Judul : yoga to the people st marks schedule
link : yoga to the people st marks schedule
yoga to the people st marks schedule
marcia day childress:good afternoon. i'd like to welcome you tothis medical center hour. this is a program entitled,is there life after death? fifty years of research at uva. i'm marcia day childress fromthe center for biomedical
yoga to the people st marks schedule, ethics and humanities, andwe're delighted to produce the medical center hour andbring it to you each week during the academic semesters. i would quickly askthat there are a few--
a couple of seats still left. anybody sitting onthe stairs, i would encourage you pleaseto find a seat, because the firemarshall who sometimes visits us doesn't approve ofpeople sitting on the stairs. does some aspectof our personality survive bodily death? long a philosophical andtheological question. in the 20th century,this became the subject
of scientific research. 50 years ago this year in1967, dr. ian stevenson then chair of uva'sdepartment of psychiatry within the department aresearch unit now known as the division ofperceptual studies to study what, if anything,of the human personality survives after death. dr. stevenson's ownresearch investigated hundreds of accountsof young children
who claimed torecall past lives. in our medicalcenter hour today, one of our history ofthe health sciences lectures, faculty from thedivision of perceptual studies highlights this unit's researchinitiatives since its founding. they will also preview the unitpriorities and partnerships for its second half century. we are delighted towelcome four presenters to cover this span of studies.
on my immediateright, jim b. tucker, who is the bonner-lowryassociate professor of psychiatry andneuro-behavioral sciences. he's also the directorof the division. next, is bruce greyson, chestercarlson professor emeritus third is kim penberthy, thechester carlson professor of psychiatry andneuro-behavioral sciences, and finally, on myfar right ed kelly, research professor of psychiatryand neuro-behavioral sciences.
they will be presentingin this order. by way quickly of somehistorical background, i'll mention that the medicalcenter hour in past years often addressed the divisionof perceptual studies research, especially ianstevenson's internationally known studies of childrenwith possible past lives. and indeed, ian presented heremultiple times about his work. his research, like that of hissuccessors in the division, is i think especiallynoteworthy for scientific rigor
with which it was performed. indeed, dr. stevenson isstandard for impeccable science was extraordinarily high, andit even continuously challenged him in his own work. i'd like to say thattoday's program is co-presented with historicalcollections of the health sciences library and withthe department of psychiatry and neuro-behavioralsciences here at uva. all of the speakershave completed
disclosure forms andnone had conflicts of interest to disclose. so we'll start with dr. tucker. welcome. [applause] jim tucker: thank you very much. as you have heard,we are going to try to cover a fair amount today. i'm going to start by tellinga little but about the history
of our division, andthen we'll each talk about one particulararea of research. and mine will be thiswork that marcia mentioned that dr. stevenson beganwith young children who report memories of past lives. as she said, we donot have anything to disclose as far asconflicts of interest. so the story beginswith ian stevenson, and he came here to be thechairman of the department
of psychiatry in 1957. at that point, he was in themiddle of quite a successful mainstream career. he had nearly 70 publicationsto his credit at that point. but he also had an interestin para-psychology. and after he hadbeen here a while, he heard about thesecases of children from various parts of theworld who described memories of a past life, and he decidedto go investigate those cases.
he was able to fund thattravel with the help of chester carlson, which is aname you've already with people on thechester carlson chair. chester carlson inventedthe xerox machine. so he was quite wealthy, andhe became a big supporter of ian's. so in 1967 withcarlson's help, ian was able to step down aschairman in the department and establish the-- what we nowcall the division of perceptual
studies. so this year marks our50 year anniversary, and we've been goingstrong ever since then. and most of the timewe were-- our home was this old clapboardhouse on wertland street, which is now student housing. a few years ago we movedto our current home, which is near the downtownmall, and we certainly don't occupy theentire building.
but we do have the ian stevensonmemorial library there, which has over 5,000 books in it. and we also have aneuro-imaging lab. and as for ian, once heestablished the division in 1967, he spent thebulk of the next 40 years focused on thesecases of children reporting past life memories. he published numerous booksand papers about them. one of his books wasreviewed in jama,
and it's actually reviewedby the book review editor who wrote, "in regardto reincarnation, he has painstakinglyand unemotionally collected a detailedseries of cases from india. cases in which the evidenceis difficult to explain on any other grounds. he's placed on record a largeamount of data that cannot be ignored." so to tell you a littlebit about his phenomenon,
we had now studied over2,500 cases around the world. they are easiestto find in cultures with a belief in reincarnation. but they have beenfound wherever anyone has looked for them. they have been found on all thecontinents, except antarctica. and they typically involvevery young children who spontaneously starttalking about a past life, and a recent ordinary past life.
these kids are not claiming tobe cleopatra or julius caesar or anything like that. just describing somebodywho lived and died. the one part of the life that'soften out of the ordinary is how the previous person died. in over 70% of the cases,the previous person died by unnatural means meaningmurder, suicide, accident, combat, that sort of thing. and often the kids in mostcases that we've investigated,
the kids give enoughdetails so that people have been able to confirm thatsomebody did actually live and die whose life matches thedetails that the child gave. now along with the statements,that children often shows emotional or behavioralfeatures that seem connected to the materialthey are describing, and i'll give you anexample of that in a minute. in addition, some childreneven had birth marks or birth defects that matchwounds, usually
the fatal wounds on thebody of the previous person. and ian studied alot of these cases. one was a littlegirl who remembered the life of a man who gothis fingers chopped off as he was being murdered,and the little girl was born with her handslooking like that. there was a boy whoremembered the life of a boy in another village who had lostthe fingers of his right hand in a fodder chopping machine,and the second little boy
was born with his handslooking like that, which is quite an unusual defect. and then there wasa boy who remembered the life of the man who hadbeen killed by a shotgun blast to the side of his head,and the little boy was born was born with just a stump foran ear and underdeveloped right side of his face. ian also listed 18cases in which children were born with twobirthmarks, ones
that matched both theentrance wound and the exit wound on the bodyof a gunshot victim. now in recent years, we havefocused more on american cases. and we can nowsay with certainty that this is not purely acultural phenomenon that takes place in areas withbelief of reincarnation, because we know lotsof american cases. and most of them takeplace in families who have never believedin reincarnation
before the children startedtalking about a past life. so i want to give youan example of a case, and then i'll turnthings over to bruce. this is a case that got somepublicity a few years ago. it's a little boynamed james leininger. well, he's not solittle anymore. but james was the son of achristian couple in louisiana, and his dad, in particular,was quite opposed to the idea of reincarnationbefore all this started.
but around the time ofhis second birthday, james started having horriblenightmares multiple times a week in which he would bekicking his legs up in the air and screaming airplane crash onfire, little man can't get out. and during the day, he wouldtake his little toy airplanes, and he would say"airplane crash on fire," and bam, he would slam themin the family's coffee table. he did this over and over againand his parents are apparently tolerant people, becausetheir coffee table had
dozens of scratches and dentsfrom "airplane crash on fire," bam. so when you add thatplay to the nightmares that he was having, he reallylooked like a traumatized child. but he had not experienced anytrauma, at least in this life. and then a little whileafter his second birthday, his parents were able to haveseveral conversations with him during the day in which hecould talk about those things.
and he said how his planehad crashed on fire, and how he had been shotdown by the japanese. and he said thathe flew a corsair. now i'd never heardof corsair, but it was a special plane that wasdeveloped during world war ii. then when he was28 months old, he said one day that his planehad flown off of a boat. and his parents askedhim the name of the boat, and he said natoma,and it turns out
there was a uss natoma bay thatwas stationed in the pacific during world war ii. then when he was 2and 1/2 his father bought this book on iwo jimato give his own father, james' grandfather for christmas. and he was looking through itone day when james came and got in his lap. and they were thumbing throughit, and they got to this page. and james' pointed at thepicture and said "that's where
my plane was shot down." and his dad said, "what?" and he said, "my airplanegot shot down there daddy." and that just floored his dadthat his 2 and 1/2 year old was talking like that. and then he learnedthat, in fact, that natoma bay did take partin the iwo jima operation. then james got oldenough to draw, he drew dozens and dozens ofpictures of planes and battle
scenes, and he alwayssigned them james iii and said that hewas the third james. well, eventually, withall this going on, his dad begin to wonder if hewas remembering a past life. so when james was 4 1/2, hewent to a natoma bay reunion. and he learned that one, andonly one, pilot from the ship had been killed duringthe iwo jima operation. this was a young manfrom pennsylvania named james huston.
so what we can do iscompare was james leininger said to james huston's life tosee how well that they match. now james' parents said that healso talked about family life before the war, but wedon't have documentation of those statementsthat was made before huston was identified. but what we do havehere, this is a list of items where we do havedefinite documentation named before anyone knew anythingabout james huston.
so james signed hisdrawings "james three." huston was james jr.,which would make james leininger the third james. james said theyflew off the natoma. huston was the piloton the uss natoma bay. james said they flew a corsair. huston had flown a corsair. he was actually flyinga different plane when he was killed,but he was part
of the squadron that testedthe corsair for the navy. james said he was shotdown by the japanese, and huston was shotdown by the japanese. james said, he died in iwo jima. huston was the one and onlynatoma bay pilot killed during the iwo jima operation. james said one day quote, "myairplane got shot in the engine and crashed into the water,and that's how i died." eye witnesses reported thathuston's plane was quote,
"hit head on right on themiddle of the engine." james had nightmares of hisplane crashing and sinking in the water, and huston'splane crashed in the water and quickly sank. and james said one day that hisfriend, jack larson, was there. and jack larson wasthe pilot of the plane next to huston's on theday that he was killed. james is now 18 years old. he graduated from highschool last spring,
and he has now joined the navy. so with that, i will turnthings over to bruce greyson. bruce greyson: thank you, jim. a lot of thephenomena that we've been studying at the divisionof perceptual studies or dops for the past 40 yearshave been new death experiences or ndes. many people when theycome close to death report unusual andprofound experiences
in which they appear tohave left their bodies and claim to have movedbeyond the boundaries of time and space. these ndes have been recorded ina variety of ancient cultures. you can find them in thewritings of cleo, in the bible, in writings from tibet,india, egypt, china, japan, and in the folklore of the southpacific and native americans. the interpretationof these experiences varies from culture to culture,but the basic phenomena
remain the same across theglobe and across the centuries. these experiencesnear death were recorded in medicalliterature and journals in the 19th century. and they were described asa discrete syndrome in 1892 by heim. they were written about quite abit in fresh academic journals in the 1890s when victoregger gave the term near death experiences.
that term becamepopular in english in 1975 when thebook was written by a uva intern named raymondmoody called life after life. there remained some controversynow about what causes ndes, and what thereultimate meaning is, but there's no questionabout there incidence or their impact on people. a variety of studies here atuva and in europe and the uk suggests that theyoccur in about 20%
of people who have a documentedcardiac arrest in study after study. we at uva have developed amodel of the nde and a scale to quantify thedepth of ndes that's been used in hundreds ofstudies around the world. it basically looks atndes as being composed of component parts, changesin thought processes, changes in emotionalstates, apparently paranormal phenomena,and what seem
to be otherworldly phenomena. the changes in thoughtprocesses include a sense of time being distorted. people often talk about havinga sense of timelessness, thinking, being faster,and clearer than usual, having a life review orpanoramic memory where your entire life flashesbefore your eyes, and a sense of suddenunderstanding or revelation where everythingbecomes crystal clear.
the changes in feeling includea sense of peace and well-being, feelings of joy,a sense of oneness or cosmic unity, anencounter with what seems to be a loving,warm being of light. the apparentlyparanormal features include extraordinarysensory vividness. people report seeing colorsthey have never seen on earth, hearing sounds they'venever heard before, having what seems tobe frank extrasensory
perception of thingsgoing on elsewhere, visions of the future,and a sense of leaving the physical body. the otherworldlyfeatures include being in an otherworldly realm,an unearthly or mystical realm. encountering some mysticalbeing or presence, seeing deceased spiritsor religious spirits, and coming to a point ofno return beyond which you can't come back.
now most ndes, in fact, havea combination of all four of these elementsto varying degrees. as an example, let me giveyou a report of one woman who had the following experience. she said, during the war iwas very ill in the hospital. one morning the nurse camein and found me showing no sign of life whatever. she called the doctors towhom i also appeared dead, and i remained so theytold me afterwards
for at least 20 minutes. i became aware of a brilliantlight and felt drawn toward it. it seemed that time wasdifferent or nonexistent there, wherever there was. the light wasbeautiful to look at and projected feelings ofunconditional love and peace. looking around, i foundmyself in a beautiful green, undulating country. i then saw a young officer witha few soldiers approaching.
the office was myfavorite cousin, albin. i did not know thathe had died, nor had i ever seen him in uniform. but what i saw of him wasconfirmed by a photograph i had seen many years later. we spoke for a fewminutes happily, and then he and the fewmen with him marched off. then a presencebeside me explaining that these soldiers wereallowed to go and greet
others who were dying andhelp them meet their death. my next vividrecollection after this was of looking down fromabout ceiling height onto a bed on which laida very emaciated body. there were doctorsand nurses around it. i yelled out to them, butthey couldn't hear me. i could see everythingclearly and felt warm, safe, and peaceful. in a few moments, iwas looking up at them
and feeling sensation ofintense disappointment. i had come back from somethingso lovely and so utterly satisfying. two days later, the doctor toldme i was lucky i didn't die. i told him that i did. he looked at me in astrange way and scheduled me for psychological evaluation. i learned to keep my mouth shutabout that from that time on. now one of the problemswe have in researching
near death experiences isthat for the most part, they're retrospective. we're gettingaccounts from people who had the experiencessometime in the past. that leaves open the questionof how reliable memories of ndes really are. some authors havespeculated that memories are embellished over the years. in particularly, that thesense of well-being and peace
and the pleasantnessof the experience gets embellished over time. because we've been studyingthese experiences for four decades now, we're ableto address this question. starting in 2002,i started trying to reconnect withpeople i had interviewed in the 1980s about theirnear death experiences and asked them to describetheir ndes for me again. what we found-- oops, i'mgoing the wrong way here--
is that the nde scale scoresmeasuring the depth of the nde were the same now in the 2000sas they were in the 1980s. and that held true for allfour of the components, changes in thinking, changes in feeling,paranormal, and transcendental. so memories of the nde are,indeed, reliable over yea. and that's in just thatretrospect to research is also reliable. another important question aboutretrospective reports of ndes is whether they're influencedby cultural beliefs.
we know that people's culturalbeliefs influence how they interpret their perceptions. we see what we expect. for example, neardeath experiences of third worldcountries do not talk about entering a tunnelthe way americans do. they would talk aboutentering a cave or a well. one truck driverwho i interviewed talked aboutentering a tailpipe.
so you have to usewhatever cultural metaphors at your disposal todescribe the phenomenon. so our nders justreporting what they expect to happen whenthey come close to death. the image of ndes thatmost people have nowadays is the one described byraymond moody in 1975. now we've been collectingndes here at uva since 1960s, years before moody'sbook came out. so we compared 24 experienceswe collected in the 1960s
with 24 recent experiencesthat were matched with the original ones in termsof age, race, gender, religion, cause of death andproximity to death. what we found is that thefeatures that moody reported, were reported just asoften before the experience and experience. no matter what we looked at,the out-of-body experience, the feeling of peace, meetingothers, a being of light, noises, or life reviewall reported before we
moody had described themas often as they are now. and they also hold truefor the after events that moody reported, attitudechanges, loss of fear of death, difficulty tellingothers, belief in survival after afterlife,and corroboration of extrasensoryperceptions, or as often before described them as after. so report do notseem to be influenced by the widespread publicknowledge of ndes.
although the interpretationof the phenomenon maybe influence by culture,the actual experience appears not to be. but even though thesememories of ndes are reliable andconsistent over decades, that doesn't establishthat their memories are real events rather than memoriesof fantasies or hallucinations. to test that possibility, weuse the memory characteristics questionnaire,which was designed
to differentiatememories of real events from memories ofimagined events. this memory characteristicsquestionnaire taps into the fiveaspects of memories that reliablydifferentiate memories of real from imagined events. it includes the clarityof the memories including the visual detail, sensoryaspects, like sound, smell, taste, in the memory,contextual features,
like the memory for locationand spatial arrangements, thoughts and feelingsduring the recalled event, and the intensity of feelingsboth during the event and now remembering it. we asked people whohad come close to death to rate their memories of thatevent, and also of real events that happened around thesame time in their lives. and also about an imagined eventfrom that time in their lives. what we found is that forthose people who had ndes,
the near deathexperience was remembered with more clarity, more detail,more context, and more intense feelings that real eventsfrom the same time period. ndes were recalled asrealer than real events to the same degree that realevents remembered as realer than the imaginary events. on the other hand, peoplewho did not have ndes reported there closebrush with death to be as well as other realevents, but not realer.
so ndes are remembered withgreat consistency over decades, and they're recalledas realer then real. how do we explain them? there are no variablesthat we found yet that can predict whethersomeone's going to have an nde. neither age, race, gender,religion, religiosity, or mental illness. there's been lots of speculationabout physiological variables that may be involved inndes, but the bottom line
is that it's hard to reconcileenhanced mental function, thinking and perception beingclearer and sharper than ever before with theimpaired brain function as you have in deepanesthesia or cardiac arrest. so why are near deathexperiences of interest to health professionals? one reason is that there'sa consistent pattern of after effects fromnear death experiences. changes in beliefs,attitudes, and guidance,
and it's even corroboratedwith long term studies and interviews withsignificant others. we see increasesin spirituality, a sense of concern orcompassion for others, appreciation of life, asense of meaning or purpose, confidence and flexibilityin your coping skills, and a belief inpostmortem survival. and along with thesewe see decreases in fear of death, thedecreased interest in material
possessions, decreased interestin status, power, prestige, and fame, and decreasedinterest in competition. a second reason thatndes are important to us is what they suggest aboutsurvival of bodily death. as dr. tuckermentioned, our division was founded to explore thepossibility that something may survive after death, andndes do provide some evidence on that question. for example, we haveenhanced cognition
when the brain is impaired,such as by anesthesia or cardiac arrest, whichsuggests that the mind is not just what the brain does. second, we haveaccurate perceptions from an out-of-body perspective. a recent review of over100 published cases of people who had lefttheir bodies during an nde and reported seeing things,showed that greater than 90% were 100% accurate.
further evidence of potentialindependence of mind and brain. third, we getaccurate information that's imparted by deceasedvisitors in the nde, such as the location of animportant document or a hidden treasure, which is evidencethat these were encounters with interactive beings not justmental images of the deceased. a shocking example of this arendes in which the person meets in the experience someonewho was not known at the time to be dead.
an example with theexperiencer i mentioned before, who saw her cousin, albin,who she had known had died. of course, she did know thathe was a soldier, so it's conceivable she could haveimagined that he had died. but that's not always the case. we also have the nde from ayoung girl, an only child who almost died duringheart surgery and said that in her near-deathexperience during surgery, she needs someone who identifiedhimself as her brother.
when she told herfather about this he was so moved thathe confessed to her that he had had a sonshe didn't know about who had died before she was born. we have identified dozensof cases of this type. some going backto ancient greece. the bottom line isthat our culture tends to talk aboutdeath as if it's the end. the end of all existence.
but nde suggests that it maybe more like a change of state. i'm going to turn things overnow to dr. kim penberthy. i'm happy to followthe snow men. well, thank you. i am kim penberthy, and i amthe newest member at dops, and i feel very honored to bepart of this esteemed group bring with me whati'm going to talk about now, which is some ofthe directions we're moving in. as you heard, there'sbeen an extensive history
of research in the areaof near-death experiences in children whoremember past lives. that's not all that we aredoing, though, or have done. and so i'm going to describeto you a little bit, very briefly some ofthe work i'm doing, and then my colleague,dr. kelly, will finish up. so the areas you heardof are important, because of the main questionand mission that dops has. this idea of survival.
this idea of therelationship between what we call the mind and the brain,and are we more than just the bodies that we inhabit. additional research thisbuilds in that area, which would make sense. so the areas of researchthat we've strategically outlined and planned and,sort of, begun to collaborate include areas that build uponthis, including continued work in areas you've heard about.
we're also looking to expandand focus our research in the area of end of life. i work in the cancercenter as a clinician. i am a clinical psychologistworking with palliative care, and we have a lot of questionsabout all the experiences of people while they weredying, the experiences of people who were working withthe dying, and we'll hope to launchresearch in that area and begin hopefully this fallwith a big event that we have.
we also have a strong backgroundin the neuroimaging field and have specific dedicatedresearchers to look at this. so the folks you've justheard about, and you've heard alluded to, we canlook at their brains and look at what is goingon with various imaging sort of strategies, includingeeg, other imaging capacities that we have. and we have brilliantpeople doing that work. so we're alwayslooking for individuals
where we can, sort of,use these techniques and develop ourhypotheses and test them. we also are lookingat the phenomenon that exist where we can experiencesome of this ability without having thenear- death experience or a memory of a past life. these are someextreme examples that promote these things that dr.-- that bruce was talking about.
and one of the areasof research for me is how can weachieve these sorts of states of minds, thislevel of consciousness with intentionality. so not all of us will havea near-death experience. not all of us willremember a past life. does that mean we'reexcluded from this realm of understanding? and i don't believe that'snecessarily the case.
so my interests fold intowhat we've talked about. this idea of the-- this optimistic ideathat we can achieve this. so one area ofresearch that i have is looking atintentional strategies to develop these andunderstand this relationship between consciousnessand the physical world. so i have currentlygot funding to look at the developmentof these skills,
and how they may beassociated to people who are practicingmindfulness, meditation, various forms of yoga. and i'm collaboratingwith my colleagues at the institute of noeticsciences in california where we have somepreliminary data to demonstrate that thereseems to be an association. and the reality is-- i mean this is what some ofthese practices developed for
are to enhance these abilities. and we often in our modern dayresearch don't ask about them. so we might teach someonehow to meditate and measure their blood pressure and seethat their blood pressure went down, which is pretty darnamazing in and of itself. we don't ask them,however, did you notice if you were moreintuitive, or that you've had any kind of otherextraordinary experiences. and if you-- it turns outif you begin to ask people,
many of them we'll report that. so we're now currently lookingat prospectively monitoring this in cohorts hereand in california, and looking at it againin the tradition of dops in a scientific way, whatwe can find in that area. i have researchedlooking at developing a mindfulness-based interventionfor people with lupus. there have been veryfew developments in this area fordecades, and we were
charged with this taskof looking at can doing a mindfulness exercisenot only reduce the stress, improved fatigue,but can it actually change biological markers. markers of mental logicalfunctioning or inflammation, il-6, these sorts of things. and again this isa big deal, if we can look atintentionally developing these skills in order tohelp ourselves that way
and help other people. so through theresearch at dops, i would just liketo emphasize what we do is we striveto challenge some of the entrenchedmainstream views that may be held in medicine even. and evaluation empiricalevidence regarding consciousness, andits relationship to the physical world,including our body and our--
and the mind and thebrain and looking at whether they are indeeddistinct and separate. this is the work we do. and i'm going to handit over to my colleague to discuss this a bitfurther, because it's important to understandthe ramification of what this might mean notjust for ourselves, our health, our ability. but i would challengeyou to think
about for the future of ourdeath and our people as a race. so thank you. so i'm to try to explain inthe next five or six minutes the implications ofthose two large books. yeah, i'll just stay here. obviously, it's going tohave to be very telegraphic. but we put outbrochures both down here and on the table outsidewhere you can find us, on your way toour website, which
contains lots more information,and the real justification for some outrageous thingsthat i'm now going to tell you. my career, kind of, bracketswhat goes on at dops. a little differentbackground, i started out as an experimental psychologiststudying psychology and language andcognitive science at harvard in the 1960s. this is when we wererecovering from the dark ages of behaviorism.
beginning to realize thatthere are things like minds and consciousness and so on. and i mean i had absorbed theview that most scientists held then and most do now, whichis that basically mind and consciousness are generatedby physiological processes going on in brains. well late in the-- late in the piece when i wasworking on my dissertation, i became interested inexperimental parapsychiology.
this had to do withsome experiences involving my sister, andi learned to my amazement that there was a vast sectionof widener library devoted to the subject ofpsychical research, including a lot ofexperimental research that i've never heard of before. and so i began readingit, and eventually decided well this stufflooks really interesting, and if it reallyhappens, something's
fundamentally wrong with ourbasic scientific outlook. and so i decided to sign up withjb ryan down at-- in durham. he had been at dukemost of his career, but had moved off campus. and so i started there atthe usual $400 a month, six month trial period, and thelots of idealistic young people who clambered tooccupy those few slots. within a month, imet a guy who erased any doubts i still hadabout the existence
of the basic phenomenathat ryan was studying. this guy could do basicallyanything we asked him to do. he succeeded atcontrolled psy task at prodigious levels ofstatistical significance. so the first take home lessonis, whether we like it or not, psy-phenomenon existas facts of nature, and science is going to haveto come to grips with that fact somehow. i had also gotten interested,because of some things
we found out about this guy,and the possibility of measuring brain waves in relation to hisperformance in these tasks. and i won't go intothat in any detail, but i'm happy to say that eventhough it, kind of, petered out at that time, this was inthe school of engineering, electrical engineeringdepartment where i encountered my colleague rossdunseath over here. raise your hand. we spotted him.
he was an undergraduateat the time. he's been with us ever since. anyway, the group was there. we made some headway,but the technology really was not up to it. we laid the, kind of, conceptualtechnical foundations, but couldn't do many ofthe things we hoped to do. we now have established atdops a really first class neuroimaging facility,and can begin
to do things nowthat we could only dream about back in the 1970s. ok, but now we come to theother part closer to this. i had to give up psychoresearch for a long time. i worked in neuroscienceat unc chapel hill. all the uva enemies,right, the core. and we did somegood things there and continued to develop oureeg techniques, and so on. but i was anxious to finda way back into the field,
and actually married oneof ian's long time research collaborators, emilywilliams, in 1998 and retired early andmoved here in 2002 so that we could work intensely onthe first book, irreducible mind. now the way that cameabout was that mike murphy who you may know as aco-founder of esalen institute out in big sur, california,which is now an island apparently, by the waydue to the recent storms. he-- i mean, he's anamazing man much like ian.
in fact, we dedicatedour book to ian and mike jointly even though theynever met in the flesh. they are both, kindof, the descendants of the original foundersof psychical research that is in the breadth oftheir scientific vision. mike was well awareof the prevailing view in neuroscience, andif that view is correct, there can be no survival period. that's an inescapable fact.
if mainstream view of productionof mind and consciousness by psychological processesin the brain is correct, there can be no survival. that's the fundamentalbiological objection to survival, and it'sbeen elaborated ad nauseam in a reason recent book calledthe myth of an afterlife. anyway we started byjust reviewing evidence for survival, which mikewas very interested in. but we graduallyrealized that we
needed to undertake a muchbigger project in two stages. irreducible mind isthe first stage where we assembled inone place a whole lot of empirical evidencethat we think disproves the conventionalview of mind, brain relations. we incorporated all theexperimental parapsychology and survival researchby reference. we want to make a bookabout science survival, but we wanted touse that evidence,
so there's a big annotatedbibliography in there. but we then went onto describe a variety of other well-documentedempirical phenomena that are difficult orimpossible to explain from a conventionalpoint of view. and i won't go through it. they include things likeextreme physiological influence. the manufacturing of things likestigmata or hypnotic blisters. even blisters having aspecific geometrical form.
they include, in particular,cases of this sort that bruce talked about. near-death experiencesunder conditions such as deep general anesthesiaand or cardiac arrest. and those are crucial,because these things are happening under conditionsthat 99% of contemporary neuro scientists believe are-- the conditions whichneuro scientists believe are necessaryfor conscious experience
have been abolished. and that can beshown categorically. the way we know that they hadthe experiences during the time of unconsciousness isthat they can sometimes report things correctly, thingsthat happen during that period. and there are severalarguments about all that, but that's the basic idea. anyway, the end resultof this whole exercise, and i have to finish withinthe next minute or two
was to show that thecorrelations that exist between mental events andphysical events, which we all accept that's justhow it is, can be interpreted in a different way. that it is that mind,consciousness, or something inherently larger than wenormally know that overflow the organism in some sensewould operate the condition by the behavior of thebrain and the sense organs and all the rest of it.
now to me that totallychanged the landscape of the conceptual territoryof this survival discussion, because now we havea way of thinking about the mind, brain connectionthat allows for the possibility that mind can operateseparately from the organism. to me that eroded thebiological obstacle to survive. ok, well now we'vegot that far, and so in psychological way, whatdoes it all mean in terms of our fundamental worldview.
that was a secondmuch harder job, and we struggled withit for a long time, but finally put togethera book that's remarkable at least for its authorship,because we have physicists, scholars of religion,and philosophers all under thecovers of one book. and to cut to the bottomline, the basic picture is one that seems to convertthe currently popular view of the relation between thephysical and the mental.
we have begun to thinkwe're being driven towards some kind of anidealistic picture in which mind is not derivativefrom matter, but if anything theother way around. so it has fundamentalimplications for our basic vision ofreality and our place in it. so i think i'll stop there,and we start questions. marcia day childress: thank you. thank you for fourwonderful presentations.
i daresay this isour mind expanding. and we are open to yourcomments and questions. we have a couple of mics wecan bring to those of you who have questions. i would ask that youplease identify yourself before you make your commentor ask your question. and you may direct your questionto any or all of the presents. so who would like to start? audience: i'm bob reynolds, aretired professor of medicine
here and used to bea vice president. and i find this materialabsolutely fascinating and mind boggling. i'm reminded of a book madeinto a recent movie called heaven is for real. and it tells thestory of a three or four-year-old boy whohas a ruptured appendix, and i presume had anear-death experience. and as he gets older,he tells the family
about what he experienced. would you categorize this as oneof your near-death experiences, and the story that came with it? bruce greyson: well, i wouldcertainly characterize it as a near-death experience. there are a lot of questionsabout this particular case. he was a four-year-old boyas i said-- as you said. and his parents werequite religious. in fact, the fatherwas a pastor.
and there's a lot of suggestingthat his account was, kind of, filtered throughthe parents belief system. that does not, of course, changethe phenomena that he reported. he did, in fact, encounterdeceased relatives that he didn'tknow, and so forth. so there are somephenomena that classify as his legitimatenear-death experience, although the trappings may becolored by his family's belief system.
audience: hi, i'm anita regal. i'm a retirednurse practitioner. first, i want to give a shoutout to dr. tucker's books for anybody whohasn't read them. they're reallyextraordinary, and i think it underscores therigor of the research. but i have a questionfor dr. greyson. when i was a nurse practicingin the coronary care unit, i had a few patients thati can recall that had
or that talkedabout what sounded like near-death experiences. but there was onepatients in particularly that was so disturbing,i mean i still remember his nameand the vision, because it wasreally unsettling. it was not apleasant experience. it was very-- he actuallysaw on a rainy day, he had-- it was during a cardiac arrest.
he talked about being up in theroom being able to see things going on that were confirmed. but then he talkedabout his experience where he actuallysaw his funeral. it was a horse drawn carriage. it was very, veryunsettling to him. so it was not that peaceful,sort of, calming effect. have you come across anyexperiences like that? i don't know if it was anear-death experience or not,
but it was just very differentfrom anything i've ever heard. bruce greyson:there certainly are a number of experiences thatseem to qualify as near-death, but they are not pleasant. we don't know howmany there are, because it's hard to get peopleto talk about these things. most people who havestudied the phenomena say that between 1and 10% of people who have a near-death experiencewill have an unpleasant one.
although again,it's hard to say, because they don'ttalk about them. nancy evans bush, who herselfhad a terrifying experience, wrote a book about itcalled dancing past the dark, in whichshe describes not only a range of unpleasantnear-death experiences, but how to dealwith them, and how to make them into creativepositive experiences. most mythologicalhero's journeys,
include travels throughterrifying travails to get to get the finalenlightenment or goal. and she, kind of, interpretsin times-- in terms of that. that some people need to gothrough these horrible things to get to the point. because we don't have many ofthese experiences to look at, we don't know what goes intomaking a near-death experience pleasant or unpleasant. for some people we know thatwhat makes them unpleasant
is the difficulty in letting go. and people who are very rigidpersonalities find themselves out of their bodies and areterrified by the experience. so instead of embracingthe experience, they fight against, and thatitself makes it terrifying. marcia day childress: hi, i'm-- i'm sorry there's oneright before you sir. so sorry. audience: hi, i'm marystack, and i very much
believe in what you're talkingin reading things on it. and i remember, so oliversacks, in his hallucinations, he's poo pooing. what is your responseto what he says. oliver sacks presents thestandard materialistic position that the braincreates in the mind. and he pretty much discountsall of phenomena that we look at and credit. and i don't know whathis rationale was
for this discounting those,except that they don't agree with his world view. interestingly, he started one ofhis books, musicophilia, which then-- with anear-death experience of tony cicoria, who wasan orthopedic surgeon in rochester, who had anear-death experience when he was struck by lightning, andthen had a total personality change. he started composing classicalmusic, which he had never been
involved with music before. totally changed his life. and yet sacks interpretedthis as just an artifact of his brain being friedby the electricity. so i know that he knows ofour work, and he has read it, and just thinks it's notworth paying attention to. audience: i'm greg patterson. i'm the gamma knife nursecoordinator here at uva. is your instituteusing anything to study
isochronic or binauralacoustic waveforms to alter mental status? such as in a lot ofthe popular literature, they're using thetawaves, delta waves, to elicit out ofbody experiences, healing, changingbrain chemistry, things of that nature. edward kelly: we're certainlyinterested in that subject. one of the implications of thekind of psychological model
that i sketched isthat we potentially have access to allkinds of capabilities that normally we can't access. sometimes peopleblunder into it, through having a near-deathencounter of some sort, some through meditatingfor decades, maybe there are all kinds of ways ofaccessing these things that we haven't found out about yet. some kind of stimulation,whether electrical
or magnetic stimulation ofthe brain directly, or sound of one sort or another. i don't think anybodyhas discovered anything like that yet that isreally all that effective, but the possibilitiesare definitely there. audience: i'm anna tate. i'm one of the abdominaltransplant nurse practitioners here. i had just a quick question.
when you're talking about thesenear-death experiences that involve cardiac arrests or theseanaesthesia, sedative states, does that includestudying patients that have been in prolongedcomas, or icu sedative states but have normal brain activity? bruce greyson: we havenot studied people in prolonged coma,simply because we want people who have an acuteevent that we can look at before, during, and after.
some people are. steven laureys at theuniversity of liege in belgium-- who has done a lotof the important work with people who seem to be ina persistent vegetative state, and if you talk tothem they can show these electricalresponses-- he is now very interested innear-death experiences. some of his grad studentsare working with me in collaborative research.
audience: hello. i am victoria. i'm a uva student. i have a question. is there a scientificexplanation why people who experienceclinical death have this-- some parts of theirbrain are activated or they have external powers? for example, inrussia, there are
a lot of psychicswho see the future, but the majority of them,they've had other trauma, or they had a coma. do scientists explainwhat happens in the brain that after experiencingdeath, they have these powers? kim penberthy: that's you. [laughter] bruce greyson: i don't thinkwe have the answer to that yet. we certainly have a lotof anecdotal evidence
that people claim all sortsof abilities after the nde that they didn't have before. it's difficult to studythese with neuroimaging, for example, becausea lot of them can't do these things on demand. there have been afew people to be studied in the lab whoclaim to be able to do these things on demand. but to do mostneuroimaging techniques,
you have to be physically stillwhile you're being imaged. and a lot of these peoplehave trouble doing that. but we are stilllooking for people who can manifest theseabilities at will, that can do it in a way thatwe can do neuroimaging with. audience: hi. my name is libby rexrode. i'm a nurse coordinatorin the surgery department. i'm just curious howyou find your subjects.
do they come to you, or are youmade aware of these incidences, or how do you comeabout finding them? jim tucker: well, thesedays they find us. they go online if their childis talking about a past life, or if somebody has anear-death experience, or extraordinary abilities. then they find ed's lab. it would be very hard togo out and find people, but fortunately, it's very easythese days for them to find us.
edward kelly: if icould add to that, though, it's thehardest part of our job, is finding suitable peopleto work with in our lab. so if anybody knows ofanybody who has recently-- still send them our way, please. audience: dan grogan. unless i missed something, theonly percentile correlation you looked at was, or mentioned,was cardiac events and trauma, suicide, war.
does that aspect-- i assume you were lookingat the highest correlations. but connecting cause ofdeath with nde percentages, does that area lead youin any other direction? or is there some-- what's the current theory aboutwhy those areas correlate? and then, i'd also be interestedin your view of the young man of james iii, and hispersonality in the western context, rebirth orre-incarnated folks--
what they bring to society afterthat in the arc of their life. bruce greyson: i'lltake the nde part first. we have studied-- we havefiles on more than 1,000 near-death experiences. about a quarter of thoseare from cardiac arrest. most of them are fromother causes of death. the problem with alot of these cases is that it's hard to knowhow close they were to death, because they happened in acar accident or some place
where they are notbeing monitored. we like to study cardiacarrest, because we know exactly what's goingon with them, so we can get nice figures about that. because with people whowere in a car accident, we don't know what thebaseline is, so we don't know how many of them have ndes. so it's neater to doresearch with cardiac arrest, but we study otherpeople as well.
in fact, we have not found thatthe way you come close to death has any impact on that typeof near-death experience that you're going to have. there are someexceptions, like people who were intoxicated at the timeor under the effect of drugs tend not to have as many ndes,or to have shallower, quote, ndes than people who werementally clear at the time. jim tucker: so as far as thequestion of what children who remember past lives,what they then take with them
into their life-- most of thechildren, by the time they get to be six or seven,stop talking about this stuff, and they just go on with theirlives, as far as we can tell. now, some of them as adultssay that it did give them more of sort of a spiritual outlook. but for the most part,they seem to be pretty much like the rest of us. they're certainly not littlemystics or anything like that.
they're just kindof typical kids. we've done psychologicaltesting with stuff some of them. the only thing thatreally showed up is they tend to bequite intelligent. but otherwise, they're prettymuch just like everybody else. marcia day childress: sowe've come to the end of hour, but obviously, not to theend of your questions. so you'd be welcome to come downand talk with the presenters following the program.
we invite you to join us nextweek, march 1st, at 12:00 noon, please, because we're combinedwith medical grand round. we have gerardclancy here with us, who's president of theuniversity of tulsa in tulsa, oklahoma. he's also a psychiatrist. he will be talkingabout a story of success in reversing urbanhealth disparities. so please join us thenat noon next week.
please now join mein thanking members of the division ofperceptual studies.
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