Meditation-induced near death experiences

Apologies for starting another thread on the same paper; had I spotted this one, I wouldn't have bothered.

Another good example of the limitation's of the Greyson scale perhaps...?

Self-score 16 questions... get a total score of 7 or more and you had an NDE, get a total score below 7 and you didn't have an NDE. A researcher gets to compare pears with pears (mediators), on the basis of 16 questions, but then suggests similarity between pears (meditators) with apples (everybody else with a score over 6).

Possibly more meaningful, as you say, to compare a known physiological state (i.e. cardiac arrest) - so one can compare apples with apples, and ensure *all* experiences recalled following cardiac arrest are relevant, even if they would have scored less than 7.

The Greyson Scale may have it's uses, when used appropriately to select a sub-group of experients to compare, for example Pim van Lommel 2001, it may for instance, show some correlation with the severity of cardiac arrest. But honestly, it doesn't say whether one had an NDE or not (doesn't even count distressing experiences)... and is often used inappropriately by researchers.

I was thinking along the same lines while reading one of Liester's papers about ayahausca and NDEs, and another on basic DMT and NDEs. It seems to me that in those comparisons, they Greyson Scale will give you the appearance of strong similarities according to its bullet points, whereas an actual look at the descriptions of the experiences doesn't seem to give much of a match at all (though, to be fair, I've read far fewer reports on DMT trips than I have NDEs, and then only so many of those.)

Whether that holds for these "MI-NDEs" I'm not sure; none of the experiences was described in sufficient detail in the paper.