Near Death Studies - Consciousness After Death

I don't think it is bogus. I myself had a near death experience, and would love to see scientific studies done to gather evidence. We don't know what consciousness IS, and it could be a huge leap for man to understand that.

According to Susan Blackmore, vision researcher Dr. Tomasz S. Troscianko of the University of Bristol speculated:

If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer....the tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger....If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light. (Blackmore 1993: 85)

Blackmore attributes the feelings of extreme peacefulness of the NDE to the release of endorphins in response to the extreme stress of the situation. The buzzing or ringing sound is attributed to cerebral anoxia and consequent effects upon the connections between brain cells (op. cit., 64).
Blackmore, Susan J. Dying to Live: Near-death Experiences, (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1993).
Dr. Karl Jansen has reproduced NDEs with ketamine, a short-acting hallucinogenic, dissociative anaesthetic.

The anaesthesia is the result of the patient being so 'dissociated' and 'removed from their body' that it is possible to carry out surgical procedures. This is wholly different from the 'unconsciousness' produced by conventional anesthetics, although ketamine is also an excellent analgesic (pain killer) by a different route (i.e. not due to dissociation). Ketamine is related to phencyclidine (PCP). Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines - they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, is much shorter acting, is an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anaesthetic for children in industrialised countries and all ages in the third world as it is cheap and easy to use. Anaesthetists prevent patients from having NDE's ('emergence phenomena') by the co-administration of sedatives which produce 'true' unconsciousness rather than dissociation.*

According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.

And yet, neurophysiological processes must play some part in NDE, because NDE-like experiences can be induced through electrical “stimulation” of some parts of the cortex in patients with epilepsy,8 with high carbon dioxide levels (hypercarbia)9 and in decreased cerebral perfusion resulting in local cerebral hypoxia, as in rapid acceleration during training of fighter pilots,10 or as in hyperventilation followed by Valsalva maneuver.11 Also NDE-like experiences have been reported after the use of drugs like ketamine,12 LSD,13 or mushrooms.14 These induced experiences can sometimes result in a period of unconsciousness, but can at the same time also consist of out-of-body experiences, perception of sound, light or flashes of recollections from the past. These recollections, however, consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE. Further, transformational processes are rarely reported after induced experiences. Thus, induced experiences are not identical to NDE.

... And I think it is possible that if remote viewing is REAL, (well, a few governments have definitely done a LOT of testing on it, that says something to its validity) that these people are capable of "pushing their own button" to make the soul leave the body. Can anything like that EVER be proved? I have no idea. But I would like to see science try.

The fact that governments would expend taxpayers money in something says nothing about the validity of the idea.

Experiences made with astronauts and people inside nuclear submarines under the arctic ice revealed results not very different than those due to chance.

Several speculative and as yet untested hypotheses suggest that endogenous DMT, produced in the human brain, is involved in certain psychological and neurological states. As DMT is naturally produced in small amounts in the brains and other tissues of humans, and other mammals, some believe it plays a role in promoting the visual effects of natural dreaming, and also near-death experiences and other mystical states. A biochemical mechanism for this was proposed by the medical researcher J. C. Callaway, who suggested in 1988 that DMT might be connected with visual dream phenomena, where brain DMT levels are periodically elevated to induce visual dreaming and possibly other natural states of mind.[11]

Dr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon. Several of his test subjects reported NDE-like audio or visual hallucinations. His explanation for this was the possible lack of panic involved in the clinical setting and possible dosage differences between those administered and those encountered in actual NDE cases.

Ethical concerns do not allow for the testing of this hypothesis in humans, as the biological samples must come from the living human brain.

Conclusion: It ain't heaven if you can't see grandma naked?

Why would you even see bodies? Why would you see? Even if we assume that the mind somehow exists beyond the brain and after death, anything that you experience would by definition all be in your mind.

I attended a lecture by a guy doing research into this at Cambridge. He said he had managed to achieve the same in patients as NDE by using various tranquillisers.Pity it was about 10 years ago and I can't remember most of it. Suffice to say he speculated that this was nothing more than a state readily achievable given certain stimuli conditions or lack there of.

Probably the fact that it relates to our images of death is some sort of coincidence, but I can see how not fearing death would be a comfort to people anyway.

Would he be Dr. Karl Jansen, that I mentioned in my previous post?