To NDE or not to NDE (re-done)

I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that Sartori said that the OBEs were dead on accurate. She notes many discrepancies between what the patient reported and the actual conditions, among those with OBEs.

Maybe you are thinking of the few OBEers who incorporated details of their resuscitation in their imagery? Those details incorporated into their imagery tended to be accurate (for a loose definition of accurate). But both the OBEers and the non-OBEers were inaccurate when they were queried about conditions which weren't incorporated into their imagery (the hidden targets, for example).

Linda

To revisit this thread, I was reading about a post where Linda was claiming there are a lot of NDEs that got the details in their OBEs wrong? What is to be thought about this? 

She often references Penny Sartori, who actually I believe took all the OBEs she could find reported, and found that the vast majority of them were dead on accurate. With only a few having "errors"

There are lots of people who get their recollections wrong when recalling past everyday experiences. So it’s hardly just a problem with NDE OBE’s. If we are going to discover whether information is leaking into patients recollections in a way that doesn’t fit with our current way of understanding the world, we’re desperately in need of clever studies that also use additional targets that are not hidden or secret.

There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest to me that people may come into possession of information that they should not be aware of. The problem appears to be that our perceptions do not appear to be formed in an informational vacuum, so designing experiments that allow information to be freely available in the subjects environment, whilst also showing that some information recalled by the subject should not have been available to them seems necessary. Difficult, but not unachievable... however, I think it’s more likely that progress will be made in lab conditions, where confounding effects can be removed or isolated.

To revisit this thread, I was reading about a post where Linda was claiming there are a lot of NDEs that got the details in their OBEs wrong? What is to be thought about this? 

She often references Penny Sartori, who actually I believe took all the OBEs she could find reported, and found that the vast majority of them were dead on accurate. With only a few having "errors"

Not sure whether this is coincidence but my Facebook News this morning has a Skeptiko link to an interview Alex did with Penny. Here's a quote:

Yeah. So, it just goes to show that the people who did report the near-death experience, described their experience with accuracy, whereas the control group weren’t accurate, and most of them couldn’t even hazard a guess. So, it just makes you think.

http://skeptiko.com/penny-sartori-are-nd...-love-374/

I was reminded of this thread after Dante responded to my post about NDEs in the Improbability Principle thread. Desperado and I asked for research on whether or not NDEs could be distinguished from "hallucinations, dreams, and other 'unreal' experiences". I'm not aware of any and no one offered some references (although ridicule is a popular response  ). 

I'm bumping this thread to ask whether anyone can suggest references for research which has actively looked at this. The closest I can think of is Steven Laureys' study on the quality of memories of NDEs compared to other events (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article...e.0057620#). He found that memory of NDEs were more like "flashbulb memories" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory), although he regarded them as flashbulb memories of hallucinations. However, his sample of NDEers seems to have been an unrepresentative sample selected post hoc on the basis of whether the experience was memorable to begin with, rather than a prospective collection. So that doesn't tell us whether NDEs are more memorable than other kinds of emotionally charged 'unreal' experiences (as one potential way to distinguish them), as much as it tells us that experiences selected on the basis of whether they are memorable tend to be more memorable.

Any other suggestions/ideas?

Linda

I was reminded of this thread after Dante responded to my post about NDEs in the Improbability Principle thread. Desperado and I asked for research on whether or not NDEs could be distinguished from "hallucinations, dreams, and other 'unreal' experiences". I'm not aware of any and no one offered some references (although ridicule is a popular response  ). 

I'm bumping this thread to ask whether anyone can suggest references for research which has actively looked at this. The closest I can think of is Steven Laureys' study on the quality of memories of NDEs compared to other events (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article...e.0057620#). He found that memory of NDEs were more like "flashbulb memories" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory), although he regarded them as flashbulb memories of hallucinations. However, his sample of NDEers seems to have been an unrepresentative sample selected post hoc on the basis of whether the experience was memorable to begin with, rather than a prospective collection. So that doesn't tell us whether NDEs are more memorable than other kinds of emotionally charged 'unreal' experiences (as one potential way to distinguish them), as much as it tells us that experiences selected on the basis of whether they are memorable tend to be more memorable.

Any other suggestions/ideas?

Linda

..........................................

Just making a note for the time being.(tim)

Is that last post from Tim or Linda?? It reads like Linda and I certainly don't think Tim would be happy lumping NDEs together with "other kinds of emotionally charged 'unreal' experiences", potentially or otherwise.

Is that last post from Tim or Linda?? It reads like Linda and I certainly don't think Tim would be happy lumping NDEs together with "other kinds of emotionally charged 'unreal' experiences", potentially or otherwise.

I think he's doing it for reference, as Linda make retract her original statements later when under scrunity and edit them to make them look like he's the one misinterpreting them. Just makes a little sense since she apparently resorts to certain "shenignans". Otherwise, I have no clue

Apologies Desparado. I misunderstood your intentions. 

Linda

...I asked for research on whether or not NDEs could be distinguished from "hallucinations, dreams, and other 'unreal' experiences".

I don't think you can call these, and other similarly labeled experiences "unreal". They are "real", they are real experiences. So perhaps you might want to try and find some more accurate way of defining them?

The label I see most in the literature is "non-veridical", it is perhaps a little more accurate, as veridical suggests the idea of some information that is not only truthful, but I would say that can be verified as such at a later time. But, I'm not convinced this way of slicing (labeling) the data is particularly useful either, because the phenomena we tend to discuss on here is of interest specifically because it *is* sometimes considered to contain veridical information, and this seems to happen whether or not it occurs under the label of NDE's, hallucinations, dreams or any other similar label.

These types of phenomena are therefore considered by some as anomalous, that is, some of us find the generally accepted ways of explaining some of these phenomena to be particularly unsatisfying, and requiring a major rethink, in my own case, I think another round of generalization in science is on it's way.