Speaker 1: Oh Hello, it's that sentence that your cat just typed
Speaker 1: out that you're decoding for supernatural clues. Ali Ward, here
Speaker 1: we are, here, we all are before we're dead. If
Speaker 1: you're listening, you're on this side of the known universe.
Speaker 1: But come take a walk with me to the border,
Speaker 1: where I'll ask a guy who studies the brink of
Speaker 1: death a bunch of not very smart questions about just
Speaker 1: what the fuck is going on here, and somehow perhaps
Speaker 1: it'll put you in a better mood. He's not just
Speaker 1: some guy, though, he's one of the world's experts on this.
Speaker 1: He's a scientist and a psychiatrist who's been on the
Speaker 1: medical faculty at two teaching hospitals, even as the clinical
Speaker 1: chief of psychiatry. He's a University of Virginia Professor Emeritus
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and the American Psychiatry Association
Speaker 1: gave him their highest honor of being a Distinguished Life Fellow.
Speaker 1: His work has spanned over forty five years of research
Speaker 1: over one hundred published papers with titles such as Western
Speaker 1: Scientific Approaches to Near Death Experiences, The Phenomenology of Near
Speaker 1: Death Experiences, Do any near death experiences? Provide evidence for
Speaker 1: their survival of human personality after death and the banger
Speaker 1: dissociation in people who have near death experiences out of
Speaker 1: their bodies or out of their minds. Oh, we'll get
Speaker 1: to that stuff. So for twenty seven years, this guy
Speaker 1: served as the editor of the only journal about near
Speaker 1: death research. He also authored a book about all this,
Speaker 1: called After a Doctor Explores what Near death experiences reveal
Speaker 1: about life and beyond. And there's a new documentary out
Speaker 1: about near death experiences and he declined to be in
Speaker 1: it because it wasn't fact based enough, which tells you something.
Speaker 1: He's legit, So he's an esteemed physician with a lot
Speaker 1: of clout. He is dubious of fum flam, and he's
Speaker 1: here to tell us what he knows about biding the dust,
Speaker 1: what studies or bogus, What commonalities do we share, and
Speaker 1: what's it got to do with street drugs. We'll get
Speaker 1: right to it, but first, thank you to everyone who
Speaker 1: submits questions ahead of time at patreon dot com, slash ologies,
Speaker 1: where you can join for a dollar a month. Thank
Speaker 1: you to everyone ordering merch for the holidays at ologiesmerch
Speaker 1: dot com. Thanks to every leaving reviews. I read them all,
Speaker 1: including this piping hot one from EDR seventeen twenty, who
Speaker 1: wrote this podcast is so good. Want to know how good?
Speaker 1: I wore my AirPods into the shower and had to
Speaker 1: get new ones. Totally worth it, Eder seventeen twenty. I
Speaker 1: am sorry. Everyone else, please pause us before you go
Speaker 1: on a water slide. And if you've ever left me
Speaker 1: a review, I've read it with my own eyes. I've
Speaker 1: appreciated it. Edward Collins, it was worth booting up the
Speaker 1: iPad to leave it. Thank you. Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Quasi thanatology. This term is an amalgam of Latin and
Speaker 1: Greek to mean this study of almost death. And hey,
Speaker 1: this field doesn't have the best ology, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: take what we can get. Content wise, will be covering
Speaker 1: rigorous research at the forefront of these happenings. I was
Speaker 1: so nervous to talk to this man, and not because
Speaker 1: we'd be dancing around the topic of our own mortality.
Speaker 1: I was more immediately concerned with just wasting his time.
Speaker 1: And what if I asked, if ghosts are naked? Also,
Speaker 1: would this episode bum me out? HM, you'd be surprised
Speaker 1: it doesn't. And there are some of my biggest secrets
Speaker 1: I've ever told woven throughout it. So we cover brain
Speaker 1: activity during death, near death events versus near death experiences,
Speaker 1: bright lights, tunnel visions, the statistics on near death experiences, neurotransmitters,
Speaker 1: party drugs, religion versus spirituality, accounts from patients, out of
Speaker 1: body experiments, time dilation, the Swiss Alps, deathbed visions, accidental
Speaker 1: morgue visits, what matters most in life, and more. And
Speaker 1: if this sounds like a spook Toober episode, you might
Speaker 1: be surprised by the end of this. So get cozy,
Speaker 1: enjoy the sunshine and breeze or fresh snow or cozy blankets,
Speaker 1: and less crossover with psychiatrists and quasi thanatologist. Sure, doctor Bruce.
Speaker 2: Grayson, I'm just really excited to talk to you.
Speaker 1: I imagine a lot of people who get to chat
Speaker 1: with you are pretty excited about it as well.
Speaker 3: Thanks. Thanks, I enjoy these. Yeah, okay, I am Bruce Grayson.
Speaker 1: And pronouns are he him?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you have been the editor of journals, you have
Speaker 1: written so many papers on this, you have a book
Speaker 1: called after You're known as kind of the expert of
Speaker 1: near death experiences, which is it seems like a weighty title.
Speaker 1: Do you tell people what you study when you're at
Speaker 1: a dinner party or on an airplane or are you
Speaker 1: just like, I'm a scientist, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3: One of them at a dinner party yard, I just
Speaker 3: tell people I'm a doctor.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Have you gotten into long conversations before you learned
Speaker 1: that hack?
Speaker 3: Not so much to give more of strange looks?
Speaker 1: Oh really? How about in the industry among other doctors?
Speaker 3: Other doctors, There's no problem Now. I'm very open with them.
Speaker 3: I think they need to be educated, so I tell
Speaker 3: them everything I know about.
Speaker 1: Has there been a learning curve over the years as
Speaker 1: we've gotten better at imaging and better at brain studies.
Speaker 1: You've been doing this for so long, have you seen
Speaker 1: tides kind of shift in terms of how people see
Speaker 1: the validity of it.
Speaker 3: Yes, we've seen tremendous shifts. When we first started doing
Speaker 3: this research back in the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties, we
Speaker 3: would talk at large medical conferences and there will be
Speaker 3: a polite silence in the audience. Nobody knew we were
Speaker 3: talking about. Nobody thought these things really existed. And now
Speaker 3: when we talk to the same medical audiences. It is
Speaker 3: rare that doctors don't stand up in the audience and say,
Speaker 3: let me tell you about my near death experience. I
Speaker 3: think the change is less to the research, unfortunately, than
Speaker 3: to the public acceptance of near death experiences. They're in movies,
Speaker 3: they're on television shows. Even Homer Simpson has had a
Speaker 3: near death experience. Now, Homer, why up, you're alive.
Speaker 2: You're alive, alive, life.
Speaker 3: Everyone knows about them.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Do you think that the internet has done anything to
Speaker 1: kind of democratize people's voices in that way? Do you
Speaker 1: think it was harder to get these kind of experiences
Speaker 1: in print versus people just one off self publishing on
Speaker 1: blogs and stuff.
Speaker 3: I think the Injeneta has done a lot, both positive
Speaker 3: and negative, But in general, I think it has spread
Speaker 3: the word more so that people are less reluctant to
Speaker 3: talk about their own near death experiences.
Speaker 1: Now, how dead do you have to be for? How
Speaker 1: long do you have to be You always think a
Speaker 1: near death experience you've got to be out for maybe
Speaker 1: a few minutes. But have you found trends or data?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a great question. Ali, You know, most of
Speaker 3: the research that's been done with near death experiences has
Speaker 3: been with people who have a cardiac arrest. That is,
Speaker 3: their hearts have stopped, so we know they have had
Speaker 3: that occasion. However, before the last twenty thirty years, people
Speaker 3: were just collecting cases, and most of those were not
Speaker 3: people for whom we had physiological measures. For example, the
Speaker 3: first collection of cases was published in eighteen ninety two
Speaker 3: by a Swiss geologist in the publish in the year
Speaker 3: book of the Swiss Alpine Club, and he himself had
Speaker 3: had a new death experience when he failed while climbing
Speaker 3: in the Alps, and he fell sixty feet and have
Speaker 3: a very elaborate near death experience, but as far as
Speaker 3: we know, his heart never stopped.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: He was so impressed by this that he started asking
Speaker 3: fellow climbers and quickly found thirty other cases and published these.
Speaker 3: So you don't have to be that close to death
Speaker 3: and you have the same type of experience.
Speaker 1: For more on this, see the paper the Experience of
Speaker 1: Dying by Falls written by one Albertthheim, that Swiss geologist
Speaker 1: who in eighteen seventy two was leading a pack of
Speaker 1: climbers on the descent when a gust of wind took
Speaker 1: his hat, He tried to catch it, and shit sixty
Speaker 1: six feet down at Craggy Mountain. Spoiler alert. He survived,
Speaker 1: which is a whole point of this, And he wrote later,
Speaker 1: let us apply ourselves rather to this scientific study of
Speaker 1: a horrible event. The subject may thereby lose a portion
Speaker 1: of its ghastliness, he writes. Sometimes to be sure, a
Speaker 1: fall is dreadful for their survivors, but it is something
Speaker 1: quite different for the victim itself. So the subjective perceptions
Speaker 1: of those who fall to their deaths are the same,
Speaker 1: whether they fall from the scaffolding of a house or
Speaker 1: the face of a cliff. It has been proven that
Speaker 1: one who's run over by a wagon or crushed by
Speaker 1: a machine, even the drowning person, looks death in the
Speaker 1: face with similar feelings, he writes, And he says it
Speaker 1: may be briefly characterized in the following way. No grief
Speaker 1: was felt, nor was there paralyzing fright. There was no anxiety,
Speaker 1: no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness,
Speaker 1: profound acceptance, and sense of surety. No confusion entered it.
Speaker 1: All time became greatly expanded, he writes. In many cases
Speaker 1: there followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past,
Speaker 1: and finally, the person falling often heard beautiful music, and
Speaker 1: he writes of his own experience, as I fell in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy two, I merely heard the blows that injured
Speaker 1: my head and back. I felt no pain. For those
Speaker 1: who are unconscious, death can involve no more changing. It
Speaker 1: is absolute rest. He ends, we have reached the conclusion
Speaker 1: that death through falling is subjectively a very pleasant death.
Speaker 2: So yes.
Speaker 1: Swiss geologist one of the first scientists to turn his
Speaker 1: work toward collecting accounts of near death experiences, Albert Heim.
Speaker 1: Also his wife Marie, was the first female physician in Switzerland,
Speaker 1: and Albert loved Swiss alpine dogs, but they were about
Speaker 1: to die out, so he haded efforts to bring back
Speaker 1: some breeding programs. So next time you see a Bernese
Speaker 1: mountain dog, say hey, Albert, glad you didn't die on
Speaker 1: that mountain that day, even if it would have been
Speaker 1: pretty chill. Your work wasn't yet done here, as evidenced
Speaker 1: by this giant, cute dog. But why was it so chill?
Speaker 1: Do they find that any of it is related to
Speaker 1: brain chemicals for anxiety? Like just the oh shit, oh shit,
Speaker 1: oh shit response, or how do you even how do
Speaker 1: you even quantify that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's difficult to quantify because there are a lot
Speaker 3: of chemicals that are released in the brain under stress,
Speaker 3: and we unfortunately don't have the ability to measure them
Speaker 3: when someone is in that near death situation. Furthermore, they're
Speaker 3: usually just released for a short period of time, maybe
Speaker 3: a second or two, and we don't even know where
Speaker 3: in their brain to look for it. So it's virtually
Speaker 3: impossible with our technology today to measure those things. People
Speaker 3: have tried with non human animals, with sacrificing rats and
Speaker 3: measuring what's going on in the brains of the time,
Speaker 3: but I'm not sure how transferable that information is to
Speaker 3: human beings.
Speaker 1: Is there a correlation between this field of study and
Speaker 1: consciousness in animals?
Speaker 3: Actually, I've just finished writing a paper about this because
Speaker 3: it's something that's not been studied to great degree. We
Speaker 3: have a lot of anecdotes about animals who had a
Speaker 3: near death event, for example, being hit by a car
Speaker 3: or having their heart stop with a severe illness, and
Speaker 3: then they had a dramatic personality change, much like you
Speaker 3: see in humans when they have a near death experience.
Speaker 3: And we also have a lot of accounts of human
Speaker 3: near death experiences in which people claim that while they
Speaker 3: were unconscious, they were greeted by deceased pets. So those
Speaker 3: are suggestions that some type of consciousness in animals does
Speaker 3: survive bodily death, but we don't have any good evidence
Speaker 3: for that. We don't really have the ability to interview
Speaker 3: these animals and ask them what they experienced.
Speaker 1: I mean, unless you get a pet psychic, but I
Speaker 1: think those are disy at best.
Speaker 3: You have questions, I have the answers.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to me what is a near death experience?
Speaker 1: Where does it start and where does it end in
Speaker 1: terms of the criteria.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it starts when someone is coming close to death,
Speaker 3: and usually that's a very terrifying and painful experience. And
Speaker 3: the first thing that happens is people are overwhelmed by
Speaker 3: feeling of tremendous peace and well being, which is not
Speaker 3: what you would expect when someone is coming close to death.
Speaker 3: They find that their thinking is faster and clearer than usual,
Speaker 3: which again you wouldn't expect when their brains are shutting down.
Speaker 3: They have very strong emotions, usually very positive emotions. They
Speaker 3: have unusual sensations, like a sense of leaving the physical body.
Speaker 3: They have sense of being in some other realm or
Speaker 3: dimension where they may encounter entities which they consider either
Speaker 3: deceased loved ones or deities. They may review their entire
Speaker 3: lives and they will say they went through their entire
Speaker 3: life not only saw it, but relift it in vivid detail,
Speaker 3: and that only takes a matter of seconds or so
Speaker 3: to go through decades of life. And at some point
Speaker 3: they come to a border or pont of no return,
Speaker 3: and then they can't go past that and still return
Speaker 3: to life, and they either are sent back against their
Speaker 3: will or given a choice, and they choose to come
Speaker 3: back for a certain purpose. Of course, the ones that
Speaker 3: don't choose don't get interviewed by who.
Speaker 1: Ghasted me hm right, exactly? Did you have to research
Speaker 1: historically what evidence we have for the last several millennia
Speaker 1: about near death experiences? Did you have to work with
Speaker 1: archaeologists at all?
Speaker 3: Not with archaeologists. But we have lots of accounts from
Speaker 3: Greek and Roman historians with accounts of near death experiences
Speaker 3: that are very similar to the ones we hear today. Likewise,
Speaker 3: we have accounts from cultures all around the world, from
Speaker 3: Stone Age cultures around the world, and from Hindu, Buddhist cultures,
Speaker 3: Muslim cultures, and they have the same types of experiences
Speaker 3: that we find in Western societies, in US and in
Speaker 3: Western Europe.
Speaker 1: So in his reacent book after Bruce explains his own stance,
Speaker 1: and he writes, I'm a scientist comfortable dealing with this
Speaker 1: world evidence, but I'm out of my element dealing with
Speaker 1: religious doctrines and have been raised in a scientific household
Speaker 1: without a strong sense of the divine. I was uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with the overwhelming numbers of experiencers who described meeting some
Speaker 1: kind of godlike being, not just because it was not
Speaker 1: part of my personal background, but also because it seemed
Speaker 1: like something that couldn't be verified scientifically. So, going way back,
Speaker 1: this guy, doctor Raymond Moody, who first coined the term
Speaker 1: near death experiences, found fifteen elements that seemed really consistent
Speaker 1: across people and patients of all these different religious and
Speaker 1: spiritual and cultural backgrounds. And they are feelings of peace,
Speaker 1: hearing unusual noises, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of
Speaker 1: the body, meeting spiritual beings, encountering a bright light, or
Speaker 1: a being of light, panoramic life review, a realm where
Speaker 1: all knowledge exists, cities of light, a realm of bewildered spirits,
Speaker 1: supernatural rescue, a border or a limit, and coming back
Speaker 1: into the body. So Moody described all these in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five as being like, if you're going to have
Speaker 1: a near death experience, this is probably gonna happen. And
Speaker 1: after coming too, he found that a lot of folks
Speaker 1: had the same after effects of them being frustrated trying
Speaker 1: to relate the experience to other people, but also having
Speaker 1: this deeper appreciation of life, being less afraid of death,
Speaker 1: and sometimes freaking people out by things that they shouldn't
Speaker 1: have seen or remembered. So these kinds of experience have
Speaker 1: been consistent over these different cultures and backgrounds and religions
Speaker 1: and spiritual beliefs. And Bruce says also over time. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: so for longer than it would take to be a
Speaker 1: fleeting trend or something like a social contagion.
Speaker 3: Right, there's no question that people back in the ancient world,
Speaker 3: long before we had Christianity, had the same types of
Speaker 3: new death experiences we have now.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: Of course, we didn't have any way of measuring their
Speaker 3: physiology back then, but we're still on the ground level
Speaker 3: of finding out how to do that now.
Speaker 1: And I know you wrote a paper near death Experiences
Speaker 1: in spirituality and with the topic of religion. Where does
Speaker 1: this split between it being a spiritual experience and a
Speaker 1: religious experience, because I'm sure some people are like I
Speaker 1: was in heaven and other people like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I saw white light or myself on an operating table.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good questionality. Most people who have a
Speaker 3: near death experience say they are tremendously transformed by it,
Speaker 3: And the first thing say is that they're no longer
Speaker 3: afraid of death, no matter what the near death experience
Speaker 3: was composed of. They feel like they're looking forward to
Speaker 3: death eventually, but that paradostically makes them more willing to
Speaker 3: engage in life. They feel that there's no reason they
Speaker 3: shouldn't go ahead and jump in with both feet and
Speaker 3: enjoy all there is to life and take risks because
Speaker 3: what's the worst that can happen? You die, and that's good.
Speaker 3: So they feel much more joyful about life and also
Speaker 3: less frightened about death.
Speaker 1: But don't get too excited about being a corpse.
Speaker 3: I was to say that people who have come close
Speaker 3: to death but don't have a near death experience also
Speaker 3: tend to value life more highly, but they don't have
Speaker 3: this decreased fear of death. They tend to fear death more.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 1: If someone has had a near death event like a
Speaker 1: motorcycle crash, but not a near death experience where things
Speaker 1: get all like flunky, then they may still find life precious,
Speaker 1: but they're not looking forward to death like that. Shit's
Speaker 1: still a horrifying proposition for them. So a near death
Speaker 1: event and a near death experience might hit a little different.
Speaker 1: And just like all cacti are succulents, but not all
Speaker 1: succulents are cacti, all near death experiences come from a
Speaker 1: near death event, but not all near death events result
Speaker 1: in a near death experience.
Speaker 2: You with me now.
Speaker 3: Most near death experiences say they're much more spiritual now
Speaker 3: than they were before, and by that they do not
Speaker 3: mean they're more religious. They say they feel more connected
Speaker 3: to other people, to the natural world, to the divine,
Speaker 3: and this gives them a sense of compassion for other people.
Speaker 3: They often come back saying that they experienced in their
Speaker 3: near death experience that they are the same as every
Speaker 3: other person, and they're intimately connected with other people. And
Speaker 3: if you believe that, then it doesn't make sense to
Speaker 3: hurt other people because you're just hurting yourself, or to
Speaker 3: try to get ahead at someone else's expense. And I've
Speaker 3: known lots of people who had to change their careers
Speaker 3: after a near death experience. People who are in a
Speaker 3: violent profession, such as career military officers or police officers
Speaker 3: who just could not think about hurting someone shooting someone
Speaker 3: after the NDE. And people who were in cut through
Speaker 3: businesses who had to leave their jobs, and they usually
Speaker 3: end up training into something like healthcare or social work
Speaker 3: or clergy or teaching something where they're helping other people
Speaker 3: rather than hurting them. I've heard these same changes from
Speaker 3: people who were atheists before the near death experience, and
Speaker 3: again they become much more spiritual, but not necessarily more religious.
Speaker 3: They tend to feel that all our religions are man
Speaker 3: made approximations of what's really going on.
Speaker 1: I feel like some of these changes in perspective, and
Speaker 1: even some of the experience of it, sounds a lot
Speaker 1: like someone I know did mushrooms named me once. Do
Speaker 1: you find any correlations between psychedelic substances and what people experience.
Speaker 1: I know that they use it too for the termally
Speaker 1: ill to sort of confront and existential fear.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes, there's definitely a lot of similarities between what
Speaker 3: we have in the new death experience and spiritual experiences
Speaker 3: from other causes, and one of those causes is often
Speaker 3: psychedelic drugs. And people have been reporting these experiences for centuries,
Speaker 3: of a sense of leaving their bodies and encountering some
Speaker 3: other realm or dimension and then returning to this quote
Speaker 3: normal everyday life with a much more spiritual outlook. It
Speaker 3: doesn't happen as reliably with drugs. Drugs often have a
Speaker 3: lot of negative trips as well, but it does happen now.
Speaker 3: Several years ago, I was part of an international group
Speaker 3: that compared hundreds of accounts of near death experiences with
Speaker 3: thousands of accounts of psychedelic drug trips with different drugs,
Speaker 3: and we tried to look at which drugs produced the
Speaker 3: experience that was most like a near death experience, and
Speaker 3: it turned out the number one drugs was ketamine, which
Speaker 3: is aesthetic that's used mostly for animals, not for people
Speaker 3: very much, because it often produces unpleasant experiences in people.
Speaker 1: So, according to the paper Essential veterinary use of ketamine,
Speaker 1: ketamine is like the MVP of those dark guns used
Speaker 1: to sedate zoo animals and wildlife, and it's used also
Speaker 1: as a surgical anesthesia for horses and camels, so, in
Speaker 1: addition to cattle and tigers, other species that use ketamine
Speaker 1: or ravers calling it special K and sometimes slipping into
Speaker 1: a mid groove dissociative state known as a K hole.
Speaker 1: So ketamine therapy can be an effective option for treatment
Speaker 1: resistant depression when it's administered in a calm setting by
Speaker 1: doctor who read the instructions on the box. But why
Speaker 1: would anyone want to take a horse anesthetic on a
Speaker 1: Saturday night in a loud room that's dark with a
Speaker 1: bunch of strangers. Well, according to Bruce's paper Neurochemical Models
Speaker 1: of Near Death Experiences, a large scale study based on
Speaker 1: the semantic similarity of written reports published in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Consciousness and Cognition from twenty nineteen, the researchers right
Speaker 1: that near death experiences often result in a state of
Speaker 1: consciousness characterized by the perception of leaving the body, feelings
Speaker 1: of peace and bliss, and timelessness, a life review, the
Speaker 1: sensation of traveling through a tunnel, and an irreversible threshold.
Speaker 1: So these researchers looked at fifteen thousand reports linked to
Speaker 1: the use of one hundred and sixty five psychoactive substances,
Speaker 1: and they found that little drum roll here.
Speaker 3: But the reports of a ketamine experience sounded most like
Speaker 3: a near death experience. The second most common one was psilocybin,
Speaker 3: and the third was salvia or sage.
Speaker 1: Just as so, Salvia is a type of stage which
Speaker 1: is native to Central America, and it's been used for
Speaker 1: centuries as a holy medicine by indigenous groups. If you've
Speaker 1: ever watched videos of college kids on stained couches ripping
Speaker 1: bongs of this stuff, you're going to turn into Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan because although that high lasts maybe five minutes, it
Speaker 1: looks harrowing existentially. That bowl comes in my direction and
Speaker 1: I'm like, keep it moving, man, excuse me.
Speaker 3: If you go to space now. And we were kind
Speaker 3: of hoping this would give us clues as to what
Speaker 3: was going on in the brain that might facilitate a
Speaker 3: new death experience. But when you look at what these
Speaker 3: drugs do in the brain, each one of the top
Speaker 3: ten drugs works by a different mechanism in the brain,
Speaker 3: working with different neuro transmitters, so it didn't really help us. Basically,
Speaker 3: what the bills dout do is if you interrupt the
Speaker 3: normal working to the brain, you're open to having a
Speaker 3: near death experience. There's not a specific chemical effect.
Speaker 1: And I was reading in this paper that the nmethyld
Speaker 1: aspirated antagonist, which had some sort of effect on the
Speaker 1: indogenous serotonin two a receptor agonist which I was pouring
Speaker 1: through this paper, and I was like, I'm just going
Speaker 1: to ask him what that means.
Speaker 3: Sure, sure, sure, Well, actually ketamine works mostly by inhibiting
Speaker 3: the NMDA receptor in the brain. But you know, these
Speaker 3: drugs that we give people, whether it's ketamine or psilocybin
Speaker 3: or salvia or any of the others LSD, they're dirty drugs,
Speaker 3: so to speak. They have many different effects on the brain.
Speaker 3: So giving a drug that just has one effect has
Speaker 3: many and it's hard to sort out which one is
Speaker 3: the one that's effective in facilitating these experiences. I should
Speaker 3: also say that if it's associated with an experience, that
Speaker 3: doesn't necessarily mean that it's causing the experience. One of
Speaker 3: the psychiatrists who was most active in pushing the ketamine
Speaker 3: model of neotath experiences back in the eighties had had
Speaker 3: lots of experiences with ketamine that produces events like a
Speaker 3: near death experience, and then eventually, after a couple of decades,
Speaker 3: he had spontaneous near death experience with a heart attack,
Speaker 3: and at the end of that he said, you know,
Speaker 3: it's not the same thing. Really, He said that he
Speaker 3: doesn't think that ketamine produces the experience. He said, ketamine
Speaker 3: opens the door and allows you, if conditions are right,
Speaker 3: to have this experience.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 3: Another person I know who had a near death experience
Speaker 3: and had had previous experiences with psilocybin said that with
Speaker 3: psilocybin he saw heaven. With his new death experience, he
Speaker 3: was in heaven.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's a really chilling anecdote to think of
Speaker 1: how immersive that must be and why that has such
Speaker 1: lasting effects if you come back to life.
Speaker 3: I think the issue is we just have so many
Speaker 3: words in the English language describe our experiences, and most
Speaker 3: people who have a new death experience say, there aren't
Speaker 3: any words for it. I can't describe it for you,
Speaker 3: So then we researchers say, great, tell me about it,
Speaker 3: So we make them use metaphors. And there are just
Speaker 3: so many words you can use to describe it, and
Speaker 3: they don't always mean the same thing. So people will
Speaker 3: all over the world describe a warm, loving being of light,
Speaker 3: and people in the US will often say that's God.
Speaker 3: Now people in India will not use that word, but
Speaker 3: even people here will say, I'm going to call it God,
Speaker 3: So you know what I'm talking about. But this is
Speaker 3: not the God I was taught about in church. It's
Speaker 3: much bigger than that. They're just using it for.
Speaker 1: A metaphor, and heaven meaning not an actual pearly gate
Speaker 1: with angels and harps, but just something else that was
Speaker 1: pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Right, something very different from this normal, everyday physical world.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm wondering if ketamine is used as a therapy
Speaker 1: that's far but kind of an approximation of a near
Speaker 1: death experience, and if people after in near death experiences
Speaker 1: have a sense of peace and less anxiety and less
Speaker 1: existential kind of crises, does ketamine produce some of those
Speaker 1: lasting effects too? Is that why it's being looked at
Speaker 1: as a therapeutic drug.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a good question. Ketamine is now being used
Speaker 3: to treat depression, and there's some exploratory work now using
Speaker 3: to treat a postomac stress disorder. We don't know about
Speaker 3: the long term effects of it. There's been a lot
Speaker 3: more work done with psilocybin since that's much easier to control,
Speaker 3: and a lot of the work being done at Johns
Speaker 3: Hopkins University here in the US and at Imperial College
Speaker 3: in London giving people psilocybin and then having them describe
Speaker 3: their experiences, which are often quite spiritual. And the group
Speaker 3: at Hopkins has now followed people up for a year
Speaker 3: or two and they find that after just one extended
Speaker 3: session within the lab they have a decrease in anxiety
Speaker 3: that lasts for a couple of years at least.
Speaker 1: I followed the Imperial College of London protocol. When I
Speaker 1: had my one psychedelic trip was right after my dad died,
Speaker 1: and I think about that experience daily. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was such a profound experience. I didn't believe that it
Speaker 1: would have such a lasting impact, but I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't have any explanation for it. Whatever my brain was doing,
Speaker 1: it was pretty cool though, right Noe. This podcast is
Speaker 1: not intended to provide any medical advice. Also, this treatment
Speaker 1: was suggested to me by my long term Western medical
Speaker 1: psychiatrist familiar with my medical history, who sent me the protocol.
Speaker 1: I then prepared for weeks obsessively reading studies and printing
Speaker 1: a fifty seven page booklet of treatment protocol from an
Speaker 1: Ivy League medical school psychiatry department. Just no, it was wacky,
Speaker 1: and also it is illegal. But I'd be lying if
Speaker 1: I told you that I didn't have silent conversations with
Speaker 1: dead people in a rainbow colored candyland for a few
Speaker 1: hours and experiencing epiphany that anxiety is the biggest waste
Speaker 1: of brain resources and that fear truly is the mind killer.
Speaker 3: Way back in the nineteen seventies, stan Groff was using
Speaker 3: LSDU to assist people who were dying, to help them
Speaker 3: relieve their anxiety in the dying process. You know, all
Speaker 3: these drugs are not just giving someone to say here,
Speaker 3: go home and take this. Yeah, They're usually administered in
Speaker 3: a very controlled setting with low lights and smooth music
Speaker 3: and someone there to help you process the process as
Speaker 3: you're going through it.
Speaker 1: And I'm wondering about what led you to this field.
Speaker 1: If you can tell me a little bit about your backstory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I was raised in a scientific household, but
Speaker 3: my father was a chemist, and you know, as far
Speaker 3: as we knew, the physical world was all there was.
Speaker 3: We didn't have any spiritual tradition in our family. You know,
Speaker 3: when you die, you die. That's the end. That was
Speaker 3: fine with us. That wasn't a depressing fact. I wasn't
Speaker 3: afraid of death, it was just the end. I went
Speaker 3: through college and medical school with that mindset that the
Speaker 3: physical world is all that is, and all our thoughts
Speaker 3: and feelings are created by the brain. And then when
Speaker 3: I started my psychiatric training back in the early seventies,
Speaker 3: I was confronted by a patient who was unconscious when
Speaker 3: I tried to see her in the emergency room, but
Speaker 3: her roommate was waiting for me in another room down
Speaker 3: the hall. So I went to talk to the roommate
Speaker 3: to see what was going on with the patient, what
Speaker 3: she might have overdosed on, and so forth. And then
Speaker 3: I came back to see the patient and she was
Speaker 3: still totally unconscious. So she was admitted to the intensive
Speaker 3: care unit. And when I saw her the next morning,
Speaker 3: I started to introduce myself and she stopped me and said,
Speaker 3: I remember who you were from last night. You know,
Speaker 3: I know who you are. And that kind of stunned
Speaker 3: me because I was pretty sure she was unconscious. So
Speaker 3: I said that to her, and she said, well, not
Speaker 3: in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down
Speaker 3: the hall. That just blew me away. I couldn't imagine
Speaker 3: what she was talking about. As far as I could tell.
Speaker 3: The only way that could happen is she had left
Speaker 3: her body and followed me down the hall, and you
Speaker 3: know you are your body, how can you leave it?
Speaker 3: But then she went on to tell me about the
Speaker 3: conversation I had with the roommate. What I asked, what
Speaker 3: she answered, what we were wearing, what the room looked like.
Speaker 3: And I just didn't know what to make of this.
Speaker 3: I was completely dumbfounded. But you know, I wasn't there
Speaker 3: to deal with Mi the deal I was supposed to
Speaker 3: be dealing with hers, So I kind of pushed out
Speaker 3: on my mind for a while and thought, well, I'll
Speaker 3: think about this when I have time sometime in the future.
Speaker 3: And then over the next few years, I heard a
Speaker 3: few more cases like this from patients who had usually
Speaker 3: overdosed and had or one case that shot himself in
Speaker 3: the head and had a near death event and then
Speaker 3: claimed to have elaborate near death experiences. And I just assumed,
Speaker 3: you know, these are all psychiatric patients. Who knows what
Speaker 3: they really experienced. And then several years later, one of
Speaker 3: my colleagues at the University of Virginia near Raymond Moody,
Speaker 3: published a book called Life After Life, in which he
Speaker 3: gave us the name near death experience and described what
Speaker 3: they were like. And I realized this was my patients
Speaker 3: were talking about. Only Raymond's participants were not patients. They
Speaker 3: were people from all over the world having the same
Speaker 3: types of experience as my patients were. I still couldn't
Speaker 3: understand it, But I'm a scientist, so scientists don't run
Speaker 3: away from things they don't understand. They run towards them
Speaker 3: try to explain them. So I started collecting cases to
Speaker 3: try to find what patterns are consistent across cultures, across ages,
Speaker 3: across genders, across ethnic groups, and trying to find out
Speaker 3: what's going on here. And eventually we started looking at
Speaker 3: different physiological hypotheses. Is it a lack of oxygen to
Speaker 3: the brain, Is it drugs given to the patients? And
Speaker 3: so forth, and one by one we test all these hypotheses,
Speaker 3: and none of them panned out. For example, if you
Speaker 3: measure the oxygen levels of people who are close to death,
Speaker 3: you find that those who have near death experiences actually
Speaker 3: have better oxygen supplied to the brain than those who
Speaker 3: don't have near death experiences. Oh wow, So that means
Speaker 3: the oxygen deprivation is not causing the ENDE. And likewise,
Speaker 3: with drugs given to patients, the fewer drugs you're given,
Speaker 3: the more likely you are to tell about our near
Speaker 3: death experience later on.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering it must be very difficult to do imaging
Speaker 1: on these experiences because you really kind of never know
Speaker 1: when it's going to happen.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: What kind of measurements can you do while it's happening.
Speaker 3: You can't do much while it's happening. There have been
Speaker 3: one or two people who have tried to bring near
Speaker 3: death experiencers into the lab and have them try to
Speaker 3: recreate in their minds the memory of the new death experience,
Speaker 3: whether they're having an MRI or an EG or a
Speaker 3: cat scan, and what they find is that there's no
Speaker 3: one spot in their brain, the entire brain gets involved
Speaker 3: in these which is not surprising because you've got thoughts,
Speaker 3: you've got perceptions, you've got feelings, you've got emotions. The
Speaker 3: whole brain's being involved in this. Now, it have been
Speaker 3: a couple of reports recently about people who sermdipitously had
Speaker 3: a heart attack while they have their EEGs being measured,
Speaker 3: their brainways being measured, and what they find is that
Speaker 3: there is some continued brain activity apparently after the hearts
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Now this flies in the face of decades
Speaker 3: of clinical observations where we know that after the heart stops,
Speaker 3: the blood supply of the brain stops also, and within
Speaker 3: about ten seconds you start getting a marked decrease in
Speaker 3: the brain activity, and within a minute or so you
Speaker 3: get totally flatlining. So it was surprising to see these
Speaker 3: new reports of continued activity. However, it's very difficult to
Speaker 3: do this kind of research, and what they find is
Speaker 3: that the types of supposed brain waves they're finding, electrical
Speaker 3: activity they're measuring, could just as well be due to
Speaker 3: muscle activity in the head around your temples on your
Speaker 3: forehead that are contracting or going into spasm. They can
Speaker 3: produce the same types of waves that electrical activity in
Speaker 3: the brain does, and then we don't know how to
Speaker 3: separate those two, so they may not even be measuring
Speaker 3: brain activity.
Speaker 1: Ah, it might just be muscular, so it's tough to
Speaker 1: parse out right, right. Do you have any statistics on
Speaker 1: how many people who have a near death event have
Speaker 1: a near death experience?
Speaker 3: Yes, we have that are from several different studies, large
Speaker 3: studies with with soloe hundred patients each in several different
Speaker 3: countries in the US and the UK, in Belgium, in Germany,
Speaker 3: And what we find generally is that if you look
Speaker 3: at only people whose hearts have stopped, between ten and
Speaker 3: twenty percent will report a near death experience. That's a lot.
Speaker 3: Now we're relying on them to voluntarily tell us about it.
Speaker 3: There may be more people who just don't want to
Speaker 3: talk about it, but we know at least ten to
Speaker 3: twenty percent have an experience.
Speaker 1: Do you think it could be like how you might
Speaker 1: dream but not remember it in the morning.
Speaker 3: That's a possibility, although most people who tell about a
Speaker 3: near death experience say it's not at all like a dream.
Speaker 3: It doesn't fade over time. And in fact, we've done
Speaker 3: research now where I've gone back in recent years to
Speaker 3: contact people I interviewed in the nineteen seventies and nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties about their near death experience, and I reinterviewed them,
Speaker 3: and I find there was actually actually no change at
Speaker 3: all in what they tell me. The memory is not
Speaker 3: faded at all. It doesn't become distorted at all. It
Speaker 3: doesn't change over time the way most of our memories do.
Speaker 3: So when they say to us, this was more real
Speaker 3: than life itself, that seems to be true when it
Speaker 3: looks at the memories, because the memories are so vivid,
Speaker 3: they don't change over time the way memories of our
Speaker 3: normal life change.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I imagine too when people say they remember where
Speaker 1: they were when they heard JFK was shot or the
Speaker 1: nine to eleven happened, it really imprints and you can
Speaker 1: remember a lot more details because of the significance exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: your paper about near death experiences in spirituality, the false
Speaker 1: positive claims and the false negative denials, how do you
Speaker 1: determine what might be an embellishment or what might be
Speaker 1: a denial? Do you have to hook them up to
Speaker 1: a light detector test?
Speaker 3: No, No, we don't do that. Okay, Now we just
Speaker 3: look at the consistency of the reports we have a
Speaker 3: scale that we use to quantify the depth of the
Speaker 3: new death experience.
Speaker 1: Just a side note, he was the expert who invented
Speaker 1: the scale, which is a baller move and it's called
Speaker 1: the Grayson d Scale, and it's a sixteen point survey
Speaker 1: with questions such as, did scenes from your past come
Speaker 1: back to you? Did you see or feel surrounded by
Speaker 1: a brilliant light? Did you feel separated from your body?
Speaker 1: Did you come to a border or a point of
Speaker 1: no return? Did you seem to encounter a mystical being
Speaker 1: or presence? And the best thing about your score on
Speaker 1: this test is that you won't give a shit because
Speaker 1: nothing matters except for peace and unity and love. You
Speaker 1: might be out the door to a parasailing appointment or
Speaker 1: draining your savings account to buy a mini donkey sanctuary
Speaker 1: by the time these eggheads bust out the calculator to
Speaker 1: figure it out, and if.
Speaker 3: An experience falls below a certain point in that scale,
Speaker 3: we say, well, they didn't really have a full blown
Speaker 3: new death experience. Now we use that for research purposes
Speaker 3: to make sure that we're all talking about the same
Speaker 3: experience when we do research on them, but it's not
Speaker 3: helpful for an individual person. If person comes to me
Speaker 3: and says, my heart stopped and I have this incredible
Speaker 3: experience and my life will never be the same again,
Speaker 3: and we give them the scale and they don't score
Speaker 3: high enough on it, that doesn't mean they didn't have
Speaker 3: a new death experience. I can't say to this person,
Speaker 3: even though your life has been totally turned around, you
Speaker 3: didn't have an experience. Obviously the person did, but it's
Speaker 3: not the type that we want to include in the
Speaker 3: research because it's not consistent with the others.
Speaker 1: How many data points do you have to collect for
Speaker 1: a study? Can you do a small sample size or
Speaker 1: are there bigger reviews that have a lot of data
Speaker 1: points of correlations between different people's stories and things like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it depends on what measures you're using. What
Speaker 3: measures you're losing is your outcome and most research into
Speaker 3: new death experiences use several hundred new death experiences to
Speaker 3: get any significant results. There have been a few papers
Speaker 3: published with ten twenty, and as you might expect, their
Speaker 3: results are not as consistent, and later reports with larger
Speaker 3: members may not confirm what they found. But most of
Speaker 3: the research has been done with several hundred experiences.
Speaker 1: And are the most common flavors kind of a bright
Speaker 1: light or a tunnel or floating above yourself. Do you
Speaker 1: find that those are the most common experiences?
Speaker 3: They are the most common. One is a sense of
Speaker 3: overwhelming well being and peace, and sense of being uncondadially loved.
Speaker 5: It's cute.
Speaker 3: Many also report leaving their bodies and watching what's going
Speaker 3: on around them and being able to describe accurately what's
Speaker 3: going on around them, things they shouldn't be able to
Speaker 3: see or hear, and then a sense of reviewing their
Speaker 3: lives and meeting other entities. They seem to do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, not that they don't love all this, but doctor
Speaker 1: Grayson and most of us are science first kind of people.
Speaker 1: He was raised secular, all about data and mythbusting. So
Speaker 1: how does he make sure that people aren't absolutely making
Speaker 1: this stuff up? Do they have to verify with other
Speaker 1: non dead witnesses. Do you ever have to do any
Speaker 1: follow ups with other medical personnel or nursing staff to say, hey,
Speaker 1: did anyone overhear something and then tell another patient? Do
Speaker 1: you ever have to go down like an investigative hole
Speaker 1: like that? Or did you the first time it happened.
Speaker 3: Well, we do when people just say I left my
Speaker 3: body and I watched what was going on. If they
Speaker 3: described things that were unusual or they couldn't have been
Speaker 3: guessed about, then we ask other people in the room,
Speaker 3: doctors and nurses who were there to corroborate or not
Speaker 3: what the patient was saying. Now, if they say, oh,
Speaker 3: I saw doctors wearing green scrubs, well of course you
Speaker 3: might expect that. Or if they say, well, the nurse
Speaker 3: had mismatched shoelaces, that's a little more surprising, and we
Speaker 3: then will then go ahead and ask the nurse where
Speaker 3: that happened. And we have some very surprising things that
Speaker 3: patients saw of doctors nurses doing embarishing things they shouldn't
Speaker 3: have been doing that were accurately right.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me what any of them were.
Speaker 3: Well, one was a fifty f five year old truck
Speaker 3: driver who had an emergency quadruple bypass surgery that means
Speaker 3: four of the vessels supplying his heart were blocked and
Speaker 3: had to be replaced in the operation. He later told
Speaker 3: me he left his body, rose up above it and
Speaker 3: saw his search and flapping his arms like he was
Speaker 3: trying to fly, and he demonstrated by placing his hands
Speaker 3: on his chest and wiggling his arms up and down.
Speaker 3: I had never seen anything like that in an operating room.
Speaker 3: I've been a doctor with thirty years ago at this point,
Speaker 3: and I had never seen that. You don't see doctors
Speaker 3: on TV doing that. So I said to him, it
Speaker 3: sounds to me like this is a hallucination from the
Speaker 3: drugs you were given. He said, no, no, no, I
Speaker 3: really saw it. You can ask my doctor. So I did,
Speaker 3: and the doctor sheepishly admitted that he had done that,
Speaker 3: that he had developed this habit he'd never seen any
Speaker 3: other doctor do. He lets his assistance start the procedure. Well,
Speaker 3: he puts on his sterile gawn and gloves, and then
Speaker 3: he walks into the operating room to watch them start
Speaker 3: the procedure, and to avoid touching anything that's not sterile,
Speaker 3: he places his hands flat against his chest so they
Speaker 3: won't touch anything, and then he points things out to
Speaker 3: his assistances elbows so he doesn't touch anything with his fingers.
Speaker 3: And he demonstrated just the way the patient did. And
Speaker 3: you know, I don't know how he could have known it.
Speaker 3: The patient could have known that, you know, I said,
Speaker 3: to the patient. Did you ask the doctor yourself about it?
Speaker 3: He said, yes, I did. And what did he tell you?
Speaker 3: He said, well, I must have done something right, because
Speaker 3: you're here, aren't you.
Speaker 1: I thought for sure you were going to tell me
Speaker 1: that he was doing the chicken dance. I was like,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. Surgeons are so goofy.
Speaker 3: This is a very serious, straight laced doctor.
Speaker 1: He would be like that, What about you. Have you
Speaker 1: ever had a near death event or experience?
Speaker 3: I have not. I have had a very calm, peaceful,
Speaker 3: boring life. I had never had any near death events.
Speaker 1: Are you afraid of death? After hearing so many.
Speaker 3: No, I'm not. But I can't say that I was
Speaker 3: ever afraid of death before I got into this work either.
Speaker 3: As far as I could tell, death was the end,
Speaker 3: and what's to be afraid of? You just don't exist anymore.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't surprised. This wasn't a frightening thing. I
Speaker 3: don't think that's true anymore. After talking to thousands of
Speaker 3: people who claim to have died and still persisted in
Speaker 3: some form, I think that there is something after the
Speaker 3: body dies. I don't know what it is, you know,
Speaker 3: most of them say, I can't describe what it is
Speaker 3: for you, And then they go ahead and use metaphors.
Speaker 3: But I don't take those metaphors literally because they're adjust
Speaker 3: that they're metaphors, And I don't think, I don't think
Speaker 3: we have the words where the brain power to understand
Speaker 3: what it's like after you die.
Speaker 1: Right, there's still so much obviously that science doesn't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, the internet's very new, electricity is very new,
Speaker 1: indoor plumbing's relatively new. But what do we know or
Speaker 1: where wet with understanding consciousness?
Speaker 3: Wow, that's a good question, a big one. Sorry, we
Speaker 3: are really at ground zero. Most doctors are taught that
Speaker 3: the mind is what the brain does, that all our
Speaker 3: thoughts and feelings and perceptions are created by the brain.
Speaker 3: And if you ask them, well how does do that?
Speaker 3: They have no idea. How does a chemical or physical
Speaker 3: electrical change in the brain create a thought? No one
Speaker 3: has the slightest hint of a suggestion of an idea
Speaker 3: of how we might go about answering that question as
Speaker 3: a total black hole.
Speaker 1: So speaking of black holes, more on cosmology in a bit,
Speaker 1: But first, can I ask you some questions from listeners?
Speaker 1: Sure they have great ones. Also, we donate to a
Speaker 1: charity of your choosing, a related charity. So just let
Speaker 1: us know if there's one that comes to mind, and
Speaker 1: then we'll shout them out and tell listeners what they're
Speaker 1: all about.
Speaker 3: Well, what comes to mind ali is the International Association
Speaker 3: for Near Death Studies that i ADS dot org, which
Speaker 3: is a five oh one C three nonprofit organization.
Speaker 1: That's great, that's absolutely perfect, Well, donate in your name.
Speaker 6: Good.
Speaker 1: So this five oh one C three org promotes multidisciplinary
Speaker 1: exploration of near death and similar experiences and their effects
Speaker 1: on people's lives, and they publish a peer reviewed scholarly journal.
Speaker 1: They sponsor conferences, they work with the media, and they
Speaker 1: encourage regional support groups for experiencers and people close to them,
Speaker 1: healthcare professionals and educators. So to find out more about
Speaker 1: the International Association for Near Death Studies, you can go
Speaker 1: to IADS dot org, which will be linked in the
Speaker 1: show notes. And that donation was made possible by sponsors
Speaker 1: at the show. Okay, I am dying to know what
Speaker 1: you asked, So thanks to patrons at patreon dot com
Speaker 1: slash ologies for submitting questions before we recorded, and the
Speaker 1: folks at the BFFTR are for submitting audio questions. Now,
Speaker 1: many folks had chemical queries such as Asa Brillard, Mish
Speaker 1: the Phish, Holly Giorgio Dundan, Amanda lask Pavka thirty four,
Speaker 1: Doug Pace, Suzanna Capucco Interstitial okay, and first time question
Speaker 1: askers Malia Associate and Rachel Pristeko and Lauren Okay some questions.
Speaker 1: Lauren from California wanted to know.
Speaker 6: My question is about chemicals released by the brain during
Speaker 6: near death experiences. I read about a study done on
Speaker 6: rats that measured their serotonin levels upon dying, and I'm
Speaker 6: wondering if there are any studies to try to determine
Speaker 6: what other chemicals might be released by the brain in
Speaker 6: addition to serotonin.
Speaker 3: That's a difficult question because we're all talking about speculation.
Speaker 3: We don't have data on this. We do know that
Speaker 3: endorphins are produced under stress, and presumably they would be
Speaker 3: when you're approaching death as well, and endorphins produced a
Speaker 3: sense of euphoria. The so called runners high is a
Speaker 3: endorphin effect, but that's one of dozens and dozens of
Speaker 3: chemicals that are produced by the brain under stress, and
Speaker 3: it's hard to know which ones are causing which effects.
Speaker 3: If it's associated within the JETH experience, that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 3: mean is causing the experience. It may be having an
Speaker 3: effect on the brain that gets that out of the
Speaker 3: way so you can go ahead and experience this.
Speaker 1: So in his book after Bruce further explains that if
Speaker 1: near death experiences are not associated with medications given to people,
Speaker 1: might they be related to chemicals produced by people in crisis.
Speaker 1: He says, we know that our brains produce or release
Speaker 1: a number of chemicals to help the body cope under stress.
Speaker 1: The chemicals he thought might be most likely to be
Speaker 1: associated with NDEs or endorphins, the feel good hormones that
Speaker 1: produce a runner's high and that are known to reduce
Speaker 1: pain and stress, and he writes that other scientists have
Speaker 1: suggested that NDEs might be connected to serotonin, adrenaline, phasocrescin,
Speaker 1: and glutamate, all of which are chemicals that transmit signals
Speaker 1: between nerve cells. But he writes, in spite of the
Speaker 1: theoretical reasons for thinking that brain chemicals might be involved
Speaker 1: in endes, at this point, there's been no research looking
Speaker 1: into this possibility, and he says, I don't expect any
Speaker 1: such research to be done in the near future. Bursts
Speaker 1: of these chemicals in the brain tend to be very
Speaker 1: short lived and localized, so in order to find them,
Speaker 1: we'd have to look at exactly the right time, at
Speaker 1: exactly the right place in the brain. And he writes,
Speaker 1: as I discovered, we don't even know where in the
Speaker 1: brain to look, so yeah, surprise, we don't know. Katie
Speaker 1: from Glasgow and Scotland wanted to know.
Speaker 5: I was just wondering if there had been any kind
Speaker 5: of research done into people's experiences and specifically kind of
Speaker 5: memory a loss in an intensive care or a critical.
Speaker 7: Care department in hospital. I work as a research nurse
Speaker 7: and I remember vividly speaking to someone who is taking
Speaker 7: part in one of our drug drials during the first
Speaker 7: wave of the COVID pandemic, and although they were actually
Speaker 7: conscious kind of protracted periods during their stay in intensive care,
Speaker 7: when I was speaking with them afterwards, they said that
Speaker 7: the only thing that they really remembered about it was
Speaker 7: this person with pink hair being obsessed with the time.
Speaker 8: And we figured out it was because of when myself
Speaker 8: and what other research colleagues were in and we were,
Speaker 8: you know, shouting out times of each other of like.
Speaker 7: Infusion starting and stopping, and blood samples getting taken and
Speaker 7: things like that, and it.
Speaker 8: Just seemed like a really odd of all the things
Speaker 8: to have stuck it in mind during that period, was
Speaker 8: someone shouting the time at each other.
Speaker 1: It was very odd and wanted to know how auditory
Speaker 1: retention is affected by in near death experience. I understand
Speaker 1: that when you're dying, that's maybe the last sense to go.
Speaker 1: Do you hear people who hear things a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Generally speaking vision goes first and hearing is the
Speaker 3: last thing to go. But there have been studies where
Speaker 3: people had blocks put in their ears so they wouldn't
Speaker 3: be able to hear anything they hash, and actually had
Speaker 3: molded speakers put in the ears that would emit a
Speaker 3: loud burst so you could measure from the brain when
Speaker 3: the brain was responding to these clicks. And then when
Speaker 3: the brain stops spawning, you know they're totally anesthetized. And
Speaker 3: even in such circumstances, people have vivid memories of hearing
Speaker 3: and seeing things in the operating room after an near
Speaker 3: death experience, so it's hard to say what is preserved
Speaker 3: and what's not preserved. As someone is dying because we
Speaker 3: don't have to measure don't have a measure of how
Speaker 3: dead someone is, how close to death someone is. Now
Speaker 3: there have been a couple of reports of people who
Speaker 3: are actually pronounced it and left in a morgue for
Speaker 3: a couple of days before they recovered to tell a
Speaker 3: near death experience, and that those are another another problem
Speaker 3: how we deal how to deal with those people?
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you get a lawyer? Is that
Speaker 1: a malpractice? Soon you thought I was dead? Still alive?
Speaker 1: Have they ever found anything that is similar across other cases,
Speaker 1: because that sounds like the worst nightmare ever.
Speaker 3: To be honest, Yes, yes, I mean these people are
Speaker 3: usually not inclined to sue. They come back with a
Speaker 3: sense of weirrell in this together. That's a good Point'll
Speaker 3: be very forgiving.
Speaker 1: I looked to find these rare cases, these really macabb
Speaker 1: were fates, and I went belonging into deep research, only
Speaker 1: to discover right away that y'all, this happens all the time,
Speaker 1: all the time. Here are some choice bits from some
Speaker 1: somewhat recent news stories. You're ready, Iowa, a funeral home
Speaker 1: employee reportedly unzipped the bag, saw the woman's chest moving,
Speaker 1: and the woman gasped for air. Mississippi funeral workers find
Speaker 1: a man alive and kicking when they open a body
Speaker 1: bag Brazil, the crematorium staffer who went to collect the
Speaker 1: deceased patient opened the bag and noticed that their body
Speaker 1: was still warm and not yet showing rigor mortis. Poland
Speaker 1: a woman wakes up feeling very cold, only to realize
Speaker 1: she was in the morgue's cold storage. So yes, declared
Speaker 1: dead but still alive, the most bittersweet of mistakes. I
Speaker 1: have a lot of feelings about this, and one of
Speaker 1: them is that if you're given a second chance at
Speaker 1: life and they have to rip up your death certificate,
Speaker 1: do you want to spend the time on Earth giving
Speaker 1: depositions and filing lawsuit paperwork in a courthouse. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Most near death experiences come back embracing what we call
Speaker 3: the golden rule, you know, treat other people the way
Speaker 3: you want them to treat you, which is a part
Speaker 3: of every religion we have. But for these people who
Speaker 3: have a near death experience, they say, for them, it's
Speaker 3: no longer a goal we're supposed to follow guideline. It's
Speaker 3: a lot of the universe they've experienced this in their
Speaker 3: near death experience, and they know that when you hurt someone,
Speaker 3: you can't avoid hurting yourself as well, and when you
Speaker 3: help other people, you're helping yourself as well.
Speaker 1: That seems like a huge paradigm shift in what we're
Speaker 1: taught culturally.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 1: This next question is from Denoah, who hails from the
Speaker 1: land of northwest Florida.
Speaker 4: Hello, Dad, would I was wondering are there any cultures
Speaker 4: current or past that have incorporated a near death experience
Speaker 4: into some kind of.
Speaker 1: Ritual anything like that that you know have.
Speaker 3: We don't have good evidence of this, but some of
Speaker 3: the ancient Egyptian and Greek mystery religions would either put
Speaker 3: people into drug induced trances or in each actually bury
Speaker 3: them for a day or so to try to induce
Speaker 3: this type of experience, and often those people were then
Speaker 3: hailed as seers or shamans after they came out of this,
Speaker 3: if they survived. Now, there are accounts in Tibet of
Speaker 3: people who have come back from death. They call them dialogs,
Speaker 3: and they are revered, but it's not done as part
Speaker 3: of our ritual. It's just they happen to have this
Speaker 3: and then they are revered us as knowledge people.
Speaker 1: I mean it does have some cachet I'm not going
Speaker 1: why Yes, I'm like, that's pretty cool, tell me everything.
Speaker 1: And also just the victory of defeating death in the
Speaker 1: first round, exactly. Yeah. What about age? Tarina, Grace Robischow,
Speaker 1: and Donald Merritt wanted to know if, in Grace's words,
Speaker 1: does the rate of near death experiences go down after
Speaker 1: teenage years? Tarina wants to know do children have them?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Most of the cases that we have looked at
Speaker 3: are in older people, because those are the ones who
Speaker 3: come close to death more frequently. But there happened in
Speaker 3: a number of studies of children having near death experiences,
Speaker 3: and they are generally the same as those of adults,
Speaker 3: with one exception, actually more than one, to say it,
Speaker 3: but they tend not to have the elaborate life review
Speaker 3: that older people do. They haven't that much of a
Speaker 3: life to review, and they tend not to see a
Speaker 3: lot of deceased loved ones because they don't know a
Speaker 3: lot of people who have died as older people do.
Speaker 3: But with those two exceptions, children seem to have the
Speaker 3: same new death exp interest that adults do, including preschool
Speaker 3: children who have not really been indoctrinated into what to
Speaker 3: expect when you die.
Speaker 1: So on that note, many of you asked about astral reunions,
Speaker 1: such as Emily, Joanna Burr, Delli Dames, Raina, Alison Mueller,
Speaker 1: Ellie Schaeffer, Teddy Egelhoff, Audrey Ayres, and a first time
Speaker 1: question asker Charlotte Parkinson, who said, in the moment my
Speaker 1: dad was dying, he hadn't been able to say a
Speaker 1: word in two weeks due to being in and out
Speaker 1: of an induced coma and having brain damage. His last
Speaker 1: word was my mom's name, who had passed away years before.
Speaker 1: And then patron Cristo Jones asked, do a lot of
Speaker 1: people really have visions slash dreams during near death experiences
Speaker 1: or is that flim flam perpetuated by movies? You know
Speaker 1: a bunch of people you just mentioned seeing loved ones.
Speaker 1: I had done a lot of reading about hospice because
Speaker 1: my father passed last year, and some booklets and some
Speaker 1: guide books were like, it's not uncommon for your loved
Speaker 1: one in hospice to start talking to people who have
Speaker 1: passed away. A kind of explanation for that or any
Speaker 1: data on that you want to share.
Speaker 3: Well, when people report that in their near death experience
Speaker 3: they were greeted by deceased loved ones, that can easily
Speaker 3: be dismissed as wishful thinking or expectation. Or you think
Speaker 3: you're dying, so of course you want to have your
Speaker 3: deceased spouse or mother or father come greet you. But
Speaker 3: we have a number of well documented cases where someone
Speaker 3: claimed that in a near death experience they encountered someone
Speaker 3: who was deceased that was not yet known to have died. Oh,
Speaker 3: so there's no expectation here. And sometimes they come back
Speaker 3: telling about this, and the people around them are very
Speaker 3: disturbed because this person's still alive. They're talking about yeah,
Speaker 3: and then they find out a couple of days later
Speaker 3: and know they actually died just shortly before the person
Speaker 3: saw them.
Speaker 1: Gwen Kelly asked, I've always wondered if there's a difference
Speaker 1: in the experiences of NDEs between people who nearly died
Speaker 1: slowly versus people who had something quick or sudden, where
Speaker 1: your brain has very little time to process or react
Speaker 1: to realize, oh shit, I'm gonna die, and Trees wrote,
Speaker 1: please please just reassure me that even when people die
Speaker 1: horrifically they're dying, brains fire up in a way that
Speaker 1: makes their last moments peaceful or less terrifying. Lie if
Speaker 1: you must, in terms of a violent ER's sudden death,
Speaker 1: Have you talked to anyone who went through that who
Speaker 1: said that there was like an absence of terror or
Speaker 1: horror or.
Speaker 3: Most people report that as soon as the new death
Speaker 3: experience starts, all the pain goes away, all the fear
Speaker 3: goes away, and they become enveloped by this blissful feeling
Speaker 3: of peace and well being and being initially accepted. Now
Speaker 3: I have to say that there are some new death
Speaker 3: experiences that are not pleasant. We don't really know how
Speaker 3: many there are. Most people who have studied this find
Speaker 3: that about ten percent are not pleasant. But again, we're
Speaker 3: dealing with people who voluntarily talk to us about this,
Speaker 3: and I can imagine that people who have an unpleasant
Speaker 3: near death experience are less willing to talk about it
Speaker 3: than other people. As to why that might happen, we
Speaker 3: don't know. I've known people who were in prison for
Speaker 3: life for murder who had beautiful near death experiences when
Speaker 3: they had a heart attack in prison, and were certainly
Speaker 3: have a lot of writings by Catholic saints over the
Speaker 3: centuries describing their dark night of the soul when they
Speaker 3: have terrifying mystical experiences. So we don't really know. What
Speaker 3: we do know, though, is that people who have frightening
Speaker 3: near death experiences also come back feeling they're no longer
Speaker 3: afraid of death as they were before, and they come
Speaker 3: back saying, even though I had a bad experience, I
Speaker 3: was sent back so I can change my life and
Speaker 3: now have a better, better death next time.
Speaker 1: Oh, like a little bit of a do over.
Speaker 3: Exactly, I was given a second chance.
Speaker 1: H Well, I mean, I guess that's hopeful if you're
Speaker 1: out there being a dick.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A few people hen Mari Everhart, Jessica Carichara, and Clayton
Speaker 1: Harding wanted to know about the sealing experiments about putting
Speaker 1: things up on a shelf high up in the room
Speaker 1: of patients. Can you tell me at all about designing
Speaker 1: and conducting those experiments?
Speaker 3: Sure? Sure, Well. There have been numerous anecdotes about people
Speaker 3: who claim to have seen things accurately from an out
Speaker 3: of body perspective. Jan Holden at the University of North
Speaker 3: Texas actually looked at almost one hundred of these cases,
Speaker 3: and she found that in ninety two percent of them,
Speaker 3: what the person described is entirely accurate. In about six
Speaker 3: percent there were some little inaccuracies in it, and only
Speaker 3: one percent was it dead wrong, So the vast majority
Speaker 3: was completely accurate. So that has stimulated us to start
Speaker 3: doing experiments who replaced usually visual targets up high on
Speaker 3: a shelf in the room where people are likely to
Speaker 3: have a kardak arrest, like in the cardiac care unit,
Speaker 3: facing upwards so you can only see them from looking down.
Speaker 3: And there have been now six published studies of this
Speaker 3: type of research protocol and none of them has found
Speaker 3: anyone who claimed to have left their body and seen
Speaker 3: the target, So it doesn't tell us yes or no,
Speaker 3: can they really do it because no one claimed to
Speaker 3: have tried to do it.
Speaker 1: So I found their study with the protocol which said
Speaker 1: an Apple Macintosh Pismo power Book laptop computer was placed
Speaker 1: above eye level in the procedure room so that the
Speaker 1: computer screen faced the ceiling and the surface was approximately
Speaker 1: six feet above the patient, and on the screen were
Speaker 1: randomly selected animations which might involve a floating butterfly or
Speaker 1: fireworks or a jumping frog, and the results were disappointing,
Speaker 1: and Bruce says that the struggle in this kind of
Speaker 1: science is that so much of the evidence is anecdotal.
Speaker 1: Plus these patients were under heavy sedation, so that may
Speaker 1: have been a factor.
Speaker 3: When I talked about this to New Death experience is
Speaker 3: they just laugh. They say, if you're having a new
Speaker 3: death experience at your body for the first time, watching
Speaker 3: your body being resussitated, are you going to look around
Speaker 3: the room for some target you didn't know was there
Speaker 3: and then try to remember it? You know, I think
Speaker 3: it's just a ludicrous thing to try.
Speaker 1: I wasn't paying attention. This is a good point. That
Speaker 1: would probably be the least interesting thing happening in the
Speaker 1: room right. For more on this, you can see his
Speaker 1: study with doctor Holden and doctor Paul mountc titled with
Speaker 1: Honesty and Chagrin, Failure to elicit Near death Experiences and
Speaker 1: Induced cardiac arrest. So actual scientists are doing the actual
Speaker 1: work to see what's up and all the ceiling as
Speaker 1: far as flim flam and debunkery. So yes, we have
Speaker 1: no good scientific data from controlled experiments to verify the
Speaker 1: people's consciousness dips out and just takes a gander from
Speaker 1: the top. I'm sorry, y'all. Now, on the topic of
Speaker 1: consciousness in the universe, Matt Soccato, Chris Curious, Rob Lara,
Speaker 1: and Sharon had questions and they're not alone. Tiger Gary says,
Speaker 1: I saw a presentation by a Caltech professor that consciousness
Speaker 1: and unconsciousness was partially controlled by the quantum state of
Speaker 1: atoms in the brain. Have you had to talk to
Speaker 1: any theoretical physicists or anything like that about this.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a challenging area because it's all speculation. We
Speaker 3: don't have any ways of measuring these quantum fluctuations in
Speaker 3: the brain. Stuart Hamroff, an anesthesiologists in Arizona, and Roger Penrose,
Speaker 3: a physicist in England, have collaborated on a theory to
Speaker 3: explain conscientenness on this way, and they talk about microtubules
Speaker 3: in the atoms in the brain that can have quantum effects,
Speaker 3: but they don't explain how that can produce a thought
Speaker 3: or a feeling. Again, you're dealing with a physical event
Speaker 3: and trying to figure out how that creates a thought
Speaker 3: or a feeling, and there's a gap that they haven't
Speaker 3: really crossed.
Speaker 1: If you're thirsty for more on this, you can center
Speaker 1: yourself down a cyber hole about orchestrated objective reduction, a
Speaker 1: hypothesis that came onto the scene in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties via a noble laureate in physics and an anesthesiologist.
Speaker 1: And I'll read you a snippet from your friend Workipedia
Speaker 1: who told me. Orchestrated objective reduction or or or worst nickname,
Speaker 1: it's the worst is a theory which postulates that consciousness
Speaker 1: originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the
Speaker 1: conventional view of the connections between the neurons. And this
Speaker 1: mechanism is held to be a quantum process orchestrated by
Speaker 1: cellular structures called microtubules, which are subneuronal cytoskeleton components or
Speaker 1: protein filaments inside ourselves. And it's proposed that the theory
Speaker 1: may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a
Speaker 1: mechanism for free will. So, just when you think you
Speaker 1: know yourself, someone throws quantum cidoskeleton brain microtubules you and
Speaker 1: you're back wondering how you're a bloba molecules that loves
Speaker 1: a cat.
Speaker 3: For the most part, physicists are very divided about whether
Speaker 3: quantum physics can really have anything to do with consciousness
Speaker 3: or not. The original people who developed quantum physics one
Speaker 3: hundred years ago came to the conclusion that physical matter
Speaker 3: doesn't really exist, that consciousness is everything, and unless consciousness
Speaker 3: looks at the universe, it doesn't exist, and when you
Speaker 3: look at it, then it comes into creation. And later
Speaker 3: physicists said that's totally ridiculous. So most physicists today are
Speaker 3: split about whether that's true or not, and they tend
Speaker 3: to deal with it by saying quantum physics is not
Speaker 3: a description of reality. It's a mathematical formula that lets
Speaker 3: us predict how things are going to turn out, but
Speaker 3: it's not a literal description of reality.
Speaker 1: There's so many exciting things that people will know. How
Speaker 1: should we die?
Speaker 3: More physicists now say that the visible matter that we
Speaker 3: can see is five percent of the matter in the universe,
Speaker 3: and is dark matter that we should have no idea that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I talked to a dark matter expert about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how can you possibly think we understand the world
Speaker 3: if that's true?
Speaker 1: I know. I asked him if dark matter could be
Speaker 1: ghosts and be honest with me without having to name names.
Speaker 1: How many astrophysicists out there think that dark matter might
Speaker 1: be ghosts?
Speaker 2: What if dark matter as ghosts?
Speaker 1: What if dark energy as ghosts? What if it's all ghosts.
Speaker 1: What if we're swimming in ghosts?
Speaker 4: There is something to be said about maybe dark matter
Speaker 4: is something much more exciting than particles. And there are
Speaker 4: theories where the dark matter plural could form dark atoms,
Speaker 4: just like you have protons and electrons. Maybe have something
Speaker 4: like a dark proton and a dark electron that we
Speaker 4: can't see, but they can see each other, and those
Speaker 4: form dark atoms, and then it's not hard to imagine, well,
Speaker 4: those dark atoms could have dark chemistry, that dark chemistry
Speaker 4: can form dark life, that dark life could Maybe it's
Speaker 4: an entire sention civilization living in our dark matter halo
Speaker 4: where are galaxy is sitting and we just don't realize it.
Speaker 4: But because there is five times more of them than
Speaker 4: there is us, we are the ghosts. Oh, we're weird,
Speaker 4: the weird thing.
Speaker 1: Wow, oh my gosh. And he said, well, if there
Speaker 1: are ghosts, we are the ghosts in the dark matter universe.
Speaker 1: It's good wild. So that was doctor Flip to Nato,
Speaker 1: who's a theoretical particle physicist from the Scoto Hilology episode
Speaker 1: and a real gem but from dark matter to white light.
Speaker 1: Some folks including Tom Boudrey, Avery Laway, Matt Herschel, Mark Phillips,
Speaker 1: and Nde Havers, Jen Squirrel, Alvarez, Is Ebert and Schlee
Speaker 1: Schwinghammer had brightly burning questions. So many people, including first
Speaker 1: time question asker Shlee Schwinghammer, wanted to know why is
Speaker 1: it the color white that people tend to see? And
Speaker 1: a ton of people wanted to know about the light
Speaker 1: in the tunnel? Is it just a Hollywood trope? Or
Speaker 1: in Devon's words, are there any theories about the bright light,
Speaker 1: anything that might be causing ma or like a flood
Speaker 1: in the retina or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, there have been people who try to explain
Speaker 3: this in terms of the physiology of the brain. And
Speaker 3: as the brain starts shutting down, you have left less oxygen.
Speaker 3: The outer edge of your visual field tends to go dark,
Speaker 3: and what you left with is a small light area
Speaker 3: in the center. That's not what people see in a
Speaker 3: n death experience. They don't see just a smaller and
Speaker 3: smaller section of light in the middle. They tend to
Speaker 3: see the tunnel. They can see on the outside of
Speaker 3: the tunnel, they can see around it. So it's not
Speaker 3: like you're just having a small visual field getting smaller
Speaker 3: and smaller. It's like you're seeing a tunnel in your
Speaker 3: visual field. Ah, it's not the same thing at all. Now,
Speaker 3: I will say that you see tunnels in a lot
Speaker 3: of other experiences as well, besides death experiences. And some
Speaker 3: people think that the tunnel is not an integral part
Speaker 3: of a near death experience. It's the way we have
Speaker 3: retroactively of explaining how we got from this physical world
Speaker 3: to the other world of the near death experience. I'm here,
Speaker 3: that I'm there, How did I get there? I don't
Speaker 3: know what was it? Gone through a tunnel?
Speaker 1: Ah, So it's it's a mode of transport.
Speaker 3: It is. And I'll say that here again we're dealing
Speaker 3: with metaphors. Most people here in the US will talk
Speaker 3: about a tunnel. People in countries where there aren't a
Speaker 3: lot of tunnels will not say that. They'll say I
Speaker 3: went through a cave or I fell into a well.
Speaker 3: I talked to one person here who's a truck driver,
Speaker 3: who said I got sucked into this long cowpipe whatever,
Speaker 3: metaphor comes to you, is what you use to describe
Speaker 3: this long, dark and closed space.
Speaker 1: Do you have a lot of truck drivers that have
Speaker 1: near death experiences because of highway crashes?
Speaker 3: And yes, yes, yes, people of all types who come
Speaker 3: close to death from all different ways have the same
Speaker 3: types of near death experience.
Speaker 1: Of course, I had to look this up, and I
Speaker 1: know a lot of you listening out there are on
Speaker 1: a long haul, maybe at the helm of an eighteen wheeler.
Speaker 1: So yes, Tragically, life expectancy in that profession is sixty
Speaker 1: one years old, seventeen years shorter than the national average,
Speaker 1: and it's not due to accidents, but rather the majority
Speaker 1: of y'all hauling rigs tend to be men who have
Speaker 1: shorter life spans overall, and according to some CDC studies,
Speaker 1: many truckers struggle with a poor work and life balance,
Speaker 1: which can contribute to stress. And due to all these
Speaker 1: pressures to do these long hours, the average amount of
Speaker 1: sleep is several hours less per night than other professions,
Speaker 1: and access to a healthy diet on the road is
Speaker 1: also harder, as is the sedentary nature of the job.
Speaker 1: But doctors say that you can keep your job and
Speaker 1: your health by packing fresh or healthier food. If you can,
Speaker 1: try to get in forty minutes of activity a day
Speaker 1: if possible. Some truckers keep a set of weights in
Speaker 1: their cab to use well. Loading and unloading is happening
Speaker 1: in the back. So ask a doc about a sleep study,
Speaker 1: because many long haulers have sleep apnea, and a CEPAP
Speaker 1: machine can really improve your sleep and the levels of
Speaker 1: alertness and fatigue. And my grandpa, Walter Willis Ward was
Speaker 1: a trucker and he lived a jolly active life until
Speaker 1: his nineties, and then one day he collapsed buck naked,
Speaker 1: and when they resuscitate him, he seemed disappointed and slammed
Speaker 1: his fist on his hospital meal tray and said, I'm
Speaker 1: ninety two years old, let me go already. So perhaps
Speaker 1: what lay beyond was too tempting. He died not too
Speaker 1: long thereafter, and he was, as people said politely in
Speaker 1: those days, a real firecracker. Now, speaking of you know
Speaker 1: Meghan Walker MB and Clayton Harding wanted to know, in
Speaker 1: Meghan's words, to people who have near death experiences scored
Speaker 1: differently on personality scales from people who don't have them,
Speaker 1: or before and after.
Speaker 3: Well, we don't really have before and after measures of
Speaker 3: all of these people, so it's hard to say whether
Speaker 3: they scored differently on tests. Now say that they are
Speaker 3: very different, and when you talk to their friends and family,
Speaker 3: they describe, oh, yes, this is not the same person
Speaker 3: I used to know. Is totally different now really, And
Speaker 3: one way they're different is that they're much more relaxed
Speaker 3: about life. They tend not to be as controlling or
Speaker 3: as obsessive about things. They tend not to be worried
Speaker 3: about earning more money or having more power and fame
Speaker 3: and prestige. Those things aren't important to them anymore.
Speaker 1: Are they more likable?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 3: That beens That's a good question. It sounds like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, it sounds like they're wonderful ways to be
Speaker 3: more compassionate. But it actually is very difficult for their
Speaker 3: families sometimes to tolerate these changes. You know, imagine if
Speaker 3: one member of a family suddenly as their religious conversion
Speaker 3: of the other ones don't. They don't see eye to
Speaker 3: eye on things anymore, and there have been a number
Speaker 3: of divorces because of this. Families sometimes don't accept the changes.
Speaker 3: I've known parents who are very puzzled by their children
Speaker 3: suddenly changing personalities after a near death experience, and I
Speaker 3: should say sometimes that the experience for himself or ourself
Speaker 3: gets very upset when they find themselves back here in
Speaker 3: this world when they don't want to be, and they
Speaker 3: sometimes can get very angry or sad for a while.
Speaker 1: Imagine being bummed to be not dead. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: sadly probably a lot of us have had days where
Speaker 1: that's relatable and just a little content warning for the
Speaker 1: next two or three minutes, we do discuss death by
Speaker 1: suicide and doctor Grayson has found that about a quarter
Speaker 1: of people who survive a suicide attempt report having a
Speaker 1: near death experience. So what is he found through his
Speaker 1: research and decades of experience in emergency psychiatry. We did
Speaker 1: have two questions related to suicide. Scala Borealis and Audrey Keen.
Speaker 1: Skellusaid I remember reading somewhere that a huge percentage of
Speaker 1: people that survive suicide attempts regretted at the second that
Speaker 1: they say jumped.
Speaker 3: I'm glad this came up because as a psychiatrist, when
Speaker 3: I first heard decades ago the neo death experiences are
Speaker 3: no longer afraid of dying, I was worried that I
Speaker 3: was going to make people more suicidal, So I started
Speaker 3: a study of this. I looked at people who were
Speaker 3: admitted to my hospital with a suicide attempt, and I
Speaker 3: compared those who had a near death experience as a
Speaker 3: result of the suicide attempt with those who didn't. And
Speaker 3: what I found was that those who had a near
Speaker 3: death experience tended to be much less suicidal afterwards than
Speaker 3: those who didn't have a near death experience. And I
Speaker 3: tried to ask them, why, why is this, If you're
Speaker 3: not afraid of dying anymore, why are you less suicidal now?
Speaker 3: And they said a couple of things. They said, well,
Speaker 3: now I understand that there's a meaning and purpose to
Speaker 3: everything I go through in life. And the problems that
Speaker 3: used to make me run away from life, now I
Speaker 3: realized they're there for me to learn from and to
Speaker 3: grow from. There are challenges for me, nothing they need
Speaker 3: to run away from. And they also say again that
Speaker 3: if you're not afraid of dying, then you're not afraid
Speaker 3: of living either, and you can enjoy life much more
Speaker 3: than you did before.
Speaker 1: That's a beautiful thought, and it's something that I wonder
Speaker 1: how much of it is cultural in terms of the
Speaker 1: way that we live, sometimes disconnected from family members, disconnected
Speaker 1: from nature, from you know, sun dawn and dust cycles,
Speaker 1: all the ways that we were not part of the earth.
Speaker 3: Right I think. I think in our society there's been
Speaker 3: a market movement away from organized religion in recent decades,
Speaker 3: and that's made a lot of people less spiritual and
Speaker 3: more invested in the physical world, which doesn't usually produce
Speaker 3: the same type of satisfaction that spiritual developments used to.
Speaker 3: So I think you're saying a lot more people striving
Speaker 3: for some spiritual connection that used to come from from religions.
Speaker 3: Now we have to look for where we're going to
Speaker 3: get it from, and near death experiences do give that
Speaker 3: to people.
Speaker 1: Okay, big question here, what is the difference between being
Speaker 1: spiritual or religious? Because just having spirit in the word
Speaker 1: spiritual is kind of ick giving for some of us.
Speaker 1: So I asked science and I found a nugget in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen paper Spirituality slash Religiosity a Cultural and
Speaker 1: psychological resource among Sub Saharan African migrant women with HIV
Speaker 1: AIDS in Belgium, which, drawing on a two thousand and
Speaker 1: two paper in the Journal of Advanced nursing titled Towards
Speaker 1: Clarification of the Meaning of Spirituality. The former paper many
Speaker 1: many paragraphs in happened to say spirituality and religion are
Speaker 1: often used interchangeably, but the two concepts are different. Some
Speaker 1: authors contend that spirituality involves a personal quest for a
Speaker 1: meaning in life, while religion involves an organized entity with
Speaker 1: rituals and practices focusing on a higher power or God.
Speaker 1: Spirituality may be related to religion for certain individuals, but
Speaker 1: not for example an atheist or yoga practitioner. Do you
Speaker 1: ever come upon friction of that in the field? In
Speaker 1: terms of can as scientists be spiritual? Can you find
Speaker 1: your spirituality just from looking at a b on a
Speaker 1: flower or does it have to be something more like metaphysical?
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't have to be more more than that.
Speaker 3: You know, people from from Einstein to Carl Segen said
Speaker 3: that their science is a spiritual endeavor. And I think
Speaker 3: most atheists would say they do feel they're part of
Speaker 3: something weirder than themselves. That may mean they're part of
Speaker 3: some a family or a larger plan or a group
Speaker 3: of atheists, but they feel like there's something that they're
Speaker 3: attached to, something that's beyond themselves, which is a form
Speaker 3: of spirituality.
Speaker 1: So I asked Twitter aka x and also blue Sky
Speaker 1: if any atheists or agnostics wanted to weigh in on
Speaker 1: if spirituality was a part of their lives, because I
Speaker 1: still wondered what it meant for different people, especially those
Speaker 1: of us who were raised with religious dogma that we disliked.
Speaker 1: And I got some answers from some non religious folks,
Speaker 1: so many I will read you just if you. Rob said,
Speaker 1: the most spiritual experience I had was standing at fossilized
Speaker 1: tetrapod footprints on Ireland's Atlantic coast, staring out at the
Speaker 1: ocean and realizing that those prints were made at a
Speaker 1: time when the East coast of North America was still
Speaker 1: connected to Ireland. Was very awe inspiring, and Mads said,
Speaker 1: I define spirituality as anything that reminds me that I'm
Speaker 1: part of everything that has and will ever happen, and
Speaker 1: that it's all a part of me. Ideas, experiences and
Speaker 1: people that make us feel like we belong to an
Speaker 1: existence as large and as strange as the universe are
Speaker 1: all quite spiritual, and David Attenborough said when I access
Speaker 1: spiritual moments, they are often in the quiet of my mind,
Speaker 1: in moments of song and joy, in luck, and in
Speaker 1: the sharing of food. Anthro Andrew said, anthropologist. Here, I
Speaker 1: got to say that you can be spiritual without being religious.
Speaker 1: A spiritual experience can happen without one knowing, even such
Speaker 1: as with the whales I study, invoking a deeply emotional response.
Speaker 1: Rachel Lenz said, I'm an atheist, but I would also
Speaker 1: consider myself spiritual. To me, spirituality is more of an
Speaker 1: emotional state than anything metaphysical. It's slowing down, learning to
Speaker 1: revel in, awe and wonder. It's appreciating things at scales
Speaker 1: billions of times larger, longer, smaller, or deeper, the magnitude
Speaker 1: of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of nature, the infinitesimally small
Speaker 1: building blocks of the universe. To me, spirituality is love
Speaker 1: and poetry.
Speaker 3: We like that.
Speaker 1: El Zwiebel and many others wanted to know why does
Speaker 1: time seem to slow down in those precious moments when
Speaker 1: one is flirting with mortality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. There have been other
Speaker 3: studies of time slowing down in crisis situations that don't
Speaker 3: involve new death experiences, and it does seem to be
Speaker 3: something that we do to ourselves to try to help
Speaker 3: us deal with a crisis situation. If you slow time down,
Speaker 3: then you've got more time to figure out how do
Speaker 3: I get out of this. One person described to me
Speaker 3: he was up on a ladder cleaning out as his
Speaker 3: gutters and he fell, and he said, as I was falling,
Speaker 3: time seemed to slow way down, and almost so I
Speaker 3: was able to see how I need to twist around
Speaker 3: to land in the bushes rather than on the pavement.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: And you hear that again and again from people who
Speaker 3: are in crisis situations, that time slows down and allows
Speaker 3: them to think. Not only does time slow down, but
Speaker 3: their thinking speeds up, so it helps them survive the
Speaker 3: near death event. Now, having said that, many near death
Speaker 3: experiences say it wasn't just time slowing down. Time did
Speaker 3: not exist in that other realm, and they realized that
Speaker 3: what we think of as linear time is an artifact
Speaker 3: of being in a physical world, that it doesn't exist
Speaker 3: outside this physical realm.
Speaker 1: It sounds so cozy. That's a cozy place to be.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 1: It is makes me less afraid. So, according to a
Speaker 1: letter published in the Journal of Near Dusk, studies bearing
Speaker 1: the headline did NDEs play a seminal role in the
Speaker 1: formulation of Einstein's theory of relativity. It explains that apparently
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein once saw a man fall off a rooftop
Speaker 1: in Berlin. In The man survived and later told Einstein
Speaker 1: that while falling, he did not feel gravity, which may
Speaker 1: have suggested new ideas of looking at the universe to
Speaker 1: young Einstein. Let's go back a little further, though. Einstein
Speaker 1: went to a polytechnic institute in Zurich at the age
Speaker 1: of sixteen, which was in eighteen ninety five, just after
Speaker 1: Albert Heim fell off that cliff in the Swiss Alps.
Speaker 1: What are the chances that a professor of geology who
Speaker 1: wrote about time and space seeming to slow down and
Speaker 1: expand would be in the same city as a young Einstein. Well,
Speaker 1: hang on to your hats, because Albert Heim was a
Speaker 1: professor of young Einstein. So the two Alberts knew each other,
Speaker 1: studied together, and likely swapped stories of time, expansion and gravity.
Speaker 1: And in fact, two years before Einstein's death, he penned
Speaker 1: a letter to his former professor telling him that his
Speaker 1: lectures were quote magical, What a world, and for more
Speaker 1: on quantum physics and the nature of the universe and
Speaker 1: gravity and black holes in space and time, you can
Speaker 1: see the quantum ontology episode with astrophysicist doctor Adam Becker,
Speaker 1: who wrote the book What Is Real, and we'll link
Speaker 1: that in an episode on cosmology, and one on dark
Speaker 1: matter on astrobiology, and one with two UFO experts in
Speaker 1: their show notes because the fuck gosh, there's so much
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly. Last listener question, A bunch of
Speaker 1: people wanted to know looking at you, Derek Pelloquin, River
Speaker 1: Rowan Stone and Helen Demarcio, if you have thoughts on
Speaker 1: the Netflix show, Oa, Dorritt said, what do you think
Speaker 1: of it? There's so much flim flam, They're sure, but
Speaker 1: have you heard of that?
Speaker 4: Oa?
Speaker 1: I think that they use near death experiences for research.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it, but maybe you have.
Speaker 3: I have not. I have not, but there have been
Speaker 3: so many television shows and movies going back decades when
Speaker 3: there was that movie Flat Liners about medical students who
Speaker 3: tried to put themselves at a carnac arrest, and a
Speaker 3: lot of them are based on real information but take
Speaker 3: off their fiction. They take off in moral sensationalized ways
Speaker 3: that end up doing damage to the real facts about
Speaker 3: our new death experience?
Speaker 1: Is anyone doing it right?
Speaker 3: Yes? There are some Gosh, going way back decades, there
Speaker 3: was a movie Resurrection that did a very good job
Speaker 3: not only of the new death experience itself, but how
Speaker 3: people are changed after the experience.
Speaker 6: I'm doctor Harin, welcome back.
Speaker 1: And then of course for reading there's your book, which
Speaker 1: I feel like if you're going to read a book
Speaker 1: about near death experiences, read after well, thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: and last questions. I always ask, Obviously, there's got to
Speaker 1: be something about your job that sucks. There has to
Speaker 1: be the hardest thing about it. What is difficult about
Speaker 1: what you do?
Speaker 3: I think the most difficult thing about it for me
Speaker 3: is trying to get my head around it. Because I
Speaker 3: was raised as a scientist thinking that we're going to
Speaker 3: be able to understand everything, and I've confronted a lot
Speaker 3: of things now that I don't think we can understand
Speaker 3: that are beyond the ability of our brain to make
Speaker 3: sense out of and that's difficult for me, and I
Speaker 3: still that's still greats against me, and I want to
Speaker 3: try to understand things, and I haven't given up on
Speaker 3: it just becomes less and less plausible to me that
Speaker 3: we're going to understand it. But I still be tracks.
Speaker 3: I enjoy doing science.
Speaker 1: What about your favorite thing about what you study? I
Speaker 1: know that must be hard, but do you have a
Speaker 1: highlight or the thing that just still kind of gives
Speaker 1: you butterflies?
Speaker 3: What I like best about it is just talking to
Speaker 3: the people who have had these experiences, because you can't
Speaker 3: talk to them and not absorb some of this feeling
Speaker 3: of the world as a friendly place is full of
Speaker 3: unconditional love, and how can you be unhappy with that?
Speaker 1: I bet it's such a relief for them to be
Speaker 1: validated by a scientist who's collecting information and really looking
Speaker 1: at this seriously. Yes, any other myths that you want
Speaker 1: to dispel at all that you could if you could
Speaker 1: get on a soapbox, you would scream up a megaphone.
Speaker 3: Well, I want to say that these are normal experiences
Speaker 3: that happen under unusual circumstances. They are not tied with
Speaker 3: mental illness in any way. We've done studies of this
Speaker 3: and shown that people who have mental illnesses who are
Speaker 3: diagnosed with psychiatric disorders have the same number of new
Speaker 3: death experiences as everyone else, neither more nor less. And likewise,
Speaker 3: if you look at new death experiencers, they have the
Speaker 3: same rates of mental illness as people who don't have
Speaker 3: near death experiences, so it's totally independent of that they
Speaker 3: are not unusual experiences. They happen to about five percent
Speaker 3: of the general population. That's one of every twenty people.
Speaker 3: So think about people you work with, people in your classroom,
Speaker 3: people in your family, some of them have had near
Speaker 3: death experiences, and that new death experiences also lead to profound,
Speaker 3: long lasting effects that need to be addressed, both positive
Speaker 3: and negative.
Speaker 1: This has just been such a joy. I was so
Speaker 1: nervous to talk to you because what you do is
Speaker 1: so cool and you're so esteemed in this field.
Speaker 3: So honor well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to
Speaker 3: talk with you.
Speaker 1: Ali, So ask lively people deathy questions because honestly, being
Speaker 1: a live and part of the universe is just pretty
Speaker 1: wicked in a good way, and how fun to live
Speaker 1: in an era where so many mysteries remain and so
Speaker 1: many people are trying to figure it out. So I
Speaker 1: hope this episode has helped to take a deep breath,
Speaker 1: has made you ponder how science is more of a
Speaker 1: question than an answer, and has maybe made you look
Speaker 1: toward the stars or down at a worm to realize
Speaker 1: that you made it as a person on this planet.
Speaker 1: Enjoy it to fuck the bullshit. That is a poem
Speaker 1: I just wrote you. Okay, Thank you, doctor Bruce Grayson,
Speaker 1: professor emeritith, psychiatrist, quasi thanatologist, and author of the book
Speaker 1: After a Doctor explores what near death experiences reveal about
Speaker 1: life and beyond for being on and sharing your expertise
Speaker 1: with us. His info and book and the charity of
Speaker 1: Choice around linked in the show notes, as well as
Speaker 1: a link to our our website with so many more
Speaker 1: research links. Also, Bruce, I'm sorry for all the swearing.
Speaker 1: I'm not really not sorry, but thanks for putting up
Speaker 1: with it. If any of you listeners don't like episodes
Speaker 1: of swearing, feel free to enjoy asmologies, which are shorter,
Speaker 1: kid friendly versions of classic episodes, which will soon be
Speaker 1: moving to their own feed just as soon as I
Speaker 1: get my bottom together to do that. We are at
Speaker 1: Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also on blue Sky
Speaker 1: and TikTok. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com.
Speaker 1: You can join Patreon and submit questions at patreon dot com.
Speaker 1: Slash Ologies. Thank you Aaron Talbert for adminting the Ologies
Speaker 1: podcast Facebook group. Thank you to managing director Susan Hale,
Speaker 1: who steers our ship each week, scheduling producer and birthday
Speaker 1: girl this past week, Happy Happy birthday to Noel Dilworth.
Speaker 1: Emily White of The Word remakes our professional transcripts. Kelly R.
Speaker 1: Dwyer does our website and can do yours. And of course,
Speaker 1: thank you to the light at the end of each
Speaker 1: episode's tunnel. Lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick
Speaker 1: Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around to
Speaker 1: the episode ends, I tell you a secret. And this
Speaker 1: week it's putting this show together involves a whole process.
Speaker 1: It's such a process it took you to perfect. It
Speaker 1: involves color coded transcripts, shared file drives, sound effects, first
Speaker 1: and second and third and fourth past notes, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And since the beginning, I write all the
Speaker 1: aside notes in green, and then when I record them,
Speaker 1: I do a little snap or a clap on the
Speaker 1: audio file in between them so that we can see
Speaker 1: this sharp spike. And I know it's a new asside
Speaker 1: side twenty two, and then I edit the asides and
Speaker 1: move on to the next one before I send them
Speaker 1: off to Mercedes. Some episodes have like twenty asides, some
Speaker 1: have fifty. In this episode, which is about the nature
Speaker 1: of consciousness and finding personal meaning in the universe, had
Speaker 1: forty two asides before I trimmed a few. And I've
Speaker 1: never read Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, but
Speaker 1: everyone tells me I need to. But I understand that
Speaker 1: the meaning of life is supposed to be full forty two,
Speaker 1: so that might be significant for some of you. Also,
Speaker 1: please don't arrest me or my doctor for that one
Speaker 1: time that I took mushrooms to process my dad's death.
Speaker 1: That would be awesome if you did not put me
Speaker 1: in jail for that. There are so many other problems
Speaker 1: to fix, but you're doing great and I'm glad you're here. Sincerely.
Speaker 1: If things are bad, I've been there before. Please know
Speaker 1: that they can and they will get better. Deep breaths
Speaker 1: help a lot. Smelitary. Remind yourself that we are all
Speaker 1: just squishy, flawed little apes. No one expects you to
Speaker 1: be perfect, and if you want to text your crush
Speaker 1: and cut some banks, Maybe take a class in the
Speaker 1: community center, play hooky from work for a day, go
Speaker 1: for it. We're all going to be dead one day
Speaker 1: in the future, and if you're on a windy mountain,
Speaker 1: wear one of those hats that ties under your chin.
Speaker 1: But then again, would we have the theory of relativity
Speaker 1: without it? I don't know anything. Who, this world, this life,
Speaker 1: this timeline, Okay, bye bye, pacadermatology, hobology, crypto zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, factology, ethology, seriology, elinology.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find out