Scientist talks about her Near Death-like Experience and brain function.

[Ed Jewett]

Or perhaps not a different kind of 'I' so much as the same 'I' with different experiences.

The brain as an electro-magnetic containment field for the ... "I" ...

That's a great image. Or the brain as a receiver, like a radio, which 'receives' rather than generates consciousness.

It brings to mind Roger Penrose (along with Suart Hameroff who, as Wikipedia says in the entry for Penrose, "have speculated that consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules" but read the rest of that blurb and then Google for "crystalline structures in brain". Radio receivers are crystals, and the mystical third eye (thought to be the pineal gland) contains "a variable quantity of gritty material, called corpora arenacea (or "acervuli," or "brain sand"). Chemical analysis shows that they are composed of calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, magnesium phosphate, and ammonium phosphate." But see the discussion of Descartes, Spinoza, metaphysics, and philosophy. Finally, Nick Begich, in his book "Controlling the Human Mind", has a catalog of resources he sells through EarthPulse which include a dietary supplement, a proprietary blend of silica hydride (though, other than its stated purpose of keeping the body at an optimal alkaline state, I haven't a clue what he thinks it does for enhanced mental performance.