Features of NDE's

greyson discusses the several features of nde’s in his article. “perhaps the most important of these features, because it is so commonly reported in nde’s, is the occurrence of normal or even enhanced mental activity at times when, according to the mind-brain identity model, such activity should be diminishing, if not impossible. individuals reporting nde’s often describe their mental processes . . . as remarkably clear and lucid and their sensory experiences as unusually vivid, equaling or even surpassing those of their normal waking state. reports of nde’s from widely divergent cultures confirm that people have consistently reported, from different parts of the world and across different periods of history, having had complicated cognitive and perceptual experiences at times when brain functioning was severely impaired.

“another example of enhanced mental functioning during an nde is a rapid revival of memories that sometimes extends over the person’s entire life. . . . memories revived during an nde are frequently described as being ‘many’ or even as an almost instantaneous ‘panoramic’ review of the person’s entire life.

“another important feature of nde’s that materialist reductionism cannot adequately account for is the experience of being out of the body and perceiving events that one could not ordinarily have perceived.

"an even more difficult challenge to materialistic models of nde’s comes from cases in which experiencers report that, while out of the body, they became aware of events occurring at a distance or that in some other way would have been beyond the reach of their ordinary senses even if they had been fully and normally conscious. . . . [greyson shared a report of] “cases of blind individuals, nearly half of them blind from birth, who experienced during their nde’s quasi-visual and sometimes veridical perceptions of objects and events.”

greyson related an especially interesting account “of a man who had an nde during cardiac arrest in which he saw his deceased grandmother and an unknown man. later shown a picture of his biological father, whom he had never known and who had died years ago, he immediately recognized him as the man he had seen in his nde.”

greyson summarizes his article by stating that “the challenge of nde’s to materialist reductionism lies in asking how complex consciousness, including mentation, sensory perception, and memory, can occur under conditions in which current physiological models of mind deem it impossible.”

I recommend this article to you. we are learning that mentation can continue without an interaction with the synaptic networks of the brain, a “both-and” situation of dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and material components of the brain and an action of the immaterial mind that appears not to involve the synaptic networks of the brain during a nde. the mechanism remains to be determined. Of special interest is how memory is encoded within neural networks of the brain but is also an immaterial entity within the framework of awareness beyond the physical brain. this revelation reflects how the mind of man has been wonderfully created in the image of the mind of god!

Stan Lennard