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What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain
Negative NDEs experiences
Not all NDEs are positive - some can be frightening, with intense terror, anguish, loneliness, and despair. Distressing NDEs are underreported because of shame, social stigma, and pressure to conform to the positive NDEs.
A close encounter with death reminds us of the fragility of life and can reveal the layers of psychological suppression that prevents us from these uncomfortable thoughts.
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Near-death experiences (NDEs)
NDEs are triggered during a life-threatening situation when the body is injured by blunt trauma, e.g., a heart attack or shock.
Many survivors tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and entering a realm beyond everyday existence, freed from the usual boundaries of space and time. These powerful experiences can lead to a transformation of their lives.
Negative NDEs experiences
Not all NDEs are positive - some can be frightening, with intense terror, anguish, loneliness, and despair. Distressing NDEs are underreported because of shame, social stigma, and pressure to conform to the positive NDEs.
A close encounter with death reminds us of the fragility of life and can reveal the layers of psychological suppression that prevents us from these uncomfortable thoughts.
The NDE phenomenon
A 2017 study found that NDEs were recalled with greater clarity and detail than either real or imagined situations were. In other words, NDEs were remembered as being more real than life itself.
NDEs are no more likely to occur in devout believers than in secular or nonpracticing subjects.
NDEs within a natural framework
When the body is starved of blood flow and oxygen, the electrical activity in the brain has broken down. Like a town that loses power one neighborhood at a time, regions of the brain go offline one after another. In the process, the mind tells a story shaped by the person's experience, memory, and cultural expectations.
For the person undergoing an NDE, it is as real as anything the mind produces during normal waking.
The fading of the light
Many neurologists have noted similarities between NDEs and the effects of complex partial seizures. These seizures are localized to specific brain regions in one hemisphere and are accompanied by unusual tastes, smells, or bodily feelings as well as feelings of déjà vu, depersonalization, or ecstatic feelings.
Neurosurgeons are able to induce such ecstatic feelings by electrically stimulating part of the cortex in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brains. Patients report enhanced well-being and a heightened perception of the external world.
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About Consciousness
Consciousness is everything you experience - taste, pain, love, feeling. Where these experiences come from is a mystery.
Many modern analytic philosophers of mind either d...
Searching For Physical Footprints
What is it about brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? In particular, the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) - the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any conscious experience.
Consider this question: What must happen in your brain for you to experience a toothache?
Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness (NCC)
The whole brain can be considered an NCC because it generates experience continually.
- When parts of the cerebellum, the "little brain" underneath the back of the brain, are lost to a stroke or otherwise, patients may lose the ability to play the piano, for example. But they never lose any aspect of their consciousness. This is because the cerebellum is almost wholly a feed-forward circuit. There are no complex feedback loops.
- The spinal cord and the cerebellum are not enough to create consciousness. Available evidence suggests neocortical tissue in generating feelings.
- The next stages of processing are the broad set of cortical regions, collectively known as the posterior hot zone, that gives rise to conscious perception. In clinical sources of causal evidence, stimulating the posterior hot zone can trigger a diversity of distinct sensations and feelings.
- It appears that almost all conscious experiences have their origin in the posterior cortex. But it does not explain the crucial difference between the posterior regions and much of the prefrontal cortex, which does not directly contribute to subjective content.
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Past and future
- When English speakers use hand gestures to talk about the past and the future, they thrust a hand over the shoulder for the past and put a hand forward to indicate the future. English speake...
How humans sense time
Humans are different from animals in that we don't sense time only as passing. We dice time into units or think of time to go beyond our lifespan, such as millennia. We rely on time concepts that allow us to make plans, follow recipes, and discuss possible futures.
Describing yesterday and tomorrow
Recent research suggests that across all cultures, the concept of time depends on metaphor, known as a conceptual metaphor. We build our understanding of duration and sequences of events out of familiar spatial ideas such as size, movement, and location.
But the "time is like space" metaphor takes on very different forms from one culture to the next.
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Avoiding Facts
Many people avoid facts even if it is beneficial for them to know. This strange quirk that defies logic is due to many psychological factors.
Human beings often avoid learning new i...
Aversion From Bad News
Human beings feel their hopes are shattered when they learn about the outcome of a certain illness or maybe the date of their death, or divorce, preferring to remain aloof and hopeful.
While mostly this applies only to bad news, there are certain cases when individuals prefer not to know about something which may be positive as well.
The Reason For Avoiding Facts
Information avoidance, even if knowing can help us make smarter choices, is a way for us to forego some of the sufferings that may be caused by us knowing about what the future brings, and allows us to remain in a state of suspense and wonder.