Otherworld - Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson of DOPS

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

I sit down with Dr. Bruce Greyson, one of the world’s foremost experts on Near-Death Experiences, who has dedicated nearly 40 years to studying this fascinating phenomenon. He is the author of several books, including After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. Dr. Greyson is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia and the former director of UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies. Dr. Greyson’s interest in Near-Death Experiences began just months after graduating from medical school, when an unconscious patient in the emergency room later described an out-of-body experience in vivid detail. This encounter challenged his beliefs about the relationship between the mind and the brain, sparking a lifelong journey of scientific exploration that has led to over a hundred medical publications on Near-Death Experiences. Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at University of Virginia After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This is an interview that I did with Dr. Bruce Grayson. Dr. Grayson is a pioneer researcher in the study of near-death experiences, also known as NDEs. Dr. Grayson is a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia and the former director of the Division of Perceptual Studies, aka Dops. Dr. Grayson's interest in near-death experiences was sparked just, months after he graduated from medical school, while working in an emergency room, he treated an unconscious patient who, to his surprise, later recounted an out-of-body experience.

This encounter profoundly changed his view on the relationship between the mind and the brain, and set him on a path to scientifically explore near-death experiences. His journey ultimately led to over 100 publications in medical journals on the subject. Dr. Grayson's extensive research includes the development of the grace and NDE scale, a tool that allows scientists to study these experiences in a systematic way. His book, After, A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond is a culmination of his insight into how NDE's change conventional views of death and consciousness. With over four decades dedicated to exploring and understanding these profound experiences,

his work has fundamentally shaped our understanding of consciousness and what might lie beyond. For these reasons, I was very excited to speak to him, and of course, I had so many questions. I think you're all going to really enjoy listening to this one. This is my conversation with Dr. Bruce Grayson, and you're listening to Otherworld. All right, I'm joined now by Dr. Bruce Grayson. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for speaking to me. Well, thank you, Jack.

It's a delight to be here with you today. First of all, I just wanted to ask, how long have you been researching? near-death experiences. When did this all start for you? Well, for me, it really started as a research project when I read Raymond Moody's book Life After Life in 1975. This was not your original career plan, right? No, not at all. I'm sure you could ask this a lot, but was there sort of a light-bold moment when you discovered or encountered this in the field and decided to take it seriously? Because I imagine people weren't taking it seriously back then. No, they were not. And I wasn't either.

You know, I was raised in a scientific household, and I went through college and medical school with the idea that the physical world is all there is, anything else is imaginary, and what you see is what you get. And then when I started my psychiatric training, in one of the first weeks, I was asked to see a patient who had overdosed.

I went down to the emergency room and saw her, and she was totally unconscious. I could not arouse her. But I went down the hall to talk to her roommate in a different room. And I spent about 20 minutes talking to the roommate. Now, just before this, I'd been in the cafeteria eating dinner, and being a brand-new intern, I was kind of startled by the Bieber going off,

and I dropped my fork and spilled some spaghetti sauce on my tie. So I'm not wanting to make a fool of myself. I planted a white lab coat and covered it up the stain. But this was a hot late summer evening in Virginia with no air conditioning back in the 70s. So I unbuttoned my coat so wouldn't sweat so much, exposing the stain inadvertently. When I finished with a roommate after about 20 minutes, I stood up to say goodbye to her and realized it was open, so I quickly closed it up again. And went back to see the patient who was still unconscious. And we had arranged for her to be admitted to the intensive care unit because her heart rate was very unsteady.

We didn't know quite what she had taken for an overdose. and I wanted to see her the following morning. And she was very, very drowsy. She was barely awake. I went into the room and said, Holly, my name is Dr. Grayson. I'm from psychiatry. And she opened an eye and said to me,

I know who you are. I remember you from last night. And that kind of threw me because she was obviously unconscious. So I said, I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night. And she said very carefully, not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall.

That just blew me away. How could that happen? The only way she could do that is if she had left her body and followed me down the hall, and you can't do that. You are your body. How can you leave it? Yep.

So she saw how confused I was, and she started telling me about the conversation I had with her roommate. Everything I said, everything Susan answered, and then finally said, and you had a red stain on your tie. That just really threw it. me. So I was stuck for a minute and I thought, well, I'm here to deal with her confusion, not mine.

So I kind of stuffed it away and talked to her about why she took the overdose, what she took, and so forth. And arranged for her to be admitted to the psychiatric unit as soon as she was stable. This was a very unnerving experience for me. I'd never, I couldn't put it into any box. So I thought, well, there's got to be a trick. Someone's fooling me. Maybe the nurses colluded with this green intern. I tried to do. to push it out of my mind. I didn't dare tell anybody to think I was crazy. It was about five years ago when I was now on the faculty at the University of Virginia, when Raymond Moody started his training, and he was in the emergency room with me. And one time we had a slow period,

and he told me about a book he had written called Life After Life. And he described near-death experiences, something that was unknown in the English language before then. And I realized, this is what Holly had told me years before. And I still couldn't understand it, but I thought, this has really happened because my patient was a psychiatric patient, so sure. Now, she's just crazy.

But Raymond's subjects were more than 100 perfectly normal people. And I thought, I have to understand that. I'm a scientist. Scientists don't run away from things they don't understand. They run towards them, trying to make sense out of them. So I started collecting cases,

trying to make sense out of them. And now 50 years later, I'm still trying to understand them. Just so we have a sense of the scale, like how many NDE cases do you think that you have personally worked on or heard, studied? Well, I have a database at the University of Virginia with people who have been describing their experiences to me and we vetted them to make sure they were, in fact, close to death

and what they said made sense. And they're a little more than a thousand in that pool. I've talked to many more that we did not include in the database because we didn't think we were certain enough about their qualifications. And these are people that you've met in person in most cases like right after it happened. Well, sometimes it was years after. Back in the 70s and 80s, nobody would talk about these things. You'd be ridiculed or told you were crazy, so they didn't talk about it. And I talked to some people back in the 80s who had the experience 30, 40 years earlier. but it never talked to anybody.

That's so fascinating. I mean, even, I have to imagine for you, you encountered this, but do you ever think about an alternate version where you maybe just told yourself you were having a weird day and just forgot about it and never pursued this? I imagine that must happen to a lot of people. Yeah, I did think that, but it happened. I was there.

I heard it. So I couldn't totally deny it. I didn't what to make of it. And I thought, it can't be what it really seems to be on the surface. It's got to be something else. So I started doing research on all the possible things that could have been going on. Was blood oxygen falling? Whether drugs given to the patient, were she taking drugs that made her hallucinate?

And all sorts of things like that. And the more we studied these variables, the more unexplained the need-death experience seemed to be. early on when you're researching this stuff in your book you mentioned a lot of theories with like oxygen medication you know maybe these are just hallucinations all sorts of things like that

and you looked into them what were those things and what were your initial theories and how did you end up eliminating those as possibilities for cause the first thing that occurred to me was lack of oxygen because no matter how you come close to death That's one of the final things that happens to everybody. So we had several people actually measured the oxygen content in people's bloods.

Michael Seabom did this in the U.S. Pim Van Limo did it in the Netherlands. And they reported consistently that people who have near death experiences have better oxygen supply to the, and then people who do don't. I have to put the caveat here that they're measuring oxygen in the blood. They draw blood and measure oxygen. They're not measuring from the brain itself. So it's conceivable that there may be some local oxygen deprivation somewhere in the brain.

I don't know why that would happen. We have no explanation for why that might happen. But another idea was drugs given to patients. And again, that turned out to be not the case. People have looked at electrical activity in different parts of the brain. There was a theory that a particular part of the brain in the temporal parietal area, which makes us tell where we are in space, was going off somehow when you're getting close to death,

and that makes you feel you're leaving your body. But people who have that experience, they actually stimulate, electrically stimulated that part of their brain and they have a sense of leaving their body, losing control of their bodies. And they report things like, I feel like I'm falling off the table

or I feel like my legs are getting shorter. Sometimes they report seeing a double of themselves. But they never report an out-of-body experience that near-death experiences it, which is being outside the body, looking back at their physical body lying on the table. and they report seeing things accurately around the body, which people don't report when you stimulate their brains.

People have reported that in some cases there was a burst of electricity after people die. And there have been maybe a half dozen publications to this in mainstream neuroscience journals in the past year or two, and none of them actually measured dying patients. They did, for example, studies with people who were in a coma, and they were declared they couldn't help them. So they took them off artificial ventilation. And they measure what happens in the brain when they do that. And there is a small increase in electrical activity of the brain. It's not as big as it was before they did that.

But it still didn't go flat. Immediately it remained higher. but there was no indication that these people had actually regained consciousness. They didn't speak. They didn't move. They didn't do anything else. And in fact, they also measured the heart activity in these people. And the hearts were still beating all this time.

So the hearts had not stopped. They were not dying patients. And when they actually had the heart stopped, they also stopped the brain activity. So these aren't dying patients. They're people who are approaching death. There was a study done with rats at the University of Michigan where they sacrificed their rats and found a 32nd, quote, burst. Again, it was a burst that was a minuscule part of what their brain was showing before they sacrificed them. It happened to all the rats.

They did this too. Whereas only about 20% of people have near-death experiences. They found that if they anesthetize the rats first, they didn't show this at all. and of course many people have neotech experiences under anesthesia and they of course didn't interview the rats

to see what the rats were experiencing yeah it's all it's all speculation well what is this even though you were unable to speak with the rats what is what is this information with the rat study tell you about NDE's and what they could be

it tells me that it's too easy to come to conclusions from data that may not be relevant at all. You know, there we have about 50 years of good data from clinical situations where people's heart stopped and the brain stopped within usually a matter of 10 seconds. It immediately falls off and drops off. And we have data from countless situations like this. So the idea that we suddenly have this burst is a quite,

unusual thing to say. Now there is one cardiologist, one emergency physician in New York, Sam Parnia, who I studied people who were being resuscitated. And when you do that, you're either pounding on their chest for a while, then you stop for several seconds to see where their heart started again, and then you do it again, or you may be shocking them, and then waiting to see. And in the period, when they were waiting between compressions or shocks, he measured the brainwaves. And he found that in about half of them, there was some activity. Now, I'm not sure that's reliable because these brainwaves he was actually measuring also are reflecting muscle jerking around, muscle activity. And when you're pounding on someone's

chest or shocking them, your muscles are all jerking. And the few seconds you're taking to look at whether the body's recovering or not, is not enough for it to relax. Furthermore, you reported in the study of almost 500 patients that six of them reported near-death experiences. But none of those six were the ones they found the EEG activity in. The ones that have the brain activity were not the ones that reported near-death experiences. So again, it really doesn't tell us anything. Yeah, you're saying that there's no connection between,

measured brain activity and whether or not a person had an NDE? Am I getting that right? That doesn't mean we never will, but we haven't found one yet. Based on your research, are near-death experience is something that takes place after actual death? Or is it just when people come very close to it? Like that's something that I've encountered a lot in the stories people have sent into me is that some people, it's just when they're close to dying. Some people are after they die. and then some are like a coma situation.

What are the patterns you found with us? Yeah, that's a great question, Jack, because we really don't have the answer. We have lots of accounts from people whose hearts had stopped, and we know that because we've documented it, their hearts are stopped. And we have lots of accounts from people who, as far as we know, their hearts didn't stop,

people who were in a car accident, and they somehow survive it. Or people who nearly drowned. We don't have any heart measures, but there's no reason to think their heart stopped. and yet the experiences they tell us are identical. So it doesn't seem that your heart actually stopping is a necessary component to having a near-death experience. That's led some people to say that it shouldn't be a near-death.

There should be fear-death experience. And we really can't differentiate between the fear-death and the near-death. They sound the same to us. So what are some situations where a person doesn't actually come very close to dying, but they still have an experience like this. And what do you think could trigger this happening, I suppose? I know that probably requires you to take some guesses, but I'm fascinated. Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the first collection of near-death experiences,

which they didn't have a name for it back then, but back in the 1890s, a Swiss geology professor, Albert von Sincallumheim, fell when he was climbing in the Alps. and he fell about 60 feet. And on the way down, he had a very elaborate near-death experience. And he wrote this up in great detail. And he said he was out of his body, watching his body repeatedly crash against the rocks,

getting bloodier and bloodier. And time sort of slowed way down for him. And he was able to look around and see, well, there's snow over there, but rocks over there. So if I somehow can maneuver to get in the snow, know I might survive this. And should I take off my glasses so they don't question my eyes over? Should I keep them on? And he had all this time to think about these things. Plus, he had a very elaborate life review reviewing the entire 50 years of his life in a matter of seconds it took

to fall 60 feet. He was so impressed by this experience that he started asking other climbers, and he quickly got 30 other cases, which he published in the yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club in 1892. Huh. Is this one of the earliest cases that you've come across? That's something I've wondered myself as like how far do these go back? I have to imagine that modern medicine and the advancements of modern medicine would enable us to like actually notice these more commonly in recent years because people would just end up dying most likely in the past. Well, Hym's book in the 1890s was the first collection. But we have report to these going back to ancient Greece and Rome, that sound just like the near-death experiences we have today. So culture does not seem to affect it very much. And people around the world today, from Christian nations, from Hindu nations, from Shinto nations, they all report the same types of near-death experiences. However, most near-death experiences will tell you when you start, when you ask them that the experience,

they will say, I can't really describe it. There are no words for it. it. So let me say, you know, that's great. Tell me about it. So they end up using metaphors, and whatever metaphors come to them most readily. And that's going to depend on your culture and your religion. So for example, most Christians will say, you know, I saw this one loving being of light that makes me feel welcomed and unconditionally loved. I knew I was in the presence of God or Jesus. if you talk to a Hindu or a Buddhist, they won't use those words. They may say, they give another name like a yandud or something, or they just may say this warm, accepting, loving being of light.

And some may identify it as a deceased loved one that they couldn't identify. And that applies not just to the so-called deity they see. many people describe they're here in this physical world and then they're in this other realm and they don't remember how they got there so they say well I went through this long dark and closed space and Westerners will say I went through a tunnel now people from third world countries where there aren't a lot of tunnels don't say that they may say I went through a cave or I fell into a well and in fact I interviewed one truck driver who said, I got sucked through this long tailpipe. So I tend to think that the tunnel

is not necessarily a real thing, but something our brain constructs to explain how they got from here to there. That's fascinating. Well, you actually started answering one of my next questions, which was like the cultural differences between people of different religious backgrounds or where they're from. Are there any other differences you've noticed between cultures? Well, there are some of different types of groups of people. For example, people who are intoxicated when they have near-death experiences tend to have much shallower, less elaborate experiences. People who are very young, children, don't have the elaborate life review that adults do.

They don't have as much life to review, I guess. They also tend not to report as many deceased relatives. coming back to greet them because they don't know enough deceased relatives. They're more likely to say that they met a deceased pet that they had. So there are some differences going to what type of person is giving you the answer. And some of that involves culture as well. For example, many people report coming to a border or point of no return, and if they go beyond that, they won't be able to come back.

and in the Western world that's often a wall or a barrier of some kind or being sent back by a deity or by a deceased relative whereas in a lot of Asian countries they say it's a river came to this river that I couldn't cross so the droscar being the same phenomenon but using different metaphors for it and in fact they will tell you it's a metaphor I've had many people say to me and then I was in the presence of God. Now, I'm using God because I don't know what else to call it that you'll understand me,

but it wasn't the God I was taught about in church. It was much bigger than that. That's fascinating. I mean, I know from your book that there are a lot of examples of this, but when I hear this described, I can imagine skeptical people saying that this is a hallucination at the end of the life just based on, you know, the idyllic version of where a person would want to go, seeing their friends, a kid seeing a dog. What are some of the cases that you've come across that sort of validate for you

that this is not just a hallucination? I know there's cases where people have seen things that they couldn't have known. Right, right. Well, you know, many people report a sort of an afterlife or a different environment that contradicts what they were taught to believe. if they were in a religion that teaches about a typical heaven and they describe something very different like a featureless void,

they come back very surprising. This wasn't what was expecting at all. We also have a lot of well-documented cases where someone claims to have left their body in a near-death experience and seen things that they should, have been able to see, either because they've been totally unconscious or because it was outside of their range of vision, maybe in a different room. And we have lots of good examples of this.

Jan Holden at the University of North Texas studied almost a hundred of these, and she found in 92 percent their description was perfectly right. In six percent, they were some right and some wrong things in it. And only two percent were they totally wrong. So the vast majority seems to be accurate, and hallucinations can't do that. Furthermore, many, many people describe being encountered by deceased loved ones in a near-death experience, and that's very easy to dismiss as wishful thinking expectation. Of course, when you're dying and you want to see your deceased grandmother to greet you, you imagine her, sure. But there are a number of cases where people have encountered deceased individuals that were not yet known to be dead.

So there's no reason to think they had died and no way they could have known about it. This is not a new phenomenon. Pliny the Elder wrote about a case like this in the first century. And we have them today quite quite quite like 10 years ago, 12 years ago now. I published a paper with 30 recent cases like this. This is so fascinating to me. Is there one that stands out to you as a good example of somebody encountering a person that couldn't have known was dead or something of that nature?

Yeah, one that I investigated was a 25-year-old fellow. This is back in South Africa in the 70s, and he was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. And in the hospital, he was cared for by one particular nurse, Anita, who was about his age in her late teens, early 20s, and he was kind of flirting with her when he could. And one day she told him that she was going to be taking the weekend off, and there'd be other nurses substituting for her.

And while she was gone, he had another period where he couldn't breathe, and they had to resuscitate him. And during that episode, he had a near-death experience. And he found himself in a beautiful pastoral scene, and there he sees his nurse Anita coming walking out of the woods toward him. And he's stunned because what's she doing there? So he asked her and she said, Jack, I want you to go back to your body. You can't stay here with me.

I want you to find my parents and tell them that I love them. And I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB. Now, Jack tells me there weren't a lot of MGBs in 1970s in South Africa. But when he woke up back in his hospital bed, he tried to tell this account to the first nurse that walked in. And she got very upset and rushed out out of the room. It turned out that his nurse Anita had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday, and her parents surprised her with the gift of a red MGB. She got very excited, jumped in the car and took her for a test drive, crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly,

just a few hours before Jack's near-death experience. That is crazy. There's no way he could have expected or wanted her to be dead or known how she died, and yet he did. And there are many, many cases like this. Pim Van Lumel, a Dutch cardiologist, tells us about a middle-aged man who had a heart attack and a near-death experience. And he was greeted by a man he didn't know

who looked on him very lovingly. And when he came back, when he revived and he was talking to his mother about it, he described this person to his mother. And his mother got out an old photo album which he had never seen and showed him the photo of that man. It was his biological father. She had married him, and then he went off to the war and was killed in Germany in the war.

And then she remarried, and her second husband raised this fellow, so he never knew his biological father. And yet, that's who he was greeted by against his near-death experience. My God. Is that fairly common that people, are people often told things when they have a near-death experience information that could be verified? later or do they people ever get asked to do things well it's both um the the things they are told are not often verifiable they're often more general things um sometimes they are fairly specific um you know one fellow was told that the kid down the block from you has leukemia and yet his family doesn't know it yet you need to alert them and get them to do some medical workup on him and that was true

But those are unusual cases. Most of the time they're told things that you can't really verify. They're subjective things. Sometimes it tells something specific, like you need to go back because your father's going to be in a very difficult situation. You need to help them through this. Or you need to go back because you're going to have a child and you have to raise that child.

And sometimes it's all just more general things like the way you've been living your life is not very good. You need to change things around. And this happens to people who are. in violent professions, such as police officers or military, career military people, who when they come back, find that they're no longer able to shoot, even in self-defense. And they have to change their careers. And they often go into helping professions, like medical care, clergy, social work, teaching. I've also seen this in people who are cutthroat businessmen who came back

thinking, it makes no sense to get ahead at someone else's expense, because we're all in this together. And when you hurt someone else, you're hurting yourself. So, you know, they're basically told of the golden rule, which is part of every religion we have, is not just something we're supposed to follow. It's a law of the universe. When you hurt other people, you're hurting yourself, too. We're all part of the same thing. That is so fascinating. It actually reminds me that I've seen some articles recently that ayahuasca ceremonies have become very popular with tech CEOs and people in like the tech industry, but I guess it's become a bit of a problem because a lot of these guys will come back and just abruptly quit their job and realize that they come back change

and they won't work anymore. They'll just go, yeah, it's so fascinating. Because yeah, these do have a major impact on people, the near-death experiences. Yeah. All right, we have to take a break. We'll be right back with the rest of this interview. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and it's a powerful reminder that whatever you going through right now. You don't have to navigate it alone. We all have those nights where we're lying awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling like we have to figure out every answer by ourselves, but no journey should be solo. Having someone with you to listen and provide unbiased support can change everything. If you've been feeling overwhelmed or just stuck lately, therapy can be that

space to check in with yourself. Better help makes getting started easy. They use a short questionnaire to match you with one of their 30,000-plus licensed therapists, and you could switch therapists, at any time if it isn't the right fit. You don't have to do this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash otherworld. That's better-h-elp.com slash otherworld.

That strikes me is that I've had a lot of vivid dreams before, powerful ones. I've had a lot of scary dreams. That being said, about five minutes after waking up, I've completely moved on. I don't change my life. Even if I received an omen in one of the dreams, I would probably forget about it within three minutes. These people change their lives after these, right? Right.

And that's not true of hallucinations. People don't change their lives with hallucinations. But we hear a consistent set of after effects from near-death experiencers. And the most consistent thing we hear is that they're no longer afraid of death. Whether they were or not before, they're not afterwards.

And when I first heard that, back decades ago, I was a little concerned because as a psychiatrist working in the emergency room, I'd seen a lot of people who were considering suicide, but were deterred because they were afraid something bad would happen if they killed themselves. And here we're telling them, nothing bad would happen. Death is wonderful. Are we going to make people more suicidal? So I did a study with people who had been admitted to the hospital with suicide attempts. And I studied those who had near-death experiences as a result of the suicide attempt, which is about 20% of them, and those who didn't.

And we followed them up for month after month. And we found that those who had a near-death experience were much less suicidal, which kind of surprised me. So I asked him to explain to me why are you less suicidal. And they said a variety of things. They said, if you're not afraid of dying, then you're not afraid of living either. you can take more risks. You can live time to the fullest because what's the worst that happens? You die.

They tend to enjoy life a lot more. They also say that now that they've been in this other realm, they realize that there's meaning and purpose in everything we do. And the problems I had that made me suicidal are not things to run away from, the things they need to grow from and learn from and try to deal with. So they come back with a sense of meaning and purpose. didn't have before. That is so fascinating. Actually, it brings up another question I was going to ask you later. You've actually started to dive into a few of the things that I plan on asking you about.

I do want to talk about the patterns, but you just reminded me, something I've been wondering is if anybody reports a negative NDE experience. I mean, obviously, in many religions, there's a component of the afterlife for people who behave poorly, where it's like a form of punishment. You know, hell. Do people ever report something similar after they die? Yes, they do. Some do. Really? When I first started studying this, I talked to a lot of other people who were

studying near-death experiences in the early 80s, and they all had different ideas about what questions to ask, what's important in the near-death experience. Some thought it was primarily an out-of-body experience. Some thought it was a reunion with God. Some thought it was a feeling of bliss, but there was no consistency. So I decided we need some consistent measure. So I surveyed all the researchers.

It came up with a list of 80 phenomena they thought were part of the near-death experience, which is ridiculously large. You can't ask someone about 80 different items. So I took that list of 80, and I gave them to a large sample of near-death experiences, and I said, which ones are these are the important ones? and they whittled it down. And I took the whittledown list and sent it back to the researchers. And they would riddle it down more.

But I took that back to their experiencers and they did it even more. And they went back and forth until I found 16 items that they all pretty much agreed on with the important parts. And they include changes in your thought processes, becoming faster and clearer than before, changes in your emotions, very strong emotions. usually peace, proven as peace and joy, something we call paranormal for a lack of any better word, sense of leaving the body,

seeing things that aren't in your range of vision, occasionally seeing visions to the future, and otherworldly experiences, feeling like you're not on this earthly plane anymore, seeing deceased loved ones, seeing what may be religious spirits, and then coming to the point of no return. And those are the concerns,

consistent things that most people report, not all of them, by any means, in near-death experiences. Now, there are some people that have frightening or unpleasant experiences. And we didn't hear those back in the 80s because people were afraid to talk about them. It was hard enough to talk about a pleasant near-death experience. But that's what was publicized. So if you had a frightening one, you think something's wrong with me. Either my personality or just the way I've lived my life, I don't deserve to have a good one. So I'm not going to tell anybody about this.

And it's only been in the last 10, 20 years, we started really finding these unpleasant experiences. And there were narity. We don't know how many there are. The highest estimate we have is around 20% of near-death experiences. But no one knows because they're still harder to talk about than the pleasant ones. So there may be more that people who sit in what don't want to share. And we found three types of unpleasant experiences. The most common type sounds just like the pleasant ones, but they're experienced in an unpleasant

way. For example, people will be rushing down a tunnel and confronted by this blinding light, and they're terrified because they're out of control. No matter what happens to an NDE near-death experience, you're not in control. And for people who need to be in control all the time, assessive people like myself and probably you, that's scary to be out of control. so they fight against it. And that's the large group of unpleasant experiences.

Now we find that some of these people, they fight against it and try to get back in control of their bodies, and they eventually get exhausted and just surrender to it. And as soon as they do that, it becomes a blissful experience. So it was the resistance to it that was making it unpleasant. There's a second category where people find themselves in just a black void with nothing, no sight, no sound, just their consciousness without a body. And it feels like they're floating in that for eternity.

And for most of us Westerners, that's a terrifying thought. Yeah, especially me. But I've talked to people who are raised in Hindu and Buddhist cultures, where that's nirvana, that's bliss, being in this wonderful nothingness for eternity. Huh. So it's partly culturally to Sherman what you think is pleasant or not. The smallest group of unpleasant experiences are the ones with frankly hellish imagery as a Christian would drive to find hell with fire and firmsone and demons. And as I said, that's the smallest group.

And I've only heard that from people who were raised in a religion that preached that, either Roman Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants. I'd never heard anyone else describe those. interesting so i mean we'll get to the life review and everything but there's you haven't really encountered people um facing bad parts of their life or things they did wrong or anything like that has there ever you've seen any examples of that yes i will say though about the unpleasant experiences we try to find what makes them unpleasant and we really can't find anything it's not true that nasty people have unpleasant experiences um A lot of traditional Catholic saints throughout the centuries

have written about the dark night of the soul where they had terrifying spiritual experiences. And I've known people who were career criminals, or some on death row who had blissful experiences. So it's not how you live your life necessarily. It may be related to your mental state when you go into the experience. I'm not sure about that.

We don't have enough data on that yet. Most people who report a life review report both memories of good of things they've done and of bad things they've done. And remembering the bad things is not pleasant. But they do not say, for the most part, that they were being judged by someone else, by a deity or an angel or anything like that. They report being guided through the review, but the judging comes from them themselves. And they say, gosh, I made a mistake from that time.

They don't talk about sin. They talk about make mistakes. And when they come back, they're often determined to correct those mistakes. And they're glad they had this experience. So they have a second chance to do it better this time. Let's just get into the Life Review, actually. This is a major thing I wanted to talk to you about. But this is something that is commonly reported.

You call it the Life Review. And it's, you know, it's a cliche. People say that their lives flash before their eyes when they die. But this is literally reported. It's actually, in certain episodes of the show, this has happened to people. various forms, but how is this happening for people, like in physical space? How is this life review taking place? Are there themes to that? Does it happen differently each time? And what is being shown? Yeah, again, we're faced with the fact that people say there were no words to describe

it, so they use metaphors. Yep. And they often describe reviewing everything in their lives. and for someone who is 40, 50 years old, reviewing their entire lives in a matter of seconds sounds ludicrous. And yet they say, and in fact, Albert Heim fell in the Alps in the 1890s described going through its entire life in those few seconds. Some describe it going chronologically from birth to the present. Some describe it in reverse chronological order. Some people describe it in other ways. And for the most part, they describe how they felt in the experience, how it made me feel to do this, that I feel good about doing this, that I feel bad about myself for doing this. But in a lot of cases, they also report reliving these events from the perspective of somebody else.

I'm giving you an example, a fellow named Tom, who's in his 30s, who was working underneath his truck and his driveway. And the jack holding the truck up happened to be over an airhole under the pavement. And it came crashing down and the truck crushed his chest. And he had an elaborate near-death experience. And a lot of that was life review. And he remembered as a teenager driving his truck down the street and a drunk man ran out in front of him. He jerked on the brakes and he rolled down his window. and started yelling at the guy.

And the man being quite intoxicated, reaches his hand inside the window and slap Tom across the face. We're talking about a hot-headed teenager here. So he gets out of the truck and starts beating the man up. And leaves him just a bloody mass on the median strip. And then gets back in his truck and drives away. In his life review, he said he relived that from his own perspective, feeling the rage, in the adrenaline rush, but also through the eyes of the drunk man, feeling the humiliation of being

beaten up by a teenager, feeling the pain of the 32 blows on his face. Now, Tom couldn't have told you was 32, but reliving it from the man's perspective, he counted them as 32. He described his nose getting bloodier and bloodier and his teeth going through his lower lip, all from perspective of his victim. And I've heard this again and again. from different people, that they feel the events of the life review from the viewpoint of somebody else. And often they come back thinking, this is because we're all part of the same thing. There's no difference between you and me. It's like the fingers on your hand. If you look at the fingers, they're individual, but they're really part of the same thing. So you can't chop off one

without hurting the whole hand. I've also had people talk about getting to understand other people's motivation. For example, one woman, Barbara, talked about reliving her life and remembering as a child, her mother being very abusive. And in her life review, she re-experienced that from a mother's perspective. And so how helpless the mother felt having been abused herself, and she didn't know any other way to express herself. And she came out of that near-death experience with a lot more compassion for her mother than she had before. So, you know, I'm not sure how you explain these so-called empathic near-death experiences. And of course, we can't validate them. We can't find the drunk man that Tom beat up and, you know, asking what happened. So it's all relying on what they report to us.

That is so incredibly fascinating. Even outside of those extreme cases, what are the type of events people are being shown in these live reviews and also like how is it physically being shown to them are they in it are they participating it in first person is it like on a screen yeah is it a projection a hologram or something like that they're often very surprised by the things that appear prominent in the near-death experience of example um one one fellow who was actually a doctor here in charlestville had an yet death experience and expected to be shown when he got to be an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts, when he graduated from medical school and so forth. And that wasn't a big part of it. The big part of it was doing tiny things to help individual people and being kind to others. And it was that type of thing,

that one-to-one interaction with people, not the things we usually value in this life. As to how they experience it, that varies a lot according to the person's metaphors. Some say it was like turning pages of a book. Some say it was like watching a movie of my life. But most say it was reliving it. I was there. I saw, felt, heard, smelled, tasted everything that was there. I could smell the fresh grass. I could count the mosquitoes in the air around me. I was there living it in slow motion. The other thing about this that's really intriguing to me and unexplainable is that the sense of time seems to stop or become non-existent in a near-death experience. And I've heard this again and again that there was no time.

And yet, when people relate to your near-death experience to me, it sounds like a sequence of events. I did this, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then I had the Life Review play out, and I don't know how you can have a sequence of events, without the linear passage of time. And when I say that to near-death experiences, they say, well, when I tell you about it here in our physical bodies,

it's a paradox. It doesn't make any sense. But over there, it made perfect sense. It was everything happening in sequence at the same time. That makes no sense to me, but that's the way they experienced it. That is so fascinating. And that's a major part of these NDE's. is time stopping or slowing down to an extreme rate.

Are there any other interesting descriptions you've had from people related to time? I mean, I guess I have a few questions about this, but I don't want to overwhelm you. Let's go with this first. Let me say that the sense of time stopping is not unique to near death experiences. People often have this when they're in a crisis situation. for example when you're facing a car accident and time seems to slow down for you and your thoughts speed up so you can figure out how you need to maneuver to get out of the accident and it's fairly common among people in crisis situations to have this sense of time altered so they seem to be able to think quickly and avoid the problem you know one fellow I knew who's on a ladder doing something on his roof and the ladder slipped and he fell. And he had time, in the time it took to fall about 15 feet,

to figure out how we needed to maneuver to land in the bushes, not on the pavement. There's another story from the 1700s about an Italian count who was in a stagecoach and fell out and realized he was going to get run over by the rear wheel. And he managed him to figure out in the second it took to get to the, the bottom, to the road, how to maneuver out to get out away from under the wheel. And times it seems to stop and you have all the time in the world. That is so fascinating. And the other time question I have is like, when people experience these NDE's, how do they describe their position and their life in the scale of time? Do they have a sense of it being the end? Or do they have a sense of

them having existed before their life or does this question make sense to you like it's a very abstract but like i've heard i've heard that people are have a sense that like they had lived many lives or have been around a lot longer after they die some do describe many lives on earth um and some in fact in their life review remember events from our previous life in most cases we cannot verify that but i know one example of case who actually was able to verify it. He remembered a life where he was killed in World War II. And his description of how it happened, what type of plane it was, where it was, what his name was, all checked out.

But most cases, we can't really verify those past life events. But many people say that, in fact, most people say, that this lifetime is not the whole thing for us, that we existed long before this and will long after that. It's not always in a previous lifetime on Earth. It's like we're in this other realm, this spiritual, non-physical realm, and then for some reason, come to the physical realm,

and then when we die, go back to the other one. And I've often asked them, why did you come here? Why do we do this? and I don't get specific answers, but often they say there are things you can learn in the physical body that you can't learn in that other realm. And sometimes it deals with conflict, that they feel that there's not much conflict in the other realm, but you need to deal with conflict and learn how to love despite the hateful feelings you may have and the bad situations you encounter so that when you go back, you have a pure type of love. I don't know about this. This is one of these things you can't really verify.

But they describe it about something about this physical world, that's a lesson for a school for us. Hmm. That is so fascinating. A lot of this stuff really blows my mind. It's so interesting. I've got something I want to talk more about. Sure.

That's the after effects. I mentioned that the decreased fear of death, most people have a sense of joy about death. and not fear. And this makes them different from people who have close brushes with death, but not a near-death experience. For example, people who have a heart attack, and they're often very afraid of dying after that, which makes them great patience to do whatever you tell them to do.

Whereas near-death experiencers will not do that. They're not afraid of dying. You tell me that smoke quit smoking, I like smoking, so what if I die? So it's harder to treat near-death experiences than other people. They also consistently report a greater sense of spirituality. They don't mean more religiosity. Most of them are not dedicated to the same religion. Some are, but most are not.

They tend to feel that all religions are basically the same, the different paths to the same endpoint. What they mean by spirituality is a greater sense of connection to other people, to nature, to the universe, to the divine, and a sense of compassion for everyone. Now, I've heard this also from people who were atheists before the near death experience. And they say, I still, I'm not sure I believe in God,

but I do think we're part of something greater than ourselves, and we're all interconnected. And they don't make sense of it the way a more religious person might, but they're still aware of it and they're changed. And along with the sense of spirituality, goes to decrease concern with worldly matters, material goods, power, prestige, fame. And that really changes their lives.

They become more altruistic. They might change their careers. They tend still to enjoy things here, but they don't become addicted to them anymore. I've known people who were severely addicted, and after a near-death experience, gave that addiction up entirely. Well, they still enjoy things.

Now it's not always benign after effects. There are some problems also, as you might imagine. Other people often have disbelief or they really cruel the person. People are sometimes angry or sad about having been returned to life. The elected better over there. So sometimes they seek help for this to adjust to a, quote, normal life. And they often seek help most often from health professionals. And often the families can't accept the change.

They feel neglected. Often there are divorces after a near-death experience. When children have the NDE, the parents are often very puzzled by it. And when parents have a near-death experience, the children often feel, well, you used to love me more than anyone else. Now you can love all the kids in the neighborhood. What's going on here? So it's not always unicorns and rainbows after a near-death-old. experience.

Where do people report going to a common place? Like, where are they physically in? I've encountered patterns within submissions to my show. Weirdly enough. Have you noticed any patterns of them going to a physical place? I can't say that. There are people who describe things in physical terms, but they'll say, you know, it's not like the physical things you have here.

They may describe beautiful colors. colors, beautiful sounds, but they'll say, it's not like any colors I've ever seen on Earth. It's totally different from that. And I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a place for a spiritual realm, because space involves physical things. It's like saying, if the mind is not in their brain, where is it? Well, there's no where. There's no where if it's not a physical thing. You can't say it's in a certain place. Sure, absolutely. I've encountered some people reporting going to this expansive field and reporting, seeing tents and like all these people kind of milling about. That's something that's kind of come up multiple times, which is weird because from people who don't know each other.

Yeah. Some people describe being in outer space. Some people describe being in a heaven-like realm. So there are various things. Most people describe just being in a beautiful nature scene. I should also say that what they're reporting to us is what happened to them in a few seconds or minutes after their heart stopped. So we're dealing with their reports of what happens in the initial stage of being dead.

Is that the same as what happens to them 10 years later after they've been dead? I don't know. How do you know that kind of thing? Now, we do have reports of people who, in a near-death experience, encountered deceased loved ones who have dead for 10, 20 years. And they report the same types of things. So it may be that what near death experiences tell us is not just the initial stage, but the ultimate stage.

But we have no way of really verifying that. You just brought up something that reminded me of another topic I want to talk to you about. This is very important, I think, in your book and in a lot of your work, you make a distinction between the mind and the brain. Can you explain that distinction? I think this is really helpful for me in understanding all of these topics. Yeah, it's confusing.

I don't understand it myself, but the brain is this, you know, three pounds of mass inside your head. And we know pretty much what is composed of. We don't understand all how it works, but we're doing better and better at that. And the mind is that part of you that thinks and feels and makes decisions

and so forth, perceives. And, you know, I was taught in college and medicals to live the same thing. The mind is just what the brain does. The way digestion is what the stomach does. But we know how the stomach digest food. We have no idea how the chemical and electrical changes in the brain can produce a thought or a feeling. We know what parts of the brain may be associated the different things. We have no idea how that happens. So one idea is that the brain doesn't cause our thoughts. It sort of receives them the way a radio may receive radio waves and translate them into sounds we hear. This is not a new idea. Hippocrates did this, said this two thousand years ago

that the brain is the messenger of the mind. And it's been repeated throughout the centuries based on what technology was available at the time. When prisoners first came out in the Middle Ages, people talked about the prism being, like the brain filtering out the light and breaking into different parts in the 19th century. When everything was run by steam engines, they talk about the brain being the reducing valve

that takes all the energy and filters it out. We tend to use the filter model now, where there's all this consciousness and the brain filters out the stuff that's quote irrelevant or irrelevant and just lets in the important stuff what's important well the brain like the rest of us evolved to survive in the physical world so you need to be able to find food and shelter and a mate and avoid predators and you don't need to talk to deceased loved ones to do that or see god you just need to be aware of the physical surroundings So your brain filters out all that, quote, irrelevant stuff and just lets in the important things. And in situations like new death experiences, and there are others as well, where the brain starts shutting down or at least is impaired, that filtering mechanism starts to weaken and other types of consciousness come in. Now, there's various types of evidence for that from other experiences as well.

And there is some research being done now on what parts of the brain may do this filtering process. And one is the default mode network, which kind of determines what you're going to pay attention to. For example, people listening to us now, they will ramp up the auditory input to their brain and down the visual input, because that's not as important. There's also a thalamocorical loop, which takes input and changes what you, pay attention to and filters out stuff that's not immediately relevant. This is like our ears only transmit to us a small range of frequencies of all the sounds that are out there, the ones that are important to us. We don't need to hear what bats here or what elephants here. And the visual spectrum, we just see a small amount of the light that's out there, just the visual spectrum that's

relevant to the food we want to eat and so forth. We don't see the infrared or ultraviolet. We don't see the infrared, violent, which other animals do. So it's not surprising that the brain would also filter stuff out for us. It's so interesting to me because, you know, something that I think about a lot with NDEs is if you were to take a classical, skeptical stance on this, purely evolutionary, I wonder how and why we could have ever evolved to have such a feature of life, especially when it only occurs at death, if it was purely survival of the fittest, like how could we have possibly evolved to do that when you're dying when it takes place,

right? Like you couldn't. Well, you know, I started off as a very skeptical materialist, and I did give a lot of thought to this. And there are a couple of answers to that. One is that when you have a near-death experience, you become very calm and very peaceful in this. And you stop wasting a lot of energy trying to escape from the situation.

and that preserving energy may actually help you survive the event. Like a possible playing dead doesn't fight against things. It just sort of goes limp. This predator loses interest and goes away. It also may not evolve for the individual, but for other people in his genetic pool. For example, they see this person being very peaceful and saying peaceful things about death,

and they become more calm about dying. So it may be for their benefit, not for the experiencers. There's various ways you can play around with what is the evolutionary value with this. But it's all speculation. There's no way to prove any of this. That's interesting. And it answers the why, I guess, but not quite the how. Right.

Unless, of course, you consider that the mind and consciousness could be external, right? Which I think that's like, that's the compelling idea in all of this, right? is that there is something consciousness your consciousness was somewhere before and can go somewhere else after is external right and that leads to the question of how many consciousness is are there is yours different from mine or are they actually part of the same thing huh and you know many new death experiences use the analogy of a wave in the ocean uh you know it's made out of the same stuff the rest of the ocean is, but for a time period, it's got a separate form and location, and then eventually it'll melt back into the ocean and become indistinguishable from it.

They say that, you know, our consciousness is like that. For a time being, it seems to be distinct from the rest of the ocean, but it's not going to be that way forever. It's funny with this stuff. I encounter a lot, like people will hear something like this and be like, oh, that sounds exactly like every new age book I've ever heard. It's just people regurgitating new age theories are like religious. It's frustrating for me because I'm always like, well, what if it's completely the opposite? What if this has been happening to people and like this is what's caused

the religions, right? Like that would make more sense almost. Yes. This is real. Yeah, there are scholars like Greg Shushan in Wells who have studied the history of religions extensively and mystical experience. And they argue that most of our religions were started by people who had near-death experiences and tried to explain to themselves how this happened. It's not that the religion taught us what an MDE was like. It's the other way around. It's so interesting. And also the fact that religions have so many similarities, even across continents separated by oceans, this would actually make quite a lot of sense. And one of the most consistent parts of all religions is the idea of the golden rule that you should do unto others as you want them to do

unto you. And that's part of every single religion we have. And that's the way Newteth experiences say that's what they learned when they came back. That is so interesting. The question I have is as a person who's dedicated so much your life to this work, are there any things that frustrate you with strangers or colleagues in terms of like misconceptions or beliefs or just really anything, even if it's just a small frustration. I have to imagine you have some. I do, but I'm very sympathetic to that because I start out there. I understand it. I understand the skepticism. I'm still skeptical. I think I have some images, but I'm not at all sure of them. But there are some things that I know for sure. One is that these are extremely common experiences.

they occurred about 5% of the population. That's one in every 20 people. So if someone in your extended family or your workplace or your school has probably had a near-death experience. And the second thing is that they are not in any way associated with mental illness. We've studied the instance of mental illness among near-death experiencers.

And we've also looked at the instance of near-death experiences among people of mental illness. We find that there's no connection at all. people who are mentally ill have the same near-death experiences as people who aren't, and they have the same number of experiences, and people who have near-death experiences, have the same rates of mental illness as other people do. So it doesn't seem to need me any connection.

And then another important thing to remember is that near-death experiences lead to profound after effects, both positive and negative, which people need to address. just ignore them. You know, often people report to me that they start to tell their doctor about it. The doctor said, just forget about it. It'll go away. It doesn't. I've talked to people many decades after the experience, and they say it's like it happened yesterday. It never goes away, and the after effects don't go away. That's incredible. What are some of the stories or anecdotes from your research that still blow you away when you think back to them.

I'm sure it gets normal to you at a certain point, but are there any really weird ones that stand out? Well, the one I mentioned about Jack who saw his nurse. It really blew me away. But this one fellow in his mid-50s who was a van driver, and he was on his rounds, and he had this chest pain. And he had the wherewithal to drive to the emergency. room and they found he had four blood vessels to his heart that were clogged. So they rushed him

to the operating room for an emergency triple, a quadruple bypass surgery. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw them separating his chest to get to his heart. And he saw his surgeon, the main surgeon who he hadn't seen before, flapping his wings like he was trying to fly. And when he said that, I laughed. I mean, I've been a doctor for 30 years at that point. I've never seen or heard of anyone doing that. That's ludicrous.

Why would a doctor do that? So I said to him, you know, Jack, I mean, Al, I think that must have been a hallucination from the anesthesia. He said, it was not. I saw it clearly. You go ask my doctor. So I found a surgeon. I talked to him about it, and the surgeon said, well, yes, I did do that.

I developed this habit. I'd never seen anyone else do it. I let my assistant start the procedure while I wash my hands and then put on the sterile gown and gloves, then I go into the operating room, and I watch them for a while to supervise them. I don't want to risk touching anything that's not sterile, so I put my hands on my chest where I knew they wouldn't touch anything. And I point things out to them with my elbows. and he motioned just the way Jack did like he was trying to fly.

And I don't know how Al could have known that, but he said, I watched this from above. You know, it's such a, that's incredible, of course, but it's also so strange and insignificant, right? Like, we were talking about frustrations. I think, I guess a frustration I have is that people always jump to the assumption,

that everyone's making this stuff up. And in reality, like, so many of these stories, it's like not something they would make up. Like, why would you ever make that up? Nobody would ever make up something so ridiculous like that. It's so specific and so small. Yeah. Right?

Like, that's just not the type of story that people create. No, and it was verified by the doctor. Now, a lot of times they tell things that are even more significant. Like one person said, and I saw this nurse, who I hadn't seen before, and she had mismatched shoelaces on her two shoes. And turn out that that was true. Now, why would you pay attention to that?

That is so wild. I was talking to you about anecdotes that still blow you away. Are there any other ones that stick out to you as particularly strange or ones you find yourself thinking about? You know, again, the women's where people see things, see deceased entities that they didn't know had died. One woman was driving with a car, a car, having a car with a car, a dog in the car, and she had an accident and had a near-death experience where she found herself with her deceased grandmother, and the dog was, they were sitting on a porch,

and the dog was out in the yard playing around, and she wanted to go out and play with the dog, and the grandma said, no, you stay here with me. And she later woke up in the hospital bed, lots of broken bones, lots of gashes. And she found out several days later that her dog had died in that accident. She didn't know that at the time of her near death experience. So we hear that again and again that people encounter people or animals sometimes that had died, but they didn't know they had died. Is it usually loved ones that they're greeted by?

Usually. Sometimes they're unknown people. Hmm. I talked to a guy one time that said that he was with a group of people that he knew to be. his family from a different life. And he tried to explain this to me, but it was just like a sense of knowing that. But then they also were sitting there

and kind of catching each other up on what they'd done in this life. And this was during an NDE. Yeah. Well, again, people say that I have to talk about this in metaphors. And when they say, you know, I met my mother in my near death experience.

And I'll say, well, how do you know it was your mother? And sometimes they will describe physically and you know they usually describe them as they were in the prime of life not when they were dying but occasionally they say well i didn't actually see a physical body i saw this worm glowing entity i could tell by the way it made me feel that was my mother i felt her hugging me but he didn't actually see the figure of his mother so it's all people's interpretation of what they're experiencing that's fascinating

Can you talk to me about some of the people who you work with and mentor at DOPS and any of the exciting studies you have coming up in the future? Oh, there's, yeah, there's about a half dozen of us who are actively researching things now. Jim Tucker, who is currently directing the division, has been primarily working with young children who are likely remember past lives. These are preschool kids. and they often describe very detailed facts about a past life that in many cases can be verified, people they couldn't have known about. Marietta Pelovanova is a PhD who studies both near-death experiences and children who remember past lives. And she and I have been doing a work that she is the primary research.

on looking at near-death experiencers who need help after the experience. What about it makes them seek help? What type of people they seek help from? What type of help they're seeking? And then what types of help were helpful in which ones were not? We're finding some very interesting results from that. We're also surveying hundreds of doctors at the University of Virginia about their attitudes and beliefs about near-death experiences.

and posing them the question, if you were to be confronted by a patient who wanted to talk about a digital experience, would you be able to do that? And if not, what do you think of the barriers to your being able to do that? And we had a list of about 20 different barriers. And it was encouraging to us that the ones we might expect,

like, oh, I think it's a ridiculous experience, or I think it didn't really happen. It's just their imagination. It was just a neurological artifact. Very, very few doctors. said that. What they said most was, one, I don't know enough about the experience to really talk to them about it. And number two, I don't have the time to go into that stuff with them. And both of those things are correctable. We can teach people more about it. We can rearrange their schedules and

give them people to talk to. That was very encouraging. She's also doing other research with people's sense of whether they have control over the experience, especially when this comes to being sent back from this border or point of no return or whether they're seeing back against their will. She's planning a study of women who have a near-death experience during childbirth and a variety of other things like that. We also have Marina Weiler, who studies a lot of out-of-body experiences and related experiences.

And David Ocunzo, who runs our neurophysiology lab, was also studying the same phenomenon. out of body experiences and other related experiences. I don't look at what's going out on the brains when people claim to have these experiences. We also have Ed Kelly in the lab and Ross Dunceith and Kim Penberthy is one of our senior researchers who studies a lot of meditation experiences. And lately she's gotten involved in after-death communications messages that seem to come from deceased individuals. And then we have finally Philip Couselino, one of our newest members, who's also working

primarily with the children who remember past lives, but is also getting involved in near-death experiences and other phenomena. We're trying as much as possible to cross-pality each other, and not have everyone being siloed into one particular thing because there's so many similarities we've done all these experiences. So we try to combine things, especially to bring more of these experiences in the to the lab where we can study what's going on on the brain. I'm just so excited that you guys are researching this.

In your book, you used the famous analogy of the blind men trying to figure out an elephant, essentially. But I feel that way about a lot of these topics. I think we're just fumbling around in the dark, sort of. Exactly. And part of that we don't have the vocabulary for it, a vocabulary is built to study the physical world. and part is that we don't have the technology to study some of these things. Can you also tell me about this research you're starting to do with twins?

I know that you have something that you're in the early stages of. You're researching genetic markers in twins? Yeah, yeah. There have been reports for at least a century that twins have some unexplained communication with each other, not necessarily we're in their same area, but they'll have the same thought. They often will be taking a test in different rooms and write the exact same words,

but they'll often finish each other's sentences. One will have a pain, and the other one will have the pain in the same spot. This happens more often with identical twins than fraternal twins, but it is not, as far as I can tell, the majority of them. Some estimates were as high as 50%, some are a little lower. But what we want to do, this is a study that was proposed by Baruch Fishman in Israel.

And he wanted to study the genetic components that may play a role in this. Since this more happens more often in identical twins, there may be some genetic component. So we're working with a group in England that has, a database of the entire genome of 15,000 twin pairs. And we're giving them a survey of what types of apparently unusual experiences they have communicating with each other and then looking at the genome and see what genes may be associated with these things. We also look at how close the pair are in terms of did they develop a common language

when they were children as many twins do? Do they often feel emotionally close to the other and so forth? So there are a lot of genes that are speculatively maybe involved in this, genes that relate to empathy, that relieve to perceptions and so forth. So we're just sort of doing an open-ended what's out there, look at the entire genome. Okay, well, my final question, and this might be a hard one, it's purposely hard, or maybe it'll be easy, I'm not sure.

You have had a unique opportunity to talk to so many people who have died and come back, potentially, have been given a second chance. Is there any wisdom about life that you've taken away from all these many conversations? The one consistent thing people keep saying to me after a near death experience is that we're all in this together. We're all part of the same thing and that you really need to be kind to other people as you are to. yourself and treat other people as if they are you. And that's the way to live a more fulfilling life and be more satisfied with your life review when you eventually have one. I think that's very good advice. Well, Dr. Bruce Grayson, thank you so much for speaking to me. Where can people find your work and what books do you recommend if people want to hear more?

Well, I have a website, www. Bruce Grayson, that's g-R-E-Y-S-O-N.com. My book after is the book I've written that is for the general public. I've tried to keep the jargon to a minimum. There are other excellent books. Pim Van Lemmel has a book, Consciousness After Life. There are many, many books about near-death experiences.

There's no dearth of trying to find good ones. and there are new ones coming out every week practically. Well, thank you once again for speaking with me. This is so interesting, and thank you for listening. Thank you, Jack. All right. Thank you so much to Dr. Bruce Grayson. I'm so grateful to be able to speak to people like him on Otherworld.

Part of my fascination in the material we cover on this show is the genuine hope that one day we will have answers about some of these things. I'm so happy that people like... Bruce Grayson are out there studying it in a scientific way. I personally think the consciousness and our understanding of it will be a major key to solving some of the great mysteries of our world one day. If you want to know more about this subject and his work, I highly recommend reading his recent book, which is called After. A Doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. Thank you once again to the Division of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia. If you want to learn more about their work, I'll put a link in the description.

Thank you once again to Dr. Bruce Grayson, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Coberman. This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our artwork is by Coldestack Studios. Nikki Kate Delgado is our associate producer, production help by Haley Pearson. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about Otherworld.

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