body goes to sleep. It's a skill that can be learned. It takes some people months of practice, while others do it on their first try.

Crap now I'm scared of meditating kind of.

Haha! I know what you mean.

It can be scary because we're essentially confronting the unknown, but concentration helps with that. Fear is a distraction that takes you away from a single pointed mind. When you recognize fear or worry popping up, you gently return to your object of concentration until it goes away.

Did you collect any information about your surroundings in that state? Do you feel you were you really "looking" at your physical self, through some other sensory capability, or was it a mental construction?

The environment is practically identical to your physical location. You have the same level of awareness that you have here, only you can walk through solid objects and fly, etc.

However, you will often project things onto the environment subconsciously, so it may not be exactly in line with the physical world.

It's like there is a description of the world there that we can access, but we can also overlay our own constructs on top of that description. An unbridled mind fills the environment with seemingly random imagery and we experience dreams, but a concentrated mind sees the environment itself.

It's really not much different from being awake actually - sometimes you're fully aware of your concrete surroundings and other times you're lost in abstract daydreams, completely oblivious to what's going on around you.

As for "looking" at yourself, I usually wouldn't see my body, but I'd feel a strong magnetic pull coming from that area of the room. If I got too close, I'd get sucked into my body and wake up.

I believe data about the physical world is available during an out of body experience, but it's impossible to be entirely objective about it since, whether in the body or "outside" of it, we have no choice but to access that data through a mental construct, i.e., an experience.

I've read all of Robert Monroe's books on out-of-body experiences and I'm convinced OBEs are a dream-type state. Especially his later books when he discuses his conversations with other beings and trying to ignore sexual urges (erections are common in REM sleep).

Have you ever had an out of body experience?

I would probably dismiss it all as a dream state too, if not for the experiences I had - including really impossible stuff, like seeing future events.

You can certainly have conversations with other beings there, although I don't think there's a good way to discern the nature of those beings. They are intelligent anyway.

Some people view sexual energy as a fundamental power that can be used for a variety of spiritual purposes, so they suggest that it be sublimated or transmuted.

Maybe these things seem weird - and they are weird - but neither proves that the world experienced while "out of body" is fabricated by the brain, assuming that's what you meant by dream-type state of course.

Does your username have anything to do with these experiences or is it just a serendipitous coincidence?

Reading this gave me a lot more respect for the god of the gaps, or, at least, the gaps themselves.

It would be interesting to find someone who had had an NDE and taken LSD (on a separate occasion), and ask them to compare the two experiences in terms of vividness, beauty, feelings of peace or being loved, etc.

> vividness, beauty, feelings of peace or being loved, etc.

Or, you know, the complete opposite.

i was in an acoma at 16. I was floating around the room way above my bed in the hospital. my mom walked in looked up at me straight in my eyes. behind her was a priest with a purplecloth around his neck. I yelled out, that i was not going to die,by the time the words, not going to die got out of my mouth ,i was back in my body.mom laughed commented how she knew this would work. the priest had an odd look on his face as he looked at me and mom.it was a shooked look. this was normal crap for my family. i know know most people are not like this.

i was in an acoma at 16. I was floating around the room way above my bed in the hospital. my mom walked in looked up at me straight in my eyes. behind her was a preast with a purple around his neck. I yelled out that i was not going to die,my the time not going to die ,i was back in my body.momlaughed commented how she knew this would work. the priest had an odd look on his face as he looked at me and mom.it was a shooked look. this was normal crap for my family.

What we can perceive collectively tells us little about our collective consciousness. Humans are more than just meat.

Why do you think that we are more than 'thinking meat'? Seems like there is no evidence for that at all.

[Let’s say experiments are done, and there is finally a comprehensive, scientifically rigorous, and materialist account of what causes an NDE. What then? Does it mean that all the stories people tell of seeing angels and meeting their deceased relatives are just fairy tales to be ignored?]

Yes, but that's even unrelated to NDE's.

Even higher beings confirmed that we're just thinking meat. So I'm fine with that.

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

> Why do you think that we are more than 'thinking meat'? Seems like there is no evidence for that at all.

Irrelevent

> but that's even unrelated to NDE's

Exactly

What is interesting is how NDEs share traits of the unconscious mind and its archetypes. Commonality that is shared by everyone from dreams, through to meditative states, vision quests and various states of psychosis. Even Jung started building his framework with insights from an NDE; the incorporation of eastern philosophy into our western analytical model allows for a very deep study of our psyche -- regardless of world-view -- and opens up horizons for the mind that were previously inaccessible due to a lack of sophistication in that area. NDEs are another intrigue that can be added to the list of phenomenon that allow us insight into our psyche.

'Thinking meat' is mere derogatory verbiage appropriate for an arena like HN but that's just jousting.

Self awareness differentiates us from "thinking meat".

Why is self-awareness an indication of something other than "thinking meat"? Why can't it be a more abstract form of thought?

Nothing new here, move along.

But it's a good primer if you've never read up on this stuff before.

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