What Really Happens After Death - Doctors & Nurses Are Afraid To Tell You

What if you could experience someone else’s death…without being the one who was dying? For centuries, people across cultures have reported something far stranger than a traditional near death experience: shared death experiences (SDEs). Healthy, conscious people (including doctors, nurses, family members, and even people thousands of miles away) have described witnessing or experiencing phenomena seemingly connected to someone in the process of dying. But how is that possible? Some witnesses report seeing hovering apparitions, mysterious lights, mist, sounds, or even figures seemingly guiding the dying person into another realm. In some cases, multiple people in the same room claim to witness the same phenomenon. Are these experiences hallucinations? A psychological response to grief? Something science hasn't yet explained? Or could they point to something much deeper about consciousness, death, and what happens when we die? And then there are the experiences that happen after death. People who report after-death communication experiences sometimes say they have perceived a deceased loved one as being healthy, peaceful, and fully present in what feels like a new environment. Others report receiving a specific message, sign, or unmistakable sense that their loved one is still somehow connected to them. For those who experience them, these encounters can be profoundly comforting, sometimes helping people process grief, accept the death of someone they love, and completely rethink their understanding of the afterlife and what happens to consciousness after death. But are these simply experiences created by the grieving mind—or could they represent something more? We'll also revisit near-death experiencers and NDE researchers previously featured on the podcast to hear their perspectives on shared death experiences and what these accounts might tell us about consciousness, death, and the possibility of an existence beyond this life. In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, we explore the fascinating and controversial world of shared death experiences and ask questions that challenge the way we think about death, and perhaps even life itself. You don't have to be the one dying to experience death! Head to https://nuropod.com/mayimfor 5% off. Nuropod is a wearable device built on 10+ years of vagus nerve research, backed by 60+ clinical studies and a 30 day return guarantee.# https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/adNuropodPartner#Nuropod#VagusNerveUnlock your best hair & skin with @iRestorelaser and HUGE savings on iRESTORE with code BREAKER at https://irestore.com/BREAKER! #irestorepodGet 15% off OneSkin with the code BREAK at https://www.oneskin.co/BREAK #oneskinpod Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive 20% off your Helix mattress. Visithttps://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Upgrade your kitchen with Our Place today. Visit http://fromourplace.com/BREAK and use code BREAK for 10% off sitewide. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Jeff O'Driscoll was working in the ER the night a man was airlifted to the hospital following a severe and tragic car accident. He wasn't assigned to this particular case, but a nurse named Rachel grabbed his arm and told him he had to come to the trauma room. When Dr. O'Driscoll entered the trauma bay, he saw doctors and nurses rushing around the patient. But what he and Nurse Rachel saw was a woman with curly blond hair and flowing white clothing hovering above the man on the table. It wasn't a physical being, but she was clearly in the room. Skeptics often say that near-death experiences are likely hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, a spontaneous release of DMT, but nothing else. But how does that explain people who are alive and healthy witnessing absolutely unexplainable phenomena

• 0:44Mayim Bialik?

  like what Dr. O'Driscoll and Nurse Rachel saw? It has a name in the clinical literature. It's called a shared death experience. And for thousands of years, across numerous cultures, people have reported experiencing death along with a person who is transitioning. What's the purpose of a shared death experience? What's the message that we receive? And how can it change the way we view life and the nature of our purpose here?

• 1:14Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:16Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be talking about a unique and fantastic phenomenon known as a shared death experience. Most of us have heard of near-death experiences. There's a tunnel, there's light, a feeling of leaving your body, maybe there's a life review, meeting deceased relatives. But what we're going to talk about today is what a lot of people are afraid to talk about. You don't have to be the one dying to have an experience of death.

• 1:45Jonathan Cohen?

  Healthy people, conscious people, doctors, nurses, family members sitting at the bedside, and in some cases, family members thousands of miles away report experiencing what the dying person is going through in the moments before death.

• 2:01Mayim Bialik?

  Sometimes it's sharing in the trauma surrounding an accident preceding death. Sometimes it's experiencing a person ushering the dying person into the next world. Often, there's sounds, mist, a light floating around the deceased person. How can we start to understand why someone who is not dying would share any part of the transitioning experience with someone who is dying? How can we explain that sometimes numerous people in a room will witness the same thing? It seems like the only explanation would be something supernatural. It's ghosts, it's a joint psychosis. It's so hard to wrap your head around it.

• 2:40Jonathan Cohen?

  The best place to start is with Dr. Raymond Moody, who coined the concept of near-death experience in his book, Life After Life, in 1975, where he interviewed more than 100 people who had been described as clinically dead in medical terms, but then came back.

• 2:57Mayim Bialik?

  Scientists who study NDEs admit that this is one of the most challenging pieces of data surrounding what happens when we die and what it can mean for every single person who has ever sat with someone they loved at the end. So the stories that people experienced on the other side and brought back with them were nearly identical in content. There was almost always a tunnel, a bright light, deceased relatives greeting them, a sense of peace, an overwhelming love, and in many cases, as we've talked about here a lot, a life review. And in the 1980s, Dr. Moody began hearing about even more extraordinary experiences. People who had participated in a dying person's transition.

• 3:42Mayim Bialik?

  So these are people who are healthy, not dying, family members, friends, even medical personnel, who described seeing incredible things, feeling incredible things, hearing incredible things, and witnessing aspects of the death process that is otherwise inexplicable by all medical knowledge.

• 4:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Now, these are people, again, who are healthy, who described seeing glowing mist rising from the dead person's body, the shape of the room changing, and even hearing music when there was not otherwise music playing.

• 4:19Mayim Bialik?

  Some people have even reported feeling an upward physical pull on their body as if being pulled by a magnet while someone is dying. So the notion is there's something being mimicked or mirrored. We don't really know. It's what we're going to talk about today. And what Dr. Moody noted was these incredible similarities of the descriptions to the near-death experiences that he had been studying for years from people who had shared death experiences. Except, as we said, the people having these experiences were healthy, were conscious, and in many cases, weren't even related to the person. This second concept, shared death experiences, was introduced to the world in Dr. Moody's book, Glimpses of Eternity. Let's hear him talk about it.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  The pseudoskeptics tell us, oh, this is the chemistry of the brain. And they utterly fail to take into account that it is very common for bystanders at the death of someone else, who are not themselves ill or injured, have all of these experiences that we think of as a near-death experiences. The bystanders say, as Grandma died, I myself got out of my body and I rose up with her partway toward this light. Or they say that I saw the apparitions of my grandmother's deceased relatives coming in the room to take her away, and the room fills with light. I have quite a number of cases

• 5:46Speaker 02

  where the bystanders empathically co-lived the dying life review of the person who passed away.

• 5:53Mayim Bialik?

  You had an experience when your mother passed?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  As my mother was dying. My perception was that the space I was in bent, and it widened out at the top and at the bottom, and there was a very narrow intermediate space, which was tending to rotate. None of this makes sense, I know, because the words don't fit in it. But I heard my mother say twice, "I love you," although she wasn't moving her mouth. My wife, who was there, had experienced. My sister, who was there, felt the presence of my father, who had died 18 months before.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  But to me, it's immaterial that it's happened to me. You know what I mean? And yes, it's happened to me, but the impressive fact to me is that it happens to so many people.

• 6:53Mayim Bialik?

  Many people see a mist that rises off of someone when they pass? And I've been in the room when people die. No mist, but maybe I didn't know how to look. Maybe I wasn't looking right. I'm going to go ahead and say that I feel like I've missed out on this, what sounds like a terrifying but incredible experience. I was in the room when my grandfather of blessed memory passed away. There was no mist, there was no music. I'll be honest, you can feel kind of something shift. I was actually with my grandmother of blessed memory when she passed. I will say that if I were a person more in tune with what things feel like, I might have been able to articulate it better.

• 7:37Mayim Bialik?

  Something shifted, I knew that. And I couldn't even describe it then. I just knew that something changed in the room. And indeed, that's what changed. I mean, I was right there with her. But I have not had any, you know, any of these other kinds of experiences. You know, I think we talked about a pink mist in particular. You know, I was not in the room when my father of blessed memory passed away, but I was with him when he was transitioning. And so he did talk about seeing his mother. He did talk about remembering himself as a young man. And I'm like, is that a life review? He remembered my mother when he first saw her, and he described her to me, right?

• 8:22Mayim Bialik?

  Was that some sort of review? But no mist, no music, none of those things have I experienced.

• 8:29Jonathan Cohen?

  The idea that people in a sober state could see mist in a room that doesn't have a machine pumping mist into it, it is such a physical and tangible way to say something is happening that we do not understand.

• 8:47Mayim Bialik?

  There should be no mist being generated in a room when someone dies. And I'm also wondering, like, is there some gas that the body could be releasing? But like, that's not what people are describing.

• 8:58Jonathan Cohen?

  It isn't what they're describing. And it's easy to say, oh, someone felt something internally. It's emotional, or they're making it up, or that's how they're coping with the grief of the loss of a loved one. But when it's external and observable, not possibly generated by the backup of the AC system in the hospital, because AC systems don't work like that, by generating pink mist, you have to say, what else is going on? And the other question that happens a lot are people say, well, if it happened here, why didn't it happen in a similar way somewhere else? What are the conditions that have to be in place in order for someone to experience something out of the ordinary? Do you have to be religious?

• 9:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you have to be tuned in? Or does the universe simply work in mysterious ways and present?

• 9:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Something beyond the veil to those select few.

• 9:54Mayim Bialik?

  When we have a shared death experience, you're relying on report, sometimes from several people. There's no contained, controlled way to gather this data. This is a category of information that has its own evidence system. It has its own proof system. It exists outside of the realms of let's test it, what's going on that way? There are explanations I could make about why you would hear music when there are no instruments or speakers in the room. But, but let's talk a little bit more about this. We opened our episode talking about this hospital trauma room and Dr. Jeff O'Driscoll and a nurse Rachel and a man on the table, whose name was Jeff Olson. And what makes that case different from every other SDE than we've heard about

• 10:36Mayim Bialik?

  is there were people in the room who experienced things who did not get to compare their notes until years later. This was in 1997. It was Easter weekend. A man named Jeff Olson fell asleep at the wheel while driving home. The car rolled eight times at 75 miles per hour. Tragically, his wife and son died at the scene. His seven-year-old son survived. He was airlifted to a local hospital. He had severe injuries. He had a broken back. His leg was crushed. While Olson was on the operating table fighting for his life, what he later described was that he felt his consciousness was elsewhere, that it was floating above the scene of the accident.

• 11:18Mayim Bialik?

  He said that he was in a bubble of light and his wife was floating next to him. And she told him that he had to go back because their son who survived needed him. As this man is floating over the accident scene with his wife, again, in some other plane of consciousness, in the trauma room, what Dr. O'Driscoll and Rachel were watching turned out to be this image of the wife hovering over her husband on the operating table. So what they described was that she wasn't a physical being. She appeared transparent, but vibrant. They could make her out clearly. It seemed that she radiated peace. I mean, they were having this experience of seeing this being.

• 12:03Mayim Bialik?

  And Dr. O'Driscoll says that the wife looked at him and smiled, and he felt like she had known him forever. So already, the language that we're using, these are the kind of things that happen to people when they die and like meet God or their family in the afterlife. Why would an ER doctor who can see this be experiencing this interaction with a ghost? I mean, that's my best explanation.

• 12:31Jonathan Cohen?

  The other hypothesis here is that the wife was so distraught that she couldn't keep the afterlife a secret. She had to break the veil to communicate that information. And in the emotional charge of her attempts to intervene in reality, to make sure that their child was okay, she defied some normal barrier that often separates these two worlds. It's very hard to even speculate. But what we do know is Dr. O'Driscoll wrote about his experience that day with Olson's wife and a series of other shared death experiences that he had as an emergency room physician. His book was called Not Yet.

• 13:14Mayim Bialik?

  This man did recover Olson. He did recover. He was six months recovering in the hospital and he and Dr. O'Driscoll became friends. They've shared their related experiences from that trauma room at, at conferences together for many, many years. But Jonathan's already kind of, you know, heading into the explanation. And I think there's still more to examine before we decide that the trauma was so great that, right? This woman pierced the veil. There's many, many traumas where people don't appear as ghosts in hospital rooms. Right? Like, this is not something I would say that is regularly happening, but there's actually a ton in the academic research, which we're going to get to about shared death experiences.

• 13:53Jonathan Cohen?

  And why is it that O'Driscoll had more than one experience as an emergency room physician? And what was it about Rachel? Maybe Dr. O'Driscoll was sensitive in some way that he could pick up more than most people. But then there's the fact that Nurse Rachel also had that experience. How can we account for it?

• 14:16Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:00Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:29Mayim Bialik?

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• 18:25Mayim Bialik?

  At the time that Dr. O'Driscoll was witnessing this body on the table, he didn't know what had happened to him necessarily. He didn't know that there was a wife who died. Like, all these pieces may not have come together. So what he knew is that he was independently experiencing this woman. Now, you could say, and skeptics tend to, who's to say that that was the image of the woman? And it's like, if you show them a picture, you're leading the witness. Was this the lady hovering? Yes, guess what? That's the wife, right? That's the way a lot of this can happen. But there's so many other experiences. And as for why Dr. O'Driscoll might be seeing these things, my hunch would be, he's tuned into something. His frequency is tuned into something that allows him to experience these things. But we don't yet know what it is, right?

• 19:08Mayim Bialik?

  And if shared death experiences are real, you'd want to find them everywhere, right? That's one of the things about phenomenon like this. You want to find it across cultures. You want to find it across thousands and thousands of years of written history. We can't have, you know, we can't have things happen only in one place or in one very specific way. We'd want to see it kind of everywhere, right? To be able to say, this is something that is, that is going on. Our first encounter with the concept of a shared death experience was when we spoke to Martha Jo Atkins. She's a death doula who supports individuals through the process of dying. She's witnessed over 1,000 transitions. She was on our podcast and described shared death experiences that she has had. Here's a bit from our conversation with her.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  There are many occasions where several people at the bedside have the same experience. A woman at a boat talked to me about having that kind of experience. Mother's in the bed. My friend was up with her mother. Again, mothers, they're out of body and watching dad come across to get mom.

• 20:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Dad has already passed.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Dad has already passed. There's a whole body of research on shared crossings. William Peters in Santa Barbara is doing that work. He's had published research. William has a great story about this where, back when there was in hospice in one of the hospitals, he's reading to the guy. Both of them came out of their bodies and they're looking down. The guy's grinning at William. And William said, it was the wildest, most wonderful thing. And then they're back in their body.

• 20:41Mayim Bialik?

  There's actually a whole body of research on shared crossings. And Dr. William Peters in Santa Barbara is doing incredible work and has published research here. He's got a story about this where he was in one of the hospitals where he was working in hospice and he was reading to a gentleman. And they both left their bodies and they were both looking down. They saw other people looking at them. He said it was the wildest, most wonderful thing. And then boom, they were both back in their bodies. According to those who study the phenomena of shared death experiences, people have been recounting shared death experiences since the late 19th century. We have some recordings of them. It went by different names. The Society for Psychical Research in London documented these at that time

• 21:26Mayim Bialik?

  as deathbed visions. It's what they were called, or deathbed coincidences. One of the first shared death experiences to gain attention was the story of Karl Schala. He was a German poet, serving on the front lines in World War I. He was in a foxhole with his best friend and his best friend was killed when an artillery shell exploded near them. He felt his friend slump into his arms and die. But he had a shared death experience. It's recounted in the book, Parting Visions by Melvin Morse. He said, he felt himself being drawn up with his friend, above their bodies and then above the battlefield. And he said that he could look down and he saw himself holding his dead friend. He then says he looked up and saw a bright light

• 22:09Mayim Bialik?

  and he felt himself going towards it with his friend. He then stopped and returned to his body. He was also uninjured, except for hearing loss that resulted from the artillery blast. So like, this is an amazing, an amazing account. But you might say, it was a long time ago. That's just an anecdote. Well, Dr. Peters founded the Shared Crossings Project in 2013 and has now documented more than 800 cases of shared death experiences. So in 2021, Dr. Peters and his team published the first peer-reviewed study focused on shared death experiences in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. They analyzed 164 shared death experiences from 107 people.

• 22:51Mayim Bialik?

  They found four common participatory modes for involvement by the living person. Witnessing unusual phenomena, accompanying the dying, assisting the dying in the transition, and remotely sensing a death. Jonathan, if you had to guess, what percentage of people who have a shared death experience are not even in the room? What percentage? Just guess.

• 23:15Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, had I not heard about this at all, I would be like, 10% could possibly imagine or, or feel something coming.

• 23:24Mayim Bialik?

  If that, like, if you asked me, Mayim, if you have to believe in shared death experiences, are people in the room, not in the room? What's the percentage split? I would say 99.9%. You have to be in the room, right? In this study, 64% of the shared death experiences that Dr. Peters collected were remote. So the living person, a living person is having a shared death experience and they weren't even next to the person 64% of the time in this study. Sometimes they weren't even in the same country. What?

• 23:58Jonathan Cohen?

  This opens up so many questions about the nature of reality, about what we sense and what influences what we sense. Before that, continue to tell us a little bit more about the evidence for shared death experiences that help bolster the case that something else is happening.

• 24:18Mayim Bialik?

  Here's one of my favorite remote ones. There's a woman named Annie Cap. She's a psychotherapist. She was sitting in her London office. She started choking. She struggled for air indescribably for 25 minutes and felt a growing sense of dread about her mother, who happened to be in a hospital in Portland. So Annie knew that her mother wasn't well. This isn't like it came out of nowhere. She called the hospital and her mother died in that phone call, while she was on the phone. So that is a shared death experience from, you know, do the math, thousands and thousands of miles away. Here's another one. Dr. Peters talks about a man named Mark, and this one you can actually find and see him talking about it. He was in the United States. He was Canadian and he felt some connection to his father,

• 25:03Mayim Bialik?

  who was dying in Canada. And he heard his father's voice say, I don't know how to do this. He's in the US. His dad is in Canada. And Mark, this guy who was experiencing this, saw himself walking with his father up a staircase. And Mark's grandmother, his father's mother was, was there. And his father turned to him and the quote was, I didn't know it was this easy. After that vision, minutes later, Mark got a call from his brother to say that their father had just passed away. And yes, these are anecdotal, but we've got a lot of these, you know? Nurses, doctors, hospice workers that Dr. Peters spoke to,

• 25:48Mayim Bialik?

  they kept these things quiet because they feared no one would believe them. I mean, it's why we're doing this episode. No one wants to talk about this because it's so outrageous. And it challenges everything that we think we know about why we're here, how we're here, what happens when we die? And what is our literal connection with other people? Like, our literal psychic connection with other people?

• 26:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Penny Sartori was an ER nurse for 21 years and she was preparing to bathe the dying patient. She touched the edge of his bed and everything stopped. The room around them disappeared and she could feel everything the patient was feeling, including his pain. Although the patient couldn't speak because he was on a ventilator, she heard him say, leave me alone. I want to go. Let me die in peace.

• 26:41Mayim Bialik?

  And even before this experience, Nurse Sartori and other hospital workers had experienced other moments when patients were near death. There'd be a sudden drop in temperature. The room would turn cold. Some sort of light would seem to be emanating from the body. And the after effects of people who experience these things is what Dr. Peters also looked at. 87% of people who had a shared death experience, meaning who were part of this, became convinced of an afterlife. Like, whatever they experienced completely transformed, right? Their worldview. They weren't just hopeful, they felt absolutely convinced. It put grief into context and it really removed a lot of the fear of death, which is interesting because we talk about, you know,

• 27:26Mayim Bialik?

  psilocybin-assisted therapy journeys for people who are in terminal states. And how can you understand and come to terms with life and the end of life and death? What if you can have that experience of coming to terms with death through a shared death experience? It's an unbelievable turn of events for people who experience this. So this is one incredible example of a witnessed shared death experience. But is this an actual phenomenon? Is this something that's actually happening all the time? The best person who can answer that question is a death doula.

• 28:02Jonathan Cohen?

  Something that she shared, once the cameras were off, she came back to us and she said, I realize you asked me a question that I didn't have an answer for in the moment. And what she shared was one of the most interesting and potentially shocking stories that she shared with us. During one of her transitions, helping someone pass, she was in a death center and all of a sudden, the doors to the room blew open and a ferociously cold wind passed over everyone in the space. Suddenly, an image appeared in the corner. The daughter of the person who was passing looked and said,

• 28:44Jonathan Cohen?

  that's my dad, who had come to help the mother cross. It was undeniable because so many people had experienced that together in the room and they all saw the vision together.

• 28:59Mayim Bialik?

  The notion is not just that they saw this vision of the dad. The idea was that... This man was there to usher his wife into the next life. So it's not just the experiencing that Jonathan is describing that Martha Jo witnessed. The notion is, what if when we pass, indeed, we are ushered to the next side by people who love us? And that's what happened to Jeff Olson when he was on that table and his wife was hovering above him, right? She was there at that moment. And when we pass, is this part of the greeting of relatives that people who have near-death experiences report? Sounds like it.

• 29:43Jonathan Cohen?

  The other aspect that Martha Jo talks about, even more than the shared death experiences, the notion that there is some sort of observable pattern and rhythm to the moments before people pass. By observing, we can see something that would be otherwise hidden, which is a similar concept to the notion of a shared death experience. And what I love about it is that by paying more attention, by looking at the subtle cues, we can see the map, the timing, and the process underway that would normally be invisible to us.

• 30:19Mayim Bialik?

  So what are the historical touchpoints that we can point to that indicate that this is not some new, new age phenomenon that people are seeing? Because if shared death experiences are real, we would expect to find them across cultures, across time, in places where there's no common language or framework to explain them. And you do. So for thousands of years across various cultures, people have had communal experiences with the dying and with the deceased. There's actually an 8th century record of a light being witnessed when a particular monk passed away. Aboriginal Australians have a tradition where a community gathers to share spiritual experiences during a member's death. Dr. Moody talked about the oracles of the dead.

• 31:03Mayim Bialik?

  These were these subterranean chambers and tunnels in ancient Greece and in Rome where people would go to commune and communicate with dead relatives, meaning it was in that spiritual vernacular that you could have experiences with those who were dying or dead. A huge component of the Christian faith, this notion of resurrection, of salvation, redemption through resurrection, and it's still part of the liturgy in Judeo-Christianity today.

• 31:31Jonathan Cohen?

  Both metaphysically and physically, metaphysically, you cannot live until you have died. The notion that we have to dissolve ego, but what does that mean physically?

• 31:43Mayim Bialik?

  We've spoken to Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, who claims that any religion that is not clinging to those initial notions of things like resurrection, all these things, are actually watered-down religions, that a true religious notion of adherence to this concept includes access to things like the next world and that interface between death and rebirth. One of the other doctors that we've spoken to here is Dr. Bruce Grayson. He's studied the after-effects and the impact of near-death experiences for about half a century through his work at the University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies.

• 32:26Mayim Bialik?

  And he believes that just the idea that we have this ability, or that it exists, to consciously not be in our body, to observe ourselves from above, he talks about that, and he talked about it when he spoke to us.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  I've talked to thousands of people who've had this experience, and they say that it's more real to them than talking to me is, for better or worse. What they tell me is filtered through their brains. Our ability to speak, our ability to remember is all filtered through our brains. So you can't divorce what they're telling me from the functioning of the brain. Question is, how much of it is controlled by the brain? Is the experience itself caused by the brain, or just the remembering of it, or just the telling of it? That's difficult to answer, because we can't talk to people without their brains. So we looked at a variety of hypotheses that might explain what's going on in the brain that might allow people to have these experiences and/or remember them and talk about them.

• 33:25Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:55Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:31Speaker 04

  And most of the simple explanations, like lack of oxygen to the brain, erratic heart rates, drugs given to patients, and so forth, they all turned out to be not proven by the data. The data contradicted all of them. So we didn't have an explanation. Now, that doesn't mean to scientists that there is no explanation. It means we haven't found it yet.

• 35:52Mayim Bialik?

  There are so many other traditions over thousands of years that have included this conversation. One of the first things I ever was fascinated with, like every child growing up, I think when my generation did, was the Egyptian tombs, the pyramids. The notion that there was so much emphasis placed on what happens when you're dead, just having this conversation about preparation of death, that's a huge part of what we know about the entire mummification process. Think about Dia de los Muertos, think about my favorite movie, Coco. The notion that this is not all there is, and there's an ability to interface actively

• 36:33Mayim Bialik?

  in ways that are meaningful with people who have passed, and that that is part of your experience here as a living human, is to be in contact with that, to give reverence to who came before you, and then to do that and be that for the generations that come after you.

• 36:52Jonathan Cohen?

  And you can think, like, why was that so important? The notion that history may not repeat identically, but the best way to predict the future is to see the accidents and successes of the past. So understanding who has come before you, what they were like, will inform the present and the future. Ancient traditions didn't just believe that the dying could share their experiences with the living or communicate with the living, they believed that they could influence them.

• 37:23Mayim Bialik?

  Also, I wasn't just mentioning lightly in passing the movie Coco. If you have not seen it, it is a really, really, well, first of all, it's great, the music's great, but it literally talks about what does it look like to live with an awareness of those who have died. And yes, the movie is definitely, it's a fantasy exploration of what that would look like, but this is an experience of what many cultures do believe is an interface that is happening. I mean, even in our tradition, in the way that my family does it, we name for people who have passed because you're keeping alive a part of that memory. And the person can embody, it's an Eastern European tradition, the person is said to

• 38:08Mayim Bialik?

  embody some of those qualities, right? That's the way people stay alive. We keep their memory with us.

• 38:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And what does it mean in modern-day society for credentialed people, scientists, who once only believed in the material world, to believe that those who have passed could not only communicate with us, but actually influence us? We spoke to one such scientist who had an unbelievable personal experience that changed the way that she saw reality.

• 38:43Mayim Bialik?

  Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart. She didn't have a shared death experience per se, but she had an incredibly vivid, concrete after-death communication when her husband died. So what's an after-death communication? It's exactly what it sounds like. After someone has died, they somehow pierce the veil and are able to communicate something. It's often a message, it's often a feeling of comfort to the person who's living, it helps them accept the death of their loved one. Now, you might be saying, that's just a fantasy, that's a hallucination, or they were dreaming. But when we talked to Dr.

• 39:23Mayim Bialik?

  Swart, we were able to really drill down and have her explain what it was like to be visited by her dead husband as clear as day.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  So it was about six weeks after he passed away, and it was literally 4:00 in the morning. I was fast asleep, but I do remember I was lying on my left at the edge of the bed, and my right shoulder wasn't covered by the blanket. I'm awake, and I'm just looking into the darkness, thinking, what was that? And then I can see the shape of my husband, exact life-size, in the dark. I was like, is this, am I seeing this? And he just became clearer and clearer, as if he was pushing through something to make himself see.

• 40:08Mayim Bialik?

  Ooh, boy, just got chills.

• 40:09Speaker 06

  I could see the outline of his hair and his features. Then he sort of dissolved from the top down, and the last thing I saw were his shins and his feet, and then he was gone. I Googled in the morning, is it possible to see a deceased loved one? And Google said 60% of older people can have an auditory hallucination after they lose their spouse. I know I wasn't asleep, I wasn't dreaming. What I saw was present. I'm a scientist that also questions things, but of course I thought, do I tell anyone about this? I honestly don't think I've had a conversation with anyone that hasn't had some kind of experience either of someone that's passed away, like feeling their presence, or smelling or hearing something.

• 40:52Mayim Bialik?

  I, first of all, have great respect for Dr. Swart, and she's done incredible work. And also the fact that this experience and a variety of experiences around this phase of her life completely, you know, transformed the way she approaches, the way she practices medicine, and the way she lives her life. It's incredible. But also, part of me is like, what are we actually talking about? What's happening?

• 41:14Jonathan Cohen?

  And she's not the only one that we've spoken to who have had these types of experiences. What strikes me about her is that she was such a non-believer. She even said in a different interview that she has suggested treatment in the past, and she's been a part of teams who have suggested treatment for people who have believed the things that she has experienced.

• 41:39Mayim Bialik?

  Like she said, I would have put myself in the hospital.

• 41:43Jonathan Cohen?

  So what does that mean about the nature of reality? How do we reconfigure what is real, what is imagined? Where is that line? And how do we know if we're crossing it?

• 41:54Mayim Bialik?

  The real question is, and I bring this up whenever I've had a reading, been to a psychic, tried some energy healer, it seems that with after-death communication, it's almost always positive, which makes me feel like, statistically speaking, there's two options. Either that's what we want to hear, that's the comfort that we want to get from this experience, and we are somehow impacting how that information's coming in, and I got a lot of explanations for that, which we can leave for another time, or everything's hunky-dory when you die.

• 42:30Mayim Bialik?

  Like, all your negativity is removed. And actually, I think of Buddha-Betty, I think of Betty's story, I think of a lot of NDE experiencers who have said, wherever there was hurt or harm, it's like they could see the roots of that in other people, and they were able to forgive it. So maybe in the next world, we're in a different level of judgment, good, evil, sadness, depression. Maybe it is a different experience, so that after-death communication is an authentic reflection of the next world, which seems to be a lot of pleasantness, from what we've heard.

• 43:07Jonathan Cohen?

  By the time you have passed over, you will have experienced a life review, and all the positive feelings that the other side brings, all the unconditional love that's spoken about, and whatever issues you have, or you carried over with you, will have dissolved from the infinite love of the universe.

• 43:25Mayim Bialik?

  It is very possible, which brings me to one of the last things I want to talk about, a great explanation for that, and this entire conversation, shared psychosis. So one of the actual, you know, kind of hypotheses surrounding this is, shared psychosis is an actual thing, where people who are in high-stress situations, intense situations, can somehow unconsciously mirror the other's experience. This can happen a lot of different ways, and this is something, you know, kind of like beyond the scope of this conversation, to talk about shared psychosis in general, but

• 44:07Mayim Bialik?

  if we apply it to, let's say, shared death experiences, right? Could it be that for people who are witnessing, people who are dying, there is something profoundly, you know, fill in the blank, overwhelming, intense, deep, complicated? And that causes certain brains to try and make sense of it, to try and distance themselves from it, to try and get a different reading on it, and we're all tuning all the time. So is it possible that people like Martha Jo, people like Dr. O'Driscoll, they are tuned into a certain frequency that allows them to access another's experience in a way that they can make sense of?

• 44:50Mayim Bialik?

  Jo Nickle was an investigative writer for the Journal of Skeptical inquiry, and his take was that experiencing someone die is traumatic in and of itself, and is it possible that in that trauma, there's something that gets transformed as a psychological truism? You're experiencing something hard, and I'm feeling it, and this is what happens when that dynamic gets interacted with?

• 45:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, we don't know what the mechanism is. Is it that we feel others so deeply that all of a sudden we get pulled into that experience? And it's not supernatural, per se, although I don't think that fully explains many of the supernatural elements.

• 45:32Mayim Bialik?

  When you're experiencing someone else's, right, death experience, in this shared death experience, you know, is there also confirmation bias, right? Are you editing the memories of what you experienced to match the things you hear about the person later? There's no way, if we can verify that, which is why so many people don't want to talk about this, because there is that possibility. But I think the question that we've had the opportunity to get into today is, what do we know? You know, what can we know? Here's all the things that we don't know, we don't understand, and we can't confirm, but there's some pretty phenomenal things that are happening in the here and now. What information does that give us?

• 46:10Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, one of the most compelling is the idea of the remote shared death experience. How can we possibly explain people having that level of sensation or knowing while not even being in the physical space?

• 46:24Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan, you remember a lot of information. Do you remember what happened to my mother when she was driving to one of the checkups when she was pregnant with me?

• 46:32Jonathan Cohen?

  I do remember this story. It's a fascinating story. Why don't you tell us about it?

• 46:37Mayim Bialik?

  I was conceived and incubated in New York, but when my mom was nine months pregnant, they moved suddenly to San Diego. And we were living in my grandparents' living room, you know, my brother was about four at that time, and my mother was going to a checkup with this, like, new doctor, because she was very, very pregnant and had just arrived in San Diego. So my aunt, my mom's younger sister, was driving her to her checkup, and all of a sudden, my mother felt half of her face go numb, and she said to my aunt, "Turn the car around. We have to go back to mommy." That would be my grandmother. And my aunt said, "But we have to go to the doctor, you have a checkup, there's a baby in your body about to be born." And my mother said, "We have to go back."

• 47:20Mayim Bialik?

  And they drove back to the apartment where my grandparents lived, and my grandmother was on the floor, half-paralyzed, she had had a stroke. There's no explanation why the coincidences in the universe would make my mother's face go numb, and have my mother feel like she had to go back to help my grandmother. My grandmother did not pass. That's a remote tapping into an intensity, and you might say, like, "Oh, why would people only tap into people who are dying or injured?" I mean, I have an explanation for that, right? Why do intense memories get encoded better, or last longer? How does trauma work? Everything's firing, and it's firing with an intensity, and it has a tremendous amygdala component, a fear component, a stress component.

• 48:04Mayim Bialik?

  That, evolutionarily, is the way our brain is geared to, like, "Let's not have this happen again," right? That's what that feeling is. So there's, that is a loud signal, right, in the universe?

• 48:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And if we're a tuning fork, registering all the information around us, that which is loudest and most impactful is gonna resonate and get through this constant noise that we're filtering.

• 48:28Mayim Bialik?

  When we talk to people who have had near-death experiences, and I think this is true of everyone we've spoken to, everyone we've researched, and probably every story that's out there, you don't get people who come back, like, "Sucks to come back, I didn't want to be here, I got nothing to say," right? Even those who didn't want to come back, meaning they were in such a state, they were either in a bliss state, they were in a communing with God state, they were done, they thought, with their life here, they come back with a very specific either message, or set of new abilities, that has the potential to be a message. Many people have suggested, perhaps that process, people who experience death, whether

• 49:13Mayim Bialik?

  there's veracity to what happens when they die, and whether we can corroborate that with a larger truth in the universe, I don't know. But what happens is, they're declared dead, they're zipped up in body bags, they're dead. But when they come back, they come back with a purpose. They come back profoundly changed, in many cases, like Elizabeth Krone, with a set of abilities that even they don't understand. They start seeing things before they happen, or they start understanding. Vinnie Todd Tolman, he understands animals in a way that he never did before his experience. He's in touch with things in a different way. What's interesting about the shared death experiences is that for the people who are

• 49:57Mayim Bialik?

  experiencing it, meaning the people who are alive... It's like they get that message. They get some sort of message. So what's the common denominator here, right? What's the Venn diagram of near-death experiences and shared death experiences? There is some message here. And it's almost like shared death experiences are a way to get it out to more people. You don't have to be afraid.

• 50:23Jonathan Cohen?

  You don't have to be afraid, and you don't have to die to expand your understanding of what's possible here. If you're in a room and all of a sudden you have an unexplainable experience where you're feeling yourself being pulled out of your body, where you see a pink mist happening, where you see an unexplainable being appear guiding someone who is passing over to the other side, you don't go back to your life in the normal way that you otherwise would have. Something has opened. And we talked about this about Earth School. The notion that you're here to learn, well, this could be the extra credit classes that

• 51:06Jonathan Cohen?

  people are going through that help break open their idea of what's actually going on and what's possible. And what if we start to take these experiences and say, what can we actually be aware of? I had something happen to me just today. Today, I woke up to a text that I was shocked to get because just the day before I was thinking, you know what? I haven't heard about this thing for a while in my life. It must have sorted itself out. Only to wake up the next morning to say, wait a second, there's something unresolved here. So what if we start to pay attention to those subtle messages that pop into our head as

• 51:49Jonathan Cohen?

  not just random chance, but actually signs that we're receiving something?

• 51:54Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. So first of all, I love that. I love that that perspective on it. And also, when you think about, just for all of history, right? There's all different kinds of people in every culture, every society. Like, go back as far as you want to imagine. Go back to Egyptian times, or the time when Christ was alive, like any of those periods of time. Go back even farther. Go back to like, when you learned about like, the Tigris and Euphrates River, right? Like Mesopotamia. Think about what humans were like. There were human beings at that time, walking about, going to market, whatever they were doing. Making babies, getting into fights, I don't know, lots of things.

• 52:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Discovering fire.

• 52:30Mayim Bialik?

  There were always people who were smarter than other people. There were always people who were better laborers, better builders, better artists, right? And there were always people who held a place in society where they saw things that didn't yet exist. And those people have been called prophets, they've been called shamans in indigenous communities. So there's always been those kinds of differences. When we talk about Dr. O'Driscoll, this like guy in Salt Lake City, right? He's tuned into something. He's one of the people that is tuned into something that in our current culture sounds crazy. It sounds cuckoo pants. It sounds like fantasy. It sounds like hallucination. What if, you know what I thought of? You know those kids who are taking APs when no one else is?

• 53:14Mayim Bialik?

  And they're always going off for their private classes, and they got stuff to do at lunch, and they got after-school activities? Maybe people who are shared death experiencers are the AP students of the supernatural world. They are getting a special set of information. But guess what? Most people won't believe you, and you're gonna be ridiculed, and they're gonna say it's not true, and they're gonna say there's something wrong with you, and they're gonna laugh at you, but you'll get a lot of views on the internet because people are fascinated by this stuff. But maybe that's part of what shared death experience is. There are certain people who the universe is saying, guess what? This one can tune into something that most of you cannot. And do you want to listen to the message?

• 53:58Mayim Bialik?

  Death is not the end. Also a fantastic Bob Dylan song from Down in the Groove.

• 54:03Jonathan Cohen?

  This topic, while it is first-person anecdotal evidence, is being collected in numbers that are undeniable, meaning that it hasn't proved the theory, but it is showing something is going on that we can't ignore.

• 54:19Mayim Bialik?

  It seems like the time to say, when you're standing on the crossroads, that you cannot comprehend, just remember that death is not the end. And all your dreams have vanished, and you don't know what's up the bend, just remember that death is not the end. That's from Down in the Groove.

• 54:34Jonathan Cohen?

  You know what else isn't the end? The end of this episode isn't the end, because you can find more of this content that isn't available anywhere else on Substack, and check out all the amazing episodes we mentioned in preparing this. The Martha Jo Atkins, the Tara Swart episode, the Dr. Bruce Grayson, and so many other near-death experiencers who have opened our eyes to what is possible, what you can experience on the other side, and the messages that they bring back on how we should be living.

• 55:09Mayim Bialik?

  Check us out on Substack for content you can't get anywhere else. We know that this episode's gonna engender a lot of conversation. We can't wait to be part of it. We'll see you over on Substack. My and Bialik's Breakdown, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

• 55:21Speaker 05

  It's My and Bialik's Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction, one... And now she's gonna break down, so break down. She's gonna break it down.