 Do you want to have fun with me later? Courtney Holmes, I am mildly surprised by law for executive. Midnight basements at level C. What's going on? I would like you to stop my heart. That's a clip from the movie Flatliners. It's actually a remake of the 90s movie. They remade it again in 2017, which you would think with all the enormous amount of research that's been done on near-death experience, much of it influenced or done by today's amazing guest, Dr. Bruce Grayson. Well, you'd think with all that science, some of it would make it into this movie. But of course, it doesn't. And again, it's a movie. So they're trying to be entertaining. I guess that's what they're trying to be, or maybe they're trying to influence culture a little bit. I don't know. I'm hesitant. I have this great interview coming up. And this guy is fantastic. Bruce Grayson, he is such an enormous, such an important figure in near-death experience research, science. But at the same time, I can't help but feel, and I really hammered on this in this interview, that he's a little bit, what would you call it? When a group of people are dishonest, I mean provably dishonest over and over again. What do you call them? I know what I call them. But it turns out it's not the same as what today's guest, Dr. Bruce Grayson calls them. Here's a clip from the interview. I just fail to believe that Dr. Watt is sitting there doing any kind of real research that would compel her to respond to your paper. So her response, going through all the trouble and then having the right connections to immediately zipping it through a peer review process, it doesn't seem genuine. Doctors and scientists are just like everybody else. I think the vast majority of these quote debunkers are people who really believe what they're saying, who are so locked into their prejudice that they can't accept the reality of anything else. So I think most of these people are acting out of honesty with their own beliefs. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today, today we got a biggie. We have Dr. Bruce Grayson here. He has a new book titled After. And we'll get into that in a minute, but I just wanted to pick up on the after thing because I really, really love the title of that. I just think when you take a big step back, we've talked about this on the show, but if you look at not just our culture, but every culture we know of throughout history, there has been this fascination doesn't really capture it, but this deep knowing that the afterlife is key to not only understanding a deeper part of who we are, but a deeper part of what we need to be or maybe what we can be in this life. So Dr. Grayson's amazing work over his 40 year career as one of the truly pioneers and leading researchers in near-death experience science has been part of this really game-changing science that has taken this deep fascination we have in the afterlife and applied science to it and kind of broken through in some ways that I think a lot of us, I wasn't around, I could say way back when he started, but even for the last 20 years, well, I've been aware of it. You know, I don't think we could have even imagined that the kind of cultural change that has come about around near-death experience would have occurred or maybe we did expect it, maybe even assumed that it would happen sooner. I don't know, but these are all things that we're gonna talk about. There's no one more central to this super important science than Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia. And I'm just really, really pleased that he's joined us here today. Bruce, thank you for joining me. Oh, my pleasure, Alex. Thank you for inviting me. So Bruce, as I mentioned, you have a fantastic new book out. It's titled After a Doctor Explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. Fantastic book. It's gonna be just kind of one of those cornerstone books that anyone who's interested in this field is going to want to have, but it really goes beyond that because we would expect this to be kind of a capstone of your career and all that. And it has all that and it tells all these great stories of the experience you've gone through. But it also has a lot of up-to-date findings and research because you continually be so actively involved in this field. So I thought it was just terrific. What has been the reception so far on the book? Well, I've been very pleased. I've gotten mostly positive reception. I've heard from a lot of people I haven't heard from in decades that they're delighted to read it. So I'm very happy with the way it's been received so far. Great. I know you've told this story several times and you've tell it in the book. And I've also heard interviews where you talk about your first encounter with a near-death experience, but it really is a terrific story. Would you mind sharing that with folks? Sure. It kind of took me by surprise because I had been raised in a scientific household where we just talked about the physical world. It was just never any talk about anything non-physical, anything spiritual or religious. It just never came up in our family. There was no reason to. What you see is what you get. If it couldn't be measured, then we didn't worry about it. And that means that when you die, that's the end of everything. And that was fine with me. That was just the way it was. And I went through college and medical school with that materialistic mindset. I didn't think anything was missing. And then shortly after I graduated from medical school in my first few weeks as a psychiatric trainee, I was asked to see a patient in the emergency room who had overdosed. Well, I went down to see her and she was quite unconscious. I could not arouse her in a matter of what I did. So I talked with her roommate in a different room about 50 yards down the hall to get information about what has been going on in the patient's life, what my stressors might have had, what she might have taken for the overdose. And I spent about 15 or 20 minutes talking to the roommate and then went back to see the patient and she was still out cold. So she was going to be admitted to the intensive care unit overnight. And I went to see her the following morning after she woke up. When I went to see her the next day, I introduced myself. She was still very groggy, barely awake at all. I told her who I was and she said, I know who you are. I remember you from last night. That kind of caught me up short because I thought she was out cold. So I said to her, I'm surprised at that. I thought you were asleep when I saw you. And then she opened her eyes and looked at me and said, not in my room. I saw you told him to my roommate. Well, that made no sense to me. I couldn't imagine what she was talking about. That could only happen if she had left her body and moved with me down the hall to her roommate's room. And as far as I could tell that made no sense at all. As far as I knew I was my body, how can you leave it? So I kind of fumbled around and she picked up my confusion and then went to tell me about the conversation I had with her roommate, where I was sitting, where she was sitting, what we were wearing, the questions I asked, the answers her roommate gave, and she made no mistakes. I could not understand this. However, I couldn't deal with my confusion. My job was to work with her. So I focused on what was going on in her life and her suicidal thinking and tried to push my feelings out of my mind. In the next several days as I got some distance from this, I told myself this could not have happened. I must have misheard, misinterpreted. Maybe they were playing a trick on me. I'm a green intern. They're trying to embarrass me. It didn't happen. Well, it wasn't until several years later that Raymond Moody joined me at the University of Virginia and he had just written a book in 1975 called Life After Life, in which he gave us the name Near Death Experiences and told us what they consist of. And I read his book and talked with him about it. And I realized for the first time that this story my patient had told me was not just a one-time story by one psychiatric patient. It was part of a much larger phenomena that millions of people all around the world were talking about. I still couldn't understand it. But to me as a scientist, that means you need to go towards it. You don't deny something that has happened. You try to understand it. And as a skeptic, that means I need to challenge everything I thought I understood. So I decided we need to go look at this and collect as many stories as we can and try to find the patterns. And here I am, 50 years later, still trying to understand it. Yeah, that's such an amazing story on so many levels because I love the way you say it, so matter-of-factly, as a scientist. Really, no, but as a scientist as well as a physician, and I've heard this from other Near Death Experience researchers, really the best ones. It's almost like they were like, well, I knew what I had to do and I didn't think about the consequences. You encountered the consequences in your career and stumbling blocks, but at the time, you're like, hey, this is what I'm trained to do. I have a new experience. I need to follow it. I was aware of the consequences. I knew that like myself, very few doctors had ever heard of this thing and would think be very skeptical of it and weren't sure it existed. But I thought, well, I need to be true to myself. I know these things happen. I saw one and Raymond's written this book about 150 other cases, so it's there. And how can you have intellectual integrity and deny something that exists? So you need to look at it and try to understand it. Now, I still went into this thinking there's gotta be some physiological explanation for this. And that was my mindset for the first several years trying to figure out, how does this happen? How do we explain it? I recently had Leslie Canaan talking about her excellent new Netflix series, Surviving Death, which you are featured quite prominently in the first episode. You do a fantastic job. You really come across great. But one of the things that kind of struck me, and I guess I should have known this all along, but I always think of you as this NDE researcher, which you are, but you're also a people helper. I mean, you got in no doubt you got into psychiatry and you can maybe tell us about that. But like the scene that I brought up or the slide that I brought up, is you sitting in a consultation with a near-death experiencer, and I get the feeling from reading the book that you've had many of these and people have sought you out and sought you out as a people helper. Tell us about that part of this whole experience for you during your career. Well, I was interested in pursuing research in near-death experiences, but nobody pays you to do that for a living. So I made my living as a psychiatrist, treating psychiatric patients, teaching medical students and residents about psychiatry, and doing research on the side. And I loved that. I liked being a doctor, being a psychiatrist. And that was how I made my living for the next 40, 50 years. I was just gonna say, I kind of cut the bio short because I hate when people go on and on about credentials at the beginning, but I did wanna read a little clip from the book. And I don't know if this will embarrass you, you're a pretty humble guy, you don't go out and teach your horn too much, but in the book you just kind of lay out who you are and I'm reading from after here. I've been fortunate enough to serve on the full-time medical school faculty at the University of Michigan, where I ran the emergency psychiatry service at the University of Connecticut, where I was clinical chief of psychiatry, and at the University of Virginia, where I held the endowed Chester Carlson professorship in psychiatry in neurobehavioral sciences. I received research grants from government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and from private and non-private research foundations. I have been privileged to have addressed the symposium on consciousness at the United Nations and have earned awards from my medical research and have been elected as the Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Okay, so that's just all true, that ain't bragging if it's true, but here's what you say. But through all these in the back of my mind were the nagging questions about the mind and body relationship that Holly raised with her knowledge of that stain on my tie, which relates back to the first story you told us. My personal need as a skeptic to follow the evidence kept me from closing my eyes to events like that, events that seemed impossible and led me on a journey to study them scientifically. Very beautifully written. Do you have anything to add? I mean, this is a very distinguished career and I know from the book that at times you felt that that career might be threatened by your passionate drive as a scientist to investigate this. What was that like? Well, it was. But as you said before, there's been a remarkable shift in public attitudes towards knee-death experiences in the last half century. When I started out in this field, no doctor has ever heard of it and most who did hear of it were quite disbelieving. When we first started talking in medical conferences in the early 1980s about knee-death experiences, we would get a lot of people coming to our presentations but there would be a very a silence in the audience when we finished. And nobody quite knew what to make of these things. And now when we talk about these NDE's in medical conferences, it's rare that a doctor doesn't get up from the audience and say, let me tell you about my experience. So I think one of the things I like about working with doctors is that they're a very practical group. If it's something that will help their patients they want to know about it. And clearly a lot of their patients are having knee-death experiences and it affects their attitudes and beliefs and values in their healthcare. So doctors want to know about it. They still have, I think a healthy skepticism about what causes NDE's, what their ultimate meaning is. But there's no doubt in their minds that they do exist and they're fairly common. You know, what about the personal aspect of this? Because I did mention that there's some great interviews that you've done. One of my favorites is with my friend Rick Archer from boot at the gas pump. One of the things I really appreciate about your interview with him is you guys kind of separated out the spiritually transformative experience aspect of near-death experiences, which is super important. On one level that's really where the beef is. Because people come through transformed and their lives show it. But because you're a scientist and because you're a professional academic and medical professional, you've had to pursue this kind of scientifically from a physiological standpoint from a research publishing standpoint like you just mentioned at conferences. So it's great to kind of bifurcate those in a way because they're two interesting discussions. I wonder personally as a man, as a son of your parents who were, you know, your dad was a chemistry guy, very kind of nuts and bolts. But then as a father yourself, as a husband, what has this been like for you? Because I know anyone who studies this for as long as you have, there's a personal spiritual transformation just from hearing these accounts, right? There is, there is. You know, I was raised as a scientist and I currently believe that science is a great way to learn about the world around us. And so I still turn to that as my primary way of knowing what's going on. So I tend to apply scientific methods to everything in my life, including my research. I have pursued all the physiological hypotheses that have been proposed to explain NDEs. And rather than accepting or denying them, I've sought out data to test them. And all the ones I've been able to test so far have been contradicted by the data. Now there are some that we have not been able to test yet, so there still remain plausible but untested. And a part of me thinks that we may someday find a physiological answer for these things, but I'm getting less and less convinced we ever will as the time goes on and we don't find anything that's coming close to it. So I also am very aware that the major effect of this experience on people who have them is not what it tells them about the afterlife, but what it tells them about this life and how to lead a more meaningful and fulfilling life. And it is spiritual transformation. It involves their relationship to other people, to something greater than themselves, to the universe as a whole, to the divine, and that affects everything they do. And when you talk to people about this again and again over decades, you can't help but be affected by it yourself and think more and more about what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? How should we be spending our time? You wrote a book with Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas, colleague, I know you have a lot of respect for. I did too. Together, you both wrote the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, which is really, really an important book on a number of levels, but mainly because it's almost like a reference guide for healthcare professionals who encounter this, nurses who have a patient come back and are dying to tell somebody, but I saw this, I saw that. And it's a shame to think that someone, because of their own lack of knowledge would be dismissive towards that person or make that person feel less than welcomed. So that was a really important book and you've done a revision of it that is super important. But, the pushback against near-death experience science has been really hard to explain. Like the skeptical episode I brought up here, I did an interview with Jan Holden and we were really, I asked her to respond to an interview I did with Carolyn Watt who published a peer-reviewed paper. There's nothing paranormal about near-death experiences, how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead or being convinced you are one of them. And I love Jan's quote, she's actually quoting you in the interview that I did with her, but I'm saying how can such schlocky, just unprofessional research, which it is, I don't care, I interviewed Ms. Watt and confronted her with it directly, her misquotes, her complete rigging of any kind of normal interpretation of the data. You would have failed this paper. Dr. Holden would have failed this paper, would have suggested somebody seek a different profession if you're in one of your classes. But here is the quote. I said, you know, what do you make, Jan, of this? There's nothing paranormal about near-death experiences. And she says, well, she's from Texas, she lives in Texas, she's nice, you know, she's not gonna, I don't know, the material that's out there actually supports a different conclusion. To quote my colleague, Bruce Grayson, if you ignore everything paranormal about NDEs, then it's easy to conclude there's nothing paranormal about them. So maybe you wanna speak for a minute to this kind of over the top debunking that NDEs science has faced over the years. I'm somewhat sympathetic with these debunkers because I started out there and I understand where they're coming from. And it really requires you to give up some of your cherished beliefs about how the world is constructed if you really want to take these things seriously and understand them. And that is very unnerving to do. I was tremendously unnerved when I first got into this field, but I was confident that they were really a real phenomenon and it was important to understand them. If my cherished beliefs about the world were wrong, I wanted to know that. I didn't wanna continue with my wrong beliefs. So I thought it was worthwhile risking that to pursue them. I can understand how people would not be willing to do that. I get that on one level. And I wanna talk about that from your personal level of being a skeptic and being comfortable that your life is meaningless as you were told and all that. I wanna talk about that in just a minute, but I wanna throw this on the table because I wonder if you're willing to at least consider the possibility that this is manufactured descent. This isn't genuine in the way that we think about it. I have a hard day. I've done this for years. So many of these people and pursued them for peer reviewed. You know, it always has to be peer reviewed, posing a science kind of stuff. I just fail to believe that Dr. Watt is sitting there doing any kind of real research that would compel her to respond to your paper. So her response, going through all the trouble and then having the right connections to immediately zipping it through a peer review process, it doesn't seem genuine. And it doesn't seem genuine when you stack it up with all the other papers that as soon as a new significant near-death experience research effort comes out, whether it's a Samparni or whether it's Pemba-Lomel or whether it's you or whether it's Eben Alexander. You know, it's like it is organized. It is immediate. And the response is, it seems to me that it's hitting a different tone. It's hitting a tone of, I'm not sure that we want to go and leave that out there without a response. Are you at all open to that? Or are you totally convinced that it is all just kind of organic? Gosh, Dolly G, those guys are so wrong. Let me go tell them. Well, you know, doctors and scientists are just like everybody else. They have the same motives, the same biases. There certainly are, I'm sure, some people who are just playing an academic game and trying to give their supervisors what they think they wanna hear and trying to give the journal publishers editors what they think they wanna hear. But that's a small number if they do exist. I think the vast majority of these quote debunkers are people who really believe what they're saying, who are so locked into their prejudice that they can't accept the reality of anything else. In that sense, that type of unshakable belief in materialism is very much like any fundamentalist religion. You cannot accept any evidence that contradicts your beliefs. So you don't, you honestly don't believe it. So I think most of these people are acting out of honesty with their own beliefs. They're just not willing to accept. I'm down with the most people part of that and I don't wanna pursue this too much further but I'm gonna pursue it a tiny bit further because what really, it's only, I started out, really first of all, I started out interested in parapsychology because I was a business guy. And then I got done with that and I said, I wanna know the big picture questions. Who are we, why are we here? And I thought these guys, you know, Dean Raiden and Rupert Sheldrick and those guys were doing interesting real science. Well, when I found the opposition to that was just despicable as Sheldrick comes out and says a deceptive that they're being deceptive. Sheldrick's a Cambridge biologist and he's a pretty buttoned up British guy. I don't think he throws around a deceptive scientist title very easily. It started me, it started opening me up to the possibility that this science may have drawn the attention of folks who are interested in controlling messages, controlling culture and anyone who isn't comfortable with that just has to wake up to, you know, the example I always use is Gloria Steinem. Go, Gloria Stein was in the CIA. She admits she was in the CIA. She was outed for being in the CIA but she was in the CIA before she joined the women's movement. It's not like she started the women's movement and then was recruited by the CIA. She was in the CIA working on other women's projects and then got recruited to join the women's movement. This is our history. It is undeniable. They are out of her mouth, out of the words of the people who control her. I'm not suggesting that there's a parallel here with near death experience research but I'm not totally convinced that there isn't a trail of breadcrumbs that are left for people to pursue a certain line of attack against this research that shouldn't, there shouldn't be that kind of descent. Like you just mentioned, you know, the kind of research that you and your colleagues have done has been like what we would expect to see. Oh, is this the last gasp of a dying brain? Well, let's check oxygen levels. Let's check if there's other chemicals in the system. Let's check all these things on all this kind of debunking research. There's none of that. There is virtually no research. Most of the time they've never even talked to anyone who's experienced this near death encounter kind of thing. So I'll let it go after this but maybe I'll let it go now. I won't require that you comment on that but that is my inevitable conclusion to it. Well, Alex, let me just say that there definitely are people who are diehard materialists who will not look at all the evidence and insist they know the truth. On the other hand, I know diehard people with a religious or spiritual perspective who will not look at any contradictory evidence also. So that's just human nature that some people are so locked into their own viewpoint they are not willing to look at the evidence that contradicts them. Fortunately, I think the vast majority of new death researchers are not like that. They're honest, open, skeptical scientists. You know, the other thing that you mentioned a minute ago that I wanted to circle back on is do you think that people in the medical field kind of have a little bit of a leg up kind of from a philosophical standpoint or from a patient-doctor relationship? You mentioned that and I think that's definitely true. Do you want to speak to that at all? Yeah, I think it is true. I think that's one of the reasons I like working with doctors. A lot of scientists, especially basic scientists, come at it from a theoretical perspective. And of course they want to understand how things work and if they can't understand it, they don't accept it. Doctors and even more so nurses are very practical people. They want to do what works. And if they can't understand how it works, if they don't understand the mechanism, okay, that's too bad, but we know it works, so we'll use it. And that makes them different from scientists who say, I need to understand it before I'm going to use it. So I think for that reason, doctors and nurses are very practical. Their major concern is, will this help or hurt my patient? Not do we understand how it works? Great. So in the book after you not only talk about that kind of transformation that we're talking about and what it means for people's lives and some of the problems and opportunities, because it isn't always perfect. As you point out in the book, there is some transition. A lot of times that people have to do when they return and are changed and maybe other people in their life aren't changed, but that's really kind of a minor topic because the question I really wanted to ask you is, could you recall what were maybe one or two of the most significant kind of breakthrough moments for you scientifically? Where you maybe went into some research and I always like hearing when scientists say, I went into the research and I really didn't know how it was gonna come out. And I was afraid that maybe it was gonna come out and I was gonna have to go, nope, I guess I was wrong. Did you ever have any of those moments where you were kind of holding your breath to see how it would come out? Sure, sure. I think that's the essence of science. The great Lewis Thomas wrote that great science, if it's really science, is something that you don't know how it's gonna turn out. One of the most impactful events for me in this was when I had developed this near-death experience scale to standardize research into NDE. So we know we'd all be talking about the same phenomenon because then originally all the near-death research was rocking in isolation with no one else at their own university. And I wasn't sure we were all talking about the same thing. So we developed a scale through an elaborate statistical process to come up with a way of defining what a near-death experience is for research purposes. And that was in use for maybe a decade or so when I was approached by two skeptical statisticians so I did not know. And they had been using this unusual and very sophisticated tests called the RASH analysis to analyze whether a scale was really worthwhile, whether it was really valid. And they wanted to apply the scale to my data to see whether my scale was really worthwhile. And I thought about this because I didn't understand the test. It was way beyond my level of understanding of statistics. And there were people I didn't know. I didn't know how honest or how open-minded they were. And they wanted access to my raw data to test the scale. And I thought about it and thought, well, do I want to risk having all this credibility destroyed by this? Well, then if the scale doesn't work, I want to know that. I don't want to keep using it and promoting it if it isn't really valid. Can we pause one second there? I want to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about. So this is known as the grace and scale after your name. And what are some of the factors that you found in these massive number of accounts that you collected and then statistically analyzed and organized into some repeatable patterns that come up on the scale, just so people know what are some of the items on the grace and scale that these guys then further analyzed. Right, I never called it the grace and scale. I called it the NDE scale. And other people have just called it the grace and scale as a shortcut. I never called it that. And I'm not particularly happy with that being called. But anyway, the scale includes 16 items, it includes changes in your thought processes like thoughts becoming faster than ever before, clearer than ever before, having a life review. It includes emotional changes like feeling of overwhelming peace and wellbeing, a sense of being one with the universe, sense of being encapsulated by unconditional love from a being of light. It includes so-called paranormal things like a sense of leaving the physical body and seeing things beyond the range of your senses, so-called existential perception. It includes pre-cognitive visions of the future. And it includes so-called other worldly things, being in some other non-physical realm or dimension, encountering what seemed to be entities, not of this world, deities or deceased spirits. And finally coming to a point of no return beyond what you can't go and still return to life. So there are 16 of these items that were most commonly reported by new death experiences and which most easily differentiated entities from other responses to a brush with death. So that's what the scale was. And eventually I decided, I needed to know if it really worked or not. So I gave these two scholars, Jim Horan and Rensselang access to all my raw data. I thought it was around 600 or so near death experiences responses on the scale and they proceeded to analyze it. And months went by before I heard from them. And I was nervous. I didn't know what to expect from this, but I had to go with it. That's, you know, if you're gonna be skeptical, you have to be skeptical about your own ideas as well as everyone else's. So I gave them all the data and waited and waited and waited. And after a few months, they came back with the answer that the scale was valid. It produced a reasonable measure of one experience. There were some things that they corrected with my scale. For example, in my scale, each item had three possible responses. And they said, their analysis showed you didn't need three, that two was fine. If they were just yes or no, that would give you as much information. But they concluded that the scale measured one coherent experience that was the same across gender, race, religiosity, length of time since the experience and so forth. And that really validated my experience, my scale. And this scale, Dr. Grayson, has been kind of the foundational piece in just a lot of research that's been published around the world by labs outside of University of Virginia. Maybe take it to the next step and explain to people how some folks have used the scale to kind of move this research forward. Yeah, it's been translated into about 20 languages and has been used in hundreds of studies all around the world. And it's kind of the main way now of identifying and quantifying the depth of a near-death experience. It's very helpful in research to make sure you have a coherent sample of one consistent phenomenon. It's not helpful in dealing with an individual experiencer. For example, if someone says to me, I was pronounced dead, I had this incredible experience and I am forever transformed by it. And you give them the scale and they score too low to be qualified as a near-death experience. You can't tell them they didn't have a near-death experience. They clearly had a transformative spiritual event when they were close to death or pronounced dead. That's a near-death experience. So it doesn't help you in defining an NDE for an individual person, but it's helpful in looking at a large sample of research subjects. So it's been used by that over the last 40 years in all different types of study. Now there are some questions now about whether it needs to be updated because we've learned a lot about NDE's since the scale was first developed in the early 1980s. And I'm working with some people now to look at whether they should change it and if so, how? Interesting. Any study from the Grayson scale, I've got to use that term, I'm sorry, that it wasn't in at the UVA, but you thought was particularly interesting in their novel way of applying it? Well, there are a number of scales all over the country. There's a group in University of Malaysia in Belgium in Steve Lorre's lab and he's got some great young researchers there who are using it. Charlotte Martial, Vanessa, Charlotte Vervel, Elaine Tissot who are doing very innovative work with samples of near-death experiences using my scale to define them. This group in New Zealand headed by Natasha Tassel-Manamua who are using the scale. It's been used by teams in Italy, of course, several in the UK and throughout the United States as well. One example that I found super interesting is this idea that you've looked at, you are a psychiatrist. You've looked at, or I'm not sure if other people have looked at, mental health and NDE's. And I think again, this is where the scale can kind of help, right? Well, being a psychiatrist, I have access to large numbers of people with mental illness. So I looked at the association between mental illness and near-death experiences. And first I looked at a large sample of near-death experiences and gave them a screening questionnaire for symptoms of mental illness. And I found that their rate of mental illness was the same as the general population. So people with NDE's have the same amount of mental illness as everybody else does. Then I looked at people who were seeking psychiatric help. And I looked at everyone who came to the psychiatric clinic over the course of a year, some 800 people and asked them if they had ever been close to death. And if so, I had them fill out my NDE scale. And what I found that was almost 20% of them had a near-death experience, which is about the same as the general population of people who come close to death. So again, mental illness does not seem to have any particular relation with near-death experiences. We also looked at specific types of mental illness that might be theoretically associated with near-death experiences, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation and so forth. And we found that they were not the same thing that those psychiatric diagnoses did not apply to people with near-death experiences. Let me switch gears for a minute and ask you a really, really big picture question. Max Planck said, you can't get behind consciousness, which kind of takes us in a whole other direction about what we're even doing. So we're post-materialistic science, all those dummies back there. But are we considering the possibility that maybe our understanding of these extended consciousness realms were dragging along some of our, kind of, I always say, backdoor materialism, kind of look at how things are organized and how things work. I mean, if there's nothing behind consciousness, are we in consciousness all the time, both when we're not in a near-death experience and when we're in a near-death experience and when we're in a entheogen experience and all the rest of it? I'm sure you've thought deeply about this. What are your thoughts about the larger questions of consciousness? I think you have to look at those things. You have to keep going with them with an open mind. You know, I grew up with the idea that most people have that the mind is what the brain does, that all our thoughts and feelings and perceptions are created by the brain. That certainly seems that way in everyday life, when you get intoxicated, you don't think very clearly when you get out on the head or have a stroke that affects your thinking. So clearly the brain is instrumental in our thoughts and it's only in extreme circumstances like near-death experiences. When the brain seems to be offline or severely limited and consciousness seems to be expanding, people think clearer than ever before, they have perceptions more vivid than ever before, when the brain seems to be incapable of forming a thought. And we see this in other successes as well. There's a phenomenon called terminal lucidity in people with end-stage dementia like Alzheimer's disease who have not recognized family for decades and have not been able to communicate, suddenly became totally lucid in the hours before they die and they recognize family and carry on here in conversations and they collapse. And there is no medical explanation for this. Someone with advanced Alzheimer's disease does not regenerate the brain and become capable of thinking again. The brain cannot be involved in this. And yet the consciousness does. So clearly it seems to me that consciousness can exist without the help of the brain. That raises the question of whether can continue to do so after the brain dies, after our bodies die, is consciousness still there? I think you answer that over and over again but I gotta say, you're kind of staying on the scientific medical track, which is great. But I was surprised to hear you talk about God and you're really stepping out there in saying, hey, that's where the data leads. And I first heard that from Jeff Long, a colleague and I know you have a lot of respect for Jeff and I do too, radiation oncologist in Louisiana but he went out and did some survey work for the most extensive that's out there and kind of came to the same conclusion like, look, we can, you may not like the answer to this but this is the most significantly reported experience from the near-death experience. Is that experience with that greater, that God, that all-encompassing love and light? More than a tunnel, more than the light, it's that feeling experience of God. And then I've heard you say and in the book say, you're not gonna be a tight-buttoned scientist. It dodged that question. You jump right in there and say, well, that's how it looks to you too. Yeah, well, talking about the other world or about a deity, something that's very hard to study scientifically. You can't test God. Doesn't use cooperate with our double-blind trials but there are things about what they say about the other life that can be tested scientifically but whether there's a God is not one of them. Now, I look at the data from what the end of years say and how they respond. And I see remarkable consistency in the phenomena they experience but not necessarily in how they describe it. Most near-death experiences say that there are no words to describe what happened to me. I just can't put it into English. And then we say, great, tell me all about that. So we're kind of forcing them to distort it by putting into words. So they use whatever metaphors come readily to them and those are often religious or cultural metaphors. So most people will talk about encountering this warm loving being of light. It's not like a static light, like a light bulb or the sun. It's a being, it's an entity with intelligence and radiating this incredible unconditional love and acceptance and protection. And when people describe this to you, they will maybe use whatever metaphors come to them. If you happen to be a Christian, you may say that was God or that was Christ. If you're a Hindu, you may say that was a Yamdut or something else. People describe it by what their culture tells them to describe it. But even those who use the word God will often say to me, I'm using the word God, so you know what I'm talking about. But it wasn't like the God I was taught about in church. It was much bigger than that. Evan Alexander says, the word God is much too puny for what I experienced. And I think that many of them say like, and you know more Johnny says, you can call it anything you want. We can call it God, Allah, Krishna, Buddha, whatever, it's all that is. And there is no word to encompass it. And that's the type of way they describe this entity that has the properties of what we call God, but much more than that. I get you on all that, but I do think that sometimes when we talk about it, we talk about it in a way to kind of appease an atheistic scientific community that really doesn't want to hear about God. Because you're not spinning it, but you're talking about it one way, which is important to understand that we can't attach a religious tie to it. Many, I've talked to Christians who've tried to co-op. If you don't see Jesus, you didn't have, I got my own scale. My scale is if you didn't see Jesus, you didn't have a real NDE. But the thing that I just don't want to bury, and I'm not saying that you are, but I want to emphasize is this is the most profound part of their experience. So they might say, I might not have the language for this and that, but they say, listen up, this is what it's about. And the atheist materialist stuff is so far fricking wrong that it's just completely outside the box. They're not doing this scale analysis of could it be, could it be this? They have a complete knowing that there is this all loving source that this stuff comes through. And I hear you saying that in the book. I just want to make sure we're not soft pedaling it to, because I feel like we do this all the time. We are playing on the other guy's court. I mean, whether we like it or not, scientific materialism, they own the court and they decide who plays and they decide what the rules are. And you've had a fantastic career, but there's a lot of people that would love to pursue this research, but they can't, I've talked to them. They're like, this will not get me, I won't even be able to keep my job, let alone get to the next rung on the ladder. So I don't know, I just, I think that has to be thrown out there as well. Do you have any thoughts you want to add? Yeah, I sure do, I sure do. I am no longer a scientific materialist, but I'm still a scientist. And that means everything I know comes through my experiences. And I know as a scientist that my experiences are subject to my interpretation of them. I'm never totally convinced that I'm seeing things properly and that I'm understanding them properly. I am fairly convinced that the sun's gonna come up tomorrow from the evidence I've had in the past. I'm not 100% convinced. I approach the world in that way that I'm always a little skeptical about what I think I know. So I am fairly convinced from what people have told me, from what thousands of people have told me, near-death experiences, that from their own experience, not from their religious teachings, but from their experience, there is this all-knowing, all-loving being or entity that is guiding us and that is waiting to for us when we pass. And that we are in fact part of that. It's like a wave in the ocean. You're a distinct thing, you're at wave, but you're part of the same thing the rest of the ocean is. So I'm fairly convinced that that's the truth. That's the way things are. But I'm not totally convinced because I know that I can be misinterpreting, mishearing and I never totally convinced that I got the right story. I love it, I love it. And I've been holding back and every time you say skeptic, I kind of wanna jump in there because it's obviously part of the title of this show and I think the word has been, again, co-opted, abused and misused. And I even think that sometimes when we talk, this is like a point I always make is, skepticism isn't required in science. This is my opinion. It's not. If you wanna be, you just have to do good science. That's why we have the scientific method because someone can say, I'm skeptical and someone say, I'm not skeptical. I'm biased, I'm not biased. Show me the data, you know? It really, that's how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to all just come out in the wash if we do good work. It's not a matter of, oh, you're not skeptical enough. I mean, do you have any thoughts you wanna add to that? Yeah, I do, Alex. We are all biased. There's no getting around that. Everyone has biases. Whether the personal, cultural, religious, political, we're all biased. We all have ways of that determine where the color, color are thinking, not determine it, but color it. And I know that I do too. And you have to constantly be trying to understand that and maybe trying to fight against it and see what's the truth there beyond my biases. And that requires, I think, skepticism about the evidence and about your own ideas. And unless you entertain that doubt, that skepticism, you're never sure you're getting the right story or are you getting your own biases. Great. You know, Dr. Rason, we talked, well, we didn't really talk in depth about some of the more hard science, medical science that's been applied to near-death experiences, mainly because I've talked about it on so many other shows and you've done some great interviews and people need to read the book because that stuff is in there and it's kind of laid out step by step. You know, whatever you think your pet hypothesis is on why near-death experiences aren't everything you're saying, get the book, get after, and I think those will be put to rest. One thing that does, I guess, nag at me is the relationship, the whole resuscitation thing is fascinating, right? And another colleague of yours, excellent researcher, Dr. Samparnia, has really advanced this. Jan Holden again has Dr. Penny Sartori. Dr. Jan Holden, Dr. Penny Sartori, I always love and reference their research on interviewing people after resuscitation and recalling it. And they go to the control group, people didn't have an ending and they're saying, what are you talking about? I was dead, I didn't recall anything. And the other one's just, nope, here's how it was, they will be and they did this. That didn't work. Fantastic, simple, anyone can get that. Dr. Parnia, kind of more rigorous in hospital thing. But here's the thing, it kind of implies, again, back to this almost mechanistic relationship between the brain and this technology that's being applied to our body and then it's connecting to this God thing and this spiritual thing in a way that doesn't satisfy either group, doesn't satisfy the materialist leaning kind of folks and doesn't satisfy the purely spiritual kind of people. How do you wrestle with that? Well, near-death experiences share a lot in common with other spiritually transformed events that occur in other situations. You can have this through spiritual traditions like meditation, you can have it through sensory deprivation, you can have it through lots of different ways. But the near-death experience coming close to death seems to be now one of the most reliable ways of getting it. But why is that approach to death a way of reaching this spiritual transformative event? You know, most people will have one through meditation or some other spiritual tradition are trying to get it. They've been prepared for it, they know what to expect. They have a guru or someone who can help them reintegrate it. People with NDE's are looking for it, they don't want it. It sort of comes upon them. So what makes them have it? And it appears that in the near-death situation, something about dying or about approaching death triggers or allows this to happen. And I'm fairly convinced now that something about us that's non-physical can leave the body in these extreme circumstances. But it may be that something that happens in the brain, whether it's electrical or chemical or both allows that to happen. Now you certainly can have out-of-body experiences in other circumstances. But something about the brain decaying, deteriorating makes that easy to happen and permits it. So I think it's worth looking at the physiological correlates of any death experience to see what's going on in the brain to permit the non-physical part of us to separate from the physical part of us from parts that are normally working together in the peritormity. Yeah, it's just kind of interesting because now we're bringing the brain back in. We started by kind of setting it aside and saying, wow, it looks like the brain doesn't play the role that we thought it did. The brain is shut down after cardiac arrest, which I always mentioned to people, Dr. Grayson and his colleagues have focused on NDEs that are occurring in a medical situation, not because that's their pet interest, but because it's the closest they can get to kind of controlling the physiology and building on this database we have of what happens to the body. So, but anyways, we're saying, okay, the brain set that aside. This seems to be Max Planck. You know, we can't get behind consciousness or something greater. And now it's just kind of strange that we're bringing the brain back in saying, well, it does seem like maybe the brain is triggering these. And as we get better with resuscitation technology, there seems to be this link that is unexplainable from a spiritual perspective when people are saying, well, I knew I was gonna have the NDE or they told me this or that, you know, life is planned. This is part of the plan. Kind of there's gaps in the story, you know, a couple of different ways. Let me turn your thinking about the brain and these experiences around a little bit. We're thinking about the brain triggering this event. Let me propose that under normal circumstances, the brain sort of imprisons the non-physical part of us so that it can't leave. You can't experience these other types of consciousness. And they have to get the brain out of the way to let this happen. So it's not that the brain is triggering it, but the brain is being taken away from whatever it does that prohibits us from doing this. It's like the brain has a filter in it to stop this other consciousness from coming into us. And that makes sense in terms of evolution. All our senses evolve to help us survive in the physical world. You don't hear every possible sound that's out there. That would overwhelm you. You wouldn't be able to understand anything. So your ears filter out those irrelevant sounds and just lets in the small frequencies that are relevant to your survival. Your eyes don't see everything, every wavelength in the spectrum. It just lets in those few wavelengths, the small range that's relevant to our survival and filters out the rest. So thoughts are out there. If our mind is out there somewhere, it makes sense that your brain would have evolved to filter out the irrelevant stuff like God, like deceased loved ones, and just let in those thoughts and perceptions that relate to our physical survivals. How to find food, mate, a shelter. You don't need to talk about God to do those things. So it makes sense that the brain evolved to filter out the higher consciousness. And only when the brain's filter is shut down somehow, does it allow you to experience those higher forms of consciousness. But don't we still have a little bit of a wrinkle in the story when we introduce this resuscitation technology? What is going on there with technology? The link between technology, medical technology, resuscitation, and the spiritual. Do you have any thoughts? Well, I think the spiritual, this resuscitation stuff is just one way of making it more possible and more common for us to come back from this death state and talk about these things. It used to be that people would die. And if you were lucky enough to hear them talk as they were dying, you may hear about death bed visions that are like NDEs, but usually they just died and never told anybody about it. So resuscitation techniques, we can bring them back and then hear what they experienced. You know, we're struggling with how can this mind, that's if it's not part of the brain, how does it relate to the brain? We have no idea how that could happen. And materialists say, well, that means you can't have a mind separate from the brain. We don't understand how that could work. But the dirty secret of neuroscience is we can't explain consciousness inside the brain either. No one's ever come up with an idea about how an electrical or chemical process in the brain can create a thought. That's just as much mystery as consciousness outside the brain. So we're stuck in both ways of looking at things, have huge holes in them that make us not understand what's going on. I think when you have that much trouble understanding the basics of mind and consciousness and brain, then we're not asking the right questions. It doesn't seem to be an answer to the questions we're asking. Yeah, well said. I like when people always go the hard problem of consciousness. Let's start with the easy problem of consciousness, which we don't understand at all. Hey, Dr. Grayson, what do you see coming up in the future of near-death experience research? What are you most excited about? What are you looking forward to seeing come about? Well, there are two answers to that. One is me personally, and the other is where the field is going. And me personally, I am still a psychiatrist, a healer, and that's what I'm interested in. And my colleague, Marietta Pilavanova and I are now looking at people who have difficulties after a near-death experience and who feel like they need help integrating that into their lives. And we're looking at what types of things make them come for help, what types of help they're seeking, what type of helpers they're seeking, and what they find helpful and not helpful. And hopefully come up with some virtual guidelines for how to help people like this. But I'm limited because of my interest and background in what I can study. Fortunately, there's a new generation of researchers coming up behind me who have vastly different areas of expertise who are interested in NDEs and they're bringing to the study of NDEs areas that I couldn't hope to understand, whether it's cross-cultural and sociological evaluations or physiological, electrochemical evaluations. And I think in the next 20, 30, 40 years, we're gonna see a lot more about NDEs that we can't even imagine now. Well, I'm sure it's incredibly gratifying to you to see that research and know that you are directly responsible for spawning so much of it, inspiring so much of it and then being directly a part of so much of it. It's really an amazing body of work. So this book, again, folks, check it out. After a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. I kind of pushed him a little bit. He didn't reveal a lot of personal stuff about his personal spiritual experience and that's okay. He doesn't have to. It's been absolutely fantastic having you on and congratulations on a fantastic book, Dr. Chris. Thank you, that's been fun talking to you. Thanks again to Dr. Bruce Grayson for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I cannot resist teeing up from this interview is, are the dishonesty bunkers that have stood in the way of near-death experience science? By following what could only be characterized as dishonest practices. You know, I mean, dishonestly spinning the data, dishonestly publishing peer-reviewed work that doesn't meet their normal standards. Are they really dishonest? Would we really call them dishonest or are they just, oh, kind of stuck in their belief systems? And what about this idea that I keep hammering on of social engineering? I mean, could there possibly be any social engineering element to near-death experience science? Well, I guess I can't really resist injecting my opinion into the tone of that question. But I would like to hear your thoughts on it. Let me know, jump on over to the Skeptico forum or track me down any way you like. I got some really good shows coming up. Stick with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.