'The Myth of Quantum Consciousness.'

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But consciousness needs a body to be relate to and be conscious of - that is the point of it. Not sure what the point would be of being conscious of a disembodied 'field'. There's no motivation.


I think it's the way we've conceptually isolated consciousness that makes us seek it as an entity when it is really an emergent phenomenon that grows out of the interactions of physical structures. Simple feedback gone complex.

I wonder if memory is what is meant by consciousness, or just moment-to-moment awareness?
 
But consciousness needs a body to be relate to and be conscious of - that is the point of it. Not sure what the point would be of being conscious of a disembodied 'field'. There's no motivation.


I think it's the way we've conceptually isolated consciousness that makes us seek it as an entity when it is really an emergent phenomenon that grows out of the interactions of physical structures. Simple feedback gone complex.

I wonder if memory is what is meant by consciousness, or just moment-to-moment awareness?
i think memory and awareness needs mind too. like those flowers that close up when you get close, automatic reflexes?

edit 4:04 ok my psychic dictionary is calling it "supraconsciousness".
 
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Im thinking Out of body experience due to near death experience, remote viewing or astral projection is just getting like thoughts or images in the brain when alive whether its true or not I don't know but its hard to do.
 
Im thinking Out of body experience due to near death experience, remote viewing or astral projection is just getting like thoughts or images in the brain when alive whether its true or not I don't know but its hard to do.
astral projection is out of body too. I'm just saying I think that would prove "non mind based consciousness" better than near death experiences. because nde can be explained by biological processes.
 
Astral projection is not as vivid as a out of body experience due to NDE , no biological process can explain how braindead patients veridically observe events around them
 
Im not sure about Astral projection but remote viewing is alot different to a full on Out of body experience as they just get mental images which could be random .
Your welcome to provide mea medical explanation to how people accurately see and hear things going on in the operating table when they are clinically dead, good luck.
 
Im not sure about Astral projection but remote viewing is alot different to a full on Out of body experience as they just get mental images which could be random .
Your welcome to provide mea medical explanation to how people accurately see and hear things going on in the operating table when they are clinically dead, good luck.

Well the boring answer would be that they weren't dead.
After all, their body still continued to support life, so something was registering something. Then when their full faculties return they remember what happened while they were 'dead'. But they are still anchored to existence in a body, so it cannot really be said they existed without it.
Maybe if the body was dead for two weeks, everything dismembered and removed and put on ice, and then they were surgically put back together and reanimated - if they had a story to tell about the experience, that would be a little more compelling.

And you'll have to be precise on 'accurately see and hear things', because it sounds like hearsay so it's not exactly hard evidence. What if they were only a little bit accurate? Has the accuracy been tested?
 
Im not sure about Astral projection but remote viewing is alot different to a full on Out of body experience as they just get mental images which could be random .
Your welcome to provide mea medical explanation to how people accurately see and hear things going on in the operating table when they are clinically dead, good luck.
Hmmmm . . . brain activity can be measured via EEGs, seen on MRI scans, etc . . . there is an electromagnetic signal of some frequency and strength . . . there are several species of animals that have sensory capabilities humans are not normally found to possess or at least normally use and may well be vestigial except in the most unusual of situations . . . a NDE may well represent such an example . . .
 
http://www.express.co.uk/news/scien...ce-is-taking-near-death-experiences-seriously

In 2001 a group of Dutch doctors interviewed 344 patients who were resuscitated after cardiac arrest. Only 62 of them (or 18 per cent) reported a near-death experience. The finding puzzled the doctors. If there was a purely physiological or medical reason for the experience they would have expected most patients who had been clinically dead to report one.

A more recent study published in the journal Neurology compared 55 people who’d had near-death experiences with 55 people of the same age and gender who had not and found that the former were more likely to have blurred boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. The rapid eye movement (REM) associated with the dream sleep state tended to intrude into normal wakeful consciousness. This suggested the phenomenon is biological rather than spiritual.

....

What could potentially upset this rational explanation is people coming back from the brink of death and telling doctors things they could only have known if they really were watching what was going on, for example accurately describing who entered or left the room. But Dr Blackmore is sceptical. “If any of these stories held up to scrutiny, then I’m wrong,” she says. “But I used to investigate each of these dramatic cases whenever they arose and every time I discovered there wasn’t any corroboration.”

Knowing what it’s like to nearly die means it’s reasonable to assume that’s also what it’s like to fully die. We can expect the feeling of whooshing down a tunnel with a rush of joy and possibly looking down on ourselves and greeting long-lost relatives. The moment of death could be far better than we expect, whether or not there is an afterlife.

The downside is that only about 18 per cent of us can expect to experience it.
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Or read the actual reports. (which is what I was looking for, the investigative research of incidents.)

Are you implying she *did* find support for the claims but covered it up?
 
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Your welcome to provide mea medical explanation to how people accurately see and hear things going on in the operating table when they are clinically dead, good luck.
Here's a more in-depth look at such claims.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html#discrepancies
...

(4) In a study of 264 subjects with sleep paralysis[3], Giorgio Buzzi and Fabio Cirignotta found that about 11% of their subjects (28 people) "viewed themselves lying on the bed, generally from a location above the bed" (Buzzi 2116). As Buzzi points out, however, these out-of-body experiences often included false perceptions of the physical environment:

I invited these people to do the following simple reality tests: trying to identify objects put in unusual places; checking the time on the clock; and focusing on a detail of the scene, and comparing it with reality.

I received a feedback [sic] from five individuals. Objects put in unusual places (eg, on top of the wardrobe) were never identified during out-of-body experiences. Clocks also proved to be unreliable: a woman with nightly episodes of sleep paralysis had two out-of-body experiences in the same night, and for each the clock indicated an impossible time.... Finally, in all cases but one, some slight but important differences in the details were noted: "I looked at 'me' sleeping peacefully in the bed while I wandered about. Trouble is the 'me' in the bed was wearing long johns ... I have never worn such a thing" (Buzzi 2116-2117).

Buzzi concludes that because these experiences contained out-of-body discrepancies and failed his other 'reality tests,' his subjects' out-of-body imagery must have been derived from memory and imagination rather than from the physical environment at the time (2117).

(5) Melvin Morse reports an NDE where a young girl sees her teacher by her body during an OBE when her teacher is not actually there. This case also has other hallucinatory features, such as encountering doctors in an ostensibly transcendental realm:

[O]ne child.... could see her own body as doctors wearing green masks tried to start an IV. Then she saw her living teacher and classmates at her bedside, comforting her and singing to her (her teacher did not visit her in the hospital). Finally, three tall beings dressed in white that she identified as doctors asked her to push a button on a box at her bedside, telling her that if she pressed the green button she could go with them, but she would never see her family again. She pressed the red button and regained consciousness (Morse 68-69).

(6) Using open-ended questions, Morse also found a case where a child that was clinically dead reported that while she was 'above her body' looking down, "her mother's nose appeared flattened and distorted 'like a pig monster'" (Morse 67).

(7) The Fenwicks recount an NDE where the NDEr 'observed' a procedure that never took place during the heart bypass operation she underwent at the time:

he left her body and watched her heart lying beside her body, bumping away with what looked like ribbons coming from it to hands. In fact, this is not what happens in a heart bypass operation, as the heart is left within the chest and is never taken outside the body (Fenwick and Fenwick 193).

The Fenwicks try to explain away this major discrepancy by pointing out that ribbons are indeed tied to arteries during an operation of this sort and by attributing the false perception to misidentification. However, it is difficult to see how a person truly out-of-body with vivid perceptual capabilities could confuse arteries (ribboned or not) with a beating heart lying next to her outside of her body. In the remainder of her experience this NDEr reported 'traveling' to a place that looked like an enormous silver 'airplane hangar' with tiny figures off in the distance, miles away.

...

As the Fenwicks point out, if OBEs and NDEs are hallucinations,

we should expect there to be major discrepancies between the psychological image—what the person sees from up there on the ceiling, which will be constructed by the brain entirely from memory; and the real image—what is actually going on at ground level. Mrs Ivy Davey, for example, did not see her body, although her body was clearly there (Fenwick and Fenwick 41).

And in the cases above this is exactly what we find. Discrepancies between what's seen out-of-body and what's actually happening in the physical world are found in spontaneous OBEs, in NDEs where a real or perceived threat of imminent harm triggers an OBE, and in NDEs that include an OBE along with other NDE components (e.g., a tunnel and light).

...

In fact, most NDE reports are provided to researchers years after the experience itself. Ultimately, all we have to go on is after-the-fact reports of private experiences. The constant reconstruction of memory makes it difficult to know just what NDErs have actually experienced. This problem is clearly recognized by Fox:

[T]he fact that NDErs' testimonies are indeed retrospectively composed ... arouses a suspicion that what NDErs recall—and hence narrate—about their experiences may in fact be different than what they actually experienced during their near-death crises.... [A]ttempting to ascertain what really happens to NDErs—what the core elements of their experiences actually are in and of themselves—may be nigh on impossible to determine.... [W]hat is remembered about an experience or situation may not actually accurately correspond to what was experienced at the time (Fox 197).

...

[T]he facts of the case seem incontestable. Maria's inexplicable detection of that inexplicable shoe is a strange and strangely beguiling sighting of the sort that has the power to arrest the skeptic's argument in mid-sentence, if only by virtue of its indisputable improbability (Ring and Lawrence 223).

This case has taken on the status of something of an urban legend, allegedly demonstrating that Maria learned things during her OBE that she could not have possibly known about other than by actually leaving her body. But as Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan, and Barry Beyerstein make clear, the details Maria reported were in fact quite accessible to her through ordinary sense perception and inference.
...

The authors add that anyone who did press his or her face against the glass to get a closer look at the conspicuous shoe from inside the room could easily see the worn-out little toe and tucked shoelace: "we had no difficulty seeing the shoe's allegedly hidden outer side" (32). They conclude:

[Maria's shoe] would have been visible, both inside and outside the hospital, to numerous people who could have come into contact with her. It also seems likely that some of them might have mentioned it within earshot....

[And Clark] did not publicly report the details of Maria's NDE until seven years after it occurred. It is quite possible that during this interval some parts of the story were forgotten and some details may have been interpolated.... [Moreover], we have no way of knowing what leading questions Maria may have been asked, or what Maria might have "recalled" that did not fit and was dropped from the record (32-33).

Furthermore, Clark's inaccurate account of how difficult the shoe was to see from both inside and out provides evidence that she subconsciously embellished significant details to bolster the apparently veridical nature of the case (33).
....
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Or read the actual reports. (which is what I was looking for, the investigative research of incidents.)

Are you implying she *did* find support for the claims but covered it up?
I don't know whats wrong with her but I have found claims

Im sure some claims are wrong and maybe dreams , It would be interesting to see if they were actually dead .There is a difference between the validity of a near death experience and an actual death experience.
 
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There are some good points in your article , we need to test the validity of near death experiences with people that have clinically died and have come back and were not just having some random hallucination while sleeping,dreaming or not even close to death, also memories over time fade or change so the people need to be interviewed right after death.
This has been in process with the AWARE project and Dr Sam Parnia and other neuroscientists and psychologists have ruled out the Hallucination hypothesis with some of the patients who accurately viewed events while being clinically braindead, how can one see or hear or hallucinate for that matter when there is no oxygen to the brain?
The results are coming soon .
 
I don't want to get to much into this subject (especially on this thread) but here are some avenues to pursue in your research. note: if science proves all nde is biological that doesn't disprove an afterlife or 'consciousness migration'.



The electroencephalogram (EEG) reflects brain electrical activity. A flat (isoelectric) EEG, which is usually recorded during very deep coma, is considered to be a turning point between a living brain and a deceased brain. Therefore the isoelectric EEG constitutes, together with evidence of irreversible structural brain damage, one of the criteria for the assessment of brain death. In this study we use EEG recordings for humans on the one hand, and on the other hand double simultaneous intracellular recordings in the cortex and hippocampus, combined with EEG, in cats. They serve to demonstrate that a novel brain phenomenon is observable in both humans and animals during coma that is deeper than the one reflected by the isoelectric EEG, and that this state is characterized by brain activity generated within the hippocampal formation. This new state was induced either by medication applied to postanoxic coma (in human) or by application of high doses of anesthesia (isoflurane in animals) leading to an EEG activity of quasi-rhythmic sharp waves which henceforth we propose to call ν-complexes (Nu-complexes). Using simultaneous intracellular recordings in vivo in the cortex and hippocampus (especially in the CA3 region) we demonstrate that ν-complexes arise in the hippocampus and are subsequently transmitted to the cortex. The genesis of a hippocampal ν-complex depends upon another hippocampal activity, known as ripple activity, which is not overtly detectable at the cortical level. Based on our observations, we propose a scenario of how self-oscillations in hippocampal neurons can lead to a whole brain phenomenon during coma.
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http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0075257



The brain can survive for up to about six minutes after the heart stops. The reason to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is that if CPR is started within six minutes of cardiac arrest, the brain may survive the lack of oxygen. After about six minutes without [oxygen]CPR, however, the brain begins to die.
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bold is my insert
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brain-death.htm
 
Im not a brain expert either but the cells in the brain start to die after 6 minutes as soon as oxygen stops going to the brain the neurones stop firing, anyway Im no brain expert but Dr Sam Parnia is and its quite interesting what he says

 
Im not a brain expert either but the cells in the brain start to die after 6 minutes as soon as oxygen stops going to the brain the neurones stop firing, anyway Im no brain expert but Dr Sam Parnia is and its quite interesting what he says



What does he say?
 
When I looked at the cardiac arrest literature, it became clear that it’s after the heart stops and blood flow into the brain ceases. There’s no blood flow into the brain, no activity, about 10 seconds after the heart stops. When doctors start to do CPR, they still can’t get enough blood into the brain. It remains flatlined. That’s the physiology of people who’ve died or are receiving CPR.

Not just my study, but four others, all demonstrated the same thing: People have memories and recollections. Combined with anecdotal reports from all over the world, from people who see things accurately and remember them, it suggests this needs to be studied in more detail.

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Parnia: That’s a very important question. Do these memories occur when a person is truly flatlined and had no brain activity, as science suggests? Or when they’re beginning to wake up, but are still unconscious?

The point that goes against the experiences happening afterwards, or before the brain shut down, is that many people describe very specific details of what happened to them during cardiac arrest. They describe conversations people had, clothes people wore, events that went on 10 or 20 minutes into resuscitation. That is not compatible with brain activity.

It may be that some people receive better-quality resuscitation, and that — though there’s no evidence to support it — they did have brain activity. Or it could indicate that human consciousness, the psyche, the soul, the self, continued to function.
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Very fascinating discussion . . . having years of experience in medicine I have been present at the death of several people as well as the deaths of my Mother and Father-in-law . . . my wife worked some time as an oncology nurse and experienced several death events as well . . . what I will say is that each death was significantly unique . . . it is my observation that it appears very final but there are common events that are suggestive of evidence that the person is aware of their leaving and they seem to be focused on some type of unseen world we cannot see . . . call it hallucination, cascading brain death or whatever you want . . . but these dying people are communicating with someone or something not visible in the room and it predates their deaths by sometimes days, hours and sometimes minutes. . . It appears to me these phantom encounters I am suggesting are similar to those testified to by individuals experiencing NDE . . . but since those who really die never return to substantiate those observations we simply may never know . . .
 
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This video meets much of the criteria for analysis discussed in the Thread so far . . .



1) Monitored brain activity throughout NDE . . . before , during and after . . .

2) Confirmation loss of blood to the brain as well as temperature at 60 degree F . .
 
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You still need to explain what's in it though.
1) Monitored brain activity throughout NDE . . . before , during and after . . .

2) Confirmation loss of blood to the brain as well as temperature at 60 degree F . .
 
This video meets much of the criteria for analysis discussed in the Thread so far . . . .
This following video shows the following:

1) the specific memories were detailed

2) the events remembered occurred while brain had no function . . . confirmed by monitoring equipment

 
This following video shows the following:

1) the specific memories were detailed

2) the events remembered occurred while brain had no function . . . confirmed by monitoring equipment


I'm pretty open minded and being female understand 'intuition skills' but I'm not seeing any extraordinary details in this. of course the drill looks like an electric toothbrush, that's what dental drills look like. which is exactly as she describes the sound in your first video.

the only other 'detail' is someone saying "there's a problem". That's how 99 % of psychics work. You throw out enough stuff and eventually something will be right. "Houston, we've got a problem" isn't a far fetched fear in this situation. and you haven't any correlation really. Noone confirms the phrase 'we've got a problem' in the middle of the surgery. Perhaps, also as she was waking she overheard someone telling her husband 'we ran into a slight problem when we...'.

Personally, I'm not seeing anything that confirms events were remembered when brain has no function.
 
A sceptical examination of the Pam Reynolds case...
(sorry, very long)
http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html#discrepancies
The case was quickly celebrated because of the lack of synaptic activity within the procedure and Pam's report of an apparently veridical OBE at some point during the operation. But it has been sensationalized at the expense of the facts, facts which have been continually misrepresented by some parapsychologists and near-death researchers.[14] Although hailed by some as "the most compelling case to date of veridical perception during an NDE" (Corcoran, Holden, and James), and "the single best instance we now have in the literature on NDEs to confound the skeptics" (Ring, "Religious Wars" 218), it is in fact best understood in terms of normal perception operating during an entirely nonthreatening physiological state.

Two mischaracterizations of this case are particularly noteworthy, as their errors of fact greatly exaggerate the force of this NDE as evidence for survival after death.[15] First, in their write-up of the first prospective study of NDEs, van Lommel and colleagues write:

Sabom mentions a young American woman who had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG [electroencephalogram] of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE, including an out-of-body experience, with subsequently verified observations during the period of the flat EEG [emphasis mine] (van Lommel et al. 2044).

Second, in his Immortal Remains—an assessment of the evidence for survival of bodily death—Stephen Braude erroneously describes the case as follows:

Sabom reports the case of a woman who, for about an hour, had all the blood drained from her head and her body temperature lowered to 60 degrees. During that time her heartbeat and breathing stopped, and she had both a flat EEG and absence of auditory evoked potentials from her brainstem.... Apparently during this period she had a detailed veridical near-death OBE [emphasis mine] (Braude 274).

But anyone who gives Sabom's chapters on the case more than a cursory look will see two glaring errors in the descriptions above. First, it is quite clear that Pam did not have her NDE during any period of flat EEG.[16] Indeed, she was as far as a patient undergoing her operation could possibly be from clinical death when her OBE began.[17] Second, she had no cerebral cortical activity for no longer than roughly half an hour. Both of these facts are nicely illustrated in Figure 1 below.

[Broken External Image]:http://www.infidels.org/images/timeline.png

Fig. 1. Timeline of Pam Reynolds' general anesthesia. The colored areas represent changes in body temperature: Green indicates a life-sustaining temperature; yellow, the mechanical cooling or warming of blood; red, the constant temperature of her deepest hypothermia. Most times marking events or temperatures are derived from Michael Sabom's account of Pam Reynolds' procedure provided in Chapters 3 & 10 of Light & Death.

Despite accurately reporting the facts, Sabom himself has encouraged these misrepresentations.[18] Though he informs the reader that Pam's experience began well before standstill, he reveals this incidentally, so that a careful reading of the text is required to discern the point. For instance, just after describing Pam's recollections of an operating room conversation, he notes, almost as an afterthought, that "[h]ypothermic cardiac arrest would definitely be needed" [emphasis mine] (Sabom, "Light" 42). He then goes on to assert that the very features of her experience which cannot be timed happened during standstill. At first, Sabom only implies this by describing the cooling of blood leading to standstill prior to describing the remainder of Pam's near-death experience (42-46). Then Sabom turns to a discussion of whether Pam was "really" dead during a portion of her standstill state:

But during "standstill," Pam's brain was found "dead" by all three clinical tests—her electroencephalogram was silent, her brain-stem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain. Interestingly, while in this state, she encountered the "deepest" near-death experience of all Atlanta Study participants....

With this information, can we now scientifically assert that Pam was either dead or alive during her near-death experience? Unfortunately, no. Even if all medical tests certify her death, we would still have to wait to see if life was restored [emphasis mine] (Sabom, "Light" 49).

Of course, the issue of whether Pam was "really" dead within standstill is an extraordinarily misleading red herring in this context. And it is blatantly irresponsible for Sabom to explicitly state that her NDE occurred "while in this state." As Sabom's own account reveals, her standstill condition had absolutely nothing to do with the time when we know that her near-death OBE began: A full two hours and five minutes before the medical staff even began to cool her blood, during perfectly normal body temperature![19] (Again, see Figure 1.)

Unlike the other elements of her NDE, we can precisely time when Pam's OBE began because she did accurately describe an operating room conversation. Namely, she accurately recalled comments made by her cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Murray, about her "veins and arteries being very small" (Pam's words) (Sabom, "Light" 42). Two operative reports allow us to time this observation. First, in the head surgeon's report, Dr. Robert Spetzler noted that when he was cutting open Pam's skull, "Dr. Murray performed bilateral femoral cut-downs for cannulation for cardiac bypass" (185). So at about the same time that Dr. Spetzler was opening Pam's skull, Dr. Murray began accessing Pam's blood vessels so that they could be hooked up to the bypass machine which would cool her blood and ultimately bring her to standstill. Second, Dr. Murray's operative report noted that "the right common femoral artery was quite small" and thus could not be hooked up to the bypass machine. Consequently, Murray's report continues, "bilateral groin cannulation would be necessary: This was discussed with Neurosurgery, as it would affect angio access postoperatively for arteriography" (185). And although Pam's mother was given a copy of the head surgeon's operative report (which she said Pam did not read), the report did not say anything about any of Pam's arteries being too small (Sabom, "Shadow" 7).

Many have argued that Pam's accurate recall of an operating room conversation is strong evidence that she really did leave her body during the procedure. But there is at least one peculiar fact about Pam's recollections—in addition to the timing of her experience—which makes a physiological explanation of her OBE much more likely.

General anesthesia is the result of administering a trio of types of drugs: sedatives, to induce sleep or prevent memory formation; muscle relaxants, to ensure full-body paralysis; and painkillers. Inadequate sedation alone results in anesthesia awareness. Additionally, if insufficient concentrations of muscle relaxants are administered, a patient will be able to move; and if an inadequate amount of painkillers are administered, a patient will be able to feel pain (Woerlee, "Anaesthesiologist" 16). During a typical surgical procedure, an anesthesiologist must regularly administer this trio of drugs throughout the operation. But just prior to standstill, anesthetic drugs are no longer administered, as deep hypothermia is sufficient to maintain unconsciousness. The effects of any remaining anesthetics wear off during the warming of blood following standstill (G. Woerlee, personal communication, November 8, 2005).

About one or two in a thousand patients undergoing general anesthesia report some form of anesthesia awareness. That represents between 20,000 and 40,000 patients a year within the United States alone. A full 48% of these patients report auditory recollections postoperatively, while only 28% report feeling pain during the experience (JCAHO 10). Moreover, "higher incidences of awareness have been reported for caesarean section (0.4%), cardiac surgery (1.5%), and surgical treatment for trauma (11-43%)" (Bünning and Blanke 343). Such instances must at least give us pause about attributing Pam's intraoperative recollections to some form of out-of-body paranormal perception. Moreover, for decades sedative anesthetics such as nitrous oxide have been known to trigger OBEs.

Sometime after 7:15 AM that August morning, general anesthesia was administered to Pam Reynolds. Subsequently, her arms and legs were tied down to the operating table, her eyes were lubricated and taped shut, and she was instrumented in various other ways (Sabom, "Light" 38). A standard EEG was used to record activity in her cerebral cortex, while small earphones continuously played clicks[20] into her ears to invoke auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), a measure of activity in the brain stem (39).

Sabom considers whether conscious or semiconscious auditory perceptions were incorporated into Pam's OBE imagery during a period of anesthesia awareness, but dismisses the possibility all-too-hastily:

Could Pam have heard the intraoperative conversation and then used this to reconstruct an out-of-body experience? At the beginning of the procedure, molded ear speakers were placed in each ear as a test for auditory and brain-stem reflexes. These speakers occlude the ear canals and altogether eliminate the possibility of physical hearing (Sabom, "Light" 184).

But is this last claim really true? Since Sabom merely asserts this (and has an obvious stake in it being true), we have little reason to take him at his word—especially on such a crucial point. What is the basis for his assertion? Does he have any objective evidence that the earphones used to measure AEPs completely cut off sounds from the external environment?

Since Sabom does not back up this claim in Light and Death, I did a little research and discovered that his claim is indeed false. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, as a matter of procedure, a patient who is monitored by the very same equipment to detect acoustic neuromas (benign brain tumors) "sits in a soundproof room and wears headphones" (NINDS). But a soundproof room would be unnecessary, of course, if the earphones used to measure AEPs "occlude the ear canals and altogether eliminate the possibility of physical hearing." It is theoretically possible that the earphones used in 1991 made physical hearing impossible, whereas the earphones used today do not. However, it highly unlikely, as it would be far cheaper for medical institutions to continue to invest in the imagined sound-eliminating earphones, rather than soundproofing entire rooms to eliminate external sounds. As Gerald Woerlee points out, "earplugs do not totally exclude all external sounds, they only considerably reduce the intensity of external sounds," as demonstrated by "enormous numbers of people ... listening to loud music played through earplugs, while at the same time able to hear and understand all that happens in their surroundings" (Woerlee, "Pam").

After being prepped for surgery, Pam's head was secured by a clamp. By 8:40 AM, her entire body was draped except for her head (the site of the main procedure) and her groin (where blood vessels would be hooked up to the bypass machine to cool her blood). In the five minutes or so to follow, Dr. Spetzler would open her scalp with a curved blade, fold back her scalp, then begin cutting into her skull with a Midas Rex bone saw (39-41). At this point, about an hour and a half after being anesthetized, Pam's OBE began (185). She reported being awakened by the sound of a natural D, then being "pulled" out of the top of her head by the sound (41).

"But," Sabom asks, "was Pam's visual recollection from her out-of-body experience accurate?" (186). That is indeed the question to ask regarding the veridicality of her report.

Pam reported that during her OBE, she was able to view the operating room from above the head surgeon's shoulder, describing her out-of-body vision as "brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision" (41). In her report of the experience, she offered three verifiable visual observations. First, she said that "the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar. I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not." Second, she reported that the bone saw "looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it, a groove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the handle, but it didn't." Finally, she noted that "the saw had interchangeable blades ... in what looked like a socket wrench case" (41). Subsequently, she only reported auditory observations—hearing the bone saw "crank up" and "being used on something"—but most notably the operating room conversation initiated by Dr. Murray.

Given such vivid 'perceptual capabilities' during her OBE, we would expect there to be no confusion about what Pam saw during the experience. So her visual observations provide an interesting test of the notion that her soul left her body while under general anesthesia during normal body temperature. Let us look at each of these in turn.

First, there is the observation that only part of her head was shaved. Perhaps she could have guessed this at the time of her experience, but there is no need even for this in order to account for the reported observation. Surely Pam would have noticed this soon after awaking from general anesthesia—by seeing her reflection, feeling her hair, or being asked about it by visitors. And she certainly would have known about it, one way or the other, by the time she was released from the hospital. Indeed, if her hair had been shaved presurgery, or at any time prior to her general anesthesia, she would have known about it well before her OBE. And patients undergoing such a risky procedure are standardly given a consent briefing where even the cosmetic effects of surgery are outlined—if not explicitly in a doctor's explanation, then at least incidentally in any photographs, diagrams, or other sources illustrating what the procedure entails. So Pam may have learned (to her surprise) that her head would be only partially shaved in a consent briefing prior to her experience, but 'filed away' and consciously forgot about this information given so many other more pressing concerns on her mind at the time. That would be exactly the sort of mundane, subconscious fact we would expect a person to recall later during an altered state of consciousness.[21] And although we are not given the exact date of the operation, Sabom reports that the procedure took place in August 1991 (38). He later tells us that he interviewed Pam for the first time on November 11, 1994 (186). That leaves over three years between the date of Pam's NDE and Sabom's interview—plenty of time for memory distortions to have played a role in her report of the experience. So there is nothing remarkable about this particular observation.

Second, there is her description of the bone saw. But the very observation that provides the greatest potential for supporting the notion that she actually left her body during her OBE actually tends to count against that hypothesis. As Sabom recounts,

Pam's description of the bone saw having a "groove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the handle" was a bit puzzling.... [T]he end of the bone saw has an overhanging edge that [viewed sideways] looks somewhat like a groove. However, it was not located "where the saw appeared to go into the handle" but at the other end.

Why had this apparent discrepancy arisen in Pam's description? Of course, the first explanation is that she did not "see" the saw at all, but was describing it from her own best guess of what it would look and sound like (187).

Precisely! Except that, of course, Pam didn't need to guess what the bone saw sounded like, since she probably heard it as anesthesia failed. An out-of-body discrepancy within Pam's NDE prima facie implies the operation of normal perception and imagination within an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, this explanation is so straightforward that Sabom considers it before all others. And it is telling that the one visual observation that Pam (almost) could not have known about other than by leaving her body was the very detail that was not accurate.

Let us turn to the report of Pam's final visual observation during her OBE, her comment that the bone saw used "interchangeable blades" placed inside something "like a socket wrench case." This detail was also accurate; however, one need not invoke paranormal perceptual capabilities to explain it. As Woerlee notes,

he knew no-one would use a large chain saw or industrial angle cutter to cut the bones of her skull open.... Pneumatic dental drills with the same shapes, and making similar sounds as the pneumatic saw used to cut her skull open, were in common use during the late 1970s and 1980s. Because she was born in 1956, a generation whose members almost invariably have many fillings, Pam Reynolds almost certainly had fillings or other dental work, and would have been very familiar with the dental drills. So the high frequency sound of the idling, air-driven motor of the pneumatic saw, together with the subsequent sensations of her skull being sawn open, would certainly have aroused imagery of apparatus similar to dental-drills in her mind when she finally recounted her remembered sensations. There is another aspect to her remembered sensations—Pam Reynolds may have seen, or heard of, these things before her operation. All these things indicate how she could give a reasonable description of the pneumatic saw after awakening and recovering the ability to speak (Woerlee, "Anaesthesiologist" 18).

And, predictably enough, the dental drills in question also used interchangeable burs stored in their own socket-wrench-like cases.

During anesthesia awareness, and as far from standstill as a person under general anesthesia can be, Pam could have heard her surroundings, but not seen them, since her eyes were taped shut. And the facts of her case strongly suggest that this is exactly what happened. Information that she could have obtained by hearing was highly accurate; at the same time, information that was unavailable to her through normal vision was the very information which was inaccurate. More precisely, her visual descriptions were only partially accurate: accurate on details she could have plausibly guessed or easily learned about subsequent to her experience, and inaccurate on details that it would be difficult to guess correctly.

In other words, OBE imagery derived from hearing and background knowledge, perhaps coupled with the reconstruction of memory, fully accounts for the most interesting details of Pam Reynolds' NDE report. After awakening from inadequate anesthesia by the sound of the bone saw revving up, her mind generated a plausible image of what the bone saw used during her operation looked like, rendered from her prior knowledge of similar-sounding dental drills. But her best guess about the appearance of the bone saw was inaccurate regarding the features of the bone saw that only true vision could discern: whether there was a true groove in the instrument, and where it was located.

Moreover, the fact that Pam's NDE began during an entirely nonthreatening physiological condition—under general anesthesia at normal body temperature—implies that there was no particular physiological trigger for the experience (such as anoxia/hypoxia). Rather, it appears that her NDE was entirely expectation-driven. Before going into surgery, Pam was fully aware that she would be taken to the brink of death while in the standstill state. Awakening from general anesthesia by the sound of the bone saw appears to have induced a fear response, which in turn caused Pam to dissociate and have a classic NDE. Indeed, this makes sense of her otherwise odd report of being pulled out of the top of her head by the sound of the saw itself.

At least five separate studies (Gabbard, Twemlow, and Jones; Stevenson, Cook, and McClean-Rice; Gabbard and Twemlow; Serdahely, "Variations"; Floyd) have documented cases where fear alone triggered an NDE. As Ian Stevenson, Emily Williams Cook (now Emily Williams Kelly), and Nicholas McClean-Rice conclude, "an important precipitator of the 'near-death experience' is the belief that one is dying—whether or not one is in fact close to death" (Stevenson, Cook, and McClean-Rice 45). They go on to label those (otherwise indistinguishable) NDEs precipitated by fear of death alone "fear-death experiences" (FDEs). Physiologically, such NDEs might be mediated by a fight-or-flight response in the absence of an actual medical crisis. In a case reported by Glen Gabbard and Stuart Twemlow, an NDEr dislodged the pin of a dummy grenade he thought to be a live one, producing a classic NDE similar to the one Pam experienced:

A marine sergeant was instructing a class of young recruits at boot camp. He stood in front of a classroom holding a hand grenade as he explained the mechanism of pulling the pin to detonate the weapon. After commenting on the considerable weight of the grenade, he thought it would be useful for each of the recruits to get a "hands-on" feeling for its actual mass. As the grenade was passed from private to private, one 18-year-old recruit nervously dropped the grenade as it was handed him. Much to his horror, he watched the pin become dislodged as the grenade hit the ground. He knew he only had seconds to act, but he stood frozen, paralyzed with fear. The next thing he knew, he found himself traveling up through the top of his head toward the ceiling as the ground beneath him grew farther and farther away. He effortlessly passed through the ceiling and found himself entering a tunnel with the sound of wind whistling through it. As he approached the end of this lengthy tunnel, he encountered a light that shone with a special brilliance, the likes of which he had never seen before. A figure beckoned to him from the light, and he felt a profound sense of love emanating from the figure. His life flashed before his eyes in what seemed like a split-second. In midst of this transcendent experience, he suddenly realized that grenade had not exploded. He felt immediately "sucked" back into his body (Gabbard and Twemlow 42).

Gabbard and Twemlow conclude that "thinking one is about to die is sufficient to trigger the classical NDE" (42). After comparing experiences that occurred in nonthreatening conditions with those where subjects were actually close to death, they also concluded that no particular elements were "exclusive to near-death situations," but "several features of the experiences were significantly more likely to occur when the individual felt that death was close at hand" [emphasis mine] (42). That expectation alone can trigger NDEs in certain individuals, then, is well-documented.

If Pam had truly been out of body and perceiving, both her auditory and visual sensations should've been accurate; but when it came to details that could not have been guessed or plausibly learned after the fact, only her auditory information was accurate. Moreover, it is significant that as her narrative continues beyond the three visual observations outlined above, the remainder of her reported out-of-body perceptions are exclusively auditory. Finally, it is interesting that Pam reports uncertainly about the identity of the voice she heard when her OBE began: "I believe it was a female voice and that it was Dr. Murray, but I'm not sure" (Sabom, "Light" 42).

These facts strongly imply anesthesia awareness, and tend to count against the idea that Pam's soul left her body during the operation. If her soul had left her body, the fact that her account contains out-of-body discrepancies doesn't make much sense. But it makes perfect sense if she experienced anesthesia awareness, particularly when one looks at which sorts of information that she provided were accurate and which were not. Pam Reynolds did not report anything that she could not have learned about through normal perception, and this is exactly what we would expect if normal perception alone was operating during her OBE. It is little wonder that Fox concludes that "the jury is still very much out over this case" (Fox 210).
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I'm pretty open minded and being female understand 'intuition skills' but I'm not seeing any extraordinary details in this. of course the drill looks like an electric toothbrush, that's what dental drills look like. which is exactly as she describes the sound in your first video.

the only other 'detail' is someone saying "there's a problem". That's how 99 % of psychics work. You throw out enough stuff and eventually something will be right. "Houston, we've got a problem" isn't a far fetched fear in this situation. and you haven't any correlation really. Noone confirms the phrase 'we've got a problem' in the middle of the surgery. Perhaps, also as she was waking she overheard someone telling her husband 'we ran into a slight problem when we...'.

Personally, I'm not seeing anything that confirms events were remembered when brain has no function.
Good points . . . how about her memories of OBE . . . ?
 
Good points . . . how about her memories of OBE . . . ?
I don't know, I try not to leave my body. my friend used to 'do' astral projection all the time (and he didn't really do drugs) until he got scared and stopped. said he almost couldn't find his body the last time, freaked him out. ; /
 
I don't know, I try not to leave my body. my friend used to 'do' astral projection all the time (and he didn't really do drugs) until he got scared and stopped. said he almost couldn't find his body the last time, freaked him out. ; /
Do you know how he accomplished his OBE?
 
Do you know how he accomplished his OBE?
he relaxed and let go. he said.

I do wonder about OBEs and mindset. for instance Jim is a musician, like this above chick. I have one friend who always dies in her dreams and several others that fly regularly.
I NEVER fly or die. I can change things like Freddy Krugar but mostly my dreams maintain 'earthiness?' I did have one of those episodes like the alien abduction people talk about, being paralyzed.. a monster grabbed me by the leg and I was struggling to wake up (cause he was gonna kill me) and I swear the claw on my leg felt real as anything. Freaked me out. so I said "wake up Brian" outloud (because the monster was the little boy I knew) and he let go and I finished waking up.

I don't want to use the word 'rational' because I'm not always rational. but, I wonder if the OBE people are people who can fly in their dreams due to their psychological makeup. Where as I probably will never have an OBE because of mine.
 
he relaxed and let go. he said.

I do wonder about OBEs and mindset. for instance Jim is a musician, like this above chick. I have one friend who always dies in her dreams and several others that fly regularly.
I NEVER fly or die. I can change things like Freddy Krugar but mostly my dreams maintain 'earthiness?' I did have one of those episodes like the alien abduction people talk about, being paralyzed.. a monster grabbed me by the leg and I was struggling to wake up (cause he was gonna kill me) and I swear the claw on my leg felt real as anything. Freaked me out. so I said "wake up Brian" outloud (because the monster was the little boy I knew) and he let go and I finished waking up.

I don't want to use the word 'rational' because I'm not always rational. but, I wonder if the OBE people are people who can fly in their dreams due to their psychological makeup. Where as I probably will never have an OBE because of mine.
Hmmmmm . . . Me thinks there are some people who are much more likely than others to have vivid dreams and night terrors etc . . . if you have had a cat or dog you know some will have very vivid dreams where they make running movements and dogs often bark in their sleep. . . I am sure we are no different . . . I remember as a young boy having flying dreams . . . very vivid and realistic . . . I can remember the feelings they provoked and I am 63 . .
 
Hmmmmm . . . Me thinks there are some people who are much more likely than others to have vivid dreams and night terrors etc . . . if you have had a cat or dog you know some will have very vivid dreams where they make running movements and dogs often bark in their sleep. . . I am sure we are no different . . .
maybe the word is cautious. not "earthy". I always maintain a logical side even in my dreams when they start getting dangerous. for instance my mind knew it was Brian when the monster dug his claws into my back (which hurt bad) and I thought "wait. this doesn't happen to me in my dreams" and then rationalized the monster represented my angst and frustration over what was happening to this little boy. so my brain still maintains 'rational' thinking in my dreams. if I fell off a cliff I wouldn't fly. I wouldn't die. I would wake myself up.
 
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