$5M Templeton grant for NDE and afterlife research

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a three-year $5 million grant to University of California Riverside philosopher John Fischer to research aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior, according to a UCR report. The Immortality Project will solicit research proposals from scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals. "We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death," said Fischer, principal investigator of the Immortality Project.

"Anecdotal reports of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and past lives are plentiful, but it is important to subject these reports to careful analysis," Fischer said.

Skeptiko interviews two important NDE researchers

Alex Tsakiris recently interviewed two important NDE researchers on his Skeptiko.com podcast, a leading source for the skeptic vs. believer debate on science and spirituality. Dr. Melvin Morse spoke about NDE researchers' attitudes about the NDE: "We studied every survivor of cardiac arrest and virtually every child that we studied told us of some [type of near-death] experience. I’m wondering why we don’t simply accept it? ... Why don’t we just say, 'Oh, okay, that must be what happens when we die.'?”

In a separate interview, Dr. Raymond Moody spoke about his recent memoir, Paranormal: My life in pursuit of the afterlife and his new online course, "A New Way of Thinking", and related the experience of a surgeon who was operating on a man injured in an accident when the room “opened up into another dimension” and he saw and talked with the wife of the man he was working on, who had been killed in the accident.

Listen to the full interviews here: Melvin Morse and Raymond Moody.

Bioethics Forum: research on NDEs and dying

The 11th annual International Bioethics Forum of the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute in Madison, Wisconsin focused on near-death experiences and the experience of dying. The videos of the talks and panels are available. The first day focused on NDE research:

   - Pim van Lommel: Nonlocal Consciousness: Explanatory model for NDE
   - Penny Sartori: Research on NDE: An intensive care prospective study
   - A Conversation with Eben Alexander, MD - Near Death Experiencer
   - Raymond Moody: Shared Death Experiences: Implications
   - Eric Weiss: A New Philosophy of Physics, NDEs and Life After Death
   - Panel Discussion, Day 1

The full set of videos for the conference is here.

Dr. Jan Holden presents The Handbook of NDEs

Dr. Janice Holden, editor of IANDS' Journal of Near-Death Studies, recently presented an excellent two-hour lecture on The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty years of investigation, of which she is a co-editor. The Handbook is a compilation of the first 30 years of NDE research.

In the lecture, Dr. Holden summarizes the main points of the book. The presentation is given in four parts, roughly 30 minutes each: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Throughout the presentation, Dr. Holden uses an interview with Tricia to illustrate her points. Tricia, a community college English teacher, suffered cardiac arrest during surgery following an automobile accident and experienced an extensive near-death experience, with a veridical element and with numerous aftereffects.