One of the interesting things about this (in)famous study, published in 2014, and having been commenced in 2008 (and predicted to last three years) is that famously, it was the study that attempted to confirm Out Of Body experiences by
placing pictures on the top of high shelves the patients could not see. When the results were published and despite the significance attached to the pictures by the researchers in their pre-study press releases
it turned out that nobody had seen them after all.
There is one interesting claim that keeps being repeated about a single case out of the 2060 they looked at:
"For the second patient instead, it was possible to verify the accuracy of the experience and to show that awareness occurred paradoxically some minutes after the heart stopped, at a time when "the brain ordinarily stops functioning and cortical activity becomes isoelectric." The experience was not compatible with an illusion, imaginary event or hallucination since visual (other than of ceiling shelves' images) and auditory awareness could be corroborated.[24]". I have been unable to find any details behind this claim, but allegedly they can be found in this paper, that I do not have access to:
Death and consciousness––an overview of the mental and cognitive experience of death. I am suspicious though, given the paper being written by the same researcher who started as a believer and how drastically the emphasis changed from the experimental design for verification involving the pictures. Somehow we devolved from a genuine experiment to a single anecdote out of thousands along the way, which is not a good sign in terms of scientific quality and avoidance of biases.*
While I was reading around about this, I did find this page about a couple of the most famous NDE cases, which makes a good read with lots of info into how accurate the anecdotes turned out to be:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/kei ... html#mariaETA: *There's a quora answer that seems to mention details of the one confirmatory case that might allow for follow up, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) suggest the story may not be all it was cracked up to be:
https://www.quora.com/Was-there-any-cor ... o-prove-itAccording to Caroline Watt "The one ‘verifiable period of conscious awareness’ that Parnia was able to report did not relate to this objective test. Rather, it was a patient giving a supposedly accurate report of events during his resuscitation. He didn’t identify the pictures, he described the defibrillator machine noise. But that’s not very impressive since many people know what goes on in an emergency room setting from seeing recreations on television."
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