The Scientific Basis For NDEs, How Trauma Can Inform the Likelihood of Out of Body Experiences & What Near Death Experiences Reveal about Our Consciousness
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This idea has been around for centuries. Hippocrates wrote about it 2000 years ago. He said the brain is the interpreter of the mind. The mind is not the brain. People often talk about a barrier they have to pass between this world and the other world. A gate or a door. People in Japan often talk about crossing a river.

They say things like, "It's as if I'm leaving my body. I feel like I'm sliding off the table." And they call all these things out-of-body experiences. This consciousness can exist outside of our physical body. If you look at evolution, our bodies developed to help us survive in the physical world. You have all this stimulation coming at you from outside.

And some of it's important to keep your health to survive, and some of it is not. There are all sorts of electromagnetic wavelengths that we don't see as light, because they're not important to us. We just see a small portion of it. When you have a near-death experience, or come close to death, the brain's filtering function starts shutting down, and you can experience all this mystical world. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be breaking down... The afterlife.

What does it mean to say that not only are your mind and brain different things, but that your consciousness may be a separate entity that can roam about the world and experience things? And you might think, who could you talk to that could make this make sense? Before you tell everyone who is going to make sense of this,

What does it mean that your consciousness is wandering around the universe? Like I have my ideas I can share, but tell us what's going on here. I'm going to give you the answer that our guest is going to give. I don't know. And I'm comfortable with not necessarily knowing, but there's a tremendous amount of data that we can gather and understand about experiences that people have when they are in a near-death situation.

environment. They're called NDEs. And we're going to talk to one of the leading pioneers in the field of understanding what's going on in the brain, what's going on in the mind, and what's going on mystically, spiritually, and psychologically when people are experiencing out of our understanding experiences.

What's also really poignant for me is what do these people bring back? It's not that they're off having a mystical experience that then doesn't translate into their

waking life. They actually come back really transformed and there's a message for each of us, all of humanity in the experiences that they bring back with them. We're going to be talking to Dr. Bruce Grayson. He's a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neural behavioral sciences at the University of Virginia. He's also a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. For the past

50 years he has been talking about the phenomenology and after effects of near-death experiences. He actually co-founded the International Association for Near-Death Studies. His book, After, A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond,

has fascinating case studies, including Dr. Eben Alexander, who, when he had his near-death experience, came to Dr. Grayson to ask him to explain it. You may have seen or heard him recently on Oprah's podcast, but we booked him first. What a pleasure to welcome to The Breakdown Dr. Bruce Grayson. Break it down.

Thank you so much for being here. And also we can't help but acknowledge you were just on Oprah talking about NDEs. Yes, yes. That's incredible. I mean, he got brought to the mothership. We booked him first. We booked him before Oprah. And he's going to have more fun with us, I promise. That's what people tell me.

Our podcast focuses on kind of the intersection between science and spirituality. If ever there was one topic that, you know, kind of helps us best understand that intersection, I would argue, as I think you would as well, it is near-death experiences. I agree. I particularly loved After. A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. And one of my favorite parts of this book is...

When you describe how you came upon this field of study, which I think at the time was not even considered a field of study. It was not. Can you tell us about what turned you from a young medical student and new doctor into one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences? Well, I grew up in a medical household, a scientific household. We were strict materialists. What you see is what you get.

And I went through college and medical school with that medicalist, physicalist mindset that when you die, you die and that's the end of it. That's fine with us. And then when I started my first year of psychiatric training, the first few weeks I was asked to see a patient in the emergency room who had overdosed. And I was in the cafeteria having dinner when my beeper went off and it startled me. I dropped my fork and splashed some spaghetti on my tie.

I was a green intern. I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't want to be embarrassed. So I tried to blot it off and I couldn't, just made it bigger. So I put on a white lab coat over it and buttoned it up so no one would see. I went down to see the patient and she was completely unconscious. I could not arouse her. But her roommate who had brought her in was waiting 50 yards down the hall to talk to me. So I went down to talk to the roommate.

I talked to her about 15 or 20 minutes. This was a very hot late summer evening in Virginia before the days when we had air conditioning. I was starting to sweat, so I unbuttoned my coat so I wouldn't sweat so much, exposing the stain on my tie. I talked with her about 15, 20 minutes, and then we got up to say goodbye. I noticed my coat was open, so I quickly buttoned it up again so none of the nurses would see what I was doing.

Also, not to be a spoiler, this is all very important. This isn't like, why is Bruce Grayson talking about his shitty time? He was very fashion conscious, had nothing to do with the story. No, it's integral. We'll let you keep going. It's fun to talk about. So then I went back to see the patient and she was still unconscious. I had some idea from the roommate of what she might have taken for an overdose. So he admitted her to the intensive care unit overnight.

And I went to see her the next morning and she had just barely woken up at that point. She was very, very drowsy. I opened the door to her room and introduced myself. And she said, I know who you are. I remember you from last night. Nope. I'm already freaked out. So was I. So I kind of stunned and I said something like, you know, I thought you were out cold when I saw you last night.

And then she opened one eye and looked at me and said, not in my room. I saw you talking to my roommate Susan down the hall. Nope. That did not compute. I mean, the only way that could have happened is if she had left her body and followed me down the hall. And clearly that's impossible. You are your body. How can you leave it?

So I was sort of fumbling with what to say next. And then she told me what I was talking to the roommate about, everything I asked, everything she answered, what we were wearing, and finally mentioned the red stain on my tie. Nope. I did not know what to do with that. I would have admitted myself as a patient in the psychiatric unit that you were the... I was worried, but I figured I'm not there to deal with my confusion, but to deal with hers. So I kind of pushed her away and said, I'll deal with this some other time.

And I talked with her and ascertained that she was medically stable, but still needed to be admitted to the psychiatric unit. So we arranged for that to happen. And I didn't see her again. But I sort of went through my mind figuring out, how could this possibly be? Someone's got to be playing a trick on me. The nurses, I don't know who. I just sort of pushed it out of my mind. Then over the next several years, I met a few more patients who had had near-death events and had

a similar story of leaving their bodies and seeing things from an out-of-body perspective. And I thought, "Well, you know, they're just psychiatric patients. Who knows what they're really thinking?" And about five years later, I met Raymond Moody, who was an intern working under me at the University of Virginia. And he had just written a book called "Life After Life," in which he described the near-death experience and gave us a name for it. Before this, no one in the English-speaking world had ever heard of this.

And I recognized from what he was saying, this is what my patients were talking about. And for the first time, I thought, these aren't just crazy psychiatric patients. This is happening to everybody. Being a scientist, I know you don't run away from things that you don't understand. You run toward them to try to understand them. So I figured I'm going to collect as many cases as I can about this and try to figure out what's going on. At that point, I was still a materialist trying to figure out what's going on in the brain to make this illusion or delusion happen.

And I spent the next 50 years trying to figure it out, and I'm still trying to figure it out. I want to make a distinction between something too, for lack of a better word, crazy things. Let's say you're willing as a young medical student, right, or a new doctor, let's say as a materialist, you are willing to say,

there can be some mechanism by which someone would, again, quote, leave their body and be able to observe themselves as if from above. Now, we know that when people dissociate, often in traumatic situations, they will often describe, it was like I was floating on the ceiling. I'm going to put that in one category.

What you are talking about and what was presented to you was not just leaving her body. She was saying that she had the ability, her consciousness had the ability to move through space and time. Right. As you said, when people dissociate, they say, it's as if I left my body. And these patients were not saying as if. They were saying, I did leave my body. It was no doubt in their mind.

I'm curious about her emotional experience. Was it strange to her that she had this information? It just kind of, she poured it off, did that evaluation. Also, she could go anywhere, but she's checking in to see what's on your tie? This is why I don't like talking about this case, Jonathan, because

I didn't know what I was doing at the time. I was fresh out of medical school. I'd never heard of NDEs. I didn't know how to investigate a case. I didn't know there was a case. I just knew this was a patient who needed some help. If I were doing that now, I would have tracked down all the possible ways she could have understood this, could have found this out. Was there a nurse in the cafeteria who saw me and then happened to be working in the intensive care unit the next morning who

all different possibilities, but I didn't know enough to investigate the case at that time. So I don't consider this case proof of anything other than my being totally flustered by this example.

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So what you then proceeded to embark on over, forgive me, half a century was a systematic clinical analysis and understanding of this experience from a physiological level, from a spiritual level, and from a psychological level as well, right? Yes. These are the kind of three components. So what you ended up doing and, you know, the data that you have collected is

has tried to quantify and qualify what is happening. And I want to say that one of your chapters is like, is this real? And I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a framework because we've talked to Jeffrey Kripal a few times who talks about thinking impossibly, right? What does it mean to say, I'm not just going to brush that off. I'm not just going to say that's hogwash. When you think about these experiences,

How do you frame them in terms of our understanding of science? Because, as you point out in the book and as many of us talk about, people used to think that the notion of germs was insane. Like, you could be stoned to death for saying there's these things that fly around and they go in your orifices and then you get sick. Right? Meteors, right? I mean, talk a little bit about the framework of what's real.

Right. Well, like you said, we've had crazy ideas throughout the centuries that turned out to be perfectly true. Quantum physicists now say, yes, it's crazy, but it still works. You know, I look at these things and I say, well, there's no doubt they happen. I've talked to thousands of people who've had this experience, and they say that it's more real to them than talking to me is. There's a sense of ultimate reality to them about these experiences.

I haven't had one. So all I know about them is what these patients tell me, not patients, these people, most of them are not patients, what they tell me. And for better or worse, what they tell me is filtered through their brains. Our ability to speak, our ability to remember is all filtered through our brains. So you can't divorce what they're telling me from the functioning of the brain. The question is,

How much of it is controlled by the brain? Is the experience itself caused by the brain or just the remembering of it or just the telling of it? That's difficult to answer because we can't keep talking to people without their brains. So we looked at a variety of hypotheses that might explain what's going on in the brain that might allow people to have these experiences and/or remember them and talk about them. And most of the simple explanations like lack of oxygen to the brain, erratic heart rates,

drugs given to patients and so forth, they all turned out to be not proven by the data. The data contradicted all of them. So we didn't have an explanation. Now that doesn't mean to scientists that there is no explanation. It means we haven't found it yet and it may be someday we'll find it. This is what's been called promissory materialism, which means we can't identify it now, but we will someday. I gotta say that's not a scientific position.

because it cannot ever be disproven. You can always say, oh, next year or next century, we'll get it. You can never disprove that. Therefore, it's not scientific. It's a legitimate philosophical stance, but it's not a scientific statement. And I want to get into some of the science. I want to talk about some of the theories around filtering.

around kind of a down regulation of activity. You know, we can't help but reference the fact that people who have transcendental experiences, some of which are psychedelically induced, but not all of them are, we do know some things about what happens in the brain

when we experience the kind of things you're talking about, this notion of things feeling very real, feeling very crystallized, that the sort of default mode network, as it were, shuts down. And what is kind of left is what many of us say, like, maybe that's like the real me. Before we get into some of that science, can you talk about what are people experiencing? People seem to always go to a garden. That's a thing.

Well, you know, when you ask somebody what happened in the near-death experience, they almost always say, I can't tell you. There are no words for it. It can't be described. And then we say, great, tell me about it. So we make them use metaphors. And the metaphors that they tell us, they get from their cultural background, their religious background. So although the phenomena they report are the same around the world and going back to ancient Greece and Rome,

The cultural background of these people will determine how they describe it to us. Let me give you some examples. People all over the world will talk about encountering a warm, loving being of light that makes them feel welcomed and forgiven and just loved, unconditionally loved. And if you talk to people who are in the Western world, they may call this God or Christ. If you talk to people who are Hindu or Buddhist, they won't use those words. And even people here will tell me,

I'm going to say God so you know what I'm talking about, but this is not the God I was taught about in church. It's much bigger than that. Now most people will talk about going through a long dark enclosed space to get from this physical world to the other realm, whatever it is. And in the US they use the word tunnel. I went through a tunnel to get from here to there. People in third world countries don't have a lot of tunnels. They may say I went into a cave or I fell into a well.

I interviewed one fellow who was a truck driver who said, "I went through this long tailpipe." So, these little metaphors come to them, but it's the same basic phenomenon they're talking about. Some sort of transition, some like the worlds are separate or these realms are separate and there's some sort of transitionary mechanism. It almost doesn't matter what it is, but there is the world of the physicality that they know and understand and then they're transported into something else.

Exactly. And you hear this in all sorts of mystical experiences, whether it's caused by NDEs, near-death experiences, or by drugs, or by meditation. They have this experience here in this world and the experience in the other world, and no way to explain how they got from one to the other. It's just sort of black to them. So they say, I went through this dark space. So there's an element of indescribability.

which is also a hallmark when you hear certain reports of hallucinogenic experiences. This is one of the kind of markers is like, if you can explain it, it wasn't this level of deep that we're talking about. It's a different level of deep. So we have this sort of indescribability. We have this sort of like hyper realism is the only way to describe it.

some sort of transition and being greeted by something that is warm, that conveys unconditional love, it's some sort of light entity.

A lot of people do experience a lot of vibrancy in colors. You know, we've spoken to Elizabeth Crone, who had an NDE after being struck by lightning, and she explains a garden experience. But I noticed a lot of the stories do call on that kind of imagery of trees and lushness. Like, is this a nature component that is present in these experiences? What is it?

Well, again, I think it's a culturally determined thing that people will describe whatever they can think of that will explain the feeling they had over there. And for many of them, that's being back in nature, whether it's a garden or a forest or a meadow. You know, people often talk about a barrier they have to pass between this world and the other world. And people here often talk about a gate or a door.

And people in Japan often talk about crossing a river. So whatever metaphor your culture says is a barrier or the border is what you use to describe it. So I don't think these words describe literally what they experience. It's a figurative description of what they experienced, what they felt. And many people have their heart stop.

for many different reasons. You know, the cases in here range from, you know, adverse reactions to a C-section to people having, you know, farm equipment land on them, car accidents, drownings. The thing that these people have in common is that their heart stops at some point. What is the percentage of people who experience that, at least by your kind of clinical assessment, that are experiencing NDEs?

If you do studies of entire cohorts of patients in a hospital who have documented cardiac arrest, their heart stopped, you get between 10 and 20% reporting a near-death experience. And this has been documented in studies in the US, in the UK, in Germany, in Belgium. And you get the same figures, between 10 and 20%, depending on how you define the near-death experience. And again, this is the number of people who will willingly talk to you about it.

there may be more who aren't willing to talk about it for various reasons talk a little bit about what we can understand you know obviously the study of the brain has changed so much since that first patient of yours to now can you talk a little bit about

what the neurophysiology is that might be facilitating this kind of experience. There's a lot of talk about the temporal lobe, which is a very sexy lobe as they go. Talk a little bit about what do we know in terms of anatomy, in terms of functionality that might be contributing to a consciousness experience like this? Yeah, there are lots of hypotheses and some have been tested, some we don't have the technology to test yet.

When I started doing this work, we had EEGs, electroencephalograms. There were MRIs, certainly there were X-rays. And now we have so many more techniques from functional MRIs to near infrared spectroscopy that we just didn't have back then. And more sophisticated computer algorithms for analyzing EEGs and MRIs that we didn't have back then.

though there are whole new areas of neurophysiology that are available to us now that we didn't have back then. Nevertheless, we're constantly being surprised when we find we're not finding consistent patterns among near-death experiencers. Most of the work has been done on neurophysiology of psychedelic drug experiences because you can control those. And what we're finding is surprising. We have thought that the way these drugs produce these mystical states is by stimulating the brain to hallucinate.

and what we find is the exact opposite these drugs dampen down the brain there is less activity going on in the brain less connection between different parts of the brain uh and that seems to fly in the face of the idea that the brain is causing these experiences it's more like the brain is getting out of the way so you can have these experiences and that's what happens in near-death experiences as well and nd ears will say once i left my brain i was free

to experience these things again and now that i'm back inside my brain i have trouble remembering all the details we haven't really been able to do eeg studies of people having near-death experiences because we're trying to get them back to back to life again but there are studies of people who have sort of tried to get people to uh recall their near-death experience while they're having their brains imaged to see maybe what parts of the brain are being activated

And what we found to no one's surprise is that almost the entire brain is being activated. You've got auditory stimulation, you've got visual, you've got tactile, you've got memory. So all parts of the brain are being activated. So you can't say this is where it occurs. There's a lot of attention, as you mentioned, to the temporal lobe, particularly the temporal parietal junction. There's this story that if you stimulate that part of the brain, you'll get an out-of-body experience.

I have yet to see any evidence of that. Most of this goes back to Wilder Penfield, who back in the 50s, he's a Canadian neurosurgeon, started mapping out the whole brain. And these maps we have now of what parts of the brain do what all come from Wilder Penfield. And of the 1,600 patients who he tested in this way, two of them

reported something like an out-of-body experience when he stimulated the temporal lobe. I say something like an out-of-body because they didn't really report that. What did they say? Tell us. One said, it's almost as if I'm leaving my body. The other one said, it's as if I'm half in and half out. And that was it.

Now, there have been a lot of people now, there's a very active group in Switzerland that are doing studies with primarily people who have seizures, and they stimulate the temporal lobe and claim that they see out-of-body experiences. But they're not like the spontaneous out-of-body experiences you see in NDEs and other situations.

you know, as the patient that we started this with, she claimed to have left her body and gone down the hall and heard things going on from other perspective. And she was right. The people that have their brains stimulated in the temporal lobe, they say things like, it's as if I'm leaving my body or I feel like I'm sliding off the table or I feel like my legs are getting shorter. And they call all these things out-of-body experiences. They never, their consciousness never leaves the body.

they may on occasion see an image of their like a double of themselves above but they're not seeing from that doubles perspective they're seeing still from their own eyes perspective if they close their eyes that image goes away they never report saying things accurately from out of body perspective and the image they see doesn't move around it's just a static like a painting of yourself whereas in

the out-of-body experience with near-death experiences, the consciousness is no longer in the body, it's in that other image of them, looking back at the body and seeing things accurately from a different visual perspective. And it can move around, it can go to different places, and it's quite different from the stimulation you have, which produces certainly a somatic illusion, but nothing like an out-of-body experience.

We're going to get to consciousness and how it could be out there in a minute. But I do want to mention that you give a special shout out to ketamine. And ketamine obviously is a drug that can be used as a party drug and it can be abused. It's very, very dangerous and it is not something that we recommend for trying to recreate this. But there are circumstances when it is administered and in...

In many cases, what you talk about is that there's something common in that kind of chemical experience that seems to be replicating what's happening. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? There are several different psychedelic drugs that can produce something similar to a near-death experience. Ketamine is one of them. Salfi or Sage is another one.

psilocybin is another one. And all these drugs operate by different mechanisms in the brain. So it doesn't really help you understand what's going on in the brain when this happens. Carl Janssen was a neuropsychiatrist who first popularized the idea that ketamine is producing these near-death experiences. He was working at the Maslow Clinic in England at the time. Now he's back in his home in New Zealand.

And he wrote several papers in mainstream medical journals about the ketamine model of near-death experiences. And at the end of 12 years of studying this, he wrote a paper saying that he no longer believes that ketamine causes near-death experiences. He says, I tend to believe now that our mind exists before we're born and persists after we die. And what ketamine does is open the door to that experience. It doesn't cause it.

It's just one more door to get to that experience. So I think that's why you have different psychedelic drugs that work by different mechanisms that can be associated with a near-death experience. They're not causing it, they're opening the door to it. And there are many ways of opening the door. And coming close to death, having your brain go offline is one way to do that.

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Let's take a moment and do a little recap here because you shared a lot of pretty substantial information. The first piece I want to retouch on is the idea of calming the brain and actually reducing activity because this is a fundamental shift in the research and understanding of the phenomenon. We used to think that it was an activation of certain parts of the brain causing hallucination. Can you talk about the

profoundness of

Because it leads to many other quite expansive ideas. If we're slowing down the activity of the brain and removing, you know, I'll say this, it's not quite the right word, but like the confines of the mind, then we're able to access some other fundamental reality beyond what our waking or conscious state is. This idea has been around for centuries. Hippocrates wrote about it 2,000 years ago.

He said the brain is the messenger or the interpreter of the mind. The mind is not the brain. And in fact, if you look at what happens in evolution, our bodies developed to help us survive in the physical world. And our brains did also, being a physical organ. So you have all this stimulation coming at you from outside. And some of it's important to keep you healthy to survive, and some of it is not.

For example, there are all sorts of electromagnetic wavelengths that we don't see as light because they're not important to us. We just see a small portion of it.

and we filter out the rest of it. Your eye is not able to process those other ultraviolet and infrared waves, which other animals can, because it's important to them. Likewise, we don't hear sounds that bats do, that dolphins do, that dogs do, because they're not important to us. We just see, we just hear a small range of frequencies that are relevant to us.

So it makes sense that the brain would limit cognitive thoughts that are not relevant to our survival. Now, if you imagine that the mind is not in the brain, that it is somewhere else, and I want to come back to that because that's important. Where is it? If the mind is out there and is experiencing all this mystical world with deities, with deceased loved ones, all this kind of stuff, when that information comes through the brain, the brain filters it out.

It doesn't help you find food and shelter, animate and avoid predators. It just gets in the way. So your brain just lets in those things that are important in the physical world and it pushes out the rest. When you take psychedelic drugs or when you have a near-death experience or come close to death in a variety of other ways, and I want to talk about that too, what happens is the brain's filtering function starts shutting down and lets in all this other stuff which had been considered as irrelevant.

and you can experience all this mystical world. Now, this has been described throughout the centuries, and we describe it differently based on what the current technology is. Back in several hundred years ago, they talked about the brain being like a prism, which takes all these different wavelengths and comes out with one white light. Back in the late 1800s, they talked about it being a reducing valve of a steam valve.

You know, you have all the steam coming up and it's going to explode the whole thing if you just let it through. So you reduce it to a small channel. People talked when we developed radio and television, they talked about you've got hundreds and hundreds of television stations that are all broadcasting at the same time. If you listen to all of them, you wouldn't be able to understand any of it. So you need a television set that will not only receive the signals, but filter the irrelevant ones out so you only have one to pay attention to.

And if you didn't have that, you wouldn't be able to understand any of it. So you need the television set to understand the program. Does that mean the television is creating the program? No. It's out there and the television is just interpreting it for you. The idea is that the brain is like that. It's not creating the thoughts. It's translating the thoughts into chemical and electrical signals your body can understand. And it's filtering out those that it doesn't want you to be distracted by.

So then the next building block from that sequence of ideas is number one, what is a more ultimate reality? And two,

How can we access that for benefit in this world, not just as evidence that it exists? Because it feels like a lot of these NDEs are signals to our collective humanity that there is more than simply the material world. But if the brain is programming us for some reason to limit the signal in order to survive, then it feels like we're at this very interesting stage

cross-section of the human experience whereby we know that there's more out there, people are accessing in a variety of different ways, but it's not fundamental or hadn't been fundamental to our survival, but it could be argued that now it is because it could bring us back some sort of peace, tranquility, insight, information for the next evolution of what humans are going through. When I talk about the filters, I'm talking in abstract terms. So what is the filter? Where is it?

And in fact, there are people who are doing research on the brain right now to find where is this filter? And it turns out there are several filters in the brain. There's the default mode network that you mentioned, Mayim. There's the thalamocortical loop that limits your attention. For example, people who are listening to this are paying attention to our voices. They're not paying attention to the rain hitting the roof or the car honking horn outside.

and there's a thalamocortical system that limits the outside stimulation and just lets you focus on what you want, what's important to you right now. And there's several of these different filters in the brain that limit your attention. So what is this outside input? Where is it coming from? You know, basically, where is the mind? And unfortunately, we can't ask that question because we're saying the mind is a non-physical entity. If it's not physical,

How can it have a physical location? You can't ask where it is. It's like asking what color is this odor? You can't answer it. And if you ask where is the mind, you can't, it's not aware. So most people who have these experiences, these mystical experiences say it's not really out there somewhere. It's right here. It's another aspect of what we have right here. It's not physical, so we can't measure it like we measure physical things.

and our brain being evolved to help us deal with the physical world doesn't understand it. But it's part of us just as much as our fingers and toes and our physical bodies are part of us. We can't ask where, but we can describe the landscape of what, what's involved. Some people have described a lack of filter actually as psychosis.

You mentioned these people accessing dead relatives. If all of our ancestry is in this non-physical realm that is accessible as our filters reduce, that can be totally overwhelming if we can't parse through it all.

What else is there? Angels? Demons? We don't know the whole landscape. That's right. And we try to use our physical science to make sense of this all. And I'm not sure that we can. We can help though. For example, many people will describe in a near-death experience meeting their deceased loved ones. If that's all they say, and maybe describe some pleasant interaction with them,

We can say, oh, this is just expectation, wishful thinking. You feel like you're dying. Of course, you want to meet your deceased grandmother. So you imagine meeting her. We can't do much of that in terms of physical science. However, if they say, I met my father over there in that other realm. And as far as anyone knows, your father is still alive in the next town. And then you find out the father died a few minutes before he had his near-death experience.

How do you explain that in terms of physical science? And yet we have documentation that it really happens. So we have a variety of ways we can document that these things really do happen to us only because of the way they affect us, the way they affect our speech and our behavior. This is not a surprising thing. Look, we have emotions. Nobody doubts we have emotions. Can you see or feel or touch an emotion? No. But you know it's there because it affects how you think, how you feel,

how you look, how your facial expression is, how much your body tenses up or relaxes. So we can infer from these physical things that someone's having a certain emotion, whether it's hatred, fear, love. Same way with these mystical thoughts. We can't measure them directly, but we can look at how they affect us and make inferences about them. This is what subatomic physicists do with particles that are too small to be able to see directly.

and too short-lived, and you can't really observe them. But you can shoot them through a bubble chamber full of liquid nitrogen and see the path that they left in the nitrogen, and from that infer their size and their speed and their charge. Same way with emotions and same way with the mystical world. We understand them because of the effects they have on our physical world, which we can measure. One of the incredible contributions you've made to this field is

combining ancient, in many cases, ancient mystical traditions with the experiences that people are having. And Jeffrey Kripal obviously does this, and he was able to sort of explain to Elizabeth Crone why the things she was describing have existed for thousands of years. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about Kundalini energy.

Now, many people might be familiar with Kundalini energy or the word Kundalini from Kundalini yoga, which is a tradition that has also received a lot of attention because of some controversies in the community. This notion of Kundalini rising, this is like one of the things that you're supposed to achieve with this practice. But you've contributed to an understanding of Kundalini rising

As it relates to a physiological and in many cases, a mystical experience, can you talk about how Kundalini energy relates to NDEs? I did go through a period in which I thought it was going to be helpful. Kundalini is a Hindu concept. Some say it goes back thousands of years, but there's some debate about that. It really didn't become popular until the 1800s. And then people in the West knew about it.

uh and it's really hard to track down how far back it goes but the concept is of a a vital energy that rises from the base of your spine basically up through up to the top of your head and there's even a center that's above your head um but these things do not correspond necessarily to anatomic features in our bodies we say we're coming up the spine because it's roughly in that area but it's not the spine and

For a while, I was looking into this with a group of other people who were Kundalini researchers trying to see whether it has some applicability or ability to explain near-death experiences. And the more I got into it, the less helpful I found it to be. What it really did was just give us a different language for describing the same things, but didn't explain anything. There was no mechanism that was applicable to what we know in Western science.

so i eventually gave up on trying to use kundalini energy to explain that there are some comparisons between kundalini energy and a sense of of the holy ghost um the holy spirit coming down uh in in the christian tradition interesting that the christian tradition has the holy the holy spirit coming down from the top and going down whereas kundalini is going up i'm not sure it makes any difference other than this that's what the culture describes it as

The reason that this is also so, you know, kind of fascinating to me is because it does allow us, though, a bridge into trying to understand

some of the ways that certain people or certain individuals can have access to these experiences. So I'm very interested in, and Jonathan and I are both very interested in, not necessarily these experiences when you almost die or when you die and you come back, but what does it mean to live as a person understanding that this consciousness is

can exist outside of our physical body. And I think we've all, you know, either heard of or interacted with people or Jonathan and I have been friends with, you know, people who claim that they don't have that filtering mechanism and that they are aware throughout the day, throughout their lives of something else that is there. These people are in our culture dismissed as crazy.

And many of them kind of live in isolated pockets or communities where people do trust them, believe them and rely on them, often for guidance. But what we know is this is not just something that happens in Sedona, you know, or in Santa Cruz. This is something that for thousands of years there have been people who have been declared shamans and healers and guides.

who have said, "I can perceive things that you cannot. I can see energy around you." And we had Thomas Campbell on who said one session of Transcendental Meditation and he saw the cotton candy connecting everything around him, right? So I wonder if you could talk a little bit and, you know, using kind of this notion of the research you did or the work that you did, you know, into understanding this. What does it mean for us as human beings living

to know that for thousands of years, people have accessed this. And there are people walking among us who have direct access to an experience that we have to believe is true. Their consciousness does not live in your mind or in your body. Well, as you said, there are a lot of people who are psychotic, who don't have the filters and talk as if they're accessing a spiritual reality. They may not put it in those terms. In fact, they often don't.

but we call them psychotic when they're not able to function in the physical world, when they are so consumed by this other reality, whether it's real or not, the other reality to them, that they can't function. And those things are treatable with antipsychotic medications, and we can bring those people back into contact with what we call reality. In contrast, people who have mystical experiences and are still able to function in this world

are not changed by being given antipsychotic medications. They still have a firm belief in this other mystical world. Now, one of the things I've looked at in the last 50 years is how these experiences change people's lives. And it changes everything, their attitudes, beliefs, values, how they spend their lives. For some people, it doesn't change them a whole lot. If they were very spiritual to begin with, they may not change a whole lot. But if they were diehard materialists or what we call evil people,

they are changed greatly. You know, I've talked to people who were on death row who had a near-death experience through a heart attack or something else being attacked, and they have a near-death experience and are totally transformed by that and end up being helpful to other inmates in trying to convert them and to make them better people. I've also talked to people who

were good people but lived uh violent lives either police officers or military officers who after a near-death experience could not go back to that line of work they could not stand the idea of hurting someone else even in self-defense and they couldn't continue in that work i've also known people who were in cutthroat businesses who came back from a near-death experience saying it doesn't make sense to get ahead of someone else's expense because we're all in this together

I'm the same as you. If I hurt you, I'm hurting myself as well. I mean, this is why Timothy Leary said that LSD was made illegal, right? Because people who have had these experiences cannot be sent to war to kill people that they don't know. Right. Now, this doesn't mean they can't function in the world. It means they function differently in the world.

And certainly marriages break up because of this. People change their careers. They often go into helping professions, you know, medical care, teaching, social work, clergy, something like this. Angels, they become angels. Do you notice any other similarities between the experience that people bring back in terms of how they change? Yeah, the most pervasive change you hear is that they are no longer afraid of death. No matter what they thought of death before going into the NDE, they are not afraid of it coming out.

We haven't mentioned this, but some people, a small minority, have unpleasant experiences. Often they're frightened by all these leaving the body. They're terrified about that and going to another realm. It's frightening for them. And yet when they come back, they're not afraid of death anymore because they've been there, they're back, and they feel, I'm safe, I'm okay. And if they feel they had a bad experience, maybe they want to change their lives so they have a better experience next time, but they're not afraid of death anymore.

that's the most pervasive thing you hear they also say i'm much more spiritual than i was before they do not mean religious by that they may go back to their religion of origin or they may not they may more often say i see this the value in every religion i can go into any church or temple or mosque and feel at home there or i can go out into the woods and feel at home there it's all the same spiritual environment for me

But what they mean by spiritual is more connected to other people, to animals, to plants, to the natural world, to the divine, that we're all part of the same thing. People talk about when they're in a near-death experience, they have this sense of oneness with everything. And some have used the analogy of being like a wave in the ocean.

For a while, you have a distinct structure as a wave, which are made of the same stuff as the rest of the ocean. And after a while, the wave folds back into the ocean and disappears as a separate entity, and it becomes part of the ocean. Other people use the example of a hand and say the five fingers look like they're separate entities. But if you cut one, the whole hand hurts, and they're all part of the same thing. So they feel a sense of being connected in a very basic way to everyone else.

I mean, it's beautiful. It's really the most profound and universal insight across all cultures. Yes, across all cultures. I wonder if we can sort of double-click on this consciousness thing. For many people, they can understand, I have a brain. It's, you know, all this tissue, and it's up there, and it weighs this amount, and it looks like this, and it has these different structures. And if we're really boiling it down in kind of simplest terms,

People can understand that we are interacting and we have thoughts and we can experience things that describe what we're seeing, feeling, hearing, right? Using all of our senses. But when we talk about the kind of consciousness that would exist in a room where your body is not,

we're entering a very different conversation for which we do not have a scientific explanation. We just don't. Or a language. Or a language, right? And so, you know, we can look to not just Einstein and not just, you know, relativity and quantum mechanics, but we can look to the originators of even the physics world that Einstein was able to evolve in.

And there are certain things that are inexplicable. And there are certain things that for you as a doctor, we are going to ask you to try and explain.

And I mean, it's phenomenologically impossible to imagine that one would go to medical school and learn all the things that you had to learn to become a doctor and then be presented with the fact that consciousness, this amorphous thing, may exist in some collective entity. How do you make sense of it? Way back in the 60s and 70s, when I was going through college and medical school, I was told that one third...

of what you're taught in medical school is totally wrong. The problem is we don't know which third it is. So we kind of know, we're told, don't take all this as gospel. This is our best understanding as of now. When you look at the science of a hundred years ago, we laugh at some of the things they believed. And I'm sure people a hundred years from now will laugh at what we believe. So how can you say that we understand X, Y, or Z?

We don't. We have the best explanation we can have right now for it, but we don't pretend that it's the truth. This is the best model we have. And that's what science is. It's getting better and better models that can improve on the ones we had last year or last decade. We don't really know what's going on and how we conceive of consciousness is different. Whether we can even talk about consciousness is different from decade to decade.

But I want you to talk about it now because there's this thing in certain circles called the Akashic Records, right? And it's mentioned in many traditions. It's mentioned in the Kabbalistic tradition. It's mentioned in, I believe, Hindu traditions. It's mentioned in several traditions as a way to explain a consciousness that exists collectively that you're...

somehow, again, I don't know, somehow able to access or as Elizabeth Crone describes it from her NDE, that time was like a six layer cake. You could just slice into it. You're experiencing things that have happened, that will happen. The Old Testament description of the name of God is was, is, and will be, right? It's the notion of an eternal, all existing consciousness that always was, always is, and always will be.

How do you make sense of that in terms of what you know, what you were trained to understand, and what you've experienced with thousands of people? You know, most people who have near-death experiences say something about, there was all the knowledge of the world available to me back then when I was in that other state. All I had to do was ask and I would be shown everything. But I was also told that I wouldn't be able to remember it all when I came back. And, you know, some take that as a...

a moral imperative or you know you're being punished you can't remember but in fact our brains can't handle it we can't process it so of course we're not going to understand it now i don't know about the akashic records things like that we tend to think of it now as the the computing cloud it's a massive of data that exists out there but it's not consciousness per se it's not conscious of itself it's just the data

And is the Akashic Records just another metaphor like the cloud is? Or is there really something out there? You know, people in a near-death experience often say that I was one with God. In other words, I had merged my consciousness with the universal consciousness, the God consciousness. People have tried looking at multi-dimensional models. You know, if you're

a two-dimensional figure on a plane you can't imagine being on the third dimension looking down at the second at the first dimension in the same way there may be five six seven eight dimensions and we can't possibly imagine them because we're stuck here in three-dimensional concept a british physicist uh has written a lot about the hyper-dimensional models of consciousness and what that mean mean for things like near-death experiences where you're

taken out of this three-dimensional world and put into a multi-dimensional world and from that perspective you see everything but when you're back here you're no longer in that hyperdimensional world and you're stuck with what we have here when you met that young woman who had come out of

A lack of consciousness. And she knew things. She knew specific things about what you were wearing. Not just basic things like she could have guessed. You might have said to her roommate, what pills did she take? Right. Right. But we're talking about she explained this. This is throughout the book and throughout the thousands of cases that that that you have explored.

I'm asking, I'm drilling down. I'm not Oprah here. I'm not going to be gentle. I'm drilling down on this. How do you like if I'm sitting and I'm having a cocktail with you and I say to you, how do you explain that that woman knew things that were happening in a place that her body and brain were not? What is it?

The answer, Mayim, is that I don't have an explanation for it. But that's okay. But what are the possibilities? Like she's floating in some ocean of consciousness? Like what? How do you even articulate it? You could assume that her consciousness isn't limited by the brain unless you're in the brain. I mean, we think now that we are our brains. You said before we have a brain. It feels to us like we are our brains. But who's telling you that? Your brain is.

but if you get beyond that so bossy yeah i mean you can you can you can speculate that maybe she left her body and her consciousness moved somewhere else you can speculate that she didn't actually leave but she was able to access what was going on in a different location you can say that she accessed some akashic record that had the information about that you know there's lots of different different hypotheses but they're not they're not testable right

So we don't really know. And why is she focused on your stained tie instead of merging with God and hanging out in the garden? That's a great question, Jonathan. She didn't mention to me anything about anything beyond the physical, the physical environment. Now, does that mean she didn't have it? I didn't know to ask her those questions back then.

uh if i had i don't know whether she would have not i've talked a lot of people who just just remain in the operating room and don't see things elsewhere i've talked to people who did both who saw things in the physical world and then also went elsewhere also i think it depends a lot and we know this from you know from a lot of the clinical studies with with psilocybin and like we know this even from some of the studies with lsd and ketamine

It depends a tremendous amount on what is going on in your psyche. Like there's all sorts of other things in terms of the, let's say the negative experiences that some people have. And like my rotten luck, that'll be me. I'll be like, I had the opportunity to like be one with God. And instead it was just like pasta falling on the floor all day out of the pot.

You were cowering underneath a table while God was trying to show you the secrets of the universe. No, but I don't think that it's not like you have an NDE and you're necessarily saying, I'm going to pursue this. It's an experience that happens because of, and I can't help it, because of what's going on in the brain, what the experience is and kind of where you're going. But it's not necessarily something that's directed. Right.

Some people seem to feel as if their near-death experience was specifically designed for them, for what they needed. Some people come back with a sense of being accepted and forgiven, which is what they needed. Others wanted different things from it. And does that mean that they were given forgiveness?

what some overlord thought they needed? What does it mean that they participated in creating the experience for themselves? I don't know. We're limited to what they tell us about it. And maybe it's what they remember that's relevant to them, what their psyche has them remember of it, the experience. Because clearly they don't remember everything that happened to them. We're talking about not what they experienced, not even what they remember what they experienced.

Not even what they remember and can put into words that they experienced, but what they put, remember and put into words and choose to tell us. And there are a lot of barriers there. So we can't access what really happened to them.

Has there been a noticeable difference between the impact that people have who have gone off into the garden and connected with a larger god or consciousness versus the people who have hung out in the operating room? Do they come back more changed depending on the experience? We don't have the evidence for that at this point. You can imagine what it might be. Yeah. But when you look at... You have to look at thousands of people to sort out these answers.

And there's no simple answer to it. Some people, the experience of just leaving the body is enough of a mind blowing experience that it totally blows their mind and they don't know what to do with that. And it changes all their thoughts and perceptions of it. So you can't say that you need to have an experience of the light or of God or of

X, Y, or Z in order to have an effect. I've known people who had what seemed to be very "shallow" near-death experiences who were totally changed by it. So you can't really say that. Can we talk for a second about extrasensory ability? Elizabeth Krohn came back from her near-death experience with precognitive abilities, like a whole vast host of extrasensory ability.

Is there commonality between people who have near-death experience and the transformation when they come back? Is there a pattern of extrasensory ability amongst these people? It is. It's not by any means universal, but many people feel that once the filter has been loosened, it never quite goes back to where it was before. Once the door is open, it doesn't quite close again.

and they still have access to other things as well. Now, they're back here in this body with this brain, and the brain may start filtering these things out again. But for some people, like Elizabeth, they still get these hints of something going on. And from time to time, Elizabeth has sent me an email with a prediction of what's going to happen. And then a week later, I'll get another email from her with a link to the newspaper article that describes what happened, exactly the way she described it.

I've had other people who have done the same thing. They've given me predictions and then tell me when they're when they're corroborated. Now, often they're not precise. For example, the best one that Elizabeth told me was about a plane that was going to crash. And she had the color of the plane and the number of people on the plane and how it was tilted and if it hit a bridge, but she didn't know where it was.

She said it was going to be a warm place in Asia. She didn't know where. And that's the type of thing you hear. You don't know where it is. I don't want to be so picky. If someone says there's going to be a plane crash and even vaguely is kind, I know they crash a lot, but not so much. Like even that is enough for me to kind of prick up my ears. If you're telling me if there's a number of people.

Like, I know math. Like, there's a lot of numbers and I get like there's only so many people that could be on a plane. So you're dealing with there's a there's a ceiling effect and there's a floor effect. But still, I don't necessarily know that I need to know which country it's in for me to be like something's going on here.

Right. The problem is we don't know the denominator in this equation. We don't know how many inaccurate predictions there were. But you know what? If everything that was, is, and will be is in theory out there and people are accessing it, I don't know that for me it disproves anything to say how many times were they wrong. Because you know what? If there's eight dimensions of consciousness, those planes could be crashing in all the other dimensions. I got no problem with this. Like...

It comes down to what you are comfortable believing and what you're not. Because I mean, there are a lot of things that I can believe, but I still want to find evidence to show my fellow scientists. I'll keep looking for that evidence. Well, this is the perfect tee up because I very much and we all very much appreciate your scientific rigor and search to explain things scientifically.

I'm curious if you're comfortable with what your belief is having, you know, privately that may encourage scientific pursuit, but you know, when you think about the ability to have precognitive abilities, what do you personally make of that? Well, I don't make much of it. I don't understand it. But here's the difference that studying near-death experiences has made for me. When I started this,

I was a very strict materialist scientist. I knew that we would eventually understand everything. And when I didn't understand things, it may be uncomfortable. Now I'm quite comfortable with not having the answers. I know there are things that we don't have the data for. Even if we did, our brains couldn't understand them. So I think there are things that our language and or our brains cannot understand. And that's okay with me because I also understand.

believe, not 100% belief, based on what near-death experiences have told me that the universe is basically a friendly place and we don't need to be in control and have all the answers in order to be safe here. Now there's certainly a lot of bad things going on in the world and we're going to have a lot of suffering but that doesn't mean that ultimately there isn't more good and that we will end up in a good place eventually. So I kind of have that faith and I

I'm comfortable not knowing for sure what the answer is. So one of the things that Elizabeth does talk about in her book and many others talk about, and it's an uncomfortable component of talking about near-death experiences and dissociative states in general, many people have suggested that people who are able to dip into this may have some previous experience, either with trauma or with

experiences with dissociation that allow them access that other people do not have. You know, some people can have a really good trip on psilocybin and some people can be sent to the ER is what I teach my teenagers.

Is there something about the human experience when in trauma or when kind of forced to exercise a dissociative state that might make some people more likely to not just experience NDEs, but to be able to tap into this? Well, anytime you have an experience like this, it opens the door to have more experiences later on. That doesn't mean you will, but you have the capability of doing that.

And many people, particularly in childhood, who are repeatedly traumatized, whether by physical abuse or by psychological trauma, develop this psychological defense of dissociation to get away from the situation. And that sort of teaches them how to do it, how to leave your body, either physically or just emotionally leave your body and experience some safer consciousness.

So is it that in NDEs, is the experience of possibly dying a trauma that might lead to a dissociative state, or is it separate? I think in some cases it is a trauma, but it's not always a trauma. Sometimes the near-death event is not traumatic. It's peaceful, and yet they still have the same experience. I think the common denominator is the brain being shut down when we were in other.

One of the most famous cases that many of us know about is Eben Alexander, the neurosurgeon who woke up

with a really, really bad headache and ended up having a near-death experience. You were the person that he came to, I believe, two years later. His son encouraged him when he went through this to not read anything about NDEs but to simply catalog what he experienced so that he wouldn't be influenced or that anyone might accuse him of simply lifting information that's already in the literature.

His experience about a guide that he had during his near-death experience kind of knocked me off my chair. Can you talk about this particular instance of an NDE having a really otherworldly component? Yeah, his experience had many different components. Part of it was a very...

earthly brain delirium type of an experience and parts were more typically near-death experience. And the part that you're referring to is he felt himself in this other world, a beautiful environment, and he was essentially riding on the wings of a butterfly, of course, is that metaphorical. And there was a beautiful woman there with him who didn't say anything in words, but communicated to him that he was unconditionally loved and that everything was okay, he didn't have to worry about anything.

and he spent a lot of time in this environment with her. Of course, time was nonexistent in the experience, but he felt like a lot of time with her. And he had a vivid memory that when he came back, he had been adopted after birth by another family. And it turned out that later on, his birth parents got married and had another family.

that he hadn't known until shortly before his near-death experience. And he had met the parents and one of their children, a sister of his. And shortly after his near-death experience, some months after, the sister told him that there was another sister who had died in a car accident several years earlier. And she sent him a picture of this other sister. And he recognized it as the woman in his near-death experience who was on the butterfly wing with him.

And that for him was a tremendous confirmation that this really happened, that I was with that deceased sister of mine. Those of us who weren't there with him on the butterfly wing don't know that that was really who was there. Maybe after he saw the picture, he said, oh, that must be who it was. And, you know, we have no way of knowing because no one knows what he saw except he himself. I mean, it's things like that that also...

there's been so many cases of people reporting these things and it's interesting that when dr alexander had this experience it really brought us a different flavor of understanding ndes jill bolte taylor who we've spoken to and you know consider a real friend here um you know jill bolte taylor was a respected you know scientist who you know it it sometimes takes those kinds of things and i guess i sort of wonder if you know these kinds of stories

are happening and are being brought to more of a, you know, a public consciousness, for lack of a better word, so that, you know, people are able to understand there is something going on here that is real. Yes. Yeah. There are increasingly number of professional people, including doctors, neurosurgeons, who are writing books about their own near-death experiences now. I think you're right that it is having an effect on the culture at large.

Also, on a very practical note, it should drastically change how medical care providers are treating people who are unconscious. I hope so. I mean, if you know that your patients may be hearing and seeing what you're doing, that should change their behavior. Right. We assume that people who may not be conscious are in coma states, are not available, not there. But that could absolutely be not the case at all. Right, right.

And not only are doctors and nurses more careful of what they say, but they're now talking to the patient as if the patient were hearing them and encouraging them to get better. At 14, my brother who was 17 at the time, almost 18, was injured in a car accident. He was thrown from a convertible, not wearing a seatbelt, landed on his head, had a traumatic brain injury. They operated.

and he was in a coma for three and a half plus weeks. And during that time period, you know, that he was in the hospital, obviously he was getting cared for by the medical staff, but the family was there all the time. And as a young kid, I looked at him and I was like, he's not in there, but he's somewhere.

And I couldn't describe obviously the mechanism or understanding. It was also a very different time in terms of our collective understanding about consciousness. But it was very clear to me that he was somewhere else. And one of the mechanisms and tools that they used was you have to come in every day and talk to him. And my dad would be like, Daniel, wake up, wake up. Come on, we got to go. We got to go. And it was like they were almost incentivizing him, calling him back, really doing everything they could to

to make the version of him that was lying there almost reconnect to whatever spirit or consciousness that wasn't active at the time or wasn't active in his body at the time. Many people report also not really wanting to come back, meaning they feel saddled by the constriction that we have as physical beings.

So is your encouraging this person to wake up doing them a favor or not? Yeah, I don't know that it really makes a difference. Some people tell me that they were given a choice to come back or not, and they chose to come back. Of course, if they didn't choose to come back, they wouldn't talk to me. But other people said that they were not given a choice. They were just told against their will, you need to go back. So I don't know whether family members saying, come back, come back, really makes a difference.

I have heard people tell me that, that it did, that I was pulled back because they needed me, they wanted me, but I'm not sure that's always a deciding factor. I'm curious about the people who were told they had to come back. Did they argue? Were they like, wait a second? And they just said, no, it's not your time and you can't argue with timing. Yeah.

Before we let you go, I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about sort of what you feel you've been able to provide in sort of the capacity that you've, you know, seen patients and that your practice, you know, expanded out. What do you feel your legacy is in terms of near-death experiences and our understanding it from a clinical perspective?

Well, I think the most important thing is that I've helped to make it possible for people to talk about this experience without being labeled as crazy or stigmatized in other ways. I think that it's acceptable now to talk about near-death experiences, and that's, I think, a big bonus. More lately, I've been getting more excited about teaching medical students, doctors and nurses, about how to deal with their patients who report near-death experiences.

Most of them do not dismiss the experience out of hand. They may have different ideas about what's causing it, whether it's physiological or psychological or spiritual, but they recognize that these things really happen and have profound effects on their patients, and therefore they want to know about them. They often say they want to talk to their patients but don't have enough information to do so.

or they don't have enough time with a patient to go into it. And we're trying to make changes to make that possible, to educate doctors and nurses more about what these experiences are all about and how to help people with them. And very personal question, because of all the work that you do, are you afraid of death? I'm not, but I don't think I ever was. You know, I started off thinking death's at the end, you know, you die and there's nothing there. So what's there to be afraid of?

Now, do you think there's something there? Right. Now, I think there was something there. I have no idea what it is because I know that my metaphors aren't the same as yours or Mayim's. So I don't know what I'm going to experience. Well, thank you so much. Highly recommend After. Really, really beautiful book. And thank you so much for the work that you've done and for all the wonderful physicians also that have benefited from your knowledge. So thank you so much. My pleasure, Mayim. Thank you.

I love how diplomatic he is. Very, like, you ask him about his personal experience, he doesn't have one. He doesn't have a personal perspective. It's what does the data say? No, I think he has a personal perspective, but he's diplomatic in that he can't and won't make any sweeping statements about what it is or what it isn't.

because this isn't like, it's just not the same kind of scientific study that you do where you get to say, this is what caused this or this is what's happening. But what an unbelievable world to live in for 50 years of your life as a professional, to be able to hold that space for, I'm gonna listen to people say things that I have no framework for. I don't know how to frame it. As a scientist, I don't know where to put it. I don't know what it means. I don't know if it's real, but I'm going to engage with it to try and gather data.

It actually takes a very specific person willing and open and comfortable sitting in that level of unknown because most people want to quantify and explain and dismiss. And what he says is he was okay not knowing. That's a tremendous skill set in and of itself. Everything is shifting and changing and it seems like more than ever, every second person on Instagram, their bio says medium. And...

There's an enormous number of people, I think more so than ever, who have learned to adjust the filters and are accessing alter forms of consciousness. And I think this is because number one, the information is more accessible that we can change our brains and that more is available to us. And two, more techniques and tools are

are being taught. More people are meditating, more people are using breath work, more people are using psychedelics, whether you're pro or con that. And I think it starts to crack the veil of what we thought was all that there is into something more. If someone has one experience transcending consciousness, is that enough?

I think when you hang up a shingle of a medium and say, book an appointment, you should have some tools or training in going into that world, accessing that information and bringing back valuable pieces of nuggets that you're then going to help people integrate into their own lives if they don't have the ability to do that for themselves.

Yeah, I also wouldn't want to disparage people who feel that they understand things and can experience things and feel that that's something they share because also, you know, what works for some people doesn't work for others. You know, we talked to, you know, Ophi and Tali, the astrology twins, you know, for a lot of people, that's helpful information. And, you know, sometimes I've been to healers or energy workers and I'm like,

I don't like the way they speak or communicate. How could anyone get anything out of it? And I'll speak to someone else who's like, that was the most profound experience. So it's also like there's so much variability in what people need. And I just think it's really, you're right. There's so much more opening for that. And when more people are meditating, we're increasing the probability that you will be able to tap into something yourself or be open to someone who can help you do that. I want to fly on a butterfly wing.

Maybe we're doing that right now. Maybe this podcast is all happening on a butterfly wing and everyone listening are the guardian angels supporting us. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We sure enjoyed talking to a real legend in this field, Bruce Grayson. If you want more conversations like this, join us on Substack where our community is...

actively engaging in these types of conversations as well as all the bonus content that we release there. Thanks for being with us from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.