Near Death Experience

[yogi]

Hopefully you never had one, but you probably know of others who did go through a near death experience. It's the kind of thing we don't reminisce about very often so that there is a lot of speculation regarding what is going on near death. Some neuroscientists now have it all plotted out on charts and graphs. It's clearly a biological function related to brain activity. The study, for obvious reasons, was performed on rats but the implications for human correlation is strong. It's a short read and not too complicated for the average person to grasp. Since we've talked about it before in these forums, here is the scientific scoop on the topic: posting.php?mode=post&f=23

[Kellemora]

Hmm, the link only opens up a new posting window.

I have an aunt who was pronounced dead four different times, and she had amazing things to tell, which I've mentioned on here not to long ago.

[yogi]

I'm sorry about that. This should do it: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/br ... _surge_in/

They don't go into what the experiences are like. They are, however, trying to determine what causes them. Apparently the brain remains "conscious" for a short time after clinical death occurs. They analyzed the brain activity during that short time and can see evidence of patterns that resemble consciousness. The wave activity is very low level and would easily be missed if you were not looking for such a thing. Aside from the neurological questions they also are questioning exactly what the scope of consciousness is. It's never been clearly defined, but there are points of agreement. Anyway, hopefully the link will work for you.

[Kellemora]

Interesting read, albeit only discussing the topic of brain activity after death.
The brain does try to survive after its blood supply is cut off, and I assume there are enough chemicals in our headbone to keep it going for a few minutes before it dies completely.

But nowhere did they talk about the possibility of OOB experiences since they were looking only at brain activity.
I doubt if they will ever be able to explain how people who died and came back could see things one could not see from the operating table, such as looking down from above their bodies, sometimes higher than the ceiling itself.

All interesting stuff, but no proof other than what the returned to life people say they saw.

[yogi]

The article points out that the after death brain activity is very similar to what they know about living consciousness. In fact it's a super consciousness that they suggest is being seen. This brings up the question of exactly where is that center of consciousness. The experiments described in the article suggests it originates inside the brain organ, but as you point out it says nothing about focus. I'll explain it for you. LOL Consciousness as you and I know it is the result of all the sensory inputs our bodies can generate. Those inputs cause chemical reactions in the brain which ultimately result in that brain scan activity. When the body dies, and all sensory inputs cease, the article suggests that consciousness STILL exists for a short time. Consciousness without sensory inputs is the OOB experience of which you speak. If by some chance life can be restarted, the memories of after death can be recalled. Or, in the case of surgery where all sensory inputs are shut down, the consciousness has no focus and can drift about the surrounding landscape. When the body awakens, and all senses come back, then consciousness derived from sensory inputs is once again attained.

Simple.

[Kellemora]

I can only relate what I have learned from speaking with my aunt, and a couple of other people who had similar experiences.
They saw things on top of cabinets, and above the ceiling tiles.
My aunt's doctor actually, after taking down the ceiling tiles to look and saw what my aunt saw, added specific shaped objects on top of his cabinets that one could not see from the floor.
But then I don't know if anything ever came of it.

[yogi]

I'm no neurologist but they do make a distinction between consciousness and awareness. Being conscious on whatever level allows one to be aware of what is around them. Your aunt became aware of things because she was not without consciousness. How that awareness connects to memory inside the brain (so that it can be recalled later) is the mystery. There seems to be only two explanations to pick from. One is that the brain can sense things outside of the organ itself. That would explain how memory can be utilized to recall that expanded awareness. The other explanation is that the conscious awareness separates from the physical body and senses things from it's own geophysical perspective. That would explain what people call spirits.

It's complicated.

[Kellemora]

Yeppers - I know I mentioned this before, but my aunt told her surgeon and her doctor about what she saw.
Her doctor took the initiative to have the ceiling panels taken down, and sure enough the things she saw written were there, and the objects, like a tag hanging from some pipes were there also. She also said the pipes were of different colors, which really floored the doc too, because most occurrences he heard of, were all in black n white, or colors were never mentioned.
But the whole point was, how could she see what was above the ceiling panels if she wasn't up there? Guessing? Not likely, considering she knew what numbers were on the ceiling panels directly above her body, and a few she could see close to it.
She also said she was scared to death when the doctor decided to stop working on her, and that is when she snapped back.

Other people say they saw white lights, or their dead relatives.
Then a few others say they only saw black or red with something drawing them to come closer.

I'm sure a lot of that could have come from a dying brain, trying to save itself.
But for those who claim they saw their body down below them, as if hovering over it, waiting.
I do think perhaps their spirit does leave their body, but slowly.

[yogi]

You touch on the point of controversy. Is awareness confined to staying within our heads, or can it leave and be located somewhere else? That is why scientists are trying to determine exactly what awareness is. It seems to me that it's both physical and metaphysical. The brain is what makes it happen by organizing things in it's memory for future reference and responses. The input devices are our senses and they are all connected to the brain. If the understanding of awareness is limited to only those sensory inputs, then the only explanation of OOB experiences is a sensory organ we do not yet understand. It may not be an organic and living organ as far as I'm concerned. I've mentioned a few times how quantum entanglement works. Atomic particles seem to have a way of knowing what their partners are doing and they can do it over great distances. Thus when it comes to quantum entanglement time and space are irrelevant. It could be that something in our brain operates the same way, i.e., disregards time and space. Thus we can be aware of things detached from our immediate surroundings. It's still a challenge to understand how that detachment can register in our purely physical memory banks for recall at a later time. Yet we hear stories of exactly that happening.

[Kellemora]

Maybe that is just one of the things were were never meant to know.
I often wonder if we were ever supposed to learn what we have about DNA so far?
Even so, there is still one heck of a lot to learn and understand.

I read an article the other day where they created (in a lab) an artificial black hole to study.
What they are finding is pretty interesting, and they are not what we thought they were.
We know the properties of black holes, and some of the things that happen from afar.
We are learning more about them, and it turns out, they just may not be the bad thing they are made out to be.
Apparently, they are more akin to a recycling plant, hi hi.

[yogi]

I am not one to readily accept the idea of predestination, and thus my world does not consist of things we are not "meant" to know. Having said that, I also realize my world is limited relative to the universe. When we study ourselves it is the equivalent of a microbe putting itself under a microscope. It's a microbe and can only deal with existence at the level of a microbe's understanding. It might learn all about itself, but it won't know from whence the microscope came, for example. And, if that microbe is resident under your thumbnail, can it possibly know or understand who and what you are? That's about were we are as humans when it comes to understanding the universe. Self-awareness, consciousness, and even genetics are all within our capability to understand them simply because we know they exist. Logically there must be things we don't know to exist, but I have a feeling the universe is not logical.

It seems like quite a while ago when I also read an article about black holes being created in laboratories. The article was expressing a concern over how dangerous that experiment might be given that anything sucked into a black hole does not come back out again. They thought it might be possible to create a hole that consumes the experimenter, his lab, the city it's located in, and probably the entire planet. It would be a most interesting way to end this madness. LOL

[Kellemora]

Well, you know I believe everything had a creator. I don't see it coming into being by happenstance.

I wonder about a law of physics concerning black holes. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
A black hole could be like a drain in a bathtub, what goes in comes out somewhere else.

[yogi]

What goes in a black hole stays in the black hole. LOL

The dominant thought behind those holes is that among other things they are super gravitational centers. Not even light can escape them due to the influence of it's gravity. Thus what goes in, stays in. There are other thoughts, equally without proof, and one suggest that black holes are portals to alternate universes, perhaps those made of anti-matter. Some day when quantum computers and Artificial Intelligence merge they will decide it's none of the above. Wish I could be around to find out what they conclude.

[Kellemora]

I wish I would have saved that website where they showed how a home brew black hole works, and the readings they got from it correlated with what they know about those in space.
It was an interesting read for sure.
How much stuff can fit into a black hole anyhow before it gets full?
Or does a black hole eventually implode on itself and become either a new star or explode creating yet another small solar system?
I don't know if anyone knows the answers to those questions yet.

[yogi]

How much stuff can fit into a black hole anyhow before it gets full?

Those Big Bang theorists figure the entire universe as we know it was at one time smaller than the smallest atomic particles known to mankind. So, I'd guess the capacity of black holes is enormous. Plus, nobody knows what happens when you get sucked into one of them. It could change matter into energy for all we know, and perhaps each one of them has the potential to explode (Big Bang) and form another universe. All I can say is that I'd not want one in MY laboratory. LOL

[Kellemora]

I'm pretty sure they did it using virtualization! Based on data they plugged into their program. So it could be way off.
But what they see out in the universe, they were able to emulate the results in their lab.
I tried to find the short video, but the ones I am finding are all blocked if you don't subscriptions.
There are many videos of the achievements being made with the super lasers.

[yogi]

Yes, YouTube is a huge profit center for Google. Apparently Twitter is getting jealous because they now allow subscriptions to selected content. I'm not sure how that works but it will restrict what I see on my timeline if I don't subscribe to individual tweeters. If you are good at tweeting, I suppose that would be a source of income. Twitter, however, gets it's cut too. Nothing is truly free anymore. Well, except for ... Brainformation. LOL

[Kellemora]

The me you know is not on Twitter, only my author personage, and I only follow other authors and readers, and of course my book promotion company, who's tweets I go to and hit the like button for all of their authors who's books were posted. I don't tweet my own books, but if my promoter tweets my books, then I share them the day after.

I've only known one person who got paid for posting tweets on twitter, and that was by twitter for posting things they wanted posted.
And it was usually less than 3 bucks a month too.
I know a couple on Quora who have earned some small pay amounts for content that got followed heavily, but there too, it wasn't much and they didn't disclose what it was.

Many years ago, when Broderbund owned Family Tree Maker, and were publishing CDs, I got a small pittance for providing them with some family tree data I had typed up for the History Center, like the Mayflower people and a few others. They added to what I sent them and published them on CDs. I also submitted my tree to them, they added it with others they sold on CDs also.

Before FInd A Grave existed, I also worked with the History Center, going out to local area graveyards that had no record center to obtain who was buried there. Many of these were once private family cemeteries, long abandoned, but was cared for by some churches and other organizations for free. There were about 15 to 20 of us who volunteered to do this, and around 4 pm we would all meet at a restaurant for an early dinner about once a month. Although we entered the data on forms by hand out in the field. I always typed mine up before I turned them in to the History Center on their forms. Plus I kept a copy for myself as well.
Then once I got involved in the World Family Tree Project by Family Tree Maker for Windows, I got out all of my old cemetery notes, and organized them by areas, and cemetery names if they had one. And thankfully, I had kept the maps of where they were located so I could get the latitude and longitude for each one I worked. When I sent my disks to WFT, they were so well organized, they were able to use them directly, and even changed how they made other CDs using the method I used. I got paid a little over 400 bucks for that data. I also had copies of who was buried in certain cemeteries I could get from the area Catholic Churches, and I was paid around 200 bucks for my stacks of those records, I did not add them to my floppy disks though.

I must be gaining some clout on Ancestry dot com, because the number of people contacting me about names in my tree has climbed steadily over the past few years. I assume because I'm appearing as the top three trees they show when people do searches, and/or open their own hints folders and I'm there in the list of what used to be five to seven, now they only show the top three in the hints folder. The only problem is, the further away from my immediate family I get, the more errors may have crept in. So some folks send me corrections, but sadly, I can't verify some of what they send me, and on some I know my data is correct and theirs is in error. I've even caught some glaring errors in my own immediate family. Transposed year dates, that might say 1980 instead of 1890, hi hi.

[yogi]

Twitter is a bit behind the 8-Ball in that they have not been meeting the expectations of investors. It's not like they have a lot of competition, but investors are interested in growth regardless of how it happens. Since Twitter has recently been forced to more closely monitor what's it's users are doing, they have dropped a significant number of fake accounts. Thus there is less content but supposedly of greater quality. Well quality doesn't show on the bottom line which is why they decided to sell subscriptions. It's not an entirely new idea nor is it totally bad. The sold content is kind of exclusive and desirable in some circles. That is how they hope to double their sales over the next couple years.

As you must know freelance authoring isn't the best paying job in the world. You do have an advantage in the world of genealogy, however. A lot of time and effort was put into your family tree and it shows. A project of that magnitude and quality would naturally draw a lot of attention and I for one am happy to learn you are doing so well at ancestry.com. I have seen a few people selling books over on Twitter and they certainly don't go about it the same way as you do. Then, too, they are dealing with a different audience than you are. The subscriptions will probably be most successful in the op-ed department. You can go anywhere to buy a book but only special people voice their obtuse opinions on a site like Twitter. Some of those special people are worth paying to read. Twitter is counting on that.

[Kellemora]

Twitter lost quite a few users when they began censoring conservative posts, then they lost a ton more when they banned Trump from their website. But there are many of us who make use of twitter anyhow and didn't leave.

One thing I like about twitter of farcebook is to block someone on farcebook, it takes a good minute or so when your blocked file grows large. On twitter, when you block someone, it is instant, and done on the same page.

I rarely looked at the main newsfeed on either site for years. More recently I've been checking the main newsfeed every couple of days, but only for about a half hours worth of posts. And I do block many from my main newsfeed as well.
That cuts down on the number of posts I see on the main newsfeed too.
Most of those I've followed on twitter are authors and readers, and a few book promotional groups.
And most of the time, they are not up to any shenanigans or it would hurt their image.