''How about this scenario I saw on a programme about near death experiences
A woman was born blind and had no conception of images, colours or the world around her--other than what she gathered via her other senses''
I can't say, nor can I nod my head in utter wonder at marvelous claims, healthy skepticism, etc, I don't have access to what she actually experienced or what actually happened.
The brain is very complex....for example, there are reports of blind people experiencing conscious sensations in response to sounds and smell, tactile information, etc.
Plus what she reportedly 'saw' may not be what a sighted person would experience consciously.
Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which
stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
[3][4][5][6] People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as
synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as
grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia,
letters or
numbers are perceived as inherently colored.
[7][8] In spatial-sequence, or
number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise).
[9][10] Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.
[11] - Wiki.
Plus Out of Body experience are apparently related to the last frantic burst of brain activity prior to shutdown:
''Near-death experience, in which visions occur after clinical death takes place (defined by the loss of blood flow to the brain), is likely a result of normal brain function rather than evidence of an afterlife, say University of Michigan scientists who have simulated the condition in the brains of lab rats. "Within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all of the rats displayed a widespread, transient surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with a highly aroused brain. They also displayed nearly identical patterns after undergoing asphyxiation."
''The vividness of first-person human accounts of near-death experience is also explainable by the level of brain activity found in the experiment. "At near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death." The researchers conclude that near-death experience "represents a biological paradox that challenges our understanding of the brain and has been advocated as evidence for life after death and for a noncorporeal basis of human consciousness, based on the unsupported belief that the brain cannot possibly be the source of highly vivid and lucid conscious experiences during clinical death." http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/scientists-simulate-near-death-experience-in-the-brain[/sup]
