NDEs and Anaesthesia Awareness

Question from Uriadka:
“Dr. Jeffrey Long: The key thing is to know a few of the consistently seen elements of near-death experience that are the strongest evidence for their reality. For example, when you’re under general anesthesia, it should be impossible to have a lucidic organized remembrance at that time. In fact, under anesthesia, you’re typically so far under, with general anesthesia they often have to breathe for you. I mean you’re literally, brain shut down to the level of the brain stem and at that point in time some people have a cardiac arrest, their hearts stop, and of course, that’s very well documented. They monitor people very carefully that are having general anesthesia.

So, I have dozens and dozens of near-death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia and at this time, it should be, if you will, doubly impossible to have a conscious remembrance, and yet they do have near-death experiences at this time, and they’re typical near-death experiences. They have the same elements and appear to have them in the same orders as near-death experiences occurring under all other circumstances. In fact, a critical survey question I asked was what their level of consciousness and alertness during the experience was.

Well, even under general anesthetics, under those powerful chemicals to produce sedation, if they had a near-death experience under general anesthesia, their level of consciousness and alertness was identical to near-death experiences occurring under all other circumstances.

There’s absolutely no way the skeptics can explain that away, it’s impossible.”

Let’s go even further: statistically, 1 in 10,000 people have anesthesia awareness. Yet in his study, he had 23 cases out of 2000 patients. They were lucid, had none of the terrible side effects most people have during AA. I think this may prove it.

Answer by SmartLX:
Anaesthesia awareness is a separate phenomenon from NDEs, with one very important difference.

For whatever reason – dosage, faulty equipment, body chemistry – the anaesthetic fails and the patient is not entirely unconscious throughout the whole procedure. This is of course a nightmare come true, as depending on the level of consciousness the patient can experience the sounds, smells and/or excruciating pain of surgery before they’re even able to open their eyes or move a muscle. But the whole reason it’s so scary is that you are unambiguously experiencing real things as they happen, which means it’s easy to determine when it occurred in retrospect even if you give no sign for the duration.

An experience interpreted as an NDE, on the other hand, can occur at any point between the initial loss of consciousness and when consciousness is ultimately regained. If the experience involves elements of the afterlife, there’s no way to place it based on earthly events. If there’s an out-of-body experience where the patient witnesses an event in the room, assuming the events are guessed right the NDE is simply assumed to have occurred at that point, but as you say there’s a period during which there’s not enough brain activity for any such experience. There is always a period before then, and a period after then, where the brain is in an intermediate state that allows dreams and hallucinations.

I made this basic point the last time you brought up this quote by Long, earlier this month. I did not propose that the episodes were happening during periods of anaesthesia awareness, because they really don’t have to. The brain has a pretty wild time dealing with general anaesthetic or any kind of forced unconsciousness at the best of times, and whenever it is active enough to paint an internal scene at the start or end, it will probably do so.