Currently watching J-O. I am at about 5:00

4:55 reminds me of this song:

The lyrics are worth googling.

Burn

BTW, I think you will really like this video J-O, it has some pretty incredible visuals about "awakening".

Burn

Very interesting take...

I don't have time at the office to watch that, but I'll add it to my list.

I love the TED presentations! All quite insightful.

Neurotheology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology

I really enjoyed watching her describe how she found " nirvana". what she experienced could explain the NDE and the akashi records.

What a powerful  experience she had and to be able to relay it to all of us with such clarity.

you might also enjoy this one

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/184

 he discusses phantom  limb, capgras syndrome, and synesthesia

'Right Brain' or 'Left Brain' - Myth or Reality?

I remember a neuroscience class on hemispheric differences during which the professor was elaborating upon a famous research executed in the 1960s or 70s which had given evidence that Jews and Americans showed a lefthemispheric dominance while Turks showed a righthemispheric dominance. Can we conclude that Judeo-Christian thought is lefthemispheric in nature? Mind the trap of phrenology!

She had an experience that evidently affected her a great deal; a beautiful and calming experience. Good for her (at least as long as she seems to have recovered from it nicely).

However, as a heartless, emotionless atheist, I feel it is my 'duty' to trample all over her heartfelt, beautiful story (!) and say I fail to see how it translates into an experience of a 'second reality'. I'm not sure if that's her own opinion of it or not, but it may seem that way at the end of the video, and in any case it seems to be the reason for posting it here at JWD with this particular topic headline.

The brain is a very complex and powerful computer, and any number of things may go wrong up there from time to time, from small almost unnoticed hiccups to grand mal seizures. My own laptop computer experienced an "aneurism" a few weeks ago; the memory chips on the video card went bad. The result was a very colorful display of corrupt characters and shapes on screen. Did it show me something profound; some alternative reality I should really make note of? No, although the display of colorful artifacts could be said to be beautiful, even a work of random art, and by some perhaps preferable to the usual boring display of the Desktop or Internet Explorer, all it showed me was what happens when the computer malfunctions; a skewed version of what the computer was supposed to show me.

When I drink alcohol, I become handsome, the girls around me become (more) beautiful, and I am suddenly liked by them all. If I 'kicked it up a notch' and did drugs like LSD, I would suddenly be able to fly, transport away to distant planets etc. Do these experiences reflect an alternative but equally relevant reality, or is it caused by a chemically altered state of my brain, misinterpreting information? If I was caught on tape while intoxicated and watched the video when I was back to being sober, would I be able to confirm that the experience while intoxicated was real, or would I get embarrassed at how I behaved?

Some creationist on YouTube once said that evolutionists can't trust their own brains, because they believe their brains are only 'a modified monkey brain'  [sic], in other words didn't come from an already rational Creator. In actuality, it would probably be the other way around. If one accepts that all life has a natural cause, a common descent right down to the first life form, and that mutation, natural selection and a few other things are the main mechanics for how we got here from simple beginnings, it follows that the first faculties to evolve were simply cells that reacted - in some form or another - to outer, real stimuli. For instance, a type of cell on a creature's body became sensitive to light. The cells reacted to a real occurrence in the real world, and gave some kind of useful feedback about the world. This, over time, proved to be an advantage, and so light sensitive cells became the norm among many species. Over time, the sensitivity became a blurry image, and the blurry image became sharp. All the time in-between, the various stages gave feedback about the creature's actual surroundings though, otherwise it would have proved useless in most instances. Now - on the other hand, if we open up for a supernatural explanation of origins, we really can't trust our faculties and sensory inputs, because they may not have been created to react to real outer stimuli, and there's then no way of really knowing if we are "in the Matrix" or some similar sort of (spiritually) simulated world. Anything goes, pretty much.

Also, these kinds of out-of-body, spiritual experiences can be turned on and off as with a light switch by using, then staying away from, certain drugs. It's very reproducible. On and off. I guess one could go in the direction of saying that what happens is that the brain becomes more powerful and is able to tap into areas of the universe (or other dimensions) that we otherwise can't (a very common way of phrasing it). But it is my opinion at least that this is not the case; that brain cells are brain cells, and even if you fed them "rocket fuel", all they'd do would be to perhaps work better at solving a math problem for a short period of time, then burn out. I fail to see how it would make them "grow antennae" and "reach out" into a supernatural or other-dimensional world, even if such a world exists. If you give your computer's CPU more 'juice', it will work faster at the expense of becoming hotter, but it will not suddenly be able to communicate with the computer next to it, unless they are already on a network.

I hate to be the "grumpy, dream-killing atheist". I have no problem seeing that such experiences are profound for the person experiencing them, that 'seeing is believing' etc., and maybe it even makes them a better, more peaceful person because of it, but...

I'm sure some would look at my malfunctioning computer screen and go "Oh, look at all the pretty colors! I'm so glad I saw that!". Personally, I was more annoyed than anything. 

19th-century has reincarnated in 20th-century modularism (I've read the thread title and seen the vid, no problems there).

The New Phrenology. The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain. 

The link you posted is a good example of this: even though some neuroscientists claim that meditation and prayer activate certain well-defined areas in the right hemisphere, this doesn't mean it's an exclusively righthemispheric experience: left areas such as Broca are activated as well. Every attempt to clear-cut localization is to a certain extent neo-phrenology even when it comes from a neuroanatomist.