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Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

newscientist.com

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Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#151

Post by kergonath »

rapnie wrote: post #112
meghan_rain wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very interesting, do you know the name of this phenomenon? i have experienced something similar, when the brain is munched from overworking and undersleeping, you kind of start "daydreaming", although it might be slightly different than what you have described.

I don't know a medical term, other than that it is in the area of Mania [0]. For me it was luckily a one time adventure induced by the circumstances. In hindsight I consider it positively, as an enriching experience. When reading the wikipedia page, I avoided some of the more severe afflictions. There are risk factors to avoid. Good sleep most important among them. After such episode the brain is completely drained a…

> Having multiple episodes in a row usually leads to a bipolar disorder with true depression following the manic episodes, I was told.

Yes. I am not sure about the odds, but you might have been lucky. It’s a good way to end up properly insane.

I’ve never been anywhere near that state but even milder cases can be frightening. I’ve had 2 periods were everything worked, I was so clever and solved everything, and that was wonderful. Except that after that I could not get out of bed for days, had severe burnouts (no true depression though, thank goodness). And it turned out that what I did was so “clever” and complicated as to be almost re-done from scratch, and also contained mistakes hard to spot amongst the cleverness. It turns out that it does not make you a super-human, but mostly feel like one. I wonder if I had been a painter or a musician instead, if those mistakes would not have been seen as strokes of genius. Since then I’ve noticed that I get mentally tired much more quickly, and I need much more sleep.

Anyway, I’m happy for you that you came out of it in one piece and enlightened.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#152

Post by babyshake »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #122
mike_d wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are experiencing is being present for the development of a major leap in technology. You'll see a lot of trial and error and near misses until someone cracks the big breakthrough of how we non-invasively read information in bulk from a mind. Have a look at all the historical cynicism that surrounded things like voice tracks in motion pictures or consumer automobiles.

I don't deny that neuroscientists will discover something big in the future; I'm just saying that people should stop expecting that the next breakthrough will come from crude tools such as EEGs and fMRI, at least in conjunction with present-day computational power and statistical sophistication. These tools are useful enough without assigning an aura of metaphysical power to them; as things stand, billions of dollars…

It does seem reasonable that EEG can be used for a very, very crude type of mind reading. I believe it can show that you are in REM sleep or not in REM sleep, for example.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#153

Post by mistermann »

kergonath wrote: post #149
spacephysics wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random neurological firings. Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more. I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so. However, anyone who has done res…

> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings. On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how c…

> But it’s not magical either.

What is the meaning of magical in this context though?

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#154

Post by jodrellblank »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #94
dsego wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All anecdotal and hard to verify definitively.

Many things are not verifiable. “What does it feel like the moment after death?” :)

See: "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allen Poe

Story: https://poemuseum.org/the-facts-in-the-case-of-m-valdemar/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_in_the_Case_of_M._Va...

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#155

Post by mistermann »

stinos wrote: post #24
spacephysics wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random neurological firings. Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more. I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so. However, anyone who has done res…

I don't agree there's more to it than random firings, but only in the sense they aren't quite random at all. For the rest I do still think there's nothing more to it than that. The biochemistry behind psychedelics is fairly well-researched and can be explained, so while there is a random component to it just like there are variations in, say, how people perceive color, I do still belive that's really all there is to…

> No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.

Do you have a pretty diverse range of experiences on psychedelics backing this up?

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#156

Post by CSSer »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #150
wessorh wrote: post #146

Having recently recovered from Legionnaires where I was in a medically induced coma for nearly 2 months where I received CPR twice for flat-lining here is my experience... I didn't know what happened but I did get to meet deities, aliens and participate in a bunch of sci-fi oriented excursions. In short I learned about where the mind goes under a lot of drugs and I appreciate the experience. It was easier to remember…

I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing.

It sounds like it was a really heartfelt experience.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#157

Post by pedalpete »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #108

If there's one hill I'm determined to die on (given the information that I have anyway) is that any scientific finding extrapolating information from "brain waves" or "region activation" is little more than modern day phrenology. Of course this is not an original thought, though I find it alarming that it's the minority opinion seeing as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from blatant methodological and even statistical flaws.…

As someone who works in EEG, you may be surprised that I somewhat agree with you.

Let's start with where I am in agreement.

EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought.

What I do find interesting is that in the age when we were learning about the movement of fluid and pumps, everything was taken from the understanding of how blood moved through the body and how we "worked" as a result of this fluid moving through our pipes.

As we learned more about electrical activity, we suddenly thought "oh! The pumps are moving necessary biological matter, but it's really the electrical impulses that are the important part. Even when we look at how the heart or any other muscle works, it's all about the electrical now.

So what is the next phase? As we understand more about quantum mechanics, will that be the next state of science that we attach to our understanding of how we work? Will it be something else?

However, the way I see this differently from you is that knowing how the pumps work, or knowing how the electrical systems work does are still valuable to us.

This isn't like the old days where we got sick from "humours".

So don't through the baby out with the bathwater. Understanding the electrical function of the brain is likely important in reaching our next level of understanding.

Now a somewhat unrelated, but tied to your thinking. I think this is what most people miss when they are talking about Nuralink and other implantable BCI. When people talk about "connecting our brains to the internet", we have to realize that we don't really have the ability to directly put information in. We can try to map electrical activity to requests, but I don't believe we have that in a high resolution method.

This doesn't mean BCI isn't valuable. If you have Parkinson's or other medical issue that can be treated with stimulation, it is absolutely valuable. But getting a monkey to play a game is still a long way from getting information in. Plus, a joystick is still easier, cheaper, and probably more fun than just staring at a screen without moving your body....assuming you have a body to move.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#158

Post by C-x_C-f »

mike_d wrote: post #142
C-x_C-f wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow; by the same argument, measuring bumps on people's skulls can't be ruled out as not crucial to future science since it hasn't yielded a breakthrough yet. The merits of a scientific methodology cannot possibly depend on the small chance that some hitherto unsuccessful approach might result in an unexpected breakthrough. Aside from the fact that anything might hold the key to the next big thing, s…

> All else being the same, priority should be given to research which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm grasp on statistic. Agencies like DARPA exist primarily to counter this line of thinking. We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along. I hope you genuinely understand the difference between…

> We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.

Physics in the years leading up to WWII had reached levels of accuracy and predictive power never before seen, so I think this example supports my argument if anything. Also the team there did not "just kind of make it up;" sure, they followed a relatively unconstrained creative process, but the foundations they were building upon were astoundingly firm.

> I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.

I understand the difference, I was using skull bumps to prove my point by way of contradiction. I also understand the usefulness of MRIs. I'm just saying that they are useful within a certain domain, and cognitive science falls outside of that domain to a large extent (certainly to a much larger extent than sensationalistic pop-sci publications would have you believe).

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#159

Post by Jeff_Brown »

CSSer wrote: post #156
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing.

It sounds like it was a really heartfelt experience.

I certainly felt it.

Re: Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences

#160

Post by mistermann »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #53
1827163 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn't be anything wrong with having an open mind about such phenomena. While it's very likely that they are of biological origin, to immediately dismiss any other possibilities is closed minded dogmatism.

It's reasonable to dismiss hypotheses that are untestable, provide no predictive power and have questionable evidence to support them. That's not so much about being close-minded, but just a practical methodology. If you accept non-testable hypotheses, then how can you tell whether it was the result of a specific deity or an invisible pink unicorn?

How is "provide no predictive power" achieved?
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