Quasithanatology (NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES) with Bruce Greyson
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's peanut butter.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

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Oh, hello. It's that sentence that your cat just typed out that you're decoding for supernatural clues. Allie Ward, here we are. Here we all are before we're dead. If you're listening, you're on this side of the known universe. But come take a walk with me to the border where I'll ask a guy who studies the brink of death.

a bunch of not very smart questions about just what the fuck is going on here. And somehow, perhaps it'll put you in a better mood. He's not just some guy though. He's one of the world's experts on this. He's a scientist and a psychiatrist who's been on the medical faculty at two teaching hospitals, even as the clinical chief of psychiatry. He's a University of Virginia professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences. And the American Psychiatry Association gave him their highest honor of being a distinguished lecturer

Life Fellow. His work has spanned over 45 years of research, over 100 published papers with titles such as Western Scientific Approaches to Near-Death Experiences, The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences, Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality After Death? and the banger, Dissociation in People Who Have Near-Death Experiences, Out of Their Bodies or Out of Their Minds? Oh, we'll get to that stuff.

So for 27 years, this guy served as the editor of the only journal about near-death research. He also authored a book about all this called After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. And there's a new documentary out about near-death experiences. And he declined to be in it.

because it wasn't fact-based enough, which tells you something. He's legit. So he's an esteemed physician with a lot of clout. He is dubious of flim-flam, and he's here to tell us what he knows about biting the dust. What studies are bogus? What commonalities do we share? And what's it got to do with street drugs?

We'll get right to it. But first, thank you to everyone who submits questions ahead of time at patreon.com slash ologies, where you can join for a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone ordering merch for the holidays at ologiesmerch.com. Thanks to everyone leaving reviews. I read them all, including this piping hot one from EDR1720, who wrote, this podcast is so good. Want to know how good? I wore my AirPods into the shower and had to get new ones. Totally worth it. EDR1720, I am sorry. Everyone else, please pause this before you go on a water slide.

And if you've ever left me a review, I've read it with my own eyes. I've appreciated it. Edward Collins, it was worth booting up the iPad to leave it. Thank you. Okay, let's get into it. Quasi-thanatology. This term is an amalgam of Latin and Greek to mean the study of almost death. And hey, this field doesn't have the best ology, but we're going to take what we can get. Content-wise, we'll be covering rigorous research at the forefront of these happenings. I was so nervous to

to talk to this man. And not because we'd be dancing around the topic of our own mortality. I was more immediately concerned with just wasting his time. And what if I asked if ghosts are naked? Also, would this episode bum me out? You'd be surprised.

it doesn't. And there are some of my biggest secrets I've ever told woven throughout it. So we cover brain activity during death, near-death events versus near-death experiences, bright lights, tunnel visions, the statistics on near-death experiences, neurotransmitters, party drugs, religion versus spirituality, accounts from patients, out-of-body experiments, time dilation, the Swiss Alps, deathbed visions,

accidental morgue visits, what matters most in life, and more. And if this sounds like a spooktober episode, you might be surprised by the end of this. So get cozy, enjoy the sunshine and breeze or fresh snow or cozy blankets and less crossover with psychiatrist and quasi-thanatologist, sure, Dr. Bruce Grayson. ♪

I'm just really excited to talk to you. I imagine a lot of people who get to chat with you are pretty excited about it as well. Thanks. Thanks. I enjoy these. Yeah. Okay. I am Bruce Grayson. And pronouns are he, him? Yes. Yeah. So you have been the editor of journals. You have written so many papers on this. You have a book called After. You're known as kind of the expert of near-death experiences. And I'm curious, what's your experience with this?

Which is, it seems like a weighty title. Do you tell people what you study when you're at a dinner party or on an airplane? Or are you just like, I'm a scientist, don't worry about it? When I'm at a dinner party, I just tell people I'm a doctor. Yeah. Have you gotten into long conversations before you learned that hack? Not so much. I get more strange looks. Really? How about in the industry, among other doctors, doctors,

Among other doctors, there's no problem now. I'm very open with them. I think they need to be educated, so I tell them everything I know about it.

Has there been a learning curve over the years as we've gotten better at imaging and better at brain studies? You've been doing this for so long. Have you seen tides kind of shift in terms of how people see the validity of it? Yes, we've seen tremendous shifts. When we first started doing this research back in the 1970s, 1980s, we would talk at large medical conferences and there would be a polite silence in the audience. Nobody knew what we were talking about. Nobody thought these things really existed.

And now when we talk to the same medical audiences, it's rare that doctors don't stand up in the audience and say, "Let me tell you about my near-death experience."

I think the change is less to the research, unfortunately, than to the public acceptance of near-death experiences. They're in movies. They're in television shows. Even Homer Simpson has had a near-death experience now. Homer! Homer, wake up! You're alive! You're alive! I'm alive! I'm alive! So everyone knows about them.

Do you think that the internet has done anything to kind of democratize people's voices in that way? Do you think it was harder to get these kind of experiences in print versus people just one-off self-publishing on blogs and stuff? I think the internet has done a lot, both positive and negative. But in general, I think it has spread the word more so that people are less reluctant to talk about their own near-death experiences now. How dead do you have to be? For how long do you have to be

You always think a near-death experience, you've got to be out for maybe a few minutes, but have you found trends or data? Well, that's a great question, Allie. Most of the research that's been done with near-death experiences has been with people who have a cardiac arrest, that is, their hearts have stopped. Mm-hmm.

So we know they have had that occasion. However, before the last 20, 30 years, people were just collecting cases. And most of those were not people for whom we had physiological measures. For example, the first collection of cases was published in 1892 by a Swiss geologist in the publication of the yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club.

And he himself had had a near-death experience when he fell while climbing in the Alps. And he fell 60 feet and had a very elaborate near-death experience. But as far as we know, his heart never stopped. He was so impressed by that that he started asking fellow climbers and quickly found 30 other cases and published these.

So you don't have to be that close to death and you have the same type of experience. For more on this, see the paper, The Experience of Dying by Falls, written by one Albert Heim, that Swiss geologist who in 1872 was leading a pack of climbers on the descent when a gust of wind took his hat, he tried to catch it and ate shit 66 feet down a craggy mountain. Spoiler alert, he survived, which is the whole point of this. And he wrote later,

let us apply ourselves rather to the scientific study of a horrible event. The subject may thereby lose a portion of its ghastliness. He writes, sometimes to be sure, a fall is dreadful for the survivors, but it is something quite different for the victim itself. So the subjective perceptions of those who fall to their deaths are,

He writes,

And he says it may be briefly characterized in the following way. No grief was felt, nor was there paralyzing fright. There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance and sense of surety. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded, he writes.

In many cases, there followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past. And finally, the person falling often heard beautiful music. And he writes of his own experience. As I fell in 1872, I merely heard the blows that injured my head and back. I felt no pain. For those who are unconscious, death can involve no more changing. It is absolute rust.

He ends,

So yes, Swiss geologist, one of the first scientists to turn his work toward collecting accounts of near-death experiences, Albert Heim. Also, his wife Marie was the first female physician in Switzerland, and Albert loved Swiss alpine dogs, but they were about to die out, so he headed efforts to bring back some breeding programs. So next time you see a Bernese mountain dog, say, hey Albert, glad you didn't die on that mountain that day, even if it would have been pretty chill. Your work wasn't yet done here, as evidenced by this giant cute dog.

But why was it so chill? Do they find that any of it is related to

brain chemicals for anxiety, like just the, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit response? Or how do you even quantify that? Yeah, that's difficult to quantify because there are a lot of chemicals that are released in the brain under stress. And we unfortunately don't have the ability to measure them when someone is in that near-death situation. Furthermore, they're usually just released for a short period of time, maybe a second or two, and we don't even know where in their brain to look for it.

So it's virtually impossible with our technology today to measure those things. People have tried with non-human animals, with sacrificing rats and measuring what's going on in the brains at that time. But I'm not sure how transferable that information is to human beings. Is there a correlation between this field of study and consciousness in animals?

Actually, I've just finished writing a paper about this because it's something that's not been studied to a great degree. We have a lot of anecdotes about animals who had a near-death event, for example, being hit by a car or having their heart stop with a severe illness. And then they had a dramatic personality change, much like you see in humans when they have a near-death experience. And we also have a lot of

accounts of human near-death experiences in which people claim that while they were unconscious, they were greeted by deceased pets. So those are suggestions that some type of consciousness in animals does survive bodily death, but we don't have any good evidence for that. We don't really have the ability to interview these animals and ask them what they experienced. I mean, unless you get a pet psychic, but I think those are dicey at best. You have questions. I have the answers.

Can you explain to me what is a near-death experience? Where does it start and where does it end in terms of the criteria? Yeah, well, it starts when someone is coming close to death. And usually that's a very terrifying and painful experience. And the first thing that happens is people are overwhelmed by a feeling of tremendous peace and well-being.

which is not what you would expect when someone is coming close to death. They find that their thinking is faster and clearer than usual, which again, you wouldn't expect when their brains are shutting down. They have very strong emotions, usually very positive emotions. They have unusual sensations like a sense of leaving the physical body. They have a sense of being in some other realm or dimension where they may encounter something

entities which they consider either deceased loved ones or deities. They may review their entire lives and they will say they went through their entire life, not only saw it, but relived it in vivid detail. And that only takes a matter of seconds or so to go through decades of life. And at some point they come to a border or point of no return, and then they can't go past that and still return to life. And they either are sent back against their will

or they're given a choice and they choose to come back for a certain purpose. Of course, the ones that don't choose don't get interviewed by us. You ghosted me. Right, exactly. Did you have to research historically what evidence we have for the last several millennia about near-death experiences? Did you have to work with archaeologists at all?

Not with archaeologists, but we have lots of accounts from Greek and Roman historians with accounts of near-death experiences that are very similar to the ones we hear today. Likewise, we have accounts from cultures all around the world, from Stone Age cultures around the world, and from Hindu-Buddhist cultures, Muslim cultures. And they have the same types of experiences that we hear.

find in Western societies, in the US and in Western Europe. So in his recent book, After, Bruce explains his own stance, and he writes, I'm a scientist comfortable dealing with this world evidence, but I'm out of my element dealing with religious doctrines, and having been raised in a scientific household without a strong sense of the divine, I was uncomfortable.

with the overwhelming numbers of experiencers who described meeting some kind of godlike being, not just because it was not part of my personal background, but also because it seemed like something that couldn't be verified scientifically. So going way back, this guy, Dr. Raymond Moody, who first coined the term near-death experiences, found phylogenetic

15 elements that seemed really consistent across people and patients of all these different religious and spiritual and cultural backgrounds. And they are feelings of peace, hearing unusual noises, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of the body, meeting spiritual beings, encountering a bright light or a being of light, panoramic life review, a realm where all knowledge exists,

cities of light, a realm of bewildered spirits, supernatural rescue, a border or a limit, and coming back into the body. So Moody described all these in 1975 as being like, if you're going to have a near-death experience, this is probably going to happen. And after coming to, he found that a lot of folks had the same after effects.

One of them being frustrated trying to relate the experience to other people, but also having this deeper appreciation of life, being less afraid of death, and sometimes freaking people out by things that they shouldn't have seen or remembered. So these kinds of experience have been consistent over these different cultures and backgrounds and religions and spiritual beliefs. And Bruce says also over time. Oh, wow. So for...

longer than it would take to be a fleeting trend or something like a social contagion. Right. There's no question that people back in the ancient world, long before we had Christianity, had the same types of near-death experiences we have now. Now, of course, we didn't have any way of measuring their physiology back then, but we're still on the ground level of finding out how to do that now.

And I know you wrote a paper, Near-Death Experiences and Spirituality. And with the topic of religion, where does this split between it being a spiritual experience and a religious experience? Because I'm sure some people are like, I was in heaven. And other people are like, I don't know, I saw a white light. Yeah.

or myself on an operating table. Yeah, that's a good question, Allie. Most people who have a near-death experience say they are tremendously transformed by it. And the first thing they say is that they're no longer afraid of death.

No matter what the near-death experience was composed of, they feel like they're looking forward to death eventually. But that paradoxically makes them more willing to engage in life. They feel that there's no reason they shouldn't go ahead and jump in with both feet and enjoy all there is to life and take risks because what's the worst that can happen?

You die and that's good. So they feel much more joyful about life and also less frightened about death. But don't get too excited about being a corpse. Now I should say that people who have come close to death but don't have a near-death experience...

So if someone has had a near-death event, like a motorcycle crash, but not a near-death experience where things get all, like, funky, then they may still find life precious, but they're not looking forward to death. Like, that's still a horrifying proposition for them. So a near-death event and a near-death experience.

experience might hit a little different. And just like all cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. All near-death experiences come from a near-death event, but not all near-death events result in a near-death experience. You with me? Now, most near-death experiences say they're much more spiritual now than they were before. And by that, they do not mean they're more religious. They say they feel more connected to other people, to the natural world, to the divine.

And this gives them a sense of compassion for other people. They often come back saying that they experienced in their near-death experience that they are the same as every other person and they're intimately connected with other people. And if you believe that, then it doesn't make sense to hurt other people because you're just hurting yourself or to try to get ahead at someone else's expense.

And I've known lots of people who had to change their careers after a near-death experience. People who are in a violent profession, such as career military officers or police officers, who just could not think about hurting someone, shooting someone after the NDE. And people who were in cutthroat businesses who had to leave their jobs. And they usually end up

Training into something like healthcare or social work or clergy or teaching, something where they're helping other people rather than hurting them. I've heard these same changes from people who were atheists before the near-death experience. And again, they become much more spiritual, but not necessarily more religious. They tend to feel that all our religions are man-made approximations of what's really going on.

I feel like some of these changes in perspective and even some of the experience of it sounds a lot like someone I know who did mushrooms named me once.

Do you find any correlations between psychedelic substances and what people experience? I know that they use it too for the terminally ill to sort of confront an existential fear. Yes, yes. There's definitely a lot of similarities between them.

what we have in a near-death experience and spiritual experiences from other causes. And one of those causes is often psychedelic drugs. And people have been reporting these experiences for centuries of a sense of leaving their bodies and encountering some other realm or dimension and then returning to this, quote, normal everyday life with a much more spiritual outlook. It doesn't happen as reliably with drugs. Drugs often have a lot of negative trips as well.

But it does happen. Now, several years ago, I was part of an international group that compared hundreds of accounts of near-death experiences with thousands of accounts of psychedelic drug trips with different drugs. And we tried to look at which drugs produced the experience that was most like a near-death experience.

And it turned out that the number one drug was ketamine, which is an anesthetic that's used mostly for animals, not for people very much because it often produces unpleasant experiences in people. So according to the paper, Essential Veterinary Use of Ketamine, ketamine is like the MVP of those dark guns used to sedate zoo animals and wildlife. And it's used also as a surgical anesthesia for horses and camels.

So in addition to cattle and tigers, other species that use ketamine are ravers, calling it special K and sometimes slipping into a mid-groove dissociative state known as a K-hole. So ketamine therapy can be an effective option for treatment-resistant depression when it's administered in a calm setting by doctors who read the instructions on the box and

But why would anyone want to take a horse anesthetic on a Saturday night in a loud room that's dark with a bunch of strangers? Well, according to Bruce's paper, Neurochemical Models of Near-Death Experiences, a large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports published in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition from 2019. The researchers write that near-death experiences often

often result in a state of consciousness characterized by the perception of leaving the body, feelings of peace and bliss and timelessness, a life review, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel and an irreversible threshold. So these researchers looked at 15,000 reports linked to the use of 165 psychoactive substances and they found that, little drum roll here,

But the reports of a ketamine experience sounded most like a near-death experience. The second most common one was psilocybin. And the third was salvia or sage. Just a PS. So salvia is a type of sage, which is native to Central America and it's been used for centuries as a holy medicine by indigenous groups. If you've ever watched videos of college kids on stained couches, ripping bongs and this stuff, you're going to turn into Nancy Reagan. Because although that high lasts maybe five minutes, it's not.

It looks harrowing existentially. That bull comes in my direction and I'm like, keep it moving, man. Excuse me. I have to go to space now. And we were kind of hoping this would give us clues as to what was going on in the brain that might facilitate a near-death experience. But when you look at what these drugs do in the brain, each one of the top 10 drugs is

works by a different mechanism in the brain, working with different neurotransmitters. So it didn't really help us. Basically, what it boils down to is if you interrupt the normal working of the brain, you're open to having a near-death experience. There's not a specific chemical effect. And I was reading in this paper that the N-methyl-D aspirate receptor antagonist...

which has had some sort of effect on the endogenous serotonin 2A receptor agonist, which I was pouring through this paper and I was like, I'm just going to ask him what that means. Sure, sure, sure. Well, actually, ketamine works mostly by inhibiting the NMDA receptor in the brain. But, you know, these drugs that we give people, whether it's ketamine or psilocybin or salvia or any of the others, LSD,

They're dirty drugs, so to speak. They have many different effects on the brain. So you're not giving a drug that just has one effect. It has many. And it's hard to sort out which one is the one that's effective in facilitating these experiences. I should also say that

If it's associated with an experience, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's causing the experience. One of the psychiatrists who was most active in pushing the ketamine model of near-death experiences back in the 80s had lots of experiences with ketamine that produces events like a near-death experience. And then eventually, after a couple of decades, he had a spontaneous near-death experience with a heart attack. And at the end of that, he said...

You know, it's not the same thing. Really? He said that he doesn't think that ketamine produces the experience. He said ketamine opens the door and allows you, if conditions are right, to have this experience. Another person I know who had a near-death experience and had had previous experiences with psilocybin said that with psilocybin, he saw heaven.

With his near-death experience, he was in heaven. Oh, wow. That's a really chilling anecdote to think of how immersive that must be and why that has such lasting effects if you come back to life. I think the issue is we just have so many words in the English language to describe our experiences. And most people who have a near-death experience say,

There aren't any words for it. I can't describe it for you. So then we researchers say, great, tell me about it. So we make them use metaphors. And there are just so many words you can use to describe it. And they don't always mean the same thing. So people will all over the world describe a warm, loving being of light. And people in the U.S. will often say that's God.

Now, people in India will not use that word, but even people here will say, I'm going to call it God so you know what I'm talking about. But this is not the God I was taught about in church. It's much bigger than that. They're just using it for a metaphor. And heaven meaning not an actual pearly gate with angels and harps, but just something else that was pretty cool. Right. Something very different from this normal everyday physical world.

Well, I'm wondering if ketamine is used as a therapy that's far but kind of an approximation of a near-death experience. And if people after near-death experiences have a sense of peace and less anxiety and less existential kind of crises, does ketamine produce some of those lasting effects too? Is that why it's being looked at as a therapeutic drug?

Well, it's a good question. Ketamine is now being used to treat depression, and there's some exploratory work now using it to treat a post-traumatic stress disorder. We don't know about the long-term effects of it. There's been a lot more work done with psilocybin since that's much easier to control, and a lot of the work being done at Johns Hopkins University here in the U.S. and at Imperial College in London, giving people psilocybin and then

Having them describe their experiences, which are often quite spiritual. And the group at Hopkins has now followed people up for a year or two, and they find that after just one extended session in the lab, they have a decrease in anxiety that lasts for a couple of years at least. Mm-hmm.

I followed the Imperial College of London protocol when I had my one psychedelic trip. It was right after my dad died. And I think about that experience daily. I mean, it was...

such a profound experience. I didn't believe that it would have such a lasting impact, but I mean, I don't have any explanation for it. Whatever my brain was doing, it was pretty cool though. Right, right. Note, this podcast is not intended to provide any medical advice. Also, this treatment was suggested to me by my long-term Western medical psychiatrist familiar with my medical history who sent me the protocol. I then prepared for weeks obsessively reading studies and printing a 57-page booklet of treatment protocol from an Ivy League medical school's psychiatry department. Just know it was wacky enough.

Also, it is illegal, but I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't have silent conversations with dead people in a rainbow-colored candy land for a few hours and experience the epiphany that anxiety is the biggest waste of brain resources and that fear truly is the mind killer. Way back in the 1970s, Stan Groff was using LSD to assist people who were dying to help them relieve their anxiety in the dying process.

All these drugs are not just given to someone, hey, say, here, go home and take this. They're usually administered in a very controlled setting with low lights and smooth music and someone there to help you process the process as you're going through it. And I'm wondering about what led you to this field today.

If you can tell me a little bit about your backstory. Yeah, well, I was raised in a scientific household. My father was a chemist. And, you know, as far as we knew, the physical world was all there was. We didn't have any spiritual tradition in our family.

You know, when you die, you die. That's the end. That was fine with us. That wasn't a depressing fact. I wasn't afraid of death. It was just the end. I went through college and medical school with that mindset that the physical world is all that is, and all our thoughts and feelings are created by the brain. And then when I started my psychiatric training back in the early 70s,

I was confronted by a patient who was unconscious when I tried to see her in the emergency room, but her roommate was waiting for me in another room down the hall. So I went to talk to the roommate to see what was going on with the patient, what she might have overdosed on and so forth. And then I came back to see the patient and she was still totally unconscious. So she was admitted to the intensive care unit. And when I saw her the next morning,

I started to introduce myself and she stopped me and said, I remember who you were from last night. I know who you are. And that kind of stunned me because I was pretty sure she was unconscious. So I said that to her and she said, well, not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall. That just blew me away. I couldn't imagine what she was talking about. As far as I could tell, the only way that could happen is she left her body and followed me down the hall. And, you know, you are your body. How can you leave it?

But then she went on to tell me about the conversation I had with her roommate, what I asked, what she answered, what we were wearing, what the room looked like. And I just didn't know what to make of this. I was completely dumbfounded. But, you know, I wasn't there to deal with my confusion. I was supposed to be dealing with hers. So I kind of pushed that on my mind for a while and thought, well, I'll think about this when I have time sometime in the future.

And then over the next few years, I heard a few more cases like this from patients who had usually overdosed and had, or in one case had shot himself in the head and had a near-death event and then claimed to have elaborate near-death experiences. And I just assumed, you know, these are all psychiatric patients. Who knows what they really experienced? And then several years later, one of my colleagues at the University of Virginia, Raymond Moody, published a book called Life After Life.

in which he gave us the name near-death experience and described what they were like. And I realized this was what my patients were talking about. Only Raymond's participants were not patients. They were people from all over the world having the same types of experiences my patients were. I still couldn't understand it, but I'm a scientist.

So, scientists don't run away from things they don't understand. They run towards them to try to explain them. So, I started collecting cases to try to find what patterns are consistent across cultures, across ages, across genders, across ethnic groups.

and trying to find out what's going on here. And eventually, we started looking at different physiological hypotheses. Is it lack of oxygen to the brain? Is it drugs given to the patients and so forth? And one by one, we tested all these hypotheses and none of them panned out. For example, if you measure the oxygen levels of people who are close to death,

you find that those who have near-death experiences actually have better oxygen supply to the brain than those who don't have near-death experiences. Oh, wow. So that means the oxygen deprivation is not causing the NDE. And likewise, with drugs given to patients, the fewer drugs you're given, the more likely you are to tell about a near-death experience later on. I'm wondering, it must be very difficult to do imaging on these experiences personally.

because you really kind of never know when it's going to happen. That's right. What kind of measurements can you do while it's happening? You can't do much while it's happening. There have been one or two people who have tried to bring near-death experiencers into the lab and have them try to recreate in their minds the memory of the near-death experience while they're having an MRI or an EEG or a CAT scan.

And what they find is that there's no one spot in their brain. The entire brain gets involved in these, which is not surprising because you've got thoughts, you've got perceptions, you've got feelings, you've got emotions. The whole brain's being involved in this. Now, it had been a couple of reports recently about people who serendipitously had a heart attack while they had their EEGs being measured, their brain waves being measured. And what they find is

is that there is some continued brain activity

apparently, after the heart stops. Oh, wow. Now, this flies in the face of decades of clinical observations where we know that after the heart stops, the blood supply to the brain stops also. And within about 10 seconds, you start getting a marked decrease in the brain activity. And within a minute or so, you get totally flatlining. So it was surprising to see these new reports of continued activity. However, it's very difficult to do this kind of research

And what they find is that the types of supposed brainwaves they're finding, the electrical activity they're measuring, could just as well be due to muscle activity in the head, around your temples, around your forehead, that are contracting or going into spasm.

They can produce the same types of waves that electrical activity in the brain does, and we don't know how to separate those two. So they may not even be measuring brain activity. Ah, it might just be muscular, so it's tough to parse out, right? Right. Do you have any statistics on how many people who have a near-death event have a near-death experience?

Yes, we have data from several different studies, large studies with several hundred patients each in several different countries, in the US, in the UK, in Belgium, in Germany. And what we find generally is that if you look at only people whose hearts have stopped, between 10 and 20% will report a near-death experience. That's a lot. Now, we're relying on them to voluntarily tell us about it. There may be more people who just don't want to talk about it.

But we know at least 10 to 20% have an experience. Do you think it could be like how you might dream but not remember it in the morning? That's a possibility. Although most people who tell about a near-death experience say it's not at all like a dream. It doesn't fade over time. And in fact, we've done research now where I've gone back in recent years

to contact people I interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s about their near-death experience. And I re-interviewed them, and I find there is actually no change at all in what they tell me. The memory is not faded at all. It doesn't become distorted at all. It doesn't change over time the way most of our memories do. So when they say to us, this was more real than life itself, that seems to be true when it looks at the memories, because the memories are

are so vivid, they don't change over time the way memories of our normal life change. Yeah. I imagine too, when people say they remember where they were when they heard JFK was shot or 9-11 happened, it really imprints and you can remember a lot more details because of the significance. Exactly. Well, your paper about near-death experiences and spirituality, the false positive claims and the false negative denials, how do you

determine what might be an embellishment or what might be a denial? Do you have to hook them up to a lie detector test? No, no, we don't do that. Okay. No, we just look at the consistency of the reports.

We have a scale that we use to quantify the depth of the near-death experience. Just a side note, he was the expert who invented the scale, which is a baller move. And it's called the Grayson NDE scale. And it's a 16-point survey with questions such as, did scenes from your past come back to you? Did you see or feel surrounded by a brilliant light?

Did you feel separated from your body? Did you come to a border or a point of no return? Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence? And the best thing about your score on this test is that you won't give a shit because nothing matters except for peace and unity and love. You might be out the door to a parasailing appointment.

or draining your savings account to buy a mini donkey sanctuary by the time these eggheads bust out the calculator to figure it out. And if an experience falls below a certain point in that scale, we say, well, they didn't really have a full-blown near-death experience. Now, we use that for research purposes to make sure that we're all talking about the same experience when we do research on them.

But it's not helpful for an individual person. If a person comes to me and says, my heart stopped, and I had this incredible experience, and my life will never be the same again, and we give them the scale and they don't score high enough on it, that doesn't mean they didn't have a near-death experience. I can't say to this person, even though your life has been totally turned around, you didn't have an experience. Obviously, the person did.

But it's not the type that we want to include in the research because it's not consistent with the others. How many data points do you have to collect for a study? Can you do a small sample size or are there bigger reviews that have a lot of data points of correlations between different people's stories and things like that? Yeah, well, it depends on what measures you're using. What measures you're using as your outcome.

Most research into near-death experiences use several hundred near-death experiencers to get any significant results. There have been a few papers published with 10, 20, and as you might expect, their results are not as consistent. Later reports with larger numbers may not confirm what they found. But most of the research has been done with several hundred experiencers.

And are the most common flavors kind of a bright light or a tunnel or floating above yourself? Do you find that those are the most common experiences? They are. The most common one is a sense of overwhelming well-being and peace and a sense of being unconditionally loved. That's cute. I wish I could get it.

Many also report leaving their bodies and watching what's going on around them and being able to describe accurately what's going on around them, things they shouldn't be able to see or hear. And then a sense of reviewing their lives and meeting other entities, they seem to do that.

Okay, not that I don't love all this, but Dr. Grayson and most of us are science-first kind of people. He was raised secular, all about data and myth-busting. So how does he make sure that people aren't absolutely making this stuff up? Do they have to verify with other non-dead witnesses? Do you ever have to do any follow-ups with other medical personnel or nursing staff to say, hey, did anyone...

overhear something and then tell another patient. Do you ever have to go down like an investigative hole like that or did you the first time it happened? Well, we do. When people just say, "I left my body and I watched what was going on," if they describe things that were unusual or that couldn't have been guessed about, then we ask other people in the room, doctors and nurses who were there,

to corroborate or not what the patient was saying. Now, if they say, oh, I saw doctors wearing green scrubs, well, of course you might expect that. But if they say, well, the nurse had mismatched shoelaces, that's a little more surprising. And we then will then go ahead and ask the nurse whether that happened. And we have some very surprising things that patients saw of doctors and nurses doing embarrassing things they shouldn't have been doing that were accurately right.

Can you tell me what any of them were? Well, one was a 55-year-old truck driver who had an emergency quadruple bypass surgery. That means four of the vessels supplying his heart were blocked and had to be replaced. And in the operation, he later told me he left his body, rose up above it, and saw his surgeon flapping his arms like he was trying to fly.

And he demonstrated by placing his hands on his chest and wiggling his arms up and down. Now, I'd never seen anything like that in an operating room. I'd been a doctor 30 years ago at this point, and I'd never seen that. You don't see doctors on TV doing that. So I said to him, you know, it sounds to me like this is a hallucination from the drugs you were given. He said, no, no, no, I really saw it. You can ask my doctor. So I did. And the doctor sheepishly admitted that he had done that.

That he had developed this habit he'd never seen any other doctor do. He lets his assistants start the procedure while he puts on his sterile gown and gloves. And then he walks into the operating room to watch them start the procedure. And to avoid touching anything that's not sterile, he places his hands flat against his chest so they won't touch anything. And then he points things out to his assistants using his elbows so he doesn't touch anything with his fingers. And he demonstrated just the way the patient did.

And I don't know how he could have known that. The patient could have known that. I said to the patient, did you ask the doctor yourself about it? He said, yes, I did. And what did he tell you? He said, well, I must have done something right because you're here, aren't you? Yeah.

I thought for sure you were going to tell me that he was doing the chicken dance. I was like, I had no idea surgeons were so goofy. This is a very serious straight-laced doctor. He wouldn't do anything like that. What about you? Have you ever had a near-death event or experience? I have not. I have had a very calm, peaceful, boring life. I have never had any near-death events.

Are you afraid of death after hearing so many? No, I'm not. But I can't say that I was ever afraid of death before I got into this work either. As far as I could tell, death was the end, and what's to be afraid of? You just don't exist anymore. So this wasn't a frightening thing. I don't think that's true anymore. After talking to thousands of people who claim to have died and still persisted in some form,

I think that there is something after the body dies. I don't know what it is. You know, most of them say, I can't describe what it is for you. And then they go ahead and use metaphors. But I don't take those metaphors literally because they're just that. They're metaphors. And I don't think...

I don't think we have the words or the brain power to understand what it's like after you die. Right. There's still so much, obviously, that science doesn't know. I mean, the Internet's very new. Electricity is very new. Indoor plumbing is relatively new. But what do we know or where are we at with understanding consciousness? Wow, that's a good question.

It's a big one, sorry. We are really at ground zero. Most doctors are taught that the mind is what the brain does, that all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are created by the brain. And if you ask them, well, how does it do that? They have no idea. How does a chemical or physical electrical change in the brain create a thought? No one has the slightest hint of a suggestion of an idea of how we might go about answering that question.

as a total black hole. So speaking of black holes, more on cosmology in a bit, but first, can I ask you some questions from listeners? Sure, sure. They have great ones. Also, we donate to a charity of your choosing, a related charity. So just let us know if there's one that comes to mind, and then we'll shout them out and tell listeners what they're all about. Well, what comes to mind, Allie, is the International Association for Near-Death Studies. That's IANDS.org.

which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. That's great. That's absolutely perfect. We'll donate in your name. Good. So this 501c3 org promotes multidisciplinary exploration of near-death and similar experiences and their effects on people's lives. And they publish a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. They sponsor conferences. They work

with the media and they encourage regional support groups for experiencers and people close to them, healthcare professionals and educators. So to find out more about the International Association for Near-Death Studies, you can go to IANDS.org, which will be linked in the show notes. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you,

They mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision making. They're in to help you through all of it.

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Okay, I am dying to know what you asked. So thanks to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for submitting questions before we recorded and the folks at the BFF tier for submitting audio questions. Now, many folks had chemical queries such as,

Issa Brillard, Mish the Fish, Holly Giorgio-Dundon, Amanda Lask, Pavka34, Doug Pace, Susanna Capuccio, Interstitial K, and first-time question askers, Malia Asosi and Rachel Pristako, and Lauren. Okay, some questions Lauren from California wanted to know. - My question is about chemicals released by the brain during near-death experiences. I read about a study done on rats that measured their serotonin levels

upon dying and I'm wondering if there are any studies to try to determine what other chemicals might be released by the brain in addition to serotonin. That's a difficult question because we're all talking about speculation. We don't have data on this. We do know that endorphins are produced under stress and presumably they would be when you're approaching death as well. And endorphins produce a sense of euphoria. The so-called runner's high is an endorphin effect.

But that's only one of dozens and dozens of chemicals that are produced by the brain under stress. And it's hard to know which ones are causing which effects.

if it's associated with a near-death experience, that doesn't necessarily mean it's causing the experience. It may be having an effect on the brain that gets it out of the way so you can go ahead and experience this. So in his book, After, Bruce further explains that if near-death experiences are not associated with medications given to people, might they be related to chemicals produced by people in crisis? He says, we know that our brains produce or release a number of chemicals to help the body cope under stress.

The chemicals he thought might be most likely to be associated with NDEs were endorphins, the feel-good hormones that produce a runner's high and that are known to reduce pain and stress. And he writes that other scientists have suggested that NDEs might be connected to serotonin, adrenaline, vasopressin, and glutamate, all of which are chemicals that transmit

signals between nerve cells. But he writes, in spite of the theoretical reasons for thinking that brain chemicals might be involved in NDEs, at this point, there's been no research looking into this possibility. And he says, I don't expect any such research to be done in the near future. Bursts of these chemicals in the brain tend to be very short-lived and localized. So in order to find them, we'd have to look

at exactly the right time, at exactly the right place in the brain. And he writes, as I discovered, we don't even know where in the brain to look. So yeah, surprise, we don't know. Katie from Glasgow in Scotland wanted to know. I was just wondering if there had been any kind of research done into people's experiences and specifically kind of memory of loss

in an intensive care or a critical care department in hospital. I work as a research nurse and I remember vividly speaking to someone who was taking part in one of our drug trials during the first wave

of the COVID pandemic. And although they were actually conscious for kind of protracted periods during their stay in intensive care, when I was speaking with them afterwards, they said that the only thing that they really remembered about it was

this person with pink hair being obsessed with the time and we figured out it was because of when myself and my other research colleagues were in and we were you know shouting out times with each other of like infusions starting and stopping and you know

blood samples getting taken and things like that. And it just seemed like a really odd, of all the things to have stuck in his mind during that period was someone shouting the time at each other. It was very odd. And wanted to know how auditory retention is.

is affected by a near-death experience. I understand that when you're dying, that's maybe the last sense to go. Do you hear people who hear things a lot? - Yeah, generally speaking, vision goes first and hearing is the last thing to go. But there have been studies where people had blocks put in their ears so they wouldn't be able to hear anything. They actually had molded speakers put in the ears that would emit a loud burst so you could measure from the brain when the brain was responding to these clicks.

And then when the brain stops responding, you know they're totally anesthetized. And even in such circumstances, people have vivid memories of hearing and seeing things in the operating room after a near-death experience. So it's hard to say what is preserved and what's not preserved if someone is dying because we don't have a measure of how dead someone is, how close to death someone is. Now, there have been a couple of reports of people who are actually

pronounced dead and left in a morgue for a couple of days before they recovered to tell about a near-death experience. And those are another problem. How do you deal with those people? I mean, I guess you get a lawyer. Is that a malpractice suit? You thought I was dead. Still alive. Have they ever found anything that is similar across other cases? Because that sounds like the worst nightmare ever, to be honest. Yeah.

Yes, yes. I mean, these people are usually not inclined to sue. They come back with a sense of, we're all in this together. That's a good point. And it can be very forgiving.

I looked to find these rare cases, these really macabre fates, and I went spelunking into deep research, only to discover right away that, y'all, this happens all the time. All the time. Here are some choice bits from some somewhat recent news stories. You ready? Iowa. A funeral home employee reportedly unzipped the bag, saw the woman's chest moving, and the woman gasped,

for air. Mississippi, funeral workers find a man alive and kicking when they open a body bag. Brazil, the crematorium staffer who went to collect the deceased patient opened the bag and noticed that their body was still warm and not yet showing rigor mortis. Poland, a woman wakes up feeling very cold, only to realize she was in the morgue's cold storage. So yes, declared dead, but still alive. The most bittersweet of mistakes?

I have a lot of feelings about this. And one of them is,

is that if you're given a second chance at life and they have to rip up your death certificate, do you want to spend the time on earth giving depositions and filing lawsuit paperwork at a courthouse? I don't know. Most near-death experiences come back embracing what we call the golden rule, you know, treat other people the way you want them to treat you, which is part of every religion we have. But for these people who have a near-death experience, they say, for

For them, it's no longer a goal we're supposed to follow, you know, a guideline. It's

A lot of the universe, they've experienced this in their near-death experience. And they know that when you hurt someone, you can't avoid hurting yourself as well. And when you help other people, you're helping yourself as well. That seems like a huge paradigm shift in what we're taught culturally. It is. This next question is from DeNoa, who hails from the land of Northwest Florida. Hello, Dad Ward.

I was wondering, are there any cultures, current or past, that have incorporated a near-death experience into some kind of ritual? Anything like that that you know of? We don't have good evidence of this, but some of the ancient Egyptian and Greek mystery religions would either put people into drug-induced trances or in Egypt actually bury them for a day or so to try to induce this type of experience.

And often those people were then hailed as seers or shamans after they came out of this, if they survived. Now, there are accounts in Tibet of people who have come back from death. They call them delogues, and they are revered. But it's not done as part of a ritual. It's just they happen to have this, and then they are revered as knowledgeable people.

I mean, it does have some cachet. I'm not going to lie. Yes, yes. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Tell me everything. And also just the victory of defeating death in the first round. Exactly. Yeah. What about age? Tarina Grace Robichaux and Donald Merritt wanted to know if, in Grace's words, does the rate of near-death experiences go down after teenage years? Tarina wants to know, do children have them? Yeah, most of the cases that we have looked at are in older people because...

Those are the ones who come close to death more frequently. But there have been a number of studies of children having near-death experiences, and they are generally the same as those of adults, with one exception. Actually, more than one exception. They tend not to have the elaborate life review that older people do. They haven't had much of a life to review.

And they tend not to see a lot of deceased loved ones because they don't know a lot of people who have died as older people do. But with those two exceptions, children seem to have the same

near-death experiences that adults do, including preschool children who have not really been indoctrinated into what to expect when you die. So on that note, many of you asked about astral reunions, such as Emily, Joanna Burr, Deli Dames, Raina, Alison Mueller, Ellie Schaefer, Teddy Egelhoff, Audrey Ayers, and first-time question asker Charlotte Parkinson, who said in the moment my dad was dying, he hadn't been able to say a word in two weeks due to being in and out of an induced carcinogen.

and having brain damage, his last word was my mom's name, who had passed away years before.

And then patron Krista Jones asked, do a lot of people really have visions slash dreams during near-death experiences? Or is that flim-flam, perpetuated by movies? You know, a bunch of people, you just mentioned seeing loved ones. I had done a lot of reading about hospice because my father passed last year. And some booklets and some guidebooks were like, it's not uncommon for your loved one in hospice to start talking to people who have passed away. Any...

A kind of explanation for that or any data on that you want to share? Well, when people report that in their near-death experience, they were greeted by deceased loved ones, that can easily be dismissed as wishful thinking or expectation. You think you're dying, so of course you want to have your deceased spouse or mother or father come greet you.

But we have a number of well-documented cases where someone claimed that in a near-death experience, they encountered someone who was deceased that was not yet known to have died. So there's no expectation here. And sometimes they come back telling about this, and the people around them are very disturbed because this person's still alive that they're talking about. Then they find out a couple of days later, no, they actually died just shortly before the person saw them.

True.

Therese wrote, please, please just reassure me that even when people die horrifically, their dying brains fire up in a way that makes their last moments peaceful or less terrifying. Lie if you must.

In terms of a violent or sudden death, have you talked to anyone who went through that who said that there was like an absence of terror or horror? Most people report that as soon as the near-death experience starts, all the pain goes away, all the fear goes away, and they become enveloped by this blissful feeling of peace and well-being and being unconditionally accepted.

Now, I have to say that there are some near-death experiences that are not pleasant. We don't really know how many there are. Most people who have studied this find that about 10% are not pleasant. But again, we're dealing with people who voluntarily talk to us about this.

And I can imagine that people who have an unpleasant near-death experience are less willing to talk about it than other people. As to why that might happen, we don't know. I've known people who were in prison for life for murder who had beautiful near-death experiences when they had a heart attack in prison. And we certainly have a lot of writings by Catholic saints over the centuries describing their dark night of the soul when they have terrifying mystical experiences.

So we don't really know. What we do know, though, is that people who have frightening near-death experiences also come back feeling they're no longer afraid of death as they were before. And they come back saying, even though I had a bad experience, I was sent back so I can change my life and now have a better life, better death next time. Oh, like a little bit of a do-over? Exactly. I was given a second chance. Well, I mean, I guess that's hopeful if you're out there being a dick. Yeah.

A few people, Anne-Marie Everhart, Jessica Cherichara, and Clayton Harding, wanted to know about the sealing experiments, about putting things up on a shelf high up in the room of patients. Can you tell me at all about designing and conducting those experiments? Sure, sure. Well, there have been numerous anecdotes about people who claim to have seen things accurately from an out-of-body perspective.

Jan Holden at the University of North Texas actually looked at almost 100 of these cases, and she found that in 92% of them, what the person described is entirely accurate. In about 6%, there were some little inaccuracies in it, and only 1% was it did wrong. So the vast majority was completely accurate. So that has stimulated us to start doing experiments where we place usually visual targets on

up high on a shelf in a room where people are likely to have a cardiac arrest, like in the cardiac care unit, facing upwards, so you can only see them from looking down. And there have been now six published studies of this type of research protocol, and none of them has found anyone who claimed to have left their body and seen the target.

So it doesn't tell us yes or no, can they really do it? Because no one claimed to have tried to do it. So I found their study with the protocol, which said an Apple Macintosh Pismo PowerBook laptop computer was placed above eye level in the procedure room so that the computer screen faced the ceiling and the surface was a

approximately six feet above the patient, and on the screen were randomly selected animations, which might involve a floating butterfly or fireworks or a jumping frog. And the results?

were disappointing. And Bruce says that the struggle in this kind of science is that so much of the evidence is anecdotal. Plus, these patients were under heavy sedation, so that may have been a factor. When I talk about this to near-death experiences, they just laugh. They say, if you're having a near-death experience, you're out of your body for the first time, watching your body being resuscitated,

Are you going to look around the room for some target you didn't know was there and then try to remember it? You know, I think it's just a ludicrous thing to try. I wasn't paying attention. This is a good point. That would probably be the least interesting thing happening in the room.

For more on this, you can see his study with Dr. Holden and Dr. Paul Mouncey titled With Honesty and Chagrin, Failure to Elicit Near-Death Experiences in Induced Cardiac Arrest. So actual scientists are doing the actual work to see what's up.

and on the ceiling as far as flim flam and debunkery. So yes, we have no good scientific data from controlled experiments to verify that people's consciousness dips out and just takes a gander from the top. I'm sorry, y'all. Now on the topic of consciousness in the universe, Matt Ciccato, Chris Curious, Rob Lara, and Sharon had questions and they're not alone.

Taigugiri says, I saw a presentation by a Caltech professor that consciousness and unconsciousness was partially controlled by the quantum state of atoms in the brain. Have you had to talk to any theoretical physicists or anything like that about this?

Yes. It's a challenging area because it's all speculation. We don't have any ways of measuring these quantum fluctuations in the brain. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist in Arizona, and Roger Penrose, a physicist in England, have collaborated on a theory to explain consciousness on this way. And they talk about microtubules in the atoms in the brain.

that can have quantum effects, but they don't explain how that can produce a thought or a feeling. Again, you're dealing with a physical event and trying to figure out how that creates a thought or a feeling. And there's a gap there they haven't really

If you're thirsty for more on this, you can saunter yourself down a cyber hole about orchestrated objective reduction, a hypothesis that came onto the scene in the early 1990s via a noble laureate in physics and an anesthesiologist. And I'll read you a snippet from your friend Worker Pidya, who told me orchestrated objective reduction, or WPAD,

Orch or worst nickname, it's the worst, is a theory which postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons rather than the conventional view of the connections between the neurons. And this mechanism is held to be a quantum process

orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules, which are subneuronal cytoskeleton components or protein filaments inside our cells. And it's proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for

for free will. So just when you think you know yourself, someone throws quantum cytoskeleton brain microtubules at you, and you're back wondering how you're a blob of molecules that loves a cat. - For the most part, physicists are very divided about whether quantum physics can really have anything to do with consciousness or not. The original people who developed quantum physics 100 years ago came to the conclusion that physical matter doesn't really exist, that consciousness is everything.

And unless consciousness looks at the universe, it doesn't exist. And when you look at it, then it comes into creation. And later physicists said, that's totally ridiculous. So most physicists today are split about whether that's true or not. And they tend to deal with it by saying, quantification.

Quantum physics is not a description of reality. It's a mathematical formula that lets us predict how things are going to turn out. But it's not a literal description of reality. There's so many exciting things that people will know after we die. Most physicists now say that

the visible matter that we can see is 5% of the matter in the universe. And 95% is dark matter. We should have no idea. Yeah. I had talked to a dark matter expert about that. Yeah. How can you possibly think we understand the world if that's true? I know. I asked him if dark matter could be ghosts.

And be honest with me, without having to name names, how many astrophysicists out there think that dark matter might be ghosts? What if dark matter is ghosts? What if dark energy is ghosts? What if it's all ghosts? What if we're swimming in ghosts? There is something to be said about maybe dark matter is something much more exciting than particles. And there are theories where the dark matter species

plural, could form dark atoms, just like you have protons and electrons, maybe something like a dark proton and a dark electron that we can't see, but they can see each other. And those form dark atoms. And then it's not hard to imagine, well, those dark atoms could have dark chemistry, that dark chemistry can form dark life, that dark life could maybe, maybe this entire sentient civilization living in our universe

dark matter halo where our galaxy is sitting and we just don't realize it. But because there is five times more of them than there is us, we are the ghosts. We are the weird thing that

Wow. Oh, my gosh. And he said, well, if there are ghosts, we are the ghosts in the dark matter universe. It's like wild. So that was Dr. Flip Tenedo, who's a theoretical particle physicist from the scotohylology episode and a real gem. But from...

Dark matter to white light. Some folks, including Tom Boudry, Avery Alloway, Matt Herschel, Mark Phillips, and NDE Havers, Jen Squirrel-Alvarez, Yves Hébert, and Shlee Schwinghammer, had brightly burning questions. So many people, including first-time question asker Shlee...

swing hammer, wanted to know why is it the color white that people tend to see? And a ton of people wanted to know about the light in the tunnel. Is it just a Hollywood trope? Or in Devin's words, are there any theories about the bright light? Anything that might be causing that or like a flood in the retina or something like that? Yeah, well, there have been people who try to explain this in terms of the physiology of the brain. And as the brain starts shutting down, you have less and less oxygen.

The outer edge of your visual field tends to go dark, and what you're left with is a small light area in the center. But that's not what people see in a near-death experience. They don't see just a smaller and smaller section of light in the middle. They tend to see the tunnel. They can see on the outside of the tunnel. They can see around it. So it's not like you're just having a small visual field getting smaller and smaller. It's like you're seeing a tunnel in your visual field. It's not the same thing at all.

Now, I will say that you see tunnels in a lot of other experiences as well, besides near-death experiences. And some people think that the tunnel is not an integral part of a near-death experience. It's a way we have, retroactively, of explaining how we got from this physical world to the other world of the near-death experience. I'm here, then I'm there. How did I get there? I don't know. Must have gone through a tunnel. Ah, so it's a mode of transport. Yeah.

It is. And I'll say that here again, we're dealing with metaphors. Most people here in the U.S. will talk about a tunnel. People in countries where there aren't a lot of tunnels will not say that. They'll say, I went through a cave or I fell into a well. I talked to one person here who's a truck driver who said, I got sucked into this long tailpipe. Whatever metaphor comes to you is what you use to describe this long, dark, enclosed space.

Do you have a lot of truck drivers that have near-death experiences because of highway crashes? Yes, yes, yes. People of all types who come close to death from all different ways have the same types of near-death experience. Of course, I had to look this up. And I know a lot of you listening out there are on a long haul, maybe at the helm of an 18-wheeler. But yes, tragically...

life expectancy in that profession is 61 years old, 17 years shorter than the national average. And it's not due to accidents, but rather the majority of y'all hauling rigs tend to be men who have shorter lifespans overall. And according to some CDC studies, many truckers struggle with a poor work and life balance, which can contribute to stress. And due to all these pressures to do these long hours, the average amount of sleep

is several hours less per night than other professions. And access to a healthy diet on the road is also harder, as is the sedentary nature of the job. But doctors say that you can keep your job and your health by packing fresher, healthier food if you can. Try to get in 40 minutes of activity a day if possible. Some truckers keep a set of weights in their cab to use while loading and unloading is happening in the back. Also, ask a doc about a sleep study

Because many long haulers have sleep apnea and a CPAP machine can really improve your sleep and the levels of alertness and fatigue. And my grandpa, Walter Willis Ward, was a trucker and he lived a jolly active life until his 90s. And then one day he collapsed buck naked.

And when they resuscitated him, he seemed disappointed and slammed his fist on his hospital meal tray and said, "I'm 92 years old. Let me go already." So perhaps what lay beyond was too tempting. He died not too long thereafter, and he was, as people said politely in those days, a real firecracker. Now speaking of, you know, Megan Walker, MB, and Clayton Harding wanted to know, in Megan's words, do people who have near-death experiences score differently on personality scales?

from people who don't have them or before and after? - Well, we don't really have before and after measures on a lot of these people. So it's hard to say whether they score differently on tests. Now they usually say that they're very different. And when you talk to their friends and family,

They describe, oh, yes, this is not the same person I used to know. It's totally different now. And one way they're different is that they're much more relaxed about life. They tend not to be as controlling or as obsessive about things. They tend not to be worried about earning more money or having more power and fame and prestige. Those things aren't important to them anymore.

Are they more likable? Oh, Vince, that's a good question. Sounds like it. Well, you know, it sounds like they're wonderful ways to be. You're more loving, you're more compassionate.

But it actually is very difficult for the family sometimes to tolerate these changes. Imagine if one member of the family suddenly has a religious conversion and the other ones don't. They don't see eye to eye on things anymore. And there have been a number of divorces because of this. Families sometimes don't accept the changes. I've known parents who are very puzzled by their children suddenly changing positions.

personalities after a near-death experience. And I should say sometimes that the experiencer himself or herself gets very upset when they find themselves back here in this world when they don't want to be. And they sometimes can get very angry or sad for a while. Imagine being bummed to be not dead.

Well, I guess sadly, probably a lot of us have had days where that's relatable. And just a little content warning for the next two or three minutes. We do discuss death by suicide. And Dr. Grayson has found that about a quarter of people who survive a suicide attempt report having a near-death experience. So what has he found through his research and decades of experience in emergency psychiatry? We did have two questions.

I'm glad this came up because as a psychiatrist, when I first heard decades ago that near-death experiences are no longer afraid of dying, I was like, oh my God, this is a great idea.

I was worried that that was going to make people more suicidal. So I started a study of this. I looked at people who were admitted to my hospital with a suicide attempt, and I compared those who had a near-death experience as a result of the suicide attempt with those who didn't. And what I found was that those who had a near-death experience tended to be much less suicidal afterwards than those who didn't have a near-death experience. And I tried to ask them,

Why? Why is this, if you're not afraid of dying anymore, why are you less suicidal now? And they said a couple of things. They said, well, now I understand that there's a meaning and purpose to everything I go through in life. And the problems that used to make me run away from life, now I realize they're there for me to learn from and to grow from.

There are challenges for me, not things I need to run away from. And they also say, again, that if you're not afraid of dying, then you're not afraid of living either. And you can enjoy life much more than you did before. That's a beautiful thought. And it's something that I wonder how much of it is cultural in terms of the way that we live, sometimes disconnected from family members, disconnected from friends.

nature, from sun, dawn, and dusk cycles, all the ways that we were not part of the earth. Right. I think in our society, there's been a marked movement away from organized religion in recent decades, and that's made a lot of people less spiritual and more invested in the physical world, which doesn't usually produce the same type of satisfaction that spiritual developments used to.

So I think you're seeing a lot more people striving for some spiritual connection that used to come from religions. Now we have to look for where we're going to get it from.

And near-death experiences do give that to people. Okay, big question here. What is the difference between being spiritual or religious? Because just having spirit in the word spiritual, it's kind of ick-giving for some of us. So I asked science and I found a nugget in the 2016 paper, Spirituality slash Religiosity, a Cultural and Psychological Resource Among Sub-Saharan African Migrant Women with HIV-AIDS in Belgium.

which, drawing on a 2002 paper in the Journal of Advanced Nursing titled Towards Clarification of the Meaning of Spirituality, the former paper, many, many paragraphs in, happened to say, spirituality and religion are often used interchangeably, but the two concepts are different. Some authors contend that spirituality involves a personal quest for a meaning in life, while religion involves an organized entity with rituals and practices focusing on a higher power or God.

Spirituality may be related to religion for certain individuals, but not, for example, an atheist or yoga practitioner.

Do you ever come up on friction of that in the field in terms of, can a scientist be spiritual? Can you find your spirituality just from looking at a bee on a flower? Or does it have to be something more like metaphysical? No, it doesn't have to be more than that. People from Einstein to Carl Sagan said that their science is a spiritual endeavor.

And I think most atheists would say they do feel they're part of something greater than themselves. That may mean they're part of some family or a larger clan or a group of atheists, but they feel like there's something that they're attached to something that's beyond themselves, which is a form of spirituality. So I asked Twitter, aka XSoul.

and also Blue Sky if any atheists or agnostics wanted to weigh in on if spirituality was a part of their lives because I still wondered what it meant for different people especially the

those of us who were raised with religious dogma that we disliked. And I got some answers from some non-religious folks, so many. I will read you just a few. Rob said, the most spiritual experience I had was standing at fossilized tetrapod footprints on Ireland's Atlantic coast, staring out at the ocean and realizing that those prints were made at a time when the East Coast of North America was still connected to Ireland. It was very awe-inspiring. And Mads said, I

I define spirituality as anything that reminds me that I'm part of everything that has and will ever happen, and that it's all a part of me. Ideas, experiences, and people that make us feel like we belong to an existence as large and as strange as the universe are all quite spiritual. David Attenborough said, "...when I access spiritual moments, they are often in the quiet of my mind."

in moments of song and joy, in luck, and in the sharing of food. Anthro Andrew said, Anthropologist here, I gotta say that you can be spiritual without being religious. A spiritual experience can happen without one knowing even, such as with the whales I study, invoking a deeply emotional response. Rachel Lenz said, I'm an atheist, but I would also consider myself spiritual. To me, spirituality is more of an emotional state than anything metaphysical. It's slowing down, learning to revel in awe and wonder,

It's appreciating things at scales billions of times larger, longer, smaller, or deeper. The magnitude of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of nature, the infinitesimally small building blocks of the universe. To me, spirituality is love and poetry. I like that.

- Al Zwiebel and many others wanted to know why does time seem to slow down in those precious moments when one is flirting with mortality? - Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. There have been other studies of time slowing down in crisis situations that don't involve near-death experiences. And it does seem to be something that we do to ourselves to try to help us deal with a crisis situation. If you slow time down, then you've got more time to figure out how do I get out of this?

One person described to me he was up on a ladder cleaning out his gutters and he fell. And he said, as I was falling, time seemed to slow way down and almost stopped. So I was able to see how I needed to twist around to land in the bushes rather than on the pavement. Oh my gosh. And you hear that again and again from people who are in crisis situations that time slows down and allows them to think. Not only does time slow down, but their thinking speeds up.

So it helps them survive the near-death event. Now, having said that, many near-death experiencers say it wasn't just time slowing down. Time did not exist in that other realm. And they realized that what we think of as linear time is an artifact of being in a physical world that doesn't exist outside this physical realm. It sounds so cozy. It sounds like a cozy place to be. It is. It is. Makes me less afraid.

So according to a letter published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, bearing the headline, did NDEs play a seminal role in the formulation of Einstein's theory of relativity? It explains that apparently Albert Einstein once saw a man fall off a rooftop in Berlin. The man survived and later told Einstein that while falling, he did not feel gravity, which may have suggested new ideas of looking at the universe.

to young Einstein. Let's go back a little further though. Einstein went to a Polytechnic Institute in Zurich at the age of 16, which was in 1895, just after Albert Heim fell off that cliff in the Swiss Alps. What are the chances that a professor of geology who wrote about time and space seeming to slow down and expand would be in the same city as a young Einstein? Well, hang on to your hats.

because Albert Heim was a professor of young Einstein. So the two Alberts knew each other, studied together, and likely swapped stories of time expansion and gravity. And in fact, two years before Einstein's death, he penned a letter to his former professor telling him that his lectures failed.

were quote, magical. What a world. And for more on quantum physics and just the nature of the universe and gravity and black holes and space and time, you can see the quantum ontology episode with astrophysicist, Dr. Adam Becker, who wrote the book, What is Real? And we'll link that in an episode on cosmology and one on dark matter and astrobiology and one with two UFO experts in the show notes because what the fuck?

Gosh, there's so much we don't know. Exactly. Last listener question, a bunch of people wanted to know. Looking at you, Derek Pellequin, River Rowan Stone, and Helen DiMarzio. If you have thoughts on the Netflix show OA, Dorit said, what do you think of it? There's so much flim flam.

They're sure. But have you heard of that, OA? I think that they use near-death experiences for research. I haven't seen it, but maybe you have. I have not. I have not. But there have been so many television shows and movies going back decades when there was that movie Flatliners about medical students who tried to put themselves in a cardiac arrest. And a lot of them are based on real information, but

take off, you know, they're fiction. They take off in more sensationalized ways that end up doing damage to the real facts about our near-death experience. Is anyone doing it right? Yes, there are some. Gosh, going way back decades, there was a movie, Resurrection, that did a very good job, not only of the near-death experience itself, but how people are changed after the experience. I'm Dr. Herron.

Welcome back. And then, of course, for reading, there's your book, which I feel like if you're going to read a book about near-death experiences, read after. Well, thank you. Thank you. And last questions I always ask. Obviously, there's got to be something about your job that sucks. There has to be the hardest thing about it. What is difficult about what you do?

I think the most difficult thing about it for me is trying to get my head around it, because I was raised as a scientist thinking that we're going to be able to understand everything. And I've confronted a lot of things now that I don't think we can understand that are beyond the ability of our brain to make sense out of. And that's difficult for me. And I still...

That still grates against me, and I want to try to understand things. And I haven't given up on it. It just becomes less and less plausible to me that we're going to understand it. But I still be tracks. I enjoy doing science. Mm-hmm.

What about your favorite thing about what you study? I know that must be hard, but do you have a highlight or the thing that just still kind of gives you butterflies? What I like best about it is just talking to the people who have had these experiences, because you can't talk to them and not absorb some of this feeling of the world is a friendly place. It's full of unconditional love. And how can you be unhappy with that?

I bet it's such a relief for them to be validated by a scientist who's collecting information and really looking at this seriously. Yes. Any other myths that you want to dispel at all that if you could get on a soapbox, you would scream over a megaphone? Well, I want to say that these are normal experiences that happen under unusual circumstances. They are not tied with mental illness in any way. We've done studies of this and shown that

people who have mental illnesses or diagnosed with psychiatric disorders have the same number of near-death experiences as everyone else, neither more nor less. And likewise, if you look at near-death experiencers, they have the same rates of mental illness as people who don't have near-death experiences. So it's totally independent of that.

They are not unusual experiences. They happen to about 5% of the general population. That's one in every 20 people. So think about people you work with, people in your classroom, people in your family. Some of them have had near-death experiences. And that near-death experiences also lead to profound, long-lasting effects that need to be addressed, both positive and negative.

This has just been such a joy. I was so nervous to talk to you because what you do is so cool and you're so esteemed in this field. So it's really an honor. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Allie. So ask lively people deathy questions because honestly,

Being alive and part of the universe is just pretty wicked in a good way. And how fun to live in an era where so many mysteries remain and so many people are trying to figure it out. So I hope this episode has helped you take a deep breath, has made you ponder how science is more of a question than an answer, and has maybe made you look toward the stars or down at a worm to realize that you made it as a person on this planet. Enjoy it. Fuck the bullshit.

That is a poem I just wrote you. Okay, thank you, Dr. Bruce Grayson, professor emeritus, psychiatrist, quasi-thenatologist, and author of the book After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond.

for being on and sharing your expertise with us. His info and book and the charity of choice are all linked in the show notes, as well as a link to our website with so many more research links. Also, Bruce, I'm sorry for all the swearing. I'm not really that sorry, but thanks for putting up with it. If any of you listeners don't like episodes of swearing, feel free to enjoy Smologies, which are shorter, kid-friendly versions of classic episodes, which will soon be moving to their own feed.

just as soon as I get my bottom together to do that. We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also on Blue Sky and TikTok. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. You can join Patreon and submit questions at patreon.com slash ologies. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Managing Director Susan Hale, who steers our ship each week.

scheduling producer and birthday girl this past week. Happy, happy birthday to Noelle Dilworth. Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does our website and can do yours. And of course, thank you to the light at the end of each episode's tunnel, lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around till the episode ends, I tell you a secret.

And this week, it's putting the show together involves a whole process. It's such a process. It took years to perfect. It involves color-coded transcripts, shared file drives, sound effects, first and second and third and fourth pass notes, et cetera, et cetera. And since the beginning, I write all the aside notes in green. And then when I record them, I do a little snap or a clap on the audio file in between them so that we can see this sharp spike. And I know it's a new aside.

Is that 22? And then I edit the asides and move on to the next one before I send them off to Mercedes. Some episodes have like 20 asides, some have 50. And this episode, which is about the nature of consciousness and finding personal meaning in the universe, had 42 asides before I trimmed a few.

And I've never read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, but everyone tells me I need to. But I understand that the meaning of life is supposed to be 42, so that might be significant for some of you. Also, please don't arrest me or my doctor for that one time that I took mushrooms to process my dad's death. That would be awesome if you did not put me in jail for that. There are so many other problems to fix, but you're doing great, and I'm glad you're here, sincerely. If things are bad...

I've been there before. Please know that they can and they will get better. Deep breaths help a lot. Smell a tree. Remind yourself that we are all just squishy, flawed little apes. No one expects you to be perfect. And if you want a texture crush, cut some bangs. Maybe

Maybe take a class in the community center, play hooky from work for a day. Go for it. We're all going to be dead one day in the future. And if you're on a windy mountain, wear one of those hats that ties under your chin. But then again, would we have the theory of relativity without it? I don't know. Anything. This world, this life, this timeline. Okay. Bye-bye.