YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Greyson

lines on the record: 80
first: 2024-10-22
most recent: 2024-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that things I want people to know about near-death experiences are, number one, that they're very common about 5% of the general population are one in every twenty people has had a dear-death experience. And secondly, that they are not associated in any way with mental illness. People who are perfectly normal have these NDEs in abnormal situations, but can happen to anybody. And that they lead to sometimes profound, long-lasting after effects, both positive and negative, that never seem to go away over decades.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would suggest my most recent book After because that's really geared towards the average person, the layman, and is written in language that we're talking right now. I tried to minimize jargon, whereas the other books I've written primarily for academicians, which are much harder to read, much denser, still excellent books, but not for the average person.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That basically means a mind that's not reducible to chemical processes, electrical processes in the brain. It's a mind that can be independent of the brain. And that book, without ever mentioning anything paranormal or parapsychological, goes through a series of phenomena in everyday life that point to mind and brain not being the same thing. And it does include near-death experiences and other experiences near-death. It includes exceptional genius. includes psychosomatic phenomena, a variety of things that have occurred to perfectly normal people over the centuries and have been well documented and don't seem to be compatible with any of the brain creates all our thoughts and feelings.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, many of them are quite confirmed materialists. That's fine. They're still doing good research. The head of that lab, though, Steve Laurie's, is much more open-minded. He still is a materialist, but he's more open-minded about what these things may mean. And he's certainly compassionate about how it affects the people who have these, which is probably more important to me than what they think that's causing it. So there are a number of people around the world who are doing good research with this area.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are retired physicians who are still involved in this field, Peter Fenneck in England and Pim Van Lummel in the Netherlands. There's a brilliant psychologist in New Zealand, and Natasha Tassel Manamua, who's doing a lot of interesting research in this area. She is Part Mori, and she's doing work with cross-cultural comparison of Maori versus English near-death experiences, also looking a lot at the after effects. There's that large group at Liege that I mentioned to you before that's doing a lot of research into this.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A psychiatrist in Colorado, Mitch Leester, and I did this study. We surveyed a large sample of near-death experiences about what seemed to be hearing voices long after the near-death experience. And we also looked at schizophrenics, who were hearing voices, and compared the experience of those two groups. And they were quite different. The near-death experiences would claim to still be hearing voices almost universally said these were helpful guiding voices they enjoyed hearing them and they found them making their lives richer they gave them some guidance and they were kind of reassuring to them on the other hand these schizophrenics almost universally said these are terrifying hallucinations which they didn't have them they made my life much harder i don't like them at all i wish they would just go away is not experienced in the same way it's the same phenomenon”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most newgetic spirits say there was no time in this other realm, either that time stopped or just time ceased to exist. And when they say that, I reflect on what they've told me about the experience. I say, well, but you're telling me that this happened and then this happened and this happened. That implies a linear time. How can they read hot time? We've got things happening in sequence. And they just truck and say, Well, when I tell you about it now in this body, in this world, it's a paradox. Over there it wasn't. Everything was happening all at once and there wasn't any linear flow. That's just the way it is. I can understand that as a natural concept. I can't relate to it in my real life. I don't know what that means to not have time, but so much of our life is controlled by what we think of as the linear passage of time.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you believe the brain as filter mechanism, that could play a role in this. When the brain is shutting down, in the last hours before death, it releases this filter that allows the consciousness to fully flourish. Now, a big problem with that is Person is still able to speak and communicate. So obviously parts of the brain are still functioning just fine. So if you have this experience of heightened lucidity at death, how do you let people know that unless your brain is still functioning? It is a dilemma because we don't have a medical explanation for how someone with a debilitating disease that is irreversible like Alzheimer's disease can suddenly regain function again. There are speculative theories about this, but none of them really make a whole lot of sense and none of them have been corroborated by evidence.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the big question, of course, is how their mind and brain indirect. And that certainly he gets some hints of that from a near-death experience, but there are other phenomena that also address the mind and brain seeming to disparate. And one of these is the terminal lucidity phenomenon where people who have had dementia for a while and cannot communicate or recognize family suddenly become completely lucid again and carry on coherent conversations and express appropriate emotions and then they die. Usually within minutes or hours, and we don't have any explanation for this.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is essentially a spontaneous experience that does not happen under controlled conditions. When you put someone in a lab, they're not the same as they were when they're out on the street. We've learned this with sleep studies. When you bring someone into the lab to have them to measure their brain waves during sleep, it takes a day or two usually to have them adapt to the situation before you can actually do it. It gets something that's at least a bit like what their normal sleep is. So I think you have to take that into account that people have these experiences out in the wild, so to speak. And it's hard to tame it without clamping down on the controls to their brain that would shut it off, maybe. So I don't know whether you can do that, whether you can have a really controlled circumstance where you have this experience. You can certainly do it with mimics, that mimic part of the experience, for example, with drugs, or with brain stimulation that can mimic a part of it. And then by implication develop metaphors, what might be going on in the brain during a death experience, but it's not the experience itself.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot to be learned from the neurophysiological research that's going on now. There's a very active group at the University of Li ⁇ e in Belgium that's making headway with this. There are other people around the world who are studying it. There was a group at University College in London. But I think we're a long way from having an answer yet. We're just starting this type of research. And it may be certainly not in my lifetime before we find a good answer.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The stuff that Sam Parny's, I was participating in one of his studies that had 2,000 patients in it from a variety of hospitals, and we found nothing in that group. So you need a huge study to do this.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned people who claim to leave their bodies and see things accurately from antibody perspective. I would like to get a more controlled version of that. And people have tried that. Sambrania and NYU has tried it a couple of times. I did try it once. There have been a total of six published studies of attempts to do this, and none of them have been successful. Usually you'll study things for a year or two and find no negative experiences in your sample, or people who have an NDE, but didn't describe seeing things from an antibody perspective. So there really hasn't been any test of this yet. Determined skeptic could say, well, that shows that it doesn't really happen, and that people who spontaneously have this experience and tell you about it are misinterpreting what's happened to them or just making it up. And I would desperately like to find some objective way of measuring this, but we haven't had that yet. So it would be nice to try to hone down that and try to find a good way of studying this in a mess.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Frankly, I'm not encouraged by what I've seen so far with genetic engineering. We can make tomatoes with a thick skin that can travel better across country, but they don't have the flavor that a normal tomato does. So you're always paying a price when you genetically modify something. You may gain something you're looking for, but you may lose something else. When you start messing with human genes, you don't know what you're going to come up with.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience. We've been studying what's going on in the brain, what's going on in the heart and lungs. We haven't scratched the surface of what's going on in your genes that may make you more likely to have a near-death experience or a certain type of experience. Now we know that when their hearts stop between 10 and 20% of people will have an near-death experience and we haven't found any way of predicting who's going to have one or not. But maybe the answer is in the genes. So I think it's worth doing a genetic study of people who have an ethical experiences and those who don't.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This actually was not my project originally. The Israeli psychologist Baroque Fishman contacted me and said, I've got this great study I'd like to do. And I found a twin genomic database in England where they've got 15,000 pairs of twins and the entire genomic platform all laid out. So if we can survey these twins they have about what they've had some type of communication when they're at distant locations, what you call it, telepathy, you can call it extrasensory, you can call it coincidental, but they have reliable communication with each other when they're far away from each other. Can we find out from the genomic analysis what genes are associated with this ability? I thought, that sounds interesting. One of the things I would pick, but sure, I'm going to try that. So we did apply for a grant, and we got the approval of the group in England. The study hasn't actually started yet. But it makes me wonder about the genetics that goes into having a new”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intellectually curious about it. There's a challenge here. I don't understand it, and I want to. And probably more importantly for me is these experiences have profound effects on the people who have them. As a psychiatrist, I want to understand that and help them deal with those effects that they need help with it. So I think it's irresponsible to just ignore it and say it doesn't exist.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less of a problem now than it was back in the 1980s, when no one knew about these things, most academic centers assumed this was just a few crazy patients telling us stories, and they were worth investigating. And I was told in one university that if I continued to study these things, I would not get tenure. So I ended up leaving that place and go to a different university before I came up for tenure, wasn't willing to risk that. But I did now get tenure at two subsequent universities where it's become more acceptable to study unusual phenomena as long as you're doing it in a scientifically respectable way and publishing your material in mainstream medical journals. So I think it's less of an issue now, but you still see a lot of, I wouldn't say it's professional suicide, but certainly professional barriers being raised to people who study these things. I think why people do it, partly because they're”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So whether you're an empiricist, a materialist, or not, we can't explain how thoughts arise and how they get processed to us. What we do know is that all our experiences are filtered to us through the brain. You can have the most elaborate mystical experience in the world, but to tell me about it, you have to be back in your body with words created by your brain, and filter through concepts that your brain puts on it. So, obviously the brain is evolved in perceiving and processing and relating the neo-death experience. You can't get around that. It doesn't mean it's creating it.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or similar experiences, the brain is shutting down selectively so that that filtering mechanism is put on hold or being weakened, then you have access to this other consciousness. Now that raises the question of what is this other consciousness, where is it? In a way, that's a bogus question because if it's a non-physical entity, how can I have aware? It can't be any place. But I'm not a philosopher. I'm an empiricist. And when sick people say to me, as many do, if you have this non-physical mind, how does it interact with the physical brain? I have no idea. On the other hand, if you take a materialistic perspective and say how does the brain, the chemical and electrical changes in the brain, create an abstract thought. Have no idea about that either.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Train go by outside, or the traffic outside because we're focusing on this, unless your brain doing that, this filtering out, what stimuli are you going to pay attention to? And it starts even beyond the brain at our sense organs. You don't see all the visual light that's out there. You just see the small portion that is in our visual spectrum. We don't see infrared and ultraviolet. And likewise, we only hear a small fraction of the frequencies of sound available. We don't hear the sounds that dogs and bats hear or elephants and dolphins. So our brain and the associated sensory systems that we have with that filters out things that are not important to our survival. Seeing diseased loved ones, leaving the body, that's not essential for survival. You can get food and shelter in a mate and avoid predators without all that. So it makes sense that the brain would normally filter that stuff out and not pay attention to it. And if in an eager ethics”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was taught in college and medical school that the mind is what the brain does, and all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are all created by the brain. And I cannot believe that anymore. Seeing people whose brains were either offline or really impaired telling me they had the most elaborate experience they've ever had. So I'm inclined to think that the mind is something else and the brain kind of filters it, as you said. This is not a new idea. 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates said this, that the brain is a messenger of the mind. And this is not surprising because we know that the brain has these filters. There's the default network in the Thammalocortical network. If people are listening to us now, they don't really care what we look like. They want to hear what was saying. So their phalanc cortical circuit tamps down the visual input and focuses on the auditory input. And likewise, we're not hearing the”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are produced by temporal lobe stimulation and real out of body experiences. When you read some of the papers that have been published about temporal lobe stimulation, they say things like, well, my leg's getting shorter. I felt like I was falling off the gurney. And they called these out-of-body experiences. They're not. They're somatic hallucinations, but they're not out of body experiences. You can get out of body experiences with other types of mystical experience and with psychedelic drugs. Whether the same or not is kind of open to the question right now. We don't have examples of people having drug-induced out-of-body experiences, having accurate perceptions of what's going on around them. Whereas you do with near-death experiences. Now, that may be because we haven't looked deep enough yet, and we may find them.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tricky to define panatobody experience. There's a large body of evidence looking at people who have their temporal lobe with their brain stimulate electrically. And they claim they produce ad-body experientials. They do not. They may produce a sense of not being aware of your body anymore, but they don't pursue a sense of leaving your body and being able to turn around and look at your body and seeing it from an out-of-body perspective. They often say that with the stimulation, you can see a double of yourself. But you're seeing it from inside the body. You're not outside the body. And the double you see is static. It's not moving around. They can be corroborated later on. That doesn't happen with stimulation of the temporal lobe. So we all have differences between these artifacts.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the evidence for that yet. It tells us how we might look for places in the brain, where we might look and what types of changes. But that work hasn't been done yet, so it's all speculative. And certainly the drug-induced experiences are not identical to near-death experiences. Many near-death experiences have tried drugs afterwards to try to replicate the experience. And they universally tell me it's not the same thing. One person told me when I was on psilocybin, I saw heaven. I was in my near-to-the-hith experience. I was in heaven. That was the way he explained it. But they had not to have the same after effects. And one caution of that, I would say, is that the recent work done at Johns Hopkins with psilocybin has found a marked decrease in fear of death after a short experiences with psilocybin. And they've done some follow-up in this at least a year after the experience they still have that decreased fear of death, and it's very encouraging.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think there's a good way. I think the tool we have that comes closest are certain psychedelic drugs in a very supportive environment. I don't think people just taking drugs on their own can necessarily replicate a new death experience. But in a supportive environment in the lab with low lighting and good music and someone there to help you with it, you can replicate some of the features of a new death experience. Not all of them. And you tend not to have all of the after effects. And I think that's understandable because if you have an experience under drugs, you can say, oh, that's just the drugs. It wasn't real. Whereas if it happens spontaneously, it's harder to dismiss. One of the issues with the drugs is that we can find out what's going on in the brain when people are given these drugs. And that's fine. But then you make the leap to saying, well, this is the same change in the brain that occurs during injective experience. That's an assumption we”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Far the most common response doctors gave was the barrier is I don't know enough about the experience to talk to patients about it. And the second most common was I don't know time to talk about this with my patients. I'm just too busy. Those are both things that we can correct. We can certainly give more training to physicians and we can restructure the schedule so they do have time to talk to patients.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Type of help did you seek what type of help did you receive? What type of practitioner did you go to? A psychiatrist, a doctor, a spiritual healer, a pastoral counselor? And what types of help were actually helpful and which ones were not helpful? And we're finding some interesting findings from that. We're also surveying physicians about their attitudes towards near-death experiences. And we post them to the question, if a patient comes to you and says, I had this experience that I want to tell you about, would you feel comfortable talking with them about it? And what are the barriers you feel to open up and talking about them? And we had a list of some 25 possible barriers we thought might be things they said. And we were very pleased to find that almost none of them said, I don't think it's worth talking about. It's not important. Or it's just a neurological artifact doesn't mean anything, or it's just a type of psychosis.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I would like to see more research into the practical applications of new death experiences. We've done some studies now with near-death experiences who say they needed help, readjusting to a, quote, normal life after a near-death experience. And we've certified them about what did they need help with? What was so disturbing about the experience or its after effects?”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can answer that from my personal perspective, which is not what I'd like to see the field do. Like to see the field do is what they're doing right now looking at all the different possibilities, looking at cross-cultural comparisons, looking at neurophysiological changes, the types of things they're doing now, looking at other phenomena that seem to mimic parts of the NDE like psychedelic drugs, but that's not where I am right now. I'm nearing the end of my career, and I'm falling back on what does it all mean? And for me, what that means is how does it affect people's lives?”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a pattern, but again, I have to follow back on the fact that most people say there weren't any words to describe it. So when you ask them to describe what they saw, you're describing what the brain interpreted of what they saw. And most people say that they saw the deceased loved one at the prime of their lives when they were young and healthy, not when they were dying. I have had some people say I didn't really see a human figure. I just saw my grandmother. Well, how did you know your grandmother? Filter vibrations. I knew it was her. It was at her essence. So they may have just seen this blob of light and knew, by the way, it fell to them, this is grandma. There's no way of validating this type of thing. It's just their impression.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, obviously the increased brain activity is causing the near-death experience. But if you look at his data, the six who had the near-death experiences did not have the increase in brain waves. And those who had the near-death increase in brain waves did not report near-death experiences. So I'm not sure if we learn anything from that.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will mention one researcher who has actually measured EEG's brainwaves during Cardiac arrest, and this is Sam Parnia at NYU. But when you resuscitating somebody, you press on the heart, you compress the heart, heart compressions for a while, and then you stop and give them a break to see whether they're spontaneously breathe or not. And then you continue it again, or they're shocking them with electricity. And then you stop and see what's happened. And he measured the brain waves during that period when they stopped, thinking this is going to tell us what's going on. I'm not sure it is because it's only for a few seconds that you're stopping, and the body is still suffering from the shock of the electricity or the chest compressions. Furthermore, he reported some increase in several different wavelengths of brain activity in about half the patients. He also reported that there were some six patients who reported near-death experiences.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Death only about 10 or 20 percent have near death experiences. And probably most significant, they didn't bother to interview the rats to see what they were experiencing.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On dying patients, they really were not dying patients, or people who were approaching death. There was a study done in Michigan where they sacrificed rats and measured what's going on in the brains when they do that. And they reported a 30-second burst of activity after their heart stopped. That's what they said they found. Actually, it wasn't a burst. If you look at the traces they give you, it was a slight increase, but far less than the grains were showing before they sacrificed them. So it was a tiny blip, it wasn't a surge, like they said it was. Furthermore, if anesthetized the rats, they didn't show this at all. Obviously people have NDEs near death experiences under deep anesthesia. So that's not the same phenomena. There were several other things that weren't untypical of neotham, every single one of the rats they tested had this burst of activity. But if you ask people who come close to”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artificial ventilation, and what they found was that there was a change in the brain function when they did that. Reported as an increase in gam activity, it was actually not. All the brain waves were decreased when they stopped the ventilation, but the gamma waves were decreased less than the alpha beta and delta, so it looked like there was more, relatively speaking, of the gamma. It was actually less than it was before. But these people were not dead. They also reported heart function during this time. And when they were reporting these changes in brain waves, the people's hearts were still beating. They were still having a normal sinus rhythm, normal heartbeat, when the heart did stop. They didn't continue doing the EEG. So you couldn't continue to see what's going on in the brain after they actually died. But they reported it as electromagnetic activity in the brain in dying patients. Well, they weren't dying. They were just the artificial respiration was stopped, but their hearts were still beating. Similarly, there were other studies like this where they claimed to be reported”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What people have studied brain imaging with psychedelic drugs. We used to think that psychedelic work by stimulating the brain to hallucinate. And what the studies have shown is that the psychedelic trips that are associated with more elaborate mystical experiences are associated with less brain activity and less coordination among different parts of the brain. It's as if the brain is sort of getting pushed out of the way by these drugs, allowing whatever it is to come in, all this mystical experience. People have tried to look at brain function during a cardiac arrest. It is not easy. Several papers have been published in leading neuroscience journals claiming they have done this, but they have not done that. For example, once they were published of people who were comitos and on life support, and they said it was happening in the brain when they stopped the art.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much of a short form. They also tend to have as many deceased relatives that they might encounter. They have some. You're more likely to hear from children encountering a deceased pet, a dog or a cat. But by and large, people have studied children's near-death experiences find the same phenomena. They often have difficulty, even more than adults do, in putting into words. So they will often ask the children to draw what happened, and they produce artwork to explain the death experience.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's fine. That's not where I am. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not interested in the ultimate cause of the meaning of it. I'm actually a clinician. So what interests me most about neat experiences is how they affect people's lives and what people do with the experience. And that's the same regardless of what's causing it, whether it's a hallucination or a spiritual experience. It affects people in the same way. And that's, I think, what interests me most.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can never disprove it. So it's not scientific. So saying that that's a scientific way of dealing with things promissory materialism is not the way to go. We need to deal with what we have right now and how we interpret what we have right now. And I think most people who study near-death experiences, whether they're spiritualists or materialists or neurophysiologists or philosophers, they agree on the phenomena. They don't agree on the interpretation of it, of what's causing it and what its ultimate meaning is.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second caution was that even though I'm a skeptic and part of me still wishes we could find a physiological explanation, I'm still looking, you need to remember that this is what has been called promissory materialism. We don't have the answer yet, but we will someday. That's a perfectly fine philosophical position. It is not a scientific position because it can never be disproven. You can always say, well, we haven't got yet, but we'll get it in 50 years.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot going on in physiological research now that was not available 50 years ago. And we may someday have a physiological answer to explain near-death experiences. But let me give you two cautions. One is that if you find something that is always correlated within NHT experience, brain, wave activity or a chemical that doesn't mean it's causing the experience. Example, right now, people are listening to us, and there is electrical activity in parts of their brain that process hearing. It always happens when they hearing us, this part of the brain always lights up. Doesn't mean that electrical activity is causing our voices. It's just a reflection of it. So when you find these physiological concompetence of a near-death experience, you're finding perhaps the mechanism for it, but not the cause of it.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myself as a skeptic, and I tend to doubt everything I think as well as everything else that you think. I'm not happy with the lack of evidence we have for some of these things. I'm still looking for it. I went into this thinking there's going to be a simple physiological explanation. We haven't found it. It's been 50 years and we haven't found any explanation yet. That doesn't mean we won't. So we're still looking. We have some technologies now that can study the brain in ways we didn't have before. We have very sophisticated neuroimaging. We have much better computer algorithms for analyzing EEGs and we have a wider range of psychedelic drugs to use to try to replicate part of the experience in some ways.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, whatever metaphor comes readily to them is what they use to describe the phenomena. If you look at the actual phenomena they're reporting, it's the same all around the world. And in fact, we can find cases from back in ancient Egypt and Rome and Greece that have the same phenomena we talk about today. But the metaphors they use to describe them are different from culture to culture.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Christian cultures will say that they may have seen God or Jesus, people from Hindu and Buddhist countries don't use those words. They may say they met a Yandud, a messenger from Rama, or they may say they just saw this white light. Also, the tunnel, you know, we have tunnels in the US. So when people say, I went through this long, dark, enclosed space Will say tunnel. Well, people in the third world countries don't use that word. They may talk about going into a well or into a cave. I interviewed one fellow who here was a truck driver who said Then I got sucked into this long tailpipe.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compared what phenomena they report and what things they didn't. And what we found is that before Moody told us what an interest experience was like when no one had heard of these things, people reported the same things they report now. So knowing about a neoth experience does not affect whether you're going to have one or report it. Now you also asked about culture, and that's an interesting point, because most neot experiences start by saying, well, there aren't any words to describe it. There aren't any words in this, I can't tell you about. I say, you know, great, tell me about it. They use metaphors. Often they'll say, well, then I saw this god-like figure. I'm saying God because I don't know what else have called it, but it's not the kind I was taught about in church. It was much different from that. But this all-loving, all-knowing entity, whatever it was, and what you hear from people in different cultures is based on what cultural or religious metaphors they have available to them. For example, people in”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are you going to say? Say. We've done some research looking at Who reported their near death experiences to us before Raymond Moody published his book in nineteen seventy five when nobody knew what these things were working at the University of Virginia, I have access to the files of Ian Stevenson who had been there for many, many years collecting unusual phenomena, and he had maybe 50 of these cases they weren't called neutral experiences, some were called deathbed visions, some were called out of body experiences, some were called apparitions. But when you look at them, they were just like the near-death experiences we call today. So I collected 20 of those that we had enough information about and then matched them on age, sex, religious belief, so forth with 20 recent cases that I studied used.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Research has been done with cardiac rest patients Majority of people who Come to me and say, Let me tell you about my experience. Have Card Maybe 20 or 30 percent have had a Cardiac arrest and a heart stop. Or injuries, or so forth. We Large collection of people who were injured in combat who have near-tooth experience. People who fell from great heights.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's going on in the brain? People who have a sudden cardiac arrest who are otherwise fairly healthy. Clean population to work with.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have a near death experience, or what kind you're going to In other words, Exceptions If you are intoxicated One is going to be fuzzier and harder to remember. Research has been done with cardiac arrest patients. Because number one.”
2024-10-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #774: Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT