“Nonsense is just information not taken in through the five senses.”

–Jeffrey Mishlove

New Thinking Mar 16, 2025 Lisa Smartt, MA, is a linguist, educator, and poet. She founded The Final Words Project, an ongoing study devoted to collecting and interpreting the mysterious language at the end of lives. She is author of Words at the Threshold: What We Say When We’re Nearing Death. Here she points out that much can be learned about the consciousness of dying individuals by paying attention to their language. One can develop an appreciation for speech that seems nonsensical by understanding that a dying person may be experiencing two different realities simultaneously. Similar patterns can often be found in individuals experiencing other altered states of awareness such as dementia or schizophrenia. Her work is largely predicated on Raymond Moody’s studies of near-death experience and the language of nonsense. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on January 30, 2019)