MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Good afternoon.
00:29
I'd like to welcome you to this Medical Center Hour.
00:32
This is a program entitled, Is There Life After Death?
00:36
Fifty Years of Research at UVA.
00:40
I'm Marcia Day Childress from the Center for Biomedical
00:43
Ethics and Humanities, and we're delighted to produce
00:46
the Medical Center Hour and bring it to you each week
00:50
during the academic semesters.
00:54
I would quickly ask that there are a few--
00:57
a couple of seats still left.
00:59
Anybody sitting on the stairs, I would
01:02
encourage you please to find a seat,
01:04
because the Fire Marshall who sometimes
01:06
visits us doesn't approve of people sitting on the stairs.
01:13
Does some aspect of our personality
01:15
survive bodily death?
01:18
Long a philosophical and theological question.
01:21
In the 20th century, this became the subject
01:24
of scientific research.
01:27
50 Years ago this year in 1967, Dr. Ian Stevenson
01:32
then Chair of UVA's Department of Psychiatry
01:36
within the department a research unit now known
01:40
as the Division of Perceptual Studies
01:43
to study what, if anything, of the human personality
01:46
survives after death.
01:48
Dr. Stevenson's own research investigated
01:51
hundreds of accounts of young children
01:54
who claimed to recall past lives.
01:58
In our Medical Center Hour today,
01:59
one of our History of the Health Sciences
02:01
lectures, faculty from the Division of Perceptual Studies
02:06
highlights this unit's research initiatives since its founding.
02:11
They will also preview the unit priorities and partnerships
02:14
for its second half century.
02:17
We are delighted to welcome four presenters
02:20
to cover this span of studies.
02:24
On my immediate right, Jim B. Tucker,
02:27
who is the Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor
02:29
of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences.
02:34
He's also the director of the Division.
02:38
Next, is Bruce Greyson, Chester Carlson Professor Emeritus
02:43
of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences.
02:46
Third is Kim Penberthy, the Chester Carlson Professor
02:50
of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences,
02:53
and finally, on my far right Ed Kelly,
02:56
Research Professor of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences.
03:00
They will be presenting in this order.
03:04
By way quickly of some historical background,
03:07
I'll mention that the Medical Center Hour in past years
03:11
often addressed the Division of Perceptual Studies
03:14
research, especially Ian Stevenson's internationally
03:18
known studies of children with possible past lives.
03:22
And indeed, Ian presented here multiple times about his work.
03:27
His research, like that of his successors in the Division,
03:30
is I think especially noteworthy for scientific rigor
03:35
with which it was performed.
03:37
Indeed, Dr. Stevenson is standard for impeccable science
03:41
was extraordinarily high, and it even continuously challenged
03:45
him in his own work.
03:48
I'd like to say that today's program is
03:51
co-presented with Historical Collections of the Health
03:54
Sciences Library and with the Department of Psychiatry
03:57
and Neuro-behavioral Sciences here at UVA.
04:01
All of the speakers have completed
04:03
disclosure forms and none had conflicts
04:05
of interest to disclose.
04:07
So we'll start with Dr. Tucker.
04:09
Welcome.
04:09
[APPLAUSE]
04:17
JIM TUCKER: Thank you very much.
04:19
As you have heard, we are going to try
04:21
to cover a fair amount today.
04:23
I'm going to start by telling a little but about the history
04:26
of our Division, and then we'll each talk
04:29
about one particular area of research.
04:32
And mine will be this work that Marcia mentioned
04:35
that Dr. Stevenson began with young children who
04:38
report memories of past lives.
04:42
As she said, we do not have anything
04:44
to disclose as far as conflicts of interest.
04:50
So the story begins with Ian Stevenson,
04:53
and he came here to be the Chairman of the Department
04:56
of Psychiatry in 1957.
05:00
At that point, he was in the middle of quite a successful
05:03
mainstream career.
05:04
He had nearly 70 publications to his credit at that point.
05:08
But he also had an interest in para-psychology.
05:12
And after he had been here a while,
05:14
he heard about these cases of children
05:18
from various parts of the world who described memories
05:21
of a past life, and he decided to go investigate those cases.
05:26
He was able to fund that travel with the help of Chester
05:31
Carlson, which is a name you've already
05:34
with people on the Chester Carlson Chair.
05:37
Chester Carlson invented the Xerox machine.
05:41
So he was quite wealthy, and he became a big supporter
05:44
of Ian's.
05:46
So in 1967 with Carlson's help, Ian
05:51
was able to step down as chairman in the department
05:54
and establish the-- what we now call the Division of Perceptual
05:58
Studies.
06:01
So this year marks our 50 year anniversary,
06:05
and we've been going strong ever since then.
06:09
And most of the time we were-- our home
06:13
was this old clapboard house on Wertland Street,
06:17
which is now student housing.
06:21
A few years ago we moved to our current home, which
06:24
is near the downtown mall, and we certainly
06:27
don't occupy the entire building.
06:30
But we do have the Ian Stevenson Memorial Library there, which
06:34
has over 5,000 books in it.
06:36
And we also have a neuro-imaging lab.
06:41
And as for Ian, once he established the Division
06:45
in 1967, he spent the bulk of the next 40 years
06:51
focused on these cases of children
06:53
reporting past life memories.
06:55
He published numerous books and papers about them.
07:00
One of his books was reviewed in JAMA,
07:05
and it's actually reviewed by the book review editor who
07:08
wrote, "in regard to reincarnation,
07:12
he has painstakingly and unemotionally
07:14
collected a detailed series of cases from India.
07:18
Cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain
07:21
on any other grounds.
07:23
He's placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be
07:27
ignored."
07:29
So to tell you a little bit about his phenomenon,
07:32
we had now studied over 2,500 cases around the world.
07:38
They are easiest to find in cultures
07:40
with a belief in reincarnation.
07:42
But they have been found wherever
07:44
anyone has looked for them.
07:46
They have been found on all the continents, except Antarctica.
07:51
And they typically involve very young children
07:54
who spontaneously start talking about a past life,
07:59
and a recent ordinary past life.
08:01
These kids are not claiming to be Cleopatra or Julius Caesar
08:05
or anything like that.
08:07
Just describing somebody who lived and died.
08:11
The one part of the life that's often out of the ordinary
08:14
is how the previous person died.
08:17
In over 70% of the cases, the previous person
08:21
died by unnatural means meaning murder, suicide, accident,
08:26
combat, that sort of thing.
08:30
And often the kids in most cases that we've investigated,
08:35
the kids give enough details so that people
08:39
have been able to confirm that somebody did actually live
08:42
and die whose life matches the details that the child gave.
08:48
Now along with the statements, that children often
08:51
shows emotional or behavioral features that seem connected
08:55
to the material they are describing,
08:57
and I'll give you an example of that in a minute.
09:01
In addition, some children even had birth marks or birth
09:05
defects that match wounds, usually
09:08
the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person.
09:12
And Ian studied a lot of these cases.
09:15
One was a little girl who remembered
09:17
the life of a man who got his fingers chopped off
09:19
as he was being murdered, and the little girl
09:22
was born with her hands looking like that.
09:26
There was a boy who remembered the life of a boy
09:29
in another village who had lost the fingers of his right hand
09:33
in a fodder chopping machine, and the second little boy
09:37
was born with his hands looking like that, which
09:40
is quite an unusual defect.
09:44
And then there was a boy who remembered
09:46
the life of the man who had been killed by a shotgun blast
09:49
to the side of his head, and the little boy was born
09:53
was born with just a stump for an ear and underdeveloped right
09:57
side of his face.
10:00
Ian also listed 18 cases in which children
10:03
were born with two birthmarks, ones
10:06
that matched both the entrance wound and the exit
10:08
wound on the body of a gunshot victim.
10:13
Now in recent years, we have focused more on American cases.
10:18
And we can now say with certainty
10:21
that this is not purely a cultural phenomenon that
10:24
takes place in areas with belief of reincarnation,
10:28
because we know lots of American cases.
10:30
And most of them take place in families
10:34
who have never believed in reincarnation
10:36
before the children started talking about a past life.
10:41
So I want to give you an example of a case,
10:45
and then I'll turn things over to Bruce.
10:47
This is a case that got some publicity a few years ago.
10:51
It's a little boy named James Leininger.
10:54
Well, he's not so little anymore.
10:56
But James was the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana,
11:02
and his dad, in particular, was quite opposed
11:05
to the idea of reincarnation before all this started.
11:09
But around the time of his second birthday,
11:12
James started having horrible nightmares multiple times
11:16
a week in which he would be kicking his legs up in the air
11:19
and screaming airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out.
11:25
And during the day, he would take his little toy airplanes,
11:28
and he would say "Airplane crash on fire,"
11:31
and bam, he would slam them in the family's coffee table.
11:35
He did this over and over again and his parents are apparently
11:39
tolerant people, because their coffee table had
11:45
dozens of scratches and dents from "Airplane crash on fire,"
11:49
bam.
11:51
So when you add that play to the nightmares
11:56
that he was having, he really looked like a traumatized
11:59
child.
12:00
But he had not experienced any trauma, at least in this life.
12:05
And then a little while after his second birthday,
12:09
his parents were able to have several conversations with him
12:13
during the day in which he could talk about those things.
12:16
And he said how his plane had crashed on fire,
12:19
and how he had been shot down by the Japanese.
12:24
And he said that he flew a Corsair.
12:26
Now I'd never heard of Corsair, but it
12:29
was a special plane that was developed during World War II.
12:34
Then when he was 28 months old, he
12:36
said one day that his plane had flown off of a boat.
12:40
And his parents asked him the name of the boat,
12:43
and he said Natoma, and it turns out
12:47
there was a USS Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Pacific
12:51
during World War II.
12:54
Then when he was 2 and 1/2 his father
12:58
bought this book on Iwo Jima to give his own father, James'
13:02
grandfather for Christmas.
13:05
And he was looking through it one day when James came and got
13:07
in his lap.
13:09
And they were thumbing through it, and they got to this page.
13:13
And James' pointed at the picture and said "That's where
13:17
my plane was shot down."
13:19
And his dad said, "What?"
13:20
And he said, "My airplane got shot down there daddy."
13:24
And that just floored his dad that his 2 and 1/2 year old
13:27
was talking like that.
13:30
And then he learned that, in fact,
13:32
that Natoma Bay did take part in the Iwo Jima operation.
13:38
Then James got old enough to draw,
13:41
he drew dozens and dozens of pictures of planes and battle
13:45
scenes, and he always signed them James III
13:48
and said that he was the third James.
13:53
Well, eventually, with all this going on,
13:55
his dad begin to wonder if he was remembering a past life.
13:59
So when James was 4 1/2, he went to a Natoma Bay reunion.
14:05
And he learned that one, and only one, pilot from the ship
14:09
had been killed during the Iwo Jima operation.
14:13
This was a young man from Pennsylvania
14:16
named James Huston.
14:18
So what we can do is compare was James Leininger
14:23
said to James Huston's life to see how well that they match.
14:27
Now James' parents said that he also talked about family life
14:31
before the war, but we don't have documentation
14:35
of those statements that was made
14:36
before Huston was identified.
14:39
But what we do have here, this is a list
14:41
of items where we do have definite documentation named
14:46
before anyone knew anything about James Huston.
14:51
So James signed his drawings "James three."
14:55
Huston was James Jr., which would make James
14:58
Leininger the third James.
15:01
James said they flew off the Natoma.
15:04
Huston was the pilot on the USS Natoma Bay.
15:09
James said they flew a Corsair.
15:11
Huston had flown a Corsair.
15:12
He was actually flying a different plane
15:14
when he was killed, but he was part
15:16
of the squadron that tested the Corsair for the Navy.
15:19
James said he was shot down by the Japanese,
15:22
and Huston was shot down by the Japanese.
15:25
James said, he died in Iwo Jima.
15:28
Huston was the one and only Natoma Bay pilot killed
15:31
during the Iwo Jima operation.
15:34
James said one day quote, "my airplane got shot in the engine
15:38
and crashed into the water, and that's how I died."
15:43
Eye witnesses reported that Huston's plane was quote,
15:46
"hit head on right on the middle of the engine."
15:50
James had nightmares of his plane crashing and sinking
15:53
in the water, and Huston's plane crashed in the water
15:57
and quickly sank.
15:59
And James said one day that his friend, Jack Larson, was there.
16:03
And Jack Larson was the pilot of the plane
16:05
next to Huston's on the day that he was killed.
16:09
James is now 18 years old.
16:12
He graduated from high school last spring,
16:15
and he has now joined the Navy.
16:18
So with that, I will turn things over to Bruce Greyson.
16:21
[APPLAUSE]
16:32
BRUCE GREYSON: Thank you, Jim.
16:34
A lot of the phenomena that we've
16:35
been studying at the Division of Perceptual Studies
16:38
or DOPS for the past 40 years have been new death experiences
16:43
or NDEs.
16:45
Many people when they come close to death
16:49
report unusual and profound experiences
16:51
in which they appear to have left their bodies
16:54
and claim to have moved beyond the boundaries of time
16:57
and space.
16:59
These NDEs have been recorded in a variety of ancient cultures.
17:03
You can find them in the writings of Cleo, in the Bible,
17:06
in writings from Tibet, India, Egypt, China, Japan,
17:11
and in the folklore of the South Pacific and Native Americans.
17:15
The interpretation of these experiences
17:17
varies from culture to culture, but the basic phenomena
17:20
remain the same across the globe and across the centuries.
17:25
These experiences near death were
17:26
recorded in medical literature and journals
17:30
in the 19th century.
17:32
And they were described as a discrete syndrome in 1892
17:35
by Heim.
17:38
They were written about quite a bit in fresh academic journals
17:41
in the 1890s when Victor Egger gave the term near death
17:45
experiences.
17:47
That term became popular in English
17:49
in 1975 when the book was written
17:52
by a UVA intern named Raymond Moody called Life After Life.
17:57
There remained some controversy now about what causes NDEs,
18:01
and what there ultimate meaning is,
18:02
but there's no question about there incidence
18:04
or their impact on people.
18:07
A variety of studies here at UVA and in Europe and the UK
18:12
suggests that they occur in about 20%
18:14
of people who have a documented cardiac arrest in study
18:18
after study.
18:20
We at UVA have developed a model of the NDE and a scale
18:24
to quantify the depth of NDEs that's
18:27
been used in hundreds of studies around the world.
18:31
It basically looks at NDEs as being composed
18:33
of component parts, changes in thought processes,
18:37
changes in emotional states, apparently
18:40
paranormal phenomena, and what seem
18:42
to be otherworldly phenomena.
18:46
The changes in thought processes include a sense
18:48
of time being distorted.
18:50
People often talk about having a sense of timelessness,
18:55
thinking, being faster, and clearer than usual,
18:58
having a life review or panoramic memory where
19:00
your entire life flashes before your eyes,
19:03
and a sense of sudden understanding or revelation
19:05
where everything becomes crystal clear.
19:09
The changes in feeling include a sense of peace and well-being,
19:13
feelings of joy, a sense of oneness
19:15
or cosmic unity, an encounter with what
19:19
seems to be a loving, warm being of light.
19:22
The apparently paranormal features
19:23
include extraordinary sensory vividness.
19:27
People report seeing colors they have never seen on Earth,
19:29
hearing sounds they've never heard before,
19:32
having what seems to be frank extrasensory
19:34
perception of things going on elsewhere,
19:37
visions of the future, and a sense of leaving
19:39
the physical body.
19:42
The otherworldly features include
19:43
being in an otherworldly realm, an unearthly or mystical realm.
19:49
Encountering some mystical being or presence,
19:51
seeing deceased spirits or religious spirits,
19:55
and coming to a point of no return beyond which you
19:57
can't come back.
19:59
Now most NDEs, in fact, have a combination of all four
20:02
of these elements to varying degrees.
20:05
As an example, let me give you a report of one woman who
20:09
had the following experience.
20:11
She said, during the war I was very ill in the hospital.
20:16
One morning the nurse came in and found me showing
20:19
no sign of life whatever.
20:21
She called the doctors to whom I also appeared dead,
20:25
and I remained so they told me afterwards
20:27
for at least 20 minutes.
20:30
I became aware of a brilliant light and felt drawn toward it.
20:34
It seemed that time was different or nonexistent there,
20:36
wherever there was.
20:38
The light was beautiful to look at
20:41
and projected feelings of unconditional love and peace.
20:45
Looking around, I found myself in a beautiful green,
20:48
undulating country.
20:51
I then saw a young officer with a few soldiers approaching.
20:55
The office was my favorite cousin, Albin.
20:59
I did not know that he had died, nor had I
21:02
ever seen him in uniform.
21:04
But what I saw of him was confirmed by a photograph
21:07
I had seen many years later.
21:10
We spoke for a few minutes happily,
21:12
and then he and the few men with him marched off.
21:16
Then a presence beside me explaining
21:18
that these soldiers were allowed to go and greet
21:20
others who were dying and help them meet their death.
21:24
My next vivid recollection after this
21:27
was of looking down from about ceiling height
21:31
onto a bed on which laid a very emaciated body.
21:35
There were doctors and nurses around it.
21:38
I yelled out to them, but they couldn't hear me.
21:41
I could see everything clearly and felt warm, safe,
21:44
and peaceful.
21:47
In a few moments, I was looking up at them
21:49
and feeling sensation of intense disappointment.
21:53
I had come back from something so lovely and so utterly
21:55
satisfying.
21:57
Two days later, the doctor told me I was lucky I didn't die.
22:01
I told him that I did.
22:05
He looked at me in a strange way and scheduled me
22:09
for psychological evaluation.
22:12
I learned to keep my mouth shut about that from that time on.
22:17
Now one of the problems we have in researching
22:19
near death experiences is that for the most part,
22:22
they're retrospective.
22:23
We're getting accounts from people
22:25
who had the experiences sometime in the past.
22:28
That leaves open the question of how reliable memories of NDEs
22:31
really are.
22:33
Some authors have speculated that memories
22:36
are embellished over the years.
22:38
In particularly, that the sense of well-being and peace
22:41
and the pleasantness of the experience
22:43
gets embellished over time.
22:45
Because we've been studying these experiences for four
22:47
decades now, we're able to address this question.
22:51
Starting in 2002, I started trying
22:54
to reconnect with people I had interviewed
22:55
in the 1980s about their near death experiences
22:59
and asked them to describe their NDEs for me again.
23:03
What we found-- oops, I'm going the wrong way here--
23:08
is that the NDE scale scores measuring the depth of the NDE
23:12
were the same now in the 2000s as they were in the 1980s.
23:20
And that held true for all four of the components, changes
23:23
in thinking, changes in feeling, paranormal, and transcendental.
23:27
So memories of the NDE are, indeed, reliable over yea.
23:31
And that's in just that retrospect to research
23:33
is also reliable.
23:36
Another important question about retrospective reports of NDEs
23:39
is whether they're influenced by cultural beliefs.
23:43
We know that people's cultural beliefs influence how they
23:46
interpret their perceptions.
23:48
We see what we expect.
23:50
For example, near death experiences
23:52
of third world countries do not talk
23:54
about entering a tunnel the way Americans do.
23:56
They would talk about entering a cave or a well.
23:59
One truck driver who I interviewed
24:01
talked about entering a tailpipe.
24:04
So you have to use whatever cultural metaphors
24:06
at your disposal to describe the phenomenon.
24:10
So our NDErs just reporting what they
24:11
expect to happen when they come close to death.
24:15
The image of NDEs that most people have nowadays
24:18
is the one described by Raymond Moody in 1975.
24:22
Now we've been collecting NDEs here at UVA since 1960s,
24:27
years before Moody's book came out.
24:30
So we compared 24 experiences we collected in the 1960s
24:34
with 24 recent experiences that were matched
24:38
with the original ones in terms of age, race, gender, religion,
24:42
cause of death and proximity to death.
24:45
What we found is that the features that Moody reported,
24:49
were reported just as often before the experience
24:52
and experience.
24:54
No matter what we looked at, the out-of-body experience,
24:57
the feeling of peace, meeting others, a being of light,
25:01
noises, or life review all reported before we
25:04
Moody had described them as often as they are now.
25:08
And they also hold true for the after events
25:10
that Moody reported, attitude changes, loss of fear of death,
25:15
difficulty telling others, belief in survival
25:18
after afterlife, and corroboration
25:20
of extrasensory perceptions, or as often
25:23
before described them as after.
25:26
So report do not seem to be influenced
25:29
by the widespread public knowledge of NDEs.
25:32
Although the interpretation of the phenomenon
25:35
maybe influence by culture, the actual experience
25:37
appears not to be.
25:40
But even though these memories of NDEs
25:42
are reliable and consistent over decades,
25:46
that doesn't establish that their memories are
25:48
real events rather than memories of fantasies or hallucinations.
25:54
To test that possibility, we use the memory characteristics
25:57
questionnaire, which was designed
25:59
to differentiate memories of real events
26:01
from memories of imagined events.
26:04
This memory characteristics questionnaire taps
26:07
into the five aspects of memories
26:09
that reliably differentiate memories
26:11
of real from imagined events.
26:13
It includes the clarity of the memories including
26:16
the visual detail, sensory aspects, like sound, smell,
26:20
taste, in the memory, contextual features,
26:22
like the memory for location and spatial arrangements,
26:26
thoughts and feelings during the recalled event,
26:28
and the intensity of feelings both during the event
26:31
and now remembering it.
26:34
We asked people who had come close to death
26:36
to rate their memories of that event, and also of real events
26:40
that happened around the same time in their lives.
26:43
And also about an imagined event from that time in their lives.
26:48
What we found is that for those people who had NDEs,
26:51
the near death experience was remembered
26:53
with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense
26:57
feelings that real events from the same time period.
27:03
NDEs were recalled as realer than real events
27:06
to the same degree that real events remembered as realer
27:09
than the imaginary events.
27:13
On the other hand, people who did not have NDEs
27:15
reported there close brush with death
27:17
to be as well as other real events, but not realer.
27:23
So NDEs are remembered with great consistency over decades,
27:27
and they're recalled as realer then real.
27:30
How do we explain them?
27:32
There are no variables that we found yet
27:34
that can predict whether someone's going to have an NDE.
27:37
Neither age, race, gender, religion, religiosity,
27:42
or mental illness.
27:44
There's been lots of speculation about physiological variables
27:47
that may be involved in NDEs, but the bottom line
27:50
is that it's hard to reconcile enhanced mental function,
27:54
thinking and perception being clearer and sharper than ever
27:56
before with the impaired brain function
27:59
as you have in deep anesthesia or cardiac arrest.
28:04
So why are near death experiences of interest
28:06
to health professionals?
28:08
One reason is that there's a consistent pattern
28:11
of after effects from near death experiences.
28:13
Changes in beliefs, attitudes, and guidance,
28:16
and it's even corroborated with long term studies
28:19
and interviews with significant others.
28:22
We see increases in spirituality,
28:24
a sense of concern or compassion for others,
28:27
appreciation of life, a sense of meaning or purpose,
28:30
confidence and flexibility in your coping skills,
28:33
and a belief in postmortem survival.
28:36
And along with these we see decreases
28:37
in fear of death, the decreased interest in material
28:40
possessions, decreased interest in status, power, prestige,
28:44
and fame, and decreased interest in competition.
28:49
A second reason that NDEs are important to us
28:52
is what they suggest about survival of bodily death.
28:56
As Dr. Tucker mentioned, our Division
28:58
was founded to explore the possibility that something
29:01
may survive after death, and NDEs do provide some evidence
29:05
on that question.
29:08
For example, we have enhanced cognition
29:12
when the brain is impaired, such as by anesthesia
29:14
or cardiac arrest, which suggests that the mind is not
29:17
just what the brain does.
29:20
Second, we have accurate perceptions
29:22
from an out-of-body perspective.
29:24
A recent review of over 100 published cases
29:26
of people who had left their bodies during an NDE
29:28
and reported seeing things, showed that greater than 90%
29:32
were 100% accurate.
29:34
Further evidence of potential independence of mind and brain.
29:39
Third, we get accurate information
29:41
that's imparted by deceased visitors in the NDE,
29:45
such as the location of an important document or a hidden
29:48
treasure, which is evidence that these were encounters
29:51
with interactive beings not just mental images of the deceased.
29:54
A shocking example of this are NDEs in which the person meets
29:59
in the experience someone who was not known at the time
30:02
to be dead.
30:04
An example with the experiencer I mentioned before,
30:07
who saw her cousin, Albin, who she had known had died.
30:12
Of course, she did know that he was a soldier, so it's
30:16
conceivable she could have imagined that he had died.
30:19
But that's not always the case.
30:21
We also have the NDE from a young girl, an only child who
30:25
almost died during heart surgery and said
30:28
that in her near-death experience during surgery,
30:31
she needs someone who identified himself as her brother.
30:35
When she told her father about this
30:37
he was so moved that he confessed to her
30:39
that he had had a son she didn't know about who
30:41
had died before she was born.
30:45
We have identified dozens of cases of this type.
30:48
Some going back to ancient Greece.
30:51
The bottom line is that our culture
30:53
tends to talk about death as if it's the end.
30:57
The end of all existence.
30:58
But NDE suggests that it may be more like a change of state.
31:08
I'm going to turn things over now to Dr. Kim Penberthy.
31:11
[APPLAUSE]
31:18
I'm happy to follow the snow men.
31:23
Well, thank you.
31:25
I am Kim Penberthy, and I am the newest member at DOPS,
31:28
and I feel very honored to be part of this esteemed group
31:33
bring with me what I'm going to talk
31:36
about now, which is some of the directions we're moving in.
31:39
As you heard, there's been an extensive history
31:42
of research in the area of near-death experiences
31:45
in children who remember past lives.
31:49
That's not all that we are doing, though, or have done.
31:52
And so I'm going to describe to you a little bit,
31:55
very briefly some of the work I'm doing,
31:58
and then my colleague, Dr. Kelly, will finish up.
32:02
So the areas you heard of are important,
32:07
because of the main question and mission that DOPS has.
32:11
This idea of survival.
32:12
This idea of the relationship between what
32:15
we call the mind and the brain, and are we more than just
32:18
the bodies that we inhabit.
32:21
Additional research this builds in that area,
32:24
which would make sense.
32:25
So the areas of research that we've strategically
32:29
outlined and planned and, sort of, begun to collaborate
32:33
include areas that build upon this, including continued work
32:37
in areas you've heard about.
32:39
We're also looking to expand and focus our research
32:42
in the area of end of life.
32:44
I work in the cancer center as a clinician.
32:46
I am a clinical psychologist working with palliative care,
32:50
and we have a lot of questions about all the experiences
32:53
of people while they were dying, the experiences of people
32:56
who were working with the dying, and we'll
33:00
hope to launch research in that area
33:02
and begin hopefully this fall with a big event that we have.
33:07
We also have a strong background in the neuroimaging field
33:13
and have specific dedicated researchers to look at this.
33:16
So the folks you've just heard about, and you've heard
33:18
alluded to, we can look at their brains
33:22
and look at what is going on with various imaging
33:26
sort of strategies, including EEG, other imaging capacities
33:32
that we have.
33:33
And we have brilliant people doing that work.
33:35
So we're always looking for individuals
33:38
where we can, sort of, use these techniques
33:41
and develop our hypotheses and test them.
33:45
We also are looking at the phenomenon that
33:49
exist where we can experience some of this ability
33:58
without having the near- death experience
34:00
or a memory of a past life.
34:04
These are some extreme examples that
34:07
promote these things that Dr.--
34:09
that Bruce was talking about.
34:11
And one of the areas of research for me
34:15
is how can we achieve these sorts
34:19
of states of minds, this level of consciousness
34:22
with intentionality.
34:24
So not all of us will have a near-death experience.
34:27
Not all of us will remember a past life.
34:30
Does that mean we're excluded from this realm
34:32
of understanding?
34:34
And I don't believe that's necessarily the case.
34:37
So my interests fold into what we've talked about.
34:45
This idea of the--
34:49
this optimistic idea that we can achieve this.
34:56
So one area of research that I have
34:59
is looking at intentional strategies
35:02
to develop these and understand this relationship
35:06
between consciousness and the physical world.
35:09
So I have currently got funding to look
35:13
at the development of these skills,
35:16
and how they may be associated to people
35:19
who are practicing mindfulness, meditation,
35:23
various forms of yoga.
35:25
And I'm collaborating with my colleagues
35:26
at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California
35:30
where we have some preliminary data
35:32
to demonstrate that there seems to be an association.
35:36
And the reality is--
35:38
I mean this is what some of these practices developed for
35:42
are to enhance these abilities.
35:44
And we often in our modern day research don't ask about them.
35:50
So we might teach someone how to meditate and measure
35:53
their blood pressure and see that their blood pressure went
35:56
down, which is pretty darn amazing in and of itself.
36:00
We don't ask them, however, did you notice
36:02
if you were more intuitive, or that you've
36:06
had any kind of other extraordinary experiences.
36:10
And if you-- it turns out if you begin to ask people,
36:13
many of them we'll report that.
36:16
So we're now currently looking at prospectively monitoring
36:19
this in cohorts here and in California,
36:23
and looking at it again in the tradition of DOPS
36:27
in a scientific way, what we can find in that area.
36:31
I have researched looking at developing
36:35
a mindfulness-based intervention for people with lupus.
36:39
There have been very few developments
36:41
in this area for decades, and we were
36:45
charged with this task of looking at can doing
36:49
a mindfulness exercise not only reduce
36:53
the stress, improved fatigue, but can it actually change
36:57
biological markers.
36:59
Markers of mental logical functioning or inflammation,
37:03
IL-6, these sorts of things.
37:05
And again this is a big deal, if we
37:07
can look at intentionally developing
37:11
these skills in order to help ourselves that way
37:14
and help other people.
37:17
So through the research at DOPS, I
37:21
would just like to emphasize what
37:22
we do is we strive to challenge some
37:24
of the entrenched mainstream views that
37:28
may be held in medicine even.
37:30
And evaluation empirical evidence regarding
37:34
consciousness, and its relationship
37:36
to the physical world, including our body and our--
37:40
and the mind and the brain and looking
37:42
at whether they are indeed distinct and separate.
37:49
This is the work we do.
37:51
And I'm going to hand it over to my colleague
37:54
to discuss this a bit further, because it's
37:58
important to understand the ramification of what
38:00
this might mean not just for ourselves,
38:03
our health, our ability.
38:05
But I would challenge you to think
38:07
about for the future of our death and our people as a race.
38:13
So thank you.
38:14
[APPLAUSE]
38:26
So I'm to try to explain in the next five or six minutes
38:33
the implications of those two large books.
38:35
Yeah, I'll just stay here.
38:37
Obviously, it's going to have to be very telegraphic.
38:41
But we put out brochures both down here
38:43
and on the table outside where you can find us,
38:46
on your way to our website, which
38:48
contains lots more information, and the real justification
38:53
for some outrageous things that I'm now going to tell you.
38:57
My career, kind of, brackets what goes on at DOPS.
39:02
A little different background, I started out
39:04
as an experimental psychologist studying psychology
39:08
and language and cognitive science
39:09
at Harvard in the 1960s.
39:11
This is when we were recovering from the dark ages
39:13
of behaviorism.
39:15
Beginning to realize that there are things like minds
39:18
and consciousness and so on.
39:21
And I mean I had absorbed the view that most scientists held
39:26
then and most do now, which is that basically mind
39:30
and consciousness are generated by physiological processes
39:33
going on in brains.
39:35
Well late in the--
39:37
late in the piece when I was working on my dissertation,
39:40
I became interested in experimental parapsychiology.
39:44
This had to do with some experiences
39:45
involving my sister, and I learned to my amazement
39:49
that there was a vast section of Widener Library devoted
39:52
to the subject of psychical research,
39:54
including a lot of experimental research
39:56
that I've never heard of before.
39:58
And so I began reading it, and eventually
40:01
decided well this stuff looks really interesting,
40:04
and if it really happens, something's
40:06
fundamentally wrong with our basic scientific outlook.
40:09
And so I decided to sign up with JB Ryan down at-- in Durham.
40:15
He had been at Duke most of his career,
40:17
but had moved off campus.
40:19
And so I started there at the usual $400 a month,
40:22
six month trial period, and the lots of idealistic young people
40:26
who clambered to occupy those few slots.
40:31
Within a month, I met a guy who erased
40:34
any doubts I still had about the existence
40:36
of the basic phenomena that Ryan was studying.
40:39
This guy could do basically anything we asked him to do.
40:42
He succeeded at controlled psy task
40:45
at prodigious levels of statistical significance.
40:49
So the first take home lesson is, whether we like it or not,
40:53
psy-phenomenon exist as facts of nature,
40:56
and science is going to have to come to grips with that fact
40:58
somehow.
41:01
I had also gotten interested, because of some things
41:04
we found out about this guy, and the possibility of measuring
41:07
brain waves in relation to his performance in these tasks.
41:11
And I won't go into that in any detail,
41:14
but I'm happy to say that even though it, kind of, petered out
41:18
at that time, this was in the School of Engineering,
41:20
Electrical Engineering Department where I encountered
41:24
my colleague Ross Dunseath over here.
41:26
Raise your hand.
41:27
We spotted him.
41:28
He was an undergraduate at the time.
41:30
He's been with us ever since.
41:34
Anyway, the group was there.
41:36
We made some headway, but the technology really
41:38
was not up to it.
41:39
We laid the, kind of, conceptual technical foundations,
41:42
but couldn't do many of the things we hoped to do.
41:46
We now have established at DOPS a really first class
41:50
neuroimaging facility, and can begin
41:53
to do things now that we could only
41:54
dream about back in the 1970s.
41:57
OK, but now we come to the other part closer to this.
42:02
I had to give up psycho research for a long time.
42:05
I worked in neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill.
42:09
All the UVA enemies, right, the core.
42:15
And we did some good things there
42:17
and continued to develop our EEG techniques, and so on.
42:21
But I was anxious to find a way back into the field,
42:24
and actually married one of Ian's long time research
42:28
collaborators, Emily Williams, in 1998
42:31
and retired early and moved here in 2002 so
42:34
that we could work intensely on the first book, Irreducible Mind.
42:40
Now the way that came about was that Mike Murphy
42:43
who you may know as a co-founder of Esalen Institute
42:46
out in Big Sur, California, which is now an island
42:49
apparently, by the way due to the recent storms.
42:54
He-- I mean, he's an amazing man much like Ian.
42:56
In fact, we dedicated our book to Ian and Mike
43:01
jointly even though they never met in the flesh.
43:05
They are both, kind of, the descendants
43:08
of the original founders of psychical research
43:10
that is in the breadth of their scientific vision.
43:14
Mike was well aware of the prevailing
43:16
view in neuroscience, and if that view is correct,
43:20
there can be no survival period.
43:22
That's an inescapable fact.
43:24
If mainstream view of production of mind and consciousness
43:28
by psychological processes in the brain is correct,
43:32
there can be no survival.
43:34
That's the fundamental biological objection
43:36
to survival, and it's been elaborated ad nauseam
43:40
in a reason recent book called The Myth of an Afterlife.
43:46
Anyway we started by just reviewing evidence
43:50
for survival, which Mike was very interested in.
43:52
But we gradually realized that we
43:54
needed to undertake a much bigger project in two stages.
43:58
Irreducible Mind is the first stage
44:00
where we assembled in one place a whole lot
44:02
of empirical evidence that we think
44:04
disproves the conventional view of mind, brain relations.
44:09
We incorporated all the experimental parapsychology
44:13
and survival research by reference.
44:15
We want to make a book about science survival,
44:17
but we wanted to use that evidence,
44:20
so there's a big annotated bibliography in there.
44:23
But we then went on to describe a variety
44:25
of other well-documented empirical phenomena that
44:29
are difficult or impossible to explain
44:32
from a conventional point of view.
44:34
And I won't go through it.
44:35
They include things like extreme physiological influence.
44:39
The manufacturing of things like stigmata or hypnotic blisters.
44:43
Even blisters having a specific geometrical form.
44:48
They include, in particular, cases of this sort
44:50
that Bruce talked about.
44:53
Near-death experiences under conditions
44:55
such as deep general anesthesia and or cardiac arrest.
44:59
And those are crucial, because these things
45:02
are happening under conditions that 99% of contemporary neuro
45:07
scientists believe are--
45:11
the conditions which neuro scientists
45:13
believe are necessary for conscious experience
45:15
have been abolished.
45:18
And that can be shown categorically.
45:20
The way we know that they had the experiences during the time
45:24
of unconsciousness is that they can sometimes
45:26
report things correctly, things that happen during that period.
45:30
And there are several arguments about all that,
45:32
but that's the basic idea.
45:34
Anyway, the end result of this whole exercise,
45:37
and I have to finish within the next minute or two
45:41
was to show that the correlations that
45:45
exist between mental events and physical events, which we all
45:49
accept that's just how it is, can be
45:52
interpreted in a different way.
45:54
That it is that mind, consciousness, or something
45:58
inherently larger than we normally know that overflow
46:02
the organism in some sense would operate the condition
46:06
by the behavior of the brain and the sense organs
46:08
and all the rest of it.
46:10
Now to me that totally changed the landscape
46:13
of the conceptual territory of this survival discussion,
46:17
because now we have a way of thinking
46:20
about the mind, brain connection that allows for the possibility
46:23
that mind can operate separately from the organism.
46:27
To me that eroded the biological obstacle to survive.
46:33
OK, well now we've got that far, and so
46:35
in psychological way, what does it all mean in terms
46:37
of our fundamental worldview.
46:39
That was a second much harder job,
46:44
and we struggled with it for a long time,
46:46
but finally put together a book that's remarkable
46:50
at least for its authorship, because we have physicists,
46:54
scholars of religion, and philosophers
46:56
all under the covers of one book.
46:59
And to cut to the bottom line, the basic picture
47:01
is one that seems to convert the currently popular view
47:07
of the relation between the physical and the mental.
47:11
We have begun to think we're being driven
47:14
towards some kind of an idealistic picture in which
47:18
mind is not derivative from matter,
47:21
but if anything the other way around.
47:23
So it has fundamental implications
47:25
for our basic vision of reality and our place in it.
47:30
So I think I'll stop there, and we start questions.
47:32
[APPLAUSE]
47:40
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Thank you.
47:41
Thank you for four wonderful presentations.
47:45
I daresay this is our mind expanding.
47:50
And we are open to your comments and questions.
47:54
We have a couple of mics we can bring to those of you who
47:58
have questions.
47:59
I would ask that you please identify yourself
48:01
before you make your comment or ask your question.
48:05
And you may direct your question to any or all of the presents.
48:10
So who would like to start?
48:17
AUDIENCE: I'm Bob Reynolds, a retired professor of medicine
48:20
here and used to be a vice president.
48:22
And I find this material absolutely fascinating
48:25
and mind boggling.
48:27
I'm reminded of a book made into a recent movie called
48:31
Heaven Is For Real.
48:33
And it tells the story of a three
48:35
or four-year-old boy who has a ruptured appendix,
48:38
and I presume had a near-death experience.
48:40
And as he gets older, he tells the family
48:42
about what he experienced.
48:44
Would you categorize this as one of your near-death experiences,
48:48
and the story that came with it?
48:52
BRUCE GREYSON: Well, I would certainly characterize it
48:54
as a near-death experience.
48:56
There are a lot of questions about this particular case.
48:59
He was a four-year-old boy as I said-- as you said.
49:02
And his parents were quite religious.
49:04
In fact, the father was a pastor.
49:06
And there's a lot of suggesting that his account was,
49:08
kind of, filtered through the parents belief system.
49:13
That does not, of course, change the phenomena that he reported.
49:16
He did, in fact, encounter deceased relatives
49:20
that he didn't know, and so forth.
49:22
So there are some phenomena that classify
49:24
as his legitimate near-death experience,
49:26
although the trappings may be colored by his family's belief
49:29
system.
49:33
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Anita Regal.
49:35
I'm a retired nurse practitioner.
49:37
First, I want to give a shout out to Dr. Tucker's books
49:39
for anybody who hasn't read them.
49:41
They're really extraordinary, and I
49:43
think it underscores the rigor of the research.
49:45
But I have a question for Dr. Greyson.
49:47
When I was a nurse practicing in the coronary care unit,
49:51
I had a few patients that I can recall that had
49:54
or that talked about what sounded
49:55
like near-death experiences.
49:57
But there was one patients in particularly
49:59
that was so disturbing, I mean I still
50:01
remember his name and the vision,
50:03
because it was really unsettling.
50:04
It was not a pleasant experience.
50:07
It was very-- he actually saw on a rainy day, he had--
50:11
it was during a cardiac arrest.
50:12
He talked about being up in the room being able to see things
50:15
going on that were confirmed.
50:17
But then he talked about his experience
50:19
where he actually saw his funeral.
50:21
It was a horse drawn carriage.
50:22
It was very, very unsettling to him.
50:26
So it was not that peaceful, sort of, calming effect.
50:30
Have you come across any experiences like that?
50:32
I don't know if it was a near-death experience or not,
50:35
but it was just very different from anything I've ever heard.
50:38
BRUCE GREYSON: There certainly are
50:39
a number of experiences that seem to qualify as near-death,
50:43
but they are not pleasant.
50:46
We don't know how many there are,
50:47
because it's hard to get people to talk about these things.
50:51
Most people who have studied the phenomena
50:52
say that between 1 and 10% of people
50:55
who have a near-death experience will have an unpleasant one.
50:58
Although again, it's hard to say,
51:00
because they don't talk about them.
51:02
Nancy Evans Bush, who herself had a terrifying experience,
51:05
wrote a book about it called Dancing Past
51:08
the Dark, in which she describes not only
51:11
a range of unpleasant near-death experiences,
51:14
but how to deal with them, and how
51:16
to make them into creative positive experiences.
51:20
Most mythological hero's journeys,
51:24
include travels through terrifying travails
51:28
to get to get the final enlightenment or goal.
51:31
And she, kind of, interprets in times-- in terms of that.
51:33
That some people need to go through these horrible things
51:36
to get to the point.
51:38
Because we don't have many of these experiences to look at,
51:41
we don't know what goes into making a near-death experience
51:44
pleasant or unpleasant.
51:46
For some people we know that what makes them unpleasant
51:49
is the difficulty in letting go.
51:51
And people who are very rigid personalities find themselves
51:55
out of their bodies and are terrified by the experience.
51:57
So instead of embracing the experience,
51:59
they fight against, and that itself makes it terrifying.
52:05
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Hi, I'm--
52:07
I'm sorry there's one right before you sir.
52:09
So sorry.
52:10
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Mary Stack, and I very much
52:13
believe in what you're talking in reading things on it.
52:16
And I remember, so Oliver Sacks, in his Hallucinations,
52:21
he's poo pooing.
52:22
What is your response to what he says.
52:28
Oliver Sacks presents the standard materialistic position
52:33
that the brain creates in the mind.
52:34
And he pretty much discounts all of phenomena that we look at
52:39
and credit.
52:41
And I don't know what his rationale was
52:43
for this discounting those, except that they don't
52:45
agree with his world view.
52:46
Interestingly, he started one of his books, Musicophilia, which
52:50
then-- with a near-death experience
52:51
of Tony Cicoria, who was an orthopedic surgeon
52:55
in Rochester, who had a near-death experience when he
52:57
was struck by lightning, and then had a total personality
53:00
change.
53:01
He started composing classical music, which he had never been
53:05
involved with music before.
53:07
Totally changed his life.
53:08
And yet Sacks interpreted this as just an artifact
53:12
of his brain being fried by the electricity.
53:18
So I know that he knows of our work, and he has read it,
53:22
and just thinks it's not worth paying attention to.
53:29
AUDIENCE: I'm Greg Patterson.
53:30
I'm the Gamma Knife Nurse Coordinator here at UVA.
53:34
Is your institute using anything to study
53:37
isochronic or binaural acoustic waveforms
53:41
to alter mental status?
53:44
Such as in a lot of the popular literature,
53:46
they're using theta waves, delta waves,
53:49
to elicit out of body experiences,
53:52
healing, changing brain chemistry,
53:55
things of that nature.
53:59
EDWARD KELLY: We're certainly interested in that subject.
54:01
One of the implications of the kind of psychological model
54:04
that I sketched is that we potentially
54:08
have access to all kinds of capabilities
54:10
that normally we can't access.
54:13
Sometimes people blunder into it,
54:14
through having a near-death encounter of some sort, some
54:19
through meditating for decades, maybe
54:23
there are all kinds of ways of accessing these things that we
54:25
haven't found out about yet.
54:26
Some kind of stimulation, whether electrical
54:30
or magnetic stimulation of the brain directly, or sound
54:34
of one sort or another.
54:35
I don't think anybody has discovered anything
54:38
like that yet that is really all that effective,
54:41
but the possibilities are definitely there.
54:45
AUDIENCE: I'm Anna Tate.
54:47
I'm one of the abdominal transplant nurse practitioners
54:49
here.
54:50
I had just a quick question.
54:52
When you're talking about these near-death experiences that
54:56
involve cardiac arrests or these anaesthesia, sedative states,
55:01
does that include studying patients
55:03
that have been in prolonged comas, or ICU sedative states
55:09
but have normal brain activity?
55:13
BRUCE GREYSON: We have not studied people
55:15
in prolonged coma, simply because we
55:19
want people who have an acute event that we can look at
55:21
before, during, and after.
55:23
Some people are.
55:24
Steven Laureys at the University of Liege in Belgium--
55:27
who has done a lot of the important work
55:29
with people who seem to be in a persistent vegetative state,
55:33
and if you talk to them they can show
55:34
these electrical responses-- he is now
55:36
very interested in near-death experiences.
55:38
Some of his grad students are working with me
55:40
in collaborative research.
55:49
AUDIENCE: Hello.
55:49
I am Victoria.
55:50
I'm a UVA student.
55:51
I have a question.
55:52
Is there a scientific explanation
55:54
why people who experience clinical death have this--
55:59
some parts of their brain are activated
56:01
or they have external powers?
56:07
For example, in Russia, there are
56:09
a lot of psychics who see the future,
56:13
but the majority of them, they've had other trauma,
56:15
or they had a coma.
56:18
Do scientists explain what happens in the brain
56:21
that after experiencing death, they have these powers?
56:28
KIM PENBERTHY: That's you.
56:29
[LAUGHTER]
56:29
BRUCE GREYSON: I don't think we have the answer to that yet.
56:32
We certainly have a lot of anecdotal evidence
56:34
that people claim all sorts of abilities after the NDE
56:37
that they didn't have before.
56:41
It's difficult to study these with neuroimaging,
56:44
for example, because a lot of them
56:45
can't do these things on demand.
56:47
There have been a few people to be
56:49
studied in the lab who claim to be able to do
56:52
these things on demand.
56:53
But to do most neuroimaging techniques,
56:56
you have to be physically still while you're being imaged.
56:59
And a lot of these people have trouble doing that.
57:02
But we are still looking for people
57:04
who can manifest these abilities at will,
57:07
that can do it in a way that we can do neuroimaging with.
57:12
AUDIENCE: Hi.
57:12
My name is Libby Rexrode.
57:14
I'm a nurse coordinator in the surgery department.
57:17
I'm just curious how you find your subjects.
57:21
Do they come to you, or are you made aware of these incidences,
57:30
or how do you come about finding them?
57:35
JIM TUCKER: Well, these days they find us.
57:37
They go online if their child is talking about a past life,
57:41
or if somebody has a near-death experience,
57:44
or extraordinary abilities.
57:46
Then they find Ed's lab.
57:49
It would be very hard to go out and find people,
57:51
but fortunately, it's very easy these days for them to find us.
57:56
EDWARD KELLY: If I could add to that,
57:58
though, it's the hardest part of our job,
58:00
is finding suitable people to work with in our lab.
58:04
So if anybody knows of anybody who has recently--
58:06
[LAUGHTER]
58:07
Still send them our way, please.
58:11
AUDIENCE: Dan Grogan.
58:14
Unless I missed something, the only percentile correlation
58:18
you looked at was, or mentioned, was cardiac events and trauma,
58:24
suicide, war.
58:27
Does that aspect--
58:30
I assume you were looking at the highest correlations.
58:33
But connecting cause of death with NDE percentages,
58:41
does that area lead you in any other direction?
58:48
Or is there some--
58:49
what's the current theory about why those areas correlate?
58:53
And then, I'd also be interested in your view of the young man
58:58
of James III, and his personality in the Western
59:02
context, rebirth or re-incarnated folks--
59:09
what they bring to society after that in the arc of their life.
59:14
BRUCE GREYSON: I'll take the NDE part first.
59:16
We have studied-- we have files on more than 1,000
59:19
near-death experiences.
59:21
About a quarter of those are from cardiac arrest.
59:24
Most of them are from other causes of death.
59:26
The problem with a lot of these cases
59:27
is that it's hard to know how close they were to death,
59:31
because they happened in a car accident or some place
59:33
where they are not being monitored.
59:35
We like to study cardiac arrest, because we
59:37
know exactly what's going on with them, so we can
59:39
get nice figures about that.
59:42
Because with people who were in a car accident,
59:44
we don't know what the baseline is, so we don't know
59:46
how many of them have NDEs.
59:48
So it's neater to do research with cardiac arrest,
59:51
but we study other people as well.
59:53
In fact, we have not found that the way you come close to death
59:57
has any impact on that type of near-death experience
60:01
that you're going to have.
60:03
There are some exceptions, like people
60:04
who were intoxicated at the time or under the effect of drugs
60:08
tend not to have as many NDEs, or to have shallower, quote,
60:11
NDEs than people who were mentally clear at the time.
60:16
JIM TUCKER: So as far as the question of what children
60:19
who remember past lives, what they then take with them
60:22
into their life--
60:24
most of the children, by the time
60:26
they get to be six or seven, stop talking about this stuff,
60:29
and they just go on with their lives, as far as we can tell.
60:32
Now, some of them as adults say that it did give them more
60:36
of sort of a spiritual outlook.
60:39
But for the most part, they seem to be pretty much
60:42
like the rest of us.
60:45
They're certainly not little mystics or anything like that.
60:48
They're just kind of typical kids.
60:50
We've done psychological testing with stuff some of them.
60:52
The only thing that really showed up
60:54
is they tend to be quite intelligent.
60:56
But otherwise, they're pretty much just like everybody else.
61:00
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So we've come to the end of hour,
61:03
but obviously, not to the end of your questions.
61:06
So you'd be welcome to come down and talk with the presenters
61:10
following the program.
61:12
We invite you to join us next week, March 1st, at 12:00 noon,
61:18
please, because we're combined with Medical Grand Round.
61:21
We have Gerard Clancy here with us,
61:25
who's president of the University of Tulsa
61:27
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
61:28
He's also a psychiatrist.
61:31
He will be talking about a story of success
61:34
in reversing urban health disparities.
61:37
So please join us then at noon next week.
61:40
Please now join me in thanking members
61:43
of the Division of Perceptual Studies.
61:45
[APPLAUSE]