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Is there Life after Death? Near-death experiences with dr. Bruce Greyson · The Smart Cookies podcast

• Zaza (00:58.55) Bruce Greyson is a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia who has studied near-death experiences for more than 45 years and is one of the world's leading experts on their science and significance. He is the author of After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor of the Handbook of Near- Bruce Greyson (00:58.725) Ahem. Zaza (01:27.81) death experiences. Professor Grayson, welcome. Bruce Greyson (01:31.766) Thank you Zaza, I'm happy to be with you today. Zaza (01:35.138) So far on this podcast we've talked about human origins, climate change, personal philosophies, belief systems, life in the universe and yet what we're going to be discussing today seems even more grand and somehow also more intimate than any of these already very profound subjects. Maybe because the final farewell is something we're unfortunately all going to have to go through. Bruce Greyson (02:01.686) Yes. Zaza (02:01.802) So we would really like to know if possible what's in store for us, if anything at all. And near-death experiences might provide a window into this, what we call it, ultimate leap. Now I do have to confess that I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to the afterlife in any shape or form, but you know, on the other hand, I do like surprises. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm unbelievably excited for us to dig into the episode. Let's begin with your story. More than 45 years ago you were a young doctor training as a psychiatrist and as I understand it at the time without any special interest in death or near death experiences. However that quickly changed. Why? Bruce Greyson (02:38.187) Yes. Bruce Greyson (02:52.15) Well, let me say first, Azza, that I agree with you completely, that I am also a skeptic, but I would like to be surprised. And I have more reason to think so, that we will now, than when I started off. When I started off, as you said, I was a complete materialist. I was raised in a scientific household where the physical world was all there was. We never talked about anything spiritual or religious in my home. So I went through college and medical school with that materialistic mindset that what you see is what you get, and death is the end. And that was fine with me, that wasn't a depressing fact, that's just the way life is. And then in one of my first weeks as a psychiatry intern in my training, I was asked to see a patient in the emergency room who had overdosed. And I went down to see her and she was unconscious, I could not arouse her. But her roommate was waiting to speak to me down the hall in another room. So I went down to the room and Talked to the roommate for about 15 or 20 minutes. And then we finished our conversation. I said goodbye to her. I went back to see the patient and she was still unconscious. So we admitted her to the intensive care unit overnight. And I went in to see her the next morning. At that time she was arousable, but still very sleepy. So I started to introduce myself and she stopped me and said, I know who you are. I remember you from last night. That kind of surprised me because I was pretty sure she was unconscious. So I said to her, gee, I thought you were asleep when I saw you last night. And she said to me, not in my room. I saw you talking to my roommate down the hall. Well, I didn't know what to make of that. That made no sense at all to me. The only way she could have known that she could have seen me down the hall is if she had gotten out of her body and followed me down the hall. And that was clearly impossible. As far as I could tell, I was my body. So I was trying to figure out what's going on here. Is she just playing games with me? And then she saw I was confused and then went on to tell me about the conversation I had with her roommate. What the room looked like, where we were sitting, what we said. I was totally blown away. I couldn't imagine what was going on. I thought, well, maybe somebody's playing a trick on me. The nurses are colluding with this patient, something. It didn't make sense, but I couldn't deal with it at that time. Bruce Greyson (05:17.73) But I was there to deal with her, not me. So I had to push this into the back of my mind and focus on her suicidal thoughts and how to help her. I tried not to think about this because it was just too confusing, too upsetting. But over the next several years, I heard several other accounts of my patients who had come close to death and seemed to leave their bodies and have other experiences. I assumed since these were psychiatric patients that it was just part of their illness. And then in 1975, one of my colleagues at the university, Raymond Moody, published a book called Life After Life, in which he gave us the name near-death experience and told us what they were like. And I realized for the first time, this is not something that just happens to psychiatric patients. It happens to everybody. And I thought, well, I still can't make sense of this. But as a scientist... We don't run away from things we don't understand. We run towards them and try to make sense of them. So I started collecting cases and trying to understand what these are all about. And now a half century later, I'm still trying to understand it. Zaza (06:27.906) first of all I have to say that your upbringing was the complete opposite of mine. I was raised at least partially as a Catholic and then now I'm pretty much a materialist. But maybe at the end of this conversation you're going to convert me back. Let's see what happens. And number two, I wanted to ask that first patient of yours, not the first patient but the first patient that experienced an NDE, she had overdosed you said. Bruce Greyson (06:51.629) Yes. Bruce Greyson (06:55.424) Yes. Zaza (06:56.234) Was there no way for her roommate to tell her that she talked to you? Out on the hallway. Bruce Greyson (07:03.934) No, she was admitted to the intensive care unit where there are no telephones and no one is allowed in to visit except for immediate family and that's only during special visiting hour times. So, there's no way that her roommate could have communicated with her before I saw her. Zaza (07:16.183) I see. Zaza (07:21.174) Hmm. So when people go through these near death experiences or NDE's, what kind of state are they in typically? Is it cardiac arrest? Is it coma or shock? Are they actually close to death or usually just very ill or injured? Bruce Greyson (07:37.386) Well, unfortunately it varies. I say unfortunately because that makes it hard to study. Certainly we have lots of cases of people whose hearts stopped. In fact, most of the research has been done with people in cardiac arrest when their hearts have stopped. And that's the largest population we can gather a large number of and study. And they're also a less complicated population than people who have other ways of coming close to death. For example, by head trauma. or systemic diseases which have many more complicated physiological factors. So a lot of our research is done with people whose hearts have stopped. And we find that people whose hearts have stopped, about 10 to 20 percent of them will report a near-death experience. If you look at people who have heart attacks but their hearts don't stop, about 1 percent have near-death experiences. Zaza (08:23.31) 10 to 20 percent. Bruce Greyson (08:35.734) have not stopped as far as we know. For example, people who fall while they're climbing in the mountains and fall down the mountainside. Or people who are in automobile accidents, but their hearts don't stop as far as we know, and yet they're sure they're going to die and they have a near-death experience. And we haven't found any way to differentiate the experiences of those whose hearts stopped from those who don't. Zaza (08:42.359) Mm-hmm. Zaza (09:03.746) usually there's some sort of severe injury or illness involved, right? You don't have an NDE if you have a cold or if you have a fever or whatever, it has to be severe. Okay, I wanted to ask if we disregard the... Okay, maybe this before. Is the brain still normally functioning though, even if people have cardiac arrest or some sort of other injury? Is the brain still fine? Bruce Greyson (09:06.911) Yes, yes. Bruce Greyson (09:13.258) No. No, you don't. Yes. Zaza (09:33.61) Could this be arising in the brain? Or are there also cases where people's brain actually kind of went silent and they still experienced an NDE? Bruce Greyson (09:35.848) No. Bruce Greyson (09:42.618) Right. You can't say the brain is fine. There's debate about how impaired the brain is. We have many decades of studies with people who have heart attacks, who have cardiac arrests, and we look at what's going on in their brain at that time. And within a matter of 10 seconds or so, you see changes in the brainwaves, showing a decrease in activity. And within 20 seconds or so, you tend to get a flat line, no activity at all. Now, this is just measuring the surface of the brain, the cortex, which of course is the part that we think is involved with consciousness. But it's very possible, in fact, likely that deeper parts of the brain that we're not able to measure with the EEG are still active. It's unlikely though that those could have anything to do with the type of vivid experience that a near-death experience is. Zaza (10:39.522) Right. Okay, so on the surface, the brain is kind of like flatlining. I'm sorry, I'm butchering the whole medical lexicon, but there might still be some activity deep down in the brain. Did I understand it correctly? We don't know. Bruce Greyson (10:47.169) Right. Bruce Greyson (10:51.89) Yes, yes, it's likely there's something going on deep down on the brain, but those parts of the brain are the parts that keep us breathing and are heart beating and keep us alive, keep us warm, but they are not capable of creating thoughts and feelings and perceptions. Zaza (11:08.502) I see. Okay. If we disregard the cultural aspect that can probably vary, right, depending on where the person is from, what are some of the common characteristics, excuse me, of an NDE? Bruce Greyson (11:15.053) Yes. Bruce Greyson (11:22.306) Well, people typically say that their thinking is faster and clearer than ever before. And this is surprising when a brain is not really functioning well. They also report a sense of overwhelming peace and well-being. And this is in the context of a close brush with death, which is usually frightening and painful. And as soon as they have the near-death experience, they're overwhelmed by the sense of everything's okay, I'm at peace. They also have... unusual experiences like a sense of leaving the physical body. They often have a review of their entire lives in a matter of seconds or portions of a second. And they may at times encounter other entities or they seem to, which they may interpret as being deceased loved ones or deities. Now, I should say that we see the same types of near-death experiences reported around the world from people in different religions. We have the same types of experiences reported from ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt, long before the Christian era, when people talk about the same types of near-death experiences. However, most near-death experiences say that there aren't any words to describe what happened to them. So then we researchers say, great, tell me about it. So we make them distort it by putting it into words. And they do that by using whatever metaphors come most easily to them, which often come from their religion. or their culture. So an example of that is people all over the world will talk about a warm, loving being of light that makes them feel unconditionally loved. And people who are raised in Western cultures will often say that was God. People in Easter cultures will not say that. But even those from the West will say, I'm gonna say God so you know what I'm talking about, but it's not the God I was taught about in church. It's much bigger than that. Zaza (13:20.938) If I may just interject with a bit of my own madness here, you described that people are talking about a sense of peace they're describing when they're experiencing an NDE. If I think about it, the best moments of my life are always born out of kind of like spontaneity or excitement or even chaos. So if all of this is true, I'm a little bit unnerved. Like an eternal sense of calm and peace just sounds kind of monotonous and a little bit dull. I absolutely hate meditating, for example. Bruce Greyson (13:24.514) Sure. Zaza (13:51.006) I guess I would just feel better if this is true, if people describe the experience more as an endless party where everybody is having fun and less as a perpetual state of calm. I'm sorry, I just had to let this out. Bruce Greyson (13:59.374) Ha! Bruce Greyson (14:05.602) Well, you're not alone in thinking that. Certain philosophers like John Fisher Martin would say that the idea of eternity would be a horrible thing to have because people get so bored with life on this earth. Imagine having eternity, that would be terribly boring. But people who have new death experiences just laugh when we say that to them. They say, well, you just can't imagine what it was like. There's endless variety and yet, I can't describe to you what really happened. Zaza (14:34.574) Okay. I've read somewhere that although the majority of near-death experiences are described as peaceful and pleasant, like you said, distressing scary NDEs do exist as well. Could you talk a little bit about those? Bruce Greyson (14:46.626) They, yes they do, they do. We have tried to look at what differentiates the pleasant from the unpleasant ones. And we can't predict who's going to have what type. Age, gender, religion, religiosity, the physiological events around the event, do not determine whether you're going to have a nice or an unpleasant NDE. Certainly the type of life you lead doesn't make a difference. It's not true that good people have blissful experiences and nasty people have unpleasant ones. And I mean, that's not surprising. We have writings from Christian saints over the centuries talking about the dark night of the soul, which is quite terrifying. And I've heard near-death experiences from people who were convicted felons who have blissful near-death experiences. It's hard to know how common these unpleasant experiences are because people are reluctant to talk about them. Well, they think, must be something wrong with me if I have this experience. And they are less likely to share them. Most people who have studied this find that between five and 10% of people who have near-death experiences may be unpleasant. But of course, there may be more that we're just not hearing about. Zaza (16:04.534) If we go back to the pleasant ones, what else are people saying? I know they keep saying that it's hard to put it into words, but when they do put it into words, what are they describing? What are they seeing? What are they experiencing? Bruce Greyson (16:17.814) Well, they describe a sense of overwhelming peace and then leaving the physical body. They may hover for a while around the body and watch the resuscitation attempts. They may at some point get distracted and see this brilliant light and move toward the light or are drawn toward the light, which they often experience as a type of deity. And that often will lead them into a review of their entire lives. They may see other entities which they may say are deceased loved ones. And at some point they may come to a border or a point of no return beyond which they can't keep going and still come back to life. And they may then decide to come back or are told that they need to come back against their will because they have more work to do with something else like that. Zaza (17:07.117) Told by who? The deity? I see. Bruce Greyson (17:09.118) Yes. Or sometimes I've heard people say, I was sent back by my uncle. And this too is a bit of a cultural difference. Most Westerners who are brought up in a culture of achievement say they were sent back because they had more work to do. They weren't finished here. No, well, it's something important like I need to raise my children or need to help my father die or something like this. Right. Zaza (17:28.906) With their job? Hopefully not. Zaza (17:35.786) I see. OK. That would be so depressing if you're on the verge of the point of no return, and then they tell you, you have to do more accounting. You have to go back. All right. Bruce Greyson (17:39.328) Uh. Right, yeah, right. On the other hand, you know, we've done some research with people in India who are raised in a Hindu culture. And they often say, I was sent back because there was a clerical error. They took the wrong Navran Singh. And no, my Indian colleagues tell me that's because they live so long under the British bureaucracy, which is so bungling that they accept that's the way life is. Zaza (18:14.694) Oh, wow, even in the great beyond, you cannot escape the clutches of bureaucracy. All right. Now, a lot of scientific models have been proposed from psychological ones, for example, that NDEs are sort of depersonalization or a hallucination to physiological models like I read somewhere the lack of oxygen or they're caused by neurochemicals. Even though Bruce Greyson (18:18.016) Yes. Bruce Greyson (18:29.431) Yes. Zaza (18:42.502) You're a trained doctor, of course, and a psychiatrist. You don't find any of them really satisfactory if I understand it correctly. What what made you consider the sort of for lack of a better word, supernatural explanation, a more convincing one? Bruce Greyson (18:51.263) No. Bruce Greyson (19:00.266) Well, I don't think I'm entertaining supernatural ideas, but let me say that I started off this field as a materialist and studying these things, sure that I was going to find some simple physiological explanation. And one by one over the years, over the decades, we've tested them. For example, with the idea of oxygen deprivation causing the NDEs. That does not seem to be the case. We know what oxygen deprivation does, and it's not at all an NDE. It makes people... agitated, frightened, belligerent, confused, which is very unlike the calm, peaceful experience of the NDE. Furthermore, there have now been studies done in the UK and in the US that have actually measured the oxygen content in people's brains as they are approaching death. And we find that people who have near-death experiences actually have better oxygen supply to the brain than people who don't report NDEs. Now, That doesn't mean that the lack of oxygen is stopping people from having A.D.s. It may be that lack of oxygen stops you from remembering them later on. So we're not really sure about the connection, but clearly lack of oxygen isn't causing near-death experiences. Like I was, you've looked at drugs given to people as they're approaching death. And generally speaking, the fewer drugs people are given, the more likely they are to report near-death experiences and the more elaborate the near-death experience is. We have tried to study chemicals that the brain produces to see whether they may be producing sublife hallucination. And that's much harder to study because we don't really know what drugs to look at or where in their brain to look at them. And unfortunately, most of these chemicals produced by the brain are produced for a very short period of time. So you don't have much time to look for them. And it's. Zaza (20:56.182) What about the so-called DMT, the chemical that makes people trip considerably and is present in the notorious ayahuasca? Is it really released in the brain when people are dying and, you know... Bruce Greyson (21:06.794) Well, we're not sure of that, but we suspect it is. It has been found in the brains of some animals. And there were certainly some similarities between experiences produced by DMT and more likely by ketamine and salvia and other hallucinogenic drugs and near-death experiences, but they're not the same. We did a massive international study looking at Zaza (21:09.652) I see. Bruce Greyson (21:34.254) different drug experiences, more than 15,000 drug experiences, and comparing them to the accounts of near-death experiences. And there were a lot of basic similarities, but they weren't identical. People I know who have had both near-death experiences and drug experiences tell me that under ketamine, I saw heaven. In the near-death experience, I was in heaven. And they say it's like being in combat and watching a movie about war. You may use the same words to describe what you're seeing and hearing, but nobody would confuse the two. And they say likewise, there are only so many words we can use to describe such a bizarre experience as in near-death experiences. And they're the same words we often use for psychedelic experiences, but the experiences themselves are not the same. Zaza (22:31.506) Interesting. What about, okay, so you're explaining if we go back to all of these physiological and psychological models, you're explaining that you tested a lot of these models, but the results were less than convincing, right? Bruce Greyson (22:44.513) Right. Bruce Greyson (22:48.354) Let me say that it's much harder to test psychological models, which to me are plausible, but we really don't have good measures for a lot of the psychological measures that have been proposed. And furthermore, if you're studying them, for example, like depersonalization, when someone is in their normal everyday state, that doesn't tell you what they were like when they were in the near-death state. So it's hard to look at what was going on psychologically at the time of the near-death event and have any reasonable conclusions. I will say though that there are some features of the near-death experience that are very hard to reconcile with any type of materialistic explanation. For example, I said that many people will say they leave their bodies during a near-death experience and some can describe things they saw and heard Zaza (23:34.186) Alright, let's talk about those. Yeah. Bruce Greyson (23:44.95) while they were very definitely unconscious that were unexpected, couldn't be predicted, and yet the descriptions were very accurate. And it's hard to understand how they could know some of these things. For example, people report seeing that a nurse in the operating room had mismatched shoelaces. Or one fellow that I knew in his mid-50s had a quadruple bypass operation where four vessels around his heart had to be replaced. And he said that he left his body during the operation and saw his surgeon flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. And he demonstrated this to me, put his arms on his, his hands on his chest and moved his arms around like he was a chicken trying to fly. I told him that didn't make sense to me. I thought that was probably a hallucination because of the anesthesia. And he said, no, it wasn't. I really saw it. You can ask my surgeon. So I did. And the surgeon admitted to me that he does do that, that he's never seen any other surgeon do this, but he lets his assistant start the procedure while he's putting on his sterile gloves and gown. And then he walks into the operating room to supervise them. And he doesn't want to risk touching anything that's not sterile, so he puts his hands flat against his chest so he won't touch anything. And then he points things out to them using his elbows. And he demonstrated just the way the patient did. Now, I don't know how the patient knew about that, but he did. He said, I saw that. And we have many examples of this. One of my colleagues, Jan Holden, studied about 100 cases of potentially verifiable out-of-body perceptions during near-death experiences. And she found that 92% of them were completely accurate. 6% were partially accurate, and only 1% was totally wrong. So the vast majority seemed to be accurate perceptions. It's hard to reconcile that with a purely materialistic explanation. Some of them may be lucky guesses, some may be picking up clues from other things, but certainly not all of them. But let me give you a more surprising phenomenon in the NDE. Many experiences will say that they've met deceased loved ones in their near-death experience, and that can be dismissed by Bruce Greyson (26:06.774) wishful thinking or expectation. Now you think you're going to die, so you want to be seen by your deceased mother, so you imagine that. But we have a number of well-documented cases now where people saw or claim to see deceased individuals who were not yet known to have died. So that takes expectation off the table. We have case, yes, but they didn't know the person that died. This is, this is, Zaza (26:27.886) We have a number of world-fucking-ed cases that when people saw a public deceit, they seized it with rules, and now they're getting known for that. So that's the expectation of the table. Bruce Greyson (26:37.174) Well, let me give you an example. A fellow in his 20s was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and he had respiratory arrest where he couldn't breathe. And his main nurse who was working with him was about his age, a young, attractive woman. And one day she told him she was gonna be taking the weekend off and there'd be other nurses substituting for her. So she left and while she was gone, He had another respiratory arrest where he had to be resuscitated. And at that time, he had a near-death experience. And he found himself in a beautiful pastoral scene. And then he saw the nurse walking towards him. And he was stunned. He said, Anita, what are you doing here? And she said, Jack, you can't stay here with me. You need to go back. I want you to find my parents and tell them that I love them very much. And I'm sorry, I wrecked. the red MGB. And then she turned and walked away. When he later woke up in his hospital bed, he had a complete memory of this. And he started to tell the first nurse that came into his room when she got very upset and left the room. It turned out that the nurse had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday. And her parents surprised her with a gift of a red MGB. She jumped in the car, took off for a test drive, crashed into a telephone pole and died. a few hours before his near-death experience. Now, there's no way he could have known or expected that she was going to die, and no way he could have known how she died, and yet she did. We have dozens and dozens of cases like this that are fairly well documented. And in fact, they go back to ancient Rome. Pliny the Elder wrote up a case like this in the first century. So they're not a new phenomenon by any means. Zaza (28:06.302) Oh my god. Zaza (28:30.646) Did you talk to this man? Presume you presumably talked to him. How did this experience change his life or the way he saw life? Bruce Greyson (28:33.322) Yes, oh yes, yes I knew him quite well, yeah. Bruce Greyson (28:39.086) Oh, well, yes. Actually, as a psychiatrist, that's the most important part to me of this experience, that it changes people's lives. And I've talked to people in their 80s and 90s who had the experience as teenagers and said, I've never been the same. They almost always say that they are no longer afraid of death, that no matter what they experience in the NDE, they realize that it's not something to be afraid of. Now, they also say that When I first heard about this, as a psychiatrist, I was worried, is this going to make people more suicidal? Know that you're right, right. So I did a study then. I interviewed people who came to the hospital with a suicide attempt, and I compared those who had a near-death experience as a result of the suicide attempt with those who didn't. And what I found was that those who had a near-death experience were much less suicidal than those who didn't have a near-death experience. And when I asked them why, Zaza (29:13.582) Because they want to go back to that special place, right? Bruce Greyson (29:37.43) They said, well, I now realize that everything that happens in life has a meaning and a purpose. So the reasons that made me want to kill myself, I now know they're not things to run away from. They're things I'm supposed to learn from and grow from. They also said that if you're not afraid of dying, you're also not afraid of living. You can go ahead and take risks and enjoy life to the fullest because what's the worst that happens? You die. So they end up having much more joyful life than they had before. They also say that they're much more spiritual than they were before the NDE. And I've heard this from people who are religious and for people who were atheists before the NDE. They still may not believe in a God, but they believe there is some part of them that survives bodily death. Now, when they say they're spiritual, they don't mean they're more religious. In fact, they often become less devoted to any particular religion. but they feel more connected to other people, to nature, to the universe, to the divine. And this sense of connection makes them feel like they're part of something much greater than themselves. Now that leads them to basically the golden rule, which is part of every religion we have, do unto others as you have them do unto you. For most of us, that's a guideline we're supposed to follow. But for the New Year's Eve Experiencer, they experience it as a law of the universe, that when you hurt someone else, you hurt yourself too. I've heard it compared to a hand. If you look at the fingers, they look like they're separate things. But if you look at the whole hand, you see they're really connected at the bottom. And you can't cut one without hurting the whole hand. Zaza (31:29.683) You dropped some wisdom on me right there, especially the part where people say that, how did you put it? That it's not about, it's about they weren't afraid of death, they were afraid to live or something along those lines. Could you repeat that part? Bruce Greyson (31:49.558) Right, if you're not afraid of dying, then you're also not afraid of living. And people who have this experience tend to be much more engaged in life, much more outgoing, and much more caring about other people. They become much more altruistic. They do more volunteer things. Now this can cause a lot of problems. If you can imagine one person in a family having a religious conversion, and the rest of the family not, that can cause a lot of problems in the family. Zaza (31:53.938) Exactly. All right. So, yeah. Bruce Greyson (32:19.21) In addition, people sometimes can't reconcile these new attitudes with their careers beforehand. Example, I've known people who were career military officers or police officers who after a near-death experience could not shoot even in self-defense. They could not hurt someone else. And they had to change their careers. They often go into some health and health profession, healthcare, clergy, social work, teaching, something like this. I've also known people who are in very competitive businesses who came back saying, it no longer makes sense to get ahead at someone else's expense. So they end up either changing the way they do their work or leaving the field entirely and going to some other profession. Zaza (33:08.29) Fascinating. So even though NDE's are traumatic and scary, they're actually a blessing in disguise because what you're describing is that these people then lead better lives. So it's kind of not fair that most of us will not experience an NDE. I'm turning it around and making it really egoistical and all about me. Why am I not going to experience an NDE? But yeah, it's fascinating. Bruce Greyson (33:24.481) Ha ha. Bruce Greyson (33:30.218) Well, yes. Bruce Greyson (33:37.186) That doesn't mean we can't learn from what the Inuit Earth experiences tell us. Zaza (33:39.634) Exactly. Right, right. All right. Back to my skeptical nature for a second. There were some NDE studies performed, I believe, where various objects were installed into the ceiling of the hospital and could only be visible if you were floating underneath it. I guess the researchers were banking on the whole floating out of the body experience that you described earlier that is often part of an NDE. Bruce Greyson (33:45.056) Yes. Bruce Greyson (33:53.515) Yes. Bruce Greyson (34:00.616) Right. Zaza (34:06.05) From what I've read though, these studies haven't been very successful. And people experiencing NDEs haven't been able to identify these objects. Bruce Greyson (34:10.242) That's right. Bruce Greyson (34:15.838) Right, right. The targets are usually placed above eye level and pointing upwards. So you'd only see them if you're looking down from the ceiling. And there have been a total of six studies published of this type of technique. I did one at my university. In mine, we used a laptop computer on top of a machine and it was programmed. As soon as the patient went unconscious, someone pressed a button, turned it on, and it would run a randomly chosen image that was a moving, colorful image for five minutes and then turn itself off. In none of these studies, none of the six studies, did anybody claim to have left their bodies and seen the target. So it doesn't show that they can do it, doesn't show they can't, to show that they didn't experience anything like that. Now, when I talk about this to near-death experiences, they just laugh. They say, if you're in a near-death condition, finding yourself out of your body for the first time, watching your body being electrocuted and shocked back to life, are you gonna look around for some irrelevant target you didn't know was there, that has no meaning for you, and try to remember that? They said it's like, if you claimed that you had just been to France, and I thought you were making it up. I asked you to prove it. And I said, all right, when you came back home, you went through a customs agent. What was the custom agent's name? Because it was right there on a name tag on his chest. And of course, you didn't see it. So therefore, I'm justified in saying, you didn't really take that flight. You just imagined it. Zaza (36:05.118) Alright, fair enough. But is there any other way that you could possibly do an experiment that would kind of quantify or measure in any way the veracity of a near-death experience? Because these, at the end of the day, these are all kind of like anecdotes, right? I mean, it's people's reports. Bruce Greyson (36:06.378) Hahaha. Bruce Greyson (36:28.546) That's right. That's right. They're basically anecdotes, but in fact, most of science is anecdotes. When you're talking about astronomy or paleontology or archaeology, you're talking about reports of what they saw and heard and felt. You can't do controlled experiments with other planets or with ancient artifacts. They're there and you can observe them and do tests on them, but you can't do experiments just to create them or not. And likewise, you can't give somebody a near-death experience and compare them with people you haven't given it to. It just happens, and you're stuck with that. It's also very difficult to look at where people have changed after the experience because you didn't study them before they changed. So we're really doing this science with one hand tied behind our back. And there's really no way around that. Zaza (37:28.854) Alright, staying with the theme of skepticism just a second longer. A while back I hosted professor Anil Seth on the pod. He's a very eminent British researcher of consciousness. His theory is that our brains are sort of a prediction machine and that our conscious experience is an illusion created by this prediction machine to help us survive. In light of his theory, he likened death to anesthesia. In his book that I have right here, he wrote the following. Bruce Greyson (37:38.027) Yes, yes. Zaza (37:58.57) and I was wondering if you could comment on it. All right. Where is it? Alrighty here. Let me read his quote. And when life ends consciousness will end too. When I think about this, I'm transported back to my experience of anesthesia to its oblivion, perhaps comforting but oblivion nonetheless. Nonetheless, the novelist Julian Barnes puts it perfectly. when the end of consciousness comes there is nothing really nothing to be frightened of Bruce Greyson (38:35.342) Well, I agree with Anil Seth about the brain being a prediction machine. It's designed to fill in the gaps we don't have information for. So it's plausible to think that when you have a near-death experience, it may elaborate this elaborate event for you. But that doesn't explain how people can see things accurately when they were unconscious or how they can encounter what they think are deceased people who are not known to be dead yet. There's just too many unknowns in the near-death experience to say that it's just the brain. Now to say that all consciousness ends when the brain ends is not a scientific fact, it's a hypothesis. We have certainly correlations between the brain and the mind. The brain being that three-pound mass of tissue in your head, and the mind being that part of you that thinks and feels and makes decisions. Certainly, when you get intoxicated, you don't think very clearly. When you have a stroke or get hit on the head, that affects your thinking. So in everyday life, it looks as if the brain is creating the mind or is the mind in some way. But under extreme circumstances, that connection between brain and mind seems to break down like near-death experiences. And there are also other experiences as well that are different. have the brain going down and the mind continuing. Now there's another way of thinking about the connection between mind and brain, and that's that the brain doesn't cause thoughts, it filters them. Which the way a radio receiver will take radio waves from outside and transform them into sounds that you can understand. And it is that the brain can do the same thing, it takes thoughts from the mind and puts them into electrical signals. the body can understand. This goes back to Hippocrates 2,000 years ago, who said that the brain is the interpreter of the mind. And there have been neuroscientists throughout the centuries who have tried to follow that train of thought. Now, it's really hard to follow this, because there are metaphors saying the brain is for this. There's no physical filter in the brain. But there are neurological pathways in the brain that limit. Bruce Greyson (40:58.322) thing, the input that comes in, for example, it starts with your eyes. We don't see all the wavelengths of life that are, of light that are out there. We don't see the infrared and the ultraviolet, we just see a small range of light that's important for our survival. The brain, like the rest of our bodies, evolved to help us survive in the physical world. So it lets in the information that's helpful to survive, in other words, to find food and shelter and a mate and keep warm and avoid predators. but it filters out anything that's irrelevant. Near-death experiencers talk about seeing deceased loved ones and deities. That's not important for survival. In fact, it may get in the way of survival. So the brain normally filters out those things. And in fact, people have looked at what parts in the brain may be involved in this filtering process. And there are definite paths that we are looking at that do, we know, alter the input coming into the brain. For example, right now we're talking. It's important for me to hear you. It's not that important for me to see you. So there's something called the temporal loop, the cortical temporal loop that will upgrade my auditory stimulus and downgrade the visual stimulus so that I pay more attention to what I'm hearing and less to what I'm seeing. There's another whole sequence of networks in the brain called the default mode network. which limits our thoughts, only to what's important right now. So it's plausible that something in the brain will receive thoughts from outside, filter out those that are not important to survival, and just let in those that are important. And that in a near-death event, when the brain is starting to fail, that filtering process breaks down, and we have access to all this full range of consciousness. Now that, of course, raises the question of Where is the mind if it's not in the brain? Where is it? And I have no answer to that at all. You know, I'm a scientist, I'm a clinician, I'm not a philosopher, I have no idea where that is. In fact, some of my philosopher friends say, you can't ask where the mind is because it's a non-physical object. So it can't have a physical location. Bruce Greyson (43:17.666) So, you know, we're stuck with two unsolvable problems. If you think the mind and the brain are different things, you can't explain how they interact. If you think that the mind is what the brain does, we have no explanation for how chemical and electrical process in the brain can produce a thought or a feeling. They're just, we have the slightest idea how that happens. So either way, we're stuck with not understanding where our mind comes from. Zaza (43:50.91) Wow. How does evolution then factor in? Or if we go even further, is there any evidence that animals experience NDE's as well? Bruce Greyson (44:02.594) There is actually, we can't really interview animals. They don't talk to us, so we can't really know what they experienced. But there are anecdotes of animals who have a near-death event being hit by a car or having a severe illness, and their behavior changes a great deal. They were very aggressive and hostile towards other animals before that, and they became very loving and friendly after that. There are also reports of animals on their deathbeds being comatose and then suddenly becoming wide awake, looking around as if they're seeing something that their owners can't see, then they die. So what do we make of these? These are just reports of people saying, this is what my animal did, and we have no way of verifying it. We also have many accounts from people who have near-death experiences who encounter in the NDE what they say are their deceased pets. which suggests, at least to them, that their deceased pets are still alive in some form, which means they must have some type of a non-physical part, whether you call it a mind or a soul or whatever. Zaza (45:17.026) Here is a very naive, simple question. If we actually do possess anything resembling a soul, not a soul, but a consciousness that survives death, how come an illness of the brain or an injury has the ability to completely transform our personality, deeply transform who we are? Is it then that just this receiver is broken or? Do you have another explanation? Because these changes can be quite dramatic, right? Bruce Greyson (45:49.942) Right, but I think you're right that when the brain is broken or failing, it's not able to transmit as well as it did before. For example, when your television is broken, you don't see the picture anymore. That doesn't mean the picture doesn't exist. It's still out there, but you're not able to see it anymore. So it's plausible that when the brain is on the fritz, so to speak, is failing, that changes you. Zaza (46:22.194) Okay, I have you here. So I think I would be remiss if I didn't ask you, what do you personally think is really going on? Where is this receiving coming from? Where is this? What is this consciousness that is floating about? What's going on here? I'm sorry, but I do have to push and ask a little bit. Bruce Greyson (46:42.09) I honestly have no idea. I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theologian, I'm not even interested in those questions. I'm interested in the experience itself and how it changes people's lives. I will say that when I started doing this research a half century ago, I was pretty sure that death is the end and there is no consciousness beside the brain. And now I'm not sure what's going on. It's certainly plausible to be now. Zaza (46:44.148) Okay. Bruce Greyson (47:11.17) based on everything I've seen and heard, that some part of us does continue after the brain dies. But I have no idea what that is or what condition it's in. Most near-death experiences will say what they experienced in the quote, after life, the other realm, but they will say, that is what it's really like. I'm just putting into words which distorts it so I can get across to you what it was like. But if they're right about that. then we have no way of understanding what it's gonna be like for us. Our brains are too simple to grasp what it's gonna be like for us when we die. So I think, you know, I don't know whether I'm gonna survive or not, but if I do, I'm pretty sure it's not something I can imagine now. Zaza (48:02.158) How did or do your colleagues view your pursuits and your research in near-death experiences? Are any eyebrows raised when you have a conference? Or are attitudes changing? Bruce Greyson (48:15.246) Of course, of course. But I'll tell you, it's changed a lot over the past few decades. When we first started talking about near-death experiences to medical conferences in the 1980s, there will be applied silence in the audience. And now when we talk to the same audiences about near-death experiences, we often have several near-death experiences or in the audience among doctors saying, let me tell you about my NDE. There have been some studies now done in Brazil, in Scotland, and in the US, surveying scientists about their thoughts about mind and brain. And about 50% in all three cultures say they don't think the mind and the brain are the same thing. And 50% say, yes, we do think they are. But I think that's a great change from where we would have been decades ago. I think there's more openness now to thinking that We don't have all the answers. And the idea that the mind is what the brain does is just too simplistic to explain what's really going on. Zaza (49:22.594) I noticed you using the word mind, not soul. Is that because soul is very charged with spirituality and religiosity and stuff? Bruce Greyson (49:29.842) Exactly. Right. I don't even know what a soul is. I can define mind as that part of us that has thoughts, that thinks, and feels, and perceives, and makes decisions. But soul involves all sorts of religious concepts that I don't really know about. Zaza (49:48.706) Have you become slightly more spiritual or religious because of your study of NDEs and talking to these people who have experienced them? Bruce Greyson (49:56.67) I think I probably am. You know, it's hard for me to say what it was like spiritually before that because I had no concept of spirituality before that. But I certainly feel much more connected to other people and to the universe than I did before. I feel like I'm part of something greater than myself. Now, if you ask me before I started doing this research, I might've said the same thing. I might've said, yes, I'm part of this great scientific endeavor, something much greater than myself. I'm part of this culture. So I'm not sure if that's a real difference. Zaza (50:29.814) We're nearing the end, no pun intended. If I can ask you something a bit more personal, being in such proximity to these experiences and for so long, have they in any way affected your fear of death, if you had one prior? Bruce Greyson (50:46.082) Well, no, I never was afraid of it beforehand. I just thought that was the end and there'd be nothingness, so there's nothing to be afraid of. And now I think that there is probably something, I'm not sure, but there may be something, but I still think it's not something to be afraid of. I'll tell you though, that's made me much more comfortable with not knowing the answers. When I started doing this work, when I was in my 20s, I was convinced that science would have all the answers. And I was uncomfortable when we didn't know the answer to something. And now I'm pretty well convinced that we don't really, at this point, have the language to understand the questions, even to ask the right questions. So I'm happy knowing that, at least at this point in time, we're just not going to have the answers, and that's okay. It may be, and I hope, that in another couple hundred years, we'll have a better science and a better vocabulary and be able to understand them better. But for now, I think it's beyond our understanding. Zaza (51:50.05) Final and perhaps most important question, professor. What can near-death experiences teach us about how to lead our lives while we are alive? Bruce Greyson (52:02.026) I think the bottom line for many near-death experiencers is that we are all interconnected and that when you hurt other people, you end up hurting yourself. When you help other people, you end up helping yourself as well. And that the way to live a more meaningful and purposeful life is to treat other people as if we love them all. Zaza (52:25.822) Wow. Okay, this was absolutely outstanding. I don't know if I'm completely convinced, but I have to tell you something. I'm a huge hypochondriac, always have been. And this actually helped me calm down a little bit. So absolutely fantastic. Your book is on the way to me and I'm going to read it and then I hope in the future we can do this again. When can, where can people actually purchase your books? Bruce Greyson (53:00.402) It's available from most bookstores, most online bookshops. My website www.brusgrason.com has links to most booksellers where you can purchase the book. It's available in English and in German and in about 20 other languages. Zaza (53:22.414) OK, fantastic. Do you have any social media where people can follow your work, see what you're up to? Bruce Greyson (53:30.318) No, I don't. Just do my website. Zaza (53:32.562) Okay, by the way, absolutely last question before I let you go. It just popped into my head. There have been some I think some of your colleagues are doing some studies on past lives, right, and then kids remembering them. What do you think about that? Bruce Greyson (53:44.696) Yes. Bruce Greyson (53:50.454) I think that there are many examples now of young children, these are preschool children who have not had any angiogenation, who seem to know details about a past life. And more than just knowing them, they really identify with them. I'm not convinced that reincarnation is the best explanation for these. But I think there is something going on that we don't understand yet. Zaza (54:13.206) Could this be connected to NDE's in any way that you can think of right now? Bruce Greyson (54:19.555) only in the most loose terms that there's something here about the human mind that we don't understand. Zaza (54:27.014) Okay, perfect. You said reincarnation is not the best explanation. What would be a better explanation? Bruce Greyson (54:32.778) I don't know, I don't know. I mean, there are several that have been put forward that somehow a deceased entity is possessing the child. These are all just speculations, they're all hypothetical, and I don't think there's any way of proving or disproving any of them. Zaza (54:50.834) All right, perfect. Thank you so much, Professor Grayson. This was amazing. I hope we get to do this again. Bruce Greyson (54:55.074) Thank you, Zaza. It's been a pleasure.