The science of NDEs (Near Death Experiences) is thoroughly examined. This video presents a comprehensive approach, exploring neuroimaging studies and the neuroscience of dying brains. We investigate the common features of NDEs, including out-of-body experiences, encounters with deceased loved ones, and feelings of peace. Furthermore, we analyze the role of psychedelics like DMT and ketamine, and their potential connections to NDEs. Drawing on recent research, we discuss how sleep disorders (including REM sleep intrusion) may mimic these experiences, revealing the complex interplay of consciousness and brain activity during critical moments.
We cover OOBE, peak in Darien experiences, the Greyson NDE scale, gamma waves, Buddhist meditators, g-force induced loss of consciousness, and more. Join us as we unravel one of humanity’s most profound mysteries and consider the implications for our understanding of life, death, and the nature of consciousness.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:49 Phenomenology
5:22 Neuroscience
8:35 Psychedelics
12:18 Sleep Disorders
15:33 Conclusion
Watch Next
Carl Jung’s Red Book
Works Cited
Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: A large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports (Martial, et al 2018)
Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: “Peak in Darien” Experiencesanhu_1064 159..171 (Greyson 2010)
Prevalence of near-death experiences in people with and without REM sleep intrusion (Kondziella, et al 2019)
Explanation of near-death experiences: a systematic analysis of case reports and qualitative research (Hashemi, et al 2023)
Meditation-Induced Near-Death Experiences: a 3-Year Longitudinal Study (Gordon, et al 2018)
Near-Death Experiences: Neuroscience Perspectives on Near-Death Experiences (Nelson 2015)
Near-Death Experience: The biological paradox
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Exploring Truth in philosophy, science, & art. We’ll uncover concepts from psychology, mythology, spirituality, literature, media, and more. If you like Lex Fridman or Curt Jaimungal, you’ll love this educational channel.
#NDE #DMT #Neuroscience #NearDeathExperiences #Psychology #Psychedelics #Sleep #Meditation #Gamma #Spirituality #OOBE #Philosophy #Afterlife #Brain
source
0:00 Intro
0:49 Phenomenology
5:22 Neuroscience
8:35 Psychedelics
12:18 Sleep Disorders
15:33 Conclusion
You might want to check out:
-Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience by Pim van Lommel
-Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences by Jeffrey Long
-The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences by Titus Rivas
These are empirical investigations of NDEs without a neuroreductionist paradigm
TLDR: the brain reduces, not produces
My experience can in no way be shown to be not anything more than the NDE being anything more than what is was.
Everything else is counter to my experience.
Note: I did not experience the NDE.
I hold all attempts to try to explain the events on and surrounding this experience as anything other than the person experiencing the NDE as having consciousness outside of their body as entirely false and deliberately following blind faith in a paradigm. Any denial of what I experienced is a confession that I am lying or that I experienced an illusion. This would equate to my entire life being equally an illusion.
It would also demand an explanation as to why no one else understands the mathematical geometry of the brain.
Beautiful video my man!!! Gotta say. Hard to keep it fresh on YouTube. Thank you for all the hours of content you’ve captured my attention with, in turn keeping me away from brain rot shorts
I made this comment on someone explaining her NDE while drowning, she said that she saw all her dead family members line up by the beach wearing similar outfits of the same color:
If they were wearing clothes, it means that there are tailors, malls, and manufacturing up there. That they were wearing similar outfits gives me the impression that they are in a dictatorial type of government. They have good communication and coordination going since they can gather all family members at a moment notice and teleport them to your brain.
Alluded to at the beginning, but then dropped like a hot potato, was the startling, yet well-documented NDE phenomenon of a patient knowing what's going on in an operating room or nearby hospital area when he or she is under anesthesia and all vision and hearing is blocked. Has there ever been a drug-induced experience where this kind of well-documented ESP has occurred, as in, to cite only one example, the famous Pam Reynolds case?
My opinion is conscious experience is the baseline because everything is filtered through it and we can’t step outside of it. So it makes it hard to determine how a brain, which is embedded in consciousness, creates the consciousness that it is embedded in.
this video brought up new questions for me about how Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance might be related to the accurate accounts of the physical world from people in NDEs and to gamma waves in general.
Though physicalist claim to have logic and critical thinking on their side, when it comes to consciousness their worldview is based on faith and nothing else. When really looked at critically there are there no details on how you can get from chemicals and micro-volt level sparks in the brain to any subjective experience of any kind. In engineering terms there is no rigorously defined transfer function that can allow a prediction of what the subjective experience will be. You can look at brain scans all day long and never be able to ascertain what a person is experiencing without asking them. In addition, despite claims about brains storing memories, no method of storing a subjective experience in the brain has ever been described or formulated mathematically. Nor has any memory ever been retrieved or played back from any brain.
The above has to do with the “hard problem of consciousness.” But there is an even harder problem that physicalism never addresses and is totally incapable of addressing. That is the problem of individuality. Why do I seem to be an individualized consciousness associated with my specific body? Why do you seem to be a specific consciousness associated with your specific body? The physicalist claim is that all brains are functionally the same so how can they create an individualized awareness that in each case seems separate? What changed about the universe that my individualized awareness suddenly showed up? What would have to change for me to be looking out of your eyes? How much of my body would have to be reproduced somewhere else for me to exist there? All of it or just a subset and why?
Why is it that out of the infinite matter in the universe only the three pounds in my head could create my existence and the three pounds in your head creates yours?
Physicalism, in any form cannot detect me as consciousness or you as consciousness and therefore can make no coherent statements concerning the above questions. It is useless as far as explaining this, the most important question of all and should be discarded as an ontology.
It’s kind of spooky, I just started deeply diving into gamma activity and its relation to NDE-like states of consciousness, like, TODAY! The day this video released!
One thing to remember is that NDE-like phenomena and states of consciousness are reported in a variety of contexts, including sleep, anesthesia, and coma, which are marked by their lack of gamma activity. In fact, suppressed gamma activity is a key correlate to depth of anesthesia; Yet, NDEs are commonly reported during anesthesia, often with Veridical perception.
Regarding REM intrusion, Bruce Greyson and Jeffrey Long made some good points. “Data arguing against the contribution of REM intrusion to
NDE include many features, such as fear, typical in sleep paralysis but rare in NDE, and the occurrence of typical
NDE under general anesthesia and other drugs that inhibit REM.” They also pointed out that about a quarter of the general population have hypnagogic hallucinations, and the control group in the study could have a bias towards underreporting.
I find neuroanatomical explanations of the phenomenon fascinating and they help us to understand the physical correlates of the experience. However, as the dictum has it, correlation is not causation. It's important to remember, as I believe Carlos mentions, the third-person perspectives of our frameworks cannot, as a matter of logic, supply the meanings, experiences, of the first-person perspective. Causation is a complex matter, involving far more than the modern assumption that the only thing at play when observing relations, for example, in brain activity are extrinsic, objective forces that produce, generate experiences. They certainly accompany the experience but do not wholly constitute it, leaping over the quantitative-qualitative divide. Research is not done in a vacuum. There are a host of assumptions at play, principally matters of interpretation and teleology, when answering our specific, physical interests. In other words, we should be wary to move from physical explanations to physicalism. That's a danger I see on both sides of the physicalist divide, dismissive and supportive, regarding the science of NDE's.
Very interesting and meaningful topic. My father had a NDE a couple months ago. He says he perceived himself as some sort of bird flying through a valley about to make a smooth landing in a serene meadow…
You should really look into people’s experiences of 5-MeO-DMT, which like DMT is also endogenous to all mammals. I’ve worked with the substance over 1000 times at this point, as well as various other psychedelics, and it is by far the most powerful and profound on every level. Which is why it is termed the God molecule.
But unlike the NDE experience, 5MeO will elicit the experience of actual death as well as what actually happens afterwards. Which beyond better than anyone could ever imagine.
Generally within the experiences of DMT , Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, Changa or other DMT derivatives the ego-self actually remains intact as these experiences are dualistic involving a subject/object relationship. Within a full breakthrough 5MEO experience it completely non-dual and one experiences themselves as the totality of everything all at once.
I think the most likely there are many different new chemicals being released during a NDE, but that it differs experientially upon one’s actual physical ‘death’ which is really just a transition into our true source consciousness.
Ive never tried DMT or had an NDE. But Ive done salvia HARD and it was not very similar to how people describe NDEs.
Linkin Park is awesome. Maybe too awesome for background music.
Thanks for this cross-over view on NDE's with exciting perspectives. But it beats me how neuroscience can explain the non-local features where there are visions from other locations confirmed by a third person ex. nurse, doctor or familymember. A non-local neuroscience?😊
Carlos; straight up-do you believe NDE’s signify the existence of an afterlife?
Pam Reynolds is one case amongst hundreds, if not millions, science will never understand this phenomenon, they will have many theories but will never accept the obvious
There is no substitute for reading and listening to hundreds of NDE accounts in order to understand that something very interesting is going on here, and the people who poopoo NDEs aren’t paying attention to what is being said. But you can’t get people to look through the telescope.
There is no satisfactory brain based explanation for the near death experience, rather there are (only ??) over twenty proposals. That ought to tell these committed materialist scientists something but it seems to go in one ear and come out the other. I don't even need to listen to this video, I've heard it all before; it just keeps getting recycled incessantly because reductionist materialist science just doesn't like it. NDE's and their real implications are simply anathema to academia.
Patients can recall verifiable events from their period of cardiac arrest, fact ! Giving someone psychedelics/psilocybin, stimulating their temporoparietal lobes, depriving them of oxygen, observing relative (only relative) increases in gamma waves in rats and in a single comatose human in respiratory failure (not cardiac arrest BTW) etc etc…how does that enable someone to accurately observe their own resuscitation from a vantage point often at the ceiling. It's dishonest declaring that anyone has the explanation, because they don't.
Edit. In addition, when people see a being of light, they project their own cultural assumptions. It's not that some people see Jesus, some people see Krishna, Mohamed etc, they all see the same thing but use what cultural language/nouns they are familiar with.
As a psychologist an NDE could be nothing more than a response to trauma. The body knows its demise is near so it creates almost the perfect dream to counter balance the realisation one is about to die.
However the shared death experience proves this hypothesis incorrect
As an evolutionary biologist who has ben researching and writing about NDEs for quite some time, I find that while neurochemical correlates are interesting, they cannot begin to explain so-called "veridical" NDEs, those involving he experiencer observing and hearing things that they could not possibly have seen or heard. You mention these at the beginning, but then seem to forget them.
I don't know what NDEs are, and as an evolutionary biologist, I can't explain them or why they exist in evolutionary terms. But I also can't explain, in evolutionary terms, why a human brain could or would produce these experiences either. They clearly can't have anything to do with survival to reproductive age, which is what selection operates on.
This video is interesting, but sheds no light on what NDEs actually are.
Diese Titel Übersetzung ist scheisse, so meint man, dass das Video auf Deutsch ist!!!
Great video this is a topic I have been researching for a long time. I will say the problem with connecting drug states, altered states and sleep states with NDE is they are similar, but don't share all aspects.
We can always try and connect the dots, but at the end of the day we simply do not have anything that can account for recalled perception of events that would have been impossible for the NDEer to have that is later verified by others. It's always important to remember. Correlation does not equal causation.
In my NDE i saw Doraemon, Nobita and shizuka hanging out
Doraemon smoking weed
Nobita fucking Shizuka
Believe it
In my NDE i saw Doraemon, Nobita and shizuka hanging out
Doraemon smoking weed
Nobita fucking Shizuka
Believe it
Nothing can explain people's experiences that include having knowledge of an event happening far away, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away while they were unconscious or in coma. Parts of brain can be used in retention of NDE after coming back but it seems it's quite likely beyond the brain since a brain in unconscious state or coma state can not just wander out of body and know things that happened not in close vincity.
People on trips do not experience a detailed life review and detailed memory recall and meeting deceased loved ones and conversing with them and accurately describing events from an out of body perspective and sometimes events miles away that we see in typical NDEs And why don't NDE people describe crazy scenes for example pink elements flying in the sky
All this talk about veridical OBEs yet not a single hit in any controlled experiment ever. No one has seen any visual targets. Veridical OBEs are probably BS.
This was so spot on for me. Thank you so much for this information
I like your question, Why Are We Here? I would answer, because you and others that are in human form, are lucky to be. There are other entities waiting to come back into human form, most will and others will not. Time is not relative on that side, as it is here. Good analysis. I like this type of speculation.
Association of brain waves with various features of NDEs is possibly just that – association. As mentioned, NDExperiencers note significant differences between dreams and NDEs. But there is a glaring omission in this presentation. "Peake in Darien" experiences are mentioned, but other substantiated "veridical perceptions" are not presented here. In their book, The Self Does Not Die, Rivus, Dirven, and Smit document over a hundred researched episodes of perceptions during NDEs, which have no basis in ordinary sensory perception. I would urge further exploration along these lines. Bruce Greyson, MD, and Tom Aufderheide, MD, were introduced to NDEs early in their medical careers via encounters with patients, who discussed "veridical perceptions", presenting a paradigm-shifting crisis for these physicians.
Where is this graph that explains levels of awareness or what study
Maybe i was ready,All Along
sounds like ketamine to me
Your eyes can be cracked open to see whats going on around you, yet your brain makes you think you're floating above. NDE's are dying experience, they aren't dead experiences.
Thank you so much, at last a real person researching the subject in an informed way. Rather than AI coming to superficial conclusions
Sudduth’s point about dreaming in the afterlife is actually a topic I’ve been forming an opinion about the more I read. I think dreaming, specifically lucid dreaming, is much like what the afterlife is actually like. It’s fluid, dynamic, changing with thought. You’re “imagining” it, giving it imagery and form to make sense of and interface with information. Sometimes that information is “real”, aligning with the material world, hence Veridical perception. Often though, it is not, and is completely mind-generated. Augustine’s critiques actually got me thinking this way, to make sense of why there exist both Veridical and non-Veridical NDE cases.