Has anyone read this article?

[ryuuko]

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-life-after-death.htm

I apologize if this has been posted before. Does anyone have any thoughts, comments, or experiences relating to this information?

[bonthan]

Gah! I don't know what to say man. But you still have to regard the fact that what these scientists came up with is just speculation. Neither of them have experienced astral traveling, there is no concrete way to prove or to disprove astral projection other than to experience it yourself, and if you have not, whatever explanation you have for astral projection is merely a speculation.

What they came up with was a possible explanation of the phenomenon, which does not equal truth.

[CFTraveler]

Let's just say that this is true- that the brainstem is still 'on' while the higher brain is dead- the person goes into REM, creates a 'dream' (or hypnagogic hallucination') and then the person is resucitated, and their higher brain is 'turned on' again.  The question is:

If you experience this 'hallucination' while your higher brain is dead, how come you remember it?  Doesn't your 'higher' brain have to be 'on' to receive this information? Provided that somehow the brainstem can 'retain' memories while the 'higher' brain is turned 'on' again.  Either that, or they have to admit memories are not stored in the brain at all, and the higher brain somehow was able to access these memories after revived from 'somewhere'.
Another aspect that they're completely ignoring, is that a good portion of people that have NDEs and report the out-of body-state that happens before and after the tunnel-of light experience, have access to information that was happening at the time they were dead- sometimes they know what the guy in the other room was saying, and can remember what the doctor said, what they were doing, and how people were reacting at the time they were dead.  Like I said before, sometimes in other rooms, like the waiting room, or someone else's bedroom.
So how do they explain that with this theory?
This only explains how the brain is involved in the NDE, it doesn't explain the content of it at all.

[zareste]

Why does this still come up? People who follow this stuff say 'atheism is correct because the brain creates hallucinations using certain chemicals', but if you ever look up WHY they believe these chemicals produce hallucinations, it boils down to 'because the chemicals cause people to see things that defy atheism'

[CFTraveler]

Why does this still come up?

Because there are new people every day....

[ryuuko]

I'm sorry, guys (esp. zareste).  I'm not trying to challenge anyone or disprove anything. I was just a little disconcerted by the article, as I tend to get if someone/something tells me that something I put effort into is wrong, or at least misunderstood. I was only looking for advice on how to take this sort of information, or if anyone could give good reason as to why the article might be a little less than valid (which CFTraveler did; thank you).

[peto lux lucis]

It all boils down to belief.  Believe whatever feels right to you based on your experience and then no other person can really say "yay" or "nay".

[CFTraveler]

I find that a lot of the articles that try to explain "away" certain phenomena rely on studies that don't exactly show this.  That's why I prefer to look at the study itself, and ignore what the writer says about it.
In the past I've read about three or four articles, in which the reporter claimed that this or that study 'proved' this or that, but when you actually read the study itself, not only didn't, but if you read what the scientists performed the studies said about them, come to a very different conclusion.

I remember about three years ago there was a study about pattern recognition and dopamine.  The study showed  a correlation between people that had more or less receptors- the ones that were more intuitive had more receptors and the ones that were less intuitive had less.  They did the study by flashing patterns with a computer.  They found (the scientists) that the most intuitive people detected patterns the study people hadn't put in on purpose (but upon inspection found that were indeed there), and the reporter (not the scientist) that wrote the article prefaced it with the statement that people that had too many dopamine receptors saw patterns where there were none and labeled them paranoid or something like that- something that was patently incorrect (because the patterns were there, it's just that the scientists themselves hadn't done them on purpose) when the scientist themselves had completely different conclusions.

Another was the provoked OBE- what the cattleprod proved was that autoscopy could be provoked by stimulating the temporal brain.  The thing is that scientists already knew this, since this is a side effect of temporal lobe epilepsy- but the reporters (again) lumped autoscopy as an OBE (although the experience is vastly different from an OBE) and declared they could induce OBE.  Once again, if you went to the 'small print' you could see that the scientists themselves didn't come to that conclusion, because they were aware that not enough of the study participants had experienced OBE to say that.  Once again, the writer struck again.

So yes, studies and experiments are good- it shows that someone is indeed trying to explore the phenomenon- the problem is with the reporters who already have an agenda, and will write titles and prefaces that are biased towards whatever their editors (or themselves) want to convey.  You know, like the tabloids.

So, read the study itself, ignore what the article says about it.