An interview on NDE's with a neurologist, from New Scientist. From this guy's research an NDE seems to be a merging of waking consciousness with REM consciousness. I found this interesting as during REM sleep, the brain produces PGO brain waves. These are also produced during an Iboga(ine) experience, which is interesting as the Bwiti state the you only encounter 'the beyond' twice during your life...during your initiation, and when you die.

http://www.newscientist....-the-border-of-life.html

One of the questions not addressed in the article is how out-of-body perception is explained in terms of brain function only. Many NDE’s report hearing and seeing things, later confirmed, in adjacent rooms and even in distant locations (for example, seeing what a family member was doing at home during the NDE).

Of course, scientists can't begin to answer questions about such phenomena, so they just ignore them.

you're talking about a neural network system with over 100 billion connections, and a lot of random signalling.
what gives you the inkling that computing technology has come far enough to address that sort of phenomena, which is mostly intangible? this needs to be replicated and measured for science to except it, otherwise it's not science.

science likes repetition, that is how determinations are made. a lot of "parasychologists" who claim to have powers can't seem to replicate them in a controlled/monitored setting.

It is a phenomena that can be studied, at least to a certain extent. NDE-people could be interviewed soon after their experiences and if they report seeing things in another place (remote viewing, I suppose) then these claims could be verified or refuted.

Currently, all of these claims are anecdotal and not at all “scientific”. My point was that scientific investigators wouldn’t be taken seriously within the scientific community if they wanted to systematically investigate such phenomena, and so they just ignore the phenomena.

surveys are a poor approach to the scientific method; there's always a factor of subjective bias.
measurements monitoring EMF potential is a more tangible approach.
it's obviously very difficult to show evidence for what an individual actually experiences,
almost as if there needs to be an altogether different set of algorithms to translate the phenomena from measured EEG patterns, MRI scans, etc.

Japanese researchers were working on technology mapping V1 and projecting the images on a screen, no idea how far it's been developed.

Its an interesting hypothesis but to my mind it lacks something.If we imagine (for the sake of argument, and this thread) that NDEs are events along a spectrum, the farthest point of which is true irrevocable brain death with (as I guess most scientists would maintain) a complete cessation of perceptive experience, then NDEs may be regarded as a 'necessary' transition point between this state and death.The visual component of NDEs seems prominent amongst reports of these experiences and the mechanisms of complex visual hallucinosis are varied in terms of anatomical localisation (and physiology).Heres a slightly dated but good review on this:

http://brain.oxfordjourn...ent/121/10/1819.full.pdf

This article also has references to the relationship between sleep and visual hallucinosis which I found interesting.

The ultimate cause of death is invariably cerebral hypoxia causing irreversible cessation of function in CNS neurones and this can be inferred crudely on EEG, in more depth with PET/fMRI studies but the issue of truely investigating this is plagued with ethical and methodological problems as Im sure you guys can imagine ie. extrapolating in vitro findings to the in vivo scenario and limitations of using discrete obervations to explain the whole of the matter under investigation.

If we attempt to consider the issue of death rather than NDEs ie take it that one (or more?) steps further then one problem which immediately springs to my mind is the effect of cerebral autoregulation under the 'stress' of dying and this is affected by variations in anatomy of the cerebral arterioles beyond those which can be clearly imaged (ie circle of Willis), the degree of atheroma within these, and the order in which they cease to provide adequate circulation.

Ive said it before in other threads and I will say it again-Isnt neurology just so fascinating!!!!

Definitely a little out there, but still a nice watch:

http://www.ted.com/talks...l_stroke_of_insight.html