Table of Contents
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 of action was identified.
And even with robust effects that are easy to demonstrate, like magnetism, it took hundreds of years before useful explanatory theories were formed. Thus, given that no one knows how consciousness can arise out of (presumably) unconscious matter, it is not surprising that science has to yet provide a satisfactory explanation for telepathy and other subtle psychic capacities.
Theoretical explanations aside, how does the existence of psi influence our understanding of NDEs? The main implication is that it reduces the likelihood that reports of distant perceptions can only be due to confabulation or coincidence. In any given anecdotal report, it is not possible to know with certainty that the information was obtained psychically. But experimental data suggests that it could have been obtained that way.
Does distant perception imply that a disembodied consciousness literally leaves the body, or that NDEs provide evidence for the persistence of consciousness after bodily death? The evidence to date is insufficient to answer such questions because everything we know about psi comes from tests conducted with living persons.
Studies involving mediumship, which investigate individuals who claim to be able to communicate with the deceased, have attempted to probe the boundaries between life and death, but of course all such experiments ultimately involve reports from living persons; purported participation by the deceased is inferred.
To further complicate matters, there is both anecdotal and experimental evidence that non- ordinary states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming, meditating, under the influence of psychedelic compounds) are more conducive to psi phenomena. Given that near-death is a prime exemplar of a non-ordinary state it may be that some of the strikingly vivid aspects of NDEs arise because of clearer forms of psi perception that are filtered out by a normally functioning brain.
Conclusion: The bottom line is that NDEs in light of psi research suggest that one or more of today’s assumptions about the mind- brain relationship are probably wrong. An improved understanding of NDEs may well be found to involve a host of mundane brain- oriented effects, but it may also include glimpses of realities that are presently beyond our imagination. Given the revolutionary changes in our understanding of the physical world over the last century through the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, it is virtually certain that the scientific worldview of the next century will include entirely new ways of thinking about space, time, and— given the challenge of NDEs— consciousness.
In Dutch prospective studies on near- death experiences (NDEs) in survivors of cardiac arrest, 18% of the 344 included patients reported such an experience of enhanced consciousness during the period of unconsciousness, during clinical death, during a transient functional loss of the cortex and the brainstem. An NDE seems to be an authentic experience which cannot be simply reduced to oxygen deficiency, imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, or the use of drugs, and people appear to be permanently changed by an NDE during a cardiac arrest of only several minutes duration.
A near- death experience (NDE) can be defined as the reported memory of a range of impressions during a special state of consciousness, including a number of unique elements such as an out- of- body experience, pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review, and a conscious return into the body
As a result of our study, we could exclude physiological, psychological, pharmacological, and demographic explanations for the occurrence of an NDE.
My friend and colleague the eminent neurologist and renowned author Oliver Sacks, MD, assures me that I was hallucinating … but was I? Dr. Sacks has described hallucinations associated with “ecstatic” seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy that certainly sound like some descriptions by people who have had actual NDEs.7 However, numerous reports have been presented and verified in which NDE experiencers have been able to describe accurately and in incredible visual and auditory detail their NDEs. A case in point is that of Pam Reynolds, described in Michael Sabom, MD’s book, Light and Death and further studied by Holden and Woerlee.
Reynolds was a patient who had an NDE during a neurosurgical procedure called “standstill” pioneered by Robert Spetzler, MD, at the Barrow Neurosurgical Institute. This procedure was used during Reynolds’ brain aneurysm resection. She had an induced cardiac arrest and the brain was monitored and was documented to be isoelectric and non-reactive. Just before the standstill procedure was begun, Reynolds was deeply anesthetized, with her eyes taped shut and a sheet over her head. Her brain activity was monitored in more than one way to confirm that her anesthesia was complete and yet she described “popping” out of her body— having an NDE, whereupon she was able to describe sounds, “see” where people were.
Pam Reynolds underwent an extreme surgical procedure known as ‘hypothermic cardiac arrest’, to remove a very large basilar artery aneurysm. During the operation the blood was drained from her head, she had no blood pressure, breathing, heartbeat or brainwaves[3] and she was arguably as close to clinical death as possible. After surgery the patient recounted her NDE in which she described seeing and hearing the bone saw that Dr Spetzler used to open up her skull, and recalled a specific comment by the female cardiologist, who later verified its accuracy.
Source
A common characteristic of near- death experiences is an out- of- body experience. An out- of- body experience (OBE) is the apparent separation of consciousness from the body. About 45% of near- death experiencers report OBEs that involve them seeing and often hearing ongoing earthly events from a perspective that is apart, and usually above, their physical bodies. Following cardiac arrest, NDErs may see, and later accurately describe their own resuscitation. The first prospective study of the accuracy of out- of- body observations during near- death experiences was by Michael Sabom, MD. This study investigated a group of patients who had cardiac arrests with NDEs that included OBEs, and compared them with a control group of patients who experienced cardiac crises but did not have NDEs. Both groups of patients were asked to describe their own resuscitation as best they could. Sabom found that the group of NDE patients was much more accurate than the control group in describing their own resuscitations.
Another prospective study of out- of- body observations during near- death experiences with similar methodology to Sabom’s study was published by Penny Sartori, PhD. This study also found that near- death experiencers were often remarkably accurate in describing details of their own resuscitations. The control group that did not have NDEs was highly inaccurate and often could only guess at what occurred during their resuscitations. Two large retrospective studies investigated the accuracy of out- of- body observations during near- death experiences. The first was by Janice Holden, EdD.10 Dr. Holden reviewed NDEs with OBEs in all previously published scholarly articles and books and found 89 case reports. Of the case reports reviewed, 92% were considered to be completely accurate with no inaccuracy whatsoever when the OBE observations were later investigated. Another large retrospective investigation of near- death experiences that included out- of- body observations was recently published.
This study was a review of 617 NDEs that were sequentially shared on the NDERF website. Of these NDEs, there were 287 NDEs that had OBEs with sufficient information to allow objective determination of the reality of their descriptions of their observations during the OBEs. Review of the 287 OBEs found that 280 (97.6%) of the OBE descriptions were entirely realistic and lacked any content that seemed unreal. In this group of 287 NDErs with OBEs, there were 65 (23%) who personally investigated the accuracy of their own OBE observations after recovering from their life- threatening event. Based on these later investigations, none of these 65 OBErs found any inaccuracy in their own OBE observations.
The high percentage of accurate out- of- body observations during near-death experiences does not seem explainable by any possible physical brain function as it is currently known. This is corroborated by OBEs during NDEs that describe accurate observations while they were verifiably clinically comatose. Further corroboration comes from the many NDEs that have been reported with accurate OBE observations of events occurring far from their physical body, and beyond any possible physical sensory awareness.
NDERF has received scores of NDEs with OBE observations during NDEs containing highly unexpected observations that were later confirmed as factual. An illustrative example was an NDE with an OBE in which the patient described the cardiac surgeon “flapping his arms as if trying to fly.” The surgeon later verified this, stating that after scrubbing in he flattened his hands on his chest to keep them sterile and was rapidly pointing with his elbows to give instructions. NDE accounts have been reported with OBEs that accurately observed events that were completely unexpected by the NDErs. This further argues against NDEs as being a result of illusory memories originating from what the NDErs might have expected during a close brush with death.
Other near- death experience investigators have reported NDEs occurring while under general anesthesia. Bruce Greyson, MD, a leading NDE researcher at the University of Virginia, states: In our collection of NDEs, 127 out of 578 NDE cases (22%) occurred under general anesthesia, and they included such features as OBEs that involved experiencers’ watching medical personnel working on their bodies, an unusually bright or vivid light, meeting deceased persons, and thoughts, memories, and sensations that were clearer than usual. NDEs due to cardiac arrest while under general anesthesia occur and are medically inexplicable.
A study by Emily Kelly, PhD, was a comparison of 74 NDEs with descriptions of encountering deceased individuals with 200 NDEs that did not describe encounters with the deceased. This study found that when NDErs encountered beings known to them from their earthly lives in their NDEs, only 4% described meeting beings that were alive at the time of their experiences. I reviewed 84 NDEs from NDERF that described encounters with individual(s) that they knew in their earthly life.24 There were only three NDEs (4%) where the encountered beings were alive at the time of the NDEs, consistent with the findings of the Kelly study. In dreams or hallucinations when familiar persons are present they are much more likely to be living and from recent memory.
This is in sharp contrast to near- death experiences in which familiar persons encountered are almost always deceased. Cases have been reported by NDErs of seeing a person whom they thought was living, but in fact had recently died.25, 26 These cases illustrate that NDEs cannot be explained by the experiencer’s expectation of what would happen during a life-threatening event. Further evidence that NDEs are not a result of expectation comes from the aforementioned Kelly study where in one- third of the cases the encountered deceased person had a poor or distant relationship with the NDEr, or was someone that had died before the NDEr was born.