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TagNear-death experiences (Greyson's perspective)

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Near death experience ascend up towards the light in the dark tunnel

Agnostic Psychiatrist Says Near-Death Experiences Are Real

For example, he cites cases for Big Think where the clinically dead experiencer encounters a deceased individual who was not known to have died at the time

Psychiatrist and neurobehavioral scientist Bruce Greyson, author of After (2021) — a science-based look at near-death experiences — offers short videos unpacking the topic via Big Think: Are near-death experiences real? (7:15 min) BRUCE GREYSON: When I first started looking into near-death experiences back in the late-1970s, I assumed that there would be some physiological explanation for that. What I found over the decades was that the various simple explanations we could think of like lack of oxygen, drugs given to the people and so forth, don’t pan out- the data do not support them. And furthermore, the phenomena of NDEs, of near-death experiences, seem to defy a simple, materialistic explanation. When we first started presenting this material in medical Read More ›

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Tunnel of light

Agnostic Psychiatrist Says Near-Death Experiences Are Real

They change lives but he is unsure what they mean

Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, emeritus at the University of Virginia, tells us that he first started thinking about near-death experiences many decades ago when a young woman, rescued from suicide, asserted that she had seen a spaghetti stain on his tie during an out-of-body experience. She could not have known that he had gone to considerable pains to conceal the embarrassing mark from colleagues. Nothing in his background had prepared him, as a young psychiatrist, for taking seriously the possibility that the mind could be detached from the brain. He grew up with a chemist father who had a great love for science but no metaphysical convictions. But he just could not forget the spaghetti stain episode and that background prompted Read More ›