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Dec. 30, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:51
Edition 779 - Dr Bruce Greyson

World-famous NDE researcher Dr Bruce Greyson on his lifetime's work - including some genuinely astonishing and remarkable happenings that defy rational, scientific explanation.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thanks for being part of my show through this year of 2023.
This is the last edition of the year and the next edition will be in 2024.
This last edition, a very special one featuring a guest that I've tried more than a year to get on the show.
I think the wait was well worth it, but I'll tell you more about him in just a moment.
Thanks to Adam for his year of work on this show.
Thank you to you for being part of the family and for the things that you've said and everything that you've done.
No more to say.
Apart from we're going to be talking on this edition with Bruce Grayson, medical doctor in the United States.
His book is called After, and it relates to a lot of research that he's done in the field of near-death experiences.
After, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond.
And as you will hear in this conversation, that is certainly achieved.
I think you will find some wonderful reviews for this book.
And I'm pleased that Bruce Grayson was able to give me the time so that before this year is out, we do this conversation.
A shorter version of this was heard on the radio.
This is the full unexpurgated conversation here.
And I hope that you will enjoy it.
I hope that your holiday season has gone well whenever in it you're listening to this.
You know, I hope you haven't got too stressed about all the preparations and I hope you've been able to relax through it.
And I know that we will commune again here during 2024 on The Unexplained when the show will enter its 18th year as a podcast and its eighth year on the radio, certainly on a broadcast platform.
That's pretty amazing.
And I was only reflecting to myself earlier today when I was doing my tax return that I've existed for these last few years, you know, by no means lavishly.
I don't think you could call any of this not that.
You know, I've got by on my own efforts through something that I created.
And after years of working in newsrooms, on news desks, and I had a lot of fun, broke a lot of stories.
I'm looking at some fading awards on my wall here that I won.
You know, I'm happy to be doing something that I completely control.
You know, I had my ups and downs in the broadcast media.
Sometimes it was fantastic.
Sometimes I was not well treated.
And that is a story that you probably hear from a lot of people, you know, if you've got to talk to them privately.
But I'm saying so here.
And one day I'm going to write about all of it, the ups and the not-so-ups.
But it's nice to do something here that I have control over at this time in my life.
So that's just me saying that.
And maybe this is the time to say it.
Okay, guest on this edition, the Umexplained, at the very back end of 2023, sending you my good wishes from London, talking about near-death experiences and the afterlife.
This is Dr. Bruce Grayson.
Dr. Bruce Grayson, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Well, thank you so much, Howard, for inviting me.
There is so much interest in this, Bruce, and I know that a lot of people hearing this tonight are going to be new to the subject and possibly new to you, although they may indeed have bought the book, which I thoroughly recommend.
I'm just going to give a quick, and you can correct me if I've got anything wrong here, a quick biography for you, for my listener.
Dr. Bruce Grayson is the Chester Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, co-founder of the International Association of Near-Death Studies.
You worked out the famous NDE scale, which so many people now refer to these days.
Now, that is a greatly truncated version.
Is there anything I should have put in there?
That sounds wonderful, Howard.
Thank you.
Okay.
Where do we start with this?
I suppose we should start with this.
Not with your fascination with this subject, but with the general fascination at the moment with this subject.
It's always in the newspapers.
There are always accounts.
And I have a number of people in this country alone approach me every year about books they have written to do with their NDEs.
What do you think, and as I say, leaving yourself out of it for just a moment, the general attraction right now is?
Well, there are a number of things, Harold.
For me, what originally attracted me to this was that I couldn't make any sense of them.
They didn't make sense in terms of my preconceived notion that the physical world is all there is and near-death experiences can't be explained on that basis.
I think the reason most people are interested in near-death experiences or NDEs is that they suggest that we survive death of the body.
And I think that's something many people wonder about.
I have to also add that as a psychiatrist, most interesting to me about the experience is how it changes people's lives dramatically.
Indeed.
And that is something that I want to get to because I have noticed this in people from the United Kingdom that I've conversed with on this subject.
They often tell me that it has fundamentally affected them.
And it makes you wonder, and of course it has made you wonder in the book and elsewhere, how that process can be.
You know, as a psychiatrist, we work very hard to help people make fairly small changes in their lives over a long period of time.
And here we have this experience, which in a matter of seconds or fractions of a second, can totally transform someone's attitudes, beliefs, values, behavior.
And the effects don't go away.
They last for decades and decades.
Of course.
And again, I know this from my own life and experience.
A stroke, something of that magnitude, can also do that, can't it?
It can, but in different ways.
For example, people who have a near-death experience typically come back saying they are no longer afraid of death.
And because of that, they're no longer afraid of living as well.
So they become more joyful, much more, they value life much more.
Now, people who come close to death but don't have a near-death experience, as with a stroke, also often feel that they value life much more, but they are not less afraid of death.
In fact, they may be more afraid of dying after they've almost lost their lives.
As far as you know, when did we begin to use the term NDE?
Interestingly, it was first used in French in the 1890s by Victor Rigere.
He used the term experiences.
I'm blocking on the name now, but it translates to experiences near death.
The first use in the English language was by Raymond Moody in 1975 in his book, Life After Life.
And this was a convenient and has been a convenient peg to hang on a number of experiences that seem to have commonalities.
It is.
I must say that a lot of near-death experiences don't like it.
They don't like the word near.
They think, no, I was dead.
I wasn't near death.
But it's a term that's become used and known.
So we continue to use it.
You're from a scientific background.
Your father was a scientist.
You know, you're steeped in this.
You grew up with this.
Yes.
From what you say in the book after, a very three-dimensional nuts and bolts view of the world.
That's right.
That's how I started out my career.
Right.
And your father taught you to investigate.
But as you say in the book, he never mentioned the mind or anything that was abstract.
Didn't that make you a skeptic?
That's right.
That's right.
We had never talked about anything religious or spiritual.
So when I first encountered these experiences, I assumed they must have a simple physical explanation.
And how did you encounter them?
I think you were a young medic and people started having these experiences around you.
Right.
I had gone through college and medical school with this materialistic understanding of the world.
There's nothing beyond the physical.
And in my first weeks as an intern in the hospital, I was confronted by patients who claimed to have left their bodies when they were near dead and have seen and heard things that they shouldn't have been able to see and hear.
And I just couldn't make sense out of that immaterialistic mindset.
I had to make sense of it.
So I started studying them and collecting them, try to understand what's going on here.
And colleagues, people that you'd come up with in medical training, must also have come up with this because, as we know, this is something that has been described by people, if not named, for hundreds, if not more years.
In general, how did the medical profession look at this or did they choose not to?
Well, they generally chose not to.
I'll say that they go back to ancient times.
We have records from ancient Greece and Rome of accounts that we now recognize as being typical near-death experiences.
And they would occasionally appear in the medical literature of England and France and the U.S., but they'd be dismissed as hallucinations.
And they were single-case studies.
It wasn't until the 1980s that people started doing really serious research on them.
I think when we started doing this research in the late 70s and early 80s, most doctors assumed that we were being fooled by global patients or they were hallucinations of some type.
And no one had really known about them.
When we talked to doctors about them, they looked at us like we were crazy.
They had never heard of these things.
Now, of course, everyone has heard about them.
And when we talk in medical conferences about near-death experiences, we get nods and people know what we're talking about.
And often we'll have doctors standing up in the audience saying, let me tell you about my near-death experience.
So as a young medic, you know, coming out of your training and coming into maturity in the profession, people are telling you these experiences.
You're fascinated by them in a way.
I suspect you didn't think you would be.
How did you take it from there?
How did you begin to think that you would do research on this?
Well, the first several I've heard were from my own patients who were psychiatric patients.
So I naturally assumed this is something to do with their mental illness.
And it wasn't until years later in 1975, when Raymond Moody published his book and gave us the name Neodath Experiences that I realized it wasn't confined to patients.
It was being reported by people all over the world who were perfectly normal.
I still couldn't understand this.
So I figured, as a scientist, you don't run from things you don't understand.
You run toward them and try to make sense of them.
So I started collecting cases and I started looking at what are the common features that seem to be independent of culture or religion, things that people reported all over the world and back through the centuries and trying to make sense of them in that way.
And was there a lot for you to research into?
I mean, was there a lot of material in the case files?
Well, there was actually much more than I expected.
We didn't have a word for them before 1975, so we didn't have a literature that was called near-death experiences.
But if you look through, you found reports of things that people called out-of-body experiences or deathbed visions or hallucinations near-death or sensory deprivation experiences.
And you could gather information about these cases, as I said, going back to ancient times.
Is it tempting, was it tempting for you and your colleagues to say, well, there's some kind of mental aberration going on here, you know, starved of blood, starved of oxygen, perhaps going through some kind of mentally traumatic episode in a hospital situation because it's frightening for people who go there?
You know, was that the temptation to dismiss these experiences or were you always convinced there must be something more?
No, I was convinced that they were real experiences, but I did assume that they were somehow related to neurological or mental illness.
So I started collecting data and looking at what is it that specifically caused the experience.
Is it lack of oxygen to the brain?
Is it mental illness?
We did studies and we looked at the oxygen supply going to the brain.
We looked at drugs given to patients.
We looked at other symptoms of mental illness, history of mental illness.
And none of these things seem to explain the experience.
People who have near-death experiences actually have better oxygen supply to the brain than people who don't have NDEs.
And they tend to have been given fewer drugs, not more drugs.
And they have the same rate of mental illness as people who don't have near-death experiences.
You said that there is better oxygen supply.
I did read that in your book, and I was fascinated by that aspect of it.
How can that be?
Is there some mechanism within the body that when we are facing some traumatic event where we're close to death and maybe we're being tended to by medics that actually comes to our rescue and supplies more oxygen to the brain at that point?
How does that work?
Well, we do have mechanisms that try to shunt oxygen from some parts of the body to others in order to keep us alive.
But in many cases, the death process supersedes that and you're no longer able to do that.
But there have been studies done in the UK and in the US where people have actually measured the oxygen concentration in people who are in near-death situations.
Those early cases, those early situations where people told you that this had happened with them, was there one that swung you more in this direction, that made you more determined to do this research?
Was there a sort of a moment of great enlightenment from one of these?
I wouldn't say enlightenment.
They sparked my curiosity.
The very first one I encountered was a woman who left her body and seemed to report it coming to a room where I was, a different room from where she was, and described what I was wearing, including a stain on my tie that no one else had seen.
And I couldn't explain that.
But at that time, I didn't know what a near-death experience was.
I didn't know how to investigate them.
So I didn't really pursue it as rigorously as I would have now.
So I don't consider that evidence.
I just consider it something that really shook me up and made me curious about these things.
Later on, of course, years later, I did encounter many near-death experiences that had phenomena that I could rigorously investigate and confirm that what these people were seeing and hearing far from their bodies was actually accurate.
What's the difference between a near-death experience and an out-of-the-body experience?
The tie experience where that woman said, you've got a stain on your tie that she couldn't have known about.
Those sorts of things are reported, aren't they, by people who say that they can travel out of their bodies.
They're not close to death.
That's right.
That's right.
The out-of-body experience occurs in about 40% of near-death experiences, but it also occurs in a lot of other circumstances as well.
People who report these during meditation, during other emotional or physical crises where they don't come close to death, there are techniques that have been developed by various spiritual practices to induce near-death experience, sorry, out-of-body experiences.
So they are much more common than you would expect.
That's interesting.
I was going to get to that later, but let's touch on this now.
You say that there are some who feel that they can induce these things.
How would you go about that?
And if you could, that to me sounds like an amazing, if it's ethical and if it's allowed, research tool for you.
Well, it is.
It is.
There are people who actually profess to train people how to go out of their bodies.
And I have studied some of those and I've not been impressed by them.
I think different people have different capabilities, innate capabilities of getting this sensation of leaving the body or not.
Some people are more tied to the physical body than others and have trouble getting a sense of leaving it.
So I don't think you can reliably induce these.
Now, there are people who claim to be able to do it at will, and they can be studied in the laboratory.
And we have been doing that, looking at what's going on in the brain at the time they were doing this.
And we can also plant objects in different areas and see if they can go out of their bodies and report seeing them.
And lots of people are doing this type of research all around the world now.
And do you know of cases where looking at the out-of-body aspect of the near-death experience, do you know personally of cases where you have, you know, or your friends who are researchers have planted things in corners of the room or in different places that have actually been observed by those traveling out of their physical body?
There are some studies like that that have been published.
I myself have not been involved with them.
I've only been involved with those in a near-death situation.
And unfortunately, although we have lots of accounts of people who claim to have left their bodies and seen unexpected things that they couldn't have been predicting, we don't have rigorous objective evidence where you've planted a target and near-death experiences have been able to accurately report that.
There have been, I believe, six studies now published of people who have tried to do this research, intentionally planted hidden targets where people were likely to leave their bodies, for example, in intensive care units or cardiac care units.
And none of them have ever found a single patient who claimed to have left their body and seen the target.
So we don't have evidence for or against it from that.
When I talk to near-death experiences about this research, they think this is ludicrous.
They say, if you're out of your body for the first time in your life, watching your body being resuscitated, why are you going to look around the room for some target you didn't know was there and then try to remember it for the researcher?
That's a very good point.
You know, you're focused on other things.
You're going to be, if you are able to do that, you're going to be looking down at the medics.
You're going to be looking at the machinery they're using.
You're going to be trying to see if the scopes and monitors are showing any signs of life.
You ain't going to be looking for the plastic flower that's been put behind the bin.
Exactly.
I don't know how you get around that.
How would you?
Well, people have tried to make targets that were designed to catch the patient's attention, but they really have not been successful.
I think it has to be individualized, and you can't really develop a different target for each individual patient.
That would be too time-intensive.
Is there any particular kind of person, type of person, age of person, prone more to the near-death experience?
My own mother was 10 years of age, and I have told this story before on the show, but you won't have heard it, but a lot of my listeners will.
My mother was 10.
She got pneumonia in an era where the therapies and the drugs were not nearly as good as they would be now.
So she hovered between life and death, and the doctor told my grandmother, her mother, that she may not make it through the night.
She would go through a crisis, and we all had to pray for her.
Now, during that period, my mother, right up to her dying day, and right the way through my life, she never wavered in consistency of the story, told me that she went to a beautiful place that had greenery and natural presentations that were way beyond anything that we would understand here.
And she was met by friendly, wonderful, marvelous people who told her that she had to come back.
And indeed, she did.
And, you know, the reason I'm talking to you now is as a result of that.
Now, my mother was 10 years of age.
So I am guessing that I may be partially answering the question that I asked you, That if a 10-year-old can have an experience like that and you've got an eight-year-old in your book, then there are no common experiences.
It's something that is all ages and what have you.
But you tell me.
Yes, we haven't found any variables yet that will determine who will have a near-death experience.
We've seen them in people of all ages, all genders, all races, all religious beliefs.
There are some differences, though.
For example, in young children, they tend not to have the elaborate life review that often happens to older people, which is understandable as they haven't had much of a life to review.
But older people also often report being visited by deceased loved ones.
And children, as your mother, may see other beings in their near-death experience, but they don't recognize them as deceased loved ones because they don't have many loved ones that they know who have died.
I think the eight-year-old in your book described to you or whoever was doing the research that you quote, described that he was going through and experiencing things that as an eight-year-old he couldn't describe, and they were sort of being interpreted for him, if I've got that right.
That's right.
They often feel that looking at them through the eight-year-old or whatever eyes cannot comprehend things.
And they feel like they're being given like adult intellect at that time so they can understand them.
Many, many children who have near-death experiences encounter deceased pets that they have been fond of rather than adults because they don't know many adults who have died.
Now, that either means, it seems to me, and I'm not a scientist and I'm not a medic, but it seems to me that either the eight-year-old or ten-year-old or whatever is connecting with things that are familiar that may be filed away within the brain and not necessarily connecting with deceased pets in some kind of reality.
I've put that badly, but I think you might get where I'm going.
Right, right.
When people report seeing deceased humans in their near-death experiences, sometimes the humans give them information that they couldn't have gotten from any other source.
So that's some evidence that maybe this deceased person is still around in some form.
But when you're talking about deceased pets, they usually don't tell you information.
They're just there to greet you and make you feel loved and welcomed.
But you can't really corroborate anything that a deceased pet has said or done.
So really relying on the child's report.
And of course, that can't be confirmed.
It could be just coming from the child's imagination and wishful thinking.
Getting information that you couldn't ordinarily have had, you couldn't have known.
That's interesting.
Are any of these experiences in some way precognitive?
Do they predict things that are going to happen?
On rare occasions, people do have precognitive visions during the near-death experience.
Sometimes they are told about things that may happen by deceased entity or parent deceased entities, and sometimes they are given a vision of it.
For example, many people have a life review in which they see their entire life flash before them.
And sometimes it will not stop at the present, but will continue into the future.
Now, that's interesting.
And that must have, I presume, and that's a big presumption, a profound effect upon them.
It does.
It does.
It really changes their concept of time.
And in fact, many near-death experiences, whether or not they have precognitive visions, say that in this other realm where they were, this other dimension that they were, there was no time as we know it.
There was no linear sense of one thing happening after another.
It was as if everything was happening all at once.
People in books and on shows like this, they love to hear real-life stories or real death stories, real near-death stories.
You've got so many of them in the book.
You have the story quite early on of a firefighter, an Air Force firefighter called Bill Hernlund.
Quotes, the light was drawing me towards it.
A lot of people report the light.
I moved exceptionally fast down a tunnel, he said.
And he was asked by what I perceived to be a light being about his lifetime dealings with other people.
In other words, had he got on with other people, had he hurt other people, as all part of the life review.
This is very common.
You know, people going into the experience assume that their material accomplishments would be what's most important in the life review.
I made Eagle Scout.
I made so much money.
I was a prisoner to this.
And that's totally irrelevant in the life review.
What matters is how you treated other people.
Have you been kind?
Have you been loving?
And that's what people come back with, a sense that what really matters in life is treating other people kindly, and that they come back embracing what we now call the golden rule, which is part of every religion we have on this planet.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But for the neo-death experiencers, it's not a rule we're supposed to follow.
It's a law of nature that they've experienced in the NDE.
This is the way things are.
So do you think, and we can't know, can we, that when you actually do die, you will go through that assessment process and what happens to you subsequently might be determined by the things you have done?
I don't know the answer to that because I haven't been there yet.
Some people who have near-death experiences tell me that the way you've lived your life in this earthly life does not determine what will happen to you after death.
That after death, everyone is, I want to say forgiven, but there's no one to forgive you.
It's just you, yourself.
But you come to terms with what you've done and you may feel very bad about it and regret a lot of things you've done.
But you see them not as sins, but as mistakes.
And you come to terms with that and you live with that.
And you're welcomed and accepted into the other realm, despite what you've done here.
Have you come across people who have changed their ways on the basis of seeing how badly they treated others?
Definitely.
And also just people not being kind to other people all the time.
And one dramatic example is people who have a career that involves necessary violence.
For example, career police officers or military officers who are injured in the course of their duties and have a close brush with death and come back after a near-death experience saying that they just can't shoot anymore, even in self-defense.
And they end up having to change their lives around, leaving their Careers, starting something different.
I've also known people who were in cutthroat businesses who used to get ahead at someone else's expense, and that makes no sense to them anymore because they feel like we're all in this together.
And they either change the way they do their business or they leave the business entirely and often go into helping professions, healthcare, social work, teaching, clergy, and so forth.
That suggests to me, and I'd like to believe that is so.
I've known all kinds of people in the profession that I've chosen, and some of them not the nicest people in their drive to make profits or get on or whatever.
And some of them quite lovely, but some of them not.
That almost sounds to me like there is some kind of, and again, this is something that we can only speculate about based on the evidence that you and others have gathered, that there is some kind of universal law that actually is to the good and does respond to good behavior.
In other words, the fundamental driving force of this life, as a lot of people have tried to tell me through my life, is love and doing as much good as you can do.
That would suggest, on the basis of some of the things that you've been told, that would suggest that that is the prime directive.
Well, that is, I'm not sure that directive is the word I would use, but there does seem to be what most near-death experiences say, that something like what we call love is what holds the universe together and keeps it running.
It's not an order you must love someone.
It's this is what makes sense to do because we're all in this together.
And hurting someone else hurts yourself as well.
And loving other people, helping other people helps you as well.
That's just the way it is.
When you say those things, Bruce, do you surprise yourself?
Because you weren't in your younger years and in your family life when you were growing up.
You weren't religious or spiritual, were you?
No, I wasn't.
But I feel like I like to think that I was moral, that we were taught, even though there's no, we didn't think there was any God, there was any afterlife, there was any spiritual realm, we thought it made sense to be nice to other people.
That was just part of our culture.
You're here.
You're all in this together.
You're all working in the same environment.
So why not be nice to other people?
The imponderable that goes beyond the scope of your research, I know, is what happens to those who are assessed in that process when they die and then go on to something else.
Are they retrained, re-educated?
We can't know, but it's fascinating to speculate, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
It is.
You say that NDE experiences often recount what they go through with extreme clarity, and also events around them unfold at great speed, which refers back to what you said about time not really having any relevance.
That's one of the surprising things to me, that people report their thoughts were going faster than ever and are clearer than ever, and their perceptions were crystal clear.
They see colors they'd never seen before.
And this is happening when the brain is not functioning very well or sometimes not functioning at all.
So it's hard to understand how this can happen if we assume that the brain creates all of our thoughts and feelings and perceptions.
Because we would only be able to, if it was all in our minds, in our brain, then we would only know those things that we have experienced.
And in my mother's case, as you've just said, my mother always talked about experiencing colors that we don't have here.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And they hear sounds that we haven't heard before.
They report a lot of things that were just unknown to us.
One of your examples, a woman describes how she went out of her body and looked at herself, and she described bubbles.
And in each bubble before her was a scene or a vignette from her life.
That was how she visualized the life review.
Sometimes people report it as watching a film, a cinema of their life.
Some report it as actually reliving the life.
And in this case, Barbara reported seeing like bubbles, each one with a different scene from her life.
I think that's partly your own preconceived idea of how you're going to visualize things.
Different people have different ways of doing it.
And then there's the state that you are in while you're experiencing this near-death experience.
You describe a woman who's having a medical procedure, I think it's during a troubled childbirth, who heard the medical team say, I think we're losing her.
I think that's a quote from the book.
Now, if you heard that in life about yourself, say you were in a medical situation and you just happened to overhear something that shouldn't have happened, you would probably, unless you had a constitution of absolute steel, I know that I would panic.
But in the situation that these people are in in the near-death experience, if it's a medical situation and you hear words like, we're losing her, they are completely calm about it.
Yes, yes.
Yes, that's another surprising thing about the experience.
As you said, if we were having an experience like that and we heard someone say, we're losing her or I'm not getting a pulse, we'd be terrified.
But they seem to be feeling perfectly fine.
And they're often puzzled by this.
And they think to themselves, why are they upset that they think they're losing me?
I'm fine.
I'm in any trouble.
When you started doing this research, I'm just formulating this, this notion, when you started doing this, I know that it had a momentum for you.
And people, just as often happens in research, people started sending you their stories and they are still sending you their stories, I know.
Yes, yes.
How did that process feel for you when you started to connect with people wanting to share with you their real stories?
I was surprised that there were so many people and that so many were willing to share it because there was at that time back in the 1970s, early 1980s, a lot of stigma about this.
Most people would assume that you're either crazy or gullible, and most people did not want to talk about their experiences.
And as it became more and more well known in the popular culture, people have been opening up more and more.
There are television shows, there are movies, there are books about it now.
So I think everyone hears about it.
And it's pretty well accepted, even by health professionals, that these are common experiences that occur to perfectly normal people under unusual Circumstances.
There's still a lot of justifiable skepticism among healthcare workers about what causes it, but there's no longer any doubt that they are common experiences and have profound effects on the individuals.
How does it all dovetail an interface if it does with religion?
Because I've interviewed people who say that they've had NDEs, who claim to have encountered God or something very akin to God.
Yes, yes.
Most Neetith experiences talk about meeting some benign, loving entity, and they may give it a name, they may not.
Some just call it a loving being of light.
And here's where culture plays a role in what we're seeing.
They will report the same thing, the same raw phenomena in every culture and across the centuries, but the way they describe it to us will be determined by their culture.
Most near-death experiences say that there aren't any words to describe what happened to them.
And then we researchers say, great, tell me about it.
So, of course, we make them use metaphors, which distorts what they actually saw.
So most Westerners, most people from the UK and the US will say, then I encountered God.
Whereas people from Hindu, Buddhist cultures will not use that word.
And even those who are raised Christian or Jewish will say, I'm going to use the word God so you know what I'm talking about.
But this isn't the God I was taught about in church.
It's much bigger than that.
And is this a God that knows all about you because you are part of some greater whole?
It's something that is all-encompassing and all-knowing and seemingly all-powerful.
Some people liken it to the force in Star Wars.
You know, it's there and it binds everyone together and it's got some power, but it's not, and it has some intelligence as well.
It's a knowing entity.
I mean, it makes you wonder where that entity, thing, presence, where it resides.
Yes.
You also mentioned that it's something that we're a part of, and that's something that near-death experiences usually report, that this divine, whatever it is, is the same stuff that we are made out of.
And many will use the metaphor of a wave in the ocean, the ocean being God or the Godhead or the basis that we're talking about, and the individual being a wave that's made of the same material, but for a time being at least, has a separate structure.
And at some point, you will dissolve back into the ocean and no longer have this individual structure.
For something that is seen and described as being something airy and fluffy and nebulous but nice, you created an NDE scale in the 1980s.
Nobody had ever done that before.
How were you able to come up with a scale with which to quantify these experiences?
I started with what people had written about near-death experiences, and there were a dozen or so researchers who had compiled lists of the different things they reported in NDEs.
And I got a list of about 80, 8, 0 of these more common phenomena that were reported by several researchers.
And I showed that list to a group of about 100 near-death experiencers.
And I said, which ones are these make the most sense to you?
And I took the ones that they selected and I took them back to the researchers and said, okay, here's what the near-death experiencers say.
How would you compare them?
And they whittled down some more.
And I took the whittled down list.
I took it back to the near-death experiences.
I went back and forth several times until I came down with a final list of 16 items that were statistically significant and which everyone agreed, the researchers and the near-death experiencers.
I will say that that was back in around 1980.
And we know a lot more about near-death experiences right now.
And there were some things we know now that we didn't know then that I would have included in the scale if I had known about it back then.
And what have we learned since the 1980s?
You know, in the 1980s, I can remember people talking about the bright light, possibly the being and the tunnel.
And that's about all I would have known if you'd asked me in the late 80s about this.
But what have we learned?
Well, I think the most important thing, the most glaring error was that we didn't include any negative, any unpleasant near-death experiences.
You know, back in those days, people would hear about a near-death experience and say, gee, that sounds wonderful.
Mine was terrifying.
There must be something wrong with me.
And they wouldn't talk about them.
So we didn't hear about the unpleasant near-death experiences, but now we have.
And I would now include something about negative experiences as well as positive ones in terms of just the emotional factors involved.
We talk about blissful experiences, blissful emotions.
I would also talk about frightening or depressing experiences now as well.
And when you're experiencing those things, assuming you are the bad ones I'm talking about, do you get the feeling that harm could come to you or do you feel protected?
You do feel protected, but you feel sad about the things you've done that may have contributed to having this unpleasant experience.
Now, there are stages of this frightening experience.
Sometimes they start off being terrified and they fight against it and they try to get back into their bodies.
And at some point, they often get exhausted by this and they just give up and surrender to it.
And as soon as they surrender and do it, it becomes a blissful experience.
The experience itself hasn't changed, but the emotion behind it changes to one that's terrifying to one that is blissful.
That suggests a kind of logic, a logic that is forcing you to learn your lesson.
I'm not sure I'd say what's a logic.
It's just sort of more of a perception that there's nothing dangerous here, that even though I feel scared, this entity that I thought was threatening me is actually loving and welcoming me.
Tough love.
Yes, yes.
Making you face your life, which may or may not be pleasant for you, but is not being judged by the other entities.
So, Bruce, are NDEs and dreams related?
Because a lot of the things you've discussed certainly sound like dreams that I've had, certainly this year and during the COVID period, where I've gone into situations that are like reality, but not.
They're three-dimensional, they're full color.
And sometimes I meet people who have either passed on or who I don't know.
They do sound sort of like dreams when you hear someone tell about them.
But people who have the experience almost universally insist they are not at all like dreams.
They are more real than this life is, the way this life is more real than a dream is.
That's interesting.
You say that you get a lot of information from cardiac arrest patients who seem to be prime candidates for this kind of experience.
But one thing that made me smile, made me laugh, was when you described how cardiac arrest patients don't take kindly to the question, what happened when you blacked out?
Because they say, I never blacked out.
Well, that was one particular study where we were looking at people who had automatic defibrillators placed in their chests that would monitor your heart rate.
And if you started going into a dangerous heart rate, it would automatically give you a shock to put you back into normal rhythm.
And when the surgeons put this device in your chest, they have to test it by stopping your heart intentionally and then sitting back and waiting for this device to kick in.
So during that procedure, we know exactly when the heart was going to stop or be stopped.
So we thought this is a great place to do research.
So that we placed targets, hidden targets in the room during this procedure and then watched what happened to them and then asked them about the procedure later on.
And we asked them later on, what happened when you blacked out?
Many of them said, I didn't black out.
What are you talking about?
Because they were only unconscious for about five minutes and they were heavily anesthetized before that because the process can be quite painful.
So a lot of them didn't remember anything about the procedure at all.
There is some new research.
There is a lot of suggestion that when medics think we have died, we may not have died and we may still be processing information at some point and hearing things possibly for a while afterwards.
Do you think the research that you're doing with NDEs is going to be helpful in that research?
I think so.
I think so.
It's difficult to know when someone has, quote, died because you don't die all at once.
We know that when oxygen and fuel stops getting to the brain, different parts of the brain shut down first and others remain so that it takes a while for someone to, quote, die.
And it can take minutes, it can take hours.
If you look at the brain waves measured by an EEG, you see changes within 10 seconds.
And usually within a minute or so, less than that, usually, it goes completely flat, which means there's no detectable electrical activity in the brain.
But the EEG measures only the surface of the brain, which is the part that is normally associated with thinking and concentration.
It doesn't measure the deeper parts of the brain that are associated with keeping us alive, keeping your blood pressure up and so forth.
So there are parts of the brain that persist for longer.
It's not clear, though, that that continued activity can explain a near-death experience, because as I said, it's not the part of the brain that thinks and perceives and sees and hears and experiences things.
Which makes us think about the nature of consciousness.
It does.
It does.
It certainly seems in near-death experiences and in other experiences as well that consciousness can exist when the brain is not functioning.
And if that is the case, then the near-death experiences, as you've described them, may be simply an extension of consciousness that we don't understand properly yet.
That's right.
Well, I mentioned there are other examples of this as well.
There's something called terminal lucidity, in which people who have had Alzheimer's disease or other dementias for months and years and have not been able to recognize family or communicate, suddenly become totally lucid again and sit up and they talk and they're animated, they recognize people, and we have no medical explanation for how this can be.
And then they pass away within minutes or hours or sometimes in a couple of days.
But we have no explanation for how people can regain concentration and consciousness when their brains are irreversibly deteriorated.
That's one of the fascinating things that needs to be further researched, it seems to me.
New research, some science that I was reading earlier this year suggests that we're getting quite close to being able to almost put on a video screen, which is straight out of science fiction, but the things that are going through people's brains at any one time, through their minds at any one time.
Sorry, I'm using those terms interchangeably, and I probably shouldn't.
Do you think that if we're able to develop that technology that can get inside the brain and understand what it is seeing or displaying, do you think that would help you in your work?
I think it would help.
I don't believe it will ever happen, though.
I think we're making huge leaps, making assumptions that are not supported by the data that we have.
I don't think there's evidence suggesting that we actually can do such things.
There are simple things like being able to move a finger or move a leg that produce reliable signals in the brain that we can measure.
But you can't measure.
There's no way you can detect what someone is actually thinking or imagining or perceiving.
So how do you see this research then developing?
What's going to be the next step?
That's a good question.
I think there are lots of different ways similar people are going with this.
There are many people who are looking at the physiological evidence of near-death experiences, looking at what's going on in the brain and other parts of the body as well during a near-death experience.
There are people looking at the similarities and differences between near-death experiences and other unusual experiences.
For example, psychedelic drugs can produce a lot of experiences that are similar in many ways to near-death experiences and differ in some ways.
But that's a phenomenon that we can control.
We can determine when someone's going to have a psychedelic drug experience, and we can set up all sorts of monitoring equipment for them.
So that's one way of studying this type of experience.
I will say that it's not a complete exact copy of a near-death experience.
It's an analogy.
It's similar to it in some ways.
I heard you talk in another interview about the effects of hallucinogens like LSD, whatever it might be.
Yes.
And some people saying, well, that's all it is.
It's just a chemical change in the brain, and it does what LSD and drugs like that do.
And sometimes the experiences are, you know, nice and sometimes they're not so nice.
But as you just said, the actual experience is quite different.
It is.
It is comparable.
One near-death experiencer said to me that on LSD, he saw heaven, but in his near-death experience, he was in heaven.
And that to him was a very different experience.
And another experiencer told me that it's like comparing the experience of being in combat and watching a war movie.
You might use the same words to describe what you're seeing, but nobody would confuse the two experiences being the same experience.
Looking into 2024 then, I know that you had the book out that we've sort of been talking around now.
That's after, in 2021, which was right in the middle of COVID and the world seemed to stop for a while.
But where are you going next?
How are you going to start the new year?
As I said, I'm a psychiatrist.
I'm interested in how these experiences change people.
And I'm getting towards the end of my career.
So I'm thinking more and more about the practical applications for people of knowing about these experiences.
So I am looking more at what we can do with this information rather than how can we explain them.
There are other people who are still looking into, fortunately, looking into how we can explain these experiences.
But I'm focusing more and more now on what we can do with the information.
For example, I am looking at people who have difficulty returning to a, quote, normal life after a near-death experience, how they're integrating these changed attitudes and beliefs and values into their daily life.
And those who have trouble with doing this, what help do they seek?
What type of people do they seek help from?
And then what type of help actually helps and which does not help.
And I'm also looking at healthcare workers' attitudes and beliefs about near-death experiences, because many people say that in a near-death experience, they try to talk to doctors and nurses about it.
And we're told, just don't talk about that.
It'll go away.
And of course, it doesn't.
So we're surveying doctors and nurses about their beliefs, their attitudes towards near-death experiences, whether they feel they have the training to talk with near-death experiences about these things, whether they feel empowered to do so.
Doctors are encouragingly saying that they don't feel that near-death experiences are meaningless and they feel that they are important experiences that happen to people and need to be addressed in order to help them deal with it.
They are reporting that they lack enough information about near-death experiences and lack the time in their practices to really spend time talking with patients about their experiences.
And they would like more training and more time to talk to patients about them.
But they are not prejudiced against talking to patients about them.
And I suppose they need to be made to understand nicely when, you know, maybe somebody is in hospital facing an operation that could go either way, that they need to be helped to understand that they might have an experience like that.
And if they do, it's okay.
Yes.
And one thing that happens as a result of that is that doctors have been more careful about what they say and do in the operating room because they know they may be watched.
And I have one story in my book where a 55-year-old man was in the hospital having quadruple bypass surgery.
He had four vessels around his heart that were stopped.
And in the middle of the operation, he told me that he left his body, rose up above it, and saw his doctor flapping his arms like he was trying to fly.
And that just seemed ludicrous to me.
I'd been a doctor for decades then.
I had never heard of something like that.
So I told him, gee, I'm not sure that happened.
I think that might have just been a hallucination you had.
He said, no, no, I saw this.
I really happened.
Ask my doctor about it.
So I did talk to his surgeon.
And the surgeon said, yes, I really did that.
It's a habit I developed.
I let my assistant start the procedure while I put on my sterile gown and gloves.
And when I go into the operating room, I don't want to touch anything that's not sterile while I'm watching them operate.
So I place my hands palm across my chest where I know they wouldn't touch anything.
And I point things out to my assistants using my elbows so I don't risk touching my thing with my fingers.
And he demonstrated to me just the way the patient did.
And he was kind of sobered by the fact that his patient actually saw this.
And I think people are more reluctant to say and do things like that in the operating room now.
Well, that, Bruce, can only be a good thing.
So now at the end of all of this research that you've done and the book that you've written and all of the involvement you have with this subject, do you have any trepidation, any fear that, you know, as to what might happen if you yourself, indeed if I have one, but if you have one?
I don't, but I must say that when I started this work and I was a die-hard materialist, I didn't have any fear of death then.
I assumed when you die, that's just the end of your consciousness.
And that's nothing to be afraid of.
You have nothing to fear.
But now, having talked to all these people, I suspect that there is something after death, that after our bodies die and our brains are no longer functioning, we still have some consciousness.
I'm not sure about that.
I'm a scientist.
I can't be definite about it.
But the evidence seems to be strongly pointing in that way.
I will add, though, that most near-death experiences, as I said, say that there are no words to describe it.
So I don't take literally their descriptions of what happens after the near-death experience.
I think that what happens is something that they convey the emotion of, but the details are more metaphoric than literal.
So I will say that I think it's likely that we do survive, but I have no idea in what shape or form that will be.
I think that's progress.
And as an American politician once said, to paraphrase this person, near-death experiences then, thanks to your research, are a known unknown.
Exactly.
Bruce Grayson, thank you Very much indeed for your time.
My pleasure, Harold.
It's a delight talking to you.
Dr. Bruce Grayson and his book is called After, and it's well worth reading.
I'm just flipping through it here.
There are something like, let's count the pages here, about 300 pages or so, 250 pages or so, all tightly packed, all full of detail, something that's definitely going to make you think.
If you're looking for something to fill some time towards the end of this year or as we go through that strange period as we cross from one year into another, I would recommend Dr. Bruce Grayson's book, It's Called After.
More great guests in the pipeline in 2024 here on The Unexplained.
So until we meet again here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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