Near-death experiences are fairly common among survivors of cardiac arrest and other severe medical conditions. Near- death experiences captured worldwide attention in 1976 and they have held the public’s interest and stoked their imagination continually since then
What are NDE’s?
What happens to consciousness during the act of dying? Our best answer comes from people who “almost die” but return to life and recount events that happened while resuscitation, emergency care, or surgery was performed to snatch life back from the jaws of death. As our medical and surgical skills increase, we can bring back patients who have traveled further on the path to death ever before.
Their recollections often contradict physicians’ scientific explanation of how an oxygen- starved brain can produce such intense, vivid, and often corroborated veridical recollections. These events are now called “near- death experiences” (NDEs) and are often life- changing for those people who have them. The term “NDE” was coined by Raymond Moody, MD, PhD, in Life After Life, which is a perennial best- seller: over 13 million copies sold to date.
The NDE typically include:
- The mind leaving the body and traveling upward; passing from dark to a brilliant light often within a tunnel.
- The light, which is often interpreted to be God or the Supreme Being, is ineffable and transmits joy, peace, love, and comfort.
- Experiencers meet with deceased loved ones, friends, and relatives who welcome them. They have a life review in which they come to understand the meaning of their life and how they have lived it and how it affected others.
- They never wish to leave this unity with the light source of love.
- They return to mortal life reluctantly to help those needing them on Earth or sometimes involuntarily because they hear “your time has not yet come.” Upon returning to their earthly body, most live a more purposeful, love- filled life. Thereafter the fear of death is generally absent.
With one exception, NDEs may be interpreted as unusual forms of hallucinations associated with the injured or dying brain. The exception involves perceptions described from vantage points outside the body that are later confirmed to be correct and could not have been inferred. Over a century of laboratory studies have investigated whether it is possible in principle for the mind to transcend the physical boundaries of the brain. The cumulative experimental database strongly indicates that it can. It is not clear that this finding implies the mind is separate from the brain, but it does suggest that a comprehensive explanation for NDEs will require revisions to present scientific assumptions about the brain- mind relationship.
The Mind is an Illusion
Neuroscientist Francis Crick famously quipped that the mind— the self-aware, subjective aspect of the brain— is “nothing but a pack of neurons.” Crick asserted that all mental activity, all of “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” This proposal, which is now a central tenet in the neurosciences, suggests that near- death experiences (NDEs) are best understood as hallucinations caused by distortions in neural activity as the brain shuts down.
No other explanation is possible, because from the “pack of neurons” perspective mind and brain are identical, in which case visions of distant environments or discussions with disembodied entities are both examples of bizarre dreams. Among counterarguments to such brain- based explanations is the observation that NDEs are reported even when the brain’s electrical activity, as reflected in an electroencephalogram (EEG), has flat- lined.
This would seem to rule out hallucinations and dreams because if the brain is completely inactive then the mind must also be inactive. So NDEs could not be reported, but ipso facto they are reported, and so mind and brain cannot be identical.
Persistent Mind in a Dying Brain
At face value this line of reasoning seems persuasive, but it has been challenged by the recent discovery that brains continue to show activity below what was once considered to be flat- lined conditions in deep coma and in the dying brain.
In 2013, Kroeger et al. reported that a “novel brain phenomenon is observable in both humans and animals during coma that is deeper than the one reflected by the isoelectric EEG,” and Borjigin et al. found evidence contrary to the assumption that the brain is hypoactive during cardiac arrest, and in particular that, “High- frequency neurophysiological activity in the near- death state exceeded levels found during the conscious waking state demonstrating] that the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near- death.”
Based on these discoveries, if NDEs exclusively consisted of dream- like images, however vivid, convincing, or unusual they may seem, then brain-oriented explanations would be plausible. But hallucinations do not cover the full phenomenology. Some NDEs also include perceptions reportedly from outside the body that could not have been inferred from information received through the ordinary senses, and that are verifiably correct.
This does not happen very often, but that it happens at all challenges the assumption that NDEs must be figments of the imagination, or that those reporting these experiences were discombobulated and, in a sense, going out of their minds. From a conventional view “distant perception” experiences are often explained as coincidence, selective memory, confabulation, or they are simply ignored as impossible. But are such explanations correct?
Experiments for Psychical Research
To investigate this question with rigorous science, about a century ago a new approach was initiated. Experiments were conducted under rigorously controlled conditions to see if distant perception was possible. Origins In 1876, physicist Sir William Barrett from the Royal College of Science in Dublin, Ireland, presented experimental evidence in favor of what he called thought transference” to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Six years later, Barrett helped found the London- based Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the first scientific organization established for the study of exceptional mental capacities known today as psychic or “psi” phenomena.
There are challenges with studying mental phenomena but overcoming these led to gold-standard tools in science (double-blind protocols to control for expectation effects, EEG, meta-analysis).
Surveys of the general population collected by the SPR, and others were used to classify and create taxonomies of reported psi experiences. Four categories proved to be most amenable to laboratory study. They were mind-to- mind communication (now called telepathy), perception of information beyond the reach of the ordinary senses (clairvoyance), perception through time (precognition), and direct mind- matter interactions (psychokinesis). Publications of experiments exploring these experiences attracted a great deal of critical attention, which led to new methods and designs to address potential artifacts. Improved studies were conducted, and this cycle was repeated over many decades.
Some may imagine that research on telepathy still involves the use of ESP (extrasensory perception) cards, which were popularized by Duke University psychologist Joseph B. Rhine starting in the 1930s. Dozens of experiments conducted by Rhine and others were published, comprising a cumulative database of over four million card-guessing trials collected from the 1880s to the 1940s.
Analysis of that database persuaded many scientists that ESP was an established faculty of the mind. One example of a scientist who was impressed by the state of the evidence was Alan Turing, a seminal figure in the foundations of modern computer science and the mastermind who helped break the German Enigma cryptograph code during the Second World War. In discussing the problem of how to differentiate between machine and human intelligence, Turing wrote: I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them!
Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. Many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.
Turing’s opinion was prescient in that this line of research was indeed forgotten by most scientists and scholars. But it was also a victim of unfavorable timing. Rhine’s work reached its pinnacle during a period in which it became fashionable for academic psychologists to deny the existence of any form of mental activity, including consciousness itself, largely due to the rising influence of psychologist B. F. Skinner’s brand of behaviorism. But psi research did not disappear entirely for a very simple reason— many people, including academics, continued to report psychic experiences.
Ganzfeld Telepathy
By the 1970s, a new method for studying telepathy was designed to over-come two problems encountered in studies involving ESP cards. Those experiments were easy to conduct but the test design often involved guessing dozens to hundreds of cards in a row, so boredom and biases introduced by knowledge of previous guesses (the gambler’s fallacy) were inevitable. These problems contributed to what came to be known as the “decline effect,” a systematic decrease in performance over repeated testing.
They tried a new method, ganzfeld, which was more rigorous and solved the problem of boredom in addition to other problems.
When the ganzfeld telepathy database is updated with new publications reported through 2010, 1,323 hits are reported in 4,196 trials, for average hit rate of 31.5%.17 The additional data increases the overall odds against chance to 13 billion trillion to 1. These analyses have been published and critiqued in peer- reviewed journals, and similar successful results have been reported by researchers who explicitly stated that they did not believe in the existence of psychic abilities.
If scientific evidence were analogous to forensic evidence presented in a courtroom, then one could justifiably say that this one class of experiments demonstrates the existence of telepathy beyond a reasonable doubt. When conceptually similar experiments are added to the evidential database, including controlled laboratory tests of the “feeling of being stared at,” and correlation of EEG and functional MRIs between isolated couples, the weight of the cumulative evidence is even stronger. The bottom line is that there is now strong evidence, confirmed using Bayesian statistical methods that take into account analysts’ prior expectations, indicating that the mind can indeed transcend the physical constraints of the brain. This conclusion is bolstered by other classes of experiments that also provide strong statistical evidence for clairvoyance, precognition, and mind- matter interactions.
A century of scientific studies indicate that perception is not bound by the limitations of the brain, at least not by any means that are presently understood.
Theoretical explanations continue to lag behind the empirical data, but this is common in the history of science. For example, herbal preparations containing salicylates were used for thousands of years before Aspirin’s mechanism