Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Near-Death Experiences

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

This week on Sawbones, Oh No Ross and Carrie! hosts Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy hosts step in for Sydnee and Justin as part of the Max Fun Great Switcheroo as they look into the history of near-death experiences. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth! Hello everybody and welcome to Sobhones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. I am your co-host Ross Blacher. And I'm Carrie Poppy and you might notice that we're not the macaroise. Yeah, I'm not Sydney and you are not Justin. Nope, nope. In fact the neither of us have expertise in this at all. We are not married. I'm married. We are not married, right. But someone else. Right. We're not married to each other. Neither of us has a

doctorate or an empty. So, this is going to be a good show. But Max Fun is doing this very cool flippy-flu where we all host each other's shows and I'm very excited because I'm a huge sobboons fan. I don't know about you. Oh, I definitely am. Yeah, I'll show. Sydney and Justin are going to host our show and we're hosting their show this week. So if you're like, I miss Justin and Sydney, we'll go listen to Ono Ross and Kerry. Exactly. And you'll get them. Yeah. But yeah, keep listening. We're going to, we've got interesting stuff for you. Yeah, we're going to talk about near-death experiences. Indiees as the insiders call it.

We're going to talk about NDE's and depth. Oh, I like it. See what you did there. Thank you. You're ashamed of it, but you see it. No. So near death experiences, so what do you think like the layman's understanding

of the near death experiences? Oh what do you think like the layman's understanding of the near death experiences? Oh yeah, well, I mean, it's so pervasive in popular culture where you see these images of white clouds and someone kind of walking towards the light. And you know, generally here in the US it's all about the Judeo-Christian view of heaven. And yeah, so people go up and they get this decision moment, oh, I'm gonna go to heaven, it's gonna be great.

But oh no, you've got more left for you back on earth. Go home, go back, your wife needs you. And then you're sent back to your body to live your life, but tell others that the afterlife is real. Totally, that's my impression too. Yeah, I think that's right. And it turns out that when people do have near death experiences, in some ways kind of

similar. Like, there's the rushing tunnel is actually a pretty common experience. And that's one of the arguments for it is that it's consistent across different accounts. Right. Although some people will, if they're Christian, they're more likely to say, I saw Jesus, if they're Buddhist, they might have seen the Buddha, if they're Hindu, they might have seen one of the Hindu gods, etc. And you were already suggesting there's different components of the experience. So there's like the tunnel. And then yeah, there's meeting the ethereal being.

And they don't always happen together. Some people will have certain aspects of the NDE experience, which we'll get into. But yeah, you're right for that one with meeting your deity or angel or whatever. It may be obviously it's gonna be constrained to your religious experience or maybe not obviously. Yeah, exactly. So it might say something.

Right. So maybe that means that your, so it could mean a couple things, I guess. It could mean that your brain is like telling you how to interpret this experience. And so it overlays your pre-existing beliefs. Or it could mean that whatever deities or powers are out there, that they express themselves to you in a way that you'd feel comfortable, but you like the movie contact. That makes sense. Exactly. So Ross, you but you like the movie contact. That makes sense.

Exactly. So Ross, you looked into like the long, long, long history. Yeah, and it is. Near death experience goes back a long way. It's at least stories of people experiencing the afterlife. So back in Plato's The Republic, there was a Greek soldier named Er. Er.

What? Er. I don't know, it just sounds like every time you're talking to him, there was a Greek soldier named Er, ER, what? Er, er. I don't know, it just sounds like every time you were talking to him, yeah, you would just sound like you made a mistake. So Er, he was left for debt on a funeral pyre and he awoke to describe a place where the souls are judged and there were passageways

like it would lead to heaven or to torture. And then in the Tibetan Buddhist literature, they had the Dhas Locok. I'm sure I'm saying that incorrectly. But it essentially meant return from the dead. And these were writings that also described kind of how to proceed into the afterlife. We all know about the Egyptian book of the dead, which also told similar stories, just about people being able to communicate back stories from. And I think that's why this whole category is interesting because we all want to know what happens after we don't.

But typically, you know, you don't get to hear about it because those people don't. Died. Right. They don't come back. So either you've got two hopes then. Either they'll come back the last moment and tell you about this experience or they'll come back as ghosts and tell you things. Oh, right. So I think that's what fueled a lot of these historical stories. There was also many North American, Native American stories. There was one I read about a Chippewa chief who was killed in battle and then his warriors were going back, he's like, wait, guys, don't leave me here.

He follows them back and he's trying to shout at his wife and stuff and why can't anyone hear me? And then eventually he goes back to his body and takes him like four days, but then he's able to come back to life and then walks back to his. Oh, jeez. Yeah, right?

And then they're all excited. Talk about a journey. Yeah. And then there was also a story about like a Lithuanian man who had an out-of-body experience. He was pulled out of his body and he saw them take his body and got as far as the funeral. Then he went to, I guess, I think it was, kiss himself on the forehead or something. Then boom, he was back and he got up and went home with them.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. When was that? I want to say it was more recent, like kind of turn of the previous century. Okay. It's a little harder to verify.

But yeah, yeah, totally. I did hear, I read this one account. This was just a couple of years ago, but and I don't know if it's true, but it made the news that this woman was in her casket at her funeral because she'd been declared brain dead. She came to saw like everyone kneeling over her coffin had a heart attack and died in her own car.

Oh no, that scared her so bad. That she actually died because obviously she was very weak to begin with. Oh, that is the word. That's like everybody's worst fear and then just like compounded. Yeah, it's everybody's worst fear. Plus their worst fear. Yeah, yeah. Oh, poor deer. I know. It's horrible. I don't even want to look up to see if that's true. Let's just assume it is. Sure. I'm gonna accept it on faith.

Medieval Europe, of course, had many stories of the afterlife and I think Christianity definitely played into these stories. Both of, this is interesting too. I don think Christianity definitely played into these stories both of, and this is interesting too. I don't know if this came up in your research, but usually we hear about really positive Indiees. Yes, yeah. The light and the affirmation, but in the medieval times you also had like these horrible

instances of torture and judgment and being pulled down by demons. And apparently that does happen. But just a very small percentage of the time. Yeah. That's definitely what seems to be happening now in the modern research. And we'll get into that more. But one thing that seemed to be a through line in my research was that when there were

reported cases of health sightings, they were only documented by Christian researchers who then concluded, you know, this is sort of a sign that everybody needs to adopt a religion. There were like two researchers who actually had those findings none others did, and they were actually using it as like a ministry tool. Right. Within the research, which was little dodgy. Yeah, it's, I mean, maybe, or maybe once you see see that you become a Christian. I don't know sure

I remember I used to be a born-again evangelical Christian. I remember hearing those stories Mm-hmm. You know like the horror of smelling the sulfur and the demons drying you down It's just a horrific image really. Oh, yeah, and that being used is kind of like a you know a frighteninger to say The stuff is real. Yeah, no that that would work on me I mean even if you were just like, don't go to that Starbucks, it's on fire. And people are being hit with whips. I would just be like, I'm not going there.

Right, totally. That would be a bad start. Right. I want to write the Better Business Bureau, or at least leave a bad yelp review or something. I hear people are being flagellated at the Starbucks. And burned alive. I haven't actually gone, but rumor has it. But if the preponderance of NDE research is any indication, it sounds like most of the experiences are very positive. Yes. Theologically it points to a very loving accepting and forgiving God.

So you want to take us into the current realm? Sure. Yeah. So the modern research really started with this guy named Raymond Moody. There's going to be so many weird names in Valter. We've got, er, we've got Moody. Later we're going to hit Malarkey. Oh, yeah. Raymond Moody was this guy who collected a bunch of anecdotes from people who had had near-death experiences, and he co-lessened them into this book called Life After Life. Big best seller, right? Big best seller.

Actually, Reddit and college, not for a class. I just happened to be in college. So Raymond Mutey started telling people that about these experiences, and every time he would go and give a talk, he said someone would come up out of the audience and be like, that's happened to me. And so he kept collecting go and give a talk, he said someone would come up out of the audience and be like, that's happened to me. And so he kept collecting more and more stories. But, and here's where he kind of shot himself in the foot. Oh, sorry.

Oh, he was a doctor, right? I think he was collecting stories out of his practice, but that's interesting that he kind of branched out and just started collecting them from the public. Right. And then he kind of shot himself in the foot by keeping everyone's stories anonymous. So some people wanted to be anonymous and then he just thought, oh, let's just anonymize all of them. Well, now we're just taking Raymond Moody's word for it.

No one can follow up on it. No one can say, okay, well, right? Exactly. Because what you really want, like the holy grail of near death experience research would be someone who had an experience where they saw something that they couldn't have seen through their body that then is verified. So like, let's say, I'm dead for a second. And then, and you're in my hospital room while I'm dead. And you weep and you say, oh, it's so sad because I never got to tell Carrie that her mother is a nun. I don't know. Something that like I

wouldn't even know. And then I come to and I say, you know what? I remember standing in the room, seeing my body, I remember Ross crying and tripping on a banana and then he said my mom was a nun. It was crazy. It had a red shirt on and then you say, yeah, all that stuff happened. That is a vertical. Vertical, yeah, that's what they refer to it as in the research. Right.

Meaning a true. Yeah, right. Verifiable, yeah, verified. By the way, I meant to note, for those of you wondering like why didn't it react like, okay, why did you read life after life? That's because this is carry. Oh, right.

And of course she would read something like that So just so you know normally with anybody else you'd be like, Oh, why would you read that? Carrie will read. Oh, of course, and so would any crazy. Yeah, totally. Yeah for people who aren't aware of our show Like this is a lot of the stuff we're into. We love like paranormal claims and looking at this stuff from We are strange people We're weirdos and we like looking at this stuff from a scientific viewpoint. However, we are still not Sydney and don't listen to us. Anyway, so Moody interviewed over a thousand anonymous people and they mostly had similar

experiences. So Moody concluded that there's definitely an afterlife. Oh, okay. Yeah. I think Moick convinced. Yeah, completely. So there's another guy named Bruce Grayson who's definitely an afterlife. Oh, okay. You came more convinced. Yeah, completely. So there's another guy named Bruce Grayson, who's a big researcher.

He's mentioned in Mary Roach's Spook, which is one of our favorite books. And this is all recent enough, too. They're all still alive. Yes, in fact, I'm going to get to an email that Bruce Grayson sent me this morning. What? Yeah.

So Bruce Grayson is this big researcher who's studied near- death experiences by doing something Pretty genius, I think. Do you know about his big stuff? Yeah, where he kind of isolated those different components of the Indie and then created a rating scale By which he could kind of measure how strong of an Indie experience it was and how deep it was That is right, but also what I think is really genius is that he would study specifically cardiac patients because cardiac patients who are kind of in very extreme life or death states often have to be put into clinical death in order to treat their hearts.

So especially if they're putting sort of a device that kick starts your heart in there, they have to stop your heart to do it. So he went to these places where there were cardiac patients and up above on the ceiling in these operating rooms, he put a laptop or an iPad that shown up toward the ceiling and projected an image. So, and there were 12 different images. So one was like a blue rabbit and then there was a red house. Things that would be pretty memorable, they were very vivid, brilliant colors.

So the thought was, if you do actually leave your body and float up above and go toward the ceiling, you could see this image and you could report back. Oh yeah, there is a random glowing red picture of a house because that would be a pretty memorable random detail. That's such a smart, obvious thing to do. You know, people say they are floating up, you know, the brain can generate amazing simulations of the world and we do that in our dreams all the time. Right. The opposite view of this whole situation is that our bodies are sitting there in the situation and maybe some of our senses are still working. Apparently hearing is one of the last ones to go. Right.

So maybe just from that information alone or maybe the sense of touch, we can put together a lot about the scene and then kind of tell it back later. Right. And then you have a situation where people can really accentuate the hits and be like, well, that's right. Or, you know, we can slightly change our story based on the retelling and the

response from others. Or think you remember it that way, you know, if I'm in your room and you come back and you say, carry weren't you wearing a blue shirt and I'm like, I was either blue or purple. No, yeah, I think it was blue. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, having that kind of objective thing can help show if it's veridical. Exactly. But I want to tell you an update on Bruce Grayson. OK, so when Spook was written, which was 10 years ago now, it was 2005, Grayson was right in the middle of his research.

And Mary Roach actually finishes her chapter on your death experiences by saying, if Grayson ever finds someone who can say what was on that, what that picture was, I'll be a believer. Oh, okay. So I went to see like, okay, I mean, 10 years ago, you'd think like he has some conclusions now. So I went and I was searching all through his website and whatnot and I couldn't find anything. So I emailed him. You think this would be a big deal if someone had.

Right. So I emailed him, and I said, you know, I was rereading Spook this afternoon, you know, you're prominently featured in it. I was wondering what became of that study. Did anyone ever correctly identify the picture being projected up at the ceiling? Yeah. So he just wrote back to me 28 minutes to go Ross.

What? And here's what he said. Dear Carrie, no one in that study had any recollection at all of anything that happened during the procedure. So we did not have any near-death experiences to study. Thus, the study did not provide any evidence bearing on the question of whether or not people can see

from an out-of-body perspective during NDEs. It's disappointing, but in retrospect, the study may not have been as perfect a setup as I had anticipated for studying NDs. The period in which people were without heartbeat was generally just a few seconds, and they were all pre-medicated with sedative drugs that interfere with memory, in order to prevent any of them from having traumatic memories of having their heart stopped and undergoing electric shock to restart their hearts.

So the bottom line is that we have lots of anecdotal evidence of people having accurate out of body perception string and ease, but still no experimental evidence. That's very clear headed and honest. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely one of those claims that could be confirmed but never disconfirmed. Yes, as pretty much anecdotes are.

So this is kind of the problem with anecdotes, right? I mean, you want to trust the person telling you the story but without being able to check up on it, what can you really do with it? And the disconfirmation, I guess, could come in the form of people remembering things incorrectly. But again, those stories seem to just be kind of brushed aside

like, oh, well, you know. Yeah, I mean, and I don't know that I'd even make note of that in my mind, you know, if you said, I think I remember you wearing a blue shirt and I was like, no, I was wearing a pink shirt. I wouldn't even think like, oh, that's just confirmation, you know, like I would just think, yeah, no, you were asleep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Of course you don't remember. Yeah, so it's only the stories where like, oh my goodness, you got the right color. Right. But you remember. Pop up, pay attention. I remember hearing the story that apparently is very famous about someone,

I think it was also cardiac arrest, but she had floated out of her body and she had seen on the ledge of the hospital itself a tennis shoe. And then supposedly people found it later, but all kinds of problems arose with the story that there was never a patient by that name, Maria was her name, like at that time of the hospital, and they couldn't verify any of the details essentially. Yeah and actually this is really funny. There are three supposedly verified examples of people traveling and seeing something and all three are shoes. Oh. Okay. Or at least by this one. This is a very useful power. Right. Okay, so there's that one. Where the. This is a very useful power. Right.

Okay, so there's that one where the shoe is like a tennis shoe on the ledge in the hospital, but the woman who went to grab the shoe and said, yeah, it's there. It didn't take anyone with her and didn't like take a picture of the shoe. So great. Not very useful. Another, maybe you've heard this one too, was a red shoe that was actually on the roof of the hospital. Oh, I went searching for red shoe because I kind of remembered that and then I found the

tennis shoe store. It seemed to be the best. I was like, oh, I must have misremembered the red thing. No. Look at me being for a red shoe on the roof. So again, no one really like rode down the details of like, okay, then who went and verified the shoe? Was it in view when you drive up to the hospital?

No one really checked up on those. And then the other one is a woman who said to her nurse, oh, you're the woman with the plaid shoelaces and she wasn't wearing plaid shoelaces that day. She had only worn them on a day when the woman was brain dead. Yes. So here's the thing, Ross you die you are gonna know so much about shoes That's right your shoe vision opens up to unimagined Capability maybe heaven is just like a beautiful shoe repair shop God's really into shoes He's got a shoe finish. Yeah, maybe when people return to their bodies

They're just misunderstood and God because he's like shoot shoot people return to their bodies, they're just misunderstood in God because he's like, shoo, shoo. Get away from heaven, shoo, shoo. And then they start going back and then he's like, no, no, I was saying you can do shoo. Come back. Probably what happens. I think we really cracked the story on this one. So Grayson's hypothesis is that clinical death basically allows us to change the channel

on our brains. So just like a TV, we were only tuned into certain things because our brain can only focus on so much while we're alive. Our brain is focusing on all the sensory inputs, all the emotional inputs, everything going on in the body. But just like a TV, there's all these other channels out there that you're just not listening to. So when you are clinically dead, your mind can focus on all these other things that are coming in from the spiritual realm.

And it seems like these studies were very closely tied to, looks at out-of-body experiences, very similar phenomenon. But of course, the OBEs can happen without the near death situation. Right. And other corollaries arise like drug use. You can take certain drugs. Cetamine. Heshish, ether, other anesthetics, hallucinogens like LSD,

and even DMT, that you can have these kind of mystical experiences and all these different pieces of the NDE experience. Totally. So that says something. Also, like under the the dress of heightened gravity like for pilots. Oh, okay. Point pilots, like who gets subjected to like six Gs or plus.

Oh, right, right. They'll black out momentarily. And they'll often come back with those. Oh, wow. Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, with ketamine, apparently the experience, if you take a lot of ketamine, which we are not recommending,

not recommending, apparently the experience is very much like an NDE. And there was one doctor who was like, this is a way to study our connection to the afterlife. And then he was found dead in his bathtub next to a bottle of ketamine. So listen guys, don't do it. This whole field is really tough to study because obviously you can't like get a grant to nearly kill a bunch of people and see what happens to them.

And a lot of these studies seem to focus around cardiac arrest patients because that's like one of the easiest situations where you actually have data about there. You know, they're blood composition, the amount of oxygen that's a huge issue. And a lot of research into this is focused on the presence and lack of oxygen as being an important factor here. And also the presence of too much carbon dioxide as another factor. But even when you do get, let's say like 300 something people that have undergone cardiac arrest, it will only be a small subset that actually experience into ease or can report on them later. And it's usually like 12 to 8. Yeah, somewhere in that range. And so even then you have to wonder, well, what is the role of memory? Have they forgotten?

Did they experience it at the time, or was it as they came back that they actually had the experience? And there's just so many fudgy details here that really make it hard to nail down what's going on. Yeah, for sure. And a lot of the times they're looking at the brain signals, whether there's brain activity, but sometimes there's brain activity that we can't see yet.

Right, yeah, the machines that we used to monitor that, I read were kind of compared as like a one megapixel camera versus like a eight megapixel camera. There could be a lot still going on that we don't know about. And it's about how much we need for doctors to do their jobs, right? If your brain is at this low level of activity, you are definitely in danger, so they need to start resuscitating you.

Right. In our way of monitoring brain activity is always by proxy anyway. All we can see is oxygen supply or blood flow. We can't see actual neurons firing. Right. We don't have the equipment to do that. Right. So when we call someone equipment to do that. Right. So when we call someone clinically dead, there might still be some action going on in that brain. So, you know, when people come back

and say they've had these experiences, one of the responses is like, that's impossible, like they were dead. Well, dead doesn't necessarily mean what we think it does in this setting. Right. Yeah. And just like in the Princess Bride, Miracle Max says, you know, oh, he's not dead.

He's just nearly dead. It's the same kind of thing. Like, well, all of these people who are telling the stories, they didn't actually die because here they are. Yeah. Well, yeah, well, unless you believe they came back because of the shoe shoe. Oh, sure. We've kind of alluded to this, but there's two major hypotheses.

One is the afterlife hypothesis, which is I think what most people take as a lesson from near death experiences. And then there's the dying brain hypothesis, which is kind of the idea that this is symptomatic of what happens to the brain as it's going through that death process when it has less oxygen, when it has a surge of neurotransmitters, that it will experience these various phenomena. Along the lines of what you were saying of a lot of these experiences being similar, there's a researcher named Michael Sabam who catalogs descriptions of the afterlife that Neurodephyrnsers have had. And the last time he published, literally half of them, 50% were nothing but sky.

And the other entire 50% were idyllic fields, sometimes with a gate. Interesting. No people, no clouds, well, clouds maybe, but no angels on harps and whatnot. Yeah, that consistency piece breaks down a little bit because it seems people have these kind of outlier stories that don't fit within that typical narrative.

Well, another researcher is Kenneth Ring and he spoke to many people in one study of 102 stories. He cataloged kind of the core experience and how prevalent it was. So the feelings of peace occurred in 60% of the stories. Okay. Just the majority. The just a majority of the actual out of body component was only in 37%. Oh wow. The stories. Yeah. Okay. So they still

probably didn't feel they weren't in their bodies, but they're not like having that experience where they're looking at their bodies. Exactly. Right. Entering the darkness. That was 23%. So that's very common to be going through a tunnel. Yes. Sorry, what percent was that? 23%. Oh, okay. And then seeing the light, I guess is a separate phenomenon, is not always there was 16% of the respondents.

Oh my God, I would hate to go through the tunnel and not see the light. Yeah, right. Just in the tunnel. It's just like a like Alice in the rabbit hole. Never ending time. Yeah, clock floats by you. But this whole thing is where we get like the, you know, walk toward the light. Yes.

Praise. Totally. That we all, you know, yell at each other. Yeah, one has to wonder if it's possible that a lot of our views of heaven just come from people having these experiences so long ago that they started talking about them back when heaven started to be talked about. Totally. Now Ross, if you were trying to find like the most excellent, the most excellent, you'd

have experience. A tubular one? Yeah, where it was just amazing that a person could have seen anything at all. Who would you want that to be? What would be the holy grail person who would see something they couldn't have possibly seen. Maybe a blind person? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Right, that would make sense. So there are these studies called the mind sight studies that are entirely about blind people who had indies and say they could see. Supposedly they saw their doctors, they saw the room, they saw the people who had indies and say they could see. Supposedly they saw their doctors, they saw the room,

they saw the people who had visited them. But again, no one really documented all of the things that all of the details we would need for an independent party to go back and verify. People pay attention. Yeah, right? Without your cameras, Jesus. Exactly.

But there was one woman Nancy. She was blind, but she reported seeing her lover and her ex-husband watching her be wheeled out on a gurney when she was clinically dead, and they went back and verified that yeah, her lover and her ex-husband two people who maybe wouldn't normally stand next to each other. We're standing next to each other watching her be wheeled on the gurney. They find this very, very compelling. I'm kinda like, I mean, if these two guys are close to you, even if they're not close to each other and you're dying,

yeah, I think they'd both show up. Right, right, yeah, this comes down to like, just like a greeting, it's very similar where like a lot of these things just could be inferred. Right. Very easily. Oh, she was on a gurney, that's amazing. Right. Now if they'd wheeled her around on a stuffed crocodile,

then I'd be very impressive. Gurney. Yeah. Well, I think the more impressive part was supposed to be that she knew who was looking at her. And it was these two people who would normally not be together, her current lover and her ex husband. Sure.

Yeah, on the face of it. Yeah, it's like a little, but I'm still just like, yeah, you were dying and the two most important people in your life showed up. Yeah. It's one of those situations where, yeah, the second you get to know those people better in the situation, all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, it makes sense. Yeah, sure. There's a list that Moody had put together.

We put together a number of lists of common features of the Indie experience. But they include ineffability, just the lack of an ability to describe what's going on. People would comment on that. Hearing the news. Hearing the news? Yeah. Like, suddenly they're like, there's a backup on the the floor Are you aware that the bird is the word? No, I think the idea is that someone would kind of notify them like oh you are dead. Oh, okay

All right, you are going through this now. I'm Fritz Coleman Feelings of peace and quiet. That was a very common recurring factor sure and allowed noise Yeah, like a popping it or even like a rushing sound That was a very common recurring factor. Sure. A loud noise. Yeah, like a popping. Or even like a rushing sound. Oh, right, right, right. And it's interesting, like many of these different factors are tied to certain modes of death as well, which is very telling.

And again, like a really good avenue for research. The dark tunnel, as we've discussed, the out-of-body experience is another meeting others. We've talked about either loved ones, and that was interesting. That was cultural. In the US, you were more likely to see your loved ones. In India, you were more likely to see deities. Okay. You can see that.

The review, like having a review of your life. We've heard about your life flashing before you guys. Yes. Very common. Mm-hmm. Let's see, the border or limit. So like coming to the end of this and like kind of having a decision point, coming back, so that process of returning. Shoo, shoo.

And then, and then telling others, and then the resulting effects on people's lives as well, new, new views on death and corroboration. So those were... Okay, yeah. So that extended even back to once they were back in their... Abiliment. I do remember in life after life, the moody book, I do remember there being a lot of cases of that seeing your life flash before your eyes.

And people kept saying, you saw all of your life all at once. Like it felt like one second of your entire life. And again, an effemility, they would be like, I know that sounds crazy. I can't really describe it, but like all of a sudden, you know everything that happened all at once. Like telling God someone your dream. Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh my God.

So like in Madonna and I were on the rooftop and then as we were driving around, well, I know we were just on the roof, but it makes sense. We were actually in the car. And then she became my mom. I know it's weird, but like, or well, she still looked like Madonna,

but I just knew she was my mom. This is a good story. Right. Right. I always find myself like trying to convince people of stuff and I'm talking to my dreams like, like, I was picking a flower but it was super creepy. I know that doesn't sound creepy but you must be like it was super creepy. It's creepy flower.

Another study I was looking at was they had been talking to people who had like fallen off of cliffs like off of really high heights and I was just amazed that any of them were alive but they there were enough that they could talk to some of them. And yeah, the live flashing before the eyes was very common. And also that again, that sense of peace, which is interesting. It seems like when people get in these situations where they're about to die, seems like the body does kick up those neurotransmitters and gives you like this just sense of peace. Maybe it's just to help you maybe focus. Yeah, or accept. I don't know.

Yeah. Have you ever thought you were about to die? I almost drowned in a pool when I was three or four. Great. Psychics would do a great job on you saying there was an accident more. For I totally. Yeah, how cliche.

And I remember, it's like one of my first visual memories that I can kind of go back to is like, I fell through like one of those cheerio floats. Oh yeah. The donut hole things. And I remember just kind of like looking around and I mean like, I don't know what to do. I have no control over this. My sister saved me and I told that I was resuscitated.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm not, obviously, I don't have any memory of that again, I was three or four. Okay. So you don't remember if you had any transcendent experience. Don't have any member of that again, I was three or four. Okay. So you don't remember if you had any trance and an experience. Don't have any recollections of your death. Okay.

I thought I was going to die twice. And I definitely got senses of peace in both times and moments when you'd think would just be filled with panic. Yeah, yeah. One was on a plane and I'm not even afraid of flights at all. But like for some reason there was just a particular jostle that just my immediate reaction was like, oh, the plane's crashing.

And I just remember being overwhelmed with like, okay, well that's okay, I did a good job. Like it's okay. Well for every one of you, there's like 90, like screaming, running around. Sure, and maybe if it had lasted more than three seconds, I would have been like, oh, maybe I should try to stay alive.

But there was no instant review of Carrie's life. No, no. But if that happens from actual death, it's not like my brain was dying. The other time I hit a semi head on because I lost control of my car. Yeah, oh my god, it was terrible. Yeah, I actually think Ella Poppy pulled my purse

strap was around the emergency break and I was going on the freeway and I think she stepped on the person it pulled the emergency break up. So I lost control of my car I spun around and I yep and I hit a semi head on and when you're about to hit a semi You know, you're just like okay, I'm this is it right? Yeah, and so as I was about to hit it semi, you're just like, okay, this is it, right? Yeah. And so as I was about to hit it, all I remember is this peaceful feeling and then thinking, oh crap, everybody I know

just has a dead friend now. Oh, that was your last thought. That was it. It was just this sort of man and then just like, oh well, but then I hit it and they had stopped it enough time and I had like, you know, gotten enough breakage and enough time that we just kind of went, big and then I'm sick and went off the freeway.

That's horrible. When did this happen? That was 2008. Oh my goodness. I think we just met around then. Maybe. Okay. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. Maybe it was a little after then. Yeah. Okay. I my goodness. Or maybe it was a little after then. Yeah. Okay. I'm just like, how do I not know this? My thought is always like, if I'm thinking about a situation where I would die, it's always like, oh no, how's my wife going to figure out all my passwords? That's a great idea.

There's always a lot of things like, she's not going to be able to access anything, she's going to be shut out, she won't be able to find anything or get money. Maybe you should give her all your passwords. Yeah, I've been creating a master list. Oh, good. For her. That's hilarious. That's, let's like my first thought.

You were mentioning that very few people like C. Hell or see anything negative. Right. One of the things that Grayson said is that he had people that he would think of as horrible people. Like one was a mobster murderer who saw paradise. So he was like, I haven't had anybody who, like you think, was going to help report anything of hell. So that's interesting.

Yeah. So, yeah, if you're going to accept these theologically as bolsterers of belief in life after death, then it might shake up your views of the afterlife. But again, that's always God's judgments, not ours. Sure, sure. But I think some people might come to a universal salvation conclusion from that. Totally. Ross, I have so much more to tell you, but before we get there, would you follow me to the billing department? Okay, so I also want to tell you Ross, do you know who Dinesh D'Souza is?

Oh, yes I do. Do you want to tell us who he is? Give us a brief answer. It is kind of a Christian evangelical, I don't know, debater, Gatfly, he writes deceptive books and says deceptive things. Yeah, I mean, you're not doing that voice because he's an evangelical or an angelic book because he's just sort of a blowhard. You can be a very honest, wonderful evangelical, but he's, he a blow heart is the right word.

He didn't even make like a documentary about Obama, like, supporting gosh, I don't even know. I don't follow Dennis very closely. Like he's so annoying. Supporting like all these absurd arguments about him is frustrating. You like you hear him in a debate and just know he's being dishonest. He knows he's lying. I don't like that. And he also, do we broke the lot at some point, like a campaign financing thing?

I think. Oh, that sounds familiar. Well, anyway, he reviewed all this evidence and he has a book called Life After Death, The Evidence, and it's forwarded by Rick Warren. And he uses Indie's to say everyone should convert to Christianity, but surprisingly, he uses all the examples of people who have very Judeo-Christian experiences, the few like hell experiences and so on. So it's very easy to sort of cherry pick these stories. There are many of them in the popular literature.

Go on. For example, Heaven is for real. It was a huge bestseller. Yep, remember that? I think that was made into a movie. Yeah, yeah, it was. A recent movie, I think, did actually quite well, which is unusual for those, you know, kind of,

Cameron type Christian films. So this one didn't involve him. But that one was written by a little boy who had that experience, right? A little boy is a astounding story of his trip to heaven and back. Yeah, but then there was another one written recently, the boy. By Alex Malarkey.

Yeah, the boy who came back from heaven and yeah, a little Alex Malarkey had told his story with the help of his dad. And then years later, he, there was 2010. And then I think it was this year, 2015, he kind of came out with a public statement saying hey, you know I actually made all that up. It's not true. I was I was 10 or whatever. Yeah, don't ask me about it But you know don't let this diminish your faith right right and I believe he's a quadriplegic always eat

Yeah, I think so okay Anyway, very brave guy to come out and say that yeah The last thing we should mention I I think, is the Aware Study, which is a very big deal. And basically, they took Grayson's original study where they're projecting images upward in 20 hospitals in dying patients' rooms. And they, so originally, when they put out their entire plan for publishing and their budget and whatnot They said they were gonna publish in 2010 But in 2010 they were like, oh, we don't have enough data

So they finally published in 2014 and they reported that although people did have NDE's Not one person saw the imaging recalls it correctly. Wow. How many people had Indies? and saw the image and recalled it correctly. Wow. How many people had indies? You know, they didn't actually say. They just said, although some people had them, no one saw the images and recalled them correctly, at least from what I read,

which may have been the abstract there may be. So it took extra years of saying, oh, we're not getting what we want. Let's do it longer, let's do it. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, that's fine. But we're talking about 20 hospitals, so. Okay.

That not one person did it. Yeah, starts to be a little. Says something. Yeah. Totally. A little questionable. But as they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Sure. Sure. Bigfoot could be out there. He could, or she, or she, Ross. Sorry, Bigfoot. I didn't mean to be gender. I'm gonna What are you saying? Oh, did you? Yeah. Anyway, I was gonna call you bad name, but Let's see. So that's all I had to say. Oh, okay. So so we're left with a very So, we're left with a very difficult field to make heads or tails of because you have the trickiness of the different modes of death, the very small numbers of people who actually have these experiences, the different types of experiences within that that don't always

line up. And so, there's consistency, but there's also inconsistency. And it's very hard to track and to know exactly what's going on and what's due to the brain's activity and what is a Cartesian dualist other self body that is ethereally floating about. And so the scientific community seems to lean towards the more materialist view of this whole situation. That is that the brain produces these things. And that, for example, this tunnel vision is your optic nerve being acted upon by the lack of oxygen

or other chemical surging. And that's what's creating the darkness with the light in the center. The lightness that is always described as being like the brightest thing they've ever seen, but not painful, which makes sense if it's, you know, not an actual light. And other aspects can be explained through functions of the brain in that kind of panicked survival mode. Right. And then the spiritual community would say, uh, that's all fine and good, but maybe God or the spirits or whatever, give us these experiences. And that's how they give

them to us. They use, they use the brain, they use the tools of the materialistic world to communicate higher experiences. And if they're supernatural, well, then yeah, you can never fully describe them using the tools of science. Right. So, really, the only response is just to keep studying and looking for new angles. And it's a field that is contentious, but there's a lot more to be done. And it's fun. Yeah.

It's a fun field. Totally is. And I would recommend to everybody to read Spook if you haven't yet. Read Spook and I highly recommend dying to live near death experiences by Susan Blackmore. Excellent. And of course, Alex Malarkey's book that turned out to be a bunch of Malarkey. The boy who came back from heaven. Yeah.

Why not? Thank you to Ross and Carey for stepping in with us this week. We will try not to mess up your show, Oh no Ross and Kerry, but Oh no Justin and Cindy will be over there on their feeds to go check that out as soon as it's up, which hopefully will be very soon. Thanks. We'd also like to thank the taxpayers for providing this awesome music. And special thanks to Justin and Cindy McElroy for letting us host their show.

And for hosting our show, we're looking forward to hearing that. Yeah, we finally have a Doctor hosting our show. It's gonna be great. Yeah, some legitimacy. Finally. My name's Carrie Poppy. My name is Ross Blacher. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone,

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