Biophysicist discovers new life after death: Joyce Hawkes at TEDxBellevue

have you ever looked at yourself and wondered what's under the skin do you realize there's a hundred trillion cells in you 25 trillion of them are red blood cells those red blood cells wear out last 4 months so if you calculate it out while you're sitting here every second your body is making 2 to 3 million brand new red blood cells and you don't have to even think about it that unseen part of us is astonishing I fell in love with an electron microscope a long time ago and that microscope led me to a fabulous career I was at the very top peak of it as a biophysicist scientist publishing speaking running a lab I loved this work and I felt always well science was the whole deal and then all of a sudden something else happened I was home cleaning house and this thing was on the mantel and I was vacuuming in front of the mantel I didn't bump it but it fell off and I took it in freefall it hit me on the head that was a game changer sudden death I went down the long dark tunnel I never heard of near-death experiences I didn't believe in them if I had heard of them this was in the late 70s before they were popular I had no belief in an afterlife and greeted me at the entrance to the light was my grandmother and mother two women that I loved dearly who had passed and they could express their love to me and they didn't look like they've been dead 20 years they were in great shape and then into a place that was exquisitely beautiful with rolling hills and lights and the emotional sense was you'd never want to leave everything was perfect there was no agenda and nothing going on in my head except being there completely then BOOM in the presence of a being of light once again unusual I had no belief I had no idea this was just not part of the paradigm in which I worked I had no discussion about coming back or not I had no real life review but all of a sudden I'm back on the floor with a really sore head and I reach out and touch my head and it's matted with dried blood so I wasn't out a second or two seconds or even a few minutes what we've figured is probably at least an hour and a half maybe two hours and most people out that long are gone they die there's something like 13 million records of near-death experiencers in our culture now very interesting stories similarities but not exactly the same I had some take-home messages from this event the first one which I've put into practice deeply and and all the time is housecleaning is very dangerous don't do it you know so then my scientist brain which is curious but also kind of stubborn said well yeah okay so you had an event with low oxygen so by the end of that and I discounted the whole thing but I couldn't get away from what I had seen in the unseen world I couldn't get away from the expansion of my reality and I couldn't get away from the emotions that I experienced there so I started reading and talking to people so on and so forth and slowly began to experience and understand that a healing gift had emerged not because of near-death but because of becoming aware that all of us are healers you've got two to three million brand-new red blood cells in this last second your body is healing all the time we touch one another with kindness with love and that becomes healing we can meditate and do some things with that it took me seven years and a real distinct calling to make that my life work and so I truly jumped off a cliff and left the lab trained somebody to take over the lab that I was running and shook my head a bunch of times and said what have I done in the process of trying to understand what how we touch one another with health I had the opportunity to go to several foreign cultures the most powerful one was in Bali I experienced 10 years of going back and forth from Seattle to work with a shaman trance medium healer there she was amazing her name was Jiro mong-koo she worked deeply in trance and this is one of her states when she was in that state she could look inside of someone's body and describe what was going on with them she described cells she'd never seen a cell she never heard of cells she'd never seen a book of histology she had no education in it whatsoever but in her own way she penetrated to the depth of a person's issues and could describe that so that I understood it we shared a lot in those 10 years and I worked exclusively with her during that time she took me to some very unusual places unusual temples this particular one in this carving you would never find there's no sign it's not in any tourist book but I had great experience with her she would bless me with holy water and from time to time and sprinkle me with a little water and on this particular day she decided to be fun to just soak me totally the experience there was such that when I came back to work with my clients the work had expanded I could do things I couldn't do before so the learning was not about technique it was not about protocol it was about deepening oneself in the practice and sharing that with another in more recent years there's been a lot of interest particularly in Richard Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin and now it spread to some other places in what goes on at least in one group of cells the neurons of the brain when we're in a compassionate state and reaching to another or in a meditative state so the curiosity for me has continued to expand and move and ask questions trying to work with both sides what's the science of what's going on here and what is the spirit of it and how can we help each other this was a bit of research that we did in New York City there's a young man up on the table and his brainwaves are being shown on the far left computer he looks like he's asleep right now the thinking mind is closed down he's got a lot of Delta at the bottom of that computer chart and so that says he's in a deep unconscious state of sleep when he actually woke up and we were finished he said the Arthritis has just been hurting me so much he is gone it's a lot better that stayed gone now my brain is being recorded on the right the axis right down the middle is a split between the right list hemispheres of the brain there's been a lot of information that our left brain does the thinking and the right brain does other stuff scientific literature now is saying that's not entirely true and here is a situation where both my right and left side of brain are doing similar things at the same time so the very upper bars are very fast neuron activity the gamma and right under it the next couple of bars are the somewhat speedy beta waves activity again of our neurons thinking so I'm alert aware not drowsy then the big broad expanse there are alpha those are slower and those are the sense of well-being so when you're doing this work of responding compassionately to another there's a sense of well-being in the practitioner also right under that big broad expanse or some other bars about three levels of those those are fatal they're slower again in neuronal activity those are active in dream states they're also active when we're visualizing and the bottom ones that are busy they're - our Delta Waits Delta's usually only seen in most of us in deep unconscious sleep but in event meditators and when people are sending healing there's a lot of Delta activity curious we don't know why but it's curious now here's another EEG type of work which has a little bit different access but you see over 1 2 3 4 5 sensors the huge array of blue spikes all across the top of my brain when I'm sending healing to someone those are all Delta and you see the bar graph the one that's blue some of that Delta activity is 10 times higher than anything else going on in the brain so there's something about this very slow pattern which is active in the waking mind but when we are involved in helping others I had a really cool opportunity to go to Tokyo was invited there and tuna Han University where they hooked me up with 125 sensors now I'd have a lot of the EEG work because we were interested in curious and all of this and lo and behold they stuck those sensors on my head out of a vat of saltwater and it ruined my hairdo field but each of those had a wire that went to record what was going on in the neurons of my brain and we saw that in the thinking brain or just sitting around brain there wasn't much activity that's the little picture the big one is during a healing session when I was sending to a man that had was right in front of me with end-stage colon cancer the red is the highest activity of neurons that could be recorded with their equipment and in fact it started kind of in the rear part of the brain moved across the right side then off to the left and looked like it all shot out of the left prefrontal cortex that's a part of the brain that's known to be active when compassion arises so then we asked as our curiosity kept dragging us along what happens if your working with someone a long ways away this distance limit this work so my friend Juan Acosta was recording someone with quantitative EEG in Santa Cruz and I was in Seattle almost a thousand miles away and I thought oh boy oh boy they're going to show a lot of Delta right because I'm running Delta no way this woman had virtually the same activity in her beta theta and Delta what changed was her alpha wave when I talked to her afterwards she'd been in the midst of a horrendous time in her life she had not had a sense of well-being or peace she said for over a year and during a very short session about 10 minutes all of a sudden she felt peaceful again and her alpha pattern went from 41 microvolts squared to 110 so the healing is not confined to the brain or to the neurons and it's not the route of it but it's an easy group of cells to be able to test we don't have to chop you up and put you in the microscope I've also done work now in India seven thousand seven hundred miles away and we found immediate response and changes in someone who is being tested at a bio Sciences Research Center I'm also now actively working with a group at the University of Washington a group of fabulous scientists and so we're just beginning some studies again following the sense of curiosity what can we understand how can we help one another so I hope that you will take with you today this idea we walk with mystery in us around us what we know from microscopes and telescopes inform us that the world is huge and there's a lot of reality we don't know about we also know that compassion can actually touch the world and so I encourage you to take a moment to think about sitting on top of Mount Baker it send compassion send well-being to your loved ones to your community to this world thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,323,841

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Keywords: Biophysics (Field Of Study), tedx talks, ted x, tedx talk, English, Biology, Science, ted talk, tedx, ted, TEDx, Health, Brain, TEDxBellevue, USA, ted talks

Id: MyaBeHeRK6M

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2013