NDEs weight of evidence: Taylor excerpt #5

Greg Taylor writes: One experience related by Greyson illustrates this and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view. 

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that? 

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny.

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events,it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” 

 

A subsequent study by researchers from the One experience related by Greyson illustrates this, and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that?

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny. 

 

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events, it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” A subsequent study by researchers from the University of Padova using electroencephalography (EEG) to compare characteristics of NDE memories with memories of both real and imagined events found similarly. 

 
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.