dr_greyson_discusses_near_death_experiences2

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
From wherever you are around the world, around the world.
Welcome to the Circle of Insight, a show that explores
the many facets of human behavior and the wonders of
the human mind. And now here's your host, doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Welcome everyone. I'm really excited. We have a great guest
with a fascinating topic. He wrote a book called After
a Doctor, explores what near death experiences reveal about life
and beyond. It's doctor Bruce Grayson. It's really a fascinating read.
If you get a chance, you can pick it up
at Amazon dot com. Doctor Bruce Grayson as Professor Emeritus
Psychiatry and neuro Behavioral Sciences at the University of.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Virginia School of Medicine.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
He served in a medical school faculty at the Universities
of Michigan, Connecticut, and Virginia. He's going to talk about
today near death experiences and.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Let's not waste any more time to Welcome to the show,
Doctor Grayson.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Welcome sir, Thank you Chrols. Thanks for inviting me to
your show.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Oh, thank you very much for being here. This is
a fascinating book. There's something you mentioned in the book too,
and you talked about this experience, and nobody wants.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
To talk about death.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
We don't really know where we're going. We kind of
we have ideas and we have theories, of course, and
every religion tries to talk about it, with Tibetan Book
of the Dead and Christianity and Islam, and everybody's got
their versions of what happens afterwards. I'm not gonna knock it.
I haven't been there, so I can't tell you whether
it's true or not. But it's fascinating because this is

(01:49):
near death. It's almost like you got a glimpse of
what's happening on the other side.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
What motivated to write about.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
This book, Well, it's funny that I grew up in
a scientist the household where there was never any talk
about anything spiritual or religious. As far as we knew,
the physical world was all that is and that was
fine with us, which means when you die, that's the
end and that's it. So I went through college and
medical school with that mindset that what you see is
what you get and there's no reason for anything else.

(02:17):
And then in the opening months of my psychiatric internship,
I was confronted with a patient in the emergency room
that I was supposed to evaluate, who was totally unconscious
because of her overdose, so I couldn't evaluate her, but
I talked to her roommate in a different room fifty
yards down the hall about what was going on in
the patient's life, what stressor she had, what she might
have taken. I went back then to see the patient

(02:41):
and she was still unconscious, so he arranged for her
to be admitted to the hitsive care unit and I
would see her the following morning after she awoke. When
I went there the next day, she was still very,
very drowsy, could barely open her eyes, and I started
by introducing myself, and she said, I know who you are.
I remember you from last night. Kind of stunned me,
so I said, you know, I'm surprised. I thought you

(03:03):
were unconscious when I saw you last night. And she
opened her eyes then for the first time and said,
not in my room. I tell you, I saw you
talking to my roommate down the hall. Well, that made
no sense to me. I couldn't understand that. The only
way that could have happened is she had left her
body and followed me down the hall and as far
as I could tell I was my body, How can
you leave it? I was just stunned, and she could

(03:25):
see that I was stunned. So she went on to
tell me about the conversation I had with her roommate,
where we were sitting, what we were wearing, what our
conversation was like, without making any mistakes. I was just
in long way. I thought somebody's got playing a trick
on me here, but I wasn't there. I deal with
my confusion, but with her, so I had to stuff

(03:46):
those feelings down and just help her with her suicidal thoughts.
And as the days went on and I got some
more distance from that incident, I tried to convince myself
that it didn't really happen. I had misheard, misinterpreted, somebody
was playing a trick. Can't be as it turned out,
as it turned out across About about five years later,

(04:07):
Raymond Moody, who was also with me at the University
of Virginia, wrote a book called Life After Life, in
which she gave us the term near death experience and
told us what these experiences were like. And I realized
for the first time that what my patient had told
me was not just one event from a psychiatric patient,
but something that was happening to people all over the world,

(04:27):
millions of them, and I still couldn't understand it. But
as a scientist, I felt it would be dishonest to
deny that they were true, and my job was to
try to understand them. And here I am, fifty years later,
still trying to understand them.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
That's amazing story.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Was she aware of this phenomenon that happened to her
at the time or when she became more coherent, or
she did.

Speaker 4 (04:49):
I can't imagine how she could have been aware of it.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
Okay, so she had no idea. She just really thought
she was in the room with you in the hallway. Yeah, yeah, Ma,
that's crazy stuff.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Now. I know you have other stories in the book
as well, and I know neuroscience you mentioned it in
the book as well a lot of as well as here,
But you mentioned as well in the book about how
neuroscience tries to describe what's happening, Right, there's different things
happening in the brain that kind of fool us and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
What's your take on that?

Speaker 4 (05:19):
Well, you know, I started off as a materialistic neuroscientist,
and I desperately wanted to find a physical explanation for
these things. I didn't want my worldview upset by these
strange phenomena, so I studied all the different hypotheses that
were proposed. Lack of oxygen to the brain, drugs given
to patients, various neurotransmitters are greeted by the brain, abnormal

(05:40):
electricity in the brain, and as we went through each one,
the data contradicted them one by one. For example, when
you look at patients who are close to death and
measure their alcohol, I'm sorry their oxygen level. Those who
have new death experiences actually have more oxygen in their
brains than those who don't. Likewise, people who are given
drugs as they are pro death. The more drugs you're given,

(06:02):
the less likely you are to report on your death experience.
So we don't really have a my biological explanation for
how these things can happen. So the way most neurobiologists
deal with this is by saying it couldn't have happened.
It was something that you made up after you awoke
from the event or before you went into the event.

(06:23):
But you can't have consciousness while you are in a
cardiac arrest or some other close brush with death.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I guess that example you gave us kind of discredited too,
because she was giving you specifics of the conversation, which
then there's everything else that the wind up.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
And I've got many more examples, a boko of actually
more mind blowing examples of people who saw things they
could not possibly have seen when their eyes were taped
shut in operations, and they saw things that were very
unexpected that they couldn't possibly have known about.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Oh my gosh, again, folks, the book is After, And
now you're probably thinking, what in the world is going on?
In the book is called After, A doctor explores what
in your death experiences reveal about life and beyond. Look
you're not alone, folks, Doctor Grayson and I are a
little perplexed about this one for sure.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
So what did you do after that? What did you
start studying? Well?

Speaker 4 (07:17):
I realized that one incident like this patient totally told
me about was not evidence of anything. It was a suggestion, anecdote,
but it couldn't prove anything. So I decided I needed
to collect a large number of these quote anecdotes and
see if I could find consistent patterns among them that
we could do hypotheses on and I gradually over the
ears collected thousands of cases and was able to do

(07:40):
statistical analyzes to find consistent patterns in them in how
they presented to the patients and how they affected the
patients afterwards, and we did various research on them to
look at what these experiences might have meant. I also
was concerned though, that most of the stories I heard
were people who came to me, approached me with their ideas,

(08:02):
let me tell you about my experience, And I began
to wonder if this is a bias sample of people
who come close to death, these are the ones who
want to tell you about their experience. So I then
started doing research with patients in the hospital where I worked,
for example, interviewing every patient who was admitted in the
cardiac arrest with their hearts that stopped and asked them
what they experienced, and to my surprise, I find the

(08:24):
exact same thing. Now, the average hospital patient isn't as
verbal as the patients who come to you and say,
let me tell you about it, but the types of
things they talked about were identical to the ones that
had volunteered to give me their stories.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
You know, it's interesting, Doctor Grayson is the questions I
have that are popping up, I keep throwing them aside
because that first story ruins it for me every time
I'm trying to look at it.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Is.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Well, like, one of the instances I popped up in
my head was the God helmet person here in Canada,
and I'm looking at that, thinking, well, I can ask
them about that, But then I realized, doesn't make any
sense with this first story.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
You can Michael Persinger claimed by that by administering a
magnetic field around the head, you can induce an illusion
of communicating with the deity seeing your body and so forth.
Another group pair of Grand quest in Sweden actually was
trained by Personer on how to use the helmet. Tried

(09:22):
to replicate his research and was not able to. And
what they found was that when you left the helmet
off but told the patients it was on, they would
report these things. And when you told the patients it
was off, but they but they actually turned it on,
they didn't report them. So they thought it was more
suggestion rather than the actual electromagnetic effect. But you know,

(09:44):
there have been a variety of people proposing physiological mechanisms
like stimulation of the right temporal lope of their brain,
and these all produce illusions that are in some ways
vaguely reminiscent of near death experiences but don't replicate them.
But none of them report accurately seeing the body from
an out of body perspective and accurately seeing things they

(10:06):
shouldn't have been able to see or hear. They're just
illusions that have no bearing on reality.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, so that.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Eliminates a good portion the questions, but it does leave
me with two interesting ideas for you. And then we're
going to move into what you think it is and
how it impacted you in a sense spiritually. But one
of the ideas that pops up in my head is
a disassociation from trauma. Books like Basil, Doctor vessel Vandapork

(10:36):
and things of that. How we separate our body we can,
and a lot of times when victims are victims of
rape or child abuse and things of that nature, they
kind of disassociate from their body.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Anything there.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
Yes, it certainly is. It's fairly common for people who
are being abused, people being raped to report that they
leave their physical bodies. And this kind of makes sense.
You know, if your body's being traumatized, you don't want
to be there. So if it's possible to leave the body,
you do it. How do you do it? I have
no idea. Maybe something about the shock of the trauma

(11:13):
that allows this thing to happen.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, because I know some people in the world of trauma,
they'll use it as a it's a security system that
the body has right to protect you because you can't
handle the whatever's happening till you can't process the cognitive
leads that I'm out of here and disassociating. I wonder
if it's similar to maybe a near death experience where
they're realizing that would assume they have some kind of
low level.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
Of consciousness going on. Is that possible too.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
They do seem to, and they seem more or less
detached from the body. They don't see it as being
then they see this like a coat they took off
the that's what the body is. They usually don't report
other things that are common in a near death experience,
just leaving the body and not much else.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
That's about it, But there's still they try to communicate
or anything like that to other people.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
A ghosts. The movie goes with DEMI, Yeah, I'm.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
Not aware of that. Ever happening. If you're being abused,
you don't want to communicate with your abuser.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
No, No, but I mean the near death experiences. I'm
wonder you haven't heard anything about that.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
No. No, I think the reports about people who have
been abused or raped are pretty pretty sparse. They don't
say a whole lot about it. They don't generally want
to talk about those things.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, and how about in your cases for the NDEs,
there have you noticed anything at all in regards to
people trying to communicate with the doctor, like, hey, what
are you doing in the surgery?

Speaker 4 (12:34):
They often do that. In fact, they often complain to
the doctors, I don't want to be brought back. Stop
trying to resuscitate me, and the doctors, to their frustration,
almost never hear them. There are a couple of instances
where people have been able to get through to people
who are still alive, and I've actually talked to the
people that they claim to communicate to. One person that

(12:56):
actually had tried to hang himself from a shed in
his backyard and he didn't die. He was hanging from
a rope and the rope is getting tighter and tighter
around her neck and it was harder and harder for
him to breathe, so he left his body. And he
claimed that he went into the kitchen of his house
where his wife was watching the dishes, and started screaming

(13:17):
at her, cut me down, I mean the shed. Well,
I talked to her later on and she said, I
was standing there washing dishes, and I heard this voice
in my head saying, I'm in the shed, cut me down. Help.
So I picked up a knife and I'm out there,
and sure enough he was there. Now. Of course, by
the time I interviewed her, the two of them had

(13:37):
been able to share the story amongst themselves. So I
can't be positive that she would have told me that
before he talked to her. But I have heard a
number of stories like that where people claim to have
talked to someone still alive and the person corroborated.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
That amazing stuff telepathy in the road, what is the
remote viewing, and all those other things that we hear
the CIA does sometimes.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
No, that is knowing the kind of hitting this world
right now.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
Well, they all seem to suggest that although in daily
life it seems like the brain creates the mind, the
mind is what the brain does in extreme circumstances like
near death experiences. The brain and mind seem to be
separate things, the brain being that part of you that
thinks and feels and perceives, and the brain being that
three pound massive tissue in your head. There are times

(14:26):
when the mind seems to be functioning fine, when the
brain seems to be offline. We don't know how that
could happen. Neuroscience has no idea how you can have
consciousness outside of the brain. However, the dirty secret of
neuroscience is that we have no idea how you can
have consciousness inside the brain. We have no idea how
a physical, chemical, or electrical process in the brain can

(14:49):
create a thought or a feeling.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
And the argument of having no idea doesn't stand very strong.
And now even in pharmacology doesn't stand very strong. We
know what they do and we don't know how they
do it.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Half the time, I don't know why this medication does this,
but it doesn't.

Speaker 4 (15:07):
It must do it somehow.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, I must do it somehow. So yeah, that argument
doesn't hold enough for me. This is going to be
a far fetched idea. But alien abductions. I read a
book a few years ago a professor from Harvard, I
think she was, and she wrote a book on alien abductions,
and some of the things sounds similar again where they
were looking at these aliens but they they couldn't move.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
They're kind of like out of.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Body experiences with these aliens. So it sounds really similar.
But I guess it reminded me of ketamine or ketamine.
Doesn't that also cause some kind of disassociation?

Speaker 4 (15:46):
It can. Yeah, The alien abductions are usually associated with
something called sleep paralysis, where your body seems to be
still asleep but your mind seems to be awake, which
can be a terrifying thing.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
Now I don't know what to make of these alien abductions.
Many people who will go into a near death experience
say that words just can't explain what they went through.
So we researchers get excited and say, great, tell me
about it. So we know we're forcing them to distort
it by putting words on it. And they will say,
you know, I met this incredible being. I don't know

(16:24):
what it was. You know, I'll call it God, so
so you know what I'm talking about. But it wasn't
like the God I was taught about in church. But
people will use whatever metaphor they come up with to
describe this unknown being. And in the twentieth century we
had this great culture about extraterrestrials and the image that

(16:46):
came to a lot of people's mind when they thought
all this unknown being was someone an alien from another planet.
In past centuries that might have said that was an angel.
In the twentieth century they said it was an alien.
So I don't know what it really was was, but
they seem to be encountering some unfamiliar being that they
put a label on and try to use it to

(17:07):
try to understand it.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
I think that's exactly what I read to you about
the great heads and things of that nature. Whatever they
saw in the movies at the time. Seemed to write
that was a great segue to the other part of
this because it transformed you in that way.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, tell U little bit about that.

Speaker 4 (17:24):
Well, let me let me say first of about how
it transfers the experiencers, because as a startling as some
of these experiences are, what's most interesting to me is
a psychiatrist, is how they change people's lives. You know,
I make my living trying to help people make changes
in their lives. As I'm sure you do too, and
you know how hard it is. And yet here's this

(17:44):
experience in a matter of seconds that can totally transform
someone's attitudes, beliefs, values forever. We've done studies now with
people that we interviewed back in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
indeed them again in recent years to see if the
after effects of change, and they have not at all,
They don't diminish. Over the decades. They typically become much

(18:06):
less concerned with things of this world, with material goods,
with power, prestige, fame, competition, and much more interested in
so called spiritual things, compassion, caring other people. They become
much more altruistic in their behavior. And this goes on
and on. And I've talked, to example, people who were

(18:26):
career military officers or police officers who after an ear
death experience could not stand the idea of shooting someone
I've hurting someone else, and they left their chosen career
and retrained to become healthcare workers, teachers, social workers. I've
known cut through aut businessmen who couldn't stand the idea
of competition afterwards and change the way they work their businesses.

(18:49):
I've known addicts and criminals who reform their lives after
a new death experience. These are very dramatic ways of
changing your life. Hallucinations don't do that to people. Dreams
don't do that to people, Which is more evidence for
me that we're not dealing about dealing with a routine
hallucination here. This is something that's more powerful than that.
There's also some evidence now that just learning about near

(19:12):
death experiences can give people who haven't had the ND
some of those same after effects. There have been studies
at colleges such as University of Connecticut in Miami, University
of Ohio where they have taught classes in near death
experiences and found with before and after studies that after
the class the students became much more compassionate and altruistic,

(19:35):
and they often did one year follow up studies after
the class was over and these changes persisted. There was
also a study done with nursing students that showed the
same thing, and one study with college students in Ohio
that showed the same thing. When they learned about near
death experiences, they become more compassionate. And I find that
the same is true of the researchers like myself. I

(19:56):
went into this field as a materialist, convinced that there
was some physical way to explain these things away. And
over the decades i've been doing this research, I've pretty
much given up on that idea. Haven't totally given up
on it, and I'm still a skeptic, but the evidence
seems strongly to be pointing to me that there's something

(20:16):
about us that can exist when the body seems to
be not functioning, particularly when their brain seems to be
not functioning. I don't know what that is. I don't
know how it relates to the brain, but the event
seems to be that it is there, and in fact,
most experiencers say that that's the more important part of us,
not the physical part of us, and that's made me

(20:38):
much more open about things. I'm much more willing to
look at the unknown, much more comfortable with the unknown. Furthermore,
the most pervasive after effect of a near death experience
is elimination of your fear of death. No matter what
people say happen to them when they died, they say,
it's not something to be afraid of. And that's had
a tremendou effect on me too, because once you lose

(21:00):
fear of dying. The near death experiences tell us you
lose your fear of living as well. I'm not afraid
of taking risks, taking chances, living left to the fullest
because you're not afraid of losing life. You know what
comes afterward is even better. So that gives you a
life that becomes much more meaningful and fulfilling than it
was before. And it's made me much fearful of a

(21:21):
lot of things in my life, knowing that there's a
good likelihood that there may be something on that I'm
going to after I die. I'm not convinced it remains skeptic,
but I think the evidence is pointing in that direction.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
It's a lot of empowerment and hope in those words, yes,
for a lot of people out there. Again, the book
is called After Doctor explores what Near Death experiences reveal about.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
Life and beyond. It absolutely does.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
It's interesting you mentioned that because I can't remember the
book now I read, but there was a book I
was reading about the near death experiences and just talking
about death and how people became much more compassion as
you mentioned and compacited some of the studies you just
mentioned those, of course, and their reasoning of course, being
their religion, they want to make sure the many browning

(22:11):
points as they can before they cross over, depending on
the religion you believe it at the time.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
So it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Do you have any take on why you think people
become much more compassion. Is it the same reason or
do you think it's just I don't know.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
Well, I think there are a lot of reasons here.
Many people who have a new death experience go through
a life review in which they their whole life flashes
before them, and in many cases they re experience events
not only through their own eyes, but through the eyes
of other people as well who are involved in the situation.
And one example was a fellow named Tom Sawyer that's

(22:45):
his real name, who had a new death experience in
his thirties when a truck he was walking under working
under fell and crushed his chest. And he had a
life review in which he remembered many things about his life.
And the most dramatic example was an instant when he
was a hot headed teenager at age seventeen driving his
truck down the street and a drunk man ran out

(23:08):
in front of his truck and he almost hit him.
He was furious, so he stopped the truck, rolled down
the window and started shouting at the man. Then the man,
unfortunately being drunk, reached his hand in the window and
slapped Tom across the face. That was too much for
the hot headed teenager, so he got out of the
truck and started beating the man to a bloody pulp,
left him on the median strip and drove away. Well.

(23:30):
When he had his near death experience, he relived that
in a life review, not only through his own eyes,
but through the eyes of the drunk man, and he
watched his face, Tom's face getting redder and redder, and
then felt each one of the thirty two blows of
Tom's fist on his face, felt his nose getting bloodier,
felt his teeth going through his lower lip, felt the humiliation,

(23:53):
the embarrassment, and Tom came away from this near death
experience realizing that we're all in this together. We're not
separate entities. It's like the fingers on a hand look
like they're separate. When you look at the whole hand,
you see they rarely connected. They're all the same. And
that leads people with a sense that what you do
to somebody else, you do to yourself. Basically, it's the

(24:15):
golden rule, which is a part of every religion we have,
and there's a reason for that. I think most religions
came from people who had experiences like NDEs. So most
news death experiences come back with a strong sense that
this is the way to make a meaningful life. Not
because it's a goal we should strive for, as religions
tell us, but because they've experienced it as a law

(24:39):
of the universe, like gravity. This is the way it is.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
It's fascinating. Bring up another interesting point.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
I'm just trying to see how you can frame this
question because I had a conversation this morning with Professor
Ian McGilchrist and he wrote a book called Master and Emissary.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
The whole book is okay.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
So basically the book is left in the right brain,
but he talked about empathy in the right brain and
how we're kind of the society today is moving forward
to the left. And we'll get into another book here,
but I just want to make sure I get in
the background for everybody out there listening. And he was
talking about the empathy component of the right brain, but
so did Simon Baron Cohen over in Cambridge, where he

(25:20):
talked about empathy and the empathy circuit. It almost sounds
like there's some kind of deficit in these NDEs are
either bringing it back to in a homeostatic way or
just enhancing it and those empathy circuits. I wonder if
neuroscience could even show a difference in activity or volume
in that area just ran on them.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
Yeah, I mean, it's real hard to do neuroimaging while
someone is in a near death state. And you know,
there have been lots of hypotheses about different parts of
the brain or different neurochemicals in the brain being involved
in an ND and one problem with that is that
when the brain is demonstrably not functioning, for example, when
you have a cardiac arrest, when your heart stops within

(26:01):
twenty seconds, the easy flat lines and there's no electrical
activity in the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain
that's responsible for consciousness, and yet people to support having
the most vivid experience of their lives while the brains
were not functioning. So that's a tough barrier to get
over if you're an neuroscientist. People have tried to image

(26:22):
the brains of people as they are remembering a near
death experience to see where there are certain parts of
the brain are involved in that, and they find there's
no one part. The entire brain lights up, and you
should actually expect that because you've got thinking going on,
you've got perception, you've got memory, you've got emotions, so
of course the whole brain's going to be involved in this.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah, I guess it's too hard to because you could
always do an fMRI after they have in your death
experience and see if those empathy circuits are more enhanced.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
But you can't get because you don't know who's going.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
To be Indeed, yeah, if we were pressing it and
that would be great, but I guess we're not hot
fascinating book indeed, after a doctor explored, but near death
experiences reveal about life and beyond fascinating.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
Step. So, doctor, we've been together now for almost thirty minutes.
We're getting ready to wrap up.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
What are the key message you want everybody to know
out there about your book?

Speaker 3 (27:15):
I think you kind of summarized it earlier nicely.

Speaker 4 (27:17):
They are Number one. Number one is that these neo
death experiences are incredibly common. Most research shows that about
one out of twenty people in the general population has
had one, which means someone in your family, someone in
your workplace, someone in your class has probably had one.
And number two, they are not related in any way
to mental illness. We've done research on this extensively in

(27:40):
my psychiatric units, and there is no connection between mental
illness of any type and near death experiences. So these
are normal experiences that happen to normal people under abnormal conditions.
And number three, they have profound after effects, including most
prominently a lack of a fear of death. Beyond that,
they also so suggest that the mind and the brain

(28:02):
may not be the same thing. And that's still a
puzzle for me. It's not for the experiences, but for
me as a scientist, I still don't not explain that.
But if that's true, that the mind can function when
the brain is not, that opens the possibility that the
mind can still function after the brain has died completely,
after we have died.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
It's like Date Card's giving you a thumbs up from
wherever he is at. I guess my last question is,
I know people are going to be upset if I
don't ask it now that to think about it, did
you have any research as you find anything in regards
to seeing the light. We've seen that movies from twenty
thirty years ago. Was that ever mentioned? Did they see
light rain?

Speaker 3 (28:42):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (28:42):
Yes, it's very, very very common. And they universally say
it's not a physical static light like a light bulb
or the sun. It's a living being and it's something
that radiates warmth and love and acceptance and safety, protection.
And they don't know what to call it. Some will

(29:02):
call it God. People who are not in God centered
religions Studio Christian religion as they call it something else.
But in many even many Christians will say, it's not
that God I was taught about. You can call it God,
you can call it Ali, you can call it Buddha,
you can call it all there is. The label doesn't matter.
It's something that was divine and actually we are all

(29:24):
part of that as well. And they compare it two
being a wave in the ocean. A wave is one
small part of it, but it's made of the same
stuff that the ocean is and it will someday fade
back into the ocean.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
Fascinating stuff.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
I can keep you here all day, doctor Grace, really
fascinating stuff, folks. Again, the book After a Doctor explores
what near death experiences reveal about life and beyond.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Doctor Grayson, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 4 (29:49):
Thank you, Carlos folks Hey, thank.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
You for joining us as well.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
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