i think everyone would agree there is not that much difference between our brains and other mammals brains, we basically do the same things... but just think about different things... while other mammals might not have 100's of billions of neurons firing, they still play, eat, sleep, dream and reproduce the same way humans do... i was always told when growing up the animals do not think, which from personal observation know this is wrong...
but my point of what i was saying earlier in the thread, the elevated neuron firings at the moment of death kind of confirms this... since all of your reality (perceptions of) is nothing but chemical reactions that happens inside your brain, how could someone perceive to outside of their body where no neurons are available? if your brain controls everything you see, touch, feel, smell, and sense, how could you be able to tell the difference between whats real and not real at the time of death?
everything is interpreted inside your head, nowhere else...
appears like death has 2 stages.
bodily followed by 'mind driven brain'
let's say body dies, heart / lungs & all those autonomous
functions - all those associated with the brain-stem, dies..
but the mature brain, the neo-cortex is an evolved creature
it has all the experiences and memories....
& ego to the point that it commanded attention while
'all the while the body aged, it managed
as teeth fell out, vision blurred, memory became unreliable
IT with age, started losing trust on it's body,
and what is deemed as our lower brain, the reptilian brain
So when the reptilian gives up, dies..
the neo-cortex, the higher up, the boss, says hell!
"the ship got torpedoed;
the engine room is on fire, the control room got shorted,
abandon ship.."
IT experiences loss of sensory inputs,
feels pain allover, 'agony of death'
but IT won't give in; a whisper says 'i am too young to die'
IT resists death - naturally
or the whisper says, 'my job is done'
IT accepts death - naturally
--xx--
taking the first case, 'too young..'
the brain 'misinterprets the death signal as it had not
expected / experienced sufficiently to catalogued it in memory
and so interprets the death signal as "abandon ship"
now here is where the mind takes over & says:
'abandon the neuron base we know as home
lets swiftly move outside of this sinking skull..'
i.e. assuming that we have a mind
then such a projection; a demand to the computer not to 'crash'
is plausible.
So when the Mind 'knowing' that it is superior to all that bodily / brain universe;
and yet not in denial that it needs this 'soil' to exist
but for a moment resists its 'death'.
(whatsoever the state the body may be in)
now the Mind prompts the only soil it really controls
it prompts all of the neo-cortex to battle stations - keep firing
(explains the brain arousal reported at NDE)
and by this process of extreme arousal
the mind 'periscopes' out
(let's keep in mind this is a death upheaval)
and what does the Mind necessarily do?
if it could periscope outside of the body?
yes, using it's ethereal mirror (for seconds) it to looks down
and asks - "am i really dead?"
--xx--
this is a fairy tale
yet, after going through the links provided by MM
there does seem to be a time lapse between the death by cessation of heart beat and 'brain death' or cessation of NDE!!
In fact it is possible that this time lapse could be in hours..
which brings us to the point that
we may all experience some form of NDE before final brain death.
Nice theory. That's all.