imagine how amusing it would be, to witness the dismay of religious fanatics and spiritual freaks, when the NDE is consistently reproduced in a controlled setting, without the use of mind-altering drugs. this has happened before, when air force pilot trainees were subjected to centrifugal force as part of their training (hypoxia caused their NDEs)

So? Aren't ppl reproducing NDEs all the time without drugs? Well, they aren't really NDEs since they call it OBEs but hypoxia due to AF training isn't a real NDE either. For real NDE you want to put ppl in lifethreatening situations but no ethics committee will approve of this.

then by your logic, I had an NDE when medics pumped my stomach from acute alcohol poisoning (0.45 BAC).
I had another one on an overdose of PCP (albeit, strong dissociatives are often attributed to NDEs).

i consider those near-fatal experiences, not NDEs.
the program that featured said trainees actually referred to their experiences as "near-death experiences".

I don't know. Were you floating above your body or did you see a tunnel with a white light at the end?
Didn't we also talk about NDEs which weren't induced by drugs?


Sure, we could also call them ante mortem experiences, AMEs (I made that up btw). Still a very subjective term.


Okay, I see. So when people are in extreme situations (drugs, illness, impending death, prolonged meditation, hypoxia, etc.) some report subjective phenomena which share a common theme. This common theme is seeing yourself while floating above your body and is frequently reproduced without drugs. But do we see an outcry by religious fanatics and spiritual freaks?

actually, there was a buzz from them in that documentary, it was amusing.
in my cases, i have no recollection, hence, they were near-fatal experiences, no "white light" or other mystical/superstitious experience/interpretation.

the floating around your body phenomena you refer to sounds like an OBE. that's arguably synonymous with astral projection.

I wish I could remember who it was...but some member here has had more than one NDE (one being when they were hit by a car) and they felt that in some ways it was very similar to their DMT experiences. They had tried DMT before this happened. I hope they can chime in with their thoughts.

NDEs are reported at times with feelings of vertigo preceding the visionary aspects of the experience (as well as lingering after). I wonder about the similarities between the mind's sensation of spinning and the actual spinning of the air force subjects, both leading to NDEs.

Is it known if there any correlation between the brain's interpretation of spinning via centrifugal force and the onset of vertigo-like symptoms in the absence of said centrifugal force? How can the mind spin as though it were affected by a centrifugal force?

Mhh... I always thought that these kind of ppl don't read scientific journals and consider scientific proof as their faith is being tested by god (radiocarbon dating, dinosaur bones etc.)



Maybe that's why:





Well, I think that NDEs are subjective consciousness phenomena belonging to a certain class. The Wiki seems to agree:

This is the person's post: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...px?g=posts&m=460844

At least it appears to be, although I don't think AtomicChronic had tried DMT beforehand according to the post unless I didn't read it correctly.

I had a NDE once.... Only reason I am alive to tell about it is because a spirit physically carried me to the surface of the water - I was stuck in a undertow before that.

I would love to see that recreated in a lab for sure!

The Near Death Experience Network is a forum dedicated to discussion of NDEs. Many of the members have had an NDE and there is a great deal of info about them on there.

From what I've read on NDE's, science has yet to come up with a completely watertight mechanism for how or why they occur, including quite a number with veridical elements. They are receiving increasing scientific attention but are not the easiest things to study with the scientific method being such deeply subjective experiences. Interesting to note that a number of prominent NDE researchers such as Dr's Raymond Moody, Phyllis M. H. Atwater, Elisabeth Kubler Ross, Bruce Greyson, Jeffrey Long, Kenneth Ring, Peter Fenwick, Pim van Lommel, Michael Sabom, Melvin Morse, Barbara Rommer, Penny Sartori and Sam Parnia all began their studies of NDE's as sceptics, deeming them hallucinatory illusions of the mind easily explained away, but following their research findings all of them changed their stance, holding the view that materialist, reductionist explanations of brain function do not adequately explain what is occurring. Whatever your views, there is clearly still a lot more to learn here.

This was an interesting study from a few years ago:

Thonnard, M. Charland-Verville, V., Brédart, S., Dehon, H. Ledoux, D., Laureys, S. & Vanhaudenhuyse, A. (2013). Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories. PLoS ONE, 8, (3), e57620.

http://journals.plos.org...371/journal.pone.0057620

There's a pretty good book on this actually:

Spiritual Doorways In The Brain - A Neurologists Quest for the God Experience
by Kevin Nelson

His theory (and he provides pretty good evidence to back it up) is that NDEs are the result of dysregulation of the different states of consciousness associated with sleep and waking (REM and waking perception, mostly). I don't have the time right now to give it a full breakdown, but I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the neuroscience of NDEs, or mystical experiences in general.

Blessings
~ND

Just an interesting follow up on the NDE/REM intrusion hypothesis, via IANDS. A paper critiquing the NDE/REM intrusion paper is attached.

NDEs and REM Intrusion

During the past few years the worldwide press has seen a virtual explosion of headlines claiming that a condition called "REM intrusion" explains near-death experiences. The media's excitement makes it sound like a final solution. However, the people who really know NDEs say, "Not so fast."

REM intrusion is a condition that occurs when some characteristics of the common REM sleep state - such as rapid eye movement, low muscle tone, and dreaming - activate during wakefulness. Without question, there are marked similarities between REM intrusion and NDEs, just as there are similarities with other much-hyped earlier comparisons such as temporal lobe epilepsy, oxygen deprivation, and the effects of some drugs. However, once again, what the world's media overlooked in presenting the REM findings are their marked differences.

- NDE research years ago firmly established clear distinctions between NDEs and hallucinations; NDErs who had also experienced REM intrusion were not asked to compare the two.
- REM intrusion does not explain key NDE elements such as veridical perception, lasting aftereffects, and visual perception in the blind
- REM intrusion experiencers immediately recognize that their visual and auditory experiences are not reality-based, whereas NDErs describe theirs as "realer than real."
- Although the published study concludes that a higher rate of REM intrusion predisposes a person to NDEs, the NDErs weren't asked when the intrusions occurred; so, it is just as likely that they occur as a result of an NDE. Further, 40% of the NDErs said they had never had REM intrusions at all.

In this paper NDE researchers Dr. Jeffrey Long, from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, and Dr. Janice Miner Holden, from the University of North Texas, respond in-depth to the numerous flaws they see in the study's methodology and findings. Click here to read the paper.

From:

https://iands.org/news/n.../392-rem-intrusion.html

I'm personally of the view that science has yet to produce a completely viable and water tight explanation for how NDE's occur, and anyone who thinks it has needs to get better acquainted with the science in question.