How many seconds can you fight in near death

There are reports of religious images appearing at times in NDEs, but they are not limited to one single religion, and they don't always appear. Sometimes Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed appear, but usually they don't, Laureys said.

Nevertheless, an NDE can make a convert of a skeptic. Eben Alexander is a well-known case of an agnostic scientist who became convinced of the existence of the spiritual.

He has often shared his story in television interviews with journalists and expressed his views in lectures and in books and video presentations, which he sells on his website.

Alexander, a neurosurgeon, according to his autobiography, has described his experience in the same terms as the Belgian researchers: "hyper-reality," "too real to be real. In the beginning, he tried to interpret his experience as a brain function, he wrote on his website, but he became increasingly spiritual.

He has come to the conclusion that people are reincarnated. Alexander says his experience could not have been a hallucination, because the parts of the brain necessary to produce his experiences were basically dead when he had them.

Laureys strongly disagrees. Lying in your hospital bed, you have become a true believer, and you are happier for it. But your brain never died, the doctor tells you. You were in a coma. Perhaps your heart stopped for a while; maybe it didn't. But that's not even necessary to have an out-of-body experience.

Mapping the brain, exploring its secrets. The American Psychological Association concurs. It defines near-death experiences as "profound psychological events with transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring to individuals close to death or in situations of intense physical or emotional danger. In the case of coma patients, the brain producing the NDE may be functioning minimally, but it is still alive, Laureys hypothesized. He said one can stimulate certain parts of the brain to produce single elements of the experience.

It's a vivid hallucination, Laureys' report surmises. Though the results of his studies were marked and consistent, the Belgian research team has tested only a small number of patients so far. And it has not been able to scan brain images of patients having NDEs to get hard data on the hypothesis of the physiological nature of the experience.

Laureys' research alone is not enough. He wants to see more scientists get involved. As a doctor, he feels it's the compassionate thing for them to do. Too many people have the experience for serious researchers to ignore it, he said, and a lot of people are afraid that their consciousness will linger long after they pass away, making them witnesses to whatever happens to their bodies.

There are more than enough spiritual models for NDEs, he said -- and superstitious ones. It's high time for more hard science, Laureys said. A high percentage of his coma patients report having had NDEs, and he believes many of us go through these "afterlife" experiences when we die. Laureys doesn't want to speculate on the existence of heaven or hell, but he does say that only a small minority of near-death experiences are horrifying. Most of them are pleasant and uplifting. From his accounts, it sounds like more people go to "heaven" than to "hell.

The results suggest that the NDEs were recalled with greater vividness and detail than either real or imagined situations were. Greyson, one of the two researchers on the study mentioned earlier, who also published The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences in Noticing patterns in what people would share about their near-death stories, these researchers turned a phenomenon once derided as confabulation or dismissed as feverish hallucination deathbed visions of yore into a field of empirical study.

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences. They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.

That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.

The challenge, then, is to explain NDEs within a natural framework. As a longtime student of the mind-body problem, I care about NDEs because they constitute a rare variety of human consciousness and because of the remarkable fact that an event lasting well under an hour in objective time leaves a permanent transformation in its wake, a Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus—no more fear of death, a detachment from material possessions and an orientation toward the greater good.

Or, as in the case of Hemingway, an obsession with risk and death. Similar mystical experiences are commonly reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin the active ingredient in magic mushrooms , LSD, DMT aka the Spirit Molecule , and 5-MeO-DMT aka the God Molecule , consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices.

It must be remembered that NDEs have been with us at all times in all cultures and in all people, young and old, devout and skeptical think, for instance, of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead , which describes the mind before and after death. To those raised in religious traditions, Christian or otherwise, the most obvious explanation is that they were granted a vision of heaven or hell, of what awaits them in the hereafter. Interestingly, NDEs are no more likely to occur in devout believers than in secular or nonpracticing subjects.

Personal narratives drawn from the historical record furnish intensely vivid accounts of NDEs that can be as instructive as any dry, clinical case report, if not more so. In , for instance, British admiral Sir Francis Beaufort after whom the Beaufort wind scale is named almost drowned, an event he recalled in this fashion:. A calm feeling of the most perfect tranquility succeeded the most tumultuous sensation….

Nor was I in any bodily pain. On the contrary, my sensations were now of rather a pleasurable cast Though the senses were thus deadened, not so the mind; its activity seemed to be invigorated in a ratio which defies all description; for thought rose after thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable, by anyone who has been himself in a similar situation.

The course of these thoughts I can even now in a great measure retrace: the event that had just taken place Thus, traveling backwards, every incident of my past life seemed to me to glance across my recollection in retrograde procession Another instance was recorded in , when Scottish surgeon Sir Alexander Ogston discoverer of Staphylococcus succumbed to a bout of typhoid fever. He described what happened this way:.

I lay, as it seemed, in a constant stupor which excluded the existence of any hopes or fears. Mind and body seemed to be dual, and to some extent separate. I was conscious of the body as an inert tumbled mass near a door; it belonged to me, but it was not I. I was conscious that my mental self used regularly to leave the body I was then drawn rapidly back to it, joined it with disgust, and it became I, and was fed, spoken to, and cared for And though I knew that death was hovering about, having no thought of religion nor dread of the end, and roamed on beneath the murky skies apathetic and contented until something again disturbed the body where it lay, when I was drawn back to it afresh.

More recently, British writer Susan Blackmore received a report from a woman from Cyprus who had an emergency gastrectomy in On the fourth day following that operation I went into shock and became unconscious for several hours Although thought to be unconscious, I remembered, for years afterwards, the entire, detailed conversation that passed between the surgeon and anaesthetist present I was lying above my own body, totally free of pain, and looking down at my own self with compassion for the agony I could see on the face; I was floating peacefully.

I was going elsewhere, floating towards a dark, but not frightening, curtain-like area Then I felt total peace. Suddenly it all changed—I was slammed back into my body again, very much aware of the agony again.

The underlying neurological sequence of events in a near-death experience is difficult to determine with any precision because of the dizzying variety of ways in which the brain can be damaged. Furthermore, NDEs do not strike when the individual is lying inside a magnetic scanner or has his or her scalp covered by a net of electrodes. Ultimately, we know very little about what happens when someone is dying.

The best we can do is describe it. My research is focused on trying to demystify the dying process, understand the basic biology and develop models predicting the last weeks and days of life. In time, we may also get to research the role endorphins play in the last hours of life and actually get to answer your question definitively. It is possible that we experience our most profound moment in the murky hinterland between life and death.

Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfilment. It seeks to answer our readers' nagging questions about life, love, death and the Universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

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By Seamus Coyle 6th February From The Conversation. The moment of passing appears to bring an expression of relief to the deceased. But what is going on in our minds? In a new collaborative series with The Conversation, we answer that question.

The poet Dylan Thomas had some interesting things to say about death, not least in one of his most famous poems : And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. You might also like: The woman who forced us to look death in the face What if we knew when and how we'd die? Why contemplating death changes how you think The actual moment of death is tricky to decipher. If pain has not really been an issue for a person earlier, it is unusual for it to become a problem during the dying process.