02:00 AM Oct. 31, 2002 PST Two British scientists are seeking £165,000 ($256,000) to carry out a large-scale study to discover if clinically dead people really have out-of-body experiences. Dr. Sam Parnia, senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, and Dr. Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at Oxford University, are both highly respected researchers. Near-death experiences are the most common experience and include seeing a white light, while out-of-body experiences involve serenely observing one's dead body while medics work frantically to resuscitate it. The researchers have founded a charitable trust, Horizon Research, to promote studies in the field. Last year Parnia published a study indicating that 10 percent of clinically dead patients who were later resuscitated reported memories while they were lifeless. Evidence includes patients recognizing hospital staff they had never met but who helped during their resuscitation. Others have recalled conversations between doctors. According to known medical science, this should be impossible, given the absence of any brain activity. In the past, the theory has been scorned by the scientific community. Even those who want to believe the truth is out there have turned skeptical. Susan Blackmore was once the doyenne of British paranormal research. She has since retired, disillusioned, from the field. She concluded in her book about near-death experiences, Dying to Live, that near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are a result of anoxia, or lack of oxygen in the brain. While skepticism remains, scientists are coming to recognize that more research is necessary. In December 2001, a Dutch neurologist, Dr. Pim van Lommel of Hospital Rijnstate in Arnhem, Netherlands, led a team that published an article in The Lancet, the United Kingdom's highly respected journal of medicine. The study showed that 18 percent of clinically dead patients, later resuscitated, recalled near-death experiences years after the event. Another study, this one conducted in the United States by the father of near-death-experience studies, Kenneth Ring, used blind patients, resuscitated from cardiac arrest, who likewise described seeing their body while clinically dead, although slightly out of focus. The book Mindsight was inspired by this research. Fenwick and others are not positing life after death per se, merely consciousness after death. Nevertheless, the implications are enormous. If near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences don't come from the brain, where is consciousness based? "There are two ways to view the universe," says Fenwick. "Our current world model is that everything is matter." In other words, everything that we think of as "real" in scientific terms has a physical form that can be perceived by our senses. But this model, which philosophers call "radical materialism," cannot explain the existence of consciousness, which has no physical essence. So how do we account for consciousness? "There's a little (unexplained) miracle, and consciousness arises," Fenwick says of the current paradigm. However, another theory proposes that the basic building block of the universe is not matter but instead consciousness itself. This is described as the "transcendent" view, a perspective shared by many of the world's religions. "This second, transcendent, view of the universe makes it much easier to understand NDEs," says Fenwick, who believes that science will eventually replace the material view of the universe with the transcendent one. The advent of quantum mechanics, which posits that matter can simultaneously have both a physical form and a wave form is a step in that direction, he says. So are scientific studies of the power of prayer, which suggest that subjects benefit from the prayers of others even when they aren't aware that someone is praying for them. These studies have been interpreted by some researchers as an indication that consciousness behaves as a field, much like magnetism, which can be affected by other fields. If that's true, then it's possible one person's consciousness could affect another person's. Now Fenwick and Parnia hope to add new near-death-experience and out-of-body-experience research to these findings. If they can raise the cash, they intend to study 100 reanimated heart-attack victims who had near-death experiences. Research has shown that 30 of them can be expected to have out-of-body experiences. Fenwick and Parnia plan to place cards above the patients' heads that can only be seen from the ceiling, where those who experience out-of-body experiences claim to watch their resuscitation. So will this convince the skeptics? "No, nothing will, but that's OK," says Fenwick, laughing. "It's how science progresses. Any research that says you have to have a major rethink in your world model is always rejected. But it will prove that consciousness is not in the brain." Another thing the research proves is that there's life left yet in speculating about the afterlife. Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55826,00.html
Two British scientists are seeking £165,000 ($256,000) to carry out a large-scale study to discover if clinically dead people really have out-of-body experiences. It would be most upsetting if these dollars came from tax dollars, especially if it was taken away from worthwhile projects. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You would be surprises how much money goes to worthless projects from Tax dollars in both US and UK....in the name of research.
fully agree all these projects of "what color people like best" etc just make me sick, and I'm not even a US or UK taxpayerPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! compared to them this one is quite interesting
You should be interested!!! If there is no interference by the government supplying the funds,we may be able to learn something about the place where we are all going to end up eventually.But I am sure if this research yields anything important,you and I won't hear it,or benefit from it.
ok- here's a far shot-> maybe our consciousness exists after we die but only for some minutes, and ceases to exist after last traces of our brain's EM field is lost just a though, can laugh it upPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You would be surprises how much money goes to worthless projects from Tax dollars in both US and UK....in the name of research. And that's the problem. Damn you crackpots....damn you all to hell! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Come on, guys...give me a break... research dollars to study clinically dead people having out-of-body experiences ? Give yer heads a shake. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
How did they decide that these memories happened when they were lifeless as opposed to just before or after?
"In a new study released today in the journal Nature, Swiss scientists describe how they were able to trigger bizarre, out-of-body experiences in a 43-year-old female epileptic patient while analyzing her brain with electrodes. When Blanke and colleagues activated electrodes placed just above the patient's right ear — a region known as the right angular gyrus — the woman began to have the strange sensations. Depending on the amplitude of the stimulation and the current position of the patient's body, her experience varied. Each of the patient's four episodes lasted about two seconds. After one stimulation, the patient said she felt as though she were sinking into her bed and then she felt as though she were "falling from a height." After another stimulation she said felt like she was "floating" about 61/2 feet above her bed, close to the ceiling. When she was asked to watch her legs during the stimulation, the patient said she saw her legs "becoming shorter." Scientists have long tried to explain how people might have such sensations. Last December a British journal described a Dutch study that estimated 12 percent of cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death experience out-of-body sensations such as seeing a bright light or their own dead bodies. In 1995, Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, found he was able to trigger out-of-body and other paranormal experiences in people by exposing the right sides of their brains to a series of electromagnetic pulses. Severe migraines, small strokes and epilepsy have also been known to trigger the condition and previous work has located the cause to the brain's right lobe. " http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/outofbody020919.html review of Lancet Study on NDE's December 15, 2001
Depending on the amplitude of the stimulation and the current position of the patient's body, her experience varied... After one stimulation, the patient said she felt as though she were sinking into her bed and then she felt as though she were "falling from a height." After another stimulation she said felt like she was "floating" about 61/2 feet above her bed, close to the ceiling. When she was asked to watch her legs during the stimulation, the patient said she saw her legs "becoming shorter." ...found he was able to trigger out-of-body and other paranormal experiences in people by exposing the right sides of their brains to a series of electromagnetic pulses. Severe migraines, small strokes and epilepsy have also been known to trigger the condition and previous work has located the cause to the brain's right lobe. In other words, electromagnetic stimulation can produce interesting bio-chemical reactions in the brain thus causing the mind to hallucinate as well as experience migraines, epilepsy, imagination... Perhaps this form of research could lead to controlling migraines, epilepsy, etc., but it is unlikely that researching dead people for out-of-body experiences will lead to little more then a few devious researchers lining their pockets.
so much for a paradisePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
so the naysayers grab on to that little factoid and rest their case? i think there is enough here to merit further study (and funds!) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "Lead researcher Pim van Lommel of the Hospital Rijnstate in the Netherlands said the study suggests that researchers investigating consciousness should not look in the cells and molecules alone. Even when the brain is not showing signs of electrical activity, it is possible that a person can still be conscious, he said. In other words, people can be conscious of events around them even when they are physically unconscious." everything you wanted to know about obe........... let your imagination run wild 'Consciousness has never been observed. Neither has it been weighed or measured. The source of consciousness is unknown. It's location, within or without the body, has never been discovered. No one has determined what consciousness consists of, or contains. And, there's not one single bit of scientific proof that consciousness is biological. Therefor, it appears, all the material written about consciousness is subjective." (roger penrose?)
There is an essay here that speculates that conciousness is a fundemental property like matter, space etc. Also a thread in the philosophy forum : http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11774 If it is a fundemental property, it might be easy to miss. Forest, trees etc.
Somebody called for speculation? When I was in college, I used to dream specific stories on demand after training myself for a month. While the heart may have stopped, the brain stays alive for a little while until depletion of all oxygen from the blood and decomposition sets in. So it is possible that the ears hear sound and the brain could project itself the operating room or the corridor or the outside of the hospital etc. People can dream as if they are flying on top of trees and buildings. It is possible, the brain has capacity to rebuild a separate perspective of the geography from memory. After all, the brain does not store information as is - rather could be in a fractal format and reconstitutes when demanded by other part of the brain. Just a thought....for weird speculation, we need to move to Pseudoscience...I have some too....
hi, i missed this thread...OBEs as i read from Carl Sagan's Broca's brain occur due to extra amounts of Nerve wrecking drugs released in brain.Accordingly,the amounts of LSDs and other drugs's amount increase during death,we all know that these kinds of drugs produce OBEs and especially with Morijuana you can fly out of you body high up.so this might be one of the causes of OBE after death... bye!
Km, the OBE's often occur after death.i would like to describe an NDE experience of one of my friends uncle... he dies in an accident(hit and run) and after one day of mourning he wakes up with back-pain...(extreme back-pain),he says that while he was death he was out of his body flying high up,and then later on some one just said(a voice came)that you cant be dead and fell (with his back facing his body's chest)onto his body...the back-pain remained with the fella for the rest of his life and he died with this pain cursing that he should have been dead long ago... bye!
