Ologies with Alie Ward - Quasithanatology (NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES) with Bruce Greyson

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Tunnels of light. Unconditional love. Visions of dead aunts. And a lot of questions. What happens when you die…  or almost die? GOOD QUESTION. Dr. Bruce Greyson chats about about brain activity during death, accounts from patients, out of body experiments, time dilation, the Swiss Alps, deathbed visions, accidental morgue visits, neurotransmitters, party drugs, religion vs. spirituality, and what matters most in life. As a world-renowned and respected psychiatrist and neurobiologist, he’s sought out answers for four decades and shares what we know – and don’t know – about the border of alive and unalive. Get out your phone and some scissors because it’s a real crush-texter & bang-cutter of an episode. Visit Dr. Bruce Greyson’s website and shop his book, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and BeyondA donation went to the International Association for Near-Death StudiesMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Scotohylology (DARK MATTER), Quantum Ontology (WHAT IS REAL?), Cosmology (THE UNIVERSE), Astrobiology (ALIENS), UFOlogy (UNEXPLAINED AERIAL PHENOMENA), Thanatology (DEATH & DYING)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio ProductionsManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel Dilworth Transcripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hello, it's that sentence that your cat just typed out that you're decoding for supernatural clues. Allieward, here we are, here we all are before we're dead. If you're listening, you're on this side of the known universe. But come, take a walk with me to the border. We're all ask a guy who studies the brink of death, a bunch of not very smart questions about just what the fuck is going on here. And somehow, perhaps it'll put you in a better mood. He's not just some guy though, he's one of the world's experts on this.

He's a scientist and a psychiatrist who's been on the medical faculty at two teaching hospitals, even as the clinical chief of psychiatry. He's a University of Virginia professor emeritus of psychiatry and neuro-behavioral sciences, and the American Psychiatry Association gave him their highest honor of being a distinguished life fellow. His work is spanned over 45 years of research, over 100 published papers with titles such as Western scientific approaches to near-death experiences. The phenomenology of near-death experiences, do any near-death experiences provide evidence for their survival of human personality after death and the banger dissociation in people who have near-death experiences out of their bodies

or out of their minds? Oh, we'll get to that stuff. So for 27 years, this guy served as the editor of the only journal about near-death research. He also authored a book about all this called After, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond, and there's a new documentary out about near-death experiences. And he declined to be in it, because it wasn't fact-based enough, which tells you something.

He's legit. So he's an esteemed physician with a lot of clout. He is dubious of Fumflam, and he's here to tell us what he knows about biting the dust. What studies are bogus? What commonalities do we share? And what's it got to do with street drugs? We'll get right to it, but first, thank you to everyone who submits questions ahead of time at patreon.com slash allergies, where you can join for a dollar a month.

Thank you to everyone ordering merch for the holidays at oligiesmerch.com. Thanks to everyone leaving reviews, I read them all, including this piping hot one from EDR 1720 who wrote, this podcast is so good. Wanna know how good? I wore my AirPods into the shower and had to get new ones. Totally worth it. EDR 1720, I am sorry. Everyone else please pause this before you go on a water slide. And if you've ever left me a review, I've read it with my own eyes, I've appreciated it, Edward Collins, it was worth booting up the iPad to leave it. Thank you. Okay, let's get into it. Quasithanatology. This term is an amalgam of Latin and Greek to mean the study of almost death.

And hey, this field doesn't have the best ology, but we're gonna take what we can get. Content-wise, we'll be covering rigorous research at the forefront of these happenings. I was so nervous to talk to this man, and not because we'd be dancing around the topic of our own mortality. I was more immediately concerned with just wasting his time, and what if I asked if ghosts are naked.

Also, with this episode bum me out, you'd be surprised. It doesn't. And there are some of my biggest secrets I've ever told woven throughout it. So we cover brain activity during death, near-death events, versus near-death experiences, bright lights, tunnel visions, the statistics on near-death experiences, neurotransmitters, party drugs, religion versus spirituality, accounts from patients, out-of-body experiments, time dilation, the Swiss Alps, deathbed visions, accidental morgue visits, what matters most in life and more. And if this sounds like a spooktope episode, you might be surprised by the end of this.

So get cozy and join the sunshine and breeze or fresh snow or cozy blankets and less crossover with psychiatrist and quasi-thanatologist, Dr. Bruce Grayson. Grace it. I'm just really excited to talk to you. I imagine a lot of people who get to chat with you are pretty excited about it as well. Thanks. Thanks. I enjoy these. I am Bruce Grayson. And pronouns are he him? Yes. Yeah. So you have been the editor of journals. You have written so many papers on this. You have a book called After. You're known as kind of the expert of near death experiences, which seems like a wavy title. Do you tell people what you study when you're at a dinner party or on a near plane or are you just like, I'm a scientist, don't worry about it.

When I'm at a dinner party, I just tell people, I'm a doctor. Yeah. Have you gotten into long conversations before you learned that hack? Not so much. It give more strange looks. Really?

How about in the industry among other doctors? I'm not going to have other doctors. There's no problem now. I'm very open with them. I think they need to be educated. So I tell them everything I know about it. Has there been a learning curve over the years as we've gotten better at imaging and better at brain studies?

You've been doing this for so long. Have you seen tides shift in terms of how people see the validity of it? Yes, we've seen tremendous shifts. When we first started doing this research back in the 1970s, 1980s, we would talk at large medical conferences and there will be a polite silence in the audience. Nobody knew what we were talking about. Nobody thought these things were really existed. And now, when we talk to the same medical audiences, it's rare that doctors don't stand up in the audience and say, let me tell you about my near-death experience.

I think the changes, less to the research, unfortunately, than to the public acceptance of new death experiences there in movies, there on television shows, even Homer Simpson has had a new death experience now. Homer, Homer wake up, you're alive, you're alive! I believe, I believe! So everyone knows about them. You know, do you think that the internet has done anything

to kind of democratize people's voices in that way? Do you think it was harder to get these kind of experiences in print versus people just one off self publishing on blogs and stuff? I think the internet has done a lot, both positive and negative, but in general I think it has spread the word more so that people are less reluctant to talk about their own near-death experiences now. How dead do you have to be? For how long do you have to be?

You always think in your death experience, you've got to be out for maybe a few minutes, but have you found trends or data? Well, that's a great question, Ali. Most of the research that's been done with near-death experiences has been with people who have a cardiac arrest that is their hearts have stopped. So we know they have had that occasion. However, before the last 20, 30 years, people were just collecting cases. Most of those were not people for whom we had physiological measures. For example, the first collection of cases was published in 1892

by a Swiss geologist in the published in the year because of the Swiss Alpine Club. And he himself had had a new death experience when he fell while climbing in the Alps. And he fell 60 feet and had a very elaborate new death experience. But as far as we know, his heart never stopped. He was so impressed by that that he started asking fellow climbers and quickly found 30 other cases and published these. So you don't have to be that close to death and you have the same type of experience. For more on this, see the paper, The Experience of Dying by Falls written by one Albert Heim, that Swiss geologist who in 1872 was leading a pack of climbers on the descent. When a gust of wind took his hat, he tried to catch it and eight shit 66 feet down a craggy mountain.

Spoiler alert, he survived, which is a whole point of this. And he wrote later, let us apply ourselves rather to the scientific study of a horrible event. The subject may thereby lose a portion of its gasliness. He writes, sometimes to be sure, a fall is dreadful for those survivors, but it is something quite different for the victim itself.

So the subjective perceptions of those who fall to their deaths are the same, whether they fall from the scaffolding of a house or the face of a cliff. It has been proven that one who's run over by a wagon or crushed by a machine, even the drowning person. Looks death in the face with similar feelings, he writes. And he says it may be briefly characterized in the following way. No grief was felt nor was there paralyzing fright. There was no anxiety. No trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm, seriousness, profound acceptance and sense of shurty. No confusion entered at all, time became greatly expanded, he writes.

In many cases, they're followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past. And finally, the person falling often heard beautiful music, and he writes of his own experience. As I fell in 1872, I merely heard the blows that injured my head and back. I felt no pain. For those who are unconscious, death can involve no more changing. It is absolute rust. He ends. We have reached the conclusion that death through falling is subjectively a very pleasant death.

So yes, Swiss geologist, one of the first scientists to turn his work toward collecting accounts of near-death experiences. Albert Heim. Also, his wife Marie was the first female physician in Switzerland, an Albert loved Swiss Alpine dogs, but they were about to die out, so he headed efforts to bring back some breeding programs. So next time you see a Bernice mountain dog, say, hey Albert, glad you didn't die on that mountain that day. Even if it would have been pretty chill. Your work wasn't yet done here as evidenced by this giant cube dog, but why was it so chill? Do they find that any of it is related to brain chemicals

for anxiety, like just the O-Shit, O-Shit, O-Shit response? Or how do you even quantify that? Yeah, that's difficult to quantify because there are a lot of chemicals that are released in the brain under stress. And we unfortunately don't have the ability to measure them when someone is in that near death situation. Furthermore, they're usually just released

for a short period of time, maybe a second or two. And we don't even know where in the brain to look for it. So it's virtually impossible with our technology today to measure those things. People have tried with non-human animals, with sacrificing rats and measuring what's going on in the brains of the time, but I'm not sure how transferable that information is

to human beings. Is there a correlation between this field of study and consciousness and animals? Actually, I've just finished writing a paper about this because it's something that's not been studied into a great degree. We have a lot of anecdotes about animals who had a near-death event, for example,

being hit by a car or having their heart stop with a severe illness, and then they had a dramatic personality change much like you see in humans when they have a new death experience. And we also have a lot of accounts of human new death experiences in which people claim that while they were unconscious, they were greeted by deceased pets. So those are suggestions that some type of consciousness in animals does survive bodily

death, but we don't have any good evidence for that. We don't really have the ability to interview these animals and ask them what they experienced. I mean, unless you get a pet psychic, but I think those are dicey at best. You have questions. I have the answers. Can you explain to me what is a near death experience? Where does it start and where does it end in terms of the criteria? Yeah, well, it starts when someone is coming close to death and usually that's a very terrifying and painful experience. And the first thing that happens is people are overwhelmed by feeling of tremendous peace and well-being, which is not what you would

expect when someone is coming close to death. They find that their thinking is faster and clearer than usual, which again, you wouldn't expect when their brains are shutting down. They have very strong emotions, usually very positive emotions. They have unusual sensations, like a sense of leaving the physical body. They have sense of being in some other realm or dimension where they may encounter entities which they consider either deceased loved ones or deities. They may review their entire lives and they will say they went through their entire life not only sought but relifted in vivid detail and that only takes a matter of seconds or so to go through decades of life. And at some point they come to a border or

point of no return, but would and then they can't go past that and still return to life. And they either are sent back against their will or they've given a choice and they choose to come back for a certain purpose. Of course, the ones that don't choose don't get interviewed by us. Who ghosted me? Right, exactly. Did you have to research historically what evidence we have for the last several millennia about near-death experiences? Did you have to work with archaeologists at all? I'm not with archaeologists, but we have lots of accounts from Greek and Roman historians with accounts of new death experiences that are very similar to the ones we hear today.

Likewise, we have accounts from cultures all around the world, from Stone Age cultures or around the world, and from Hindu Buddhist cultures, Muslim cultures, and they have the same types of experiences that we find in Western societies, in the US and in Western Europe. So in his recent book, After Bruce explains his own stance, and he writes, I'm a scientist comfortable dealing with this world evidence, but I'm out of my element dealing with religious doctrines, and have been raised in a scientific household without a strong sense of the divine, I was uncomfortable with the overwhelming numbers of experiencers who described meeting some kind of God-like being,

not just because it was not part of my personal background, but also because it seemed like something that couldn't be verified scientifically. So, going way back, this guy, Dr. Raymond Moody, who first coined the term near-death experiences, found 15 elements that seemed really consistent across people and patients of all these different religious and spiritual and cultural backgrounds, and they are feelings of peace, hearing unusual noises, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of the body, meeting spiritual beings, encountering a bright light, or a being of light, panoramic life review, a realm where all knowledge exists. Cities of light, a realm of bewildered spirits, supernatural rescue, a border or a limit and coming back into the body.

So Moody described all these in 1975 as being like, if you're going to have a near-death experience, this is probably going to happen. And after coming to, he found that a lot of folks had the same after effects. One of them being frustrated trying to relate the experienced other people, but also having this deeper appreciation of life, being less afraid of death, and sometimes freaking people out by things that they shouldn't have seen or remembered. So these kinds of experience have been consistent over these different cultures and backgrounds and religions and spiritual beliefs, and Bruce says also over time. Oh, wow. So for longer than it would take to be a fleeting trend

or something like a social contagion. Right, there's no question that people back in the ancient world, long before we had Christianity, had the same type of new death experiences we have now. Now, of course, we didn't have any way of measuring their physiology back then, but we're still on the ground level of finding out how to do that now. And I know you wrote a paper near death experiences in spirituality, and with the topic of religion, where does the split between it being a spiritual experience

and a religious experience? Because I'm sure some people are like, I was in heaven and other people are like, I don't know, I saw white light or myself on an operating table. Yeah, that's a good question, Natalie. Most people who have a near death experience say they are tremendously transformed by it. And the first thing that says that they're no longer afraid of death, no matter what the near death experience was composed of, they feel like they're

looking forward to death eventually. But that paradoxically makes them more willing to engage in life. They feel that there's no reason they shouldn't go ahead and jump in with both feet and enjoy all there is to life and Take risks because what's the worst that can happen? You die and that's good. So So if you they feel much more joyful about life and also less frightened about death. But don't get too excited about being at corpse. Now I should say that people who have come close to death, but don't have a near-death experience, also tend to value life more highly. But they don't have this decreased fear of death. They tend to fear death more.

So if someone has had a near-death event, like a motorcycle crash, but not a near-death experience where things get all- like funky, then they may still find life precious, but they're not looking forward to death. Like that should still a horrifying proposition for them. So a near-death event and a near-death experience might hit a little different. And just like all cacti or succulents. But not all succulents are cacti. All near-death experiences come from a near-death event, but not all near-death events result in a near-death experience.

You with me? Now most near-death experiences say they're much more spiritual now than they were before. And by that, they do not mean they're more religious. They say they feel more connected to other people, to the natural world, to the divine, and this gives them a sense of compassion for other people to the natural world, to the divine, and this gives them a sense of compassion for other people. They often come back saying that they experienced in their near-death experience, that they are the same as every other person, and they are intimately connected with other people. And if you believe that, then it doesn't make sense to hurt other people because you just hurting

yourself or to try to get ahead at someone else's expense. And I've known lots of people who had to change their careers after a near-death experience. People who are in a violent profession such as career military officers or police officers who just could not think about hurting someone, shooting someone after the NDE. And people who were in cutthroat businesses who had to leave their jobs and they usually end up training into something like healthcare or social work or clergy or teaching something where they're helping other people rather than hurting them. I've heard these same changes from people who were atheists before the near-death experience and again they

become much more spiritual but not necessarily more religious. They tend to feel that all our religions are man-made approximations that was really going on. I feel like some of these changes in perspective and even some of the experience of it sounds a lot like someone I know who did mushrooms named me once. who did mushrooms, named me once. Do you find any correlations between psychedelic substances and what people experience? I know that they use it too for the termally ill, the sort of confront an existential fear.

Yes, yes. There's definitely a lot of similarities between what we have in a natueth experience and spiritual experiences from other causes. And one of those causes is often psychedelic drugs. And people have been reporting these experiences for centuries of the sense of leaving their bodies and encountering some other realm or dimension.

And then returning to this, well, normal everyday life with a much more spiritual outlook. It doesn't happen as reliably with drugs, drugs often have a lot of negative trips as well, but it does happen. Now several years ago, I was part of an international group that compared hundreds of accounts of near-death experiences with thousands of accounts of psychedelic drug trips with different drugs. And we tried to look at which drugs produced the experience that was most like a near-death experience. And it turned out that the number one drug was ketamine, which is anesthetic that's used

mostly for animals, not for people very much because it often produces unpleasant experiences in people. So according to the paper, essential veterinary use of ketamine. Cetamine is like the MVP of those dark guns used to sedate zoo animals and wildlife, and it's used also as a surgical anesthesia for horses and camels. So in addition to cattle and tigers, other species that use ketamine are ravers, calling it special K, and sometimes slipping into a mid-groove to associative state, known as a K hole. So ketamine therapy can be an effective option for treatment-resistant depression when it's

administered in a calm setting by doctors who read the instructions on the box. But why would anyone want to take a horse at a static on a Saturday night in a loud room that's dark with a bunch of strangers? Well, according to Bruce's paper, neurochemical models of near-death experiences, a large-scale study based on the semantics similarity of written reports published in the Journal of Consciousness

and Concussion from 2019. The researchers write that near-death experiences often result in a state of consciousness characterized by the perception of leaving the body, feelings of peace and bliss and timelessness, a life review, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel and an irreversible threshold. So these researchers looked at 15,000 reports linked to the use of 165 psychoactive substances. And they found that little drum roll here. But the reports of a ketamine experience sounded most like a near death experience. The second most common one was psilocybin.

Ah. And the third was salvia or sage. Just a ps. So salvia is a type of sage, which is native to Central America in its menus for centuries as a holy medicine by indigenous groups. If you've ever watched videos of college kids on stained couches, ripping bongs of this stuff, you're gonna turn into Nancy Reagan. Because although that high lasts maybe five minutes, it looks harrowing existentially. That bowl comes in my direction now and I'm like, keep it moving, man. Excuse me. I have to go to space now. And we were kind of hoping this would give us clues as to what was going on in the brain

that might facilitate a new death experience. But when you look at what these drugs do in the brain, each one of the top 10 drugs works by a different mechanism in the brain, working with different neurotransmitters. So it didn't really help us basically what the bossed out to is, if you interrupt the normal working in the brain, you're open to having a near-death experience. That's not a specific chemical effect. And I was reading in this paper that the end-methyl-deasparate receptor antagonist, which has had some sort of effect on the endogenous serotonin two-way receptor agonist,

which I was pouring through this paper and I was like, I'm just gonna ask him what that means. Sure, sure, sure. Well, actually, ketamine works mostly by inhibiting the NMDA receptor in the brain, but these drugs that we give people, whether it's ketamine or psilocybin or salvia or any of the others, LSD, they're dirty drugs, so to speak.

They have many different effects on the brain. So giving a drug that just has one effect and has many, and it's hard to sort out which one is the one that's effective in facilitating these experiences. I can also say that if it's associated with an experience that doesn't necessarily mean that it's causing the experience. One of the psychiatrists who was most active in pushing the ketamine model of near-death experiences back in the 80s had had lots of experiences with ketamine that produces events like a near-death experience.

And then eventually after a couple of decades, he had spontaneous near-death experience with a heart attack. And at the end of that, he said, you know, it's not the same thing. Really? You see, he said that he doesn't think that ketamine produces the experience. He said ketamine opens the door and allows you, if conditions are right, to have this experience. Ah-ha.

Another person I know who had a near-death experience and had had previous experiences with psilocybin, said that with psilocybin, he saw heaven. With his near-death experience, he was in heaven. Oh, wow. That's a really chilling anecdote to think of how immersive that must be and why that has such lasting effects if you come back to life. I think the issue is we just have so many words in the English language to describe our experiences

and most people who have a new death experience say there aren't any words for it. I can't describe it for you. So then we researchers say, great, tell me about it. So we make them use metaphors. And there are just so many words you can use to describe it. And they don't always mean the same thing. So people will all over the world describe a warm loving being of light. And people in the US will often say, that's God. And people in the US will often say, that's God. People in India will not use that word. But even people here will say,

I'm gonna call the God, so you know what I'm talking about. But this is not the God I was taught about in church. It's much bigger than that. That's just using it for a metaphor. And heaven, meaning not an actual pearly gate with angels and harps, but just something else that was pretty cool. Right.

Something very different from this normal everyday physical world. Well, I'm wondering if ketamine is used as a therapy that's a far, but kind of an approximation of a near-death experience. And if people after near-death experiences have a sense of peace and less anxiety and less existential kind of crises, does ketamine produce some of those lasting effects too? Is that why it's being looked at as a therapeutic drug? Well, it's a good question. Ketamine is now being used to treat depression.

And there's some exploratory work now using as a treat a post-traumatic stress disorder. We don't know about the long-term effects of it. There's been a lot more work done with psilocybin since that's much easier to control and a lot of the work being done at Johns Hopkins University here in the US and at Imperial College in London, giving people psilocybin and then having them describe their experiences, which are often quite spiritual. And the group of Hopkins has now followed people up for a year or two,

and they find that after just one extended session within their lab, they have a decrease in anxiety that lasts for a couple of years at least. I followed the Imperial College of London Protocol when I had my one psychedelic trip right after my dad died. And I think about that experience daily. I mean, it was such a profound experience. I didn't believe that it would have such a lasting impact, but I mean, I don't have any explanation

for it. Whatever my brain was doing, it was pretty cool, though. Right. No, this podcast is not intended to provide any medical advice. Also, this treatment was suggested to me by my long-term Western medical psychiatrist, familiar with my medical history, who sent me the protocol. I then prepared for weeks obsessively reading studies and printing a 57-page book-lit-up treatment protocol from an Ivy League Medical School's Psychiatry Department. Just know, it was wacky and also it is illegal,

but I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't have silent conversations with dead people in a rainbow-colored candy land for a few hours, and experiencing a piphany that anxiety is the biggest waste of brain resources, and that fear truly is the mind killer. Way back in the 1970s, Stan Groff was using LSD to assist people who were dying to help them relieve their anxiety in the dying process. All these drugs are not just given some of these here, take, go home and take this. Yeah. They're usually administered in a very controlled setting with low lights and smooth music and someone there to help you process the process as you're going through it.

And I'm wondering about what led you to this field if you can tell me a little bit about your backstory. Yeah. Well, I was raised in a scientific household. My father was a chemist, and you know, as far as we knew, the physical world was all there was, we didn't have any spiritual tradition in our family. You know, when you die, you die, that's the end. That was fine with us. That wasn't a depressing fact.

I wasn't afraid of death. It was just the end. I went through college and medical school with that mindset that the physical world is all that is and all our thoughts and feelings are created by the brain. And then when I started my psychiatric training back in the early 70s, I was confronted by a patient who was unconscious when I tried to see her in the emergency room, but her roommate was waiting for me in another room down the hall. So I went to talk to the roommate to see what was going on with the patient, what she might have overdosed on and so forth. And then I came back to see the patient and she was still totally unconscious. So she was admitted to the intensive care unit.

And when I saw her the next morning, I started to introduce myself and she stopped me and said, I remember who you were for the last night. Yeah, I know who you are. And last night. You know, I know who you are. And that kind of stunned me because I was pretty sure she was unconscious. So I said that to her and she said, well, not in my room, I saw you talking to Susan down the hall.

That just blew me away. I couldn't imagine what she was talking about. As far as I could tell, the only way that could happen is to see her lift her body and follow me down the hall. And you know, you are your body. How can you leave it? But then she went on to tell me about the conversation I had with the roommate. What I asked, what she answered, what we were wearing, what the room looked like.

And I just didn't know what to make of this. I was completely dumbfounded. But I wasn't there to deal with my confusion. I was supposed to be dealing with hers. So I kind of pushed it on my mind for a while and thought, well, I'll think about this when I have time, sometime in the future. And then over the next few years, I heard a few more cases like this from patients who had usually overdosed and had, or some one case, that shot them off in the head and had a near death event and then claimed to have elaborate near death experiences.

And I just assumed, you know, these are all psychiatric patients who knows what they really, they really experienced. And then several years later, one of my colleagues at the University of Virginia, Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life in which he gave us the name, near death experience, and described what they were like. And I realized this was what my patients were talking about. Only Raymond's participants were not patients. They were people from all over the world, having the same types of experiences my patients were.

I still couldn't understand it, but I'm a scientist. So scientists don't run away from things they don't understand. They run towards them, try to explain them. So I started collecting cases to try to find what patterns are consistent across cultures, across ages, across genders, across ethnic groups, and trying to find out what's going on here. And eventually we started looking at different physiological hypotheses, is it lack of oxygen to the brain, is it drugs given to the patients and so forth. is it lack of oxygen to the brain? Is it drugs given to the patients and so forth? And one by one, we test for all these hypotheses and none of them panned out.

For example, if you measure the oxygen levels of people who are close to death, you find that those who have near-death experiences actually have better oxygen supply of the brain than those who don't have near-death experiences. Oh, wow. So that means the oxygen deprivation is not causing the NDE. And likewise with drugs given to patients,

the fewer drugs you're given, the more likely you are to tell about our near-death experience later on. And wondering, it must be very difficult to do imaging on these experiences because you really kind of never know when it's going to happen. That's right. What kind of measurements can you do while it's happening? You can't do much while it's happening.

There have been one or two people who have tried to bring new death experiencers into the lab and have them try to recreate in their minds the memory of the new death experience while they're having an MRI or an EEG or CAT scan. And what they find is that there's no one spot in the brain. The entire brain gets involved in these, which is not surprising because you've got thoughts, you've got perceptions, you've got feelings, you've got emotions, the whole brain's being involved in this.

Now, it has been a couple of reports recently about people who served purposely had a heart attack while they had their EEGs being measured, their brainwaves being measured. And what they find is that there is some continued brain activity, apparently, after the heart stops. Oh, wow. Now, this flies in the face of decades of clinical observations, where we know that after the heart stops, the blood supply of the brain stops also. And within about 10 seconds, you start getting a marked decrease in the brain activity. And within a minute or so, you get totally flat lining.

So it's surprising to see these new reports of continued activity. However, it's very difficult to do this kind of research. And what they find is that the types of supposed brain waves they're fighting, the electrical activity they're measuring, because just as well be due to muscle activity in the head around your temples and on your forehead that are contracting or going to spasm, they can produce the same types of waves that electrical activity in the brain does, and that we don't have to separate those two. So they may not have to be measuring brain activity. Ah, it might just be muscular, so it's tough to parse out, right?

Right. Do you have any statistics on how many people who have a near-death event have a near-death experience? Yes, we have data from several different studies, large studies with with several hundred patients each in several different countries in the US, in the UK, in Belgium, in Germany. And what we find generally is that if you look at only people whose hearts have stopped between 10 and 20 percent will report a near death experience. That's a lot. Now we're relying on them to voluntarily tell us

about it. There may be more people who just don't want to talk about it, but we know at least 10-20% haven't experienced. Do you think it could be like how you might dream but not remember it in the morning? That's a possibility, although most people who tell about a near death experience say it's not at all like a dream. It doesn't fade over time. In fact, we've done research now where I've gone back in recent years to contact people I interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s about their new death experience. And I've re-interviewed them.

And I find there is actually no change at all in what they tell me. The memory is not faded at all. It doesn't become distorted at all in what they tell me. The memory is not figured at all, it doesn't become distorted at all, it doesn't change over time the way most of our memories do. So when they say to us, this was more real than life itself. That seems to be true when it looks at the memories because the memories are so vivid, they don't change over time. The way memories of our normal life change. Yeah, I imagine too when people say they remember where they were when they heard JFK was shot or that 9-11 happened, it really imprints and you can remember a lot more details because of

the significance. Exactly. Well, your paper about near-death experiences and spirituality, the false positive claims and the false negative denials, how do you determine what might be an embellishment or what might be a denial? Do you have to hook them up to a lie detector test? No, no, we don't do that. Okay. Now, we just look at the consistency of the reports. We have a scale that we use to quantify

the depth of the new death experience. Just a side note, he was the expert who invented the scale, which is a baller move, and it's called the Grayson NDE scale. And it's a 16 point survey with questions, such as, did scenes from your past come back to you? Did you see or feel surrounded by a brilliant light? Did you feel separated from your body? Did you come to a border or a point of no return?

Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence? And the best thing about your score on this test is that you won't give a shit because nothing matters except for peace and unity and love. You might be out the door to a parasailing appointment or draining your savings account to buy a mini-donkey sanctuary by the time these eggheads bust out the calculator to figure it out. And if an experience falls below a certain point in the scale, we say, well, they didn't really have a full-blown youth experience. Now, we use that for research purposes to make sure that we're all talking about the same experience when we do research on them. But it's not helpful for an individual person. If a person comes to me and says, my heart stopped and I have this incredible experience

and my life will never be the same again. And we give them the scale and they don't score high enough on it. That doesn't mean they didn't have a new type of experience. I can't say to this person, even though your life has been totally turned around, you didn't have an experience. Obviously the person did.

But it's not the type that we want to include in the research because it's not consistent with the others. How many data points do you have to collect for a study? Can you do a small sample size or are there bigger reviews that have a lot of data points of correlations between different people's stories and things like that? Yeah, well, it depends on what measures you're using, what measures you're releasing is your outcome. And most research into new genetic experiences use several hundred new death experiences to get any significant results. There have been a few papers published with 10, 20, and as you might expect, their results are not as consistent, and later reports with larger numbers may not confirm what they

found. But most of the research has been done with several hundred experiences. And are the most common flavors kind of a bright light or a tunnel or floating above yourself? Do you find that those are the most common experiences? They are. The most common one is a sense of overwhelming well-being and peace and sense of being unconditionally loved.

It's cute. I wish I I get it? Many also report leaving their bodies and watching what's going on around them and being able to describe accurately what's going on around them. I think they shouldn't be able to see or hear. And then a sense of reviewing their lives and meaning other entities, they seem to do that. Okay, not that I don't love all this, but Dr. Grayson and most of us are science first

kind of people. He was raised secular all about data and mid-busting, so how does he make sure that people aren't absolutely making this stuff up? Do they have to verify with other non-dead witnesses? Do you ever have to do any follow-ups with other medical personnel or nursing staff to say, hey, did anyone overhere something and then tell another patient? Do you ever have to go down like an investigative hole

like that, or did you the first time it happened? Well, we do. When people just say, I left my body and I watched what was going on. If they described things that were unusual or they couldn't have been Guessed about then we asked other people in the room doctors and nurses who were there To corroborate or not what the patient was saying now if they say oh, I saw doctors wearing green scrubs

Well, of course you might expect that But they say well the nurse had mismatched shoelaces. That's a little more surprising and we then will then go ahead and ask the nurse With that happened and we have some very surprising things that patients saw of doctors and nurses doing, embarrassing things they shouldn't have been doing that were accurately right. Can you tell me what any of them were? Well, one was a 55 year old truck driver who had a emergency quadruple bypass surgery. That means four of the vessel supplying his heart were blocked and had to be replaced. And in the operation, he later told me he left his body, rose up above it, and saw his surgeon flapping his

arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated by placing his hands on his chest and wiggling his arms up and down. Now, I had never seen anything like that in an operating room. I've been to Dr. Rho 30 years ago at this point, and I had never seen that. You don't see doctors on TV doing that. So I said to Emily, it sounds to me like this is a hallucination from the drugs you were given. He said, no, no, no, I really saw it.

You can ask my doctor. So I did. And the doctor sheepishly admitted that he had done that, that he had developed this habit. He had never seen any other doctor do. He lets his assistants start the procedure, while he puts on his sterile, gown and gloves. And then he walks into the operating room to watch them start the procedure. And to avoid touching anything that's not

sterile. He places his hands flat against his chest so they won't touch anything and then he points things out to his assistance. He says, elbows, we doesn't touch anything with his fingers and he demonstrated just the way the patient did. And I don't know how we could have known that. The other patient could have known that. Now I said to the patient, did you ask the doctor yourself about it? He said, yes, I did. And what did he tell you? He said, well, I must have done something right because you're here, aren't you?

I thought for sure you were going to tell me that he was doing the chicken dance. I was like, I had no idea surgeons. I was so goofy. This is a very serious, straight-laced doctor. He would be like that. What about you? Have you ever had a near-death event or experience? I have not.

I have had a very calm, peaceful, boring life. I had never had any near-death events. Are you afraid of death after hearing so many? No, I'm not. But I can't say that I was ever afraid of death before I got into this work either. As far as I could tell, death was the end and was to be afraid of. You just don't exist anymore. So it wasn't a frightening thing. I don't think that's true anymore. I have to talk to thousands of people who claim to have died and still persisted in some form, I think that there is something after the body

dies. I don't know what it is. Most of them say, I can't describe what it is for you, and then they go ahead and use metaphors, but I don't take those metaphors literally because they're just that. They're metaphors, and I don't think we have the words or the brain power to understand what it's like after you die. Right. There's still so much, obviously, that science doesn't know. I mean, the internet's very new. Electricity is very new. Indoor plumbing is relatively new.

But what do we know or where we are with understanding consciousness? Wow, that's a good question. It's a big one, sorry. We are really at ground zero. Most doctors are taught that the mind is what the brain does, that all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are created by the brain. And if you ask them, well, how does it do that? They have no idea.

How does a chemical or physical, electrical change in the brain create a thought? No one has a slightest hint of a suggestion of an idea of how we might go about answering that question. It's a total black hole. So speaking of black holes, more on cosmology in a bit, but first, can I ask you some questions from listening? Sure, sure. They have great ones. Also, we donate to a charity of your choosing a related charity. So just let us know if there's one that comes to mind, and then we'll shout them out and tell listeners what they're all about. Well, what comes to mind, Ali, is the International Association for Near Death Studies,

that's iands.org, which is a 501-C3 nonprofit organization. That's great. That's absolutely perfect. We'll donate in your name. Good. So this 501-C3 org promotes multidisciplinary exploration of near death in similar experiences and their effects on people's lives.

And they publish a peer review, it's scholarly journal. They sponsor conferences, they work with media, and they encourage regional support groups for experiencers and people close to them, healthcare professionals and educators. So to find out more about the International Association for Near Death Studies, you can go to iands.org, which will be linked in the show notes, and that donation was made possible by sponsors at the show. Okay, I'm dying to know what you asked. So thanks to patrons at patreon.com slash allergies first submitting questions before we recorded and

the folks at the BFF tier first submitting audio questions. Now many folks had chemical queries such as Issa Brillard, Misch the Fish, Holly Georgia, Dundin, Amanda Lask, Pabcat 34, Doug Pace, Susana Capucho, Interstitial K and first-time question askers, Malia, Asosi and Rachel Prosteko, and Lauren. Okay, some questions, Lauren from California wanted to know. My question is about chemicals released by the brain during near-death experiences. I read about a study done on rats that measured their serotonin levels upon dying, and I'm wondering if there are any studies to try to determine what other chemicals

might be released by the brain in addition to serotonin? That's a difficult question because we're all talking about speculation. We don't have data on this. We do know that endorphins are produced under stress and presumably they would be when you're approaching death as well. And endorphins produce a sense of euphoria. The so-called runner's high, is an endorphin effect. But that's one of dozens and dozens of chemicals that are produced by the brain under stress. And it's hard to know which ones are causing, which effects.

If it's associated with the near-to-the-experience, that doesn't necessarily mean it's causing the experience. It may be having an effect on a brain that gets it out of the way so you can go ahead and experience this. So in his book after Bruce further explains that if near-death experiences are not associated with medications, giving to people might they be related to chemicals produced by people in crisis? He says we know that our brains produce or release a number of chemicals to help the body cope under stress. The chemicals he thought might be most likely to be associated with NDE's were endorphins, the feel good hormones that produce a runner's high, and that are known to

reduce pain and stress. And he writes that other scientists have suggested that NDE's might be connected to serotonin, adrenaline, phasocressin, and glutamate, all of which are chemicals that transmit signals between nerve cells. But he writes, in spite of the theoretical reasons for thinking that brain chemicals might be involved in NDEs, at this point there's been no research looking into this possibility. And he says, I don't expect any such research to be done in the near future. Bursts of these chemicals in the brain tend to be very short-lived and localized. So in order to find them, we'd have to look at exactly the right time, at exactly the right place in the brain,

and he writes, as I discovered, we don't even know where in the brain to look. So yeah, surprise, we don't know. Katie from Glasgow in Scotland wanted to know. I was just wondering if there had been any kind of research done into people's experiences and specifically kind of memory of loss in an intensive care or a critical care department in hospital. I work as a research nurse and I remember vividly speaking to someone who is taking part in one of our drug trials during the first wave of the COVID pandemic and although they were actually conscious for kind of protracted periods during their stay in intensive care. When I was speaking with them afterwards, they said that the only thing that they really

remembered about it was this person with pink hair being obsessed with the time. We figured out it was because of when myself and other research colleagues were in and we were, you know, shifting out times with each other of light infusion, starting and stalking and blood samples getting taken and things like that. It just seemed like a really odd of all the things to have stuck in my during that period, was someone shouting the time at each other. It was very odd. And I wanted to know how auditory retention is affected by a near death experience. I understand that when you're dying, that's maybe the last sense to go.

Do you hear people who hear things a lot? Yeah, generally speaking, vision goes first and hearing is the last thing to go. But there have been studies where people had blocks put in their ears so they wouldn't be able to hear anything. The hash, I said, molded speakers put in ears that would emit a loud burst so you could measure it from the brain when the brain was responded to these clicks. Now, when the brain stops spawning, you know, they're totally anesthetized. And even in such circumstances, people have vivid memories of hearing and seeing things

in the operating room after a near-death experience. So it's hard to say what is preserved and what's not preserved as someone is dying because we know that a measure don't have a measure of how dead someone is, how close death someone is. Now there have been a couple of reports of people who are actually pronounced and left in a morgue for a couple of days before they recovered

to tell an near new death experience. And that those are another another problem, how we deal, how do you deal with those people? I mean, I guess you get a lawyer. Is that a malpractice suit? You thought I was dead. Still alive. Have they ever found anything that is similar across other cases? Because that sounds like the worst nightmare ever, to be honest. Yes, yes. I mean, these people are usually not inclined to sue. They come back with a sense of whirl on this together.

That's a good point. It won't be very forgiving. I looked to find these rare cases, these really macabre fates, and I went spelunking into deep research, only to discover right away that y'all this happens all the time. All the time, here are some choice bits from some somewhat recent news stories. You ready Iowa?

A funeral home employee reportedly unzipped the bag, saw the woman's chest moving, and the woman gasped for air. Mrs. Sippy, funeral workers find a man alive and kicking when they open a body bag. Brazil, the crematorium staffer who went to collect the deceased patient, opened the bag and noticed that their body was still warm and not yet showing rigor mortis. Poland, a woman wakes up feeling very cold, only to realize she was in the morgue's cold storage. So yes, declared dead, but still alive.

The most bitter suite of mistakes, I have a lot of feelings about this. And one of them is that if you're given a second chance at life and they have to rip up your death certificate, do you want to spend the time on earth giving depositions and filing lawsuit paperwork at a courthouse? I don't know. Most new death experiences come back embracing what we call the golden rule. You know, treat other people the way you want them to treat you, which is a part of every religion we have. But for these people who have a near-death experience, they say,

for them it's no longer a goal we're supposed to follow, you know, guideline. It's a lot of the universe. They've experienced this in their near-to-the-experience. And they know that when you hurt someone, you can't avoid hurting yourself as well. When you help other people, you're helping yourself as well. That seems like a huge paradigm shift in what we're taught culturally.

It is. This next question is from DeNoa, who hails from the land of Northwest Florida. Hello, Dad Ward. I was wondering, are there any cultures current or past that have incorporated the near-death experience into some kind of ritual? Anything like that that you know of? We don't have good evidence of this, but some of the ancient Egyptian and Greek mystery religions would either put people into drug-induced traces or in Egypt actually bury them for a day or so to try to induce this type of experience. And often those people were then held as seers or shamans after they came out of this,

if they survived. Now there are accounts in Tibet of people who have come back from from a death, the Kvalpum Daylogs, and they are revered, but it's not done as much of a ritual, it's just they happen to have this, and then they are revered as knowledgeable people. I mean, it does have some cache, I'm not going why. Yeah. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Tell me everything. And also just the the victory of defeating death in the first round. Exactly. Yeah. What about age, Tareena, Grace Robachot, and Donald Merritt wanted to know if in Grace's words, just a rate of near death experiences go down after teenage years years, Torina wants to know, do children have them?

Yeah, most of the cases that we have looked at are in older people because those are the ones who come close to death more frequently. But there have been a number of studies of children having near-death experiences and they are generally the same as those of adults with one exception, actually more than one is certain, they tend not to have the elaborate life review that older people do. They haven't had much of a life to review. And they tend not to see a lot of deceased loved ones because they don't know a lot of people who have died

as older people do. But with those two exceptions, children seem to have the same near-death experiences that adults do, including preschool children who have not really been indoctrinated into what to expect when you die. So on that note, many of you asked about astral reunions, such as Emily, Joanna Burr, Deli Dames, Raina, Alison Muller, Ellie Schaeffer, Teddy Egelhoff, Audrey Ayers, and first-time question asker Charlotte Parkinson, who said in the moment my dad was dying,

he hadn't been able to say a word in two weeks due to being in an out of an induced coma and having brain damage. His last word was my mom's name who had passed away years before. And then patron Christopher Jones asked, do a lot of people really have visions slash dreams during near-death experiences or is that flimflam perpetuated by movies? You know, a bunch of people, you just mentioned seeing loved ones. I had done a lot of reading about hospice because my father passed last year and some booklets and some guidebooks were like, it's not uncommon for your loved one in hospice to start talking to people who have passed away. Any kind of explanation for that or any data on that you want to share? Well, when people report that in their near death experience, they were greeted by deceased loved ones.

That can easily be dismissed as wishful thinking or expectation. Or you think you're dying, so of course you want to have your deceased spouse or or mother or father come greet you. But we have a number of well-documented cases where someone claimed that in a near-death experience, they encountered someone who was deceased that was not yet known to have died. So there's no expectation here. And sometimes they come back to talk about this and the people around them are very disturbed because this person's so alive they're talking about. Then they

find out a couple days later, no they'll actually die just shortly before the person saw them. Gwynn Kelly asked, I've always wondered if there's a difference in the experiences of NDEs between people who nearly died slowly versus people who had something quick or sudden, where your brain has very little time to process or react to realize, oh, shit, I'm going to die. And Teresa wrote, please, please, just reassure me little time to process or react to realize, oh shit, I'm going to die. And to restraught, please, please, just reassure me that even when people die horrifically, their dying brains fire up in a way that makes their last

moments peaceful or less terrifying lie if you must. In terms of a violin or sudden death, have you talked to anyone who went through that who said that there was like an absence of terror or horror or? Yeah, most people report that as soon as the Neodeth experience starts, all the pain goes away, all the fear goes away, and they become enveloped by this blissful feeling of peace and well-being and being initially accepted. Now, I have to say that there are some new-death experiences that are not pleasant. We don't really know how many there are. Most people who have studied this find that about 10 percent

are not pleasant, but again, we're dealing with people who voluntarily talk to us about this. And I can imagine that people who have an unpleasant neodephth experience are less willing to talk about it than other people. As to why that might happen, we don't know. I've known people who were in prison for life, for murder, who had beautiful neodephth experiences when they had a heart attack in prison. And we certainly have a lot of writings

by Catholic saints over the centuries, describing their dark night of the soul when they have terrifying mystical experiences. So we don't really know. What we do know though is that people who have frighteningly a death experiences also come back feeling they're no longer afraid of death as they were before. And they come back saying, even though I had a bad experience, I was sent back so I can change my life and now have a better life, a better death next time. Oh, like a little bit of a do-over. Exactly. I was given a second chance. Well, I mean, I guess that's hopeful if you're out there being a dick. Yeah. A few people,

Ann Marie Everhart, Jessica, Cherichara, and Clayton Harding wanted to know about the ceiling experiments, about putting things up on a shelf, up in the room of patients. Can you tell me at all about designing and conducting those experiments? Sure, sure. Well, there have been numerous anecdotes about people who claim to have seen things accurately from an out-of-body perspective. Jan Holden at the University of North Texas actually looked at almost a hundred of these cases, and she found out in 92% of them what the person described is entirely accurate.

In about 6%, there were some little inaccuracies in it, and only 1% was a dead wrong. So the vast majority was completely accurate. So that has stimulated us to start doing experiments, who replace usually visual targets up high on a shelf in the room where people are likely to have a cardiac arrest like in the cardiac care unit facing upwards, so you can only see them from looking down. And there have been now six published studies of this type of research protocol, and none of them has found anyone who claimed to have left their body and seen the target.

So it doesn't tell us yes or no, can they really do it? Because no one claimed to have tried to do it. So I found their study with the protocol, which said, an Apple Macintosh Pizmo Power Book Laptop computer was placed above eye level in the procedure room so that the computer screen faced the ceiling. And the surface was approximately 6 feet above the patient, and on the screen were randomly selected animations,

which might involve a floating butterfly or fireworks or a jumping frog. And the results were disappointing. And Bruce says that the struggle in this kind of science is it's so much of the evidence is anecdotal. Plus, these patients were under heavy sedation. So that may have been a factor. What I talk about this to near-death experience is they just laugh. They say, if you're having a near-death experience, you're out of your body for the first time

watching your body being resuscitated. Are you going to look around the room for some talk? You didn't know it was there. And then try to remember it, you know, or if they think it's just a ludicrous thing to try. I wasn't paying attention. This is a good point. That would probably be the least interesting thing happening in the room. Right. For more on this, you can see his study with Dr. Holden and Dr. Paul Mountsey, titled with honesty and chagrin, failure to elicit near-death experiences in induced cardiac arrest. So actual scientists are doing the actual work to see what's up and all the ceiling as far as flim flam and debunkery.

So yes, we have no good scientific data from controlled experiments to verify that people's consciousness dips out and just takes a gander from the top. I'm sorry. Now, on the topic of consciousness in the universe, Matt Tsikato, Chris Curious, Rob Lara, and Sharon had questions, and they're not alone. Tiger Gary says, I saw a presentation by a Caltech professor that consciousness and unconsciousness was partially controlled by the quantum state of atoms in the brain. that consciousness and unconsciousness was partially controlled by the quantum state of atoms in the brain. Have you had to talk to any theoretical physicists or anything like that about this? Yes.

It's a challenging area because it's all speculation. We don't have any ways of measuring these quantum fluctuations in the brain. Stuart Hameroff and anesthesiologist in Arizona and Roger Penrose physicist in England, have collaborated on a theory to explain consciousness on this way. They talk about micro tubules in the atoms in the brain that can have quantum effects, but they don't explain how that can produce a thought or a feeling. Again, you're dealing with a physical event and trying to figure out how that creates a thought or a feeling. And there's a gap that they haven't really crossed.

If you're thirsty for more on this, you can suntry yourself down a cyber hole about orchestrated objective reduction, a hypothesis that came onto the scene in the early 1990s via a noble laureate in physics and an anesthesiologist. And I'll read you a snippet from your friend, worker Pidja, who told me, orchestrated objective reduction or orch or worst nickname. It's the worst. Is a theory which postulates that consciousness

originates at the quantum level inside neurons rather than the conventional view of the connections between the neurons. And this mechanism is held to be a quantum process orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules, which are sub-neuronal cytoskeleton components, or protein filaments inside ourselves. And it's proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will.

So, just when you think you know yourself, someone throws quantum cytoskeleton brain microtubules at you, and you're back wondering how you're a blob of molecules that loves a cat. For the most part, physicists are very divided about whether quantum physics can really have anything to do with consciousness or not. The original people who developed quantum physics hundred years ago came to the conclusion that physical matter doesn't really exist, that consciousness is everything. And unless consciousness looks at the universe, it doesn't exist.

And when you look at it, then it comes into creation. And later if it's said, that's totally ridiculous. So most faces this day are slit about whether that's true or not. And they tend to deal with it by saying, quantum physics is not a description of reality. It's a mathematical formula that's just predict how things are going to turn out. But it's not a literal description of reality. There's so many exciting things that people will know after we die. Mark physicists now say that the visible matter that we can see is 5% of the matter in universe.

And then it's dark matter. We should have no idea. Yeah, I had talked to a dark matter expert about that. Yeah, how can you possibly think we understand the world if that's true? I know I asked him if dark matter could be ghosts and be honest with me without having to name names How many astrophysicists out there think that dark matter might be ghosts? What if dark matter is ghosts? What if dark energy is ghosts? What if it's all ghosts? What if we're swimming in ghosts? There is something to be said about. Maybe dark matter is something much more exciting than particles. And there are theories where the dark matter plural could form dark atoms.

Just like you have protons and electrons, maybe something like a dark proton and a dark electron that we can't see, but they can see each other. And those form dark atoms. And then it's not hard to imagine, well, those dark atoms could have dark chemistry, that dark chemistry can form dark life, that dark life could maybe this entire sentient civilization living in our dark matter halo where our galaxy is sitting and we just don't realize it but because there is five times more of them than there is us we are the ghosts we're like we we are the weird the weird thing wow

oh my gosh and he said well if there ghosts, we are the ghosts in the dark matter universe. It's like, good point. So that was Dr. Flipp Tnato, who's a theoretical particle physicist from the Skoto-Highology episode and a real gem. But from dark matter to white light, some folks, including Tom Boudre, Afri-Laway, Matt Hershel, Mark Phillips, and NDE Havers, Jen Skrull Alvarez, Ease Iberr and Shli Schwinghammer had brightly burning questions. So many people, including first-time question-asker, Shli Schwinghammer wanted to know, why is it the color white that people tend to see and a ton of people wanted to know about the light in the tunnel? Is it just a Hollywood trope or in Devon's words, are there any theories about the bright light?

Anything that might be causing that or like a flood in the retina or something like that? Yeah, I've been people who try to explain this in terms of the physiology of the brain, and as the brain starts shutting down, you have leftless oxygen. to the brain, and as the brain starts shutting down, you have left-less oxygen. The outer edge of your visual field tends to go dark, and which you left with is a small, light area in the center. But that's not what people see in a neat-geth experience. They don't see just a smaller and smaller section of light in the middle. They tend to see the tunnel. They can see on the outside of the tunnel. They can see around it So it's not like you're just having a small

Visual field getting smaller and smaller. It's like you're seeing a tunnel in your visual field Ah, it's not the same thing at all Now I will say that you see tunnels in a lot of other experiences as well besides near-death experiences and Some people think that The tunnel is not an integral part of a near-death experience. It's the way we have retroactively of explaining how we got from this physical world to the other world of the near-death experience. I'm here that I'm there, how did I get there? I don't know. What's it on through a tunnel?

So it's a mode of transport. It is. And I'll say that here again, we're dealing with metaphors. Most people here in the US will talk about a tunnel. People in countries where there aren't a lot of tunnels will not say that. They'll say, I went through a cave or I fell into a well. I talked to one person here who's a truck driver who said, I got sucked into this long cow pipe. Whatever metaphor comes to you is what you used to describe this long dark and closed space. Do you have a lot of truck drivers that have near-death experiences because of highway crashes? Yes, yes. People of all types who come close to death from all different ways have the same types of near-death experience.

Of course, I had to look this up. I know a lot of you listening out there are on a long haul maybe at the helm of an 18 wheelers that yes tragically life expectancy in that profession is 61 years old. 17 years shorter than the national average and it's not due to accidents but rather the majority of y'all hauling rigs tend to be men who have shorter lifespans overall. And according to some CDC studies many truckers struggle with a poor work and life balance, which can contribute to stress. And due to all these pressures to do these long hours, the average amount of sleep is several hours less per night than other professions.

And access to a healthy diet on the road is also harder, as is the sedentary nature of the job. But doctors say that you can keep your job and your health by packing fresh or healthier food if you can. Try to get in 40 minutes of activity a day if possible. Some truckers keep a set of weights in their cab to use while loading and unloading is happening in the back. Also as a doc about a sleep study, because many long haulers have sleep apnea and a

CPAP machine can really improve your sleep in the levels of alertness and fatigue. And my grandpa Walter Willisward was a trucker and he lived a jolly active life until his 90s. And then one day he collapsed, buck naked. And when they resuscitated him, he seemed disappointed and slammed his fist on his hospital meal tray and said, I'm 92 years old. Let me go already.

So perhaps what lay beyond was too tempting. He died not too long thereafter. And he was, as people said politely in those days, a real firecracker. Now speaking of, you know, Megan Walker and being Clayton Harding, one or two known Megan's words, two people who have near-death experiences score differently on personality scales from people who don't have them or before and after. Well, we don't really have the four and after measures on all of these people. So it's hard to say whether they scored differently on tests.

Now they usually say that they're very different. And when you talk to their friends and family, they describe, oh yes, this is not the same person I used to know is totally different now. And one way they're different is that they're much more relaxed about life. They tend not to be as controlling or as obsessive about things. They tend not to be worried about earning more money or having more power and fame and prestige. Those things aren't important to them anymore. Are they more likable? Oh, that fence, that's a good question.

It sounds like it. Well, it sounds like they're wonderful ways to be. You're more like a compassionate, but it actually is very difficult for the families, sometimes atollerate these changes. Imagine if one member of the family suddenly has a religious conversion to the other ones don't, they don't see eye to eye on things anymore. And there have been a number of divorces because of this. Family sometimes don't accept the changes. I've known parents who are very puzzled by their children suddenly changing personalities after a new death experience. And I should say sometimes that the

experiences are yourself or yourself gets very upset when they find themselves back here in this world when they don't want to be. And they sometimes get very angry or sad for a while. Imagine being bummed to be not dead. Well, I guess sadly, probably a lot of us have had days where that's relatable. And just a little content warning for the next two or three minutes, we do discuss death by suicide. And Dr. Grayson has found that about a quarter of people who survive a suicide attempt report having a near death experience.

So what is he found through his research and decades of experience in emergency psychiatry? We did have two questions related to suicide, Scalaborialis and Audricine. Scalis said I remember reading somewhere that a huge percentage of people that survived suicide attempts, regretted it the second that they say jumped. I'm glad this came up because as a psychiatrist, when I first heard decades ago,

that Neodeath Experiences are no longer afraid of dying, I was worried that that was gonna make people more suicidal. So I started to study of this. I looked at people that was going to make people more suicidal. So I started to study this. I looked at people who were admitted to my hospital with a suicide attempt, and I compared those who had a near-death experience as a result of the suicide attempt with those who didn't. And what I found was that those who had a near-death experience tended to be much less suicidal afterwards than those who didn't have any a death experience. Am I trying to ask them, why? Why is this, if you're not afraid of dying anymore, why are you less suicidal now? And they said a couple of things.

They said, well, now I understand that there's a meaning and purposed everything that goes through in life. And the problems that used to make me run away from life. Now, I realize they're there for me to learn from and to grow from. They're challenges for me. Nothing stays new to run away from. And they also say again that if you're not afraid of dying, then you're not afraid of living either. And you can enjoy life much more than you did before. That's a beautiful thought. And it's something that I wonder how much of it is cultural in terms of the way that we live, sometimes disconnected from family members, disconnected from nature, from, you know, sun, dawn and dusk cycles, all the ways that we were not part of the earth. Right. I think I think in our society there's been a market movement away from organized religion in recent decades and that's made a lot of people less spiritual and more

invested in the physical world which doesn't usually produce the same type of satisfaction that spiritual developments used to. So I think you're saying a lot more people striving for some spiritual connection that used to come from religions. Now we have to look for where we're going to get it from. And near-death experiences do give that to people. Okay, big question here. What is the difference between being spiritual or religious? Because just having spirit in the word spiritual, it's kind of itch giving for some of us.

So I asked science and I found a nugget in the 2016 paper, Spirituality Slash Religiosity, a cultural and psychological resource among sub-Saharan African migrant women with HIV aides in Belgium, which, drawing on a 2002 paper in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, titled, Towards Clarification of the Meaning of Spirituality, the former paper, many many many paragraphs in, happened to say, spirituality and religion are often used interchangeably,

but the two concepts are different. Some authors contend that spirituality involves a personal quest for a meaning in life, while religion involves an organized entity with rituals and practices focusing on a higher power or God. Spirituality may be related to religion for certain individuals, but not, for example, an atheist or yoga practitioner. Do you ever come up on friction of that in the field in terms of can a scientist be spiritual? Can you find your spirituality

just from looking at a bee on a flower or does it have to be something more metaphysical? No, it doesn't have to be more than that. People from Einstein to Carl Sagan said that their science is a spiritual endeavor. And I think most atheists would say they do feel they're part of something weirder than themselves. That may mean they're part of some family or a larger clan or a group of atheists, but they feel like there's something that they're attached to something that's beyond themselves, which is a form of spirituality. So I asked Twitter, akaX, and also Blue Sky, if any atheists or agnostics wanted to weigh in on

if spirituality was a part of their lives, because I still wondered what it meant for different people, especially those of us who were raised with religious dogma that we disliked. And I got some answers from some non-religious folks. So many. I will read you just a few. Rob said the most spiritual experience I had was standing at fossilized tetrapod footprints on Ireland's Atlantic coast, staring out at the ocean and realizing that those prints were made at a time when the East Coast of North America was still connected to Ireland was very awe-inspiring. And Mads said, I define spirituality as anything that reminds me that I'm part of everything that has and will ever happen. And that it's all a part of me. Ideas, experiences, and people that make us feel like we belong to an existence as large and as strange as universe are all quite spiritual. David Attenborough said, When I access spiritual moments, they are often in the quiet of my mind,

in moments of song and joy, in luck, and in the sharing of food. Anthro Andrew said, Anthroologist here, I got to say that you can be spiritual without being religious. A spiritual experience can happen without one knowing even, such as with the whales I study, invoking a deeply emotional response. Rachel Lens said, I'm an atheist, but I would also consider myself spiritual. To me, spirituality is more of an emotional state than anything metaphysical. It's slowing down, learning to revel in awe and wonder. It's appreciating things at scales, billions of times, larger, longer, smaller, or deeper.

The magnitude of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of nature, the infinitesimally small building blocks of the universe. To me, spirituality is love and poetry. Like that. Elisweebel and many others wanted to know why does time seem to slow down in those precious moments when one is flirting with mortality?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. There have been other studies of time slowing down in crisis situations that don't involve new death experiences. It does seem to be something that we do to ourselves to try to help us deal with a crisis situation. If you slow time down then you got more time We figure out how do I get out of this? One person described to me he was up on a ladder cleaning out as his his gutters and he fell

And he said as I was falling Time seemed to slow way down and almost stopped So I was able to see how I needed to twist around to land in the bushes right on the pavement Oh my gosh And you see that again and to twist around to land in the bushes right on the pavement. Oh my gosh. And you hear that again and again from people who are in crisis situations that time slows down and allows them to think not only does time slow down, but they're thinking speeds up. So it helps them survive the near death event.

Now having said that, many near death experiences say it wasn't just time slowing down. Time did not exist in that other realm. And they realized that what we think of as linear time is an artifact of being in a physical world that doesn't exist outside this physical realm. It sounds so cozy. It's like a cozy place to be. It is. It makes me less afraid.

So according to a letter published in the Journal of Near-Dust Studies, bearing the headline, did NDE's play a seminal role in the formulation of Einstein's theory of relativity? It explains that apparently Albert Einstein once saw a man fall off a rooftop in Berlin. The man survived and later told Einstein that while falling, he did not feel gravity, which may have suggested new ideas of looking at the universe to a young Einstein. Let's go back a little further though. Einstein went to a Polytechnic Institute in Zurich at the age of 16, which was in 1895, just after Albert Heim fell off that cliff in the Swiss Alps. What are the chances that a professor of geology who wrote about time and space seem to slow down and expand would be in the same city as a young Einstein?

Well, hang on to your hats, because Albert Heim was a professor of young Einstein. So the two Albert's knew each other, studied together, and likely swapped stories of time expansion and gravity. And in fact, two years before Einstein's death, he penned a letter to his former professor, telling him that his lectures were quote, magical. What a world! And for more on quantum physics and just the nature of the universe and gravity and black holes in space and time. You can see the quantum ontology episode with astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker who wrote the book, What Is Real? And we'll link that in an episode on cosmology and one on dark matter, an astrobiology, and one with two UFO experts in their show notes because the fuck?

Gosh, there's so much we don't know. Exactly. Last last question, a bunch of people wanted to know. Look at you, Derek, Peliquin, River Rowan, Stone, and Helen, Demarcio. If you have thoughts on the Netflix show, O.A., Dorit said, what do you think of it? There's so much flimflam. They're sure. Have you heard of that? O.A., I think that they use near-death experiences for research. I haven't seen it, but maybe you have. I have not. I have not. But there have been so many television shows and movies, going back decades when there was that movie flatliners about medical students who tried to put themselves in a cardiac arrest. And a lot of them are based on real information, but take off, you know,

they're fiction. They take off and in more sensationalized ways that end up doing damage to the real facts about our new death experience. Is anyone doing it right? Yes, there are some. Gosh, go on way back decades. There was a movie resurrection that did a very good job, not only of the new death experience itself, but how people are changed after the experience. I'm Dr. Heron.

Welcome back. And then, of course, for reading, there's your book, which I feel like if you're going to read a book about your death experiences, read after. Well, thank you. Thank you. And last question I always ask, obviously there's got to be something about your job that sucks. There has to be the hardest thing about it. What is difficult about what you do? I think the most difficult thing about it for me is trying to get my head around it because I was raised as a scientist thinking that we're going to be able to understand everything. And I've confronted a lot of things now that I don't think we can understand that are beyond the ability of our brain to make sense out of.

And that's difficult for me. I still, that's still great against me. And I want to try to understand things. And I haven't given up on it. It just becomes less and less plausible to me that we're going to understand it. But I still be trance. I enjoy doing science. Mm-hmm.

What about your, your favorite thing about what you study? I know that must be hard, but do you have a highlight or the thing that just still kind of gives you butterflies? What I like best about it is just talking to the people who have had these experiences, because you can't talk to them and not absorb some of this feeling of the world as a friendly place, as full of unconditional love, and how can you be unhappy with that? I bet it's such a relief for them

to be validated by a scientist who's collecting information and really looking at this seriously. Yes. Any other myths that you wanna dispel at all that you could get on a soapbox, you would scream over a megaphone? Well, I wanna say that these are normal experiences that happened under unusual circumstances.

They are not tied with mental illness in any way. We've done studies of this and shown that people who have mental illnesses who are diagnosed with psychiatric disorders have the same number of new death experiences as everyone else, neither more nor less. And likewise, if you look at new death experiences, they are the same rates of mental illness as

people who don't have Neat Death Experiences. So it's totally independent of that. They are not unusual experiences. They happen to about 5% of the general population. That's one of every 20 people. So think about people you work with, people in your classroom, people in your family. Some of them have had Neat Death Experiences. And that Neat Death Experiences also lead to profound long-lasting effects

that need to be addressed both positive and negative. This has just been such a joy. I was so nervous to talk to you because what you do is so cool and you're so esteemed in this field. So it's really an honor. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk with you, Ali. So ask lively people, deathy questions because honestly, being alive and part of the universe is just really wicked in a good way. And how fun to live in an era where so many mysteries remain and so many people are trying to figure it out. So I hope this episode has helped you take a deep breath, has made you ponder how science is more of a question than an answer, and has maybe made you look toward the

stars, or down at a worm to realize that you made it as a person on this planet. Enjoy it. To fuck the bullshit. That is a poem, I just wrote you. Okay, thank you, Dr. Bruce Grayson, Professor Emeritus Psychiatrist, quasi-thinitologist, and author of the book after a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. For being on and sharing your expertise with us, his info and book and the charity of choice around LinkedIn, the show notes,

as well as the link to our website with so many more research links. Also, Bruce, I'm sorry for all the swearing. I'm not really that sorry, but thanks for putting up with it. If any of you listeners don't like episodes of swearing, feel free to enjoy smallages, which are shorter, kid-friendly versions of classic episodes,

which will soon be moving to their own feed, just as soon as I get my bottom together to do that. We are at Oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also on Blue Sky and TikTok. Oligies Merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. You can join Patreon and submit questions at patreon.com slash allegies. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for admitting the Allegies Podcast

Facebook group. Thank you to managing director Susan Hale, who steers our ship each week, scheduling producer and birthday girl, this past week, happy, happy birthday to Noel Delworth. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts, Kelly Ardwier, does our website, and can do yours. And of course, thank you to the light at the end of each episode's tunnel,

lead editor Mercedes-Mateland of Maitland Audio, Nick Thorburn wrote the music, and if you stick around until the episode ends, I tell you a secret. And this week it's putting the show together involves a whole process. It's such a process, it took years to perfect. It involves color-coded transcripts,

shared file drives, sound effects, first and second and third and fourth pass notes, etc. And since the beginning, I write all the aside notes in green and then when I record them, I do a little snap or a clap on the audio file in between them so that we can see the sharp spike and I know it's a new aside. So 22. And then I edit the sides and move on to the next one before I send them off to Mercedes. Some episodes have like 20 sides, some have 50. And this episode, which is about the nature of consciousness and finding personal meaning in the universe had 42 a sides before I trimmed a few. And I've never read Douglas

Adam's hitchhiker's guide to the Universe, but everyone tells me I need to, but I understand that the meaning of life is supposed to be 442, so that might be significant for some of you. Also, please don't arrest me or my doctor for that one time that I took my rooms to process my dad's death. That would be awesome if you did not put me in jail for that. There are so many other problems to fix,

but you're doing great. And I'm glad you're here, sincerely. If things are bad, I've been there before. Please know that they can and they will get better. Deep breaths, help a lot, smell a tree. Remind yourself that we are all just squishy, flawed, little apes. No one expects you to be perfect. And if you want a texture crush, cut some bangs, maybe take a class

in the community center, play hooky from work for a day, go for it. We're all going to be dead one day in the future. And if you're on a windy mountain, where are one of those hats that ties under your chin? But then again, would we have the theory of relativity without it? I don't know. Anything. This world, this life, this timeline. Okay, bye bye. Hackadermy's College, Ameology,

CryptoZoology, Lithology, Danosing Technology, Meteorology, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't know. I'm dying to find out.