Interesting article. Good find, subby

FTFA: In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated

So...PART of the brain, not the WHOLE brain.

Got it.

xanadian: So...PART of the brain, not the WHOLE brain.

Indeed. A fascinating crock of self-affirming sh*te.

Ya know, I had always thought of the brain as little more than our own personal radio. It picks up transmissions from what we call "our soul" and interprets them in such a way that it manifests as what we think of as reality. Just because the radio's switched off (or run over because you left it out on the driveway while washing your car, then never bothered to pick it up before running it over) doesn't mean the transmissions aren't still there, nor that the signal isn't stored in some other way for future retrieval.

However, one doctor's anecdote does not constitute proof of anything, really, either my POV or anyone else's. We also may find that the "human" part of our brain is NOT the seat of consciousness, but it rests elsewhere, or it's a synergistic effect of many different parts of the brain.

The jury's still out.

xanadian: The jury's still out.

Well, yeah. If one has "proof" of something or another, then one no long needs "faith" in order to believe in it.

The whole "life after death" obsession strikes me as silly and indicative of perpetual juvenility.

You're not going to know jack sh*t until you are dead. Dead-dead, not "turned-off dead". Anyone claiming certainty on the matter is either delusional or a charlatan. When you've got a book deal like TFA, I'm banking on the latter.

Babwa Wawa: xanadian: The jury's still out.

Well, yeah. If one has "proof" of something or another, then one no long needs "faith" in order to believe in it.

The whole "life after death" obsession strikes me as silly and indicative of perpetual juvenility.

You're not going to know jack sh*t until you are dead. Dead-dead, not "turned-off dead". Anyone claiming certainty on the matter is either delusional or a charlatan. When you've got a book deal like TFA, I'm banking on the latter.

The thing that grabbed me was how everything in this "heaven" could be easily related to how we perceive things here (minus the whole insta-thought thing). Not until he described the void with nothing human or Earthly or "heaven-like" did it start to sound plausible. I can't believe that if there is an afterlife, that it would be ANYTHING like what we perceive now.

xanadian: one doctor's anecdote does not constitute proof of anything

Babwa Wawa: You're not going to know jack sh*t until you are dead. Dead-dead, not "turned-off dead". Anyone claiming certainty on the matter is either delusional or a charlatan. When you've got a book deal like TFA, I'm banking on the latter.

Just the fact that he didnt "Die Die" as you'd have it doesnt mean that just him surviving alone is a miraculous outcome. (notice, I didnt use the word "miracle"). As a fellow scientist by education, I found the article to be at the very least interesting and I have no reason to attack him or others for his change of belief based on his own individual observation.

You've posted twice in this discussion already - are you so afraid of something you cannot believe or so angry that you dont want to let people find calming words about their own death, even if it is misguided? What's the harm in letting others have their own beliefs, even you must acknowledge that after death it wont matter and wont change the outcome of their beliefs they hold while alive?

Jesus, Aliens, whatever. A lack of evidence or understanding is not evidence of magic.

Sounds like it still is.

me texan: Just the fact that he didnt "Die Die" as you'd have it doesnt mean that just him surviving alone is a miraculous outcome. (notice, I didnt use the word "miracle"). As a fellow scientist by education, I found the article to be at the very least interesting and I have no reason to attack him or others for his change of belief based on his own individual observation.

You've posted twice in this discussion already - are you so afraid of something you cannot believe or so angry that you dont want to let people find calming words about their own death, even if it is misguided? What's the harm in letting others have their own beliefs, even you must acknowledge that after death it wont matter and wont change the outcome of their beliefs they hold while alive?

Don't get where you're getting "angry" and "afraid". When my mother died, she had faith in an afterlife - we had a priest at her side. I have zero issue with that. My issue with this particular instance is twofold:

1. When you have proof of something, it can be used to mandate behavior. If I have proof that fossil fuel use is linked to climate change, then I can use that knowledge to compel behavior. "Proof" of god, an afterlife, or any of that crap changes faith and belief into certainty. That is dangerous for society on a number of levels.

2. There's a very clear profit motive. This horsesh*t sells big.

the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness [...] now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it. [...] When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first.

So a whole theory is layed to waste by one persons anecdote? Does an anectdote undergo some alchemical transformation into objective data when it is experienced by a DOCTOR?

The enormity of the universe he describes is surpassed only by the enormity of the ego of a doctor.

And saying that no one wants to pay attention "at first"? As if the claim that there is an afterlife is brand new cutting edge fringe stuff?

Kyro: [i1.kym-cdn.com image 200x200]

Jesus, Aliens, whatever. A lack of evidence or understanding is not evidence of magic.

It's an appeal to his own authority.

Personally, an answer to this, the greatest mystery, would just end up being something that diminishes what it means to be human.

Babwa Wawa: That is dangerous for society on a number of levels.

Bingo.

HakunaMatata: Does an anectdote undergo some alchemical transformation into objective data when it is experienced by a DOCTOR?

What the doctor's experience tells me is this: the doctor, being very knowledgeable about neuroscience, has found that his understanding about the brain and consciousness is incomplete.

Quick! Someone call Ric Romero!

I'm not saying what he experienced (if it's "real") isn't impossible. But, at the very least, it serves to underscore how little we know about our own freakin' brains.

logistic: Although I considered myself a faithful Christian

Loses any trace of credibility at this precise point. Not arguing one way or another, but his opinion is nixed by this statement.

You didn't finish the sentence. I was so more in name than in actual belief. So according to the Bible, he wouldn't be in heaven, he'd be in Hell!

/how come no one has near death experiences of Hell, anyway?

CSB: I had a non-religious friend who I respected to the utmost and had a "life after death" experience in Vietnam when for a few minutes he was critically brain dead. He would be driven to tears trying to explain it because a lot of it he didn't understand, but there were strange details like how he thought he smelled bread baking and there were relatives who died years ago there, but when he was given the chance to return he took it then woke up in the hospital again (though he wondered for years afterwards if it was worth it considering how much rehabilitating pain he had from his injuries).

Guy was, as I said earlier, not religious so he willingly acknowledged it could all just be his brain shutting down... but he could never quite believe it because then why would he be given the choice to return? Weird thing to put in a shut-down mode.

Friend died a few years ago in a heart attack, so I've always wondered a bit about that since as he's the only person I've known personally to have such an experience- and then not cloud it with Judeo-Christian overtones to boot. If nothing else though it's consolation to me to know that when it hit he recognized what was happening and wasn't afraid.

Mugato: /how come no one has near death experiences of Hell, anyway?

Because *that* is truly an invention of man, meant to keep us under the thumbs of the ruling elite.

Higher than the clouds-immeasurably higher-flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.


Streetlights?

xanadian: The thing that grabbed me was how everything in this "heaven" could be easily related to how we perceive things here (minus the whole insta-thought thing). Not until he described the void with nothing human or Earthly or "heaven-like" did it start to sound plausible. I can't believe that if there is an afterlife, that it would be ANYTHING like what we perceive now.

Well fwiw the Buddhists explain this by saying it is our emotional attachment to terrestrial experience that shapes the way we perceive these phenomena. They call this illusion "Samsara" and it is one of the goals of Buddhism to break our attachment to Samsara so that when we die we can move beyond our limited human vision and evolve into the multi-dimensional beings we truly are.

me texan: Just the fact that he didnt "Die Die" as you'd have it doesnt mean that just him surviving alone is a miraculous outcome. (notice, I didnt use the word "miracle"). As a fellow scientist by education, I found the article to be at the very least interesting and I have no reason to attack him or others for his change of belief based on his own individual observation.

Criticizing isn't "attacking."

AbbeySomeone: Attitudes like yours are why more people don't share their experiences. If it hasn't happened to you or it's something you can't imagine or understand it isn't real, right?


And by "share" you mean charging $10 on Amazon, correct?

AbbeySomeone: Attitudes like yours are why more people don't share their experiences. If it hasn't happened to you or it's something you can't imagine or understand it isn't real, right?

I have no issue with people sharing near death experiences - I think they are interesting. I'm almost perfectly certain of the reality of near death experiences. Given the number of documented near death experiences, I tend to doubt many people have problems sharing because of people like me.

I'm not skeptical about the experiences, rather the conclusions that people draw from them after the fact.

As for my issues with this clown, here they are: I have issue with people presenting unrelated qualifications (like MDs) to lend unwarranted weight to their own interpretation of their near death experience (like this clown).

But primarily I have issue with people presenting near death experience as supporting proof of their faith (like this clown).

Technically I died four times on the table when I had my aortic aneurysm. Ascending aorta blew out like a bad seal, and it took half the valve attached with it. 26 and half hours of surgery, 267 units of blood and blood related products, and a LOT of folks worked on getting my fuzzy butt back.

I did have something of an experience. Call it hypoxia, loss of blood, or just plain near death--literally the surgeon had to massage my heart directly at one point to keep the blood flowing because the poor sucker was just beat down. My heart had to be restarted a total of four times while I was on the table.

The brain was certainly firing. I had to be put back down under a few times during this whole experience, 26 hours is a long time for anesthesia, especially when you are looking at keeping the heart continuing to roll.

Did I see a white light? Did I see vast hordes of loved ones in the Beyond? Not so much. I was faced with a choice, to give up and move on, or stay. It wasn't anything so dramatic as an angel, but then again, perhaps my view of a Divine is perhaps a lot less spectacular than most folks'. Call it an understanding of biofeedback and long practice with dualistic thought and meditation to separate bodily function and thought, call it a rationalization of parsing the many voices that were hammering at my ears, and understanding that I was jacked the Hells up, but in that place in my head, while this was all going on, I met myself, and I faced a choice to give up, or keep going. I loved my fiancee and I didn't want her to grieve, so I chose to stay. It wasn't an easy thing. There were a lot of paths to choose from, and few of them led back to her. I look on it as seeing possibilities opening, and not many of those possibilities led to a place where I was conscious. In one way, I can see it as consciousness seeking the proper path, with a myriad of possibilities and possible selves all crowding and seeking that same path, or another, that would lead to their "right" place. It was confusing, and can be easily chalked up to a LOT of drugs in my system, a lot of odd brain cells firing in the throes of the body fighting to keep going. As a Buddhist, it can be both spiritual and physical. We find meaning in things, because our brains are fantastic machines for making correlations. Even disparate and seemingly unrelated things. We create our own meaning from events.

My own experience was a near thing. Dead on the table four times, and I feel lucky to still be here. The post op experience was a long fight, and my fiancee was there, and she kept me focused--for a long while it was a fight to keep my heart rate up. I was glad to have had some training when I was younger with biofeedback, and I had to concentrate to keep going until I could heal up enough to not be so active in trying to stay alive. In some ways, I was lucky that the breathing machine was so damn uncomfortable and breathing wrong, because it kept me awake, even with the spinal block that kept me from moving too much. She was my focus though. Even while I couldn't speak, I did find enough control to move my fingers, and the stupid Squeeze Talk that we'd worked out when we were in college came through--one for Yes; two for No; three for I Love You; a long squeeze for I'm Going to Spell Now, followed by squeezes to the appropriate letter, with one for A, two for B, etc--because that let us communicate, even while I doped up and had the damn tube down my throat. 

In the end, I know I got lucky. If you put credence to the Many Worlds hypothesis, there were a LOT of Hubies out there who didn't make it. I can certainly see how my brain translated the experience into a lot of paths to choose from, and the effort to survive the mess as being as much luck of the draw, as a fight to remain and keep the damn heart going. At the same time, as a Buddhist, I see it as a choice to remain, a choice to not move on. As a Buddhist, it can be both, and in the end, I survived an event that kills 99.6% of folks within the first 20 minutes, and it was over 40 before I got to the right hospital. Aortic dissections are no joke, and I burned up a lot of luck, as well as a lot of Western Mass' blood supply 15 years ago. It is hard to not get a little contemplative after such a thing.

Whether the experience was "supernatural" doesn't really matter. It is the meaning that we attach to such things that matters. For me, I chose to stay, and I chose to stay for my wife to be. I don't regret that decision, even though the marriage didn't last, because we have a lovely daughter because of it. I don't use the experience to "prove" any afterlife, because even as a Buddhist, I'm not entirely certain there is one, but the experience did fire in me that things are a lot weirder than we might understand.

xanadian: Ya know, I had always thought of the brain as little more than our own personal radio. It picks up transmissions from what we call "our soul" and interprets them in such a way that it manifests as what we think of as reality. Just because the radio's switched off (or run over because you left it out on the driveway while washing your car, then never bothered to pick it up before running it over) doesn't mean the transmissions aren't still there, nor that the signal isn't stored in some other way for future retrieval.

However, one doctor's anecdote does not constitute proof of anything, really, either my POV or anyone else's. We also may find that the "human" part of our brain is NOT the seat of consciousness, but it rests elsewhere, or it's a synergistic effect of many different parts of the brain.

The jury's still out.

Where are the new souls coming from?

Sorry, folks. The afterlife is an eternity waiting on a Cinnabon line at O'Hare during a snowstorm on the day before Thanksgiving.

Mr. Coffee Nerves: Sorry, folks. The afterlife is an eternity waiting on a Cinnabon line at O'Hare during a snowstorm on the day before Thanksgiving.

Is there heterosexual farking? If so, we'll probably be able to cope.

I had the exact same experience where i realized that the whole universe was less than a speck. It happened in a second. I was tripping balls

Quantum Apostrophe: xanadian: Ya know, I had always thought of the brain as little more than our own personal radio. It picks up transmissions from what we call "our soul" and interprets them in such a way that it manifests as what we think of as reality. Just because the radio's switched off (or run over because you left it out on the driveway while washing your car, then never bothered to pick it up before running it over) doesn't mean the transmissions aren't still there, nor that the signal isn't stored in some other way for future retrieval.

However, one doctor's anecdote does not constitute proof of anything, really, either my POV or anyone else's. We also may find that the "human" part of our brain is NOT the seat of consciousness, but it rests elsewhere, or it's a synergistic effect of many different parts of the brain.

The jury's still out.

Where are the new souls coming from?

The goff is empty, hence, the end of the world.

/or whatever it was called

Has there ever been a neurosurgeon who said "We know absolutely everything about the brain"? Nice story and all but we don't know enough about the brain to know that you couldn't possibly have been dreaming of some sort.

EyeballKid: Newsweek: Just Throwing Some Shiat on a Wall and Seeing What Will Stick.

Newsweek: Oh God Please Buy A Copy We're Starving Here. Jerry Mows Lawns on the Weekend Just To Get By. I Have 9 Credit Cards Maxed. We'll Talk About God, Sex, Football, American Idol, Whatever You Want