Neuroscientist on Life After Death and Intuition | Marjorie Woollacott, Ph.D. (Episode 175)

Near Death Experiences (NDEs)Science and Research
Written By Liz Entin

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Can a neuroscientist who spent 35 years studying the brain prove consciousness survives death?

What happens when a strict materialist neuroscientist has an experience that shatters everything she believed about consciousness? Dr. Marjorie Woollacott, emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon, shares her transformation from skeptical scientist to consciousness researcher and her groundbreaking work on telepathy, terminal lucidity, and near death experiences.

About This Episode:

Dr. Marjorie Woollacott is an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon, where she taught for 35 years and chaired the Department of Human Physiology for seven years. She has published over 200 scientific articles, received $7.2 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health, and authored or co-edited eight books including Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (Parapsychological Association Award for Best Book of the Year). She is President of the Academy for the Advancement of Post Materialist Sciences, Research Director of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS), and Co-Director of the Galileo Commission. Her research now focuses on consciousness, meditation, terminal lucidity, and telepathic abilities in children with nonspeaking autism.

In this conversation, we explore:

From Materialist Scientist to Consciousness Researcher:

  • Graduate school training that the brain is the sole producer of consciousness

  • The meditation initiation that changed everything: electricity flowing from forehead to heart radiating pure joy

  • Living a double life for 25 years: materialist neuroscientist by day, meditator by night

  • Kicking her husband under the table when he mentioned energy healing for fear of losing credibility with colleagues

  • Why most scientists never look at consciousness research even when it exists on PubMed

  • Earning a master's in Asian Studies to integrate neuroscience with meditation and consciousness

Telepathy Research in Nonspeaking Autistic Children:

  • Working with Diane Hennesy Powell and Dr. Marina Weiler on telepathy studies

  • Parents reporting children always knew what they were thinking and where things were hidden

  • The boy who typed five digit random numbers with 99% accuracy by reading his mother's mind (compared to 5% above chance in typical adults)

  • Addressing skeptics' concerns about facilitated communication and whether children have agency

  • Eye tracking studies proving children look at letters before hitting them

  • Why this may be the best evidence for psi phenomena we have

Terminal Lucidity and End of Life Experiences:

  • Collaborating with Bruce Grayson and international researchers on terminal lucidity

  • People with severe Alzheimer's and giant holes in their brains suddenly becoming fully lucid in final hours

  • Recognizing everyone, sitting up, eating, expressing gratitude before dying within hours

  • Children in comas waking to say goodbye, ask for toys, and pray with family before passing

  • How this challenges materialist neuroscience: irreversibly damaged brains should not produce lucid consciousness

  • Changing hospital end of life routines to allow peaceful family goodbyes instead of emergency resuscitation

How the Brain Filters Consciousness:

  • The brain has multiple neural filters limiting our awareness of the full electromagnetic spectrum

  • Visual and auditory receptors only capture a tiny spectrum compared to other animals

  • The ascending reticular activating system filters everything except what we attend to

  • The default mode network creates our ego and constant narratives about our lives

  • How language filters perception: naming a robin makes you stop seeing it fully

  • Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke shutting down language centers and creating expansive oneness

  • Why meditation, near death experiences, psilocybin, and strokes all reduce the same neural filters

  • How reducing these filters could create more interconnection and help the planet

Near Death Experience Evidence and Veridical Perception:

  • Why she didn't look at NDE research on PubMed until after her meditation awakening

  • Prospective studies by Pim van Lommel bringing every cardiac arrest patient into studies

  • 10-25% of cardiac arrest survivors report NDEs with accurate observations despite flat EEG

  • Dr. Bettina Peyton's NDE during cesarean section when her heart stopped

  • Watching her own resuscitation with eyes taped shut: seeing the code button, blood transfusions, senior surgeon clamping her aorta

  • Writing on a napkin after waking: "I know I have a baby girl, my uterus is out, my heart stopped"

  • Doctors confirming on Boston TV there's no physiological explanation for her accurate observations

  • Transforming from atheist materialist to absolute knowing, changing her career to hospice care

Reincarnation Research and Past Life Evidence:

  • Dr. Ian Stevenson's legal-standard evidence collection methods

  • Interviewing children and previous families separately to verify 11-15 facts children could not know

  • James Leininger: WWII pilot reborn with nightmares of plane on fire, all details corroborated by military records

  • Birthmark cases matching wounds from previous lives

  • How consciousness creating the body explains what genes and materialism alone cannot

  • Why children who die traumatically young may return quickly to finish what they started

  • Dean Radin's alternative hypothesis: accessing global information field versus actual reincarnation

Key Quotes

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Liz Entin
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