Near death experience question

[Anonymous]

I have a question about the afterlife. Those who have died and have come back report some similar feelings and experiences.

If the memories and experiences they have while they died are true, is it all just happening in their brains and bodies? Or is it that they think their spirit went to a different dimension and then came back into their body?

[Anonymous]

Someone smarter and with more expertise than I have will surely come along and explain it better, but I remember watching a documentary once where a neuroscientist explained that as the brain shuts down, the last area that goes is the part where light is processed and so the experience of being in a tunnel and “moving toward the light” is to be expected.

[Anonymous]

It’s just chemicals in the brain. But it’s fascinating - there’s a story you can google called “lamp story” where a guy had a head injury and in the couple minutes he was unconscious, lived an entire life where he met a woman, got married, had kids. After he woke back up, he actually had to grieve the wife and kids he lost for years, because in his brain he had actually lived that life.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes that flash of white is just the airbag deploying

[Anonymous]

I'm not religious, but I think I did travel and came back. I think so because I felt the physical sensation of my body (pain), and it went away as I travelled into the light. As I came, back, this throbbing (my mother squeezing my hand) brought me back. Of course, it could be easily explained by my mind thinking those experiences and making them true in my brain but it felt so real. I don't have any proof that I flew away (I opened my clenched fist and found a golden feather!) except I know what I saw and experienced

[Anonymous]

It's just brain cells dying. No mystery or mystical experience.

[Anonymous]

They left their body and came back.

[Anonymous]

There is no such thing as a NDE. There is basically a surge of hormones when someone nears death, that causes the brain to go completely wild. Think of it as the body's biological shutdown mechanism, to make dying less painful.

It's all hormonal and in the brain.

[Anonymous]

Long before the whole NDE dialogue began, I knew someone who had a near death experience. She was a grownup talking to my mom. I was the kid listening in on the conversation. When NDE became a topic of discussion a decade or so later, I was struck how this person's account very closely aligned with huge numbers of other individuals with NDE.

Who knows what these people are actually experiencing. Nobody knows.

[Anonymous]

It fascinates me how CERTAIN people can be that there’s NO SUCH THING as near death experience, afterlife, etc. Then those same people mock others for being CERTAIN those things DO exist. 🙄 The truth is, it’s an unknowable fact until the time comes we die and found out for sure which way it is. I’m learning toward there’s something more out there, this isn’t the end.

[Anonymous]

For all of the people citing neurologists, our understanding of the process of death is actually limited. (They are starting to realize that people continue to hear and understand after being declared dead, for instance.) So, anyone who is definitive doesn’t know…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It fascinates me how CERTAIN people can be that there’s NO SUCH THING as near death experience, afterlife, etc. Then those same people mock others for being CERTAIN those things DO exist. 🙄 The truth is, it’s an unknowable fact until the time comes we die and found out for sure which way it is. I’m learning toward there’s something more out there, this isn’t the end.

I don't know what happens after we die. But still, NDE's aren't a thing. It's biologically explainable.

[Anonymous]

From what I understand, and I've done a lot of reading on this- science doesn't know how to explain some of these episodes. I'm a believer. I'll find a link re: a neurologist who says there is no scientific explanation at all.

[Anonymous]

I post this below, but I would say at the same time just because science doesn't have an explanation for something doesn't mean it doesn't exist still applies. In other words, maybe there's a scientific explanation but we got it wrong.

But like I said, there is way too much that I have read to not think there is much, much more to what we currently understand.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6170087/

Given the extraordinary memories I had of my time deep in coma, the emerging picture of the entire experience proved impossible to explain as a simple brain-based phenomenon (i.e., as a hallucination, dream state, drug effect, or confabulation). Our modern understanding of the role of the neocortex—the outer surface, or human part, of our brains—holds that it is necessary for the detailed construction of consciousness, but the extreme severity of my meningo-encephalitis rules out the participation of my neocortex in generating memories during those seven days. Thanks to its preferential destruction of the neocortex, severe meningo-encephalitis is, essentially, a perfect model for human death. That fact would nominate the disease for widespread study in brain and consciousness research, save for one problem: it almost always results in death. Almost no one returns to tell the tale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It fascinates me how CERTAIN people can be that there’s NO SUCH THING as near death experience, afterlife, etc. Then those same people mock others for being CERTAIN those things DO exist. 🙄 The truth is, it’s an unknowable fact until the time comes we die and found out for sure which way it is. I’m learning toward there’s something more out there, this isn’t the end.

I don't know what happens after we die. But still, NDE's aren't a thing. It's biologically explainable.

But just because it's biologically explanable (and see my above link; it's not always) does that mean nothing else is possibe to you? I find it really strange that people are convinced the only logic that can apply is scientific logic, especially when we are talking about other paradigms. People can be very close-minded and uncurious and uncreative. Sometimes I wonder about how much exposure to different ways of thinking these people have had in their lives to be so convinced what they were taught and what is the apparent fact MUST be true. (And yes I know that is the rationale behind conspiracy theories. etc. - but the rationale still holds if you ask me).

I don't mean that as a personal insult, but I find it truly flummoxing when people think that you are dumb for example if you believe in God, and equiate Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. People who have had close relatives die often report weird things happening -- and yes, one explanation is that they are looking for comfort and "signs' where they don't exist, but another is that 1) you can't really study these things in a lab and people just relaly, really love the scientific method and so nothing you can't prove can be and 2) maybe something really does exist out there?