It's very possible that the somewhat incoherent narratives of our dreams are attempts by the brain to make sense of inchoate stimuli caused by random firing of neurons during REM sleep. What may happen in the particular state of approaching death, I have absolutely no scientific idea, but it's possible that a powerful narrative may be constructed at that moment. (Secondly, as the much-maligned Freud would tell us of the interpretation of dreams, what matters is the meaning you give your memory after the event, what understanding you later build of it).
Through this narrative, it seems to me you told yourself that you wanted to live because you were persuaded of your worth and the hopeful possibilities of your life. You chose to live, not to die. And you woke the next morning in better health.
And I'm so very glad you did.
But she wrote that she saw her body in the bed, That at least hints that "something" left the body behind, something with consciousness. Could be "attempts by the brain to make sense of inchoate stimuli caused by random firing of neurons during REM sleep." or it could be something else.
Me screaming "Let go Joe" over and over at the moment of my father's painful death across the country, out loud in an empty hallway at the top of my lungs, however, did involve the body. Suggesting there's more to the eye than meets the eye, et. al. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
But In Wales has described her experience very clearly and trying to rewrite it for her with a different perspective would not be her experience anymore.
Yes it would, but it would not be her description of her experience - a different thing. Sometimes others - doctors, scientists, can give accounts of our experience which we may find helpful and that they offer explanations which make sense and may be supported by much other evidence.
I think honoring the original and letting the owner decide its meaning, is what matters.
She put it here expecting some discussion - not just for each of us to say "we honour your account." Afew wasn't telling her what its meaning was, but offering a possible explanation of what happened. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Pioneering TMS researcher Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, is doing even more astounding work. By stimulating specific areas in the right hemisphere of the brain, he is able to induce mystical states of consciousness, giving some subjects the experience of encountering God. In scientific terminology, he uses a specific, precisely timed, repetitive signal - one dubbed the "Thomas Pulse" - to create a "sensed presence" in the test subject's brain. Some volunteers have reported feelings of pleasant detachment, while others have broken into a panic, convinced the test chamber is "hexed". And some have had direct experience of the divine. Persinger is convinced that naturally occurring electromagnetic fluctuations could be responsible for paranormal experiences like ghosts, UFOs and mystical apparitions. Some have argued, on the basis of Persinger's work, that religion itself could be electromagnetic in origin - and the transcendent experiences like those recounted by saints and mystics can be recreated with electromagnetic pulses in his laboratory. http://www.erowid.org/tech/devices_article1.shtml
Pioneering TMS researcher Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, is doing even more astounding work. By stimulating specific areas in the right hemisphere of the brain, he is able to induce mystical states of consciousness, giving some subjects the experience of encountering God.
In scientific terminology, he uses a specific, precisely timed, repetitive signal - one dubbed the "Thomas Pulse" - to create a "sensed presence" in the test subject's brain. Some volunteers have reported feelings of pleasant detachment, while others have broken into a panic, convinced the test chamber is "hexed". And some have had direct experience of the divine.
Persinger is convinced that naturally occurring electromagnetic fluctuations could be responsible for paranormal experiences like ghosts, UFOs and mystical apparitions. Some have argued, on the basis of Persinger's work, that religion itself could be electromagnetic in origin - and the transcendent experiences like those recounted by saints and mystics can be recreated with electromagnetic pulses in his laboratory.
http://www.erowid.org/tech/devices_article1.shtml
Electric stimulation of the occipital lobe induces 'visions.' Does that mean "electromagnetic fluctuations" are responsible for seeing? Well. Yes. In part - ignoring the neurotransmitters - all brain activity is "electromagnetic fluctuations" but no one is daft enough to claim all human vision is an hallucination.
The location of stimuli processing in the brain is not the source of the stimuli that location processes.
Got a decided fondness for hard evidence, including a bit o' Brain lurking somewhere behind Mind. (I hasten to add: I don't claim to understand the Brain, the Mind, or the Brain/Mind totality!)
At least with toast you can see it. (And eat it too, I suppose.)
I have a general suspicion - not really a theory - that All Narratives Are Self Serving. There's always a pay off of some sort - some more than others, of course, and there's almost endless mileage in persuading people your narrative promises a pay-off even if it never delivers.
Even so - if there was nothing to make a narrative emotionally compelling it would be impossible to remember it, except as a curiosity.
Although I'm strenuously agnostic about 'spiritual' things, it's hard to reconcile a pragmatic view of personality as a patchwork of competing and often inconsistent narratives filtering primal drives with the idea that there might be something organised enough to be usefully metaphysical.
I suppose the drives might have a life of their own - they can certainly feel that way sometimes - but if they do, there's no definitive picture I've found yet anywhere, metaphysical or not, which is detailed enough to explain what's happening without leaving a lot of gaps and begging a lot of questions.
(And wouldn't that be - interesting?)
I don't think anyone reports seeing the Invisble Hand, because it's - you know - invisble.
You may not be able to see it, but if I had my livelihood invested in subprime paper right now, I'm pretty sure I'd be able to feel the Invisible Hand...
I wonder how an invisible punch to the nuts feels like. [Drew's WHEEEEE™ Technology]
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I have a general suspicion - not really a theory - that All Narratives Are Self Serving.
I agree, but don't we do that in "Reality" too? Don't we all create our own Concept or Map of Reality or Narratives, which is suppost to serve us deal with live? I do not believe anymore in the so called 'objectivity' - I really doubt there is such a thing. Every scientist will filter his research data through his Concept of Reality. I think that is what created the frustrating situation that when studying Psychology you get so many different researches and different outcomes. Some of them were chosen to be more true.
Objectivity would be something more stable to me, but looking at the history of science the views and narratives always changed, despite having had objectiv truth about something. I think there might have been 'objective' reasons to consider the world flat.
I think the best we can do is become aware that we are subjective by nature and take this into account when we look at the world.
Scientists are as brutal with each other about new possibilities as they are with outsiders. Sometimes this goes horribly wrong, and useful ideas are left to rot for a few decades. But it also means that at the core, maps are likely to be accurate because they've been tested independently many times, and anyone who learns to read the map will get the same answers no matter how they feel about science.
When views change they change because new information appears and they're adapted. Views are always provisional, but some are more provisional than others. Ideas at the edge of science where new ground is being broken are always very provisional and subject to change without notice. Ideas at the core are much more likely to be stable, or at least likely to be stable except in exceptional circumstances.
It's very difficult to do that kind of science when all you have is self-reporting, and once you move away from the physical sciences, everything gets fuzzier, less precise, and often more ideological.
But that doesn't mean everything is subjective - more that the maps are more complicated and much harder to draw accurately.
No, we can't. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
But of course, measuring the value of a treatment in survival rates is a very Modern(TM) way of looking at the world, that may not be Helpful to the patient.
New Scientist (where else?) had an interesting feature earlier in the year about the relative effectiveness of drugs, and how there's solid evidence that objectively influenced by the placebo effect and by the confidence of the patient in what is - often - as much a ritualistic activity as a scientific one. Doctors reliably hand out ineffective tablets and get positive results. How is that not voodoo?
So far as I know, shamanistic cures have only very rarely been studied objectively, so there's very little evidence for their effectiveness, or lack of it.
What passes for shamanism in the West is usually based on silly white people buying themselves a drum after a package holiday to Siberia or a weekend in a slightly remote part of Wales. I'd be surprised if it has much in common with the real thing, which - by all acounts - can kill you if you don't learn it properly, and will probably drive you mad even if you do.
The fact that frontline Western doctors (and vets) are very suicide prone is possibly just a coincidence.
It's a continuum - not all of the action happens at either extreme.
The difference in science is that the maps have to be share-able.
That's is a key point.
Also, in some disciplines, the map and the narrative comes with a recipe: under these conditions, do such-and-such, and you'll get this. In other areas the recipe is: under this statistical environment, do such-and-such, and you'll get this range of responses.
the recipe works, even if the story to explain it is nonsense.
classic colman!
weird isnt it?
the point where reason just keels over and...accepts. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
So the reasonable thing to do is accept that the trick works, discount the woo-woo story and don't worry too much about why it works.
maybe digging the mystery of it too, that such a homespun technology, (in the same sense that knowledge of training horses is 'technology' too), should elude the intellectual understanding demanded by double-blind tests and the like.
'woo-woo' is an appellation used to distance oneself from attempting to delve deeper into meeting the experience, rather than laying back and letting it roll over you, as you say, not worrying about the why.
what especially fascinates me is that after this brief abdication of the instinct for categorisation, one's reason seems to work better.
as if it had had a refreshing rest!
not to dismiss the importance of reason, not at all, just to put it in its place as useful complement to other sources of less easily quantifiable data. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
So far we have some labels and something which twitches into life occasionally, but given what seems to go on in everyone's mind most of the time, that's about the extent of it.
How do you prove it correct?
In Jake's example of the deadly mushroom hunt, were you to partner with a shaman from a local culture it is highly likely that you would only eat mushrooms that had properties that he predicted. Scientifically minded non-botanists who were foolish enough to participate in such a procedure on their own would be subject to the same winnowing he described. Hell, even animals usually do better than that. How do they manage? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
So yes, the shaman may know which mushrooms to pick. In fact, if I had to choose between a local who's been mushroom hunting for years on end in the same area and a botanist who's never studied the particular area in question, I'd go with the local. Hands down, no contest. But that doesn't mean that the local's explanation of how you can tell which mushrooms are poisonous makes sense. It's perfectly possible to construct a memorable narrative that gets all the known facts right and yet is completely incapable of dealing with new facts - i.e. has no predictive power.
Local knowledge is, in fact, often used as a starting point for scientific enquiry - but usually the first part of the exercise is to strip out all the concrete facts and discard the fluffy narrative.
So going back to the acupuncture example, you'd start by investigating whether sticking needles into people at random points produces medically interesting effects. It's perfectly testable whether "traditional" acupuncture has stumbled upon a useful fact that sticking needles in people actually triggers a useful biological response.
The second thing to investigate is whether sticking needles into certain points produces effects that differ from sticking needles into semi-random points. Again, this is a perfectly testable proposition.
Chakras, however, are not useful at any point in this exercise, except insofar as they can serve as mnemonic tricks, similar to learning multiplication by doing times tables. The times tables aren't interesting in and of themselves, they're just a scaffolding you can use to memorise facts. By contrast, while scientific theories can serve as mental scaffolding, their greatest value is that they can be extrapolated to cover unknown situations.
Faced with an unknown mushroom, our shaman wouldn't know whether it was poisonous or not (he'd very probably know whether to eat it or not, but that's not quite the same thing :-p). The botanist wouldn't either, of course, it being an unknown mushroom. But the botanist would know how to run a chemical analysis on it and compare the results to a list of known chemical substances. For that matter, if he has a good chemist at his lab, he'd be able to extrapolate from the known toxicity of related chemicals to hazard an educated guess as to whether the mushroom is dangerous or not.
Not necessarily, because this assumes that it's the needles and the sticking which are important.
Something else could always be going on. A more interesting test would be a combination of self reporting - not for definitive results, but for pointers - with a battery of tests for a wider spectrum of outcomes.
Realigning your Chakras will cure a common cold in seven days. Doing absolutely nothing will cure a common cold in a week.
Secondly, attempting to claim equivalence between bioelectric potentials and Chi flows is just plain silly. This is precisely the kind of rhetorical slight-of-hand and "gotcha" games that makes people who actually spend some time studying science exasperated with woo-woos.
Thirdly, even if a religious ritual happens to chance upon something that works above and beyond confirmation bias, placebo effect and what have we, it does not necessarily validate the underlying model.
To illustrate this, let me tell a little story:
1000 people went picking mushrooms one by one. Each found two mushrooms - one of which is instantly lethal when consumed, the other is harmless - and each of them flips a coin to decide which to eat for dinner.
The next day, the remaining five hundred go out into the woods and find two mushrooms - one dangerous and one harmless. Again, each flips a coin to decide which one to eat.
This repeats itself on the third day.
On the fourth day, the remaining 125 people meet for a Grand Council where they relate their recent experiences in the craft of mushroom picking.
They then conclude that flipping a coin to decide which mushrooms to eat makes perfect sense - after all, it's worked for all of them for three days in a row, which cannot possibly be a coincidence.
Attending the council meeting is a botanist, who happens to have a handbook on mushroom picking. He courteously explains that his professional opinion is that using the handbook to discern between poisonous and edible mushrooms is superior to using the coin-flip method.
The coin-flippers tell the botanist that they already know which mushrooms are edible: The coin told them, and what the coin told them matches what the botanist's science tells them. So obviously the two must be equivalent. Or, in fact, the coin-flipping method is slightly superior on account of having found the edible mushrooms first and faster and with less fuss and bother. So they'll stick to the coin-flipping method, thankyouverymuch.
The council is dissolved and each coin-flipper goes his own ways to search for mushrooms.
Ten days later, the botanist is the only one attending the meeting who is still alive.
The End.
A pertinent comment in Finland at this autumn mushroom-picking time ;-)
However, you forgot to add to your story the alternative botanist who carefully collected and consumed Amanita muscaria, and who, for short periods of time, regarded the Council and its members as a cosmic energy flow in another dimension. You can't be me, I'm taken
Because firstly, most of their results are frankly not clinically interesting. In most cases (and for many kinds of woo-woo in all cases investigated), the improvement felt by the individual comes down to confirmation bias, regression to the mean and various and sundry other well-known mental short-circuits.
This isn't actually true. It's probably impossible to investigate woo woo without confirmation bias on either side, and I can certainly think of at least one disconformation study with a methodology which would have been rightly ripped to shreds or ignored if it hadn't produced a negative result.
In the placebo studies I mentioned, the results were statistically significant. In fact they were more significant than the results of mainstream drug studies - not that that's a high standard, necessarily. But even so.
But that just highlights the double standard - this study was quoted by 'serious' researchers as if it was definitive and utterly professional, when in fact it was a very small data set collected under less than strictly controlled conditions as a high school student science fair project.
The trend of 20th century science has been, to a large extent, within the "narrative" of Statistical Mechanics. By definition this means a Set, therefore restricted, of Probable outcomes in the Learning process.
Shaman's invoke a Learning process on a 1:1 or, maybe, a 1:'Small Group' basis. Due to uncertainty of the affects of stimuli on an individual's neuro-psychology Shamans can constrain but not restrict.
I agree - but to take the extrem example of Shamans again, they can share their recipe between them, which creates certain outcomes, but with in their own map of reality.
But not reliably. The difference between science and woo-woo is that science works without preconditions. Science eventually turns into technology which makes outcomes easy.
I don't need to be in the right mood to make my light switch work. I don't need to spend three years living on my own, doing lots of drugs, communing with elders, invoking the spirits, having conversations with the vegetation around me, purifying my karma, sacrificing chickens and small furry animals, or waiting for the planets to line up just so.
I don't even need to know Maxwell's equation or understand the scientific model of the world.
If I want light - click - I get light. I can be drunk, I can be tired, I can be angry [1], I can be half dead from a terminal illness, I can be blind and unable to see the light after it's been turned on - it doesn't matter.
The problem with woo woo is that it's so very contingent and unreliable. You may get something from a ritual, ceremony, exercise, divination or happening, but it's just as likely that you won't. If you're a complete novice, you almost certainly won't. If you're a master you probably will, but there's no guarantee.
Eventually your map will not be the same as anyone else's map, because everyone else's map will reflect their own psychology.
It's a lot more like an art than a science. You can never tell ahead of time whether a musical or stage performance will be rockin', or a dud. You can't force it to be either, although you can increase the likelihood by practicing.
This doesn't prove woo-woo doesn't exist, but when something is this subjective, it's pretty damn hard to make share-able maps of it, or to know which parts of the map matter, and which parts are just superstition and myth-making which have been picked up along the way.
[1] Although in fact I have a history of fusing light circuits when I get really annoyed. Hmmm.
I don't need to be in the right mood to make my light switch work. I don't need to spend three years living on my own, doing lots of drugs, communing with elders, invoking the spirits, having conversations with the vegetation around me, purifying my karma, sacrificing chickens and small furry animals, or waiting for the planets to line up just so. I don't even need to know Maxwell's equation or understand the scientific model of the world.
I hope you are not serious. :-) How many years of training does a Western Healer aka medical doctor need? Here I think it is up to 10 years including internship. I do remember experiments with eggs, etc. - so I am not sure what it was all about. And btw. it used to be prerequisit that to become a Psychiatrist you had to go through a personal analysis with a mentor.
I don't there was ever any need for psychiatrists to have therapy. Psychotherapists usually try to enforce therapy on up-and-coming therapists, but I've seen the results of that first hand, and it's rarely been impressive.
Psychiatry isn't particularly impressive either, but that's not necessarily the point here.
This isn't just about medicine.
The difference between science and woo-woo is that science works without preconditions. Science eventually turns into technology which makes outcomes easy.
This is an interesting part of our western narrative of science and technology. Science gives technology, technology works thereby proving science. I really recomend The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology: Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch: Books for an in-depth look at that relationship.
The short version as I recall it (I read it years ago, my apologies in advance to Collina and Pinch) is that technological development mostly works with different methods then scientific research. The goal is not understanding, but improving the tech which is often done from an in-depth understanding of specific - not general - properties. New technology therefore gives incentive to develop the general theories to explain the tech and perhaps develop it further. Do read the book, it is well written and full of interesting stories about drilling for oil in Sweden, US-Israel missile cooperation and english economists.
It took somewhere around a century between Watts steam-engine (which was nto the first, but an improvement) and Joules theories that explained how it worked. We have cut significant time since then, but the general model stays the same. Medicine is mostly technology in this sense, it is less about the general explanations and more about finding methods that work. Same with finding truffels. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
I can plug a TOSLINK cable into my Mac, wire it up to a DAC, and get music out of it. I don't need to know about semiconductor band gaps, optical transmittivity, coding protocols, dither, or clock jitter.
Assuming I have the very basic level of knowledge needed to understand that I'm supposed to plug it into a DAC and not my ear, and as long as something isn't broken, it will just work for me.
Obviously if you're an engineer it's your job to know more, and to understand how to wave dead chickens and oscilloscopes around. But if you do your properly most people won't need to get that hands-on.
Woo woo tends not to be that reliable. Sometimes interesting, surprising, exotic and baffling things happen, but just as often nothing significant happens at all.
Maybe if we had a unified theory of woo woo it would work reliably. Or maybe it's perpetually liminal and just doesn't work like that.
No one knows. Camps on both sides assume they do, but really they don't at all.
... being sceptical is not the same as nihilism; one should be both sceptical AND respect well-researched, well-argued views. What we need is a "reasonable scepticism ": While these examples are meant to disillusion the reader about the objectivity and vision of transcendent truth claimed by scientists, they are not intended to be antiscientific or to suggest that we should give up science in favor of, say, astrology or thinking beautiful thoughts. Rather, they are meant to acquaint the reader with the truth about science as a social activity and to promote a reasonable skepticism about the sweeping claims that modern science makes to an understanding of human existence. There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism, for the former can lead to action and the latter only to passivity. So these pages have a political end, too, which is to encourage the readers not to leave science to the experts, not to be mystified by it, but to demand a sophisticated scientific understanding in which everyone can share. A Reasonable Skepticism by Richard Lewontin http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-101AA/readings/Lewontinfull.htm
... being sceptical is not the same as nihilism; one should be both sceptical AND respect well-researched, well-argued views. What we need is a "reasonable scepticism ":
While these examples are meant to disillusion the reader about the objectivity and vision of transcendent truth claimed by scientists, they are not intended to be antiscientific or to suggest that we should give up science in favor of, say, astrology or thinking beautiful thoughts. Rather, they are meant to acquaint the reader with the truth about science as a social activity and to promote a reasonable skepticism about the sweeping claims that modern science makes to an understanding of human existence. There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism, for the former can lead to action and the latter only to passivity. So these pages have a political end, too, which is to encourage the readers not to leave science to the experts, not to be mystified by it, but to demand a sophisticated scientific understanding in which everyone can share. A Reasonable Skepticism by Richard Lewontin http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-101AA/readings/Lewontinfull.htm
A Reasonable Skepticism by Richard Lewontin
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-101AA/readings/Lewontinfull.htm
Also objectivity is to do with the process rather than the end result, I.e. it's about the kind of process TBG describes in his comment. So to say that something is objective is not to say it is the absolute truth, but rather that it was arrived at using the kind of procedures used in science: considering rival theories, looking at the relevant evidence, doing experiments which might well undermine the cherished theory of the scientist doing it. This has been a lot more productive than asserting subjective opinions:
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in realitythis is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. http://www.todayinsci.com/B/Bronowski_Jacob/BronowskiJacob-Quotations.htm
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in realitythis is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
http://www.todayinsci.com/B/Bronowski_Jacob/BronowskiJacob-Quotations.htm
I don't think anyone reports seeing the Invisble Hand, because it's - you know - invisble. And not actually a hand, as such.
And here we come to a huge problem.
The Epistemic system an individual carries around in their neuro-psychology affects how, when, and why that individual processes stimuli, both input and output. "Seeing" the Invisible Hand, for example, is a process whereby an individual (input side) selects particular and/or a group of stimuli-as-evidence from the full gamut of all possible stimuli-as-evidence based on previous 'runs' of that person's Epistemic system. On the output side, the individual self-reports the existence of the Invisible Hand based on the 'evidence' constructed by the stimuli-as-evidence as further processed by Knowledge structures within the Epistemic system. Granted, under certain circumstances the stimuli received from Reality -- whatever that is -- can, and does, change, morph, affect, effect, and muck-around with these Knowledge structs as well as the Epistemic system, and even the neuro-psychology.
Put another way:
What you see is what you are prepared to see unless something comes along to change it.
(But that's soooooo understandable.
:-D
This is why I appreciate the scientific method - it gives humanity a small bootstrapping away from the all-consuming bias of "self-serving narratives."
I have a basic theory for what I think drives humanity:
you are the media you consume.
If I stimulate a certain part of your brain and you say "I felt like I was leaving my body" all I can say is that you reported leaving your body.
Anyway, maybe it's time for me to provide my take o Jill Bolte Taylor because assuming her self-reporting is reliable, it tells us quite a lot about the physical basis for experiences of "oneness" and bodily dissociation. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Don't we know that already?
With evidence such as this we may be able to formulate hypotheses as to why evolution would have provided us with such structures. It is only recently that we have discovered that birds and possibly other animals have what appears to be a built in magnetic compass that may be important to migratory abilities. Beats studying operant conditioning of rats in mazes. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Stimuli processing occurs in parallel and sequence(s) among and along many different locations in the brain.
There wasn't a 'he' behind me any more than my home disappeared into the light as I opened the door.
But the clarity of the voice is not something I have never 'heard' for real which is another thing that strikes me about it, looking back.
I was very accepting of the experience at the time and still young enough that the boundaries were still blurred between what 'can' be real and what can't. I possibly still believed that swallowing cherry stones would make a tree grow in my stomach.
I think what adds another dimension to it is that I was a child and not an adult which limits the possible construction of narratives around the experience. I'm not saying that the brain didn't construct something ie why a 'he' and not a gender neutral or female presence, why the journey towards the voice, why the life review, why the very clear message that I am here for a reason?
I was told in words (not through telepathic understanding) that it wasn't time for me to go and that I had to go back. I didn't 'consciously' choose to live within the context of the narrative, I chose to be 'good' as a result of the experience. Perhaps that translates to a fight to stay alive as I was dying, through whatever the NDE was.
All I can give you is what I recall, and given that I didn't speak to anybody about it for years, the 'narrative' is entirely as I perceived it at the time and held in my memory. Ad astra per aspera
