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character to trying to interpret what

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you're hearing

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so there's not much of this research

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done here there's a lot done in europe

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still though

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and then we have decoding of encrypted

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messages

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back in the late 1800s some of the

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founders of the

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society of psychical research decided to

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plan

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evidence for survival so they would

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leave

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encrypted messages with the idea that

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after they died

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they would communicate postmortem the

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key to decipher

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the message now back in the eighteen

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hundreds

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that would have been hard to do you

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could have been hard to decipher message

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without

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knowing the key now it's very simple

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with the computer

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so ian stevenson developed a

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modification of this

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and we have combination padlocks that

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you can set the combination to

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and the idea is that you would set the

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combination to your lock

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and then memorize a mnemonic device a

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phrase or a word

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that can be translated into a series of

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numbers that will open the lock

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you never write down the combination or

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the mnemonic

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so the key to opening the lock exists

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only in your mind and nowhere else

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and then after you die you will

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communicate

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the key we have some two dozen locks in

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our office

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and none of them for none of them have

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we gotten the combination uh committed

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to transmitted to it

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the third hypothesis i mentioned was

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that oops

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was that the mind can function

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independent of the brain

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now this is not a sufficient condition

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for survival

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but it is a necessary condition for

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survival if you don't have mind

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functioning without brain

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then you don't have survival because the

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we have lots of evidence for this in

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several of my colleagues recently

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published this book irreducible mind

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with 800 pages of very densely packed

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evidence mostly from

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medical journals of mind functioning

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without the brain or independent of the

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i won't read it to you now

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but i will mention some of the more

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dramatic lines of evidence

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first is deathbed recovery of lost

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mental function this happens typically

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in people who have

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dementia who've been unable to recognize

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people for decades

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people with chronic schizophrenia who

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have been psychotic for decades

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and then on their death beds they

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suddenly become rational

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lucid remember family members speak

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coherently

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now this is extremely rare most people

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with dementia do not recover before

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death

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but that happens at all is something

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material science cannot explain

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how often does it happen we don't know

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if you talk to hospice workers they will

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say oh yeah i've got lots of examples of

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that

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but there's almost nothing written in

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the medical literature about it

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nevertheless we found

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79 cases in the medical literature of

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people with severe dementia

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or chronic psychosis who in the hours

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before death or sometimes in the days

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before death

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suddenly became lucid again

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then we have people with normal

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intelligence with minimal brain tissue

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and this is brought to our attention by

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a british neurologist john lorber

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who is specializing in severe

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hydrocephalus

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usually children who have the cerebral

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ventricles which are filled with fluid

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tremendously swollen so that it presses

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on the brain

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in some of these cases you have just a

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tiny couple of millimeters of

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cerebral cortex around the outside of

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some of these are so severe it's hard to

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imagine the child even living

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let alone having a normal intelligence

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in fact most of them do not have normal

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intelligence

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but some do in fact some have high

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intelligence

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one of lorber's colleagues at the

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university of cambridge where he worked

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was a math professor and said to laura

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one day

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i've got a grad student whose head is so

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big it looks like one of your side just

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valikites would you take a look at them

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so lauber did on the left is a normal

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brain scan

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the stippled area is cortex and the dark

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area in the middle is the

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ventricles full of fluid on the right

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is this 26 year old grad student in math

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at cambridge

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but functioning as a grad student in

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what else have we got we have evidence

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from

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near-death experiences a variety of

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things about near-death experiences

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that relate to survival of death

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first almost all near-death experiences

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report that

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their thinking processes during the nde

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was

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faster and clearer than it ever has been

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before

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at a time when their brains were

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impaired

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and in some of these cases we have very

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good documentation of the brains being

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impaired for example in cardiac arrest

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where there is no blood going to the

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brain

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and yet these people say my thinking was

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better than ever

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almost as if as they say my mind was

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free of the limitations

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one fellow that i interviewed was a guy

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who had

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overdosed on medications in a suicide

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attempt

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and then started hallucinating and he

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was seeing

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little humanoid figures around him

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and then he had started having second

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thoughts about the suicide attempt

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so he tried to make it from his bed

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where he was to a telephone

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and he was having a very hard time

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because these humanoid figures were

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stopping

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getting in his way and at that point

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he drew out of his body

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and from a position about 10 feet behind

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his body his thinking suddenly became

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crystal clear

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and he looked at his body and his body

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was looking around confusedly and from

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where he was 10 feet behind

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he could not see these humanoid figures

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but he remembered

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being in the body hallucinating so here

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we have

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a brain that's still hallucinating while

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the subject the person

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so how does medical science make sense

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we also have accurate perceptions from

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an out-of-body perspective

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we have lots of examples of this lots of

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quote anecdotes

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about this one of my favorites is a

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fellow that i knew in connecticut

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named al sullivan who was a truck driver

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and during open heart surgery he left

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his body

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and as he described it he saw the

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surgeon flapping his wings as if he was

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i've been in medicine for four decades

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i've never seen a surgeon do this

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but al described it to me he said yep

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i said did you ask him about it he said

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yeah after the surgery

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i asked the surgeon why were you doing

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that

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and he said the surgeon got a very red

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face and said who told you about that

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and i said nobody told me i saw it

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when you killed me i drew with left my

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body and i watched it

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and the surgeon got very angry and said

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well you're here now aren't you

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i said i must have done some right that

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by the time al told me this it was

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several years later so i think it was

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safe for me to talk to the surgeon so i

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did

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and i asked him about this and he said

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that

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he had developed this habit of letting

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his

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residents start the surgery and then he

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would go

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in after they got started and he had

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scrubbed his hands they were gowned and

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gloved

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and he wasn't going to operate he was

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going to watch them for a while we

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wanted to make sure he didn't touch

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anything that wasn't sterile and

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contaminate

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his hands so he put the where he knew

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and then he supervised them you know

227
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pull over there a little more

228
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come over there i've never seen

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00:08:54,870 --> 00:08:53,200
anybody else do this this doesn't happen

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00:08:58,150 --> 00:08:54,880
on house or er

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00:09:01,509 --> 00:08:58,160
i don't think al could have seen it

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00:09:04,150 --> 00:09:01,519
so are these just anecdotes

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00:09:04,870 --> 00:09:04,160
jan holden has looked at the literature

234
00:09:06,550 --> 00:09:04,880
of

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00:09:09,269 --> 00:09:06,560
vertical perception in near-death

236
00:09:13,110 --> 00:09:09,279
experiences and she found 107

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of those there were 98 that were

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completely accurate

239
00:09:23,430 --> 00:09:20,800
there were only eight that had any

240
00:09:24,949 --> 00:09:23,440
inaccuracy at all in them

241
00:09:27,430 --> 00:09:24,959
of those 98 that were completely

242
00:09:29,829 --> 00:09:27,440
accurate 41

243
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were corroborated as being accurate by a

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now in spite of all these quote

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00:09:41,030 --> 00:09:39,279
anecdotes we don't have any

246
00:09:42,310 --> 00:09:41,040
experimental verification of this

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controlled studies

248
00:09:45,750 --> 00:09:44,240
there have been a few people who tried

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to plant targets

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00:09:51,030 --> 00:09:49,040
where patients might have ndes

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now the skeptics like to say with all

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the control studies done you've never

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00:09:55,190 --> 00:09:53,200
had a single

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person out of their body seeing

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something accurately well all these

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studies we've done