The Ecosystem of Consciousness: A Scientific Explanation for the Near Death Experience

 

A Scientific Explanation for the Near Death Experience

One barrier to understanding nonlocal phenomena such as near death experiences and remote viewing is that we do not, as yet, have a comprehensive scientific model for such experiences.  At the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, this is one of our priorities.

John Peter Thompson and I have developed such a model and are in the process of having it peer reviewed and sent out for publication in the scientific literature.  First stop, Nature!

We need your help.

We recently posted a YouTube video discussing the new theory.

Nonlocality: A New Paradigm for Consciousness

Here are the scientific references that are the basis of the video.  If you know of better ones, please email me through spiritualscientific@yahoo.com <spiritualscientific@yahoo.com>; the same for any corrections, improvements, problems with the theory etc.  Let the scathing and cleansing fires of peer review begin even before the scientific peer review.

References

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Pauline and Dr. Morse: Remote Viewers AND Harley Bikers? (It’s True)

Harley Biker Remote Viewers

Here I am out on my Harley (Topper Scooter 1962) with two babes.  We are not wearing our leathers today.  When Pauline and I need a little endogenous adrenaline to boost our remote viewing abilities, we put on full leathers, slap on a few Henna tats, and we ride our Harley down to the the Star Light Inn, used to be run by our man John Peter.
We kick some righteous butt, mock their pathetic rides, Pauline usually kicks over some knucklehead or softail weenie bike, then we roar away on our Harley.
I typically end up head banging and fist dancing with some joker named Tiny, until finally Pauline smashes a extra large energy drink can over his head.  I shake up a Diet Coke Zero (Cherry Flavor) and shoot it up his hyperventilating nostrils. I know we’ve done it right when it sprays out his ears.
We do our best remote viewing after these sorts of warm up sessions, find it really lets some right brain sensory stream information flash dance all over our jumbled left brain severely impaired reality generator machine, just peels those left brained based motor cortex psychic fingers with their death grip on the ledge of the right-left brain interface right off into the general right temporal/hippocampal CA1 zone, baby! Helps to let some of those streaming 3 billions bits of info per second into the general mix.
Poor Tiny doesn’t know his CA1 from his CA3 and that Coke Zero brain shower totally F–s their perforant pathways. Typically Pauline gives him a mantra to reboot his left brain ego based convergent reality matrix, she’s just that kind of Topper Harley Motor Cycle Mamma.
I don’t know about you, but I find your average Harley riding motorcycle Dude, sure he’s totally into functional neurogenesis and he knows his neurogenesis-depression hypothesis down cold, but you try to explain that new neurons mature very slowly in monkeys, and he goes bat sh-t on you, I typically have to give him an active lesson on neuronal firing patterns in the waking state, yeah baby, totally replicated in the sleeping adult, that Vulcan neck pinch comes in handy.
Here’s a shot of Tiny, dang he is a “bad Dude”!  Its open season on mice when Jason “Tiny”

Check him out at http://www.functionalneurogenesis.com/blog/

Snyder is in the house.  Sure he is Functional Neurogenesis Man, and is on track to totally teach us how to dial into God, not bad for a running dog materialist capitalist lackey of the ruling class, but did he really have to kill 10,000 to do it?  When Pauline and I swagger into your typical biker bar, af…ter launching through the plate glass window on our 1962 Topper Scooter “Bad Boy”, we come to stop three inches from his substantia nigra, and while everyone else is having a mass bowel evacuation, Jason just laughs, raises his bottle of Perrier to us, and says. Dr. Morse, don’t have an amygdala storm baby, and don’t forget “all human experience rewires brain structure”.
Do you see why we love this guy?
Uh, sorry Jason, man love only.
Dr. Morse and Pauline
Oh Yeah, We are also Harley Bikers.  See you next Ocean City Weekend Dudes

A Few of Our Fellow Riders Oh Yeah We Harley Bikers Too!

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Lyn Buchanan Reviews the Four Modes of CRV

For most of us, Lyn Buchanan requires no introduction.  He is one of the original Army “Psychic Spies” and was featured in the movie Men Who Stare at Goats. He was the trainer for the controlled remote viewing (CRV) unit.  Although he loves to describe his career and persona “not bad for an Army Sergeant”, in fact Lyn Buchanan has a Masters in Linguistic Psychology, is a MENSA member, and is proficient in many languages including Mongolian, Japanese and Russian.  He served as one of a few Russian Scientific Research Linguists.  He is also an astonishing artist, here is but one example of his work.

 

Art by Lyn Buchanan This is a S'Poan Temple
Lyn Buchanan: S’Poan Temple

Lyn Buchanan is an outstanding CRV teacher.  There are three remote viewing teachers I recommend.  1) Paul H Smith PhD. Take Paul’s course if you want a grueling, highly disciplined challenge.  As one of my fellow students said about Dr. Smith’s course: it was like taking a year of CRV in a week.  2) Lyn Buchanan’s course has all the discipline and rigor of Dr. Smith’s course, but is far more user friendly.  Psychics, mediums, people who already are right brain based will thrive in his course.  3) Stephan Schwartz  He does not teach CRV and has a famous antipathy for it.  He teaches a simple yet powerful direct connection to the divine (or all knowledge informational domain as he calls it).

Lyn Buchanan: Art Exhibit

The following is Lyn Buchanan’s reply to on-line questions on how much do we need to worry about frontloading, polluting sessions, and operational feedback:

“Everyone is so afraid of pollution that they forget that working in the real world will almost always carry pollution with it. The police don’t tell you anything about a case,
but you still know that it is a police case. Most of the time, when
you are working a real-world session, the customer will pollute you
with so much information that it’s amazing you can do any viewing at
all… but still, you do, and still, it works.

Listen… this whole “double-blind” stuff comes from the people who
work in research mode. To remind everyone, there are four modes to
CRV work…1) Research mode,
2)Training mode, 3)Practice mode, and
4)Operations mode.

The people who work in research can’t seem to understand that there is a messy world outside their lab walls, and so they believe that everything has to be done their
squeaky-clean way. Well, in the other modes, it doesn’t.

In Training mode, you want the monitor to know what the target is so he/she can learn to
“read” the viewer’s micro-movements, habits, etc. It trains the monitor to
better understand when the viewer is going into AOL, building castles,
etc.

In practice mode, if you’re lucky enough to have a constant monitor,
you start out the same way – with the monitor knowing what the target
is. As the monitor learns everything about reading the viewer, then
you start weaning the monitor of the knowledge of what the target
is. The pair slowly build a relationship that is such that the monitor can know when the viewer is on target, off target, using symbology, building castles, etc., without ever needing to see the practice target. When you have a pair working together like that, you have an unstoppable team. It starts with the monitor being totally aware of the target, and ends with what would seem like “double-blind”. Once that is achieved successfully, it is then the
duty of the monitor to slowly begin introducing pollution into the session, in order to train the viewer to work operationally.

Computer Art by Lyn Buchanan

Lyn Buchanan: Arrival

In training and early practice modes, if you have a monitor, you can
have “double-blind tasking”, but in reality, you can’t have double-blind session.
The whole idea of “double-blind” is to keep what’s in the monitor’s mind from polluting the session. But in actual practice, the viewer says something like, “tall, cementy,
grey” and the monitor thinks, “Oh! It’s a building!” From that point on, what’s in the monitor’s mind pollutes the session. The purpose of teaching the monitor to read the viewer during practice mode is to get the monitor so confident in the viewer’s abilities
that he/she no longer feels the need to identify the target. AOLs happen with the monitor, too, and that has to be trained out of the monitor.

Lyn Buchanan

In operations mode, you rarely have the luxury of doing an unpolluted
session. The customer needs the answer right now, and having you mentally wander
about a site describing the water, then the land, then …. whatever… is a luxury that just doesn’t exist any more. Even clean frontloading, (like, “The target is an activity”)
that would stop the more wimpy viewers in their tracks will be a thing of the past. The customer may tell you something like, “We know that a shipment of drugs is coming across the border this month. Tell us where and when.” In such a case, you have to work
polluted. The question is whether or not you can can be a tough enough viewer to go ahead and do it, or will you simply throw up your hands and quit? If you have to have a squeaky-clean situation in order to remote view and can’t work through a little pollution, then truthfully, you’d be better off taking up basket-weaving as a hobby. Operational viewing may not be for you.The question is not whether you can have a squeaky-clean and totally
unpolluted double-blind situation for a viewer. That’s for the lab guys. For those of us who hope to work in the very messy real world, the question is whether or not you can work through pollution to find the unknown.

The world is a tough place. You have to be tough, too. I hope this helps.”

Yes it does help, and thank you Lyn Buchanan.  The concept that spiritual and psychical abilities require considerable mental toughness is often overlooked in the New Age approach to spirituality.  In my own working with energy healers and psychics, I often quote Lyn Buchanan to them.  Paul O’connor, in his videos (Click Here and go to bottom makes precisely the same point. He states that far too often we have assumptions that we cannot remote view because we don’t have a special pen, or don’t have the right monitor, etc.

Lyn Buchanan is author of  The Seventh Sense: Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a Psychic Spy for the US Military.  Click here to order from Amazon. This is one of the core books for understanding remote viewing.

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3d US Spiritist Medical Conference: Marlene Nobre MD

Third US Spiritual Medical Conference:
  George Washington University School of Medicine  July 2010
Marlene Nobre MD
Winner Chico Xavier Peace Award from State of Minas Gerais in Brazil
 
Marlene Nobre MD is the President of the International Spiritist Medical Association (AME-Int).  Spiritists are primarily physicians, neuroscientists, and other professionals who follow the teachings of 19th Century French educator, physician, and philosopher Allan Kardec.  Many of these scientists and physicians are also mediums!  Dr. Nobre lives in Brazil.  She runs a day care facility in Diadema, a poor suburb of Sao Paulo, the country’s largest city.  She is the author of many books on Spiritist doctrine, most of them published by Editora Fe, Brazil.  My favorites are The Clamor of Life  and The Soul of the Matter.  The last book title gives you an idea of her wit and succinct wisdom.  She is retired as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist and in the last two decades has dedicated herself to high-level conferences around the world presenting the cutting edge of neuroscience and spiritual understandings.  Click here to access her Health and Spirituality Journal with more information.
Marlene Nobre MD, Obstetrician, Gynecologist, President of International Spiritist Association

Dr Nobre lectures on Quantum Healing

Dr. Nobre’s lecture is a broad overview of the concept of “top down causation” in science.  We are so used to “bottom up” causation as an embedded scientific metaphor that we don’t even realize that in fact science (just the facts Ma’am) is not a philosophy at all!  It is a system of thinking, a rational and logical way of understanding the world.

Until recently, the prevailing scientific philosophy was a type of materialism developed several hundred years ago.  Matter, the solid material the world consists of has changed considerably over the ages, in Western thought.  Aristotle’s “matter” contained the concept of the potential for change.  His world was made of substances that existed in their own right and functioned as living things do! By the time of Isaac Newton, matter became solid teeny tiny particles which formed a clockwork mechanical Universe, where “god” became an unnecessary hypothesis in terms of the World order.

Gravity: The First Unruly Action At a Distance

Even in the very mechanistic materialistic world view, there has always been the “ugly”  concept of effects at a distance, now most prominently seen in entanglement and energy healing.  Newton and the subsequent scientific materialistic philosophers could never get away from Gravity, a puzzling “glue” that exerts an influence at a distance and yet cannot be directly measured.  There are no gravity rays, no gravity particles, and yet it is a known force in the Universe.  So even in the heyday of Scientific Materialism, there has always been a mysterious force causing actions at a distance, a Materialistic skeleton in the closet.

Not Your Grandfather’s Matter!

Physics today has resoundingly rejected the ”matter” inherent in scientific materialism! Matter is now considered to be “baryonic matter”, the stuff of the stars and planets and ourselves.  It is not just the actual particles that make up reality, but all of the radiation, kinetic and potential energies of all known particles, leading to a Mass-Energy definition of matter.  And even more horrifying to the scientific materialist, the known matter of the Universe doesn’t add up to the calculated mass necessary to explain the movement of the galaxies in the Universe.  There must be hidden matter that we can’t see!  Dark Matter!  Indeed this dark matter is intertwined with this reality, only called dark because we can’t see it!  Or for those of you who have seen angels, perhaps you have seen it!

                                                                      with Chaos Mathematician Jay Kappraff

                                       The Spiritist Medical Model

Dr. Nobre presented the Spiritist medical model, which is that consciousness and spirit underlie all of physical reality.  She reviewed the concept of “top down causation” which is that consciousness creates our material world.  I have reviewed above the old paradigm that the material world created consciousness.  Dr Nobre feels we are at a time where our denial of the importance of spirit in our lives has “petrified” our society.  She feels Spiritism is a creative small group dedicated to re-energizing medicine.

She reviewed the work and research of William Miller PhD, a Psychologist at the University of New Mexico.  Dr. Miller developed an innovative and successful program to cure alcoholism by integrating spirituality into the therapy of alcoholics.  Click Here for more information on William Miller.

Melody Morse is very interested in Dr Nobre's lecture.
Melody Morse is very interested in Dr Nobre’s lecture

Next Dr. Nobre reviewed the research of Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief. Dr Nobre was very eloquent on the need for forgiveness in our lives, as a medical intervention!  “To forgive is to forget the shadows” she said.  We are healthier when we forgive others.  I was very impressed with this.  I often think that foregiveness is something we should do for spiritual well being, but did not think of the damage we are doing to our own body when we don’t forgive others. Click Here for More Information on Bruce Lipton

Dr. Nobre’s point was that many of the foremost scientists in the world have “top down” consciousness, meaning that their research supports the philosophy that consciousness creates material reality.  When I trained at Johns Hopkins, we were rigorously taught to not have ANY philosophy or metaphor embedded in our science.  However, in the real world that simply is not the case.  Many scientists think the brain secretes consciousness like the liver secretes bile, and someone is a traitor to science if they think otherwise. In other words they are both scientists AND materialist philosophers.

Dr. Nobre cites the work of some of the top scientists in the world including Kazuo Murakami who showed that thoughts can effect our DNA.  He wrote The Divine Code of Life.  He is a Professor Emeritus at a leading Japanese University.  Other important thinkers include Physicist Russell Targ who wrote The End of Suffering.  Her point is that many top scientists, including the scientists at the conference who included Amit Goswami PhD, Peter Fenwick MD, PhD, Stephan Schwartz, Gary Schwartz PhD MD, as well as researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health are not materialists but embrace the New top down paradigm.

She concludes with the inspiring words of the Brazilian psychic Chico Xavier:

Our Inner Peace is Not the Result of External Factors, but the Peace of Mind We Achieve When We Fulfill Our Obligations” Francisco Candido Xavier ( Brazilian psychic)

Dr. Nobre and Melody discuss Dr. Nobre’s lecture

 

 

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Spiritual Realities are Real: Science Says So

A Paradigm Is Dead: Long Live the New Paradigm: Science and Spirit Re-united in the 21st Century

Consciousness > Information > Laws of Physics > Material Reality

       Melvin L Morse MD FAAP     John Peter  Thompson                   

“You are what you know.  Fifteenth Century Europeans “knew” that the sky consisted of closed concentric spheres rotating around a central Earth, carrying the stars and the planets. That knowledge structured everything they did and thought because it told them the truth.  Then Galileo’s telescope changed the truth”  James Burke in The Day the Universe Changed

Recent scientific advances in Neuroscience and Information Theory have triggered a profound paradigm shift that is currently rippling through science and society.  It is the long waited reunion of Science and Spirituality.  The New Paradigm embraces consciousness as a primal component of the Universe, no less than the mathematical laws which are also embedded in it.  Like prior paradigm shifts, “Consciousness Comes First” does not overthrow our current knowledge of material reality.  It simply adds a deeper level of understanding, that our Universe is made of “Vital Dust” as Nobel Laureate Christian De Duve described it.

James Burke, in his award winning television series and book The Day the Universe Changed, documented 8 dramatic changes in the “truth” which have occurred in Western Society in the past 1000 years.  These included a new way of painting pictures in Italy which directly led to
Columbus discovering America; the printing press which forever altered man’s astonishing ability to memorize gigantic amounts of information.  This in turn changed what a “fact” meant.

Just as the reality of near death experiences and their spiritual message is ignored by science today, the scientific establishment of the early 1700s ignored French peasants who reported meteorites landing in their fields.  The hard evidence was right in front of them, yet they dismissed it as “crazy and delusional”.  It took the French Revolution and the overthrow of the Church’s grip on knowledge before science could acknowledge that meteorites were real.

Burke points out that our current Western state of “truth” is that we control our destiny through our scientific curiosity.  Most of us are confident in our abilities to be Masters of the Universe because we do not believe a supernatural deity takes responsibility for our existence.  This current  “truth” is rooted information learned in the 1800s when the old “truth” that there was a grand design to the Universe created by a Supreme God was determined to be flawed. Even the Bible, then regarded as The Book of Truth, was discredited as it was found to written by men over many generations and centuries.  We hold on to our current truths just as firmly as past generations held on to their concepts of reality.  Burke concludes that knowledge is merely what we determine it should be, an artifact of what we discover about the Universe, and that reality will be endlessly changing according to our point of view.

The Scientific Debate Concerning Life After Death:  “Lame Outdated News Clippings?”

I realized the Universe had changed for me recently  when I hurt the feelings of a good friend of mine, Sara Victoria.  “Oh”, she pouted.  “I thought you would be interested in anything having to do with life after death.  After all,  NBC News said you have done more to prove the existence of life after death than any other scientist.  Now you’ve made me feel like some old grandma sending you lame outdated news clippings.”

She had emailed me a link to yet another discussion on scientific evidence of the proof of life after death.  This one was between the Head of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Transpersonal Psychologist Arthur Hastings PhD.  I dutifully filed it away to read later.  The same folder contained an unread account of a debate between Science Skeptic Michael Shermer and Deepak Chopra on the same topic.  It rested next to a flyer advertising an upcoming debate between parapsychologists Ray Hyman PhD, Jessica Utts PhD, and Stephan Schwartz at the 2011 American Parapsychological Association meetings.  This last debate represents 15 straight years the same individuals have similar debates.

Game Over: Reset to New Paradigm

Recent advances in Neuroscience and Information theory have made such debates obsolete for me.  New discoveries in seemingly unrelated fields have led directly to Science firmly reuniting with ancient Spiritual Truths.  They are:

1) Functional neurogenesis:  This is the fairly recent discovery that thoughts change brain structure.  Even more fascinating is that thoughts alone can trigger the healing of brains severely damaged by strokes or other causes. This healing begins precisely in the same brain structures responsible for our sense of self, personality, memories, and relationship to god. The newly formed brain cells then migrate throughout the brain to where they are needed.

I was a student when Fred Gage, a pioneer of neurogenesis, was at Johns Hopkins.  I vividly remember him saying how disturbing it was that the brain could alter itself and change. He mused about how personality and memory could be stable in an unstable brain (if they are only brain based).  I was already struggling with the same questions, as I was taking care of patients who had had one half of their brain removed for seizure control. Post-operatively they had the same personalities, memories, and even walked and talked with very little apparent neurological deficits.

2) Information Theory:  For nearly 100 years, theoretical physicists have struggled with their mathematical models and experimental data showing that information is the core essence of this Universe.  Information, which seems to exist independent of time and space, expressed primarily in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes.  Information theory, although entirely mathematically based, has impacted neuroscience and engineering in virtually every aspect of modern society, from computer science, cell phones, the Internet, ecology and physics.

Information is defined as a random variable defined by the sum of probabilities of what is real.  Concepts such as intuition and hidden math are important parts of information theory.  My friend and chaos mathematician Jay Kappraff, in Beyond Measure documents how information theory intersects with the mathematical underpinnings of everything from plant growth to architecture to the myths of primitive peoples.

Paul Davies in Information and the Nature of Reality writes that the basis of reality is “information > laws of physics>material reality”.

Yet if mathematics and information theory are the basis of the Universe, in whose brain are they emanating from?  Science has without comment slipped into a profound mysticism implying that there must be a consciousness or source of universal information as the basis of material reality.  In fact, Aristotle proposed a similar defination of matter thousands of years ago.  The current physics model of “matter” is that it is a sort of “energy-mass-potential” matter, hardly the tiny spects of stuff that were supposed to be the basis of all of reality.

3. Cognitive Neuroscience:  One major barrier to understanding spiritual realities is that they seem to be invented or created in the brain.  In fact, nearly 25% of our brain is dedicated to perceiving spiritual realities.  I coined the term “the god spot” in 2002 to describe the hippocampus and right temporal lobe as links to the “all informational domain”, better known as “god”.  This has been supplanted by Mario Beauregard’s documentation that there is no “god spot” as most of the brain is dedicated to intersecting with spiritual realities.

Now visual cognitive neuroscientists such as Don Hoffman (Visual Intelligence) have documented that our consensual “local” reality is also created in the brain.  In fact, the brain receives millions of bits of information per second and uses only a small percentage of it to create our visual reality. 

Consciousness Persists in Dying Dysfunctional Brains at the Point of Death

Bruce Greyson MD, the grandfather of near death research, states: “the conflict between current neuroscientific orthodoxy and the occurrence of near death experiences is head-on, profound and inescapable.  This reason for this is simple. Consciousness persists in dying dysfunctional brains at the point of death.  Two prospective case control studies of near death experiences, mine done on children at the University of Washington, and Pim van Lommel’s done on adults, published in the American Medical Association’s Pediatric Journal and the Lancet respectively, clearly document this.

All of the so-called controversies in near death research, such as which neurotransmitters mediate the experience, or what is the neurophysiological basis of the tunnel are meaningless.  The fact is that dying dysfunctional brains are frequently fully conscious.  They shouldn’t be according to the old paradigm’s view that the brain creates consciousness.  In fact, this finding has been replicated in laboratory studies of fighter pilots whirled to the point of near death in studies of how the brain responds to high G forces.  They report precisely what the children we studied at the University of Washington reported: first a period of unconsciousness as they approached near death, and then a return to consciousness at the point of death.

The Collision of the Facts v Science Saved by Philosophy

I had a conversation with philosopher John Peter Thompson which finally ended my journey of understanding about near death experiences.  We bantered back and forth about field theory, and Einstein, and quantum physics,  and how to define imagination as opposed to emerging phenomena when we reach the chaos at the limits of the known reality.

He restated in philosophical terms what Don Hoffman defined in neuro-cognitive terms: Perception must be defined in BOTH phenomenal terms and relational terms.  What we see is first and foremost a visual construct of the mind, a phenomenon.  Consensual local reality is something we all see and agree upon.  Alcoholics see  pink elephants that the rest of us can’t see. 

Visual perception must be further defined in a relational sense.  Do we relate and interact with what we see? By this test, pink elephants are not real, and the near death experience is very real.  It is transformational to those who experience them.  The content of the experience precisely matches what both informational theory and ancient spiritual wisdom tell us about god and reality.

I learned from John Peter that what scientists now call “Informational Theory” or Jay Kappraff called fundamental mathematical principles he finds in nature, the brain, human mythological structures, the dynamics of waves and curving nature of streams, virtually every religion has called “god”. 

For example:

A Person Describes their near death experience as: ”It had all of the love, all of the knowledge, everything that is, was and will be,and that (knowledge) is the hard core of reality. And death? Death is a body problem.

A child describing god in his near death experience: I first saw a wizard dressed in white, telling me to struggle and I shall live.  But then I knew it was god, from the knowledge in his voice.

Jonathon Edwards: (American Calvinist, nearly died at age 7: I saw the sweet light of the all knowing god that is not of this world yet surrounds us all.

The Jewish/Christian Bible: he has filled him w/ the Spirit of God, w/ wisdom, w/ understanding, w/ knowledge & w/ all kinds of skills Exodus 35:31

The Koran:that Allah is the All-Knower of each & everything. Al-Maeda, Chapter #5, Verse #97  The knowledge thereof is with Allah (Alone), but most of mankind know not Al-Araf, Chapter #7, Verse #187 And surely, Allah is All-Hearer, All-Knower. Al-Anfal, Chapter #8, Verse #42 Knowledge is identical with God’s being; God is knowledge Islam: past, present and future ~ Hans Kung

The Vedas:“The Vedas contain all knowledge . Bless me with this knowledge just as you have blessed the deities.” Yajur Veda via

Robert Lanza MD wrote in American Scholar that consciousness is the ultimate smallest particle of the Universe.  He further states that consciousness uses the brain to interact with this local reality (that small percentage of information received by the brain to create our current version of reality). Time and space are “tools of the brain!”  Robert Lanza is arguably the world’s smartest scientist, working primarily with cloning.  He doesn’t mention near death research at all in reaching his conclusion that this is a conscious interactional Universe.

Cognitive neuroscience tell us that we create our shared reality, what we all agree is real” with less than 5% of the total information our brain receives!  Information science tells us that all of that information is in fact the underpinnings of reality, not tiny tiny tiny pieces of matter.  Jay Kappraff tells us that within this reality (which is but a fraction of the total reality) there are hidden mathematic equations and correlations which seem to be some sort of spiritual glue connecting the myths of primitive peoples with the artwork of great painters to architecture to how plants grow.  In fact they seem to be a filter or template within our brain which shapes how we perceive reality.

So Can a Dead Brain Think? And Heal Itself?

Wow, clearly we can no longer say that we see or understand “reality” with our five senses.  To answer the question of “what is real”, we have to consult chaos mathematicians, cognitive neuroscientists, and learn how thoughts can restructure the brain.

All I want to know, at the end of the day, is “are near death experiences real”.  I am a clinician.  For the first many years of my career, I worked for an Air Transport Service bringing critically ill children to Seattle Children’s Hospital.  Most of these patients died. Over half of those grieving parents have powerful spiritual experiences regarding the death of their child.  They want to know if near death experiences are real because they want to know if they can trust their own spiritual visions and intuitions. 

So I put it to John Peter directly: How can we trust the spiritual visions of children who are on medications and have nearly died?  They say their experiences are real, in fact “realer than real”.  In fact one little girl told me that “I was never so alive as those few minutes I was dead”.

John replied: The explorer of reality must use a consistent, well-defined and well-understood language to communicate concepts such as reality.  Ultimately, we have to take what limited information we have, and create a model of reality from it.  We can never know absolute reality.  What we experience as reality is simply a man-made structure.  What we observe in nature is not nature itself, but rather nature filtered through our efforts to understand it.

We must be patient with the language of science, to learn what personal myth lies beneath it.  Even the experimental data of science is expressed in human words, words which are crafted through metaphor and analogy.  It is our word choice and language which ultimately colors and shapes our world view.

As human beings, we appear to be hard wired to map an informational reality to create a predictable world we can function in.  This will work until new information causes the previously constructed matrix to break down.

Now at last I understand the case of Angela Ronson, who had a severe stroke and was in a coma for seven years.  She finally recovered, with her memory and personality intact, yet most of her brain was destroyed by her cranial bleed.  She too was still alive.  Functional neurogenesis explains how she tediously healed and restored her own brain.

When her brain was destroyed by the stroke, her consciousness, complete with memories and personality still existed in the greater informational reality, or mind of god depending on your belief system.  Most people at that point simply go on to a new brain, what we call re-incarnation.  Or as Robert Lanza MD says, we “re-set” to a new brain.  Apparently Angela took the trouble to tediously restore and refurbish her old brain, by the now known processes of functional neurogenesis.  What a gal!  Thanks Angela for showing us it can be done!

The Old Paradigm Validated that Meteors Are Real: The New Paradigm Validates that Spiritual Realities are Real

At long last, I can look my grieving parents in the eye, and speak to them with the confidence of a scientist: “Yes, your vision that your departed child returned and told you not to cry was real.” It is as real as math, as real as love, as real as information science.  Your child, after his body died in what we call reality, is in fact still part of the greater informational reality we all exist in.  There is absolutely no reason, from a scientific point of view, that your child could not have taken the trouble to communicate with you.  Your brain simply would have to be prepared to access some information that it usually filtered out as “not real”.

I shook John Peters hand, and silently cried.  So many of my patients died.  The handful who survived told me that they had a wonderful secret to share with me, that when they were dead, they were still alive.

I have felt an obligation to those parents to explain the near death experience in the language of science.  It has taken me twenty years. 

Twenty years later, I now understand what a small comfort and terrible understanding this is.  Their child still died, no matter that science confirms the existence of spiritual realities.  I weep for my failures as a physician and for all those children who died.

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Angela Ronson: Part 4 Spiritual Survivor and Motivational Writer

Spiritual Survivor

Angela returned to complete chaos.  Her home, her former life, everything was gone.  She had to re-unite with her children, navigate uncaring government bureaucracies, figure out how to financially survive, continue with her rehabilitation, and deal with issues as mundane as she couldn’t get reliable access to the Internet.  Despair and bitterness constantly beckoned to her as an easy way out.

She started to write.  First of her experiences and story, later to inspire and educate others.  Like so many survivors of the near death experience, she returned with the clear message that there is “no other side”.  This life is the spiritual life, is the only life we have.  Of course consciousness survives the death of the body, her own coma and recovery indicate that.  However, she realized that so many are unprepared for this life.  She returned with insight and wisdom, and wants to share it with others.

NOT SPIRITUAL ADVICE BUT PRACTICAL INFORMATION ON RECOVERY FROM BRAIN INJURIES: REHABILITATION, DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

This Part Four of Angela’s story will be constantly updated.  It’s purpose is to compile in one place the practice advice Angela has for us on surviving brain injuries and resources in the community and on the Internet.

Angela’s Writing

1.  Angela Ronson’s Home Rehab Program:  She searched the literature and consulted with the experts to come up with this most excellent most based rehabilitation program for traumatic brain injured patients and stroke victims.  This is what she does at home.  Click here for link

2. Comment on AFO splints

3. Blog on The Neuron Network: For Professionals.  Angela states her purpose is to speak for those who can’t. NeuroNetwork

4.  Angela writes on Neuroplasticity

5.  Angela writes in University of West Georgia Aneurysm and AVM Support Site on rehabilitation.  Click Here

6. Angela gives invaluable advice on Medicaid: (click here:) (Angela knows Medicaid especially California Medicaid)

7.  Angela’s New Blog: The Thoughtful Vegetable.  Excellent writing   Click Here

Angela’s Favorite Articles

1. Alternative Therapies for Brain Disorders

2. Brain Shows Neuroplasticity Article from 1969

3. Bradley Voytek Storing Phantom Images in the Brain

4. Tracking Recovery of Consciousness from Coma

5. Nice YouTube video on Neuroplasticity

Angela’s Favorite Links

1. She loves Posit Science and receives therapy through them.

2. A young researcher you haven’t heard of YET! Bradley Voytek

3.  A young researcher who will someday lead the spiritual  revolution.  He is the stealth bomber of the New Paradigm, low below the radar doing cutting edge Neurogenesis research at NIH  Yes, it’s the man embedded in God’s plan Jason Snyder: Functional Neurogenesis.

4.  The Dana Foundation: Gateway to Information on Brain Research

5. The Brain Detectives: Blog from Montreal Neurological Institute

PRAISE FOR ANGELA

1.  Angela thank you for being my friend. You are a strong person especially with your struggle on your rehabilitation. Also for having all of your websites with information and spiritual guidance. We have similar goals which to help others which gives us the strength to continue with what we are doing. I believe that I was given a sign (seeing The White Light) to help and educate others which is what this group is for. You have passed very helpful information here. I applaud you for your knowledge of information and helping us.
God bless you Angela,
Joe  Martin

2. “Angela’s training as a therapist and Behavior Specialist gives her the knowledge to give us this update from the point of view of an Evaluation on this point of her recovery.  Vegetable? I think not”  Jim Craft University of West Georgia

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When Does the Near Death Experience Occur? (or Do We Need a Brain to Think?)

I Wasn’t Dead At All: I Was Alive!

Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)

The most important question about the near death experience (NDE)  turns out to be a very simple one: When does it occur?  Does it occur in the last few minutes of life, when those who have had one think it occurs?  Or is it an invention of the mind after the fact of recovery to full consciousness, a confabulation, the well known ability of the mind to fill in memory gaps.

Science has now answered this question.  The facts of the NDE, supported by 50 years of clinical AND experimental research are clear:  it is in fact the dying experience.  It happens in the last few minutes of life.  It happens to fully conscious brains in the last few minutes of life.  It happens to completely comatose dysfunctional brains in the last few minutes of life.  It happens to heavily medicated brains in the last few minutes of life.  It happens to patients who are not taking any medications at all, in the last few minutes of life.

(click here to see video) I Wasn\’t Dead At All: I Was Alive 

Unfortunately, most scientists, especially neuroscientists who specialize in studying how the brain works, seem completely unaware of the research and facts documenting that the Near Death Experience is in fact the dying experience.  We die awake, aware, thinking and learning, mostly people report learning lessons of love about living.

So What Does Science Have To Say About NDEs?

In 2007, in a dense heavily referenced tome (1) Bruce Greyson MD Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, after 45 pages of summarizing the scientific literature wrote: “In sum, the central challenge of NDEs lies in asking how these complex states of consciousness, including vivid mentation, sensory perception, and memory, can occur under conditions in which current neurophysiological models of the production of mind by brain deem such states impossible. This conflict between current neuroscientific orthodoxy and the occurrence of NDEs is head on, profound, and inescapable.  Dr. Greyson goes on to state that no further progress in understanding either the brain or consciousness can be made until scientists in general and neuroscientists in particular comes to grips with the facts, the facts, the facts, and nothing but the facts, of the near death experience.(1)

Spoon Feeding the Neuroscientific Community

In November of 2010, the Neuroscientific Community had their annual convention.  30,000 people attended.  Statistically speaking, over 700 of them had had near death experiences, 900 had spontaneous out of body experiences, and 2400 had profound spiritual experiences coupled with vivid perceptions of another reality.  They were enthralled by lectures on bird songs and how they impact the human brain.  There was not a single lecture or poster presentation on spirituality or the implications of the near death experience.

Since then, I have deliberately provoked and engaged neuroscientists, to see what they are thinking (and not thinking).   One thing I learned was that they are NOT thinking about science.  Here are these highly educated neuroscientists general thoughts about NDEs

1.  NDEs are hallucinations:  They make this sort of statement that has absolutely no basis in the scientific literature.  It is an off the cuff assumption on their part, completely unsupportable by science.  Specifically, hallucinations are caused by brain dysfunction.  They involve distortions of reality or denial of reality.  For example, the patient having an operation might believe he is home having coffee with his family, is a common ICU delusion.  In sharp contrast, patients having NDEs are oriented to person, place, time, accurately describe their current surroundings and describe a second reality superimposed or intermingled with this one.  The one serious attempt I am aware of to catagorize NDEs as hallucinations concluded that they are so different from other hallucinations that they needed their own separate descriptive category.(2)  Well, if that’s the case, then if called hallucinations it should be pointed out they are unlike any other hallucinations.

2.  NDEs are dreams of the dying brain  I love the poetic beauty of this statement.  After all, if they are dreams of the dying brain, then what happens when we awaken to a new reality?  However it is not a scientific statement.  Dreams occur to healthy brains when asleep.  Dreams have specific stages, rapid eye movements are associated with them, etc.  NDEs, as stated above, occur to completely awake brains and profoundly comatose brains, the common element being they occur in the last few minutes of life.

So How Do We Know They Are the Dying Experience?

1.  The first clinical study of NDEs in the medical literature  I am aware of was published in 1968.  The authors concluded that ‘interviewing survivors of cardiac arrest, as crude a tool as that may be, is the best way to learn about the final moments of life”  In fact, we have not improved on that understanding.  However, this was a retrospective study, interviewing survivors of cardiac arrest.(3)

2.  In the 1990s, my research team at Seattle Children’s Hospital, concluded the first prospective study of near death experiences.  It was more fascinating in that we studied children, ages 3-12, who were less likely to have cultural expectations about the experiences.  Our research team consisted of the Heads of Child Neurology, Child Psychiatry and the Intensive Care Unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital, affiliated with the University of Washington.  We concluded that the experiences were not statistically associated with a lack of oxygen to the brain, being hospitalized in a scary intensive care unit (the fear death response), medications, or psychological factors.  Control patients who were seriously ill did not have the experience.  Only when they came close to death, did they report being conscious of their dying experience. 

My favorite experience was a young man who was completely conscious, not taking medications, but had a heart pacemaker.  His pacemaker failed in the lobby of the hospital and he collapsed in coma and full cardiac arrest.  After we resuscitated him, he opened his eyes and said: ” that was weird, you guys just sucked me back into my body.”  Obviously not a dream, a hallucination, or medication induced.

We published our research in the American Medical Associations Pediatric Journals and Contemporary Pediatrics.(4,5)

3.  Pim van Lommel did a similar prospective study of near death experiences in adults.  I met with Dr. van Lommel in the 1990s and we co-ordinated our research design to make sure they were similar.  He reached the same conclusion as our team, and published in the Lancet.(6)

4.  There was an excellent experimental study of near death experiences in completely reproducible laboratory conditions, done by the United States military and James Whinnery MD.  Click here for video of his research: Experimental Study of Near Death  Dr. Whinnery has published the results of his study in the medical literature (7,8).  I have known Dr. Whinnery for years, we both served on the National Institute of Discovery Science, a private  scientific effort to understand consciousness in the US led by Robert Bigelow. 

Dr. Whinnery was studying the effects of high G forces on pilots.  He whirled them in a centrifuge to the point of near death, to the point of theoretical cessation of blood flow within the brain.  He varied the intensity of the centrifuge runs and was able to very nicely document exactly when the near death experience occurred.  It was not enough for the pilots to collapse into coma, have seizures, and complete loss of bladder and bowel control.  When revived, they did not report NDEs.  Only when they went beyond that point, to the brink of near death, did they have a near death experience.  For the pilot in the video, his near death experience was bouncing out of his physical body, being fully conscious, as if he were in a bumper car.  Obviously he was not having a dream.

5.  It is reasonable to ask if near death experiences are then simply the result of a dysfunctional dying brain, with all the release of endorphins, endopyschosins (neurotransmitters that cause hallucinatory experiences).  At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone can argue with this point of view.  All of life could be considered in that perspective.  There is a philosophical line of thinking that all of this is a dream and we will wake up from it.  There are people who believe that love isn’t a “real” experience, but simply the result of various hormones designed to control the organism to reproduce.  These are all philosophical constructs, and I am not a philosopher.  I am simply a scientist, documenting that the experience occurs in the last few minutes of life.  It is up to the individual to interpret that experience. 

However, for those who interpret the near death experience to be a hallucination of a dying dysfunctional brain, consider this:  Near death experiences also occur to fully conscious brains in the last few minutes of life.  Any neuroscientific understanding of how the brain mediates the experience also has to explain how it can occur BOTH in dying dysfunctional brains and alert fully conscious brains.  This evidence comes from the Journal of the Swiss Alpine Club, over 100 years ago.  They documented that mountain climbers who fell from great heights but were saved by falling into a snow bank, for example, also had all the features of the classic near death experience.  More recently, a researcher at Yale documented that children had near death experiences even if fully conscious and were not taking medications. (9,10)

The Response From the Neuroscientific Community: You are Psychotic and Insane to Believe This

The reason for this reaction is simple.  The scientific facts of the near death experience point to a different reality, a different scientific model than the current one.  Terms such as ‘psychotic” and ‘delusional” are terms we use when we believe that another person perceives a different reality than the rest of us.  Within the narrow confines of the rigidly dogmata philosophically monochromatic neuroscientific community, anyone who concludes from scientific facts that we can think without a brain must be delusional.  This is why Dr. Greyson pointed out that the collision between the Science Fundamentalists (my term) of Neuroscience and the scientific facts of the near death experience are inescapable.

It is not generally well understood that science is a system of inquiry designed to help us understand reality.  Although it is a branch of philosophy, it is really a process, a protocol.  It is not supposed to have one philosophy or another embedded in it.  Yet it does, simply because scientists are human beings with emotions and feelings and preconceptions as well.  When we speak of science, we generally mean ‘the scientific method coupled with the materialistic philosophy’.  Therefore, the reaction of your average neuroscientist to anyone who ‘believes” that we can think without a brain, is in fact an emotional and philosophical reaction.  We are no longer engaging such a scientist on the rational level, but we have attacked his underlying belief systems.  They typically react with rage.

But not all scientists embrace materialism as their underlying and hidden philosophy.  Robert Lanza is often described as the world’s most brilliant scientist.  As a teenager, he cloned an animal for a science project!  Recently he wrote an article in the American Scholar stating that consciousness is the underlying reality of the Universe and that it uses the brain to interact with this local perceptual reality. (11) Click here for his website:  He is certainly not alone.  Nobel Prize winner molecular biologist Christian De Duve, who discovered how RNA evolved from the primal chemical soup of this Earth, also states that consciousness was part of that evolutionary process, and exists independent of a working brain.(12)

A Child Has the Last Word

The science of the near death experience is clear.  We die awake, aware, with an expanded sense of reality.  I have studied NDEs in Japan and Africa, as well as in the United States.  Cross cultural studies of the NDE show that the common elements are that we die the life we live, in terms of the specifics of the experience.  However, we all die consciously, learning lessons of love about our life.(13)

 Perhaps some will interpret this as simply a hallucination of the dying mind.  Frankly from a scientific point of view, I don’t see how we can argue with that.  Yet I see it as circumstantial evidence that we continue to live, that death is just a body problem.  After all, why would we have evolved a complex neurobiological system involving easily 25% of our brain, just to give us a pleasing hallucination at the point of death.

Listen to Chris’s near death experience.  Notice when he says “everything went blank” as corresponding to the cessation of ordinary sensory input, and yet he still was awake, aware, and alive.  Click here Five year old NDE Was it a tunnel or a noodle?

 Reference

1.  Greyson B:  Unusual Experiences Near Death pp 367-421 in Kelly EF, Kelly EW, Crabtree A et al (eds) Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st Century.   (2007) Rowman and Littlefield

2.  Schnaper N:  ”The Psychological Implications of Severe Trauma: Emotional Sequelae to Unconsciousness”  J Trauma 15 (1975) 94-98 Click here for pub med link

3.  Bruch GE, DePasquale NO, Phillips JH. What death is like, Am Heart J 1968;76/l438-9 (Does anyone have this article? If so, email me and I will add it to the blog.  This article is an awesome classic.)

4.  Morse ML, Castillo P, Venecia D: “Childhood Near Death Experiences” American Journal of Diseases of Children 140 (1986) 110-114 Click here to read

5.  Morse ML:  “Near Death Experiences and Death Related Visions: Implications for the Clinitian”  Current Problems in Pediatrics (February 1994) 55-83  Click here to read

6.  Lommel P van, van Wees, Meyers V et al:  “Near Death Experiences in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet 358 (2001) 2039-45 Click here to read

7.  Whinnery JE, Whinnery AM: “Acceleration Induced Loss of Consciousness”  Archive of Neurology 47 (1990) 764-76 Click here to read

8.  Whinnery JE: ”Observations on the Neurophysiological Theory of Acceleration Induced Unconsciousness” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine. 60 (1989) 589-93

9.  Heim A “Notizen uber den Tod durch Absturz” Jahrbuch des Schweizer Alpenclubs 27 (1982) 327-37 Translated by Noyes R: “The Experience of Dying From Falls” Omega (1972) 45-52 Click here to purchase copy

10.  Komp D: A Window To Heaven: When Children See Life in Death   (1992) Zondervan Grand Rapids, Michigan

11.  Lanza R: “A New Theory of the Universe”  American Scholar Spring 2001 Click here to read

12. Duve C de: Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative   Basic Books (1995) New York

13.  Carr C.  “ Death and near death: a comparison of Tietan and Euro-American experiences”.  J Transpersonal Psychol 1993;25:59-110.  Click here for Journal of Transpersonal Psychology website to purchase article. (this is a very hot article, referenced a lot.  I am proud that I played a small part in Dr. Carr’s research for this article- Strong work Dr. Carr!)

 

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Angela Ronson Part 3: How Our Brain is Connected to the Universe

SO COULD IT REALLY BE TRUE THAT ANGELA’S CONSCIOUSNESS HEALED HER BRAIN?

Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)

YES!  In fact, the best scientific understanding of how consciousness works clearly validates the idea that Angela (her consciousness, her spirit, her gaseous vapor of a soul, whatever words you feel most comfortable with) healed her own brain from a vantage point outside of her body.

Wow Dr. Morse! Did they teach you that at Hopkins?  Or is that statement really the result of, shall we say, a bit too much extracurricular artificial brain enhancer use?

Although it is true that when I was a kid I did smoke marijuana once or twice (but like Bill Clinton, I never inhaled) I still maintain that my statement that the spirit or soul of Angela Ronson healed her own brain is in fact a scientific one.  Now why she did this, I have no idea.  It took seven long tedious incredibly difficult painstaking years, and she still hasn’t repaired the links between her brain and her body.  Virtually all other humans throughout history simply moved on to a new brain, and “rebooted time” as Robert Lanza MD likes to call the process of re-incarnation. (Lanza is arguably the world’s smartest medical scientist) Think of all those miles and miles of myelin sheath Ms. Ronson had to laboriously re-knit to heal and reconnect her severely damaged brain.

Child's Near Death Experience Her consciousness leaves her body after dying of bacterial meningitis

Most Simply Leave the Brain Behind Like This Girl Started To

I cheerfully admit, however, that my assertion that Angela Ronson’s consciousness healed her brain depends of two speculations: scientifically respectable speculations to be sure, but nevertheless speculations at this time.  They are

1.  That the timeless spaceless and conscious quantum non-locality that the theoretical physicists speak of is something that is both real and directly connected to the human brain and consciousness.

2.  Memories, in fact, all knowledge and information exists OUTSIDE the human brain and that we have the ability to access that universal source of memory.

THE GOD SPOT

It has been known for over 100 years that the human brain has a specific area in it that allows us to have the experience of communicating with a “god”.  For some odd reason, this area of the brain, the right temporal lobe (and associated hippocampal and other brain structures) was considered the source of “hallucinations” of god and religious ecstasy.  Huh?

1) We have a specific area of the brain, the occipital lobe, which we use to create the visual images we call “reality”.  I have never heard the same reasoning applied to the existence of the occipital lobe.  I have never heard anyone say that obviously this local visual reality is a hallucination because we have a huge portion of our brain dedicated to creating it.

2) Why would we have evolved nearly 1/3 of our brain and associated other pathways and structures involved to simply give us a hallucination of a non-existent “god”.  When books such as The  Basis of God Beliefs  (Persinger), Religious and Mystical States: A Neuro-psychological Model (D’Aquilli and Newberg), The God Area of Brain (Alpert) attempt to explain why we would evolve a hallucinatory god experience area of the brain, they go through such amazing mental contortions that I am surprised that they can write it without bursting into laughter at themselves.  For some bizarre reason, if its about god, then it’s just in the brain and not real.  Everything else that we experience and create in our brains is “real”.  Well GET REAL Persinger, Andrew Newburg, Michael Shermer, Mathew Alpert and the rest of you sloppy scientific thinkers, experiencing god is just as real as any other human experience.

Wilder Penfield Father of Modern Neuroscience Consciousness Near Death Experience Spiritual Neuroscience

Wilder Penfield

The Deep Temporal Lobe, when stimulated creates near death like experiences, consciousness outside of the brain, out of body states

Areas associated with NDE-like Experiences

Wilder Penfield, the Father of Modern Neurosurgery, mapped out much of what we know about how the brain works by directly stimulating the brain in conscious patients undergoing Neuro-surgical procedures.  Since the brain itself doesn’t feel pain, patients can be awake during surgery.  When he would stimulate the motor areas of the brain, they might move their arms.  When he stimulated the areas of the brain in the top right picture, the deep right temporal lobe, patients said things such as “oh god, are you there?”, or “god, I am leaving my body (and coming to be with you”, or even more intriguing “I am out of my body, no, I am half in and half out”.  Penfield, of course, at the end of his career determined that the brain could not account for consciousness, and that consciousness must be independent of brain function.

(As a hilarious aside, I once debated a Skeptic from Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Organization, on NPR.  They are so dedicated to calling everything and everyone a “pseudo-scientist” that he ended up calling Wilder Penfield a “pseudo-scientist”!  Michael, this was really disappointing to me, although it did make me fall over laughing, as I love your book “Borderlands of Science”.  I simply expected better science from these knee jerk “if they disagree with me then they must be pseudo-scientists” thinkers, who must not have read Borderlands themselves.)

Brodman's area 7, spiritual neuroscience, near death experiences, out of body states, consciousness, Melvin Morse

Area of brain responsible for our sense of self

 Decreased activity in Area 7 leads to increased frontal lobe activity and ultimately right temporal lobe experiences

Areas of brain responsible for out of body state, near death experience, consciousness, Melvin Morse, spiritual neuroscience

It is my speculation that this area of the brain in fact permits us to interact and communicate with what physicists call “non local” reality.  This is a theoretical model of reality that states that all of the information in the Universe that ever was and ever will be is “non local” meaning that it exists independent of time and space.  This is the current theory of “reality”.  When the children who have had near death experiences ask me if what they experienced was “real”, this is the current scientific model of reality that I have to use to judge the reality of their experience.

MARIO  BEAUREGARD: NO GOD SPOT (THE WHOLE BRAIN IS THE GOD SPOT!)

In Mario Beauregard’s brilliant book Spiritual Brain states that there is in fact no “god spot’.  This is simply because Dr. Beauregard who is a lot smarter than me, says that in fact the entire brain is the god spot!  I have learned a lot from Dr. Beauregard and he has helped me with a number of my studies.  I don’t see a significant difference between my limited idea of a god spot, and his conceptualization of a brain as the god spot, in terms of how Angela Ronson healed her own brain. 

THE NEUROSCIENTISTS ARE SIMPLY LATE FOR THE PARTY! SCIENCE HAS THOUGHT THE UNIVERSE IS CONSCIOUS FOR A HUNDRED YEARS!

According to the theoretical physicists, this “non local” reality is conscious!  Conscious! You bet! As one of them famously said “if you are not totally blown away and astonished by quantum physics, then you don’t understand it”.  It seems just about every famous physicist has written in their off laboratory hours a book stating that reality  is conscious and that we routinely interact with it.  In fact, they go further! They claim that our interactions with reality actually change its fundamental nature! Henry Stapp,( Mindful Universe), is but one of many such thinkers.

So Speculation 1, that our brains are linked to a greater timeless space-less all knowing information containing reality turns out to not be so speculative after all.  In fact I had dinner with Amit Goswami (The Quantum Activist Physicist) and Peter Fenwick (Neuropsychiatrist and all around genius) a while back.  Peter Fenwick was kind enough to tell me that my theory that the right temporal lobe is our connection to the physicists Non-local reality was “a good first try”.  Then Drs. Fenwick and Goswami, within 2 hours, roughed out a coherent theory of exactly how our brains could be connected to quantum non-locality.  As Peter Fenwick concluded, “well its just a giant math problem now”.

Wow, we are just a giant math problem away from understanding exactly how Angela Ronson could have healed her own brain from the vantage point of being outside of her body, according to the some of the foremost scientific thinkers on Earth today.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MEMORIES EXISTING OUTSIDE OF THE BRAIN?

1) Fred Lashley, the Father of Modern Brain research, at the end of his career stated “If I didn’t know better, I would think memories were in fact stored outside the brain.

2) Alan Gauld in Irreducible Mind(The most recent and outstanding textbook of conscious and the brain) states that the concept that memory is stored IN the brain is simply a neuroscientific dogma, without any evidence to support it!  He calls it a myth!

3.  Frick, in his excellent book The Astonishing Hypothesis, dramatically concludes the book by demonstrating how sea slugs might have simple memories in their rudimentary brains! Not exactly compelling evidence that memory is in the brain.  Granted Frick’s book was written in 1994.  Well Scientific American’s Dictionary of Science, written in 2007 states that we are just learning about memory and brain function, without any other details!

(As another hilarious aside, I noticed that Frick worked for the Salk Institute in California.  I wonder what Frick would think if he knew that I interviewed Jonas Salk, several years before his death.  Jonas Salk was lucid and highly intelligent at the time of that interview.  He shared with me that aliens, during his sleep, gave him the secret to the Salk vaccine!  He then took that information to the lab and changed history!  So I don’t think people should be so arrogant and smug that they understand everything about how our brains might or might not be connected to the Universe.  Frick’s own boss when he wrote The Astonishing Hypothesis actually thought aliens implanted memories in his brain in his sleep.)

So, although my theory of how Angela Ronson healed her brain might be speculative, here is some evidence that no less an authority as Scientific American is moving towards my point of view!

Sound Life, right temporal lobe connection to the Universe, near death experiences, consciousness, out of body experiences, spiritual neuroscience, Melvin Morse

Seattle Times Article From 1990s illustrating my theory

Memory outside the brain, out of body experience, near death experience

20 Years Later, Scientific American Agrees!

 I doubt the Editors of Scientific American would say that they agree with my theory of how our brain could connect to the Universe.  However, the two covers are remarkably similar.  The Scientific American article is on how memory can be downloaded from the brain.  They review the research of Boston memory researchers who have created a Mouse Earthquake memory and then downloaded and stored it in a computer.  Well give me a break SciAm, I know that you are the home of Skeptic Michael Shermer, but if we can download memories out of the brain, then it certainly is reasonable to speculate that we can upload memories into the brain as well.

In fact, when is Michael Shermer going to stop taking on easy targets such as people who invent telephones to talk to the Dead, and start addressing some of these issues?  I hesitate to say this too loudly, as I don’t want Sci Am to retaliate and cancel my subscription, but the premiere Skeptic of our time, a man who wrote the brilliant Borderlands of Science which is a blueprint of how a fringe science might become respectable, has a responsibility to take on more challenging subjects and help us to understand them.  Perhaps my theories and speculations are all wrong, but I am convinced that any sincere  process of discrediting them will help us to understand what is really going on!

Instead, Michael Shermer is content to let his Internet Science Fundamentalists viciously attack scientists such as Terrance Witt (he wrote Undiscovered Universe – an alternative explanation to Quantum Physics click here) by endlessly chanting “crack pot, crack pot” over and over again without any other critical comments.  No less an authority as Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality said that brilliant outsiders (such as Terrance Witt) might reinvent physics and that quantum physics may be flawed.

This is an important issue, as fundamental to understanding how Angela Ronson could have recovered from a seven year coma and semi-coma with her personality and memories intact is our fundamental understanding of what is real!  We must ultimately look to science to help us to understand what is real, while not neglecting that spiritual insight and intuitions are a second form of knowledge just as important.

Spiritual neuroscience is our first step at understanding what is “real”.  It is the scientific understanding of how the brain actually works, and how that might help us to understand our spiritual perceptions and rational understandings.

We, in fact, have two brains, with two independent consciousnesses, which work very differently.

1) The left brain is rational and logical and responsible for analysis and judgment.  This is essential for science.  It is also essential for our primary mission here in this reality: to learn our lessons of love.  Learning lessons involves judgment and analysis.  However, the left brain has a deep flaw, in that in its zeal to understand, it will simply make stuff up!  If it has no data to interpret, or is given inaccurate data, it will simply make things up to explain the data, or no data, and believe what it has made up to be true.  Just as true as an scientific deductions.

When I was a medical student, we would splash water on the hands of patients who could only perceive the world through their left brain.  The sensory input of the water would go to the areas of their right brain which no longer properly worked.  The patients would seamlessly tell us things such as they got wet because it was raining outside, or that they accidentally spilled water or even urinated on themselves.  No amount of showing them what really happened would shake their beliefs.

This is what has happened to Michael Shermer and his Skeptical colleagues.  They are brilliant left brain thinkers, but they have ignored or misinterpreted the raw data, and have made up a version of reality that they now believe to be true.  In controlled remote viewing, we call this process “making sand castles in the air”, which is the remote viewing equivalent of the left brain reaching completely wrong conclusions.

2.  The right brain is often pure sensory and emotion input without any filter or rational analysis.  It will compile lists of information.  It can draw a picture with all the various parts of the picture, but has a hard time putting the various pieces of the picture in their proper location.  It is relatively non-verbal.  It operates primarily on intuition, symbols, pictures, and concrete images.  Right brain and Autistic writer Temple Grandin does an excellent job of describing how she doesn’t have an abstract concept of “dog” that most of us have, but rather a library of hundreds of pictures of individual dogs in her mind that she reviews whenever someone asks her about a dog.

The right brain can reach just as startling wrong conclusions as the left brain, but in a totally different manner.  Perhaps Jonas Salk did not receive the information about the Salk vaccine from aliens.  Perhaps in fact that was simply right brain knowledge that he obtained through intuition.  Without any left brain analysis or input, it would be easy to make a quick association “oh it must have been an alien who told me” and then never rationally examine that association again.

What Pauline and I have learned through the process of Controlled Remote Viewing, I would be inclined to think that Salk did in fact simply misinterpret a right brained event.  Certainly we have done the same many times in the process of learning remote viewing.

Regardless, as the German Kekule, the Father of Organic Chemistry said “Gentlemen, dream, dream, and then take your dreams to the laboratory and (see if they are true, if they stand up to scientific scrutiny).  Kekule had a famous dream of snakes eating each other, which gave him the insight as to the precise chemical nature of the Organic Ring.  However, it was by using both his right brain intuitions and then his left brain analysis that he changed modern chemistry forever.

IT TAKES COURAGE AND FAITH TO PROPERLY USE YOUR RIGHT TEMPORAL LOBE – Pauline Morse

In fact, inspired by Borderlands of Science, our research team is validating my initial intuition and speculations in the scientific arena.  Twenty years ago I did the first prospective clinical study of near death experiences.  It was also done in children.  It was published in the American Medical Associations Pediatric Journal.  This study was replicated by Pim van Lommel in adults, and he published his results in the Lancet.  Jim Whinnery MD has demonstrated that near death experiences can be replicated in the laboratory environment in fighter pilots exposed to high G forces.  There is no doubt now that science has documented that near death experiences are real, and occur to dying, dysfunctional, and let’s fact it, dead brains.

We have since then done studies documenting that energy healers can influence the electronic white noise created by semi-conductors at the same time that they can raise the white blood cell counts in severely ill patients.  We have shown that health care professionals can be taught intuition and can remotely determine if a plant has a virus or not, through non-ordinary perceptions.  We have or are in the process of again publishing in mainstream medical and scientific journals.  We use scientific protocols that other scientists can use to replicate or refute our findings.

RIGHT BRAIN PERCEPTIONS (IN THESE VIDEOS) CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF A QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY

LEFT BRAIN SCIENCE  WILL TEACH US HOW ANGELA HEALED HER OWN BRAIN

THIS IS HOW WE WILL MOVE FROM WOW TO HOW

My personal dream is that my theories and speculations are proven by other scientists to be completely wrong.  Because in that process, we will learn what is right.  However, the fundamental raw data, the knowledge that our consciousness can interact with a timeless space-less source of knowledge, and exist independent of our brain, is now a scientific fact, no longer speculation.

Quantum theory is simply a mathematical model.  However, these are people who have directly experienced the reality that Angela Ronson was in, when she tediously and laboriously undertook the task of healing her severely damaged brain.

Click on the title to watch these videos of Near Death Experiences

Isreal Land Mind Surviver Lost Knowledge on way back

DeathIsABodyProblem

Chris Davis Wizard Knowledge in his voice

Murder NDE Its About Learning to be Loved

HERE IS HOW I THINK ANGELA RONSON HEALED HER BRAIN

While in coma, she had the equivalent of a near death experience.  Certainly Brodman’s area 7 was turned off!  She had massive damage to that area of her brain!  Her consciousness persisted even though her brain was not functioning except at a brain stem level.  We know this occurs, as one child told me of her experience with a dying dysfunctional brain “I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead at all. I was alive!”.  Or as another child that I had to inject into her heart adrenalin just to restart it told me “I was never so alive as that time that I was dead”.

Angela then entered into that realm of all knowledge, that quantum non-locality that theoretical physicists believe is real.  Instead of just doing the smart thing, waiting around for a new brain, or whatever the process is when consciousness “reboots”, Angela decided “what the heck, waste not want not.  I have a perfectly repairable brain.  I am in the realm of all knowledge, so the blueprints to my brain and how to repair it exist here.”  Maybe she channeled Jason Snyder as he will be 50 years from now and further perfected his research on functional neurogenesis!  Maybe then Jason talked her into it to prove his functional  neurogenesis theories are correct, in this timeless space-less all information realm. Maybe now she doesn’t want to tell Jason “thanks Bud for the heads-up on how to heal my brain” because he hasn’t done the basic research yet in this time dependent reality.   All of that IS silly  speculation on my part.

Probably,  since time doesn’t exist in this all knowledge state, Angela didn’t realize that it would be seven long excruciatingly difficult years to fix her brain from the original DNA blueprints.  One child told me of his NDE, “it could have been a minute, it could have been a hundred years”.  Let’s fact it, Angela, maybe you just blew it and didn’t realize how hard it would be. Just because it was a spiritual decision doesn’t mean it was a good decision!  Or maybe you just wanted to prove to the rest of us that it could be done.  Perhaps you wanted to inspire us, to shake us out of our materialistic slumber and help understand our connection with the divine.

Regardless Angela, welcome back.  We need you here, to help us to understand our connection with the divine.  You have helped so many with your inspiring story and your lessons of how to cope with disability, practical aspects of dealing with insurance companies, the government, and the grueling process of rehab: what works and what doesn’t.

As most of my readers know, Angela is an Investigative Reporter for Spiritualscientific, she has tackled silly topics such as the true meaning of the “Bacon Angel” to the most profound.  She recently reported to us that math is the glue of the Universe, and is the spiritual equivalent to the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, in our lives. That is a profound statement of the scientific (math) spiritual (Holy Spirit) connection that we all need to understand better. 

  Thank you Angela Ronson, for making the effort to fix your brain and returning to this life.

Well what about Agela’s rapid hair growth?  Is this a marker for recovery from stroke and severe brain damage?  Uh, well enough speculation and brain twisting for this blog, I will address that in a future blog.

Respectfully submitted

Melvin L Morse MD (www.spiritualscientific.com)

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ANGELA RONSON PART 2: CONSCIOUSNESS HEALS THE BRAIN

 

SPIRITUAL NEUROSCIENCE

Melvin L Morse MD (spiritualscientific.com)

There has a been a quiet brain revolution going on in neuroscience, in the past ten years, one that will change everything we know about spirituality and the brain.  While the general public still is mired in the “skeptic vrs believer debate” most prominently promoted by Michael Shermer (http://www.michaelshermer.com/), most people are completely unaware that science has already embraced spirituality.  In my opinion, spirituality can no longer be understood unless practitioners and the general public are willing to understand the new spiritual neuroscience.  As physician Robert Lanza stated  (http://www.robertlanza.com/) in American Scientist in 2007, time, space, and this material reality are simply tools of the brain to allow our conscious self to interact with this reality.  He states that the current scientific evidence states that time “reboots” after our brains die (and we then get a new brain to begin a new life).   Obviously science and spirituality has moved far beyond the tired “skeptic v believer debate” that seems to still play out in the Wall Street Journal and the major television networks.

THE CASE OF ANGELA RONSON: NOT YOUR FATHER”S NEUROSCIENCE

Angela Ronson

Angela Ronson

Angela Ronson suffered a major AVM bleed and stroke with massive injury to her entire brain.  She was in a coma, semi-coma, and ultimately the “locked in syndrome” for a total of 7 years.  Yet she has made a full neuro-psychiatric recovery, with her personality and memories basically the same as prior to her massive brain injury. She speaks, can use her arms and fingers, and  is even starting to walk again! 

How is this possible?  If we knew for sure, we would also know the answer to the great mystery of the near death experience, which is: how can patients with near death experiences have any memories or experiences at all! After all, their brains are dying or let’s face it, actually dead for a brief period of time.  If Robert Lanza is correct, then consciousness comes first, and somehow being brushed with the divine and the universal knowledge of cosmic consciousness (or the Mind of the All) permits the brain to rewire and heal itself.

When I went to medical school, I was taught that the brain creates consciousness.  Our personality and memories were thought to be entirely dependent on brain activity.  Furthermore, the brain was thought to not be able to regenerate new brain cells or heal itself in any ways.  We are ominously warned to never drink alcohol (which I don’t) as each glass of beer could kill off hundreds of brain cells that could never be replaced.

Then I took an elective with the great Dr. Montcastle who was removing half a patient’s brain in an operation that took a few hours.  He did this as a last resort to attempt to cure intractable seizures.  I asked him, “well, what about their personalities, their ability to walk, to talk?  Aren’t brain functions localized to specific areas of the brain?”  He laughed merrily and told me not to believe everything I learned in medical school.  Remember, he reminded me, “half of what you know isn’t true, but unfortunately we don’t know which half is wrong!”.  Dr. Montcastle was one of a now departed breed of Neurosurgeons who seemingly gleefully removed huge areas of the brain in an effort to cure it, in defiance of what Neurology textbooks claimed was true.  He would cheerfully laugh “hell, boy (that was me) what the F*&k do they (Neurologists) know?”.

Dr. Montcastle was correct.  As a medical student I took care of many patients who had an entire half of their brain removed.  They had the same personality, the same memories, and really lost very little function or skills from their pre-operative selves.  For the most part, you could only tell that they had half their brain removed by administering sophisticated neuro-psychiatric tests.  Anyone could spend a day with them and be unaware they had had half their brain removed.  Perhaps they walked with a slight limp.  Yet this operation took only a few hours, and astonishingly, somehow it had very little effect on them.

I later did an elective at the Solomon Snyder Department of Neuroscience, where much of modern functional neurogenesis was discovered.  Functional neurogenesis means that new brain cells grow deep within an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and then migrate to specific areas of the brain where they are needed.  These new brain cells then permit new functions or repair damaged functions in the brain.

I vividly remember one of the Professors telling us how disorienting and even scary this concept that the brain can change itself, was to him.  He said that under the old model, we had every reason to believe that our personality, beliefs, and memories would remain stable, as long as the brain remained stable.  But now, he said “we are discovering that thinking and experience can actually change the brain!  How unsettling.  It seems to invite chaos into our personalities, emotions, memories and our sense of self.”  As Jason Snyder PhD stated:http://www.functionalneurogenesis.com/blog/about-functional-neurogenesis/jason-snyder/ “what would the general public think if they knew that all human experience is capable of changing the brain?”.

Dead brains having complex near death experiences and perceptions of other realities?  Human experience and thoughts alone actually changing the brain?  New brain cells mysteriously growing deep within the brain and knowing where to migrate to heal the brain?  And what about Angela Ronson?  Her entire brain wiped out by a stroke, and seven years later she regains consciousness and has her same personality and memories?  And why does her hair grow so fast, and what could that have to do with it?  What about researcher Bradley Voytek (http://darb.ketyov.com/) who titles papers “Cognitive Processes and their effect on Prefrontal Damage”.  He means THINKING is healing the brain.  But wait a doggone minute.  I thought the brain caused us to think, how can thinking heal the brain?  Yaaaaaaaaaaah.  This is not the Neuroscience that I was taught at Johns Hopkins. 

(To be continued)

 

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John Ulstrom Walks from Texas to Washington DC

John Ulstrom, on September 16th, 2010, will be walking from Texas to Washington DC.  I will keep you updated on his progress with this blog.

He is doing this to support Our Forgotten Warriors: A Private Organization dedicated to treating traumatic brain injuries, post traumatic stress syndrome, and amputations.

Click Here for video on the Organization (KOMO News)

Click Here for Press Release  (It’s in the What’s New Section at the Top)

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