#774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode
0:00:08 of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview world-class performers from all
0:00:12 different disciplines to deconstruct how they do what they do. Now, in this case, I wouldn’t
0:00:19 recommend replicating or attempting to replicate what some of the subjects’ patient’s case studies
0:00:24 have experienced, which is namely dying and then being revived in some capacity. So don’t do that.
0:00:30 But my guest today is Bruce Grayson M.D. He is the Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus of
0:00:35 Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and Director Emeritus of the Division of Perceptual
0:00:39 Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has practiced and taught psychiatry and carried
0:00:45 out research since 1995. He’s also a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association,
0:00:50 and his most recent book is After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal
0:00:56 About Life and Beyond. He has studied, documented more than a thousand near-death experiences,
0:01:03 and what made him appealing to me as a guest with this incredibly unusual terrain is that he was
0:01:09 raised with a secular, what we could call rational, materialist worldview. So with that
0:01:15 introduction, I hope you enjoy this very wide-ranging and unusual conversation. But first, just a few
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0:05:58 Dr. Grayson, thank you for making the time today. It’s very nice to meet you.
0:06:00 Thank you, Tom, to let it to be here with you today.
0:06:05 So I thought we would start more or less at the beginning in terms of chronology of your life,
0:06:11 and we’re not going to do an ABCD linear recap of your whole life because that would be an epic
0:06:19 multi-day affair. But perhaps you could tell us as a setting of the table a bit about your childhood.
0:06:26 How were you raised? What did the environment foster in terms of thinking in you frameworks for
0:06:31 understanding the world, that type of thing? Sure, Tim. Well, I was raised in a scientific,
0:06:35 non-religious household. My father was a chemist, and as far as she was concerned,
0:06:40 what you see is what you get. There’s nothing beyond the physical. So that’s how I was raised.
0:06:45 Being a scientist, he stimulated me. I desired to gather information,
0:06:49 and I often participated in some of his experiments. He had a lab set up in his basement.
0:06:55 He also taught me, though, that if you study things that we pretty much understand already,
0:06:59 you can make little inroads here and there about fine points. If you really want to make some
0:07:04 impact, easy to study things we don’t understand at all. And he gave me examples of that. So I
0:07:10 grew up with that idea that I wanted to be a scientist and discover new data and try to
0:07:18 figure out what’s going on with it. Did you have at that point an innate fear of death?
0:07:24 These seem like some questions that might be important to touch upon before we get into the
0:07:29 meat and potatoes of what we’ll dive into shortly. Was that inbuilt or experienced by you?
0:07:35 Actually, the answer is no. I didn’t have any fear of death. We certainly had family relatives
0:07:40 that died. And as far as I could tell, when you died, that’s the end. What’s to be afraid of there?
0:07:41 Lights out.
0:07:43 Lights out.
0:07:51 What attracted you to psychiatry? What was your path to psychiatry from the experiments
0:07:53 in the basement? What led you there?
0:07:58 Well, when I went through medical school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I kind of
0:08:04 thought I’d be a family doctor. But I found that when I did my psychiatry rotations,
0:08:09 there were so many more unanswered questions, so many things that we had no idea how to explain.
0:08:13 Much more though, with the brain than with the kidneys or the heart or the lungs,
0:08:18 I thought, this is where I need to go to look at what’s going on in the brain to have these
0:08:21 thoughts and ideas and feelings. So I went in that direction.
0:08:30 Were there any particular conditions that fascinated you? This is predating the NDE
0:08:34 investigations. But were there any particular conditions?
0:08:42 I found myself really drawn towards psychoses, people who had hallucinations and delusions
0:08:47 and just didn’t think the way the rest of us do. Most of the things that psychiatrists deal with
0:08:52 are common, everyday things like anxiety, depression, which everyone has to some extent.
0:08:58 But I really was fascinated by the more extreme conditions, schizophrenia and manic depressiveness.
0:09:02 People who just had totally different views of the world than I did.
0:09:12 So I suppose this is as good a time as any to segue into some of the what many would consider,
0:09:17 I think what most would consider stranger terrain, even beyond psychoses, although that’s
0:09:25 a Pandora’s box we could certainly get into quite separately. And I suppose that the stain on the
0:09:30 tie and the story surrounding that may make some sense to tell, would you mind sharing that with
0:09:35 the audience? Sure. I went through college and med at the school with this strict materialistic
0:09:41 mindset that the physical world is all there is. And in one of my first weeks as a psychiatric
0:09:47 intern, I was asked to see a patient who was in the emergency room with an apparent overdose.
0:09:52 I was in the cafeteria half of my dinner when this call came through. And being a green intern,
0:09:57 I was startled by the beeper going off. I dropped my fork and spilled some spaghetti sauce on my tie.
0:10:03 So again, being a new intern, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. So I put on a white lab coat
0:10:08 and buttoned it up so you nobody could see it. And I went down to see the patient. And she was
0:10:13 totally unconscious. I could not revive her. But there was a roommate who had brought her in,
0:10:18 who was in another room about 50 yards down the hall. So I left the patient. There was a sitter
0:10:23 there with her as it happens with all suicidal patients. And I went down to see the roommate.
0:10:28 I spent about 20 minutes talking to the roommate, trying to understand what was going on with the
0:10:33 patient. What stresses does she have? What drugs she might have taken for an overdose and so forth.
0:10:40 It was a very hot Virginia late summer night, and I was starting to sweat in that room.
0:10:44 There’s no air conditioning back in the 70s. So I unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn’t sweat so much,
0:10:48 inadvertently exposing the stain on my tie. When I finished talking to the roommate,
0:10:51 I stood up to leave and then saw that it was open. So I quickly buttoned it up again,
0:10:57 said goodbye, and sent her on her way. Then I went back to see the patient. And she was still
0:11:03 unconscious. I confirmed with the sitter who was with her that she had not awakened at all
0:11:08 during the time I was gone. She was admitted to the intensive care unit because she did have some
0:11:13 cardiac instability because of the overdose. And when I saw her the next morning, when she
0:11:20 had awakened, she was just barely awake. I went into her room. I said, so-and-so, I’m Dr. Grayson
0:11:26 from psychiatry. And she opened one eye and said, I know who you are. I’m in view from last night.
0:11:31 And that just blew me away because I knew she was asleep at best and unconscious that it would
0:11:36 worse. So I don’t know how she could have known that. So I said to her, and yeah, I’m surprised.
0:11:42 I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night. Then she opened her eye again and said,
0:11:45 not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall.
0:11:51 That made no sense to me at all. She was lying there in the gurney. The only way she could have
0:11:55 done that is if she had left her body and come down. And that made no sense. You are your body.
0:11:59 How can you leave it? So I didn’t know what to do. I thought, is she pulling my leg? What’s
0:12:04 going on here? She saw that I was confused. And then she started telling me about the conversation
0:12:10 I had with her roommate, what questions I asked, what Susan’s answers were. And then finally said,
0:12:15 and you had a red stain on your tie. That just blew me away. I didn’t know what to make of this.
0:12:19 I was really getting flustered at this point. I thought, were the nurses somehow colluding with
0:12:25 her to trick this poor intern? But no one knew about the stain except the roommate.
0:12:32 So I realized that I was having trouble keeping my composure then. But my job was to deal with
0:12:37 her mental status, not mine. So I pushed things into the back and just dealt with her about
0:12:42 what made you take the overdose? What are you thinking about suicide now and so forth.
0:12:48 I thought, well, I’ll think about this other stuff later on. So she was admitted to the psychiatric
0:12:54 unit and I was a busy intern. I didn’t have time to think about this stuff. I didn’t dare tell
0:12:59 anybody. They think I was crazy. So I pushed her on the side and just didn’t think about it for a
0:13:04 while. But it was very, very emotionally upsetting to me to think this bizarre thing happened,
0:13:10 but it can’t happen. It can’t have happened. There must be some other answer to it. It just sat
0:13:15 there in the back of my mind for about five years until I was up now on the faculty at the
0:13:21 University of Virginia. And we had a young intern join us, Raymond Moody, who wrote a book called
0:13:26 Life After Life in which he gave us the term near death experiences and described what they were.
0:13:30 I had never heard of this type of thing before. And when he described it to me,
0:13:36 I realized that’s what this patient was talking about. She was talking about in a near death
0:13:42 situation, leaving her body, seeing things accurately from another location. And I thought,
0:13:47 well, I need to understand this. So I started collecting cases and it wasn’t hard to do.
0:13:51 These are very, very common phenomena where nobody talks about them. But if you start
0:13:55 asking patients who have been close to death, they will tell you about them.
0:13:59 And here I am 50 years later still trying to understand them.
0:14:03 Did you expect it was going to last five decades or did you think this was going to be a
0:14:05 short project of collecting case studies?
0:14:11 I assumed to him that in a couple of years, I have a simple physiological explanation for this.
0:14:16 And that would make me satisfied and be the end of it. But the more I learned about them,
0:14:22 the harder they seemed to understand. So I think I’m more comfortable with not knowing all the
0:14:30 answers. So just a clarifying question on the case study of this particular woman who had overdosed,
0:14:38 attempted suicide, was that, I guess, based on all you know now, or what people would consider
0:14:45 a near death experience in NDE, or was it some close cousin? Because presumably she was not
0:14:52 intubated and flatlined at the point that you were talking to her roommate. She was
0:14:58 alive, but either comatose or sleep or otherwise cognitively offline.
0:15:00 Right. How do you think about that?
0:15:05 Well, they were measuring her heart function, her EKG, and her heart had not stopped.
0:15:11 She was having erratic arrhythmias, erratic forms of her heart beat. So I don’t know
0:15:15 how close to death she was. I mean, it’s always hard to tell how close to death someone is.
0:15:20 Whether she had a real near death experience or not. I don’t know because I didn’t
0:15:23 investigate it. At that time, I didn’t know anything about near death experience. I didn’t
0:15:28 know what questions to ask. So I just wanted to get out of my life and push out of the way.
0:15:34 So looking back on it, it’s certainly not proof of anything except how unnerving this was to me
0:15:44 emotionally to have this happen. So I suppose that as part of sort of investigating the overall
0:15:52 context for thinking about these things, it might be useful to talk about, this is I’m sure out of
0:15:57 order in terms of the questions you might usually get asked, but the NDE scale and the reason I want
0:16:02 to ask about the NDE scale that I believe you developed, maybe it was in collaboration with
0:16:09 colleagues, is the high internal consistency. And maybe you can just describe these things,
0:16:14 split half reliability, that one I’m actually not familiar with, and then test retest reliability,
0:16:18 which is seemingly a critical component of this. And the reason I bring all this up,
0:16:24 as the crow flies, doesn’t really need to fly hops, but 20 feet away, I have an encyclopedia
0:16:31 Britannicus set that was bought by Richard Feynman when he was, I believe 42. And I’m going to butcher
0:16:37 this paraphrase of a quote of his, but in effect, it is most important not to fool yourself and you’re
0:16:42 the easiest person to fool, I believe is one of his quotes, right? Hence, we have the scientific
0:16:46 method, the structured way of investigating and testing hypotheses. So, could you speak to the
0:16:55 scale? And we’re going to get to other questions around the perhaps common criticisms or forms of
0:17:00 skepticism, speaking to the biological underpinnings. But let’s talk about the scale first, because
0:17:03 I’m sure a lot of people listening would think to themselves, well, number one,
0:17:08 there have to be a lot of people who just make up stories, and they want to sell books, and they
0:17:12 do this, this, and this, not in your case. I’m just saying those who’ve experienced or claimed
0:17:19 to have experienced NDEs and seen X, Y, or Z. And then there are people who would love to misrepresent
0:17:24 and become a messiah of this, that, and the other thing. So, how do you make sure you’re not fooling
0:17:30 yourself or being fooled? Could you just perhaps describe the NDE scale or speak to that in whatever
0:17:36 way makes sense to you? Well, back in the late 1970s, after people had read Raymond Mody’s book,
0:17:43 several psychologists and physicians started getting interested in studying this phenomenon.
0:17:47 So, we assembled a meeting at the University of Virginia with about two dozen of these people,
0:17:54 the researchers, who wanted to study it and try to agree on how to do that. And it turned out that
0:17:58 everybody had a different idea about what a near-death experience was. Depending on their
0:18:05 background, some thought it was an out-of-body experience. Some thought it was a sense of
0:18:10 feeling of bliss. Some thought it was a communion with God, all sorts of different interpretations
0:18:15 people had. And they didn’t agree on what should be included as part of a near-death experience.
0:18:21 So, I surveyed a large number of researchers who had published about this and asked them to give me
0:18:26 a list of the most common features you see in a near-death experience.
0:18:35 I had some 80 features, which is ridiculous. So, I took that list and I gave the list to a bunch
0:18:41 of near-death experiencers and said, “Which ones of these do you think are really important in
0:18:46 defining a near-death experience?” And they whittled it down a bit. And I took the whittle down
0:18:50 list and gave it back to the researchers and said, “Which ones of these do you think are really
0:18:55 important ones?” And they whittled it down again, back and forth between the researchers and the
0:19:01 experiencers until I had a consistent list of 16 features that they all agreed were the important
0:19:07 parts of a near-death experience. And they included changes in your thought processes,
0:19:14 taking faster and clearer than ever before, having your past flash before you, straw feelings of
0:19:21 emotions, usually joy and bliss and a sense of being unconditionally loved by a brilliant light.
0:19:28 Not only, sometimes there’s fear also. So, we developed the scale of these 16 items. And if you
0:19:34 use that for the standard of deciding which ones of these phenomena are near-death experiences,
0:19:40 which ones are not, has been now translated into more than 20 different languages, has been used
0:19:45 in thousands of studies around the world. There have been attempts to refine it, to improve it.
0:19:49 There are things we know now that I didn’t know back then and people have tried to add things to
0:19:53 it. But basically, all the additions don’t make much of a difference. You still identify the same
0:19:58 experiences as being NDE’s with or without them. So, that’s where it was. That’s where the scale
0:20:05 came from. Can you speak to some of the elements that might help you separate out, for lack of a
0:20:11 better way to phrase it, true experiencers versus people who have false positives or who want to
0:20:17 tell a story? Well, I actually published a paper about false positives where we had people who
0:20:22 claimed to have a near-death experience but did not score very highly on that scale. And we wanted
0:20:27 to look at why they think they have near-death experiences. And you were right when you said
0:20:31 before that some people are making things up. Do they want the publicity? Do they want to be
0:20:37 held as messiahs? That’s true. But I think there was a small minority of people who claimed to have
0:20:43 near-death experiences. And they’re usually very easy to identify by what they do with the experience.
0:20:48 If you immediately go on the talk circuit and talk to Tim Ferrish and other people like that and
0:20:53 want to brag about how enlightened you are now, we say, “Well, let someone else study those. I’m
0:20:59 going to deal with those.” But the majority of people who I think were false positives are people
0:21:04 who had some less intense form of mental illness. If people are blatantly psychotic, we don’t include
0:21:09 them in the studies. But there are people who have personality disorders who seem on the surface to
0:21:16 be perfectly fine but have exaggerations of our traits that make them function differently in the
0:21:23 world. And some do have this incredible need to get confirmation of what’s happening to them.
0:21:28 They feel different and they don’t know why. So they hear about near-death experience of things
0:21:31 and think, “Maybe that’s why I’m different. Maybe I had a near-death experience.”
0:21:36 What we’re going to do in this conversation, and I’m just scratching my own edge from a curiosity
0:21:41 perspective, but we’re going to bounce all over the place. I like to frame that as a feature,
0:21:48 not a bug, but it’s going to be pretty non-linear. So I want to zoom in and out from the clinical,
0:21:55 skeptical side to hopefully, and I think we’ll get to quite a few of these, but examples that could
0:22:01 be corroborated in some fashion. And those may overlap with those that are described as out-of-body
0:22:07 experiences. They might not, and we’ll probably come back to that term as well. But could you
0:22:13 tell the story of the, tell me if this is enough of a cue, the red MGB?
0:22:20 Many people in the near-death experience say that they encountered deceased loved ones in the
0:22:26 experience. And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking, expectation. You think you’re
0:22:31 dying, and you would love to see your grandmother once more, so she comes to you, and there’s no
0:22:38 way to prove or disprove that. However, in some cases, the person having the near-death experience
0:22:44 encounters someone who had died, but nobody yet knew they had died. So that can’t be dismissed as
0:22:49 expectation and wishful thinking. This is not a new phenomenon. Plenty of the elder wrote about
0:22:52 a case like this in the first century AD, but we’re hearing about a lot of them now.
0:22:59 About 12 years ago, I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years. Jack was one
0:23:05 of those. He had an experience, actually he was in South Africa back in the 70s, and he was a young
0:23:10 technician at that time and had very serious pneumonia, and he would usually stop breathing,
0:23:15 have to be resuscitated. So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia. And he had
0:23:21 one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse, a young pretty girl about his age.
0:23:26 He flirted a lot with her where he could, and one day she told him she’s going to be taking a
0:23:32 long weekend off, and there’d be other nurses substituting for her. So he wished her well,
0:23:39 and she went off. And over the weekend while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where
0:23:44 he couldn’t breathe. He had to be resuscitated, and during that time he had a near-death experience.
0:23:51 And he told me that he was in this beautiful pastoral scene, and there out of the woods came
0:23:56 his nurse Anita walking towards him. And he was stunned because he was in this different world,
0:24:01 what’s she doing there? So he said, “What are you doing here?” And she said, “Jack,
0:24:06 you can’t stay here with me. I want you to go back, and I want you to find my parents,
0:24:10 and tell them that I love them very much, and I’m sorry I wrecked the red MGB.”
0:24:14 He didn’t know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods,
0:24:20 and then he woke up later in his hospital bed. Now he tells me that back in the 70s,
0:24:24 there were very few MGBs in South Africa, and he had never seen one.
0:24:28 When the first nurse came into his room, he started to tell her about his experience,
0:24:33 and seeing his nurse Anita, she got very upset and ran out of the room.
0:24:38 It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday,
0:24:44 and her parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB. She got very excited,
0:24:50 hopped in the car and took off for a test drive, and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly,
0:24:56 just a few hours before his near-death experience. I don’t see any way he could have known or
0:25:02 wanted or expected her to have an accident and die. It’s certainly no way he could have known
0:25:07 how she died, and yet he did. And we’ve got lots of other cases like this. They’re called
0:25:12 “Peek and Daryan” cases, based on a book that was published in the 1800s with cases like these,
0:25:18 where people encounter deceased individuals who were not known to be dead. I don’t know how to
0:25:25 explain those. Now, just to put my skeptics hat on, I could say, well, if I were Jack,
0:25:30 was it Jack? Let’s just say it’s Jack. That would make one hell of a story if there wasn’t a third
0:25:36 party to independently verify it with. Right. But there are other cases, and for people listening,
0:25:42 we’re going to come back to some of the common questions, I would say, forms of discussion
0:25:46 around these related to possible biological mechanisms or lack thereof. We’re going to come
0:25:53 back to that in a second. But there are then cases that are seemingly characteristically quite different,
0:25:59 and perhaps can be going to be curious to know if this has been done or not, but verified with
0:26:08 third parties. And one that comes to mind that I’ve heard you discuss is related to the surgeon
0:26:16 flapping like a bird. And I was hoping that you could give a description of that particular case
0:26:24 study before we get to that. How many near-death experiences have you documented, studied, or
0:26:30 otherwise read about, put into the archives yourself? How many instances would you say you
0:26:35 have encountered in one way or another? I’ve got slightly more than a thousand in my database
0:26:40 at the University of Virginia, where we have validated as much as we can that they were,
0:26:44 in fact, close to death, and this is what happened to them. I’ve talked to many more people about
0:26:47 their near-death experience that I haven’t included because I wasn’t confident that they
0:26:51 really fit the criteria for being in the study. But it’s really much more common than you might
0:26:56 think it was because people don’t talk about these things. You mentioned people wanting the
0:27:02 publicity of this. That is actually maybe more true now, but back in the 70s and 80s, nobody
0:27:08 wanted to talk about these things. If you talk about things, you got ridiculed, you got referred
0:27:14 to a psychiatrist, you were called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists
0:27:19 and religious folks. They didn’t want to hear about these things. So people did not talk about
0:27:26 these events. And what of this surgeon flapping like a bird? This was a fellow Al in his mid-50s
0:27:35 who was a van driver. He was out on his rounds one day, and he had chest pain. He had to do enough
0:27:40 to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency room. They did some evaluations and found that
0:27:46 he had four arteries to his heart that were blocked. They rushed him to the emergency room for
0:27:53 urgent quadruple bypass surgery. So he’s lying on the table, fully unconscious,
0:27:58 the drapes over and so forth. And he tells me that in the middle of the operation,
0:28:05 he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeons operating on. And he saw the chief
0:28:11 surgeon who he hadn’t met before flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated
0:28:18 for me. At that point, I laughed. So I thought, this is obviously hallucination. Doctors don’t do
0:28:22 that. But he insisted that I check with the doctor. He said, this really happened. Ask him.
0:28:26 So he told me lots of other things about his new death experience, but that’s the one that
0:28:34 I was able to verify. So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan. And he said,
0:28:41 well, yes, I did do that. I have a habit of letting my assistants start the procedure
0:28:44 while I put on my sterile gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth.
0:28:49 Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a while. Because I don’t want to risk
0:28:53 touching anything with my sterile hands now. I point things out to them with my elbows.
0:28:59 And he pointed things out just the way Al was saying he was trying to fly. I don’t know any
0:29:04 other doctor that’s done that. I’ve been a doctor for more than 50 years now. I’ve never seen anyone
0:29:10 do that. So it’s kind of an idiosyncratic thing. Is there any way Al could have seen that? Well,
0:29:14 he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart was open. I don’t think there’s any way he could
0:29:22 have seen that. And yet he did. Alright, so so many questions. And let’s start with the question of
0:29:31 how rational materialist skeptics, and that’s not meant as a criticism of those people at all,
0:29:37 might try to explain this. They might say it is a lack of oxygen or a diminishing amount of oxygen.
0:29:43 It might be a cascade of neurotransmitters that are released when A, B, or C happens.
0:29:47 It might be the introduction of drugs. I certainly know when I’ve had surgeries,
0:29:52 never had versed or God knows what else introduced to my bloodstream. So very strange things happen.
0:29:57 Although I haven’t experienced the type of thing you’re describing when I’ve been anesthetized.
0:30:02 How do you respond to those? Or how do you think about those explanations?
0:30:06 I’m sympathetic with them. I start out as a materialist skeptic.
0:30:11 After 50 years, I’m still skeptical. But I’m no longer a materialist, I think.
0:30:15 That’s it. That’s kind of a dead end when it comes to explaining near-death experiences.
0:30:18 Another phenomenon like this. When I started out, I assumed, okay, we’ll look at
0:30:26 things like heart rate, oxygen level, drugs given and so forth. And each thing we tried to study
0:30:30 turned out not to explain anything. For example, the most obvious thing was the lack of oxygen,
0:30:34 because no matter how you come close to death, that’s the last common denominator,
0:30:39 you’re going to lose oxygen to the brain. When you actually study this, what you find is that
0:30:45 people who have near-death experiences actually have a higher oxygen concentration
0:30:48 than people in similar situations who don’t have a near-death experience.
0:30:53 Could you say more about that? How do we know this? Or how do we surmise that?
0:30:57 They don’t measure what’s going on in the brain, but they measure in the peripheral blood system
0:30:58 how much oxygen is flowing through.
0:31:01 With a pulse oximeter or something like that?
0:31:01 Yes.
0:31:02 In a hospital setting.
0:31:02 Okay.
0:31:06 They also can draw blood and measure it more directly than at the pulse oximeter.
0:31:10 But what they find is that when they draw blood from people who are in a near-death situation,
0:31:15 those who have a near-death experience have a higher oxygen level than those who don’t.
0:31:19 So what that means is that lack of oxygen is not causing the experience.
0:31:25 In fact, it seems to be inhibiting it in some way. And what that mean may be that many people
0:31:30 have a near-death experience, but if you’re lacking oxygen, you can’t remember it later on.
0:31:34 And then only if you have good enough oxygen do you remember it later on.
0:31:37 So it may be related more to the memory of the experience than the experience itself.
0:31:41 Likewise, with people given drugs as they’re approaching death,
0:31:46 the more drugs you’re given, the less likely you are to report a near-death experience later.
0:31:50 Now, there are some drugs that can mimic parts of a near-death experience.
0:31:54 They’re not drugs that are given to dying patients, but things like ketamine,
0:31:57 various psychedelic drugs, people using psilocybin now.
0:32:02 And they can produce things that mimic, in some ways, some features of near-death experiences.
0:32:05 They don’t produce the whole phenomenon. They don’t, for example,
0:32:10 reliably have the blissful feelings, and they certainly don’t have the accurate
0:32:14 out-of-body perceptions that many near-death experiences have.
0:32:20 I should say that Jan Holden at the University of North Texas studied about 100 cases of people
0:32:24 who claimed to be out of their bodies and seeing things. And what she found when she
0:32:30 sought third-party corroboration was that in 92 of the 100, they were completely accurate.
0:32:34 In six cases, they were partly accurate and partly inaccurate.
0:32:41 Only one or two were completely wrong. So the vast majority were actually corroborated by other
0:32:47 people. What are some other examples of hospital setting? And part of the reason I mention that
0:32:54 specifically is that you have multiple credible witnesses in some cases, I would imagine.
0:32:58 Which makes it interesting, because you could independently, at least in theory,
0:33:06 verify, confirm various occurrences while a patient was sedated, suffering from cardiac arrest,
0:33:12 or otherwise. What are some examples that come to mind that you think are the most
0:33:18 defensible in those environments or otherwise, but where you have the ability to independently
0:33:26 confirm or have denied X, Y, or Z that happen? The ones that come to mind are the ones where
0:33:32 people see deceased individuals who no one in the way had died yet. I can give you more examples
0:33:37 of that, and they’re often corroborated by other people. And also people who claim to leave their
0:33:40 bodies and see things from an out-of-body perspective that they shouldn’t have known about.
0:33:45 And we’re not talking about seeing things like “Oh, I saw the doctor in green scrubs,
0:33:47 or I saw a dust on the lap.” Something you would expect.
0:33:51 Talk about really unusual things like “The nurse had mismatched shoelaces,”
0:33:55 you know, things that you wouldn’t expect, or “The doctor flapping his wings.”
0:33:58 We have corroboration for a lot of these cases.
0:34:03 What is the most fertile ground from a pathology perspective for near-death experiences? For
0:34:09 instance, cardiac arrest. Are cardiologists those most likely to hear reports of NDEs?
0:34:18 And then the secondary question is, does the manner of death influence the nature of the NDE
0:34:22 reported? Let me take the second one first, because these are just ones to answer.
0:34:26 The manner of death by and large does not affect whether you’re going to have any
0:34:30 a death experience or what kind you’re going to have. Now, there are some exceptions to that.
0:34:35 For example, if you are intoxicated at the time, you’re less likely to have an experience.
0:34:39 And if you do have one, it’s going to be fuzzier and harder to remember.
0:34:45 Most of the research has been done with cardiac arrest patients, and that’s done because,
0:34:50 number one, you’ve got a large population of people who we can document were close to death.
0:34:58 And number two, many of those people have no or very few complicating physiological problems
0:35:03 with them. If you study people who were on dialysis, they got many other problems going on
0:35:06 that can complicate what’s going on in the brain. But there were a lot of people who have a sudden
0:35:11 cardiac arrest who are otherwise fairly healthy, so they’re kind of a clean population to work with.
0:35:16 So for that reason, most of the research has been done with cardiac arrest patients,
0:35:21 but the vast majority of people who spontaneously come to me and say, “Let me tell you about my
0:35:27 experience,” did not have cardiac arrests. I say maybe 20 or 30% have had a cardiac arrest
0:35:33 and a heart stop. A lot of them are accidents or injuries or so forth. We have a large
0:35:36 collection of people who were injured in combat who have new death experiences.
0:35:40 People who fell from great heights, this sort of thing. People who drowned.
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0:37:06 Has the nature of reported NDEs changed over time, or does it vary widely across cultures? And the
0:37:13 reason I ask is that, for instance, the observation of the placebo effect and how it manifests has
0:37:17 changed quite a lot over time. There’s actually a great piece in Wired Magazine about this,
0:37:26 depending on culture, depending on how widespread readings and reporting about the placebo effect
0:37:32 is in terms of strengthening or decreasing the strength of placebo effect. And you see examples
0:37:39 of this also in reports of, say, in some cases, alien abduction or UFO encounters, et cetera.
0:37:44 And there’s sort of a homogenizing of the experience or reporting of it in some cases
0:37:49 that one could attribute to mass media coverage discussions on podcasts and so on.
0:37:54 So how does that apply or not apply to reports of NDEs?
0:37:59 In terms of knowledge about near-death experience, whether it affects what you’d like to say,
0:38:05 we’ve done some research looking at people who reported their near-death experiences to us
0:38:12 before Raymond Moody published his book in 1975, when nobody knew what these things were.
0:38:16 Working at the University of Virginia, I had access to the files of Ian Stevenson,
0:38:21 who’d been there for many, many years collecting unusual phenomena. And he had maybe 50 of these
0:38:26 cases. They weren’t called near-death experiences. Some were called deathbed visions. Some were
0:38:32 called out-of-body experiences. Some were called apparitions. When you look at them, they were
0:38:37 just like the near-death experiences we call today. So I collected 20 of those that we had
0:38:44 enough information about and then matched them on age, sex, religious belief, so forth, with 20
0:38:49 recent cases that I studied. We compared what phenomena they reported and what things they
0:38:54 didn’t. And what we found is that before Moody told us what a near-death experience was like,
0:38:58 when no one had heard of these things, people reported the same things they report now.
0:39:04 So knowing about a near-death experience does not affect whether you’re going to have one or report
0:39:10 it. Now, he also asked about culture, and that’s an interesting point, because most near-death
0:39:14 experiences start by saying, “Well, there aren’t any words to describe it. There aren’t any words
0:39:19 in this I can’t tell you about.” And I say, “Great, tell me about it.” They use metaphors,
0:39:23 often will say, “Well, then I saw this god-like figure.” I’m saying, “God,” because I don’t know
0:39:26 what else to call it, but it’s nothing that I was taught about in church. It was much different
0:39:33 than that with this all-loving, all-knowing entity, whatever it was. And what you hear from people
0:39:39 in different cultures is based on what cultural or religious metaphors they have available to them.
0:39:48 For example, people in Christian cultures will say that they may have seen God or Jesus. People
0:39:53 from Hindu and Buddhist countries don’t use those words. They may say they met a Yandu,
0:39:59 the messenger from Rama, or they may say they just saw this white light. Also, the tunnel,
0:40:04 you know, we have tunnels in the U.S. So when people say, “I went through this long,
0:40:09 dark, enclosed space,” they will say, “Tunnel.” Well, people in third-world countries don’t use
0:40:16 that word. They may talk about going into a well or into a cave. I interviewed one fellow who here
0:40:22 was a truck driver who said, “Then I got sucked into this long tailpipe.” So whatever the metaphor
0:40:26 comes readily to them is what they use to describe the phenomena. If you look at the
0:40:32 actual phenomena they’re reporting, it’s the same all around the world. And in fact, we can find cases
0:40:37 from back in ancient Egypt and Rome or in Greece that have the same phenomena we talk about today.
0:40:41 But the metaphors they use to describe them are different from culture to culture.
0:40:50 When you’re sitting at, say, dinner or you meet a scientist outside of your field of study
0:40:56 who’s well-intentioned, they’re not coming at you in some type of malicious or cynical way.
0:41:02 They’re genuinely curious because I think really good scientists are open-minded, but they also
0:41:08 ask for proof or they look to demonstrate proof or disprove hypotheses. What are some of the…
0:41:17 If you had to steal man against a non-materialist explanation for NDE’s, are there any,
0:41:24 if you had to pick them, compelling ways to interrogate this experience from a materialist
0:41:29 perspective? I myself as a skeptic and I tend to doubt everything I think as well as everything
0:41:34 else that you think. I’m not happy with the lack of evidence we have for some of these things.
0:41:37 I’m still looking for it. I went into this thinking there’s going to be a simple physiological
0:41:43 explanation. We haven’t found it. It’s been 50 years and we haven’t found any explanation yet.
0:41:47 That doesn’t mean we won’t. So we’re still looking. We have some technologies now that can
0:41:53 study the brain in ways we didn’t have before. We have very sophisticated neuroimaging. We have
0:41:59 much better computer algorithms for analyzing EEGs and we have a wider range of psychedelic
0:42:05 drugs to use to try to replicate parts of the experience in some ways. There’s a lot going on
0:42:13 in physiological research now that was not available 50 years ago and we may someday have
0:42:18 a physiological answer to explain near-death experiences. But let me give you two questions.
0:42:24 One is that if you find something that is always correlated with the near-death experience,
0:42:29 brain wave activity or a chemical, that doesn’t mean it’s causing the experience.
0:42:36 For example, right now, people are listening to us and there’s electrical activity in
0:42:41 parts of their brain that process hearing. It always happens when they’re hearing us.
0:42:45 This part of the brain always lights up. That doesn’t mean that electrical activity
0:42:50 is causing our voices. It’s just a reflection of it. So when you find these physiological
0:42:55 incompetence of a near-death experience, you’re finding perhaps the mechanism for it,
0:43:01 but not the cause of it. The second question was that even though I’m a skeptic and part of
0:43:06 me still wishes we could find a physiological explanation, I’m still looking. I need to remember
0:43:13 that this is what has been called promissory materialism. We don’t have the answer yet,
0:43:18 but we will someday. That’s a perfectly fine philosophical position. It is not a scientific
0:43:22 position because it can never be disproven. You can always say, “Well, we haven’t got it yet,
0:43:27 but we’ll get it in 50 years. We’ll get it in 100 years.” So you can never disprove it. So it’s not
0:43:31 scientific. So saying that that’s a scientific way of dealing with things, promissory materialism
0:43:35 is not the way to go. We need to deal with what we have right now and how we interpret what we
0:43:40 have right now. And I think most people who study near-death experiences, whether they’re
0:43:47 spiritualists or materialists or neurophysiologists or philosophers, they agree on the phenomena.
0:43:52 They don’t agree on the interpretation of it, of what’s causing it and what its ultimate meaning is.
0:43:58 I think that’s fine. That’s not where I am. I’m not a philosopher. I’m interested in the
0:44:04 ultimate cause or the meaning of it. I’m actually a clinician. So what interests me most about
0:44:10 near-death experiences is how they affect people’s lives and what people do with the experience.
0:44:16 That’s the same regardless of what’s causing it, whether it’s a hallucination or a spiritual
0:44:21 experience. It affects people in the same way. That’s, I think, what interests me most.
0:44:29 We’ll probably come back to this, but I’ll just maybe as a teaser for folks. Please fact-check
0:44:35 me if I get any of this wrong. But it seems like some of the common after-effects for those who
0:44:43 experience NDEs are increased altruism, a feeling of connectedness. If they had a profession involving
0:44:48 some degree of violence, for instance, not necessarily ill-intentioned, but law enforcement.
0:44:55 If they were in the mafia, I know there’s a case of this, specifically. They’re no longer capable
0:45:01 or willing to perform those jobs. Those who have attempted suicide and have the experience
0:45:08 of an NDA counter-intuitively are less suicidal after the fact. So I’ll provide those as teasers,
0:45:12 but just to scratch my own itch, I’m going to pick up on a thread from
0:45:20 quite a few minutes ago where I was asking about possible differences in reported NDEs.
0:45:25 Do children and adults report the same phenomenon, obviously, using different metaphor
0:45:33 for trying to convey the ineffable, perhaps? Do they differ in any notable way?
0:45:38 They don’t really differ. The one difference is that children don’t have the elaborate life
0:45:46 review that most adults do. They also tend to have as many deceased relatives that they might
0:45:52 encounter. They have some. But you’re more likely to hear from children encountering a deceased pet,
0:45:58 a dog or a cat. But by and large, people who have studied children’s near-death experiences
0:46:03 find the same phenomenon. They often have difficulty, even more than adults do, in putting
0:46:09 into words. So they will often ask the children to draw what happened, and they produce artwork
0:46:14 to explain the near-death experience. You’re mentioning new tooling, new equipment,
0:46:20 and technological capabilities that we have, whether that be fMRI or some type of advanced
0:46:28 brain imaging, the use of computers, algorithms, certainly AI at some point, if not already,
0:46:38 to analyze EEG, KG data, and so on. How might you use something like brain imaging if you could
0:46:43 design a study? Because presumably, if someone’s about to flatline, you’re not going to slide them
0:46:49 into an fMRI machine because the clinicians would not be able to get to them. So would that mean
0:46:57 you would be putting someone into, say, an fMRI and then doing your best to simulate an NDE with
0:47:03 exogenous compounds such as psychedelics or otherwise? How might you use the brain imaging?
0:47:09 Well, people have studied brain imaging with psychedelic drugs. We used to think that
0:47:14 psychedelics work by stimulating the brain to hallucinate, and what these studies have shown
0:47:21 is that the psychedelic trips that are associated with more elaborate mystical experiences
0:47:26 are associated with less brain activity and less coordination among different parts of the brain,
0:47:33 as if the brain is getting pushed out of the way by these drugs, allowing whatever it is to
0:47:40 come in, all this mystical experience. People have tried to look at brain function during a
0:47:46 cardiac arrest. It is not easy. Several papers have been published in leading neuroscience journals,
0:47:52 claiming they have done this, but they have not done that. For example, once they was published of
0:47:58 people who were comatose and on life support, and they said it was happening in the brain
0:48:03 when they stopped the artificial ventilation. And what they found was that there was a change in the
0:48:09 brain function when they did that. It was reported as an increase in gamma activity. It was actually
0:48:16 not. All the brain waves were decreased when they stopped the ventilation, but the gamma waves were
0:48:21 decreased less than the alpha, beta, and delta. So it looked like it was more, relatively speaking,
0:48:27 of the gamma. It was actually less than it was before. But these people were not dead. They also
0:48:34 reported heart function during this time. And when they were reporting these changes in brain waves,
0:48:38 the people’s hearts were still beating. They were still having a normal sinus rhythm, normal,
0:48:43 normal heartbeat. When the heart did stop, they didn’t continue doing the EEG. So you couldn’t
0:48:48 continue to see what’s going on in the brain after they actually died. But they reported it as
0:48:54 electromagnetic activity in the brain in dying patients. Well, they weren’t dying. The artificial
0:48:59 aspiration was stopped, but their hearts were still beating. Similarly, there were other studies
0:49:04 like this where they claimed to be reporting on dying patients. They really were not dying
0:49:08 patients. They were people who were approaching death. There was a study done in Michigan where
0:49:15 they sacrificed rats and measured what’s going on in the brains when they do that. And they reported
0:49:21 a 30-second burst of activity after their hearts stopped. That’s what they said they found. It
0:49:28 actually wasn’t a burst. If you look at the traces they gave you, it was a slight increase,
0:49:32 but far less than the brains were showing before they sacrificed them. So it was a tiny
0:49:38 blip. It wasn’t a surge, like they said it was. Furthermore, if they anesthetized the rats,
0:49:43 they didn’t show this at all. Obviously, people have NDE’s Neurotethic Experiences under deep
0:49:48 anesthesia. So that’s not the same phenomena. There were several other things that weren’t
0:49:53 untypical of Neurotethic Experiences. For example, every single one of the rats they tested
0:49:58 had this burst of activity. But if you ask people who come close to death, only about 10 or 20%
0:50:02 have Neurotethic Experiences. And probably most significant, they didn’t bother to interview
0:50:10 the rats to see what they were experiencing. I will mention one researcher who has actually
0:50:17 measured EEG’s brainwaves during cardiac arrest. And this is Sam Parnia at NYU. But when you’re
0:50:24 persisting somebody, you press on the heart, you compress the heart, heart compressions for a while,
0:50:28 and then you stop and give them a break to see whether they spontaneously breathe or not. And
0:50:33 then you continue it again. Or they’re shocking them with electricity. And then you stop and see
0:50:38 what’s happened. And he measured the brainwaves during that period when they stopped, thinking,
0:50:43 this is going to tell us what’s going on. Well, I’m not sure it is because it’s only for a few
0:50:48 seconds that you’re stopping. And the body is still suffering from the shock of the electricity
0:50:53 or the chest compressions. Furthermore, he reported some increase in several different
0:50:59 wavelengths of brain activity in about half the patients. He also reported that there were some
0:51:03 six patients who reported Neurotethic Experiences. And he said, well, obviously the
0:51:09 increased brain activity is causing the Neurotethic Experiences. But if you look at his data,
0:51:13 the six who had the Neurotethic Experiences did not have the increase in brainwaves.
0:51:18 And those who had the Neurotethic Increasing Brainwaves did not report Neurotethic Experiences.
0:51:20 So I’m not sure if we learned anything from that.
0:51:27 All right. So I’m going to ask you to make some sort of theoretical
0:51:33 leaps to answer the next few questions. But first, because I have to ask this,
0:51:40 when people see or claim to have seen deceased relatives, how, and I don’t know if you have
0:51:45 this level of granularity in the reports, how old are those deceased relatives? Are they
0:51:51 last they saw them? Because presumably some of these people who died would have had a slow decline
0:51:58 with neurodegenerative disease and so on. So do they appear much younger? Is there any
0:52:04 pattern in the reports whatsoever in terms of the age that these people seem to be
0:52:10 when they are observed? There was a pattern. But again, I need to follow back on the fact that
0:52:14 most people say there aren’t any words to describe it. So when you ask them to describe what they
0:52:20 saw, you’re describing what the brain interpreted of what they saw. And most people say that they
0:52:25 saw the deceased loved one at the prime with their lives when they were young and healthy,
0:52:32 not when they were dying. I have found some people say I didn’t really see a human figure.
0:52:35 I just saw my grandmother. Well, how did you know it was your grandmother?
0:52:41 I felt her vibrations. I knew it was her. It was had her essence. So they may have just seen this
0:52:46 blob of light and knew that by the way it felt to them, this is grandma. There’s no way of
0:52:51 validating this type of thing. It’s just their impression. All right, let me ask a sort of
0:52:56 tactical, practical question and then we’ll get into the stranger stuff. Sure. If you had,
0:52:59 let’s say there’s someone listening and they’re like, okay, I’m not sure I want my name on it,
0:53:08 but as an anonymous donor, I’m willing to give Dr. Grayson some sum of money or maybe some secret
0:53:13 agent at the NIH is like, you know what, I know it’ll liberate some funds. Right.
0:53:19 What studies would you like to design and see done? I mean, they don’t need to be specifically
0:53:24 related to NDEs, but if they are, I suppose that’d be more germane to the conversation.
0:53:29 Any types of studies that you would love to see performed related to this?
0:53:35 I can answer that from my personal perspective, which is not what I’d like to see the field do.
0:53:39 Sure. What I’d like to see the field do is what they’re doing right now,
0:53:43 looking at all of the different possibilities, looking at cross-cultural comparisons,
0:53:46 looking at neurophysiological changes, all the types of things they’re doing now,
0:53:51 looking at other phenomena that seem to mimic parts of the NDE like psychedelic drugs,
0:53:54 but that’s not where I am right now. I’m nearing the end of my career.
0:54:03 I’m falling back on, what does it all mean? For me, what that means is it has it affect people’s
0:54:11 lives. I would like to see more research into the practical applications of new-death experiences.
0:54:17 We’ve done some studies now with new-death experiences that say they needed help
0:54:23 readjusting to a “normal life” after a new-death experience, and we’ve surveyed them about
0:54:28 what did they need help with? What was so disturbing about the experience or its after-effects?
0:54:34 What type of help did you seek? What type of help did you receive? What type of
0:54:41 practitioner did you go to? Is a chiodrist, a doctor, a spiritual healer, a pastoral counselor?
0:54:44 And what types of help were actually helpful and which ones were not helpful?
0:54:48 And we’re finding some interesting findings from that. We’re also surveying physicians
0:54:54 about their attitudes towards new-death experiences, and we posted the question,
0:54:58 “If a patient comes to you and says, ‘I had this experience that I want to tell you about,’
0:55:03 would you feel comfortable talking with them about it, and what are the barriers you feel
0:55:10 to open up and talking about them?” And we had a list of some 25 possible barriers we thought might be
0:55:15 things they said, and we were very pleased to find that almost none of them said,
0:55:20 “I don’t think it’s worth talking about. It’s not important.” Or, “Is just a neurological
0:55:24 artifact? Does it mean anything?” Or, “It’s just a type of psychosis.”
0:55:31 By far, the most common response doctors gave was, “The barrier is I don’t know enough about
0:55:36 the experience to talk to patients about it.” And the second most common was, “I don’t have time
0:55:40 to talk about this with my patients. I’m just too busy.” Now, those are both things that we can
0:55:45 correct. We can certainly give more training to physicians, and we can restructure the schedule
0:55:52 so they do have time to talk to patients. What are the most, if any, reliable ways to simulate
0:56:00 an NDE or NDE-like experience? And it makes me think back to a movie. It may not age well,
0:56:06 but I enjoyed it at the time with Kiefer Sutherland 2000. No, it was prior to that 1990
0:56:11 something called Flatliners. I believe there were medical students who would take turns putting
0:56:18 themselves right to a brief period of death, and then they get into this arms race of competing
0:56:22 with one another and pushing it further and further and further. But my understanding,
0:56:28 based on some of what I’ve read, you do have familiarity with some of the psychedelic-related
0:56:35 science is that these NDE’s seem to produce more what have been described as out-of-body
0:56:41 experiences, perhaps more, I don’t want to say reliably, more frequently than psychedelic experiences.
0:56:46 But are there any, we’ll come back to that point, but are there any ways to simulate it in such a
0:56:53 way to make it more studiable, even if it’s not the exact phenomenon since I’m sure the IRB
0:56:58 would have a tough time accepting temporarily killing patients or subjects that are recruited
0:57:04 for a study? Is there anything that approximates it or any thoughts on how we might do that?
0:57:10 Keeping in mind, and this is an imperfect example, but long ago, decades ago, psychedelics reviewed
0:57:17 as psychotomimetics so they could be used as a tool for effectively eliciting a psychotic
0:57:22 episode so it could be better studied. Now, that ends up not being quite right. But how would you
0:57:29 think about approximating an NDE? I don’t think there’s a good way. I think the tool we have that
0:57:36 comes closest to our certain psychedelic drugs in a very supportive environment. I don’t think
0:57:41 people just taking drugs on their own can necessarily replicate a new death experience,
0:57:46 but in a supportive environment in the lab with low lighting and good music and someone there to
0:57:52 help you with it, you can replicate some of the features of a new death experience, not all of
0:57:57 them. And you tend not to have all the after effects. And I think that’s understandable
0:58:01 because if you have an experience under drugs, you can say, “Oh, that’s just the drugs. It wasn’t
0:58:06 real.” Whereas if it happens spontaneously, it’s hard to dismiss. One of the issues with the drugs
0:58:12 is that we can find out what’s going on in the brain when people are given these drugs.
0:58:16 And that’s fine. But then you make the leap to saying, “Well, this is the same
0:58:21 change in the brain that occurs during a new death experience.” That’s an assumption. We don’t
0:58:27 have the evidence for that yet. It tells us how we might look for places in the brain,
0:58:31 where we might look, and what types of changes. But that work hasn’t been done yet,
0:58:38 so it’s all speculative. And certainly, the drug-induced experiences are not identical to
0:58:43 new death experiences. Many new death experiences have tried drugs afterwards to try to replicate
0:58:49 the experience. And they universally tell me it’s not the same thing. One person told me,
0:58:55 “When I was on psilocybin, I saw heaven. When I was in my new death experience, I was in heaven.”
0:59:00 That was what he explained it. But they had not to have the same after effects. And one question
0:59:07 of that I will say is that the recent work done at Johns Hopkins with psilocybin has found a marked
0:59:14 decrease in fear of death after a short experience with psilocybin. And it doesn’t follow, but at
0:59:18 least a year after the experience, they still have that decreased fear of death and it’s very
0:59:25 encouraging. Yeah, it’s surprisingly durable. It directly correlated with the strength of the
0:59:33 mystical experience, which is measured using an assessment much like your scale for NDEs.
0:59:42 What other characteristics seem to be hard to replicate with drugs or
0:59:49 less frequent in occurrence? And perhaps this is an opportunity to speak to what exactly
0:59:55 an out-of-body experience is, as you would define it. And I think we already gave perhaps
0:59:59 an example of this with the wings flapping. But can you say more about that?
1:00:04 It’s tricky to define an out-of-body experience. There’s a large body of evidence
1:00:10 looking at people who have their temporal lobe or their brains stimulate electrically.
1:00:13 And it is worth claiming they produce out-of-body experiences. They do not.
1:00:17 They may produce a sense of not being aware of your body anymore,
1:00:21 but they don’t produce a sense of leaving your body and being able to turn around and look at
1:00:25 your body and seeing it from an out-of-body perspective. They often say that with the
1:00:30 stimulation, you can see a double of yourself, but you’re seeing it from inside the body. You’re
1:00:36 not outside the body. And the WC is static. It’s not moving around. Whereas people who have real
1:00:41 out-of-body experiences talk about moving around the room, won’t get distant places.
1:00:47 People who have out-of-body experiences sometimes can report things accurately. They can be
1:00:51 corroborated later on. That doesn’t happen with stimulation of the temporal lobe.
1:00:56 So they’ll have differences between these artifacts that are produced by temporal lobe
1:01:01 stimulation and real out-of-body experiences. When you read some of the papers that have been
1:01:07 published about temporal lobe stimulation, they say things like, “Well, my legs were getting
1:01:11 shorter. I felt like I was falling off the gurney.” And they’re called these out-of-body
1:01:16 experiences. They’re not. They’re somatic hallucinations, but they’re not out-of-body
1:01:21 experiences. You can get out-of-body experiences with other types of mystical experience and with
1:01:29 psychedelic drugs. Whether the same or not is kind of open to question right now. We don’t have
1:01:35 examples of people having drug-induced out-of-body experiences having accurate perceptions of what’s
1:01:41 going on around them. Whereas you do with near-death experiences. Now, that may be because we haven’t
1:01:45 looked deep enough yet and we may find them. But this one, we don’t have that.
1:01:51 I’ll share a strange experience and then we’ll get into the, as promised, to the listeners,
1:01:58 some of the stranger stuff. But not that this is just a plain vanilla walk through the DSM.
1:02:03 So, I have a fair amount of flight time with different psychedelic compounds. And the
1:02:12 one time, I would say, I consistently experienced what you would describe or might describe as an
1:02:20 out-of-body experience was in using, and I highly discourage anyone to use this, a terpenoid
1:02:25 called salvanorinae, which is found in salvia divinorum, otherwise known as diviner sage,
1:02:30 used by the Mazatecs in Mexico for centuries, probably millennia. And part of the reason I
1:02:37 don’t recommend it, well, first of all, you can go on YouTube and just search salvia freakout and
1:02:41 you’ll get lots of video footage for why you should probably steer clear of it. But it’s a
1:02:50 as I recall a Kappa opioid agonist. And that is consuming an agonist of the Kappa opioid receptors
1:02:56 typically is described as acutely dysphoric. So, what is dysphoria? Well, it’s the opposite
1:03:00 of euphoria. It’s horrible, terrible, terrifying experience for most people. So, I don’t recommend
1:03:05 using it. But these experiences are notable for two reasons. Number one, I had no expectancy,
1:03:14 no, I didn’t know anyone who had consumed a purified salvanorinae. And secondly, I was
1:03:21 observed by clinicians. And in one case was inside an fMRI machine. So, I could not see anything
1:03:28 outside of the machine. But in both cases, the experience was effectively a flattened,
1:03:34 abstract experience, devoid of time, space, a sense of self. Nonetheless, there was an observer,
1:03:41 but incredibly bizarre experience even compared to, say, a psilocybin or an NDMT or something else.
1:03:50 And in each instance, I had two experiences at some point, mid abstraction, I effectively
1:03:56 had the view of a CCTV camera in the upper corner of each room. And I was able to see
1:04:02 what all the scientists were doing, all the clinicians, and was able to corroborate those
1:04:07 after the fact. Now, in the first instance, I was not in an fMRI machine. So, people might say,
1:04:11 well, you could have had one eye open and you could have been watching. Now, I would challenge
1:04:17 anyone in the depth of this experience to attempt to report anything visual with their eyes open.
1:04:24 But the fact that I was literally strapped down inside an fMRI machine would preclude
1:04:31 any ability, as we currently understand it, to use my eyes to see anything. And that raises
1:04:37 some questions for me, because I do have a reasonably broad palette of experience with
1:04:43 different molecules. But that was two for two. And I haven’t experienced that in anything else.
1:04:48 This is slowly meandering into the stranger territory. So, it seems to be the case that
1:04:57 certainly we can occasion very strange experiences with the ingestion or inhalation of different
1:05:05 compounds. So, the brain has some role as a mediator of experience in the world.
1:05:17 But then you seem to document in your experience these phenomena that seem to reflect a mind beyond
1:05:21 brain for lack of a better descriptor. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
1:05:28 How do you begin to even think about this? And is the brain, I suppose we could make an argument
1:05:35 for this on a whole lot of levels, a reducing valve, as Aldous Huxley might put it, that is
1:05:46 filtering for information that is optimized for survival and procreation. And when you do something
1:05:51 that, I suppose, opens the aperture of that reducing valve, then suddenly you have these
1:05:59 experiences. Is the brain acting like a receiver of some type? Now, the argument against that would
1:06:06 be, well, if you damage the brain, you can observe all of these effects on perception and
1:06:12 cognition and so on. How at this point, given all of your documentation, discussions with colleagues
1:06:19 in and outside of this area of expertise, think about mind versus brain. With the understanding
1:06:24 that there’s a lot more we don’t know than what we know. But how do you think about this?
1:06:27 I was taught in college in medical school that the mind is what the brain does.
1:06:32 And all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are all created by the brain.
1:06:38 And I cannot believe that anymore. I’ve seen people whose brains were either offline or
1:06:43 severely impaired telling me they had the most elaborate experience they’ve ever had.
1:06:48 So I’m inclined to think that the mind is something else and the brain kind of filters it,
1:06:55 as you said. This is not a new idea. 2000 years ago, the Abakortes said this, that the brain is a
1:07:01 messenger of the mind. And this is not surprising because we know that the brain has these filters.
1:07:06 It’s the default boat network and the thermo cortical network. If people are listening to us now,
1:07:09 they don’t really care what we look like. They want to hear what we’re saying.
1:07:17 So their thermo cortical circuit tamps down the visual input and focuses on the auditory input.
1:07:22 And likewise, we’re not hearing the train go by outside or the traffic outside because you’re
1:07:26 focusing on this. And that’s your brain doing that. It’s filtering out what stimuli you’re
1:07:30 going to pay attention to. And it starts even beyond the brain that our sense organs.
1:07:36 You don’t see all the visual light that’s out there. You just see this small portion that is in
1:07:41 our visual spectrum. We don’t see infrared and ultraviolet. And likewise, we only hear
1:07:46 a small fraction of the frequencies of sound available. We don’t hear the sounds that dogs
1:07:52 and bats hear or elephants and dolphins. So our brain and the associated sensory systems that we
1:07:57 have with that filters out things that are not important to our survival. Now we think about
1:08:02 the things that happen in near-death experience, seeing deceased loved ones leaving the body.
1:08:06 That’s not essential for survival. You can get food and shelter in a mate and avoid predators
1:08:11 without all that. So it makes sense that the brain would normally filter that stuff out
1:08:16 and not pay attention to it. And if in a near-death experience or similar experiences,
1:08:23 the brain is shutting down selectively so that that filtering mechanism is put on hold
1:08:28 or being weakened, then you have access to this other consciousness. Now it raises the question
1:08:33 of what is this other consciousness? Where is it? In a way, that’s a bogus question because
1:08:39 if it’s a non-physical entity, how can I have a where? It can’t be any place. But I’m not a
1:08:45 philosopher. I’m an empiricist. And when see people say to me, as many do, if you have this
1:08:53 non-physical mind, how does it interact with the physical brain? I have no idea. On the other hand,
1:08:59 if you take a materialistic perspective and say, how does the brain, the chemical and electrical
1:09:07 changes in the brain create an abstract thought? We have no idea about that either. So whether you’re
1:09:13 an empiricist, a materialist or not, we can’t explain how thoughts arise and how they get
1:09:19 processed to us. What we do know is that all our experiences are filtered to us through the brain.
1:09:23 You can have the most elaborate, mystical experience in the world. But to tell me about it,
1:09:29 you have to be back in your body with words created by your brain and filtered through concepts that
1:09:38 your brain puts on it. So obviously, the brain is evolved in perceiving and processing and relating
1:09:41 the near-death experience. You can’t get around that. It doesn’t mean it’s creating it.
1:09:47 And also, I just wanted to add, and I’ve heard you discuss this, just because something is currently
1:09:53 unexplainable does not mean it is fundamentally unexplainable. If we look back at the history of
1:09:59 science, and certainly, this will continue to be the case, we would laugh at some of the
1:10:05 presuppositions of 200 years ago. And there’s no reason to think that 100, 200 years from now,
1:10:10 certainly with the rate of technological change, maybe five, 10 years from now,
1:10:16 almost with certainty, we will look back at many of the things we took to be true now and laugh at
1:10:23 them similarly. And that in science, everything is provisional in a sense, right? It is until proven
1:10:29 otherwise, which it almost inevitably is. At least there’s something that’s added to it. It would
1:10:37 seem to me that studying this field, documenting these cases, doing your best to make sense
1:10:46 of these things, is not without career cost. It would seem to me, and certainly this was the case
1:10:51 with psychedelics, say, a few decades ago, to try to scientifically study psychedelics, putting
1:10:57 aside all of the nightmares of logistics with dealing with the FDA and handling schedule one
1:11:06 compounds and so on, to take that path was viewed as career suicide. And I don’t know if that’s a
1:11:14 fair label to apply to your field of study with respect to NDE’s, but what have the cost been,
1:11:22 if any, and why have you persisted despite those costs? It’s less of a problem now than it was
1:11:29 back in the 1980s. When no one knew about these things, most academic centers assumed this was
1:11:36 just a few crazy patients telling the stories and they weren’t worth investigating. And I was told
1:11:42 in one university that if I continued to study these things, I would not get tenure. So I ended
1:11:46 up leaving that place and go to a different university before I came up for tenure. I wasn’t
1:11:51 willing to risk that. But I did now get tenure at two subsequent universities where it’s become more
1:11:56 acceptable to study unusual phenomena as long as you’re doing it in a scientifically respectable
1:12:01 way and publishing your material in mainstream medical journals. So I think it’s less of an
1:12:08 issue now, but you still see a lot of, I wouldn’t say it’s professional suicide, but certainly
1:12:14 professional barriers being raised to people who study these things. I think why people do it,
1:12:18 partly because they’re intellectually curious about it. There’s a challenge here. I don’t
1:12:24 understand it and I want to. And probably more importantly for me is these experiences have
1:12:29 profound effects on the people who have them. As a psychiatrist, I want to understand that
1:12:34 and help them deal with those effects if they need help with it. So I think it’s irresponsible to
1:12:40 just ignore it and say it doesn’t exist. Let’s talk about some of your other interests,
1:12:46 research interests. And I have a note here, genomic study of extraordinary twin communication.
1:12:52 Could you elaborate on this? This actually was not my project originally. The Israeli psychologist
1:12:58 Borough-Fishman contacted me and said, “I’ve got this great study I’d like to do. And I found a
1:13:03 twin genomic database in England where they’ve got 15,000 pairs of twins and they have the entire
1:13:11 genomic platform all laid out. So we can survey these twins they have, but they’ve had some type
1:13:16 of communication when they’re at distant locations. You call it telepathy, you can call it extracensory,
1:13:20 you can call it coincidental, but they have reliable communication with each other when
1:13:26 they’re far away from each other. Can we find out from the genomic analysis what genes are
1:13:30 associated with disability?” And I thought, “That sounds interesting.” It wasn’t something I would
1:13:36 pick, but sure, I came to try that. So we did apply for a grant and we got the approval of the group
1:13:41 in England. The study hasn’t actually started yet, but it makes me wonder about the genetics that goes
1:13:47 into having a new death experience. Now we’ve been studying what’s going on in the brain,
1:13:51 what’s going on in the heart, and lungs. We have to scratch the surface of what’s going on in your
1:13:57 genes that they make you more likely to have a new death experience or a certain type of experience.
1:14:03 Now we know that when their hearts stop, between 10 and 20 percent of people will have a new death
1:14:06 experience. And we haven’t found any way of predicting who’s going to have one or not,
1:14:11 but maybe the answer is in the genes. So I think it’s worth doing a genetic study of people who
1:14:19 have new death experiences and those who don’t. I’ve had a handful of guests on this show who have
1:14:27 identical twins and they have all maybe off the record, I think in some cases on the record
1:14:34 in conversation, shared with me stories that certainly defy any current conventional explanation
1:14:39 of communication with their twins. And it’s 100 percent at this point. And I’ve only had a handful
1:14:47 of individuals with identical twins, but in several cases, these are scientists, these are
1:14:54 people who are otherwise as kind of rational materialists as you could be, but they are not
1:14:58 going to refute their own direct experience, continue direct experience with their identical
1:15:02 twin. It does raise a lot of questions. And if we wanted to get really sci-fi, you think about
1:15:08 genetic engineering, you think of CRISPR, you think of gene therapies. If we were to, in some
1:15:15 capacity, determine which code is responsible, which light switches are responsible, would it
1:15:20 be possible to increase someone’s ability to express those capabilities in the same way that we might
1:15:30 say toy with myostatin inhibition or something like that to catalyze increased muscle growth
1:15:37 in the sense that we might see in bully whippets or in Belgian blue cattle, as an example. It certainly
1:15:42 seems like a study worth doing. Why not? I mean, worst case, you’d find no correlation.
1:15:44 There’s a lot of ifs in that question. If we could do this, if we could do that.
1:15:45 Lots of ifs.
1:15:51 Lots of ifs. And frankly, I’m not encouraged by what I’ve seen so far with genetic engineering.
1:15:56 When we can make tomatoes with a thick skin that can travel better across country,
1:16:00 but they don’t have the flavor that a normal tomato does. So you’re always paying a price
1:16:04 when you genetically modify something. You may gain something you’re looking for,
1:16:09 but you may lose something else. When you try messing with human genes, you don’t know what
1:16:14 you’re going to come up with. Oh, for sure. How much funding are you seeking for this particular
1:16:20 twin communication study, the genomics study? That’s a small one, just $50,000 or so.
1:16:27 And the role of science, that is very inexpensive. What other studies outside of NDEs would you like
1:16:33 to see done? Are there any that are kind of shovel-ready, so to speak, or close to shovel-ready?
1:16:38 We’ve mentioned people who claim to leave their bodies and see things accurately from an adipotic
1:16:44 perspective. I would like to get a more controlled version of that. And people who tried that,
1:16:49 Sampornia NYU has tried it a couple of times. I’ve done it try it once. There have been a total
1:16:54 of six published studies of attempts to do this. And none of them have been successful. Usually,
1:16:59 you’ll study things for a year or two and find no near-death experiences in your sample, or people
1:17:04 who have an NDE but didn’t describe seeing things from an adipotic perspective. So there really
1:17:09 hasn’t been any tests of this yet. A determined skeptic could say, “Well, that shows that it
1:17:13 doesn’t really happen.” And that people who spontaneously have this experience and tell you
1:17:18 about it are misinterpreting what’s happened to them or just making it up. And I would desperately
1:17:23 like to find some objective way of measuring this, but we haven’t had that yet. So it would be nice to
1:17:29 try to hone down that and then try to find a good way of studying this in a mess. The stuff
1:17:34 that Sampornia has done, I was participating in one of his studies that had 2,000 patients in it
1:17:39 from a variety of hospitals. And we found nothing in that room. So you need a huge study to do this.
1:17:44 This was related to out-of-body experiences specifically. Yeah.
1:17:50 Yeah. I think there’s a lot to be learned from the neurophysiological research that’s going on now.
1:17:54 There’s a very active group at the University of Liege in Belgium that’s making headway with this.
1:17:58 There are other people around the world who are studying it. There’s a group at University College
1:18:02 in London, but I think we’re a long way from having an answer yet. We’re just starting this
1:18:07 type of research. And it may be certainly not in my lifetime before we find a good answer.
1:18:18 Is there a study design that you think would be a more intelligent way or a better way to approach
1:18:25 controlled study or assessment of out-of-body experiences? And part of the reason I ask is that
1:18:34 if you look back at, for instance, I could give a famous example, the amazing Randy who had this
1:18:39 outstanding prize. I think it was a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars for anyone
1:18:45 who could demonstrate psi abilities or extrasensory perception or fill in the blank under controlled
1:18:52 conditions. And to my knowledge, no one ever claimed that prize. Now, at the same time, if you
1:18:59 look at a documentary like, for instance, I believe it’s called Project NIMM, which looked at the,
1:19:03 in retrospect, ill-advised idea to try to raise a chimpanzee as you would a human child.
1:19:12 The chimpanzee demonstrated all sorts of learning behaviors and so on that could not be replicated
1:19:17 in the lab simply because the chimpanzee would shut down, would not demonstrate those behaviors
1:19:24 in a laboratory setting. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. But there were challenges in studying
1:19:31 it in a controlled environment. What is your best explanation? Again, understanding that
1:19:37 for a lot of people, if you can’t verify it under double blind, placebo-controlled conditions
1:19:42 or the equivalent in this setting, then it doesn’t exist. With extreme claims comes the
1:19:48 requirement of extreme levels of proof. But how would you, based on everything that you’ve
1:19:54 studied, colleagues you’ve spoken with, explain why it is so difficult to
1:19:58 produce or replicate or study these things in controlled settings? Why is that?
1:20:04 It’s essentially a spontaneous experience that does not happen under controlled conditions.
1:20:08 When you put someone in a lab, they’re not the same as they were when they’re out on the street.
1:20:14 And we’ve learned this with sleep studies. When you bring someone into the lab to have them to
1:20:18 measure their brain waves during sleep, it takes their day or two usually to have them adapt to
1:20:22 the situation before you can actually do it. You get something that’s at least a bit like
1:20:26 what their normal sleep is. So I think you have to take that into account that people have these
1:20:32 experiences out in the wild, so to speak. And it’s hard to tame it without clamping down on the
1:20:36 controls to their brain that would shut it off, maybe. So I don’t know whether you can do that,
1:20:40 whether you can have a really controlled search engine. We have this experience that you can
1:20:46 certainly do it with mimics that mimic part of the experience. For example, with drugs or with
1:20:52 brain stimulation that can mimic a part of it. And then, by implication, develop metaphors what
1:20:57 might be going on in the brain during your death experience. It’s not the experience itself.
1:21:04 What are some of the, for you personally, open questions that you would love to
1:21:13 see answered for lights out onto the next adventure after death if there is a next adventure?
1:21:20 What are some of the open questions in this field or in other fields that for you,
1:21:24 you would most like to see answered? Are there any burning questions that come to mind?
1:21:29 Well, the big question of questions is how their mind and brain interact. And
1:21:35 that certainly, you get some hints of that from a near-death experience. But there are other phenomena
1:21:42 that also address the mind and brain seeming to separate. And one of these is the term “lucidity
1:21:48 phenomenon” where people who have had dementia for a while and cannot communicate or recognize family
1:21:54 suddenly become completely lucid again and carry on coherent conversations
1:21:59 and express appropriate emotions, and then they die. Usually within minutes or hours,
1:22:05 and we don’t have any explanation for this. I have a few friends, not just one, few friends who’ve
1:22:11 directly seen observe this phenomenon. And I do not have any way to explain that. If you believe
1:22:17 the brain as filter mechanism, that could play a role in this. When the brain is shutting down
1:22:24 in the last hours before death, it releases this filter that allows the consciousness to
1:22:31 fully flourish. Now, a big problem with that is the person is still able to speak and communicate.
1:22:36 So obviously, parts of the brain are still functioning just fine. So if you have this
1:22:41 experience of heightened lucidity at death, how do you let people know that unless your brain is
1:22:48 still functioning? It is a dilemma because we don’t have a medical explanation for how someone
1:22:53 with a debilitating disease that is irreversible, like Alzheimer’s disease, can suddenly regain
1:22:58 function again. There are speculative theories about this, but none of them really make a whole
1:23:03 lot of sense and none of them have been corroborated by evidence. Now, there are other facets of some
1:23:10 of the reported NDEs, past life review, as an example. You might also have, as I understand
1:23:17 from listening to a number of your presentations, recall or re-experiencing an event through the
1:23:23 perspective of someone other than yourself. When you consider all of these reports,
1:23:32 how is that affected, if at all, how you think about time? And I ask that it might seem
1:23:38 credibly broad, but I think most of us tend to think of time as this fundamental constant. But
1:23:44 if you talk to the Carlo Revelli’s of the world from pronouncing his name correctly, if you start
1:23:53 really digging under the hood, it’s difficult to automatically take that as a static known fact.
1:24:00 And I’m wondering how you think about time, if these reports and your research and experiences
1:24:06 have changed that at all. Most new-geth experiences say there was no time
1:24:12 in this other realm, either that time stopped or just time ceased to exist.
1:24:17 And when they say that, I reflect on what they’ve told me about the experience. I say, “Well,
1:24:22 let you tell me that this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” But that
1:24:27 applies all in your time. So how can there be no time if you’ve got things happening in sequence?
1:24:33 And they just shrug and say, “Well, when I tell you about it now, in this body, in this world,
1:24:39 it’s a paradox.” Over there, it wasn’t. Everything was happening all at once, and there wasn’t any
1:24:44 linear flow. That’s just the way it is. I can understand that as an abstract concept. I can’t
1:24:50 relate to it in my real life. I don’t know what that means to not have time, but so much of our
1:24:55 life is controlled by it. What we think of as the linear passage of time. This is the pre-one
1:25:02 this time thing, when you have some of these non-ordinary experiences. Let me ask about another,
1:25:07 perhaps, non-ordinary experience. This is something I found in the footnotes of a footnote of a
1:25:15 footnote. You may have some ability to explain this. Auditory hallucinations after NDEs. I only
1:25:21 read the very top abstract in a PDF, so I did not dig into it. But what does this refer to?
1:25:27 A psychiatrist in Colorado, Mitch Leaster, and I did this study. We surveyed a large sample of
1:25:32 near-death experiences about what seemed to be hearing voices long after the near-death experience,
1:25:38 and we also looked at schizophrenics who were hearing voices and compared the experience
1:25:43 of those two groups. They were quite different. The near-death experiences who claimed to still
1:25:50 be hearing voices almost universally said these were helpful guiding voices. They enjoyed hearing
1:25:55 them, and they found them making their lives richer. They gave them some guidance, and they
1:26:00 were reassuring to them. On the other hand, these schizophrenics almost universally said
1:26:07 these are terrifying hallucinations. I wish I didn’t have them. They made my life much harder.
1:26:11 I don’t like them at all. I wish that we just go away. It’s not experienced in the same way.
1:26:18 Is it the same phenomenon? I don’t know. Among the people who reported the auditory hallucinations,
1:26:27 was there any degree of overlap in terms of structural brain damage or otherwise,
1:26:31 in the indie group? We don’t have the measures of brain function to answer that.
1:26:38 To know, “I could keep going for many, many, many hours.” Let me ask you this,
1:26:44 just as a way of branching out a little bit. In terms of researchers who, in your mind,
1:26:53 demonstrate a compelling combination of both open-mindedness but rigorous skepticism,
1:27:01 who would you not ask you to pick among favorites, but who are a few names that come to mind?
1:27:06 Sam Parnia at NYU. How do you spell his last name?
1:27:13 The A-R-N-I-A. Got it. There are retired physicians who are still involved in this field.
1:27:21 Peter Fennec in England and Tim Van Lommel in the Netherlands. There’s a brilliant psychologist
1:27:27 in New Zealand, Natasha Tassel-Madamua, who’s doing a lot of interesting research in this area.
1:27:33 She is part Maori, and she’s doing work with cross-cultural comparison of Maori versus English
1:27:38 near-death experiences. We’re also looking at a lot of the after-effects. There’s that large group
1:27:41 at the age that I mentioned to you before that’s doing a lot of research into this.
1:27:48 This is Belgium. Yeah. Many of them are quite confirmed materialists. That’s fine. They’re
1:27:53 still doing good research. The head of that lab, though, Steve Loris, is much more open-minded.
1:27:56 He still is a materialist, but he’s more open-minded about what these things might mean.
1:28:00 And he’s certainly compassionate about how it affects the people who have these,
1:28:03 which is probably more important to me than what they think is causing it.
1:28:07 So there are a number of people around the world who are doing good research with this area.
1:28:14 You have written a number of books and co-authored, co-edited others.
1:28:20 One of them is Irreducible Mind Toward the Psychology for the 21st Century. What does
1:28:28 the Irreducible Mind refer to? That basically means a mind that’s not reducible to chemical
1:28:33 processes, electrical processes in the brain. It’s a mind that can be independent of the brain.
1:28:39 And that book, without ever mentioning anything paranormal or parapsychological,
1:28:46 goes through a series of phenomena in everyday life that point to mind and brain not being the
1:28:51 same thing. And it does include near-death experiences and other experiences near-death.
1:28:57 It includes exceptional genius. It includes psychosomatic phenomena, a variety of things
1:29:03 that have occurred to perfectly normal people over the centuries. It had been well-documented and
1:29:08 almost seemed to be compatible with either the brain creates all our thoughts and feelings.
1:29:13 Which of your books, whether solely authored, co-authored, or co-edited,
1:29:18 would you suggest people start with if they wanted to dive deeper?
1:29:25 I would suggest my most recent book, After, because that’s really geared towards the average person,
1:29:31 the layman. And it’s written in language that we’re talking about right now. I tried to minimize
1:29:36 jargon, whereas the other books I’ve written are primarily for academicians, which are much
1:29:40 harder to read, much denser, still excellent books, but not for the average person.
1:29:45 And that is after subtitle, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and
1:29:51 beyond. All right, so that’s where people should start. Well, Dr. Grayson, this has been a very
1:29:57 wide-ranging conversation. Is there anything that you would like to discuss, mention,
1:30:00 or request you’d like to make in my audience, something you’d like to point them to,
1:30:05 anything at all that I’d like to say before we start to wind to a close?
1:30:09 I think that things I want people to know about near-death experiences are, number one,
1:30:14 that they’re very common. About 5% of the general population, or one every 20 people,
1:30:19 has had a near-death experience. And secondly, that they are not associated,
1:30:25 anyway, with mental illness. People who are perfectly normal have these NDEs in abnormal
1:30:31 situations, but can happen to anybody. And they’re that they lead to sometimes profound,
1:30:37 long-lasting after-effects, both positive and negative, that never seem to go away over decades.
1:30:42 People can find all things Bruce Grayson. It would seem at brucegrayson.com,
1:30:50 if I’m not mistaken. So brucegrayson, g-r-e-y-s-o-n.com. And you have quite a few books to your credit,
1:30:54 but the one to start with would be after subtitle, a doctor explores what near-death
1:30:59 experiences reveal about life and beyond. Is there anything else?
1:31:02 I think that’s it. You covered it pretty well, Tim.
1:31:06 All right. Well, thank you very much for the time. And for everybody listening,
1:31:12 we will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes as per usual at timdoplog/podcast.
1:31:17 And you just search Bruce, probably, and he’ll pop right up. And as always, until next time,
1:31:22 be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself.
1:31:28 And thank you for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take
1:31:33 off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
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1:31:43 subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to
1:31:49 sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to
1:31:54 share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s
1:31:59 kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading,
1:32:05 albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me
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1:32:21 it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,
1:32:26 something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday,
1:32:32 type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
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