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clairemann

Do all dogs go to heaven? Pet owners increasingly think so, says study | Life and style... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...creasingly-think-so-says-study

afterlife research bias knowledge

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The definition of dog heaven is straightforward enough: bottomless biscuits, walks on demand, squirrels you can actually catch.
  • owners of all kinds of domestic animals have become more likely to believe in a pet afterlife
  • “By the mid-20th century, a greater proportion of animal gravestones suggest owners were awaiting a reunion in the afterlife.”
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  • owners are careful not to challenge contemporary Christian orthodoxy and only suggest a hope of reunion.
  • found other evidence that pet owners were increasingly likely to view animals as part of the family. He wrote that an increasing number of gravestones used family names after the second world war
  • He also found that owners would increasingly often refer to themselves by familial pronouns like “Mummy”, “Dad”, or “Auntie”.
  • Since then, cremation has become more common for those who wish to mark their pet’s death.
  • Other modern pet memorial services include paw prints cast in clay, framed collars, and even the chance to turn their ashes into diamonds. But many owners still opt for the simpler approach of burying them in the back garden – or what is euphemistically termed “communal pet cremation”.
  • Christianity has traditionally held that animals have no hope of an afterlife. But Pope John Paul II said in 1990 that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are”.
  • “what lies ahead … is not an annihilation of the universe and all that surrounds us. Rather, it brings everything to its fullness of being, truth and beauty.”
Javier E

Heaven Is Real: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife - Print View - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...-with-the-afterlife.print.html

afterlife heaven death experience psychology brain science

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
  • In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
  • All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.
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  • What happened to me demands explanation. Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation. Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.
  • Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself. But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.
Emily Horwitz

Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God? | Physics vs. God | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/ence-religion-god-physics.html

science belief religion physics

shared by Emily Horwitz on 19 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. 
  • good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.
  • Psychology research suggests that belief in the supernatural acts as societal glue and motivates people to follow the rules; further, belief in the afterlife helps people grieve and staves off fears of death.
sissij

Apeirophobia is Apparently the Fear of Living Forever | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...tly-the-fear-of-living-forever

brain science psychology science

shared by sissij on 24 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • You’re a child lying in bed at night, and you suddenly find yourself trying to wrap your mind around eternity — the room begins spinning and keeps going until you can get the idea out of your head.
  • If you believe in an afterlife like heaven, it’s about being there forever.
  • George Mason University’s Martin Weiner told The Atlantic that it may be that it’s because the frontal lobe responsible for long-term thinking is one of the last to develop as we mature.
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  • For many, the idea of not being, and forever, is absolutely terrifying.
  • one realizes that there is no way to project ahead to ‘forever’ — and that experience is, inherently, anxiety-provoking. As such, the anxiety that these folks are feeling may not be much different than the fear of growing up, getting old, or death.”
  • sissij on 24 Feb 17
     
    I found this article very interesting as it says that there are actually people who are afraid of living forever. As we see in history, almost every king is in search of ways to live forever. They are afraid of death because they don't know what they would become after death. It's like playing a game. When you work your role up to level one hundred, you will really cherish this role and don't want to have it dead. Eternity, whether to be alive or dead forever, is fearful when people think about it. The author related the reason with the logic of evolution and our development of front lobe in our brain. We are afraid of eternity because we are afraid of things that we cannot see. We cannot think of anything that's beyond eternity. It is a really terrifying feeling when you think deep about death, it feels like a blackhole that suck up your strength and hard to get out. --Sissi (2/24/2017)
Javier E

Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not | Technolo... - 3 views

www.theguardian.com/...ted-world-elon-musk-the-matrix

simulation reality computer technology universe

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence
  • Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.
  • If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,
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  • At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.
  • “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”
  • “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.
  • If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”
  • Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said
  • “Is it logically possible that we are in a simulation? Yes. Are we probably in a simulation? I would say no,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT.
  • “In order to make the argument in the first place, we need to know what the fundamental laws of physics are where the simulations are being made. And if we are in a simulation then we have no clue what the laws of physics are. What I teach at MIT would be the simulated laws of physics,”
  • Terrile believes that recognizing that we are probably living in a simulation is as game-changing as Copernicus realizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “It was such a profound idea that it wasn’t even thought of as an assumption,”
  • That we might be in a simulation is, Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness. The simulation hypothesis also accounts for peculiarities in quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem, whereby things only become defined when they are observed.
  • “For decades it’s been a problem. Scientists have bent over backwards to eliminate the idea that we need a conscious observer. Maybe the real solution is you do need a conscious entity like a conscious player of a video game,
  • How can the hypothesis be put to the test
  • scientists can look for hallmarks of simulation. “Suppose someone is simulating our universe – it would be very tempting to cut corners in ways that makes the simulation cheaper to run. You could look for evidence of that in an experiment,” said Tegmark
  • First, it provides a scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world. “You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,”
  • it means we will soon have the same ability to create our own simulations. “We will have the power of mind and matter to be able to create whatever we want and occupy those worlds.”
anonymous

The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn't - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thing-the-doctors-couldnt.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn’t
  • My obsessive online shopping wasn’t really about the clothes.
  • I said to my friend, “I want you to bury me in this dress,” which I found funny because I thought I was dying. And then I thought it wasn’t funny at all.
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  • Even if the doctors couldn’t pin down what was going on with me, I was so alarmed by my symptoms and the doctors’ gravest guesses that I felt anxious about whether or not I would have a future.
  • What was certain is that I was shrinking. Rapidly, uncontrollably.
  • My clothes hung loose at the waist and sloughed off my shoulders as if they belonged to a stranger, so I bought a stranger’s dress. Kate Spade, $348 retail.
  • I found it for $50 at an online designer consignment store while on hold with the hospital; a nurse was checking on the results of my bone marrow biopsy.
  • Online shopping was the sort of thing one might do if she were on hold with her cable company, not awaiting a possible blood cancer diagnosis.
  • I filled my cart with a cobalt dress, a blush silk blouse, a slinky skirt.
  • On paper, the doctors said, it looked like it could be lymphoma. The symptoms were classic: fever, night sweats, weight loss.
  • A biopsy of my enlarged lymph node showed it to be benign.
  • Two weeks earlier, a doctor had taken a surgical drill to my hip and hollowed out my bones with a syringe fit for a large horse. “Painful” was a deficient descriptor.
  • “I just don’t know what else to do,” my doctor said.
  • I sat still while my insides turned over. A cold sweat crept across my face. I closed my eyes, shook my head and returned to my shopping cart. I was not going to dwell.
  • No — I was going to shop. I was going to shop until I could think of nothing else. I punched in my credit card number and bought the Kate Spade.
  • Then I rushed to my closet, threw open the double doors and began rifling through Target impulse buys and ill-fitting hand-me-down
  • we’ll have to keep looking
  • I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do illness anymore. I could only do this.
  • I spun around in it, watching the hem rise and fall. Something about it made me feel less like a haggard patient and more like the kind of woman who went to cocktail parties dripping with perfume and family money.
  • Over the next few months, I made it my mission to build a new wardrobe from scratch. The process demanded every moment of my free time, every spare thought
  • We both knew it was impractical. The clothes were expensive and high maintenance, most of them over-the-top fancy for my modest life in nonprofit communications.
  • But they felt vital. I told myself I was overdue for some frivolity, that I deserved to treat myself.
  • For my next doctor’s appointment, I picked out a Valentino pencil skirt that fit snugly against my new, withered body.
  • I hurled the clothes into boxes and garbage bags. They smelled like the hospital, all burned coffee and antiseptic. I didn’t want them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wanted silk. I wanted velvet.
  • “Can I see you again in six weeks? We can repeat blood work then and come up with a timeline for scans. Does that sound like an OK plan?”
  • “Just that I live here,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I have to live here.”
  • That night I ran my fingers through my hair, and a clump of blond strands fell loose into my palm. “It’s just stress,” I told my cat. I brushed my hands together, letting my hair fall into the trash, and returned to my shopping list.
  • Each one had lived a life before me. Now I held onto them in the dim light of my bedroom like tangible hope.
  • We’re forced to find hope in what we used to mock: God, the afterlife, miracles, hemp oil. Healing, by any means. Healing, against all odds.
  • After every appointment, after every failed attempt to name my illness, I would prop myself in bed, choose new dresses and think of all the places I would wear them.
  • The clothes promised me something the doctors, as they continue to search for a diagnosis, still can’t: an uncomplicated future. And I promised a future to the clothes.
  • This was their life after life. And they deserved that, didn’t they?
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 21
     
    This is an extremely moving and well written article. It discusses mental reactions and decisions of a woman facing an unrecognized illness.
anonymous

'Kid 90' and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...punky-brewster-real-world.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy
  • A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.
  • Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.”
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  • Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.
  • “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”
  • by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.
  • Moon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more.
  • These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell
  • Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.
  • “Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings.
  • I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch.
  • The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another
  • I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,”
  • Moon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s
  • In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles.
  • Peers called her Punky Boobster.
  • “It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,”
  • What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?
  • She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery.
  • A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance
  • I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on
  • There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one.
  • What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?
  • Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me
  • But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in.
Javier E

The new science of death: 'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iousness-near-death-experience

death science brain science research psychology

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness
  • Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived
  • when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.
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  • Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies
  • According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.
  • In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.
  • in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.
  • Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased.
  • “We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.
  • Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.
  • “I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”
  • Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences
  • Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.
  • near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine
  • It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care
  • The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individua
  • Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.
  • Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain.
  • Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221.
  • Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries
  • “We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,”
  • “I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”
  • it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest
  • In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”.
  • Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.
  • That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques, and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.
  • scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.
  • In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest
  • In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.
  • That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain
  • Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.
  • In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down
  • To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead.
  • At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,”
  • In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,”
  • The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?
  • The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.
  • Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course,
  • “As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.
  • n those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irre
  • something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.
  • Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.
  • In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.
  • “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.
  • “The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?”
  • Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing.
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