NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES & ACCESSING DEAD PEOPLE'S MEMORIES - Marieta Pehilvanova PhD #93
Chasing ConsciousnessShow Notes
How can we explain vivid, life changing experiences and true perceptions occurring in patients between brain death and resuscitation? What are the implications of true information being anomalously communicated during these experiences? What are the implications of some children being able to access the memories of deceased people? Why do such a high portion of these kids remember a traumatic death?
In this episode we have the two fascinating phenomena of near death experiences, and access to deceased peoples memories to look into. So, we discuss the history of NDE research, the main repeating components of the experiences and some of the anomalous information received; we talk about the radical changes in meaning, purpose and world views after such experiences; and the difficulties integrating this with their previous daily lives and relationships. Then we switch and look at the research into children who appear to have memories of people who are no longer alive, and the attempts to identify the dead person and verify if these things actually happened to them. And of course we’re going to look at the implications of these anomalous phenomena for life, death, consciousness and the nature of reality. Our guest today is a psychiatrist and neuro-behavioural scientist in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, Marieta Pehlivanova. She’s the author of 12 scientific papers, many co-authored with Dr. Bruce Greyson, the founder of the International Association for the Study of Near Death experience, who recommended Marieta in his stead now he is unable to give interviews any more. Please feel free to donate to the Division of Perceptual Studies Donation · University of Virginia · GiveCampus Getting funding to study anomalous phenomena is harder than ever, and we don’t want this research to drop off the map.
What we discuss: 00:00 Intro. 06:45 Near Death Experiences. 06:25 The Dept Of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), UOVirginia. 14:15 Near Death Experience Scale: Features of NDE in psychiatry. 18:15 Not everyone has the life review. 19:30 Anomalous features. 26:20 The new Near Death Experience Contents Scale. 28:20 NDE is hard to put into words. 31:20 Mental health and integration support for NDErs. 39:20 Metaphysical implications of NDEs. 43:00 The afterlife hypothesis. 44:00 The prejudice caused by our experience of the arrow of time. 46:00 NDErs say, “everything is happening at the same time”. 49:25 Children who have dead peoples memories, reincarnation-like cases - Ian Stevenson & Jim Tucker. 52:30 How the accuracy of the memory is investigated. 55:31 Habitual or biological similarities between child and remembered person. 56:00 Resistance in jumping to the reincarnation hypothesis. 58:30 %60 of the kids recall a traumatic death, some have trauma symptoms 01:02:00 Comparing brain scans of these apparently traumatised children. 01:04:45 New research coming on autobiographic memory pathways. 01:07:30 Epigenetic and genetic approaches. 01:07:50 Potential to explain intergenerational trauma mechanism. 01:10:45 Metaphysical implications of children’s memories of dead adults. 01:15:30 Assessing claims that those who accept psi lack critical cognitive ability.
References: International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) Greyson’s Near-Death experience scale Charlotte Martial et al. 2020. ’The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale’. Bruce Greyson, ‘Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: “Peak in Darien’ Experiences’. Pehilvanova, M. ‘Support needs after a near-death experience: A quantitative study with experiencers’. Sadeghi, S. Et al. ‘A large-scale analysis of temporal patterns in children’s purported past-life memories: Shorter intervals following unexpected deaths’ Helené Wahbeh et al. ‘Genetics of Psychic ability - A pilot case-control exam sequencing study’ Marieta Pehilvanova, ‘Cognitive styles and psi: psi researchers are more similar to skeptics than to lay believers’
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