Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - What Really Happens After Death - Doctors & Nurses Are Afraid To Tell You

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

What if you could experience someone else’s death…without being the one who was dying?For centuries, people across cultures have reported something far stranger than a traditional near death experience: shared death experiences (SDEs). Healthy, conscious people (including doctors, nurses, family members, and even people thousands of miles away) have described witnessing or experiencing phenomena seemingly connected to someone in the process of dying.But how is that possible?Some witnesses report seeing hovering apparitions, mysterious lights, mist, sounds, or even figures seemingly guiding the dying person into another realm. In some cases, multiple people in the same room claim to witness the same phenomenon.Are these experiences hallucinations? A psychological response to grief? Something science hasn't yet explained? Or could they point to something much deeper about consciousness, death, and what happens when we die?And then there are the experiences that happen after death.People who report after-death communication experiences sometimes say they have perceived a deceased loved one as being healthy, peaceful, and fully present in what feels like a new environment. Others report receiving a specific message, sign, or unmistakable sense that their loved one is still somehow connected to them.For those who experience them, these encounters can be profoundly comforting, sometimes helping people process grief, accept the death of someone they love, and completely rethink their understanding of the afterlife and what happens to consciousness after death.But are these simply experiences created by the grieving mind—or could they represent something more?We'll also revisit near-death experiencers and NDE researchers previously featured on the podcast to hear their perspectives on shared death experiences and what these accounts might tell us about consciousness, death, and the possibility of an existence beyond this life.In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, we explore the fascinating and controversial world of shared death experiences and ask questions that challenge the way we think about death, and perhaps even life itself.You don't have to be the one dying to experience death!Head to https://nuropod.com/mayim for 5% off. Nuropod is a wearable device built on 10+ years of vagus nerve research, backed by 60+ clinical studies and a 30 day return guarantee. #NuropodPartner#Nuropod#VagusNerveUnlock your best hair & skin with @iRestorelaser and HUGE savings on iRESTORE with code BREAKER at https://irestore.com/BREAKER! #irestorepodGet 15% off OneSkin with the code BREAK at https://www.oneskin.co/BREAK  #oneskinpod Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off your Helix mattress.Visit https://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro.Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.Upgrade your kitchen with Our Place today. Visit http://fromourplace.com/BREAK and use code BREAK for 10% off sitewide.Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dr. Jeff O'Driskel was working in the ER the night a man was airlifted to the hospital following a severe and tragic car accident. He wasn't assigned to this particular case, but a nurse named Rachel grabbed his arm and told him he had to come to the trauma room. When Dr. O'Driskel entered the trauma bay, he saw doctors and nurses rushing around the patient, but what he and nurse Rachel saw was a woman with curly blonde hair and flowing white clothing, hovering above the man on the table. It wasn't a physical being, but she was clearly in the room. Skeptics often say that near-death experiences are likely hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, a spontaneous release of DMT, but nothing else. But how does that explain people who are alive and healthy, witnessing absolutely unexplainable phenomenon like what Dr. O'Driscoll and Nurse Rachel saw? It has a name in the clinical literature. It's called a shared death experience.

And for thousands of years, across numerous cultures, people have reported experiencing death along with a person who is transitioning death along with a person who is transnational. What's the purpose of a shared death experience? What's the message that we receive? And how can it change the way we view life and the nature of our purpose here? MindBallax breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep. We cannot tell you how excited we were to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about almost six years now. I've been sleeping great. Jonathan loves his. Our kids love their helix mattresses and all of the things like night sweats, back pain, motion transfer are significantly. better. Helix sleep makes premium mattresses and bedding that are customized to fit your personal needs. They're conveniently shipped to your door, and I was so happy with how easy their shipping process was. I actually ordered my son, a mattress that shipped right to his apartment at college. Helix combines innovative tech with high-quality materials to deliver comfort and support. Helix offers soft, medium, and firm mattresses. There's different options for side, stomach, and back sleepers.

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Look, I know how busy life can get. And sometimes we all just need a moment to pause and connect. Well, that's what my podcast making space is all about. Bill conversations with people who've learned how to live with purpose and heart. Think authors, thought leaders, actors, performers. And every time, I walk away with something that changes how I see the world. And I think you will too. Join me for making space every week wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Myambiallic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about a unique and fantastic phenomena known as a shared death experience. Most of us have heard of near-death experiences. There's a tunnel, there's light, a feeling of leaving your body, maybe there's a life review, meeting deceased relatives.

But what we're going to talk about today is what a lot of people are afraid to talk about. You don't have to be the one dying to have an experience of death. Healthy people, conscious people, doctors, nurses, family members sitting at the bedside, and in some cases, family members thousands of miles away, report extensively. experiencing what the dying person is going through in the moments before death. Sometimes it's sharing in the trauma surrounding an accident preceding death. Sometimes it's experiencing a person ushering the dying person into the next world. Often there's sounds missed, a light floating around the deceased person.

How can we start to understand why someone who is not dying would share any part of the transitioning experience with someone who is dying. How can we explain that sometimes numerous people in a room will witness the same thing? It seems like the only explanation would be something supernatural. It's ghosts. It's a joint psychosis. It's so hard to wrap your head around it. The best place to start is with Dr. Raymond Moody, who coined the concept of near-death experience in his book Life After Life in 1975, where he interviewed more than 100 people who had been described as clinically dead in medical terms, but then came back. Scientists who study NDEs admit that this is one of the most challenging pieces of data

surrounding what happens when we die and what it can mean for every single person who has ever sat with someone they loved at the end. So the stories that people experienced on the other side and brought back with them were nearly identical in content. There was almost always a tunnel, a bright light, deceased relatives greeting them, a sense of peace, an overwhelming love, and in many cases, as we've talked about here a lot, a life review. And in the 1980s, Dr. Moody began hearing about even more extraordinary experiences, people who had participated in a dying person's transition. So these are people who are

healthy, not dying, family members, friends, even medical personnel who described seeing incredible things, feeling incredible things, hearing incredible things, hearing incredible things and witnessing aspects of the death process that is otherwise inexplicable by all medical knowledge. Now these are people, again, who are healthy, who describe seeing glowing mist rising from the dead person's body, the shape of the room changing, and even hearing music when there was not otherwise music playing. Some people have even reported feeling an upward physical pull on their body as it

being pulled by a magnet while someone is dying. So the notion is there's something being mimicked or mirrored. We don't really know. It's what we're going to talk about today. And what Dr. Moody noted was these incredible similarities of the descriptions to the near-death experiences that he had been studying for years from people who had shared death experiences.

Except, as we said, the people having these experiences were healthy, were conscious, and in many cases weren't even related to the person. This second concept, shared death experiences, was introduced to the world in Dr. Moody's book, Glimpses of Eternity. Let's hear him talk about it. The pseudosceptics tell us, oh, this is the chemistry of the brain. And they utterly fail to take into account that it is very common for bystanders at the death

of someone else who are not themselves ill or injured have all of these experiences that we think of this in your death experiences. The bystanders say, as grandma died, I myself got out of my body and I rose up with her partway toward this light, or they say that I saw the apparitions of my grandmother's deceased relatives coming in to take her away and the room fills with light, have quite a number of cases where the bystanders empathically co-lived the dying life review of the person who passed away. You had an experience when your mother passed. As my mother was dying, my perception was that the space I was in bent, and it

winded out at the top and at the bottom, and there was a very narrow intermediate space, which was tending to rotate. None of this makes sense, I know, because the words don't fit in it. And that, but, and I, I heard my, Mother say twice, I love you, although she wasn't moving her mouth. My wife who was there had experience, my sister who was there, felt the presence of my father who had died 18 months before.

But to me, it's immaterial that it's happened to me. You know what I mean? And yes, it's happened to me. But the impressive fact to me is that it happens to so many times. many people. Many people see a mist that rises off of someone when they pass. And I've been in the room when people die. No mist, but maybe I didn't know how to look. Maybe I wasn't looking right. I'm going to go ahead and say that I feel like I've missed out on this, what sounds like a terrifying but incredible experience. I was in the room when my grandfather of blessed memory passed away.

There was no mist. There was no music. I'll be honest. You can feel. kind of something shift. I was actually with my grandmother of blessed memory when she passed. I will say that if I were a person more in tune with what things feel like, I might have been able to articulate it better. Something shifted. I knew that. And I couldn't even describe it then. I just knew that something changed in the room. And indeed, that's what changed. I mean, it was right there with her. But I have not had any, you know, any of these other kinds of experiences. You know, I think we talked about a pink mist in particular. You know, I was not in the room when my, when my father of blessed memory passed away, but I was with him when he was transitioning.

And so he did talk about seeing his mother. He did talk about remembering himself as a young man. And I'm like, is that a life review? He remembered my mother. when he first saw her and he described her to me, right? Was that some sort of review? But no mist, no music, none of those things have I experienced. The idea that people in a sober state could see mist in a room that doesn't have a machine pumping mist into it, it is such a physical and tangible way to say something is happening that we do not understand.

There should be no mist. being generated in a room when someone dies. And I'm also wondering, like, is there some gas that the body could be releasing? But, like, that's not what people are describing. It isn't what they're describing. And it's easy to say, oh, someone felt something internally. It's emotional or they're making it up or that's how they're coping with the grief of the loss of a loved one.

But when it's external and observable, not possibly generated by the backup of the AC system in the hospital because AC systems don't work like that by generating pink mist. You have to say what else is going on? And the other question that happens a lot are people say, well, if it happened here, why didn't it happen in a similar way somewhere else? What are the conditions that have to be in place in order for someone to experience something out of the ordinary? Do you have to be religious? Do you have to be tuned in? Or does the universe simply work in mysterious ways and present something beyond the veil to those select few. When we have a shared death experience, you're relying on report, sometimes from several people.

There's no contained, controlled way to gather this data. This is a category of information that has its own evidence system. It has its own proof system. It exists outside of the realms of let's test it what's going on that way. there are explanations I could make about why you would hear music when there are no instruments or speakers in the room. But let's talk a little bit more about this. We opened our episode talking about this hospital trauma room and Dr. Jeff O'Driscoll and a nurse Rachel and a man on the table whose name was Jeff Olson. And what makes that case different from every other SDE than we've heard about is there were people in the room who experienced things who did not get to compare their notes until years later.

This was in 1997. It was Easter weekend. A man named Jeff Olson fell asleep at the wheel while driving home. The car rolled eight times at 75 miles per hour. Tragically, his wife and son died at the scene. His seven-year-old son survived. He was airlifted to a local hospital. He had severe injuries. He had a broken back. His leg was crushed. While Olson was on the operating table fighting for his life, what he later described was that he felt his consciousness was elsewhere. that it was floating above the scene of the accident. He said that he was in a bubble of light, and his wife was floating next to him, and she told him that he had to go back because their son who survived needed him.

As this man is floating over the accident scene with his wife, again, in some other plane of consciousness, in the trauma room what Dr. O'Driscoll and Rachel were watching turned out to be this image of the wife hovering over her husband on the operating table. So what they described was that she wasn't a physical being. She appeared transparent, but vibrant. They could make her out clearly.

It seemed that she radiated peace. I mean, they were having this experience of seeing this being. And Dr. O'Driscoll says that the wife looked at him and smiled, and he felt like she had known him forever. So already, the language that we're using, these are the kind of things that happen to people when they die and like meet God or their family in the afterlife. Why would an ER doctor who can see this be experiencing this interaction with a ghost? I mean, that's my best explanation.

The other hypothesis here is that the wife was so distraught that she couldn't keep the afterlife a secret. She had to break the veil to communicate that information and in the emotional charge of her attempts to intervene in reality, to make sure that their child was okay. She defied some normal barrier that often separates these two worlds. It's very hard to even speculate, but what we do know is Dr. O'Driscolliskel wrote about his experience that day with Olson's wife and a series of other shared death experiences that he had as an emergency room physician. his book was called Not Yet.

This man did recover, Olson. He did recover. He was six months recovering in the hospital, and he and Dr. O'Driscoll became friends. They've shared their related experiences from that trauma room at conferences together for many, many years. But Jonathan's already kind of, you know, heading into the explanation.

And I think there's still more to examine before we decide that the trauma was so great that, right, this woman pierced the veil. There's many, many traumas where people don't. appear as ghosts in hospital rooms, right? Like, this is not something I would say that is regularly happening, but there's actually a ton in the academic research, which we're going to get to, about shared death experiences.

And why is it that O'Driscoll had more than one experience as an emergency room physician? And what was it about Rachel? Maybe Dr. O'Driscoll was sensitive in some way that he could pick up more than most people. But then there's the fact that Nurse Rachel also had that experience. How can we account for it? Myrambialx breakdown is supported by a neuropod. Neuropod is a small device that clips onto your ear. I'm wearing it right now and sends gentle signals through your vagus nerve,

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At the time that Dr. O'Driscoll was witnessing this body on the table, he didn't know what had happened to him necessarily. He didn't know that there was a wife who died. Like, all these pieces may not have come together. So what he knew is that he was independently experiencing this woman. Now, you could say, and skeptics tend to, who's to say that that was the image of the woman? and it's like if you show them a picture, you're leading the witness.

Was this the lady hovering? Yes, guess what? That's the wife, right? That's the way a lot of this can happen. But there's so many other experiences. And as for why Dr. O'Driscoll might be seeing these things, my hunch would be he's tuned into something. His frequency is tuned into something

that allows him to experience these things, but we don't yet know what it is, right? And if shared death experiences are real, you'd want to find them everywhere, right? That's one of the things about phenomenon like this. You want to find it across cultures. You want to find it across thousands and thousands of years of written history. We can't have, you know, we can't have things happen only in one place or in one very specific

way. We'd want to see it kind of everywhere, right, to be able to say this is something that is going on. Our first encounter with the concept of a shared death experience was when we spoke to Martha Joe Atkins. She's a death dula who supports individuals through the process of dying. She's witnessed over a thousand. transitions. She was on our podcast and described shared death experiences that she has had. Here's a bit from our conversation with her.

There are many occasions where several people at the bedside have the same experience. A woman at abode talked to me about having that kind of experience. Her mother's in the bed. My friend was up with her mother. Again, mothers, they're out of body and watching dad come across to get mom. The mother did. Dad has already passed. Dad has already passed. There's a whole body of research on shared crossings.

William Peters and Santa Barbara is doing that work. He's had published research. William has a great story about this where back when there was in hospice in one of the hospitals. He's reading to the guy, both of them came out of their bodies and they're looking down. The guy's grinning at William. And William said it was the wildest, most wonderful thing. And then they're back in their body. There's actually a whole body of research on shared crossings, and Dr. William Peters in Santa Barbara is doing incredible work and has published research here.

He's got a story about this where he was in one of the hospitals where he was working in hospice and he was reading to a gentleman. And they both left their bodies and they were both looking down. They saw other people looking at them. He said it was the wildest, most wonderful thing. And then boom, they were both back in their bodies. According to those who study the phenomena of shared death experiences, people have been recounting shared death experiences since the late 19th century. We have some recordings of them. It went by different names.

The Society for Psychical Research in London documented these at that time as deathbed visions. It's what they were called, or deathbed coincidences. One of the first shared death experiences to gain attention was the story of Carl Scala. He was a German poet serving on the front lines in World War War. one, he was in a foxhole with his best friend and his best friend was killed when an artillery shell exploded near them. He felt his friend slump into his arms and die, but he had a shared death experience. It's recounted in the book Parting Visions by Melvin Morse. He said he felt himself being drawn up with his friend above their bodies and then above the battlefield.

And he said that he could look down and he saw himself holding his dead friend. He then says he looked up and saw a bright light, and he felt himself going towards it with his friend. He then stopped and returned to his body. He was also uninjured except for hearing loss that resulted from the artillery blast. So, like, this is an amazing, an amazing account, but you might say it was a long time ago. That's just an anecdote. Well, Dr. Peters founded the Shared Crossings Project in 2013 and has now documented more than 800 cases of shared death experiences. So in 2021, Dr. Peters and his team published the first peer-reviewed study focused on shared-death experiences in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

They analyzed 164 shared death experiences from 107 people. They found four common participatory modes for involvement by the living person. Witnessing unusual phenomena, accompanying the dying, assisting the dying in the transition, and remotely sensing a person. a death. Jonathan, if you had to guess what percentage of people who have a shared death experience are not even in the room? What percentage? Just guess. I mean, had I not heard about this at all, I would be like 10% could possibly imagine or feel something coming. If that, like if you asked me, Maiam, if you have to believe in shared death experiences, are people in the room, not in the room? What's the percentage split? I would say 99.9.9.

9% you have to be in the room, right? In this study, 64% of the shared death experiences that Dr. Peters collected were remote. So the living person, a living person is having a shared death experience and they weren't even next to the person, 64% of the time in this study. Sometimes they weren't even in the same country. What? This opens up so many questions about the nature of reality about what we sense and what influences what we sense before that continue to tell us a little bit more about the evidence for shared death experiences that help bolster the case that something else is happening. Here's one of my favorite remote ones. There's a woman named Annie Cap, she's a psychotherapist. She was sitting in her London office. She started choking.

She struggled for air indescribably for 25 minutes and felt a growing sense. of dread about her mother who happened to be in a hospital in Portland. So Annie knew that her mother wasn't well. This isn't like it came out of nowhere. She called the hospital and her mother died in that phone call while she was on the phone. So that is a shared death experience from, you know, do the math, thousands and thousands of miles away. Here's another one. Dr. Peters talks about a man named Mark and this one you can actually find and see him talking about it. He was in the United States. He was Canadian. And he felt some, connection to his father who was dying in Canada and he heard his father's voice say,

I don't know how to do this. He's in the U.S., his dad is in Canada, and Mark, this guy who was experiencing this, saw himself walking with his father up a staircase, and Mark's grandmother, his father's mother was there. And his father turned to him, and the quote was, I didn't know it was this easy. after that vision, minutes later, Mark got a call from his brother to say that their father had just passed away. And yes, these are anecdotal, but we've got a lot of these, you know? Nurses, doctors, hospice workers that Dr. Peter spoke to, they kept these things quiet because they feared no one would believe them.

I mean, it's why we're doing this episode. No one wants to talk about this because it's so outrageous. And it challenges everything that we think we know about why we're here, how we're here, what happens when we die, and what is our literal connection with other people? Like, our literal psychic connection with other people. Penny Sartori was an ER nurse for 21 years, and she was preparing to bathe the dying patient. She touched the edge of his bed and everything stopped. The room around them disappeared and she could feel everything the patient was feeling, including his. his pain. Although the patient couldn't speak because he was on a ventilator, she heard him say,

leave me alone. I want to go. Let me die in peace. And even before this experience, Nurse Sartori and other hospital workers had experienced other moments when patients were near death. There'd be a sudden drop in temperature. The room would turn cold. Some sort of light would seem to be emanating from the body and the after effects of people who experience these things is what Dr. Peters also looked at. 87% of people who had a shared death experience, meaning who were part of this, became convinced of an afterlife. Like, whatever they experienced completely transformed, right, their worldview.

They weren't just hopeful. They felt absolutely convinced. It put grief into context, and it really removed a lot of the fear of death, which is interesting because we talk about, you know, psilocybin-assisted therapy journeys for people who are in terminal states and how can you understand and come to terms with life and the end of life and death? What if you can have that experience of coming to terms with death through a shared death experience? It's an unbelievable turn of events for people who experience this. So this is one incredible example of a witnessed shared death experience. But is this an

actual phenomenon? Is this something that's actually happening all the time? The best person who can answer that question is a death dula. Something that she shared once the cameras were off, she came back to us and she said, I realize you asked me a question that I didn't have an answer for in the moment. And what she shared was one of the most interesting and potentially shocking stories that she shared with us. During one of her transitions, helping someone pass, she was in a death center and all of a sudden the doors to the room blew open and a ferociously cold wind passed over everyone in the space. Suddenly an image appeared in the corner. The daughter of the person who was

passing looked and said, that's my dad who had come to help the mother cross. It was undeniable because so many people had experienced that together in the room and they all were. saw the vision together. The notion is not just that they saw this vision of the dad. The idea was that this man was there to usher his wife into the next life. So it's not just the experiencing that Jonathan is describing that Martha Joe witnessed. The notion is, what if when we pass, indeed, we are ushered to the next side by people who love us. And that's what happened to Jeff Olson when he was on that table and his wife was hovering above him, right?

She was there at that moment. And when we pass, you know, is this part of kind of the greeting of relatives that people who have near-death experiences report? Sounds like it. The other aspect that Martha Joe talks about, even more than the shared death experience is the notion that there is some sort of observable pattern in rhythm to the moments before people pass. By observing, we can see something that would be otherwise hidden, which is a similar concept to the notion of a shared death experience. And what I love about it is that by paying more attention, by looking at the subtle cues, we can see the map, the timing, and the process underway that would normally be invisible to us.

So what are the historical touchpoints that we can point to that indicate that this is not some new new age phenomenon that people are seeing. Because if shared death experiences are real, we would expect to find them across cultures, across time, in places where there's no kind of common language or framework to explain them. And you do. So for thousands of years across various cultures, people have had communal experiences with the dying and with the deceased.

There's actually an 8th century record of a light being witnessed when a particular monk passed away. Aboriginal Australians, have a tradition where a community gathers to share spiritual experiences during a member's death? Dr. Moody talked about the oracles of the dead. These were these subterranean chambers and tunnels in ancient Greece and in Rome, where people would go to commune and communicate with dead relatives, meaning it was in that spiritual vernacular that you could have experiences with those who were dying or dead.

A huge component of the Christian faith, this notion of resurrection. of salvation, redemption, through resurrection, and it's still part of the liturgy in Judeo-Christianity today. Both metaphysically and physically, metaphysically, you cannot live until you have died the notion that we have to dissolve ego, but what does that mean physically? We've spoken to Dr. Diana Walsh Pesolka, who claims that any religion that is not clinging

to those initial notions of things like resurrection, all these things, are actually watered down religions that a true religious notion of adherence to this concept includes access to things like the next world and that interface between death and rebirth. One of the other doctors that we've spoken to here is Dr. Bruce Grayson.

And, you know, he studied the after effects and the impact of near-death experiences for about half a century through his work at the University of Virginia, division of perceptual studies. And he believes that just the idea that we have this ability or that it exists to consciously not be in our body to observe ourselves from above. He talks about that. And he talked about it when he spoke to us. I've talked to thousands of people who've had this experience. And they say that it's more real to them than talking to me is for better or worse.

What they tell me is filtered through their brains. Our ability to speak, our ability to remember is all filtered through our brains. So you can't divorce what they're telling me from the functioning of the brain. Question is how much of it is controlled by the brain? Is the experience itself caused by the brain or just the remembering of it or just the telling of it? That's difficult to answer because we can't talk to people without their brains. So we looked at a variety of hypotheses that might explain what's going on in the brain that might allow people to have these experiences and or remember them and talk about them. And most of the simple explanations like lack of oxygen to the brain, erratic heart rates, drugs given to patients, and so forth, they all turned

out to be not proven by the data. The data contradicted all of them. So we didn't have an explanation. Now, that doesn't mean to scientists that there is no explanation. It means we haven't found it yet. There are so many other traditions over thousands of years that have included this conversation. One of the first things I ever was fascinated with, like every child growing up, I think when my generation did, was the Egyptian tombs, the pyramids, the notion that there was so much emphasis placed on what happens when you're dead, just having this conversation about preparation of death. That's a huge part of what we know about the entire momification process. Think about Dia de los Mueros. Think about my favorite movie Coco. You know, the notion that this

is not all there is, and there's an ability to interface actively in ways that are meaningful with people who have passed, and that that is part of your experience here as a living human, is to be in contact with that, to give reverence to who came before you, and then to do that and be that for the generations that come after you. And you can think, like, why was that so important? The notion that history may not repeat identically, but the best way to predict the future is to see the accidents and successes of the past.

So understanding who has come before you, what they were like, will inform the present and the future. Ancient traditions didn't just believe that the dying could share their experiences with the living or communicate with the living. They believe that they could influence them. Also, I wasn't just mentioning lightly in passing the movie Coco. If you have not seen it, it is a really, really, well, first of all, it's great.

The music's great. But it literally talks about what does it look like to live with an awareness of those who have died? And yes, the movie is definitely, it's a fantasy exploration of what that would look like. But this is an experience of what many cultures do believe is an interface that is happening. I mean, even in our tradition, in the way that my family does it, we name for people who have passed because you're keeping alive a part of that memory. And the person can embody, it's an Eastern European tradition, the person is said to embody some of those qualities, right? That's the way people stay alive. We keep their memory with us.

And what does it mean in modern day society for credentialed people, scientists, who once only believed in the material world to believe that those who have passed could not only communicate with us, but actually influence us. We spoke to one such scientist who had an unbelievable personal experience that changed the way that she saw reality. Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart. She didn't have a shared death experience per se, but she had an incredibly vivid, concrete after-death communication when her husband died. So what's an after-death communication?

It's exactly what it sounds like. After someone has died, they somehow pierce the veil and are able to communicate something. It's often a message. It's often a feeling of comfort to the person who's living. It helps them accept the death of their loved one. Now, you might be saying that's just a fantasy. That's a hallucination. or they were dreaming.

But when we talked to Dr. Swart, we were able to really drill down and have her explain what it was like to be visited by her dead husband as clear as day. So it was about six weeks after he passed away and it was literally four in the morning. I was fast asleep,

but I do remember I was lying on my left at the edge of the bed and my right shoulder wasn't covered by the blanket. I'm awake. And I'm just like looking into the darkness thinking, what was that? And then I can see like the shape of my husband, life size. In the dark, I was like, is this?

Am I, you know, am I seeing this? And he just became clearer and clearer as if he was pushing through something to make himself seen. Oh, it just got chills. I could see the outline of his hair and his features. Then he sort of dissolved from the top down and the last thing I saw were his shins and his feet and then he was gone. I googled in the morning,

is it possible to see a deceased loved one? And Google said 60% of older people can have an auditory hallucination after they lose their spouse. I know I wasn't asleep, I wasn't dreaming, what I saw was present. I'm a scientist that also questions things. But of course I thought, do I tell anyone about this? I honestly don't think I've had a conversation with anyone that hasn't had some kind of experience, either of someone that's passed away, like feeling their presence or smelling or hearing something. I, first of all, have great respect for Dr. Swart, and she's done incredible work.

And also the fact that this experience and a variety of experiences around this phase of her life completely, you know, transformed the way she approaches, the way she practices medicine and the way she lives her life. It's incredible. But also part of me is like, what are we actually talking about? What's happening? And she's not the only one that we've spoken to who have had these types of experiences. What strikes me about her is that she was such a non-believer. She even said in a different interview that she has suggested treatment in the past,

and she's been a part of teams who have suggested treatment for people who have believed the things that she has experienced. Like she said, I would have put myself in the hospital. So what does that mean about the nature of reality? How do we reconfigure what is real? What is imagined? Where is that line? And how do we know if we're crossing it? The real question is, and I bring this up whenever I've had a reading, been to a psychic,

tried some energy healer. It seems that with after death communication, it's almost always positive, which makes me feel like, statistically speaking, there's two options. either that's what we want to hear. That's the comfort that we want to get from this experience and we are somehow impacting how that information's coming in and I got a lot of explanations for that, which we can leave for another time.

Or everything's hunky-dory when you die. Like all your negativity is removed. And actually, I think of Buda Betty. I think of Betty's story. I think of a lot of NDE experiences who have said wherever there was hurt or harm, it's like they could see the roots of that in other people and they were able to forgive it.

So maybe in the next world, we're in a different level of judgment, good, evil, sadness, depression. Maybe it is a different experience so that after death communication is an authentic reflection of the next world, which seems to be a lot of pleasantness from what we've heard. By the time you have passed over, you will have experienced a life review and all the positive feelings that the other side brings,

all the unconditional love that's spoken about, and whatever issues you have or you carried over with you will have dissolved from the infinite love of the universe. It is very possible, which brings me to one of the last things I want to talk about, a great explanation for that and this entire conversation, shared psychosis. So one of the actual, you know, kind of hypotheses surrounding this is shared psychosis is an actual thing where people who are in high stress situations, intense situations, can somehow unconsciously mirror the other's experience. This can happen a lot of different ways and this is something, you know, kind of like beyond the scope of this conversation to talk about shared psychosis in general. but if we apply it to, let's say, share death experiences, right? Could it be that for people who are witnessing, people who are dying,

there is something profoundly, you know, fill in the blank, overwhelming, intense, deep, complicated, and that causes certain brains to try and make sense of it, to try and distance themselves from it, to try and get a different reading on it, and we're all tuning all the time. So is it possible that people like Martha Joe, people like Dr. O'Driscoll, they are tuned into a certain frequency that allows them to access another's experience

in a way that they can make sense of? Joe Nickel was an investigative writer for the Journal of Skeptical Inquiry, and his take was that experiencing someone die is traumatic in and of itself, and is it possible that in that trauma there's something that gets transformed as a psychological truism.

You're experiencing something hard and I'm feeling it and this is what happens when that dynamic gets interacted with. Yes, we don't know what the mechanism is. Is it that we feel others so deeply that all of a sudden we get pulled into that experience and it's not supernatural per se, although I don't think that fully explains many of the supernatural elements.

When you're experiencing someone else's right, death experience, in this shared death experience, you know, is there also confirmation bias, right? Are you editing the memories of what you experience to match the things you hear about the person later? There's no way if we can verify that, which is why so many people don't want to talk about this, because there is that possibility. But I think the question that we've had the opportunity to get into today is, what do we know? You know, what can we know? Here's all the things that we don't know, we don't understand, and we can't confirm, but there's some pretty phenomenal things that are happening in the here and now. What information does that give us?

I mean, one of the most compelling is the idea of the remote shared death experience. How can we possibly explain people having that level of sensation or knowing while not even being in the physical space? Jonathan, you remember a lot of information. Do you remember what happened to my mother when she was driving to one of the checkups when she was pregnant with me. I do remember this story. It's a fascinating story. Why don't you tell us about it?

I was conceived and incubated in New York, but when my mom was nine months pregnant, they moved suddenly to San Diego. And we were living in my grandparents' living room. You know, my brother was about four at that time. And my mother was going to a checkup with this, like, new doctor because she was very, very pregnant and had just arrived in San Diego. So my aunt, my mom's younger sister, was driving her to her checkup, and all of a sudden my mother felt half of her face go numb.

And she said to my aunt, turn the car around. We have to go back to mommy. That would be my grandmother. And my aunt said, but we have to go to the doctor. You have a checkup. There's a baby in your body about to be born. And my mother said, we have to go back. And they drove back to the apartment where my grandparents lived, and my grandmother was on the floor, half paralyzed.

she had had a stroke. There's no explanation why the coincidences in the universe would make my mother's face go numb and have my mother feel like she had to go back to help my grandmother. My grandmother did not pass. That's a remote tapping into an intensity. And you might say like, oh, why would people only tap into people who are dying or injured? I mean, I have an explanation for that, right? Why do intense memories get encoded better or last longer?

trauma work. Everything's firing and it's firing with an intensity and it has a tremendous amygdala component, a fear component, a stress component. That evolutionarily is the way our brain is geared to like, let's not have this happen again, right? That's what that feeling is. So that is a loud signal, right, in the universe. And if we're a tuning fork registering all the information around us, that which is loudest and most impactful is going to resonate and get through this constant noise that were filtering. When we talk to people who have had near-death experiences, and I think this is true of everyone we've spoken to,

everyone we've researched, and probably every story that's out there, you don't get people who come back, like, sucks to come back, I don't want to be here, I got nothing to say, right? Even those who didn't want to come back, meaning they were in such a state, they were either in a bliss state,

they were in a communing with God state, they were done, they thought with their life here, they come back with a very specific either message or set of new abilities that has the potential to be a message. Many people have suggested perhaps that process, people who experience death, whether there's veracity to what happens when they die

and whether we can corroborate that with a larger truth in the universe, I don't know. But what happens is they're declared dead, they're zipped up in body bags, They're dead. But when they come back, they come back with a purpose. They come back profoundly changed. In many cases, like Elizabeth Crone, with a set of abilities that even they don't understand.

They start seeing things before they happen or they start understanding Vinnie Todd Tolman. He understands animals in a way that he never did before his experience. He's in touch with things in a different way. What's interesting about the shared death experiences, is that for the people who are experiencing it, meaning the people who are alive, it's like they get that message. They get some sort of message. So what's the common denominator here, right?

What's the Venn diagram of near-death experiences and shared death experiences? There is some message here, and it's almost like shared-death experiences are a way to get it out to more people. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to be afraid, and you don't have to. die to expand your understanding of what's possible here. If you're in a room and all of a sudden you have an unexplainable experience where you're feeling yourself being pulled out of your body, where you see a pink mist happening, where you see an unexplainable being appear guiding someone who is passing over to the other side,

you don't go back to your life in the normal way that you otherwise would have. would have. Something has opened. And we talked about this about Earth school. The notion that you're here to learn, well, this could be the extra credit classes that people are going through that help break open their idea of what's actually going on and what's possible. And what if we start to take these experiences and say, what can we actually be aware of? I had something happened to me just today. Today I woke up to a text that I was shocked to get because just the day before I was thinking, you know what? I haven't heard about this thing for a while in my life. It must have sorted itself out. Only to wake up the next morning to say, wait a second, there's something

unresolved here. So what if we start to pay attention to those subtle messages that pop into our head as not just random chance, but actually signs that we're receiving something. Okay. So, first of all, I love that. I love that perspective on it. And also, when you think about just for all of history, right, there's all different kinds of people in every culture, every society. Like, go back as far as you want to imagine. Go back to Egyptian times or the time when Christ was alive, like any of those periods of time. Go back even farther. Go back to like when you learned about like the Tigris and Euphrates River, right? Like Mesopotamia.

Think about what humans were like. There were human beings at that time walking about, going to market, whatever they were doing, making babies, getting into fights, I don't know, lots of things. Discovering fire. There were always people who were smarter than other people. There were always people who were better laborers, better builders, better artists, right? And there were always people who held a place in society where they saw things that didn't yet exist. And those people have been called prophets.

They've been called shaman in indigenous communities. So there's always been those kinds of differences. And we talk about Dr. O'Driscoll, this like guy in Salt Lake City, right? He's tuned into something. He's one of the people that is tuned into something that in our current culture sounds crazy. It sounds cuckoo pants. It sounds like fantasy. It sounds like hallucination.

What if, you know what I thought of? You know those kids who were taking APs when no one else is? and they're always going off for their private classes and they got stuff to do at lunch and they got after school activities. Maybe people who are shared death experiencers are the AP students of the supernatural world. They are getting a special set of information,

but guess what? Most people won't believe you and you're going to be ridiculed and they're going to say it's not true and they're going to say there's something wrong with you and they're going to laugh at you, but you'll get a lot of views on the internet because people are fascinated by this stuff.

But maybe that's part of what shared death experience is. There are certain people who the universe is saying, guess what, this one can tune into something that most of you cannot. And do you want to listen to the message? Death is not the end. Also a fantastic Bob Dylan song from Down in the Groove. This topic, while it is first person anecdotal evidence, is being collected in numbers that are undeniable,

meaning that it hasn't proved the theory, but it is showing something is going on that we can't ignore. It seems like the time to say when you're standing on the crossroads that you cannot comprehend, just remember that death is not the end. And all your dreams have vanished and you don't know what's up the bend. Just remember the death is not the end. That's from down the groove. You know what else isn't the end?

The end of this episode isn't the end because you can find more of this content that isn't available. anywhere else on Substack and check out all the amazing episodes we mentioned in preparing this, the Martha Joe Atkins, the Tara Swart episode, the Dr. Bruce Grayson and so many other near-death experiencers who have opened our eyes to what is possible, what you can experience on the other side, and the messages that they bring back on how we should be living. Check us out on Substack for content you can't get anywhere else. We know that this episode's going to engender a lot of conversation.

We can't wait to be part of it. We'll see you over on Substack. Myambialy's Breakdown from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's My Ambialyx Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction.

And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.