According to the Lancet study, there's about a 2% chance you'll experience a "very deep" NDE during cardiac arrest.
Merged Near Death Experience Study
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According to the Lancet study, there's about a 2% chance you'll experience a "very deep" NDE during cardiac arrest.
I am disputing that people actually experience "life reviews" and "meetings with the dead".
I believe people have said they have experienced these things, but that they are no more than thoughts that these things happened, based on the persons conditioning during normal, waking life.
WHY are they experiencing these things when they're near-death?
And the Lancet study makes a much stronger claim than I'm making:
"Our results show that medical factors cannot account for occurrence of NDE; although all patients had been clinically dead, most did not have NDE. Furthermore, seriousness of the crisis was not related to occurrence or depth of the experience. If purely physiological factors resulting from cerebral anoxia caused NDE, most of our patients should have had this experience. Patients' medication was also unrelated to frequency of NDE. Psychological factors are unlikely to be important as fear was not associated with NDE."
dlorde
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Fast jet pilots have reported NDEs when they've experienced g-LOC (loss of consciousness due to g force) in centrifuge training (they pass out due to hypoxia from blood draining from the brain). I don't know of any research relating to NDEs in this situation (seems unlikely as these tests are generally military), and it isn't reported every time, so it would be tricky to study precisely when the experience seems to occur. I think you'd have to correlate NDEs and brain activity, as sense of time may well be distorted in these circumstances. There may be more than one stage to the perceived experience - e.g. changes in brain connectivity due to hypoxia, followed by activation of the modified neural pathways during recovery causing unusual experience, followed by generation of a narrative explanation of that experience. Maybe.
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barehl
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This statement is actually a contradiction. You can score high on the WCEI without having a life review or life-insight and disappearance of fear of death is not even one of the questions.
I'm not sure if you realize how embarrassing your reference is. The WCEI is far less than the author is suggesting. Most of the questions are subjective, several are similar and each has a 2x modifier. The maximum score is 24.
Only 2% of those he studied scored higher than 15. Yet, he claims that this is statistically important.
If you lost sensation of your body, that is worth 1 point on the NDE. I don't see how that relates to a mystical experience.
If you felt that your senses were sharper than usual, that is worth 1 point.
If you had any memories of your past, that is worth 1 point.
One question is if you had a feeling of peace or pleasantness. Another question is if you had a feeling of joy. A third question is similar asking if you felt a sense of harmony or unity with the universe.
One question asks if you felt you were surrounded by light. Unusually bright light is worth 1 point.
One question is if time speeded up; another is if it slowed down. Time slowing down is common with stress; this gets you one point.
There is a question asking if you felt that you suddenly felt that you understood everything. Understanding about yourself is worth 1 point.
Another asks if you felt that you knew what was going on in other places as if by ESP.
The last question is if you had scenes of the future.
Aside from the silliness of the WCEI, the study is also embarrassing by the number of times he tries to fudge the numbers. For example, if someone did not report an NDE days after the event but reported one two years later he rationalizes this as either that they didn't remember it right away or perhaps were too shy to talk about it. The claim that the ER nurse made a diagnosis of coma is also laughable. You need something a lot less squishy than this.
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NDE's are entirely subjective. All experiences are, by definition. There's only two ways we can even know NDE's exist- either have one yourself, or listen to someone talk about their own. Enough people have reported them, that the phenomenon itself is taken for granted. We know NDE's happen, we know some people have stronger ones than others, and we know that there are common elements to them. There's even a scale to measure them by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_studies
Obviously, if you're trying to statistically study subjective experience, you're going to have to scale it somehow, like how hospitals have a scale for pain.
As for 2% not being significant, if a doctor puts a sign on a high place in an operating room, and just one person accurately reports what it says after having had an NDE, that will be extremely significant. There's a study that's supposed to be coming out this year about just that sort of thing.
barehl
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The only way you can compare these experiences with others induced by drugs, etc. is to give them the same questionnaire. Until you do that to control for both groups you are just blowing smoke. To do a proper double blind study, you give different groups the same questionnaire. Then you let someone evaluate the questionnaires who has no idea what group each came from. Then you see if there is anything significant in the data. You aren't even in the same galaxy with a proper study yet.
That study has already been refuted. Why? Because the entire hospital staff knew what the "hidden" signs were.
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They gave ALL resuscitation patients the same questions. Some remembered nothing, some remembered a great deal.
What's interesting is Dr. Sabom used a control group and an NDE group to describe their resuscitation procedures accurately:
In an early retrospective study, Sabom[12] interviewed individuals who had claimed to see parts of their own CPR. Patients' description of their resuscitation was compared with their medical records (which the patients never saw). However, most of the descriptions (26 of 32 patients) contained only general, non-detailed visual impressions that could not be verified. While these descriptions corresponded with the known facts of near-death crisis event, the accuracy of the accounts was not verifiable. In comparison, Sabom asked cardiac patients who did not report an NDE to describe a resuscitation procedure and found that 80% of the non-NDE group made errors in their descriptions. Despite these compelling findings, most of the control group cardiac patients had never actually been resuscitated; therefore, a more precise control group would consist of all patients that had received CPR without experiencing an NDE. This was performed decades later by Sartori[13], who found that patients who reported observing their bodies during CPR could accurately describe their resuscitation, whereas those who also had CPR but did not claim to observe their resuscitation could not.
http://www.hcnet.usp.br/ipq/revista/vol40/n5/eng/197.htm
What study was this?
George 152
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Its obvious that he didn't think it out
Are you referring to me? Do you think people in cardiac arrest suffer from loss of blood?
LOL, your blood doesn't disappear during cardiac arrest. The total volume of blood in your body remains the same. What, do you think they give you a transfusion when you're having a heart attack?
It's just not moving anymore.
bruto
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Are we not just engaged in a semantic quibble here? Of course the quantity of the blood remains the same, but the function does not, if we presume that blood does its job by circulating and delivering oxygen. If the effect of stoppage is the same to a brain as the effect of diversion, then it's reasonable to lump the two functionally together as "blood loss" when speaking of brain function, even if it leaves room for a few paragraphs of sophistry.
barehl
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No. Not all resuscitation patients, all groups that have similar experiences. Limiting to resuscitation patients artificially restricts the test sample to a group that could have had a near death experience. That is confirmation bias. You need a control group for similar experiences to confirm that there are differences. In other words, he is claiming that the two groups are different but he has no evidence for it because he didn't bother doing a control test. With what is in his study, he has nothing.
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I knew a man and his wife that had OBE when faced with a head on car crash. They told me they watched the actual impact from above and couldn't understand that at all. They watched as ambulances took them. They then couldn't recall anything until they woke up in hospital. Again this was in the seventies and unheard of.
How useful is a 40-year old memory of an anecdote.
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