Experiencing Death: An Insider's Perspective

well thank you for those very kind remarks it is a pleasure to be back and I think we are in for a very special evening in some ways I feel like our series so far has been building up to the conversation we're about to have talking about certain experiences that seem to defy scientific explanation what are typically typically called near-death and out-of-body experiences as you know this is an extremely controversial subject which often pits purely materialist explanations against explicitly religious ones this evening we will hear a variety of perspectives on our panel and we're going to have some fun the reason I find this topic so fascinating is that near death experiences push us to the edge of what we know about the nature of consciousness which I happen to think is the most exciting frontier in science today and as Richard mentioned I'm a little bit biased here I produced a big radio series on the subject last year not only our stories of near-death experiences remarkable in themselves they raise profound questions about what is often called the mind-body problem and whether there is any dimension of consciousness that exists beyond the brain and lucky for us we have a terrific panel to sort out these questions so let me introduce our speakers peter fennec at the far end of the the panel there is a neuropsychiatrist affiliated with Maudsley hospital the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and the Broadmoor special Hospital for violent offenders he has a long-standing interest in questions about consciousness and is leading clinical experts on near-death experiences his books include the art of dying and the truth and the light an investigation of over 300 near-death experiences mary neal in the middle is an orthopedic spine surgeon based in Jackson Hole Wyoming she attended the UCLA Medical School and completed her orthopedic surgery training at the University of Southern California she's the author of the memoir to heaven and back which tells the remarkable story of her life changing experience while being pinned under water in a kayaking accident in Chile story was recently featured on Anderson Cooper's show 360 on CNN Kevin Nelson is a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky Medical Center where he practices clinical neurology and neurosurgery the American Association of neuromuscular and electrodiagnostic medicine is a particular interest in what's happening in the brain during intense spiritual experiences is the author of the spiritual doorway in the brain a neurologist search for the God experience and finally sampar Nia has a doctorate in cell biology and is also an MD is an assistant professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he is director of resuscitation research he also directs the awareness during resuscitation study and he's the author of two popular science books what happens when we die and erasing death the science that is rewriting the boundaries between life and death welcome all of you thank you now part of the the difficulty of talking about this this whole subject of near-death experiences is its its definitions what do we mean so Peter I'm going to start with you the phrase near-death experience seems to cover a wide range of experiences is there common agreement about what these are and what triggers them there is a common agreement but it's not very common near-death experiences are thought to be experiences which occur when people are close to death and they have a number of features these features can be measured by a scale and the scale was devised by Bruce Grayson and it's called the Grayson questionnaire so you give people the questionnaire and if they tick certain boxes and the experience they had was a near-death experience but you see it doesn't end there car near-death if it did that would be very easy it occurs also in psychological states where you're not near death at all you may be they frightened or it may be that you're having a crisis of some sort and you may get similar phenomena then it can also occur to some people quite on taneous Lee so are these all near-death experiences or not so when I looked at near-death experiences I thought there's very little point in looking at near-death experiences which would occur if I didn't know what the brain was doing so I chose specifically those when I thought there was no brain function in other words those during cardiac arrest I know what the brain is doing I can ask intelligent questions about near-death experiences so that's what I've done so there's no absolute agreement but if you get a score on the Grace and scale and you have an experience where you go down a tunnel meter being applied going to an English country garden you can tell I'm English and you then may meet dead relatives you may then also have a life review come to border and then be sent back those are all things or points on the grace and scale and if you get over seven of these then you said have a near-death experience Kevin I want to turn to you you have also been studying this you wrote a whole book about near-death experiences do you basically agree with that definition yeah I agree with much of what Peter said I want to amplify a couple points first off these are near-death experiences these are not a return from death experiences and so in the medical literature there's been a lot of sloppiness with the term clinical death well clinical death to a neurologist means your brain is dead and that's not what's happening here in fact during these experiences the brain is very much alive and very much active so I think we you know from a neurologist standpoint that has to be very clear the other thing that Peter pointed out that I think is really worth going into some detail is that many of the triggers for these experiences are in fact simple fainting the brain because of its metabolism requires constant blood flow now if that blood flow goes below a threshold for 10 seconds that's right our olds 23 milliliters per hundred grams of brain ferment for those of you who like numbers consciousness will be lost in ten minutes doesn't mean that doesn't mean that the brain is not functioning and it doesn't mean the brain is dead it simply means that the functioning is impaired there's a second threshold there of blood flow if it's diminished to about 17 milliliters branagh grams of brain per minute where irreversible brain damage is going to start occurring the neck it generally begins at about depends on the extent that the blood flow is diminished can start in two or three minutes but it can also take several hours so you're saying there's no such thing as coming back from clinical death there is no coming back from clinical death and let me make this very clear when a brain dies the cells the nerves which comprise that brain burst like a water balloon because we have a nun rush in rushing of soda our calcium and that causes the cells to lyse there's not you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again once that neuron bursts it's gone you know when a critical number of these neurons die within the brain then the whole organ may reach a point where it's irretrievably okay Sam I want to turn to you do you agree with that definition of clinical death well I think if I may I'll take a step back actually to sort of AB skip my perspective on what Peter started out with and what was just being said you have to remember where we've come from to be able to appreciate this question bit better which is that if you think about it for centuries if not millennia people have tried to reverse death who wants to die nobody wants to die people have tried that and well exception it is this who used to want to die they did it right and unfortunately human beings were not successful at reversing death and essentially the way that death has been defined and still continues to be defined in most cases is when the heart stops beating because when the heart stops beating a person stops breathing immediately and the brain also stops functioning because there's no blood getting into the brain and that's why people develop fixed and dilated pupils so you've seen on the films those are the three criteria by which doctors today define death that's when they write your death suit if you so this perception was created that there is a moment of death that could not be reversed because there was no science to do so now two important things occurred in the 1960s which changed this enormous li and the first thing was that um there was the advent of modern intensive care medicine where essentially people who were critically ill who were going to die were now able to be preserved using life support machines so a bit like an airplane that's about to crash but now you have a system to pull it up and prevent the crash from happening and people coming back out of it the second thing that was discovered at the same time quite by chance was modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR which essentially allowed physicians to restart the heart in people after they had gone beyond that traditional threshold of death so what then occurred over the ensuing couple of decades was that actually more and more thousands millions of people were now being brought back to life either because they'd been very close to death or they had temporarily gone beyond the traditional threshold of death and these people had incredible experiences they were universal as Peter pointed out they described seeing beings of light they described going through a tunnel a beautiful place having a review of their lives and sometimes watching events that were going on in hospitals now we as scientists when this was first described like anything that's described for the first time were perplexed because essentially it was a new phenomena and the although the people who had the experience believed that they were real the scientific reaction really reflected people's own personal views like much of what our perceptions about life and death is if you were to go out there today and ask people what you'll find their perception about what happens after death reflects their cultural beliefs their religious beliefs their personal beliefs or combination of that's why there are thousands of opinions out there but but I'm going to jump in on one point because it seems like there's a disagreement between what you're saying and what well it's not to touch on that but I hope that important just to get the framework of what we were coming from so now what what was mentioning which i think is very valid is and this is what's been discovered more in the 21st century is that essentially after a person dies through the conventional ways which is and it's defined in two ways one is what I just described which is circulatory failure when your heart stops and I would say to you as an intensive care physician 95 to 99 percent of patients that we define why did that certificate for them this is how this is the mode of death now the other thing though that happened is that when those people have died what we now understand is that those brain cells don't immediately go through the process that Kevin just mentioned they don't immediately disintegrate and disappear there's a process that can take potentially hours so now understanding that another dilemma that's come about which is what Kevin was referring to through intensive care is that you can have people who would have traditionally died by their heart stopping or breathing but are now being maintained on life support machines in my intensive care unit but have had massive brain injuries such that the brain itself can independently die before the heart has stopped but it just acts brain-dead and that's what Kevin was okay but it sounds like you're saying that people in a clinical sense have died and in some cases through resuscitation come back and Kevin you're saying that's not possible I mean people have not died you cannot come back from death the term clinical death causes all kinds of confusion and it causes confusion because people think well I can return from clinical death no death is death you're it's irreversible I mean once a cell dies once an organ dies it is dead now it's and points out rightfully so if you have cardiac arrest well the brains still working because it's going to work for probably about 10 seconds even with no blood flow but oftentimes particularly I see use and in the field and when there's cardiac events it's not so cut and dry in fact there the heart starts up it kind of slows down or that you know the you know may it may stop for a while and start up again it may be tin effectively so there's all kinds of very important factors that go into it will appear that someone is dead they may be comatose they may have their eyes up and they may be paralyzed but they're not dead but if I may say though and to call it clinical death you know in a scientific term I think it lends itself to this particular people are not medically sophisticated that there's a return from death and now these are not a return from death experiences these are a near-death you've you've gone to the edge but you haven't gone over the edge but I think the people we deal with actually getting do go beyond the edge and that's the point I mean this is how death is declared in this country it's basically when your heart stops beating you have no breathing and your pupils are fixed and dilated that is the criteria for determining death in people now what we're all saying is sort of similar is that the social perception of death and that's important is that death has to be a point by which you cannot come back ever again and that may be that we need to redefine the way we even issue death certificates in the future but right now and if you think about the guy who on the street right now potentially is having a car accident as being declared dead by ambulance crews who arrived there that's the way that they have died they haven't yet developed that permanent brain death but that's how it's being done all over this city all over this country all over the world so when you watch movies or you look at literature when people talk about death or the perception of death that's how they that's the majority that we're talking about but most of the time when I declare someone dead I don't need to declare them brain-dead their heart has stopped for a period of time to where you know the brain could not survive what is the brain surviving or not which is the critical factor here we're talking about the brain you know during these experiences when you speak to experience when you speak the human experience you're speaking about the brain I would I would tell you I would add one other thing because part of this whole discussion is and we could spend the whole night trying to talk about what is death but the reality is there are many different definitions of death I would go a step further and tell you that my own definition of death at this point is when the spirit leaves body and having nothing to do well and not science that I'm just telling you and I think that's perfectly acceptable but you have to roll it's a different definition of death and this point I'm making is that we can discuss it all night but we're never going to come up with a universal definition of death because the fact is there are probably five acceptable and reasonable definitions of death each person from their own perspective how you write the death certificate how you blonde etre it that's exactly so you marry yes you can define it why we like that when you speak to human experience you're speaking to the human brain and so if you're speaking to death nakhon the brain and context of death you should speak to that organs death not to some surrogate phenomena of the heart stopping that's a secondary phenomena I think we're going to come back to this question of how we define death um Peter how universal are these near-death experiences I mean is someone in China or Nigeria reporting basically the same kind of experiences as Americans do there worldwide not only are they worldwide they've also been throughout history and certainly as far as Western history goes right back to the Greeks there are accounts of near-death experiences at that time but the interesting question that's been raised is are they the same if you're Chinese will you have the same experience as you would if you're American if you were an Indian would it be the same well now there are cultural components so in fact they're different in different countries and the sorts of differences are fairly simple for example I gave you what happens in European countries in America the fact that you go down a tunnel that you meet a being of light and then go into this nice english garden and have a life review in fact if you were in China you'd probably do the same thing but if you were in India then you wouldn't probably wouldn't be any tunnel you'd certainly wouldn't go out of your body before you go down the tunnel to meet the being of light and in primitive societies hunter-gatherers they're much much simpler than that just to give you the flavor for it there's one well known hunter-gatherer experience where a man died and he got into a canoe paddled for three days to an island I expect it was like an English country guy he stayed there and then he paddled all the way back again now that has the same sort of flavours than their death experience as as we do today in Europe and America so there definite differences well why would certain cultures see the tunnel the white light and other cultures not I don't think it's really known we can talk about the Indian experience because that's been studied much more the in India they believe in the god of death and he has messengers called yamdoot and he sends his yam dudes out to take the person and bring them back so when you die you're picked up by gandu you go back to where the guard is and he looks in the book and sees exactly what you've done now what Ian Stevenson who studied them said is quite often the the guard who's reading the book says hey you brought me the wrong person taking back a mediator I didn't want that Patel I'm wanting honor the other patellas and Ian Stevenson called this official bundling so that there are very specific cultural phenomena which which do occur well I want to turn to married now because you have had a remarkable story you've written a whole book about it nearly dying in a kayaking accident in Chile back in 1999 and I know you wrote a whole book about it but can you can you briefly tell us the story of what happened I'll tell it very briefly and try to address some of the more detailed aspects that will address some of the more scientific questions that I perhaps didn't focus on in the book and my experience began when my husband and I went to Chile to kayak and we are avid kayakers so this was not on a lark and we decided to go on a river that's well known for waterfalls it's something that was certainly within our skill set we were kayaking down the section of river with friends of ours who are professionals that do this for a living and when I came to the first big drop the circumstances were such that I had to go over the main part of the waterfall instead of a smaller chute and so I started over the drop which was about 15 feet in that range and when I saw the bottom I certainly saw tremendous hydraulics no clean-out flow and I have to preface this first by saying that I did grow up as a child of the 1950s was taken to Sunday school never really expected to incorporate that into what I was or into my life and then I went off to college and medical school and residency and the whole the whole deal and I absolutely would say that before this experience I would have responded yes if someone said do you believe in God but I also absolutely subscribed and joined what I really feel is its own religion which is really the religion of the intellect you know if I'm smart enough if I spend enough money and if I spend enough time looking at things I will be able to answer all the questions that we're talking about and so I by no one stretch of the imagination would have been called a particularly religious person or a zealot and it really had not given much thought to the death experience just to return to the story of the accident so you were you went over the waterfall went over the waterfall the front of the boat instead of hitting the bottom and being flipped out and tumbled around and spit out downstream the front of the boat became pinned or stuck in the rocks and I was immediately submerged under eight or ten feet of water and so there were no air pockets there I was under solid water so that I wasn't even visible from the surface and I am a spine surgeon I'm very calm and didn't panic didn't do those things it wasn't the first time I was under the water tried to free the boat tried to free me from the boat I became clear that nothing was working and I'm a very pragmatic person I knew that I was about to drown and I asked that God's will be done in the moment I asked that I was immediately overcome with a very very physical sensation of being held and comforted and reassured that everything was fine my husband we find my for young children would be fine regardless of whether I lived or died and we then went through a bit of a life review and we looked at events not in isolation or judgment but really looked at the beauty that came out of every event and I was well aware of my circumstances I could feel the water slowly sucking my body over the front deck of the boat and I could feel my knees bending back themselves and bones breaking and limits tearing and and at this point I've been asked many times well did you feel yourself become unconscious and I would say that I had been conscious and then more conscious and I was still me I was still my same somewhat cynical analytical self and my thought balloon off to the side was experiencing this and thinking this is strange and I thought about okay I know how long I've been underwater how long were you underwater well from the time that the people I was boating with identified where underwater I probably was to the time they initiated CPR was 15 minutes on the clock and they would absolutely say that leading up to that point was another 15 minutes so they are very clear that they believed I was underwater without oxygen for 30 minutes I tend to focus on the 15 minutes because that is the shortest absolutely objective measure of time but I felt my body coming out of the boat I felt my spirit peeling away from my body and I could feel then my spirit rise up and out of the river and I was immediately greeted by a group of something people spirits beings they were people that I absolutely knew on a very core level had known me and loved me as long as I had existed I knew them I loved them and we were all overjoyed and I was very surprised with this whole process I didn't have any preconceptions and there was a shift in time dimension not quite sure what the words were so that they could take me down this incredibly beautiful pathway toward this great dome structure of sorts that I knew was essentially a point of no return I knew it was heaven whatever word you want to put on it and I could hardly wait at the same time I could look back at the scene at the river and what had happened is my body came out of the boat went downstream underwater and actually bumped into one of the guys downstream they pulled me out started CPR and I could see them do CPR one guy was never able to divorce himself from the fact that it was me his friend kept calling to me to come back and take a breath and I eventually would say okay and I'd interrupt our progress I'd go back down this path lie down take a breath and then rejoin these people these spirits eventually did make it to this threshold although he kept calling me back again and again and again it was really very irritating I did for you you didn't want to come back well I hate to say it because my daughter is here but one of the remarkable things and really one of the things that was a great surprise to me was an absolute sense of being home and an absolute sense of looking at my body recognizing that that was my body and that represented my life here it represented my children it represented my husband and I had a great life I had a husband that loved me I loved my children more than I could ever imagine loving something on earth I was not trying to escape something I had everything to come back for yet I had absolutely no intention of coming back no desire whatsoever part of which as I've been reassured it wasn't just you know I that's actually why I didn't tell my story for many years I never wanted my children to know that I hadn't wanted to come back I didn't want them to feel that they hadn't been enough of a reason I'm sure we'll come back to some of the details of your story just to back up for a moment you said that you were brought up as a Christian maybe you didn't have that strong faith before that certainly you have sense do you think your background as a Christian as a person of faith shaped the nature of this experience I do to a degree I absolutely believe that there is one God and that is a God of all of us and I believe that God speaks to us in the way we will understand and I believe that we are greeted by God's most gentle messengers and that is different for each of us so that mean so that so for me for example when I think about my experience what speaks to me and makes me feel wonderful is color and flowers and aromas and that's what I experienced if I had heard Bach or Mozart I would have thought it was in the wrong place I mean I don't that doesn't speak to me but it's the same here on earth the mountains speak to me the desert speaks to two other people and so I do think that culturally our initial experience is influenced by what we are but I also think that that makes sense because if someone in the boat came to collect me that would create fear because it would be unknown but instead it was a situation that made me feel wonderful and I too felt this absolutely pure encompassing overwhelming whoa well we have a panel full of scientists here so we've just heard this remarkable story really the rest of you think of it you make of this they're one of two points which I'd like to like to raise the first one is the question of the life review they're mainly found in Western experiences so we'll probably all have life reviews if we have a near-death experience and well 12 percent of us will anyway so that that's one point and the other point is that if you in certainly in our series and in most series if you look at the religious affiliation of the people it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they have an experience or not will will an atheist have an experience atheists will have exactly the same experience well so you know you're including beings of light ain't angelic Tobias oh yes absolutely and Peter may I interrupt you just a minute though because I have a feeling that as people are hearing what you've been saying the impression is that everyone has these experiences and they're all similar but I want to make clear that everyone doesn't have an experience and I think that's important because one of the explanations that people would like to say is that gee this is the result of a dying brain and it's entirely physiologic experience if you break your leg I can tell you the physiology and everyone is going to have a very similar experience 100% but the fact is a hundred percent of people who are near death don't have an experience and if it were purely a physiological experience everyone would have it and they would all be very similar well I want to turn to Kevin now because you have written a book that basically tries to explain these experiences through physiological means I think using a broken leg is not a great parallel here when you're talking about the brain that's the orthopedist in you and I'm a neurologist um the there are certainly shared elements because we have shared physiology we essentially all walked around with the same brain you know as a that's what we share in common with our species but there are definitely cultural differences as Peter pointed out and there's age-related differences as to children who have near-death experiences are more likely to see you know wizards and castles and Santa Claus and they're you know maybe Jesus depends on their their background than they are to see Elvis for example I mean fact al Raymond moody who wrote a book who coined the term near-death experience or what an entire book on people seeing Elvis Presley you know in their near-death experience now I'd be actually one of the questions I want to ask Peter was um do the you know people in the wilds of Papa New Guinea ever see Elvis and and my guess is not you know my guess is that this is quite right yeah we are bringing what we have as our life experience to this very traumatic event and one thing I want to point out with Mary and I mean does it really matter what the brain is doing I mean the real value for some for Mary is how it transformed her and deepened our faith that is really you know in many ways the most important thing that we should remember about this I mean you know I had a great meal last night but do I care what my pancreas was doing at that time no I I can enjoyed my meal um so you know knowing what the physiologic basis of the experience is doesn't necessarily take away its value in fact it doesn't in many ways I think it enhances its value it you know as a famous physicist once said it doesn't hurt to know a little the mystery to know a little bit about the mystery I want to come back to this question of how much are our prior beliefs shape the experience now you said that atheists have this experience did they do what why I mean presumably they don't believe in angelic beings now they don't believe in angelic beings we have to atheists in our series the first one and if you if you were listening to Mary she was very careful about what she was saying she was talking about the interpretation of the experience as she saw it well if you were an atheist you would interpret the experience as you see it and our first atheist refused any sort of being in the experience what they did was they dissolved into pure energy and they floated through a blue environment with pure energy they came to the light and they had the same experience of the overwhelming feelings of love and then the experience ended so it was not populated in quite the same way as Mary's experience was the the other one was very similar but this time there were more people who they met and they met dead relatives which is very common in their death experiences so the fact that you don't believe anything is going to happen doesn't stop it happening I want to talk about another experience that often goes along with these near-death experiences what are often called out-of-body experiences now Mary it sounds like you had one I mean basically where you're having this trauma you have the sense of your spirit separating and often coming back and watching what's going on and we've heard these stories of people who they say after they are revived that they could overhear the conversation in the operating room and report details Sam what do you make of those stories I think you know we've touched on so many things and one of the things we haven't done is is talk about the fact that and this comes to your question about out-of-body experiences as well is that actually these so-called near-death experiences are actually not very well defined and when people talk about them like when Peter and Kevin are talking about these things I as a scientist as an intensive care physician who deals with life and death on a daily basis have no idea how critically ill these people are talking about really where were they really even anywhere near that so one of the difficulties we have and I think to simplify this is that essentially the experience that we're talking about the so-called near-death experience I would rather call it really a deep mystical religious experience that people have when they've been very sick when they've been very critically ill or when they've gone beyond that traditional threshold of death now when you study these populations though most of these patients that Peter is talking about and Kevin's talking about we have no records of really how sick they were and so often what the reason why there's a lot of debate between scientists is that people are lumping a lot of different experiences under the same umbrella term for instance a person in my intensive care unit was critically ill from meningitis or from massive bleeding hemorrhage for our or from massive stroke and who are about to die have very different physiological processes and therefore mixing everything creates confusion so now when you go to out-of-body experiences we have the same issue that certain people such as Mary who had a cardiac arrest who traditionally went beyond the threshold of what people describe his death and and could see things going on so she had what I call visual awareness she could see what was happening and she could perhaps hear conversations they've been called out-of-body experiences but then if you look around people are lumping other things like creating optical illusions in a laboratory by putting a camera behind your head and putting goggles on your eyes that you cannot see anything in front of you and the only vision that you can have is what the camera is showing to you and leaving you like that for many hours so after a period of time your brain starts to think the reality of what you can see is what the camera is showing which is basically the back of your head and then coming along and attacking you with a hammer or attacking the camera with a hammer and you startling getting scared thinking you're about to be attacked and labeling that an out-of-body experience so that is not the traditional definition of what people describe but out-of-body experiences certainly have been described in cardiac arrest settings and people seem to be able to accurately recall what was being said what was being done and if you talk to their physicians they will describe events that were occurring when patients were in asystole or what we call flatline their heart had no electrical activity there was nothing going on I've seen cases which one case particular that I was astonished by where a colleague of mine told me of a patient who was not getting any kind of resuscitation no chest compressions the patient had been served my debt left in the room and they had left the person and then they noticed 20 minutes later that actually the patient looks a bit different the heart had been restarted and the patient recalled everything all conversations so they do occur it isn't the critical question what's whether the brain has flatlined or not I mean whether the whether the brain still is one of the things that Kevin mentioned also which I think and I agree with is that again you're taking a hodgepodge of different experiences and we're mixing it all together so of course in certain cases I absolutely agree there are people who hadn't whose brain hadn't flatlined they hadn't even necessarily technically gone beyond the threshold of their heart stopping but there are certainly cases where people have flatlined both from a heart perspective and for a brain perspective and paradoxically which we cannot explain they are able to to tell us exactly what's going on in the same way that anyone in this room would do except the only difference is for everyone else here their cortex this part of the brain that we need to relay consciousness is working perfectly well in these people at best their brain is fully dysfunctional or as I said completely flatline Kevin how do you explain out-of-body experiences there's actually very little to no controversy in the neurologic circles about out-of-body experiences if one of the remarkable things is that they're actually very common one in 20 people are going to have an odd abadi experience in their lifetime so if you look around you you there's quite a few people in this room in fact often times when I speak people come up to me afterwards and say jeez I had one of those in her own ear told everybody about it um so feel free to do that if you choose um but why are they so common well first off there happens commonly during syncope that is simple fainting harmless fainting about 15% of people who faint will have an out-of-body experience during that faint and it can be you know I've I have one subject who was a jet fighter pilot he was making a sharp turn and he began to get syncopal and boom he was suddenly flying his jet from above the cockpit he actually became a neurologist after that the but most of our many of the auto body experience actually happen when we blend waking and REM consciousness REM kind there are three states of consciousness that we have you know me brains only got three choices it can be awake like many of you seem to be and there's to stick conscious states of sleep there's the non REM sleep and there's the REM sleep the rapid eye movement sleep in the hallmarks of that are profound visual activation activation of the limbic system and our emotional auto body experiences is actually part of the run system bizarre dreams in the narrative quality of that during the REM state we turn off an area called the temporal parietal region now this is an area about here which is important in synthesizing our experiences it takes information from our inner ear where we are in the gravitational field it takes our vision and it takes where our spotty sense seems to be like where your right foot is right now you didn't know that before I mentioned it but now you're thinking about it well that all comes in this one area and if you disturb this area or turn it off um then like we do in REM sleep then you can have a lotta body experience but why would you have this sensation of you're hovering above your body looking back down on it the well they're all different you can have very many different kinds of out-of-body experiences you can be looking from behind now there are none that I'm aware of where you're down below on the ground you can be off to the side you can be behind you can be in front you can be on top it's very common to be above and that's a question I you know like I think needs you know some further thought but the important thing is for example old blank a neurologist and Switzerland has taken an electrode in this area and you apply the current it's about one hundredth of a 60-watt light bulb we flip the switch on boom their out-of-body they can be above they can be hovering behind turn the switch off they're back in so you're going up and down kind of like the elevator out there you know up and down out of your body so there are very you know and we've known this for a long time and we've known this since the forties when Wilder Penfield stimulated the temple area and produced out-of-body experiences during their surgery so we know that these can be done on a very non spiritual and threatening context in fact when we looked at our fifty-five people with who had a near-death experience and looked at their out-of-body experience they were as likely to have an out-of-body experience during REM intrusion that is when RAM and waking consciousness were blending as they were to have it during the near-death experiences so okay Peter do you accept this explanation of out-of-body experiences not much um and there's certain things I don't like about it and there are certain things which I'll go along with first of all they are very common as you say no doubt about that and also ordinary people will have out-of-body experiences those to me aren't terribly interesting what are interesting to me or the out-of-body experiences that you have during a cardiac arrest because remember I said that you have to know what the brain state was and in cardiac arrests on the whole we do know what the brain state is particularly if they are in people who are in a medical facility of some sort now there are a lot of accounts of these and one would normally think okay the person comes out of their body and then goes down the tunnel or something it's not quite like that they come out of their body and they perceive what is going on around them now this is very important if your brain is not functioning or certainly as far as one can get to a medical data it's not functioning but that's the first thing which is interesting the second thing is they can get veridical or true information of the environment around them now if that is true then it suggests that mind and brain can separate so it's the first point and so you have to look at these ones very carefully because there is nothing in our current science which suggests that mind and brain can settle because our science says the mind is created by the brain so you need to look at these experiences so the first thing is can they get your information the next thing about the experiences is that they don't only get information from where they are in the ORM they get it also by going through walls and hearing conversations from other people if you look at the accounts then you will see that the people whose conversations they heard when they were unconscious apparently were in different rooms and there's no way that they could hear it now that's the data now you have to interpret it well there'd been one or two attempts to do this one of the things that people when they come out of their body say is that if there is an object here you can see its top and its sides that's alright but you can see it bottom at the same time now that's not OK and if you are out of your body you shouldn't be able to go through a wall because none of us can so that's not okay either so what are these people really saying and they're one of two people who are suggesting that maybe they're in a five dimensional reality in other words is an extra dimension that will allow you see tops and bottoms or things are allowed to go through walls so it's just another way of thinking about these these phenomena and just taking them from what they are and saying okay what actually do they mean so although the standard view would be well I can explain this in many different ways but if you actually just stick to the data and see what it shows then it raises some really interesting I want to come back to Kevin okay what about these stories of people apparently hearing like something that's happening in another room I mean their body isn't even in that other room and then they reports apparently with this conversation what's much in a much less appealing accent I might say the first off let's look that down because we really need to look at the data the data isn't set in stone in fact there's a lot of ways in which people are aware of what's going on around them and yet they appear dead for example if you have a cardiac arrest what happens to your eyes they open if you see someone as a cardiac or watch you're not going I deal with them every week they never open always closed that's the one thing I can assure you that says you're not looking at the right pocket that's what I do study these and do recordings of during cardiac arrest with dances or general and see their channels the anesthesiologists do what happens is that the eyes themselves move up and the eyelids are actually half open and half closed and then during the course of things actually the eyelids will come down so the initial movements up and then it comes down and they're looking around so people are actually taking in a lot more visually and through their sound than you may think now what's one of the first neurologic things that is damaged during lack of blood flow to the brain it's memory memory structures and that's actually one of the last things to recover as well the memory system is very very activated during these times of crisis to the brain now how we you know bring memory in you know is is a very complex problem there's a mountain of scientific evidence that shows that our memory is very valuable and it's very suggestible and it's very malleable what someone may have said is your heard in another room can be incorporated into memory as a direct experience well I want to jump in here because what we're sort of talking around the the big question here the big question is is the mind simply a product of brain function which is the standard scientific model right now I mean you know when I've asked neuroscientists you know how do you define the mind that many of them will say the mind is what the brain does so I mean that's that's the question that's that is challenege stake here it seems to me the larger philosophical and scientific question and so the question is is there any way to challenge that with sound scientific data and I want to come back to the question of out-of-body experiences because Sam I know you have been the director of a study called the aware study which is actually trying to to check on this in some scientific way to see if there's a way to prove that the mind is more than just brain function did you want to tell us about your study not right now I just wanted actually before we can do that I just need to touch back on it's important for everyone to understand what we're talking about I I deal with cardiac arrests every week I've resuscitated hundreds if not more more patients and it's my bread and butter is what I do for a living and the important thing which Peter was alluding to is to understand that actually while there are many things that make people become very sick and their physiology is very different and that's why I think we're talking about different things and that's the whole point of we're comparing apples and oranges I don't think we're all talking about the same thing using the same terms but with cardiac arrest it's understood very well because we have to understand the physiology in order to be able to bring people back and preserve their brain so as Kevin mentioned when you have at the beginning when blood flow to the brain gets beyond a certain threshold then the brain does not function now when someone's heart stops immediately immediately heart when there is no pumping of the heart there is no blood zero blood getting into the brain and immediately a patient will develop fixed and dilated pupils they lose all of their brainstem reflexes which is why we can put a tube into their airway and they don't gag and their brain stops functioning completely within seconds now when we do resuscitation with the best of efforts that we make we can only get a little bit of blood 5% of the blood that the person has ordinarily into the brain and that's why throughout the entire period of resuscitation the brain remains flatlined and the pupils remain fixed and dilated the brainstem does not function the only case is where that may be an exception is if we have transiently restarted the heart and we lose it again but when their heart doesn't beat that's the case now interestingly to go to a question of consciousness what we have is that we have many thousands if not millions of people now who are reporting these incredible experiences from all over the world who many of have described our doctors our nurses conversations what was going on but you cannot have a functioning cortex in this time it's not possible so we're left with a paradox so this led us to put together a more definitive study which we call aware awareness during resuscitation to try to iron out some of these issues and part of that was to try to study the quality of oxygen getting into the brain and hopefully improve outcomes for our patients so they don't end up rain damaged and part of it was also to try to study these recollections that people have now our study has been analyzed and we will be releasing the results soon but I can just give a little snippet if I may just because everyone asks us and what we what we have found and this is not just my interpretation these are experts we have at least 20 experts from neurology to psychiatry to various fields and neuroscience to emergency medicine who have conferred the findings that essentially our data suggests that these so-called out-of-body experiences at least when they occur in the cardiac arrest setting which is why I call them visual awareness cannot be defined as a hallucination they cannot be defined as a losing they are not consistent with what we call a hallucination furthermore what we've also managed to demonstrate is that essentially when a person has died technically the way they're defined it that what happens to our consciousness is that it disappears from the external view so a bit like how you go for surgery and you're given a general anaesthetic and you may appear that your consciousness are there it hasn't disappeared off the face of the earth it's just not present and so essentially death is not something to be afraid of and the final point which i think is important and it touches on a lot of things that were said is that actually when you talk to people after the experiences they're expressing many different memories some of the people who are telling you that they had a near-death experience they're telling you about memories that were occurring a week or two later in the intensive care unit and so the problem I have with a lot of the study is that my colleagues were quoting here is that you're taking people hadn't experienced 10 years ago who knows really what was going on at that time so it's very important going forward we start it's probably over one body across Ari I'm bad but I'm just I just want to address one aspect because a couple of people have mentioned these recollections these memories and one of the things that I find sets a near-death experience apart from any other experience and I we've all listened to many I've listened to probably 500 stories and we would all say the exact same thing which is that I remember my own experience as precisely and accurately today as when it happened and it's the experience of remembering something in the present tense it's not recalling a memory from 10 years ago or 50 years ago you're saying this is that there's a different quality it is an ephemeral higher league qualitatively different from any other experience dream loose nation or big event in your life it is a qualitatively different type of memory so it's really not a recollection and I think that's one of the things that is interesting from a physiologic standpoint because indeed the brain cells start to disintegrate start to burst there's no way those brain cells are forming memories if you look at the studies that were done trying to replicate the hallucinatory effect of a near-death experience there are similarities when the neurotransmitters are injected but the memory again is qualitatively different it is not a near-death experience these are not recollections I remember the day my son was killed very clearly but I know that if I were to tell that experience of that day every couple of years for the rest of my life the details would change a little bit like I've ever ones description of a near-death experience remains exactly the same no matter how much time is passed I think the viewers are extremely vivid and the reason that they're vividly recalled is because you are activating your memory system because a fight or flight and one of the best examples if you ever want to read is of Dostoevsky when he went through a mock execution he was in no danger of car arrests or fainting like some of his other fellow prisoners were but his memory for the experience which you wrote about later is extremely much the problem with that is I in those 500 stories have only talked to a handful of people who chose to return and they chose to return for very specific reasons I have not spoken to a single person who has had a near-death experience who voluntarily said yeah I want to come back and so that speaks against the idea that it's this fighter flight that it's some evolutionarily beneficial process because nobody wants to come back well no I don't think that's true I have a number of people who want to come back in fact one of the people I can think of she was married she had a child the child was about six months old and there was a lot of ironing to be done and she got all the ironing in the basket and she had a cardiac arrest and she had her near-death experience and she went down the tunnel at the being of light and then there was a discussion with her father who had already died and she said I've got to go back because my husband can't do the ironing I have to go back and that was the reason that she said in fact some of them do have reasons why think it's a point though I think just to touch and what mary says and I think Mary oh that's why I I strongly look into calling people's experiences such as yours no longer near-death experience because as you probably agree medically there is no such thing as being near-death it's a very unscientific term my my way that I would define yours is an actual death experience and therefore what I think is often what you know Kevin may be talking about is actually a different experience we are meant basically if you think about it many human experiences have a lot of overlap it doesn't mean they're the same thing so I think it's important that going forward we study people who've objectively gone through a period of cardiac arrest because one we understand the physiology it's clear we can study it we can measure and then we can go back and look at human experience and and certainly the the evidence is coming through at least raises a serious question which is that you know as you were coming to can human mind and consciousness even though we've all perceived that it's produced by brain activity well the evidence is that that at least has been challenged because we have cases where brain activity cannot be going on but consciousness and memory appears to be going on so maybe for instance human memory we should be thinking about the relationship between memory consciousness in the brain perhaps more as like the RAM in a computer so as a memory coming because of RAM in other words you need it for memory to express itself or is it that the memory is being formed by the harddrive so how does it work and this is these are all interesting questions that are coming out for us but I think at least those of us are actively involved in the field of cardiac arrest who also work with so-called near-death or what I call actual death experiences we consider that there's enough to make us want to pursue this question more the consciousness may continue when the brain is not functioning when we've gone beyond the threshold of death I want to go to the audience I'm guessing that there might be a few questions or comments here before I do that I just have one final question for Kevin what would it take for you to accept the idea that consciousness can be separated from from brain function what would be the study that that would prove that for you that the answer those very long but let me give the general principle of it I'm going to rely on the words of the astronomer Carl Sagan that is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that's a it's a high bar and we need we need a high bar can you be more specific than that okay what would be is there an experiment that could be done that would do this the objectively verifiable now these are subjective experiences and so they by themselves are difficult to objectively verify so it's going to require a study that will objectively verify this individuals experience and it will mean that they are in fact clearly their brains not functioning is it could could such a study be done yes it can be okay where are rolling mics here please raise your hands and we will hear let's go to the gentleman right over here oh I spent many months trying to come up with an alternative explanation but no the water wasn't cold I wasn't young we were in the middle of a very inaccessible River in the middle of southern Chile I did not have Sam's expertise we had you had well without it 99 so now there really is no at the end of spending many months collecting data my conclusion was that my experience absolutely was outside the boundaries of science and outside the boundaries of Medicine there were no explanations I could find I can give you one answer to this one of the things I've been doing is studying death in fact what is the process of death how do we die and so we've got two things here we've got the near-death experience with the going down the tunnel being of light the special area that you go into and so that that and only in cardiac arrest only do it in cardiac arrest so that tells us then that there is something very special going on for whatever reasons during the time the heart stops so we need to look for other outliers when consciousness is in some way disintegrating and in fact the time to do this is to look at death itself if you look at death itself one of the things you find as you come closer and closer and closer towards death a whole lot of the phenomena that you see in the near-death experience start occurring to the people who are dying for example they see dead relatives who come into the room as they go on to the next stage they exist in two realities they exist in the reality which is full of light and love and spiritual beings and dead relatives then they're back in the hospice then they go back to the other reality again then they're back in the hospice and so as as the whole consciousness fragments what seems to come through in the dying is this other reality but if a theater is added cross-validation but if I can interject I mean the question was can science get a handle on this I mean it can you go beyond the the subjective however extraordinary the subjective stories I mean can can using the tools that we have at the disposal of science right now can can they verify this well I'm sure that's one of the things we could do is to start putting people who are dying in scanners so we can actually see what that brains are doing but I'm not sure this would pass many ethics committee so Sam you are saying that science can definitively test us I think if yeah I think the ladies asked a very interesting question and I think that the point you have to remember is that at any given era you know scientists will set sort of boundaries for what knowledge that is known at that time and things work within that boundaries but always there are things that don't quite fit in there and many times most scientists will ignore that they'll try to stick to the framework that they have because it's more comfortable and they'll continue researching that area and then sometimes you have to go and look beyond so what we have right now is certain phenomena that are challenging our worldview and we have to be able to explore them so I think to be able to explore this you know the question essentially that you I think you're asking is can we test somehow scientifically the idea that consciousness and by consciousness I want to be clear what we're talking about is what the Greeks called the psyche or the soul that thing that makes us who we are it's just a scientific term for me for the self can we test whether that can be separate from brain function right and so I think one area to do this is looking at times where whether we like it or not the brain has to be shut down one of those is when the heart stops and there's inadequate blood getting into the brain so we could continue the sorts of studies we've started with your we're study but another area which is perhaps more controlled is looking at certain groups of patients who have to go for surgery where their only option is to have their body cooled down to such an extent they see to 18 degrees Celsius which is around 60 degrees Fahrenheit that their brain also flatlines the brain cannot function there's no circulation at all and to study whether consciousness continues or stops so if obviously when the brain doesn't function consciousness also completely stops and there is no element of that then that suggests the consciousness must be produced on the brain if on the other hand you can get reports of people who can accurately have awareness they can see things or hear things and we can validate those claims then clearly that suggests that consciousness may be functioning independent of the brain and that in that case perhaps the brain is acting more as a mediator rather than the producer of consciousness but how do you know that you can set targets for them no but but many of the stories might be that the people talk about might be as they are coming out of this unconscious state and maybe the maybe the doctors assumed that they were on Collette's a very good point so you're basically saying is you know do we know if the experience is occurring when the brain is coming back online right just before they flatline well actually one of the things that we did find in our aware study is that this is the first documented case of somebody who we can verify that they had consciousness at least during a three to five minute period when the brain would not have been functioning rather than so we've timed it rather than when the brain was coming back online but you can do that because you can give patients say who are having surgery and whose brain has shut down certain stimuli at certain times and then if they can recall them you know that it was occurring when the brain had flatlined you also can give them stimuli when the brain is camp come back online so you can distinguish when the consciousness or activity of the mind or psyche or soul or whatever time you I use it is going on okay before we go to the the next question Kevin do you want to respond yeah let's take a little different tack first thing which you cannot do is reproduce much of the context of near-death experience that is the fear of dying and that takes away a great deal but that doesn't mean we cannot have human models for near-death experience in fact we already do in 1994 a neurologist in Germany by the name of Lambert had 42 people experience syncope they were young college students and recorded their subjective experiences and when you compare those to Raymond Moody's reports their effect no differences that includes the tunnel seeing other beings you know having out-of-body experiences so in fact we already have a model for near-death experience but it's you know but again we can't put it in the context of fear of your dying and the context is important you can't underestimate the context in which these experiences are occurring I think the answer to that is in at the level that we have to have it we don't have it yet there is a lot of data which is suggestive but it's not absolutely certain usually because it's people going back to the medical notes and people's memories of what happens now what is interesting is that for me the near-death experience is one of our ways or one of the roads by which we can understand consciousness so therefore it should tell us something about human consciousness and should be central and it's very important can we get funding for it no so this means that one of the most important sets of experiences we need to do we can't actually do in fact Sam and I put in the grant to one of the European institutions the idea was to put cards on the ceiling so that the people when they had their cardiac arrest could see the cards and report they came back and they said brilliantly designed study you can do it no cards on the ceiling now that of course really alters exactly what we wanted to do so if there is more money about then we can do it properly and so that's really what we have to do but I think things are changing a little bit now in general I agree with Peter on this and one of the sad things is that despite the great general interest despite the media interest in this topic there's no funding institution interest so you know people don't die of near-death experiences so there's not you know it's so it's it's hard on me right Smith NIH grant I could tell from the reviewers comments that they didn't even know where to put section what study section to put this grant um and the same with private foundations as well it's it's really unfortunate because there really there's a lot more science and work that really could be done the other problem though is I think it's very difficult just even in collecting those stories because first of all in my experience most people do not want to talk about it with increased awareness of near expiry or near death experiences more and more people are beginning to feel comfortable mentioning it but the vast majority of people if they mention it at all they mention it to their spouse or their parent or someone and they're immediately shut down and they never talk about it again until they share that experience with me or someone else who would understand them and so I think the first problem is actually having people tell you their story the second problem even with the idea of putting the cards which on the surface sounds like a brilliant idea I will tell you that from my personal experience I probably would have come back and not been able to discuss the cards because I think that's a technology unimportant I think some we don't ever have even thought twice about taking those notes partly because I had no intention of coming back and so I think it's very difficult to design a study like that that would prove this out of out-of-body consciousness yeah actually I mean people can have Auto buy experiences if they want and first of all you can do you can make yourself faint you know it's the old party trick squat down hyperventilate stand up quickly and valsalva in fact that's one of the things that kind of got me interested and I did as a youth and has an ESP experience I thought wow that's strange so it sort of got me going the other is that you can develop a technique called lucid dreaming and in REM sleep you turn off the dorsal lateral prefrontal area of your brain and that's where most of our executive function takes place and if you don't turn that off and then look so we can have lucid dreaming where you're you have insight that you are actually in a dream normally we lose that insight as part of the the the usual aspect of sleep but you can train yourself to have lucid dreams and deering lucid dreams are often Mada by experiences because you're simultaneously turning out the temporal parietal area oh yeah what yeah just quick answers to that um thank you very much for that comment and the way that you introduced it I think was absolutely correct rather than looking at these things entirely through the perspective of near-death experiences perhaps we can look at other methods which can change consciousness well of course what you've got is the near-death suggesting a model and if we can model this another different way so we can get the same phenomena then it'd be an excellent thing to do but I can also suggest to you that you probably won't get much funding for that good Kevin's lucid dreaming I've done a lot of work on lucid dreaming and in fact one of the first papers I published was on lucid dreamers and I just don't find his phenomena the sorts of things that Kevin talks about certainly weren't in my group of lucid dreamers we were doing simple experiments like for example if you held up a finger is it a real finger or not a real finger in the dream well in fact in lucid dreams you can actually check that so what you can do do it with your friends when you go out is lift up your finger and then scan held your head steady and scan it with your eyes you'll see those of you close enough is that my eyes following it now I'm going to hold up an imaginary finger and try and scan it I can't do it makes jumps now do lucid dreamers because they can move their eyes in their dream because you're using Sur cards in smooth pursuit using two different ocular systems that's absolutely right and the point is it's the lucid dreamers use the whole monty and not the imaginary one so lucid dreaming is is a quite different state but it doesn't reduce what giving um yes that came from me and that came also because I had to look at a PhD thesis and the basis of the PhD thesis was what happens if we take the veridical near-death out-of-body experiences as in fact being a correct reflection of reality now of course as soon as you get into quantum mechanics then the whole pattern changes enormous li and the whole idea of us being separate is is something that quantum mechanics doesn't recognize we're all connected and so I think that the need the the ideas of near-death experience and the relationship to physical theories of mind is very important we could go on but we are out of time thank you so much for coming thank you our panelists it has been very wonderful

Channel: NourFoundation

Views: 859,312

Rating: 4.5864625 out of 5

Keywords: death, dying, resuscitation, NDE, near death experience, consciousness, medicine

Id: zPCvuva2deU

Length: 74min 40sec (4480 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013