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Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences
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$ 20.27
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$ 25.99 |
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| Item Number |
2482261 |
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Item Description...
Overview
Through their work at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long and his wife, Jody, have gathered thousands of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) from all over the world. "Largest NDE study ever conducted reveals proof of life after death" -- Dust jacket.
Publishers Description
Evidence of the Afterlife shares the firsthand accounts of people who have died and lived to tell about it. Through their work at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long and his wife, Jody, have gathered thousands of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) from all over the world. In addition to sharing the personal narrative of their experiences, visitors to the website are asked to fill out a one hundred–item questionnaire designed to isolate specific elements of the experience and to flag counterfeit accounts. The website has become the largest NDE research database in the world, containing over 1,600 NDE accounts. The people whose stories are captured in the database span all age groups, races, and religious affiliations and come from all over the world, yet the similarities in their stories are as awe-inspiring as they are revealing. Using this treasure trove of data, Dr. Long explains how medical evidence fails to explain these reports and why there is only one plausible explanation—that people have survived death and traveled to another dimension. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 215
Dimensions: Length: 1" Width: 6.5" Height: 9.75"
Weight: 0.8 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Jan 1, 2010
ISBN 0061452556
EAN 9780061452550
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Availability 11 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 03:58.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Commerce GA.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Foolish and fraudulent Feb 8, 2010 |
Like most humans I fear death and I had hopes that this book would indeed provide "scientific" evidence for an afterlife.
It had me going until the author talked about interviewing young children using language that no child of that age could possibly understand and then produced so called testimony from young children, which was either written long after the near-death experience or was simply false since no 5 year old would have the vocabulary to express themselves as he describes.
He also presents skeptic views in a truncated and biased manner and glosses over cultural differences.
Don't waste your money on this combination of wishful thinking and pseudo-science. | | | | THE PHENOMENON OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES Feb 6, 2010 |
People so desperately want to believe that there is an afterlife! Therefore, people look for any supporting "evidence." Unfortunately, what this book (and all other examples of "evidence") does is make an incorrect and illogical association between a natural physiologic response to hypoxia (lack of oxygen delivery to the brain) and an afterlife. It is well known that causing a reduction in oxygen levels in the brain causes a characteristic feeling of "out-of-body" floating, seeing a light, distant memories, etc. This can be reproduced quite easily and scientifically. The feeling of "out-of-body" floating and seeing a light, etc, can be reproduced by certain medications such as ketamine and diprivan, medications used in general anesthesia, or even putting a tight noose around one's neck and depriving the brain of oxygen until unconsciousness occurs.
All the "evidence" consists of "near-death" experiences. Near-death is not death. There are no examples of someone who truly died and then came back to life, since that's impossible. The definition of death involves irreversible loss of life. Truly dead people cannot come back to life, since if the person does come back to life, he wasn't actually dead. Near-death is a condition in which a person's brain may be severely deprived of oxygen, but is still functioning, at least at a low level. Therefore, the examination of a phenomenon occurring during a near-death experience is not in any way germane to what happens after death. Near-death, and death, are so completely different that one cannot be used to extrapolate to the other.
This book is just one more example of authors preying on the fears and desperate hopes of those who, emotionally and psychologically, cannot accept or deal with the reality of death. | | |  | Very Informative! Thorough Research Into A Difficult Subject to Research! Feb 5, 2010 |
| I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Took a study and actually made it enjoyable to read. Definitely made me re-think things in my own life. It is a very convincing book. The research in this book was very thorough. Could more research be conducted? Yes of course as with most subjects. This study reminds us that there is life after death and more research needs to be done. | | | | An Excellent Book Feb 3, 2010 |
Dr. Long's book is a must read for anyone interested in NDEs. The book provides the best summary of the available evidence for the "survival hypothesis".
While I lean towards being "agostic" when it comes to afterlife experiences, I have to admit that I am somewhat appalled by the nay-sayer reviewers who criticize Dr. Long's science. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point by what people say on the Internet. I suspect that these people are either not scientists themselves, or they are scientists who are committed skeptics (with their own entrenched belief systems), and therefore not open to anomalous but very reliable observations.
I am a scientist with a moderate list of peer reviewed scientific publications. Not all legitimate issues in science can be easily put into an experimental control group kind of design. Hopefully, the study planned by Dr. Parnia and his associates will test these phenomena in a more rigorous scientific fashion. In the meantime, however, Dr. Long's hypthesis (i.e "survival") appears for now to be the most parsimonious explanation for NDE experiences. While not all alternative explanations can be completely ruled out, it is clear that the "dying brain hypthesis" for NDEs has many more problems in this respect, and comes across as a rather desperate patchwork attempt to explain away what many millions of people have reported.
Dr. Al Botkin
| | |  | adequate (if maddeningly naive) summary of the field Feb 3, 2010 |
It is difficult to know how to be fair in reviewing this book. The author is sincere in his beliefs and has made an earnest attempt to collate data in a difficult area (doing experiments on people at the boundary of death is hardly easy science).
The book's positive elements are that it serves as a fine summary of popular questions on this subject matter. It is the kind of material that would do well on Oprah for instance, or on daytime TV shows. In this respect it has sort of missed the boat, though, because the public thirst for such books and shows probably peaked about 15 years ago or even further back, with the publication of books by Dannion Brinkley and Betty Eadie. Personal accounts of NDEs rarely make it to the bestseller list these days.
However, there are also significant problems with this book. Its main problem is that it consists of a set of indications which could be taken to encourage the possibility of a formal experiment, rather than that experiment itself. There is an experiment currently underway called the AWARE study, which seeks to establish whether or not people really do "float out of their bodies" by putting symbols in hidden positions over beds in critical care units. A lot of the future credibility of this subject (and any prospect it has of being taken seriously by science at large) will depend on the outcome of that study and how rigorously it was conducted. This book should really have waited until that study reported, because it has no emprical data of its own taken from a medical environment to back up its essentially anthropological data-gathering model. As other reviewers have mentioned stories, however oft repeated, are not laboratory standard evidence. They are merely first sketches suggesting that we should go in search of such evidence.
The other major probem with the book is its philosophical naivete, which oscillates from moderately disturbing to flat out staggering. Here is where we need the genius of Carl Jung half a century after his death. He would have understood, I think, that these are not literal happenings, but a symbolic language of the psyche when presented with its climactic moments. We are given nine chapters arguing strands of evidence in favor of the afterlife. There isn't much in the way of deep inquiry or critical examination of these concepts. Let me go through these briefly to illustrate what I mean.
# BLIND SIGHT. It is said that blind people can see in near death experiences. Well, here is something that CRIES OUT to be tested. As it is, people simply reporting that they could see in a near death experience really doesn't count for much by way of evidence. Extraordinary claims do indeed require extraordinary evidence. Additionally, the person would have to be totally blind from birth otherwise visual cues would exist in memory. Finally, it is highly questionable that a blind person would even know whether or not they were seeing, for they have never known the category. They may simply have a peculiar experience and assume that that was seeing. Sadly, these questions are all glossed over in the book.
# PERFECT PLAYBACK. People having NDEs report panoramic "life reviews" in which, it is said, they even see the hurts that they have done to others But again, all of this can be understood on a psychological model of grief reduction (see my review of "animals and the afterlife"). In addition, there has been no study done, to the best of my knowledge, which seeks to determine whether these memories people experience are actually accurate, or whether the events and hurts they see caused in the lives of those they have influenced, really happened that way. Without such close study, it is impossible to know whether these reviews are more than internally self-referenced psychological events.
# OUT OF BODY. There is no doubt that people often have the subjective experience of being out of body. Yet almost all scientific attempts to establish the existence in literal fact of any such thing as an out of body experience, have fallen flat. The only really notable exception to this was a one-off incident with a subject of Dr Charles Tart, and that was decades ago. Here once more we have a kind of social meme existing that these out of body experiences are "real", largely fueled by the type of stories that Dr Long collects or in books by proclaimed astral travel adepts. But when you try to check if the phenomenon really happens, it mysteriously disappears. This is why the AWARE study has so much resting on it.
In the interests of not making this review too long, I won't list blow by blow through the other categories. Suffice to say that there are pretty robust counter arguments to be put against each of the author's categories (I could elaborate in comments should anyone be interested), including this popular misconception of worldwide consistency which is largely a sampling artifcat, and the book would have been much stronger if it had demonstrated an awareness of these issues or argued against them cogently, which it does not.
As one NDEr (not of the book) poignantly observed: "I couldn't go on, because I knew that beyond that point, as individuals, we would cease to exist, and I found the concept terribly sad." You won't find that kind of material here, and I would argue that until we have the courage to include such "off message" accounts, you will see no significant deepening of the published material in this subject area.
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