I hope I don’t end up in AWARE II!
I am having a fairly benign procedure this week, but it does involve general anaesthetic. Thankfully there are rarely problems. Here’s the thing though, I am having the procedure in a hospital right next door to Southampton General Hospital in the UK, the home of AWARE, and where Dr Parnia did much of his training and initial research. I believe they are a site in AWARE II, which is why I am hoping not to end up being a subject! That being said, if I end up having a CA (please pray I don’t if you are a believer) and they move me next door to the General, and I am floating near the ceiling, then I will most definitely be looking out for iPads in the resuscitation suite!
Provided all goes to plan, I will shortly be starting my job working on helping to develop clinical research into sleep medicine. It is very focused on Neurology, and I am really excited about learning a lot more about the physiology of the brain and particularly just what the heck happens to the conscious during sleep and dreams. I have done some work on this before, but will now be digging really deep into this area. You can be assured that I will post anything interesting on here.
I am very happy to finally be working in an area of medicine so closely related to the subject of this blog. While I have always worked in science and medicine, and recently my work was on the neuroscience of obesity, this is the first time I will be focused on something so closely related to consciousness. Exciting times!
Any thoughts on dreams, feel free to share!
AwareofAware 
Hi!
Hope everything will be OK, I too had a surgery 10 years ago and hoped to have a NDE but all went black and I found myself lying in the bed dreaming of good and tasty FOODS!!
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Thanks all.
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Best of luck to you!
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Has there been veridical OBE during anesthesia without CA? Pam reynolds obe started while she was fully healthy. I read some vague reports of obe but they are not veridical and is dreamlike unlike obe during CA.
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Good luck Ben
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Good Luck, Orson. But please inform if you finally fly over the ceiling! And congratulations on that new job on sleep medicine. Nice area! Btw: “DNA elephant” book just ordered.
Chad: you have several OBEs with veridical perceptions under anesthesia without CA in “The Self Does Not Die”, by Titus Rivas, et al.
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Thanks for all the well wishes. If I have any OBEs you guys will be the first to know.
Thanks for buying my book Alejandro…let me know how you get on.
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Absolutely enjoying DNA Elephant: your understandable anger against bad politicians speaking bad science… and the terrific story of the flames in your garden shed. I was laughing almost to tears when reading it: my eldest brother did exactly the same but in a flat in Madrid-Spain many years ago. The bathroom curtains were eaten by the fire in one of his chemical game experiments…Dangerous people you chemists…
The logic line of the book is very well built, prepared and explained so far. Congratulations for this great job in this crucial point. Almost reaching half of the book…
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Wow, thank you so much Alejandro, that means a lot. Most of the feedback I’ve had has been very positive and I have some talks coming up off the back of it.
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Good luck!
Nowadays GA is a pretty safe procedure, much more than it was just decades ago. Enjoy the sleep and let us know if you have a OBE!
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Oh Raf, when will you learn that OBEs are illusions created by the brain and nervous system? And highly educated, and skilled scientists who think there’s more to reality than the physical, are veering towards woo woo comforting fantasy and away from actual science and reality. Those scientists are unreliable, and some are dishonest. Don’t listen to them, get rid of superstitions, and question everything.
And throw away those unreliable new age NDE afterlife evidence spiritual books.
Just kidding. 😉
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I had GA once it should be no problem at all and its very different than an ADE. Its why Hameroff looked for tge binding problem where we thinkmGA works.
That said avoid it when you get elderly. It affected both my Aunts. It did affect my wife. She forgot all the episodes to Star Trek. So you are young Orson. Use it as a research opportunity.
If you are at Southampton then you can nose around about A2 but dknt experience it.
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Not a bad idea…might do some snooping, although it’s very hard getting into restricted hospital areas nowadays without a pass. I always need to have clearance before I meet clinical researchers and academics.
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I had GA, over 30 years ago when I was a child… didn’t have any experiences during GA but felt sick afterwards. But nowadays I guess the drugs they use are better and have no or less sideeffects. I do remember that it seemed to take forever for me to finally fall asleep.
If you do have an experience, I hope for u it’s a good one, and more important, that you live to tell about it! 🙂
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Good luck, Ben. Hope the procedure goes well.
Note, I’ve changed from Kamo to Kelesther. I’m tired of Kamo.
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Good luck and get well soon Ben.
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No NDE to report!
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Went well good
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Welcome back, Ben.
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Quick procedure?
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Thanks all for the messages of support.
In fact my procedure lasted nearly 3 hours, but for me it was a nano second. Last thing I remember was the anaesthetist telling me my arm would feel cold, which it did, the next I was being worked up in the recovery room. No beings of light, no iPads, no dividing lines. Probably a good thing if I’m honest! No complications, and given a few more days to recover should be in good shape.
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“In fact my procedure lasted nearly 3 hours, but for me it was a nano second.”
I’ve had quite a few procedures during my life for different reasons. It’s always a nano second for me, too. In a very short amount of time, I went from nervous like crazy, to relaxed, to very tired, and then the procedure was over in like a blink of an eye.
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Yep thats exactly what happened to me except I had a famous last word. I dont think its working …..lets forget about it……….then I think 6 hours later I am shivering.
That cat had a procedure a coupke of weeks ago. She was on out and home wondering where the day went ..
Whats strange is it more like death than death. That is what got Hameroff interested in microtubules. He was an anathesiologist and neurologist.
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“Whats strange is it more like death than death.”
That is strange.
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By that. It is really like nothing. You feel nothing. Some how said they had no nde described FEELING nothing.
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So what happened to my conscious during that 3 hours? Why didn’t I have an OBE? Why didn’t I dream? Did those things happen, but I just can’t remember them?
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I have a feeling maybe something really did happen, but you’re unable to remember it. I don’t know.
When I was going under anesthetics, I think there was a very tiny glimpse of ‘something’. Which is funny, because I always think ‘nothing’ is still somewhat ‘something’. Like when someone says there’s ‘nothing’ after death, I think that’s still something.
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The important point, Ben, is why didn’t your brain confabulate an NDE for you ? Retrospective confabulation has always been (and still is) possibly the favourite sceptical ‘get out’. Your heart stops…you can’t experience anything (according to current medical science) during this period.
Whist coming around (so they postulate) patients naturally desire to fill in the blank period with “something”. What better then, than a nice trip to heaven.
And the veridical elements ? They were somehow (it’s always blithely assumed) gathered unconsciously or subconsciously (depending on how sceptics need to make the explanation fit the particualr NDE report) and then later subliminally incorporated into an experience, which the patient comes to believe has more profound meaning and significance than anything they’ve ever encountered in their whole life…when in fact it is nothing but a trick of the mind, a self comforting delusion, with no significance whatsoever.
Anyone who actually believed that this is how NDE’s are created would be the biggest of idiots. Most sceptics are not idiots, though. They are ideological debunkers and out right deniers, trying desperately to protect their world view, which is looking more and more incorrect. They will never give up, though.
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It’s believed by a few scientists (Luca Turin) that some anaesthetics produce just the right conditions to allow electrons to tunnel out of the hydrophobic cavities within certain proteins. There is some evidence for that with his study on anaesthetised flies, but it remains inconclusive. I personally like Luca’s idea, looks like it has legs to me following their first experiment on flies.
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Know one really knows. Hameroff thinks it has something to do with the quantum binding in the microtubules.
Kelester you describing Sheouel the original Jewish afterlife so of a dull gray shadow. We know from Parnia its more interesting than that. But there are a lot of Jewish afterlife options.
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I think you mean ‘Sheol’. And yes, I know it’s more interesting from Parnia. What’s even funnier, is that I’ve already thought of the whole no afterlife thing as ‘something’, before I even became aware that there’s a name for that.
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I really wish someone would help answer the new objections that are coming out. Many people don’t have answers. They are arguing there is an electrical surge at the point of death. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.00800/full
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again killing rats just to debunk ndes. yep i fully trust in the integrity of the authors.
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These kinds of pseudoscience studies have been answered plenty of times before. We have now reached an impasse. On one side you have hundred of thousands of people who have experienced NDEs, some of which included verified OBEs, along with people like us, who believe that NDEs are not the product of the brain function. On the other you have hardcore materialists who will clutch at every spike in the EEG of a dying rat as evidence that NDEs are the function of brain activity.
Ultimately it is down to the fact that materialists refuse to believe that the OBEs are genuine. There is only one way to break this impasse…provide indisputable evidence that OBEs are real. However even then I suspect that the bar for indisputability will be raised impossibly high.
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Yeah. And former skeptics/materialists, and even panpsychists, are constantly being accused of “veering away from science, and have succumbed to pseudoscience. Even the most rational experts of scientists/neuroscientists can fall into a trap of believing convincing delusions, hallucinations, and wish-fullfilment fantasies.”
You can’t win.
https://books.google.be/books?id=ZcJHDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT8&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=out%20of%20body%20experience&f=false
https://naskarism.wordpress.com/?s=afterlife&submit=
While I appreciate this guy here writing so many books, and being a neuroscientist while being young, ( born in 1991. Unless it’s a typo ) I wish he applied the same amount of skepticism to the reductionist materialistic worldview he finds so obviously right. He thinks he’s debunked every single spiritual experience out there, and that “we have a soul, as long as we’re alive”.
Then again, he’s a humanitarian scientist.
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Hey Ben is there a way I can talk to you privately?
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Use the contact me directly option in the tab at the top, and that will set up and email exchange.
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Hey Kelesther! I would like to see your complete comment. In my brwoser on my phone I only can see parts of it. Is it possible to see it somehow in full?
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Hey Ben! Ther is again this Bug on Kelesthers first comment here. Is there any way to fix this?
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Hi
As far as that study goes, it is still all based on rats. Now, when we look at humans there is no confirmed proof of any spikes happening during Cardiac Arrest.
In fact, Dr. Sam parnia during his AWARE II study is recording EEG samples of all his patients during CA, and until now no spikes or hyper-activity has been recorded. The vast majority of the readings were consistently flat, while around 15-20% or so showed some “seizure-like activity”, which the doctor didn’t explain in detail during his latest talk but are anyway very different from what happens to these rats.
That’s all we have. The spikes in rats are surely interesting (although I disapprove about killing the poor creatures), but don’t really provide an answer to the NDE phenomenon.
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There are studies that show that there are spikes near the death of a person similar to the animal studies if I recall correctly :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816402/#r2
The studies were done by Chawla L. Look more on the web about his research. He calls it End of life electrical surges. The link I posted is just for starters and he has done some more research into this area.
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yes and no. Those studies are not related to sudden and total CA, but mostly happen when “pulling the plug”. it’s well researched in “the self does not die”, By rivas and others.
Normally, when somebody has a massive CA, the EEG is flat. This is demonstrated also (but not only) by Dr Parnia’s observations and research, he examined dozens of patients during CA and nothing like that surge ever showed up.
You can find Sam Parnia’s presentation here https://med.nyu.edu/medicine/education/grand-rounds/18-19
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@ju err
I don’t really see the problem. We know the brain is involved in the NDE and OBE in some way, else people would not be able to recall these experiences, and tell us about them. This new study seems to speculate that there results might confirm the reality of these experiences, by measuring some unusual activity in the brain. But in no way does this study claim that these experiences are perfectly isolated inside the rodents scull, they find interesting and important measurement, that could be correlated with the NDE/OBE…. i’m over the moon that serious researchers are now investigating this phenomena.
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Look who we are dealing with Google Epstein and Krauss. Teenage girls lie because of his athiesm.
I dont even look at anything when I see fronteirs
i will be busy dealing with end of life issues with mother in law.
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Viginia Heffernan page88 on twitter Aug 6 post .
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The rat thing doesn’t debunk anything.
However, it might convince and make people who are hard materialists, like Abhijit Naskar happy, and it might be proof to them that “rational and smart adults are foolishly believing that death is a new beginning, and not the end”.
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If there’s no blood flow, there is no consciousness after 1 minute, period. This isn’t up for debate. A few cells might be active but it’s well known without synchronized global activity there’s no conscious experiences. Also people who think these rat torture prove anything need to experience fainting, it feel very dizzy (and peaceful like in ndes), there’s tunnel vision but it’s just you lose peripheral vision you don’t see a real tunnel with actual walls. Saying ndes occur just a few seconds after CA is beyond stupid, there’s no enough time and dizziness is never reported. They can only happen after the heart is restarted or during CPR, but with CPR there should still be dizziness.
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“Saying ndes occur just a few seconds after CA is beyond stupid, there’s no enough time and dizziness is never reported. They can only happen after the heart is restarted or during CPR, but with CPR there should still be dizziness.”
You’re nicer about it than I am. I would’ve said something way worse.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438818300692
I could not say it better . Even Memory which should be easier than consciousness we really dont know . We can screw with rat memories to some extent but I would point out only observe them through behavior .
Its interesting here they are mostly playing with dead tissue . Almost everything done under neuroscience these days is looking like pseudoscience
BTW I had the displeasure of meeting Carl Sagan their dead saint once
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https://www.nyas.org/events/2019/what-happens-when-we-die-surviving-cardiac-arrest/ news from Sam Parnia
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Somebody needs to go to this.
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Just read about Krauss harassment thanks to David mentioning it. Also Michael Shermer is the same type of crony. I hope the rampant sexual harassment in the skeptic community shows the public these “skeptics” are not paragons of reason, they are ideology motivated just like bible thumpers and have very low moral character. They remind me of cardinals who molest boys. Skeptics and religious nutcases have very similar mindset imo. Ideology is what drives the majority of human thought, not reason and rationality. Even the mighty Einstein was ideology driven when he refused to believe god plays dice. If everyone was reasonable NDEs would have been shown to be real or not long ago, and there would be no wars, no mass shootings.
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I could not say it better Chad
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Even if NDEs would be proved right. This would not stop humanity from behaving badly. Look at history and religion a lot of wars were done in the name of gods and religion beliefs and those people in those times fanatically believed in their religions and yet they were not living in a utopia.
Also many people can even twist NDEs to their agendas like many cult leaders do or even make them up. It easy to claim a NDE and then twist it according to your own wishes because you cannot record a NDE and see what the person saw on the other side.
So I personally do not believe that even if NDEs are proven that it would stop humanity from their evil side and greed and create a utopia.
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I didn’t mean proving ndes would create utopia, I meant if people reasoned instead of following ideology and emotions, still won’t be utopia but im sure there won’t be anymore wars.
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“Even if NDEs would be proved right. This would not stop humanity from behaving badly.”
I agree.
I think ‘skeptics’ should stop saying “if NDEs are real and there’s an afterlife, why are there still wars? Why is there still suffering and diseases? That’s proof that all NDEs and other spiritual experiences are all in our heads and hallucinations, not from an external immaterial realm.”
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Conversely, neither would a faithless world. Most wars do not depend on belief, but interest.
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Correct.
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Guys, if you want to see aggressive ‘skeptics’, go to YouTube. I think there are materialists that are more aggressive on YouTube than the ones on Randi forums and such.
This YouTuber named, Chocolate Hat. He makes ‘debunking’ videos about “intelligent scientists that have succumbed to pseudoscience fantasies, and can’t manage their delusions and mental illness. And that people like Graham Hancock desperately need to believe in woo, that hallucinations are external and not all in their heads, exist beyond their bodies, self-escapism and escape reality”.
There are more people in the comments that disagree with Chocolate, then the ones that do agree. And he takes that as proof that he has “insulted their New Age guru and their cherished ideas that spiritual experiences and consciousness are not just all in their heads” :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyM7SByfijTbWwhIoOpo8BA/videos
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it kind of ridiculous that he hides behind an owl puppet in his entire channel. Come on, we’re not 5 years old.
Hard for me to take him seriously, especially when he hurls the word ‘woo’ every 15 seconds in some of his videos.
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He claims to hoot about logic and reason in his description, as many pseudo skeptics do. I’ve met youtube comments where when I asked them to explain what materialism is and give a materialist overview of the universe (was hoping for the usual physics description of functions as particles and laws as differential equations constraining the functions etc), and they just say “no supernatural/woo/immaterial nonsense” and compare the hard problem of consciousness to vitalism. These guys have no idea the very view they are defending. In fact I’m sure most professional scientists don’t know what rigorous logic is, science is empirically based and use normal “human logic” to check the reasoning, actual logical systems like propositional logic/first order logic are not used (except maybe in physics you can argue how things are modelled as mathematical objects and thus the reasoning is first order logic).
Imo the legions of angry high school teens (as tim calls them) are just riding the mainstream hype and trying to look cool. If they are older than 22 then they no longer have a good reason to be so childish.
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Well, I must admit, I am skeptical of Sheldrake, he does seem a little ‘askew’ or something. I don’t know how else to describe it right now. I own one of his books ( the Science Delusion ) that was mentioned in one of his puppet shows, but I take it with a grain of salt, as I do with many other things.
I don’t really like Bruce Lipton, because he twists things to fit his beliefs. And I think Bruce and Graham Hancock give post-materialists and NDE researchers a bad name.
Especially Hancock, because he seems to call things like mental illnesses, and being high on drugs that cause you to hallucinate “doors to the spirit world”, when they’re just chemicals acting up in the brain. In this case, ‘all in your head’, not external.
And don’t even get me started on Chopra.
All those people Chocolate Hat mentions might be pseudoscientists and incorrect. But because they’re not the only sources, it’s not correct to call things that suggest an immaterial realm, as a whole, BS delusional pseudoscience woo.
Again, maybe it’s just me, but I find it kind of desperate how some of Chocolate’s followers come up and say “Chocolate Hat, can you please help me debunk Noetic science on youtube, Bernardo Kastrup and the Global Consciousness Project? They’re irritating, dogmatic, and idealists.”
If you feel you need to go and send someone out to help you “debunk this!”, that, to me, says you’re not really applying skepticism, you’re just trying to discredit something you don’t like, because it doesn’t agree with your worldview.
And surprisingly, I’ve seen someone do something similar elsewhere. “Please debunk this. Sam Harris is suggesting that consciousness might not completely come from the brain. He’s off based”.
It’s one thing to ask someone what he thinks about a certain subject. But to run up to someone and ask a person to debunk a certain thing for him because “it’s irrittating”, tells me that his worldview is being challenged, he doesn’t like it, and he’s uncomfortable. However, nobody is immune to that.
I could be wrong. Posting a bunch of YouTube debunking videos is not going to make it all go away, no matter how badly we may want it to. But it might let some people sleep at night.
But in the end, many of us love science and are not in “science or evolution denial, reality and facts”, and we ARE following the evidence wherever it leads. It’s just some don’t like where it leads: Widely held materialism might not be the key to understanding reality. The possibility that there might be more to life than just working for a living, survival and reproduction, watching football and movies, playing video games, clubbing, etc.
I agree, they have no good reason to be childish about all of this. I have a feeling that maybe at least 70% of Chocolate’s supporters are just-out-of-high-school aged, and/or college aged.
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https://twitter.com/SamParniaMDPhD/status/1160007125386612736?s=09
A new tweet from Dr Sam Parnia
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In 3,2,1
Cue the ‘skeptic’s’
“even though it may seem self evident to a skeptic that NDEs are crap, it’s still important to analyze exactly how the brain can trick you into believing in the idea. The brain is so good at messing with itself that it’s very hard sometimes to tell real experience from hallucination or vivid imagination. Things you see during the experience are not necessarily true in the real world. These people are conning themselves and leaving themselves open to whatever sounds fantastic. The predisposition/proneness to believe in the supernatural is a fact, or they want to believe. They opened their mind so far, they removed their BS filters and let all the woo in, or let their brains fall out. It’s all lucid dreams and all in your head. Nothing more.”
Like I said, whatever lets them sleep at night.
That’s an awesome tweet, werner Bartl
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Think that might mark the start of a new post. I check his Twitter once a week, but this is the first post for ages.
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As you asked about dreams. Dr Sushant Meshram (an Sleep researcher) presented an interesting idea about precognition/dreams a a conference I attended a few years ago… I briefly wrote about it on Penny Sartori’s blog back in 2013… I spent a bit of time researching the physiological states we experience during sleep and dreaming
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I just had a rem intrusion again, saw white lights in the center of my vision. They were nothing like what NDErs describe. The white lights were flashing too. Problem with skeptics is they see some superficial similarities and say NDEs are debunked. I’ve never tried dmt but rem intrusion definitely have nothing to do with ndes. The only way to test the dmt hypothesis is to get NDErs to do dmt multiple times. How do they get away with the methodology they used? They tick boxes between the 2 experiences and if there’s statistical correlation they say they proved something, it’s literally like this type of reasoning http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=SRmMNrEO-lE
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Chad, that link is a bad gateway. It’s not taking me anywhere.
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I’d say if some dmt is involved in NDEs and such, so what? Many people are calling it the spirit molecule. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/drugs-dmt-near-death-experience-psychedelic-hallucinogenic-imperial-college-london-a8491691.html
I can’t remember where I got it from, but I heard somewhere ( maybe by Strassman, maybe not ) that dmt LOWERS brain activity. Or maybe that was a completely different drug.
But I don’t think dmt debunks the experiences, though some ‘skeptics’ might say it does, because they do tend to get overly excited when a drug is involved in these things.
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Go to youtube and add /watch?v=SRmMNrEO-lE to it. Whenever I posted links before i got a comment awaiting moderation, Ben doesn’t like link it seems.
Yes dmt lower brain activity https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-is-your-brain-on-drugs/ thats for mushrooms but remember another article saying dmt does the same thing. To me there are many reasonable skeptic arguments, it’s false to say more activity=more conscious experiences (e.g. people in seizures have maximal activity). I think if dmt really can induce a coherent meaningful nde with detail life review it’ll be a heavy blow to believer, but i’ve never seen anything close so far. Sure a dmt users may experience life changing trips, but the rare dream does that to people too. Most dmt users forget their experience fast whereas most nders completely change, I know of no other non-awake experience that does this to people. Not to mention the elephant in the room: geometric shapes (i’ve seen them in rem intrusion too), never ever heard an nder mention geometric shapes, something skeptics consistently ignore.
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Look at the picture he chose….it says a thousand words.
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Chad, that link is a bad gateway. It’s not taking me anywhere.
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I’ve never heard of a life review during a dmt trip either. And the geometric shapes in rem intrusion is something.
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“Even if NDEs would be proved right. This would not stop humanity from behaving badly.”
“Conversely, neither would a faithless world. Most wars do not depend on belief, but interest.”
I forgot to mention that many materialists keep saying “if we could just get people to wake up, get rid of all supernatural superstitions, and get rid of all harmful eastern beliefs, the world would be a much better place”.
Even if everybody on earth became hard materialists ( which, sorry folks, is not going to happen ), there would still be suffering, wars, illnesses, death, crime, etc. So I don’t see how that would make a difference.
Also, if you google “materialistic science education university”, you’ll see that there are papers and journals that are trying to encourage and promote students and people to “embrace materialistic science, apply skepticism, and critical thinking in higher education.
Students with higher education are more likely to be critical thinkers, less superstitious, and less likely to believe in paranormal, than the ones that don’t go to college.”
Again, it’s not going to happen. The idea of everyone on earth becoming materialists is wishful thinking, unless you plan on killing all post-materialists. But even then, that’s still not going to get rid of contrary evidence against materialism.
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That’s funny coming from them, seeing as they are actually trying to sabotage society by convincing the gullible to think free will/consciousness don’t exist and no one is responsible for their actions (because it’s all “due to the brain” they say). I love the virtue signalling cover up from these a$$holes. Religion gives people a way of life, it’s only the extremist fanatics who kill people. Without belief in something bigger than this world most people won’t be able to cope with the hardships thinking they are just a meat robot. I used to believe in a god and I felt much more comfortable dealing with pain in my life, now after years of research I 100% know a personal god doesn’t exist and it’s made me much more miserable, and im already a very mentally strong person so imagine what the average person will feel in my position. What materialists are doing is encouraging hedonism and relieving people from their moral responsibility, they try to cover it up by saying how they are the champions of reason and promoters of critical thinking. This certainly isn’t true for all materialists (I have a materialist friend who is good hearted like a crusader), but the ones who make a career out of it (sam harris, lawrence krauss, steven pinker, dan dennett etc etc) are all like this.
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“I 100% know a personal God doesn’t exist”…what are your thoughts on what the Being of light is in NDEs?
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100%?
do we not recognize more than 95% of reality and you are sure, even 100%, that God does not exist? Congratulations other than phenomenon …
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Awesome. I had a dream/vision/something in which I met this being. I know he exists 100%!
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The beings of light are like wise old people, they are very anthropomorphic because they probably used to be people. By personal god i meant an anthropomorphic god like in religions, who punishs/rewards people and intervenes with the world every now and then. I think there’s a big consciousness which can be called god, but it doesn’t have any human properties and probably doesn’t have any properties at all, showing complete indifference to the everything happening in the world. It’s similar to pantheist god, but god isn’t the right word, big consciousness is a better name.
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OK Chad, I get totally where you are coming from but there are a couple of things.
1. Where did the life the universe and everything come from? In my book explore this, and I am Ph.D. chemist, so have sufficient understanding to get to grips with the material, and there is only one conclusion…life was initiated by an intelligent entity.
2. Many people in NDEs describe meeting spirits…guides/angels/relatives, but also many describe meeting or seeing one who is at the center of everything. I have my that being in an incredible dream when I was teenager that was beyond any other experience I have ever had. Personal subjective experience, but millions of others have had similar ones.
3. Yes, I believe he interacts in the world today. This will freak you out maybe. 2 months ago I was booking a flight from the UK to NZ. I got to the final payment page, hit pay, then suddenly saw that I had put the wrong return date. I furiously hit the back key. I phoned up Cathay Pacific and asked if it had gone through, and they said no, but to wait a day or two in case it had, and they would refund it or change the dates. Three days later I went back, got everything right. Suddenly towards the end of the process I thought maybe I shouldn’t book the flight. So I prayed, to my personal God. This was my precise prayer “God, if I’m not supposed to book this flight please cause a computer malfunction so it doesn’t happen.” I continued, hit the payment button, I got redirected to MasterCard version. They approved it once I entered the password, it went back to Cathay, then there were the words on the screen “There has been a system failure please start your booking over again.” Seriously WTF! I booked with Air New Zealand. Now, of course being Cathay, my flight was routed via Hong Kong. These tickets were up front, so not cheap. If the booking had gone through I would now be having major anxiety about flying via HK with Cathay because of all the troubles. Did my personal God mess with Cathay’s computer? I have had stranger answers to prayer.
Anyway, I know this won’t wash with you, but it happened.
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I agree. However, it could also be that the god Consciousness is experiencing also through “us” … and therefore I do not exclude at all that he “lives” with empathy … As Professor Vittorio Marchi (professor of Italian Physics and researcher both in the field of Quantum Physics and Consciousness) we are one, everything is connected, there is no ego or you, duality is an illusion. Often Marchi remembered, to explain concepts of Quantum Physics united with the Conscious or the same God Consciousness, the words of Jesus (who considered the first of the quantum physicists of history, a formidable forerunner of the true reality of things), an example among many was when he said that God is within us.
The near death experiences, the research on the paranormal (the serious one) all too often confirm this, in order not to consider them rational and serious arguments on which to argue.
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I wonder about this. If God created everything, are we just extensions of him exploring his own creation? It is a mind bender.
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Vittorio Marchi professor of Physics and researcher in the field of Consciousness and Quantum Physics
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@ Ben
The experience is only if you live it, you cannot create an experience. Forces this is one of the few certainties we have. Can God experience himself through us?
Certainly we should think of a God in continuous evolution, in a constant expansion. Is the Universe God / Consciousness?
Huge argument, from which we will never skip out, many dead souls have often “affirmed” that God is not even understandable for them yet, let alone for us!
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Exactly. We kind of need to accept this one. The nature of God,,,,,,,,,,, who, what he/she/it is, when, where he came from, has he always existed etc…we will never know the answer, definitely not on this side.
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It’s a good thing these guys don’t control the law. They would act exactly like the inquisition. This was never about critical thinking or reason, this was always about ideology like christian vs muslims 1000 years ago. It’s all due to “fan mentality”, that “my principles/person/object” is the best and everything else sucks, it’s present in every aspect of human life. Staunch materialists are exactly like this, extreme fans of the meat robot ideology. Trust if these guys controlled the law they would start killing anyone opposing “science and reason”. They’ve already done their best to stall NDE research. Good thing the law is run by intelligent responsible just people.
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What do you think, because of the lecture in November? Strange that even a seamed experienced speaks, is that a positive sign?
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I would look at inspiringphilosophy’s videos on who God is. If ANYONE has a questions your more than welcome to let him know via email or facebook. Inspiringphilosophy does ALOT of research. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2r74vcMxwUk
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Ben, about the plane ticket incident, it’s far too open to skeptical arguments. The computer might have a very high failure rate recently, without knowing the computer’s history no conclusion can be drawn. And thinking about computer failure is not an uncommon requirement, if you said “make a staff come to me and say exactly these 10+ words in exactly this order” instead of computer failure it would different. And to evaluate these type of experiences you need to take into account every time you pray, can’t just count the ones that worked and discard the numerous times where nothing happened, i.e. file drawer effect. Furthermore interfering with a computer would violate physics, because computers are completely deterministic, only interacting with human free will would not violate physics because free will must have something to do with not following the expected probability in quantum physics.
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Chad, these are of course all completely valid from a skeptics point of view, and I know that it is my faith that interprets this event as God intervening…and it still does…your arguments are no more evidence than my subjective understanding of it. However, your point of “God” not interfering with physics doesn’t really wash if you are person of faith. As I have shown very clearly in the book I released earlier this year, the only way that life could have come into being is through the direct intervention by “God” or some other external intelligence that exists outside of our space time understanding of the universe. Moreover, if “God” created the universe, and therefore the laws of physics, as I believe (and you don’t believe – but both are belief), then the odd tweak here and there is not exactly a big deal.
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I agree the no interfering is a belief, just like yours. I see life as originating and evolving from some “anti entropic force”, i.e. there are undiscovered emergent phenomenon that makes the universe not a blind watchmaker, think of snow flakes forming a highly ordered pattern just by itself. But there’s no anthropomorphic intelligent deity interfering here and there. God to me is just big consciousness, showing complete indifference to humans because this big consciousness doesn’t have the human like emotions such as care and sense of justice, in fact it doesn’t have any personality not even animal ones.
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In the NYAS event with Sam Parnia on Nov 18, mentioned by werner above, I saw this speaker Dr. Tom Aufderheide, professor of emergency medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His name rang a bell from Sam’s book, Erasing Death that I read so I found this from the web from the book.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2018/03/so-i-ate-his-lunch.html
So Tom Aufderheide got exposed to NDEs very early in his career. Looking forward to the Nov 18 event!
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Good spot Alan. I remember that story alright. Always found it funny 🙂
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ok, cheers Z
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Aufderheide’s tale is very fascinating. It contains both some form of verified OBE and, interesting and weird as it sounds, thelepathy of some kind. His patinet “heard” the doctor thinking some words. As far as I know he never spoke in public about this, so I’d say that Parnia is really ready to show some light on these events, and is going to contact many of his collegues who are arespectable and can provide useful experiences/information to the cause. good job.
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I’ve seen quite a few nders say they can read other people’s thoughts during obe, so i wasn’t surprised at reading his account.
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Really, how much more proof do we need? There are just so many accounts beyond all possible explanation, and by reliable people.
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It would be a really good event to attend. Shame I moved away from Canada.
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Hey all, I’m not new to this blog but this is my first time posting. I have been studying NDEs for a while now and their is something odd (compared to what commonly occurs during these experiences) that does occur from time to time during a NDE. During some experiences, it is reported that a perceived family member is not really the former family member, but rather just an “entity” in that former family member”s form. While I am not asserting that this is always the case during NDEs, it does generate more questions than answers. If our loved ones are not greeting us during these experiences, then where are they? Have they already reincarnated ( assuming reincarnation is true). https://www.gaia.com/article/near-death-experiences
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Sorry for the delay in approving!
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Anykne going to the event. I checked with a friend and he could not make it.
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If I was still living in Toronto I’d go down for the day, but now living back in the UK. Would be good if someone went…he may even use it to present some early findings although I would have thought he’d prefer to use a proper medical convention.
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@Admiral evidential and main stream cases don’t mention reincarnation most of them say they seen a family member who they recognized. alot of these angelic people don’t look familiar cause they are very bright im sure once they take a good look they would recognize who they are. Dr Mary neal had such experience Although she did not recognize the people said she thinks it was her grandmother if she would have taken a closer look and she thinks reincarnation doesn’t make sense. Ive spoken to many NDE experts on this exact question all of them said basically no they never heard of reincarnation involved with NDEs
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That’s a great insight. There is a lot of guff on the web now from self reported NDEs…speaking of guff has anyone looked at this years IANDS program. It really has veered off into loopyland. I was considering buying a pass for the video links, but looked at the talks and decided against it.
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Bruce greyson also said Iands is not consistent with the rest of the population on NDEs. This is why I stick with experts to many people make unsupported claims and turn NDEs into what they want them to be rather then following the evidence to where it leads
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What do you guys think about nderf? Dr. Jeff Long’s site seems to be much less “wooie” than iands. A few of the reported NDEs do mention reincarnation.
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My problem with all these sites is that the NDEs are volunteered over the internet. It just asks for abuse and nutters to chuck stuff in there. Dr Long has written some great books, and the accounts which came directly from doctors or where the fact they died or were in a medical procedure have been verified are the ones that have most credence…the rest are less easy to take seriously…even if they are genuine.
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Anyone can write there story on Mr.Longs website with no evidence. In Mr. Longs books there is not one mention of reincarnation I rather stick with the reliable research. All the people who mention reincarnation have a prior belief in reincarnation which is not directly from there NDE. We should expect them to input such beliefs. Every reliable case thats out there is not on mention of reincarnation. If it was true we would see most if not all cases mentioning it but we don’t. I have many emails from experts if you would like them.
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Anything that can further enlighten me on this issue would be appreciated.
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I would be grateful for anything you have. Must admit I’m a bit ignorant in this one. I’ve always assumed that reincarnation was mentioned in many of the verified accounts but not really gone into detail.
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Here are 4. Dr.Mary neal “ Hi Justin. I definitely did not experience reincarnation and don’t even think it makes sense. The person you are close to will be there to welcome you and greet you when your work on earth is done. Until then, I can assure you that they are still aware of you here on earth and are probably your biggest cheerleader.”Dr. J steve miller “In the studies of NDEs that I found, I didn’t see any evidence of past lives, so I never really researched reported NDEs that were interpreted as past lives. ” Dr. Habermas. Justin: No, not a single one of the dozens of NDErs I’ve talked to has ever said a single thing about past lives, pre-birth memories, or merging w/ the divine, etc. I’d say that if I’ve ever read of NDErs who talk this way–& I’ve read of hundreds, maybe even more than that–I don’t recall any of these comments, either.
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Mmm. I have been planning for a long time as research for my next book to go back to the earliest NDEs reported, before the New Age movement hijacked it, and see what what these contained regarding issues like this. Thanks for sending these through as they have made me think again on this subject.
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Sorry the 4th is in This book. This was not a direct message. Around Chapter 10 he gives a good critique on this and also critiques Iands. https://www.google.com/search?q=michael+sabom+light+and+death&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
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Osis and Harlssson “Were never mentioned. Nor were reincarnation and dissolution in Brahma”
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Cheers Justin, much appreciated. I am going to create a list of contributors and will credit them in my book. I’m planning to have it ready next year.
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The phrase “spiritual New Agers love science, but only when it agrees with them, when they think it agrees with them, or when it supports their beliefs. When two spiritualists disagree, they don’t fight, they just offer their own explanations and each decodes what to believe based on their feelings” gets pretty old real fast.
I could say the same thing about materialists, because they seem to love science, only when it seems to agree with them, or support their worldview.
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/clumps-nerve-cells-lab-spontaneously-formed-brain-waves
Very Interesting read.
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“Aufderheide’s tale is very fascinating. It contains both some form of verified OBE and, interesting and weird as it sounds, thelepathy of some kind. His patinet “heard” the doctor thinking some words. As far as I know he never spoke in public about this, so I’d say that Parnia is really ready to show some light on these events, and is going to contact many of his collegues who are arespectable and can provide useful experiences/information to the cause. good job.”
I’ve NEVER heard of that one before. That’s interesting. I would actually love to see YouTuber Chocolate Hat try to debunk this, since he seems so convinced that all things regarding NDEs/obes, all of Kastrup’s ideas ( I know this, because I saw one of Chocolate’s followers run up to him and say “Hey Chocolate, please read Kastrup’s papers and debunk them!” ), all philosophies ( unless it supports their worldview ), and, idealism are all anti/pseudoscience, people’s beliefs, and ‘paranormalists’ hijacking science ( when it’s really materialists that are hijacking science ).
Anyways many of us “New Agers” are interested in these things because of the evidence, not because we ‘woo believers search for patterns and clues to deny the reality that no higher power is watching over us and nothingness at death, and need to believe in something that lets us sleep at night.’
I wonder what Chocolate’s and Philip Moriarty ( Sixty Symbols YouTuber ) reaction to the OBE would be.
Sixty Symbols got upset over Lanza’s quantum woo, and his followers started ranting about Chopra and his pseudoscience.
I can’t take Lanza and Chopra seriously. Especially when Chopra ‘whines’ about Wikipedia. He should stop trying to use or post on Wikipedia then, no? Because Wikipedia is not really a reliable source to begin with.
And maybe Lanza, Chopra, and Lipton should actually LEARN some quantum mechanics/physics while they’re at it, instead of just using big sciencey words and terminology to fit their beliefs.
They make people who are actually interested in consciousness research and the immaterial look bad.
I still don’t get why he hides behind a stuffed owl, because we’re adults, not children.
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Something else very interesting: What does it mean for NDEs? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.interestingengineering.com/inception-scientists-have-successfully-implanted-an-artificial-memory
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It seems to have been stimulation of cells that react to a shock. I am not sure if means much. It sure does not explain how people have memories when those cells are not working. While there has been a lot of focus on long term pigmentation and memory it is far from clear on how memories last for months to years because all those synapses are replaced multiple times.
Almost everything is so hyped now …think dead pig brains…..wait and see if it amounts to much.
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Agreed David. My understanding from my initial reading was the cells generated their own electrical signals. I will look into it further. The whole memory thing is fascinating. Everything we’ve ever done is stored quite literally in a giant universal “cloud” if NDEs are to be believed.
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I haven’t read the paper yet, but this appears to be an experiment building upon the epigenetic inheritance studies of rodent offspring who were conceived by IVF after the male donor was killed. These studies appear to show offspring recognition of specific sensory inputs which they had never been exposed to before, but which the male donor had been exposed to in the weeks leading up to its death. Suggesting that the offsprings ability to recognise the novel sensory input came from their male ancestor (sperm donor), whom they had never met. The donor had died before they were even conceived, killed to extract the sperm.
The brains network structures appear to be something analogous to a notebook you write notes in. Those written notes are just patterns. They allow you to access an experience, but the notes themselves don’t contain the experience. The same seems to apply to the brain. The network structures appear to store access to experience, but not the experience itself. Sure, the brain structures abilities are far more sophisticated than your writings in a notebook. But the analogy seems to apply.
It’s something much deeper within the networks themselves, that appears to be responsible for the experience. Currently molecules, and the hydrophobic cavities within the the proteins that are the building blocks which make up the networks, seem like a good candidate for constraining particles with spin and angular momentum. It’s these molecules and particles that might have something to do with “adding-up non-classically”, to produce experience.
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I was thinking of another experiment but my comments stand. I am really tired of all this killing though.
There was the Planarian one too.
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Sorry this one was the one I read. It is not related to the epigenetic one you mentioned. They just optically stimulated some nerve cells that were reacting to a shock. But the real unknown is not that but how the neck do memories persist over lifetimes when all the neurons and synapses turn over ? And ongoing lives species turn over a lot? How are they accessed by the conscious mind at will. I can state to myself I want a childhood memory now 50 years ago and I can find it.
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I only seem able to access childhood memories where I still have networks available that support the patterns which can access the original experience. But it’s reexperience is wildly interfered with by all my other experiences that use the same network patterns. So I can’t just reexperience anything, some of the networks have eroded through lack of use, and some experiences are therefore lost, and what I do reexperience is generally pretty inaccurate. The more unusual patterns relating to more unusual experiences seem to have less interference, and the stronger experiences which are strong because they are heavily weighted by my networks, do seem to be reexperienced a bit more accurately.
I don’t see any problems with the turnover of neutrons and synapses. Because as the paper suggests, the network structure only seem to allow access to experience, the network structure doesn’t contain the experience. If the networks didn’t “turn over”, they wouldn’t erode, and I wouldn’t be able to let go of less useful patterns of experience. This is one of the observations of people who are schizophrenic, parts of their network structure doesn’t seem to alter over time, they seem unchanging.
The networks themselves evolve differently with different people. Some have dense structures that make easy short connections early in life, others have less dense structures that don’t make easy connections, but keep learning later into life, whereas the fast learners can be quite fixed in their learning. However the speed of network erosion can be quite different too, creating lots of interesting and varied learning capabilities between different people.
But I certainly agree, how or why I’m having this experience is a complete and utter mystery. I’m up to something, but it’s not at all clear what, or why.
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The Wikipedia article on LTP is pretty good. It has some connection to learning but it lasts weeks to months. As you can see in the mouse experiments disrupting it hurts learning but the mice still function. So…….
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