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Bruce Greyson

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2024-10-22

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2024-10-22

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1. “Sympathetic with them. You know, I started out as a materialist skeptic after 50 years. I'm still skeptical. I'm no longer a materialist. I think that's kind of a dead end when it comes to explaining near-death experiences and other phenomena like this. When I started out, I assumed, okay, we'll look at things like heart rate, oxygen level, drugs given, and so forth. And each thing we tried to study turned out not to explain anything. For example, the most obvious thing was the lack of...”

   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

2. “Letting my assistants start the procedure while I put on my sterile gown and gloves and wash my hands and so forth. Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a while, because I don't want to risk touching anything with my sterile hands now. I point things out to them with my elbows, and he pointed things out just the way Al was saying he was trying to fly. I don't know any other doctor that's done that. I've been a doctor for more than 50 years and I've never seen anyone do that. So it's kind of an idiosyncrasy thing Is there any way I could have seen that? Well, he was totally anesthetized. He had his heart, was open. I don't think there's any way he could have seen that. And yet he did.”

   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

3. “So he's lying on the table, fully unconscious, the drapes over and so forth, and he tells me that in the middle of the operation he rose up out of his body and looked down and saw the surgeons operating on him, and he saw the chief surgeon who he hadn't met before flapping his arms like he was trying to fly, and he demonstrated for me. At that point I laughed as I thought this is obviously hallucination. Doctors don't do that, but he insisted that I check with the doctors. He said, this really happened. Ask him. So he told me lots of other things about his near-death experience. But that's the one that I was able to verify. So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan. And he said, well, yes, I did do that. I have a habit of”

   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

4. “This was a fellow Al in his mid 50s Was a van driver, and he was out on his rounds one day, and he had chest pain, and he knew enough to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency room. And they did some evaluations and found that he had four arteries to his heart that were blocked. And they rushed him to the emergency room for urgent quadruple bypass surgery”

   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

5. “And if you talk about things you got ridiculed, you got referred to a psychiatrist, you were called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists and religious folks. They didn't want to hear about these things. So people did not talk about these events.”

   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

6. “Got slightly more than a thousand in my database at the University of Virginia, where we have validated as much as we can that they were, in fact, close to death, and this is what happened to them. I've talked to many more people about their native experience that I haven't included because I wasn't confident that they really fit the criteria for being in the study. But it's really much more common than you might think it was, because people don't talk about these things. You mentioned people wanting the publicity of this. That is actually maybe more true now. But back in the 70s and 80s, Nobody wanted to talk about these things.”

   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

7. “She got very excited, hopped to the car, and took off for a test drive, and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly. Just a few hours before his near death experience. Any way you could have known or wanted or expected her to have an accident and die. And certainly in a way he could have known how she died, and yet he did. And we've got lots of other cases like this. They're called peak and darian cases based on a book that was published in the 1800s with cases like these, where people encounter deceased individuals who were not known to be dead. Now, I don't know how to explain those.”

   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

8. “And she said, you know, Jack, you can't stay here with me. I want you to go back and 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. He didn't know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods, and then he woke up later in his hospital bed. Now he tells me that back in the 70s, there were very few MGBs in South Africa, and he had never seen one. When the first nurse came into his room he started to tell her about his experience, and seeing his nurse Anita. She got very upset and ran out of the room. It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday, and her parents had surprised her with the gift of a red MGB.”

   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

9. “He was a young technician at that time and had very serious pneumonia. And he repeatedly stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia, and he had one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse, a young, pretty girl about his age. He flirted a lot with her when he could. And one day she told him she's going to be taking a long weekend off, and there'd be other nurses substituting for her. So he wished her well and she went off. And over the weekend, while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where he couldn't breathe. He had to be resuscitated, and during that time he had a near-death experience. And he told me that he was in this beautiful pastoral scene, and there out of the woods came his nurse, Anita, walking towards him. And he was stunned because he was in this different world. What's she doing there? So he said, you know, what are you doing here?”

   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

10. “Many people in initiative experience say that they encountered deceased loved ones in the experience. And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking, expectation. You know, you think you're dying and you would love to see your grandmother once more. So she comes to you. And there's no way to prove or disprove that. However, in some cases, the person having the near-death experience encountered someone who had died, but nobody yet knew they had died. So that can't be dismissed as expectation wishful thinking. Is not a new phenomenon. Pliny the Elder wrote about a case like this in the first century AD, but we're hearing about a lot of them now about 12 years ago I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years. Jack was one of those. He had an experience, actually he was in South Africa back in the 70s.”

    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

11. “Majority of people who I think were false positives are people who have some less intense form of mental illness. If people are blatantly psychotic, we don't include them in the studies. But there are people who have personality disorders, who seem on the surface to be perfectly fine, but have exaggerations of our traits that make them function differently in the world. And some do have this incredible need to get confirmation of what's happening to them. They feel different and they don't know why. So the Hiram Bagnet experience and think, maybe that's why I'm different. Maybe how do a Niche 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

12. “I actually published a paper about false positives where we had people who claim to have an EU-death experience but did not score very highly on that scale. And we want to look at why they think they have New Death experiences. And you were right when you said before that some people are making things up. Do they want the publicity? They want to be held as messiahs. That's true. But I think there was a small minority of people who claim to have near-death experiences. And they usually very easy to identify by what they do with the experience. If you immediately go on the talk surfit and talk to Tim Ferrish and other people like that and want to brag about. Enlightened you are now. We say, Well, let someone else study those. I'm like, I'll deal with those.”

    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

13. “Been now translated into more than 20 different languages. It's been used in thousands of studies around the world. There have been attempts to refine it, to improve it. There are things we know now that I didn't know back then, and people have tried to add things to it. But basically all the additions don't make much of a difference. You still identify the same experiences as being NDEs with or without them. So that's where it was. That's where the scale came from.”

    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

14. “And they included changes in your thought processes, thinking faster and clearer than ever before, having your past flash before you, straw feelings of emotions, usually joy and bliss, and a sense of being unconditionally loved by brilliant light. Not always. Sometimes there's fear also. So we developed the scalp of these sixteen items in a few stat for the standard of deciding which ones of these phenomena are new to the experiences and which ones are not.”

    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

15. “So I took that list and I gave the list to a bunch of near-death experiencers and said, which ones of these do you think are really important in defining a near-death experience? And they would let down a bit. And I took the whittle down list and gave it back to the researchers and said, which ones of these do you think are the really important ones? And they whittled it down again. They went back and forth between the researchers and the experiencers until they had a consistent list of 16 features that they all agreed were the important parts of a near-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

16. “Thought it was an out of body experience. Some thought it was a feeling of bliss. Some thought it was a communion with God. All sorts of different interpretations people had. And they didn't agree on what should be included as part of a near-death experience. So I surveyed a large number of researchers who had published about this and asked them to give me a list of the most common features you see in any-death experience. I have some 80 features, which is ridiculous.”

    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

17. “Back in the late 1970s, after people had read Raymondi's book, Serval psychologists and physicians started getting interested in studying this phenomenon. So he assembled a meeting at the University of Virginia with about two dozen of these people, researchers who wanted to study it and tried to agree on how to do that. And it turned out that everybody had a different idea about what a neoth experience was. Depending on their background.”

    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

18. “They were measuring her heart function, her EKG, and her heart had not stopped. She was having erratic arrhythmias, erratic forms of her heartbeat. So I don't know how close to death she was. I mean, it's always hard to tell how close to death someone is, whether she had a real near-death experience or not. I don't know because I didn't investigate it. At that time, I didn't know anything about near-death experiences. I didn't know what questions to ask. So I just wanted to get out of my life and push it out of the way. So looking back on it, It's certainly not proof of anything except how unnerving this was to me emotionally to have this happen.”

    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

19. “I assumed him that in a couple years I have a simple physiological explanation for this. And that would make me satisfied and be the end of it. But the more I learned about them, the harder they seemed to understand. I've gotten more comfortable with not knowing all the answers.”

    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

20. “Who wrote a book called Life After Life in which he gave us the term near death experiences and described what they were, I had never heard of this type of thing before. And when he described it to me, I realized that's what this patient was talking about. She was talking about in a near-death situation, leaving her body, seeing things accurately from another location, and I thought, well, I need to understand this. So I started collecting cases, and it wasn't hard to do. These are very, very common phenomena, but nobody talks about them. But if you start asking patients who have been close to death, they will tell you about them. And here I am 50 years later, still trying to understand 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

21. “Bizarre thing happened, but it can't happen, it can't have happened. There must be some other answer to it. It just sat there in the back of my mind for about five years until I was now on the faculty at the University of Virginia. And we had a young intern join us, Raymond Moody.”

    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

22. “No one knew about the stain except the roommate. So I realized that I was having trouble keeping my composure then, but my job was to deal with her mental status, not mine. Things in the back and has dealt with her about what made you take the overdose. What are you thinking about suicide now and so forth? And thought, well, I'll think about this other stuff later on. So she was an image of the psychiatric unit, and I was a busy internet. I didn't have time to think about this stuff. I didn't dare tell anybody. They think I was crazy. So I pushed it on the side and just didn't think about it for a while. But it was very, very emotionally upsetting to me to think.”

    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

23. “So I said to her, I'm surprised I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night. Then she opened her eye again and said not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan down the hall. Made no sense to me at all. She was lying there in the gurney. The only way she could have done that is if she had left her body and come down, and that made no sense. You are your body. How can you leave it? So I ended up, I thought, is she pulling my leg? What's hung on here? She saw that I was confused, and then she started telling me about the conversation I had with her roommate. What questions I asked, what Susan's answers were, and then finally said, And you had a wretch saint on your tie. That just blew me away. I didn't know what to make of this. I was really getting flustered at this point. I thought, would the nurse was somehow colluding with her to trick this poor intern.”

    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

24. “Say goodbye and said to our way. Then I went back to see the patient, and she was still unconscious. I confirm with the sitter who was with her that she had not awakened at all during the time I was gone. She was admitted to the intensive care unit because she did have some cardiac instability because of the overdose. And when I saw her the next morning, when she had awakened, she was just barely awake. I went into her room. I said, so-and-so, I'm Dr. Grayson from psychiatry. And she opened one eye and said, I know who you are. I am a beautiful from last night. I met this gloomy wigs. I knew she was asleep at best and unconscious that it were, so I don't know how she could have known 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

25. “Trying to understand what was going on with a patient, what stresses did she have? What drugs she might have taken for an overdose and so forth. It was a very hot Virginia late summer night. And I was starting to sweat in that room. There's no air conditioning back in the 70s. So I unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn't sweat so much, inadvertently exposing the stain on my tie. When I finished talking to the roommate, I stood up to leave and saw that it was open, so I quickly buttoned it up again.”

    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

26. “Sure. I went through college and medical school with the strict materialistic mindset that the physical world is all there is. And in one of my first weeks as a psychiatric intern, I was asked to see a patient who was in the emergency room with an apparent overdose. I was in the cafeteria half of my dinner when this call came through and being a green intern, I was startled by the beeper going off. And I dropped my fork and spilled some spaghetti sauce on my tie. So again, being a new intern, I didn't want to embarrass myself, so I put on a white lab coat and buttoned it up so you nobody could see it. Then I went down to see the patient, and she was totally unconscious. I could not revive her. But there was her roommate who was who had brought her in, who was in another room about fifty yards down the hall, so I left the patient. There was a sitter there with her as happens with all suicidal patients, and I went down to see the roommate. I spent about twenty minutes talking with her.”

    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

27. “Found myself really drawn towards psychosis, people who had hallucinations and delusions and just didn't think the way the rest of us do. Now, most of the things that psychiatrists deal with are common everyday things like anxiety, depression, which everyone has to some extent. But I really was fascinated by the more extreme conditions, schizophrenia and manic depressive illness, people who just had totally different views of the world than I did.”

    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

28. “When I went through medical school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I kind of thought I would be a But I found that when I did my psychiatry rotations, there were so many more unanswered questions, so many things that we had no idea how to explain, much more with the brain than with the kidneys or the heart or the lungs. I thought, this is where I need to go to look at what's going on in the brain to have these thoughts and ideas and feelings. So I went in that direction.”

    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

29. “Actually, the answer is no. I didn't have any fear of death. You know, we certainly had family relatives that died. And as far as I could tell, when you died, that's the end. What's to be afraid of there?”

    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

30. “Well, I was raised in a scientific non religious household. My father was a chemist, and as far as she was concerned, what you see is what you get. There's nothing beyond the physical. So that's how I was raised. Being a scientist, he stimulated me. I desire to gather information, and I often participate in some of his experiments. He had a lab set up in his basement. He also taught me, though, that if you study things that we pretty much understand already, you can make little inroads here and there about five points. If you really want to make some impact, easy to study things we don't understand at all. And it gave me examples of that. So I grew up with that idea that I wanted to be a scientist and discover new data and try to figure out what's going on with 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