Ecstatic Seizures and NDEs

He felt her results (and conclusion that she believed the rodents really were becoming more conscious, and may be having very powerful visual experiences at cardiac arrest +15 secs), opened the door to discussions amongst 'cranks' about dualism. So he seemed to feel obliged to shut this door very firmly, by stamping on her study. Don't ask me to rationalise his reaction, I can't.

Do you mean that dualists are cranks, Max ? Practically everyone that has had an out of body experience during cardiac arrest, regard themselves as having a separate consciousness or a separable "self". 

Presumably if you found yourself up on the ceiling of a room looking down and observing everything that was going on in detail (when your heart had stopped), Occam's razor would cause you to assume that your brain down below (which was not functioning) was simply getting entangled  with other functioning brains in the room ?

I agree, and studies during wakefulness, definitely seem to show that 'self' can be relocated somewhat, with suitably relocated sensory data.

I fairly recently traveled down to London to visit the Bethlem Mental Hospital (Bedlam) exhibition. The doctors reports of patients perceptions, and patients own recollections on display were really interesting. I actually traveled down, primarily to see some original writings and artwork from Jonathan Martin, who was held in Bedlam, and who I wonder may be somehow linked to my unusual behavior on the day, the evening of which, I experienced a Hypnopompic hallucination/apparition.

However, I realised from the reports I was reading, that other patients were also suffering from the same issues. Patients who would guard the entrance to their room, to prevent any people getting beyond the threshold, because these patients believed that any intruders who passed beyond the threshold, would also get inside the patients mind, via the room itself. Other patients who in the presence other people, found their body parts got distributed around the room, their left arm on one side of the room, their right leg over in the corner of the room etc.

I felt very clear as I read the documents available, that the doctors and patients original writings, often fitted extremely well with the idea that Bedlam patients may be getting mixed up both with themselves, and other people in spacetime. Because they are different in some way, which prevents them from processing information in a similar way as a neurotypical person.

Sorry Max, I don't think you got the drift of what I was getting at there but I read your thoughtful post anyway, thanks.

I spoke to a researcher in the field of epilepsy, following Borgijin’s iEEG study of cardiac arrest in rodents. He seemed to feel the spreading coherence that Borgijin had measured at 15 seconds into CA, was rather like the spreading depressions he studied in Epileptic subjects, who had OBE, euphoric NDE-like experiences. His main reason for resisting Borjigins results and conclusions was really against the idea of dualism.

Although I don’t see any reason to invoke dualism, we just don’t know how sensitive the brains networks might be to external fields in an energy starved state. Borjigins is the first (and probably the last) detailed iEGG study of the brain state during cardiac arrest. But she didn’t shield the rodents from magnetic fields. Indeed she terminated my email conversation because she thought it was a rediculous suggestion that doing so could have made any difference to her results. But more recently we have found in behavioural studies, that rodents do display robust behavioural changes when they are completely shielded from light, and both electrical and magnetic fields (hypo-magnetic) inside mu-metal chambers.

Borjigins iEEG measurements strongly resembled the measurements researchers obtained in studies of wakeful primates and humans which were undertaking a visual task. I firmly believe Borjigin may have stumbled across the very evidence that would be needed to show that brain networks in an energy starved state, may be exquisitely sensitive to compatible external fields within which they are embedded. Temporarily allowing them to become entrained by compatible external fields.

Max - I don't suppose this fellow has published work about these euphoric experiences during epilepsy?

Been reading about these "ecstatic seizures", and honestly they come off as a caricature of what NDEs usually entail. And definitely don't seem to be a sufficient explanation for OBEs either. They are no closer to the mark then the exaggerated comparisons between the God Helmet "experiments" and NDEs years ago. 

If Fenwick and Ernest Rodin have both commented on epilepsy and NDEs, and they don't see a significant connection there, I think it's safe to say there is none. People have gone around in circles for years arguing about the temporal lobe and NDEs