Oh, rats!

Someone emailed me to ask about a study in which the brains of dying rats showed a burst of activity. The question was: What implications, if any, does this have for NDEs?

I gave a general answer, but also forwarded the email to Chris Carter, because my email correspondent had asked me to. Chris replied to me with a copy of a letter by Bruce Greyson, Edward F. Kelly, and W.J. Ross Dunseath, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal that published the original study.

Doing a little Web browsing, I also found a reply to the Greyson et al.'s letter from the researchers responsible for the study.

Rather than excerpting choice bits from the two letters, both of which are quite short, I've just linked to them (above) for those who are interested.

The full text of the (highly technical) original study is also online.

As a bonus, here's a link to a HuffPo piece about possible scientific support for life after death. It's an excerpt from The Secret Physics of Coincidence, by Rolf Froboese.

Comments

[Luciano]

Very interesting articles! It's great to hear (or read) that some mainstream scientists are no longer afraid to talk about an afterlife!

[Luciano]

Even if the brain was still functioning during an NDE (wich sounds unlikely to me after hearing Sam Parnia's interviews) that would not explain the veridical perceptions that NDErs talk about so often. Perceptions that happened while the brain was partially (as the dying rats study suggests) or completely shut down.

[Juan]

I find Huffington's article disappointing; it only exposes opnions of physics in favor of an afterlife or apparently in favor but it not exposes robust cases about a afterlife, or falsifiable hypothesis or reasonable arguments.

[Alex Tsakiris]

I think this misses the forest for the trees. There's no reason to assume the "rat study" has anything to do with NDEs. It's not like they started with a solid understanding of the physiological conditions associated with NDEs and then matched them with the conditions of these poor animals. Consider:

1. NDEs are studied in cardiac arrest for convenience (i.e. well understood medical conditions), but we know they sometimes occur when the brain is not compromised... e.g. plane crash, jump off of bridge.

2. NDEs and the OBEs associated with them are often reported as a continuous, extended experience. Example, experiencers will see their body before, during and after death... e.g. "the car hit the ice and started to go into a spin, but I was seeing everything from outside... and then I went to heaven." These kinda events are reported as a continuous experience.

In general, I think you're giving far too much weight to an explanation that is completely married to an outdated, science-as-we-know-it model of consciousness.