Just wanted to make sure everyone saw this nice, mainstream article
about consciousness and what happens when we die.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html

Very interesting reading
R.

Oh so the replies got lost!

Well what I wanted to know was what others thought about the experimental design. Any thoughts?

Well tonight I caught the tail-end of a radio show by one of those talk show folks (Lovell Dyett), and I think Parnia was his guest.

The broader view of this experiemnt is aiming at trying to understand what mind and conciousness are in the first place. You can't localize thought in the brain. NDE's are jsut one way of looking at this.

Parnis said that the experiment was proposed at some conference. This website is supposed to give more info. I haven't had time to thoroughtly check it out yet.

http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/

There is a paragraph or two on the experiemtn here:

http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/Human-Consciousness-Project/aware.html

Here this has some links to podcasts of talks I think
http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/press-articles.html

Someone else posted this link but now I can't find their thread.

another article /interview with Parnia.

http://www.aolhealth.com/health/what-happens-when-we-die/1

Ok the second page gives a little more insight into the experimental set-up. There will be a shelf by the head of the hospital bed, and from below, someone would see a triangle. Why they chose a triangle, I don't know. The other side...the side you would set something on, will have a picture on it. But you can only see the picture from the ceiling.

Well seeing a picture and seeing what someone is doing to y our body are two different things. I don't know if I think this will work. It would be interesting to find why they chose this method. They say they've been trying this out in UK for the past 18 months.

Thanks to whomever originally posted this link.

I agree with you, Lucy  :)

Whoever came back from an NDE saying '00h, and I saw all these wonderful geometric shapes and photos of strangers floating around!'
It doesn't relate to the excitement of the process.

It has nothing to do with what the nature of 'soul' / 'spirit' is.  I realize that those terms have become all blurred by all the associations piled into them through time, but they still have aspects that need to be respected.  

What does a soul/spirit/entity care about a triangle?   Or a photo that wouldn't I suppose relate to their own life and might be difficult to see in the excitement of such events?

I hope the triangle doesn't show through the window /door to the afterlife--it might look like a warning and hold some souls back !


Bets

Actually, Matthew had posted about this:
http://afterlife-knowledge.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1221958145

it would be fun to have access to preliminary results. If this has been going on for 18 months, it seems like we would have heard of this before now.

I think the trianlge is supposed to be visible if you are C1 concious (not their terminology..) and the pics are only visible if you happen to be floating on the ceiling like Mary Poppins. The folks in the NDEs often report being on the ceiling.

Still don't know where that third thread  is...

I recall a book by Wm Buhlman about OBEs and he pointed out that when out of body, nothing looks the same.  For instance, even familiar objects like your living room sofa is not going to look the way it does while in the body.  There is a sort of distortion going on.

Anyway this might, if true, have an adverse impact on the experiments.  Maybe the triangle will look like a circle.....

R

Lucy i did re-read the tread of Mathew well part of it..:)

[ then when someone is officially "brain dead," there should be no evidence of true thought or consciousness if they were subsequently revived.  If consciousness can be proven to exist in a brain dead individual during objective clinical cessation of brainwave and cardiac function, then scientists would have to reconsider whether consciousness exists independent of the physical body. ]

It's been going on for 18 month..why we haven't herd of it before now; could be they don't really want people to know..!..that would be i real crash system with people/chruch or general population; it will open their eye tho..to what we do believ/know that we survive death.

The triangle thing..not sure why; have seen it while phazing/obe but most of the time it's got the all seeing eye in it.
Very interesting article.
Pul R.

The point Buhlman makes is important. I hope they based the experimental conditions on something they heard when people told them about their NDE's in the ER, and that they have been able to use this info.

Yes the issue they are stydying really has to do with conciousness and not with NDE's. Well in a way they are the same issue, but they tie it in to a lot of other info on conciousness. Scientifically, the problem is that you can't locate conciousness in a cell. So where is conciousness?