You will probably need to make it your thing, if you want to keep up. People do not read magazines, people watch videos, in 2019, so they will support their claims much more probably with some modern media.
Maybe so; and I could respond in kind with a clutch of uncommented videos; but, call me old-fashioned, I don't call that discussion.
The youtube videos I gave to you are by the experts in the field, its as good as any citation.
A citation is a source for the specific claim that is made. If the videos make the claim you quoted, that's fine.
But to make it more easier for you, I will create the citation for you:
"And what is really annoying for us is that those people actually can describe what we did and can report what we said when they come back.
We have no explanation for this and I cannot offer any explanation to you, because there is no brain activity at all."
Thomas Fleischmann. In: Youtube [online]. 15.09.2014 [cit. 03.07.2019]. Available from TEDx Talks channel.
Thanks. I watched Fleischmann's video, and it is similar to other descriptions I have heard - except that he has a larger sample.
As I see it, it's not unreasonable that we should see certain broad commonalities of experience in those that report experience in a near-death situation. If respiration and/or circulation are failing, blood pressure and oxygenation levels are likely to fall, and CO
2 and other waste gases are likely to rise; this will have an effect on the brain. For example, during 'brown-out' under high G force, military pilots have described the tunnel effect with a bright light; it's thought to be an effect of hypoxia in the visual cortex.
Most of the reported effects, including out-of-body experiences (OBE) can be elicited in healthy volunteers under lab conditions by stimulating or suppressing the activity of certain areas of the brain; in some cases directly via transcranial magnetic stimulation, in others by presenting manipulated sensory information. This suggests that these experiences are brain-mediated.
I am necessarily sceptical of his description of the cases he was unable to explain, because he provided no useful details of the circumstances; i.e. how many of these cases were there? what similarities and differences were there? did they all have 'zero brain activity'? how was brain activity measured (most clinical measures are rough proxies for brain activity)? was what the staff in the room said recorded and timed? was what the patient described a general match or word-for-word identical? did they subsequently verify that what the patient described actually happened during a period of 'zero brain activity'?
Fleischmann says that these cases occurred in emergency rooms where staff were battling to resuscitate and save the patients - were they really in a position to accurately record and remember incidental details of what was happening at the moments the patient seemed brain-dead, and match them to the patient reports hours or days later?
In the reported cases I have come across, where it has been possible for researchers to interview patient and staff after the fact, it was not possible to be sure of the precise times events happened, emergency rooms are very busy places, it wasn't possible to be sure the patient hadn't seen the emergency room or staff at some point or hadn't overheard them talking, or wasn't describing a generic emergency room, and so-on.
We also know that when people encounter what they think is an odd or unusual event, they will tell the story to others, and with each retelling, it will tend to become more odd, unusual, or interesting; i.e. they will unwittingly omit caveats and embellish it for their audience.
Now, I'm not calling Fleischmann a liar, he seems like an honest, respectable person. I'm saying that the information provided is clearly insufficient for the scientifically minded to accept at face value as evidence of something extraordinary. At best, it suggests that there may be some phenomenon occurring in these situations that is worth investigating in a structured and controlled way.
This is why I asked you if you were aware of the
AWARE study. This was a structured and controlled study organised by Dr Sam Parnia, an Assistant professor of Medicine at Stonybrook University School of Medicine and director of the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton. He's an expert in resuscitation medicine with a long term interest in NDEs and thinks that a mind mediated by, but not produced by the brain could explain them. He organised this study hoping to get definitive evidence of NDEs & OBEs to confirm his hypothesis.
The study, in 2008, involved the cardiac arrest resuscitation units in 15 leading medical centres in Europe and America set up to collect appropriate evidence - they even put images on high shelves that could only be seen from the ceiling. The results were published, after several delays, in 2014. There were 2060 cardiac arrests recorded, of which 140 survivors completed the first study interviews and 101 of those completed all stages.
9% had NDEs (consistent with other studies), while 2% described awareness with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation (but could well have been conscious). One had a verifiable period of conscious awareness during which time cerebral function was not
expected. No-one saw the concealed images or verifiably reported events they could not have known or seen from their physical position.
Neither the discussion nor the conclusion of the study report suggested any particularly unusual or inexplicable results, beyond that awareness during cardiac arrest was more common than previously thought:
Conclusion: CA survivors commonly experience a broad range of cognitive themes, with 2% exhibiting full awareness. This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness.
I italicised the sentence that may possibly explain Fleischmann's puzzling observations.
In summary, the largest well-controlled scientific study explicitly designed to examine these phenomena obtained results entirely consistent with current medical understanding and found no evidence of anything extraordinary or inexplicable.
Dr Parnia is currently supervising a second study, AWARE II, projected to report in 2020. Until then, the best scientific evidence does not support the idea that NDEs or OBEs represent anything extraordinary or inexplicable. Scepticism is still warranted.