Mind, Brain, and Near-Death Experiences
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white.
— PSYCHOLOGIST AND PHILOSOPHER WILLIAM JAMES1
In 1991, Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds felt extremely dizzy, lost her ability to speak, and had difficulty moving her body. A CAT scan showed that she had a giant artery aneurysm—a grossly swollen blood vessel in the wall of her basilar artery, close to the brain stem.2 If it burst, which could happen at any moment, it would kill her. But the standard surgery to drain and repair it might kill her too.
With no other options, Pam turned to a last, desperate measure offered by neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Spetzler was a specialist and pioneer in hypothermic cardiac arrest—a daring surgical procedure nicknamed “Operation Standstill.” Spetzler would bring Pam’s body down to a temperature so low that she would be essentially dead. Her brain would not function, but it would be able to survive longer without oxygen at this temperature. The low temperature would also soften the swollen blood vessels, allowing them to be operated on with less risk of bursting. When the procedure would be complete, the surgical team would bring her back to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in.
Essentially, Pam agreed to die in order to save her life—and in the process had what is perhaps the most famous case of independent corroboration of out-of-body experience (OBE) perceptions on record. This case is especially important because cardiologist Michael Sabom was able to obtain verification from medical personnel regarding crucial details of the surgical intervention that Pam reported.3 Here’s what happened.
Pam was brought into the operating room at 7:15 A.M., given general anesthesia, and quickly lost conscious awareness. At this point, Spetzler and his team of more than twenty physicians, nurses, and technicians went to work. They lubricated Pam’s eyes to prevent drying, and taped them shut. They attached electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes to monitor the electrical activity of her cerebral cortex. They inserted small, molded speakers into her ears and secured them with gauze and tape. The speakers would emit repeated 100-decibel clicks—approximately the noise produced by a speeding express train—eliminating outside sounds and measuring the activity of her brain stem.
At 8:40 A.M., the tray of surgical instruments was uncovered and Robert Spetzler began cutting through Pam’s skull with a special surgical saw that produced a noise similar to that of a dental drill. At this moment, Pam later said, she felt herself “pop” out of her body and hover above it, watching as doctors worked on her body.
Although she no longer had use of her eyes and ears, she describes her observations in terms of her senses and perceptions. “I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar,” she said. “I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not.” 4 She also described the Midas Rex bone saw (“The saw thing that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it . . .”5) and the dental drill sound it made with considerable accuracy.
Meanwhile, Spetzler was removing the outermost membrane of Pamela’s brain, cutting it open with scissors. At about the same time, a female cardiac surgeon was attempting to locate the femoral artery in Pam’s right groin. Remarkably, Pam later claimed to remember a female voice saying, “We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.” And then a male voice: “Try the other side.” 6 Medical records confirm this conversation; yet Pam could not have heard them.
The cardiac surgeon was right: Pam’s blood vessels were indeed too small to accept the abundant blood flow requested by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, so at 10:50 A.M., a tube was inserted into Pam’s left femoral artery and connected to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. The warm blood circulated from the artery into the cylinders of the bypass machine, where it was cooled down before being returned to her body. Her body temperature began to fall, and at 11:05 A.M. Pam’s heart stopped. Her EEG brain waves flattened into total silence. A few minutes later, her brain stem became totally unresponsive, and her body temperature fell to a sepulchral 60°Fahrenheit. At 11:25 A.M., the team tilted up the head of the operating table, turned off the bypass machine, and drained the blood from her body. Pamela Reynolds was clinically dead.
At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): she recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”7
Meanwhile, in the operating room, the surgery had come to an end. When all the blood had drained from Pam’s brain, the aneurysm simply collapsed and Spetzler clipped it off. Soon, the bypass machine was turned on and warm blood was pumped back into her body. As her body temperature started to increase, her brain stem began to respond to the clicking speakers in her ears and the EEG recorded electrical activity in the cortex. The bypass machine was turned off at 12:32 P.M. Pam’s life had been restored, and she was taken to the recovery room in stable condition at 2:10 P.M.
Pam’s experience while clinically dead seems to have been continuous from the time she “popped” out of her body at the sound of the surgeon’s saw until she “plunged” back into her body at the close of the surgery. But did it really happen? The evidence is compelling. Robert Spetzler believed that Pam’s observations could not have been based on what she experienced before she was anesthetized: the surgical instruments were covered when she entered the operating room, her eyes were taped shut during the operation, her ears were blocked by the noisy speakers, her heart stopped, her brain waves were flat. “I don’t have an explanation for it,” Spetzler said in a BBC documentary. “I don’t know how it’s possible for it to happen.”8
Pam’s experience seems incredible: how could her mind and her consciousness have a verifiable experience that was not mediated by her physical body and brain? Skeptics insist that it is not possible. But evidence based on recent scientific studies on NDE indicates that reports like Pam’s are no accident: higher mental capacities can indeed continue when the brain is no longer functional.
Tales of otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975 by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular book Life After Life.9 He presented more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during “clinical death”10 and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term near-death experience to refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and consciousness.
NDEs are the vivid, realistic, and often deeply life-changing experiences of men, women, and children who have been physiologically or psychologically close to death. They can be evoked by cardiac arrest and coma caused by brain damage, intoxication, or asphyxia. They can also happen following such events as electrocution, complications from surgery, or severe blood loss during or after a delivery.11 They can even occur as the result of accidents or illnesses in which individuals genuinely fear they might die. Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past fifty years.12
People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.13
Although the details differ, NDEs are characterized by a number of core features.14 Perhaps the most vivid is the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and watching events going on around one’s body and, occasionally, at some distant physical location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness, perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: thinking is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.
The OBE is quite important from a scientific point of view because it is the only feature of the NDE that can be independently corroborated. In Pam Reynolds’s case, for example, her memory of hearing the cardiac surgeon discussing her arteries was corroborated by the medical records.
All the other features of NDEs, however, are based solely on subjective accounts. NDErs often report feelings of peace and joy, and passage though a region of darkness or a dark tunnel often followed by the appearance of an unusually bright light. NDErs also commonly speak of entering an otherworldly realm of unbelievable beauty, where they may hear incredibly beautiful ethereal music or see magnificent gardens or stunning cities. They also commonly speak of encountering deceased relatives and friends, who look younger and healthier than remembered.
NDErs regularly report meeting a “being of light” that radiates completes acceptance and unconditional love and who may communicate telepathically. The results of cross-cultural studies suggest that personal religious or cultural views influence how the experience is described and interpreted.15 For instance, a Buddhist may believe that the “being of light” encountered during an NDE is Buddha, whereas a Christian may believe that this “being” is Jesus. In the presence of such a being, NDErs oftentimes experience a life review, during which they “see their life flash before them” and relive both major and incidental events, sometimes from the perspective of the other people involved. From this they come to certain conclusions about their life and what changes are needed.16
NDErs may also encounter a barrier, such as a wall, a river, or a gate. At this point, they become aware that once they cross this border they will not be able to return to their bodies and resume their lives. Deceased relatives, or the being of light, may explain that the NDEr must return to his or her body. Often, this is related to fulfilling a purpose in life, such as taking care of young children. It is usually at this point that the NDEr is forced to return to his sick or injured body.
Like Pam Reynolds’s “plunge into ice water,” most NDErs find this forced return to be a very unpleasant experience. In 1967, Reinée Pasarow, who temporarily stopped breathing as the result of a massive allergic reaction, experienced the return to her body as being “imprisoned” in a “foreign substance.”
Reinée’s story is fascinating for another reason: in the course of her NDE, the seventeen-year-old seems to have experienced all of the other core features I have just described. This is her experience, in her own words:
After my mother and I had eaten dinner, an old friend I had not seen for some time dropped by unexpectedly. I was rather embarrassed, because I had been covered with welts and hives for two days as a result of the allergy and looked somewhat grotesque. The swelling became substantially worse, and I had great difficulty in breathing. . . . An ambulance was called, but, as none was soon available in our rural district, two fire trucks responded in the meantime.
I was unconscious on the sidewalk in front of our residence, although I was aware of making a tremendous effort to keep breathing. Several firemen were working on me when at last the struggle to keep fighting for my life became too tremendous. I stopped breathing and felt a great relief to be free of the burden of trying to stay alive. I slipped into the dark of a totally unconscious but peaceful realm.
Suddenly, I found myself a few feet outside my body, watching with great curiosity as the firemen gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and violently slapped my legs. I remember them thinking that if they could just get me mad enough, I might come back. My mother was splashing water on my ashen face, and the eldest fireman who was giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation kept pleading with me mentally not to leave and seeing his own teenaged daughter in his mind’s eye.
Just as suddenly, I found myself viewing this cosmically comic scene from slightly above the telephone wires. I saw a young neighbor boy come out of his house upon awakening from his nap, and I tried screaming at his mother to go and get him before he saw all this. Just as I screamed at her, she looked up the driveway and saw him, and my mother said there was nothing she could do, so she [had] best get her child. One of the firemen commented with a great sigh of failure that I had been without a pulse for three minutes.
I felt a pang of guilt that this poor fireman should feel a failure in my death. He was especially touched because I resembled his own daughter. My mother was dazed, hopelessly without any control over the situation and her shock numbed the onset of grief. I remember saying a prayer for her, in hopes that this would help to see her through the pain, but then I realized that she would come to deal with the situation. I wanted to cry out to them all, my mother, friends and the firemen, that everything was as it should be, that I was fine. I was telepathically aware of everyone’s feelings and thoughts, and this seemed a burden, as their pain was as it should be.
Delighted at my newly found freedom, I began to soar. I had become the phoenix, released at last from the limitations of the physical world. I was exhilarated. Everywhere around me there was music; the ether of my new universe was love, a love so pure and selfless that I only longed for more. I became aware of my favorite uncle’s presence: we gleefully recognized each other although we were now in energy, rather than a physical form. He travelled with me for a short time, expressing even more love and acceptance. As a vast light became visible in this sea of light, however, I was magnetically drawn into it. The closer I got to this light (closeness, however not meant in the physical sense) the more love and ecstacy were mine to experience.
Finally, I was sucked into the light source, not unlike one is swept up in a whirlpool. I became one with the light. As I became one with this omnipresent light, its knowledge became my knowledge. I was in a single instant what my life had been and what had been of meaning in my life. . . . The superficial aspects of my life, what I had accomplished, owned and known, were consumed in that same instant by the energy of the light. However, those acts in which I selflessly expressed love or concern for my fellow men were glorified and permanently inscribed . . . , with total disregard for however humble those moments had been. . . .
Suddenly, I was ejected from the light to the other side of this new universe, where I realized I would have to make my way. I recall someone beckoning to me, although the identity of that person still remains a mystery, for also at that moment it was revealed to me that my moment in the cosmic dance was not completed, that there was something for my human race that I must achieve on the physical plane of existence. Coinciding with the moment of that revelation, the light, the universe, or God himself proclaimed IT IS NOT TIME, and that proclamation hurled me from this magnificent universe of love.
I was pushed through a tremendous tunnel of light, through a progressive rainbow of the wavelengths of color, and catapulted back into the physical realm. It was as if the whole process was not just initiated by the proclamation, but was the proclamation IT IS NOT TIME itself.
I found myself, griefstricken and heartsick, again a few feet from my body. I felt as if I had been cast out of paradise, an Eve no longer in the Garden of Eden. The physical realm was coarse and confusing, divided and foreign. A sense of time and space was clamped down upon my being, casting upon my soul a sense of imprisonment and degradation unlike any I had ever known.
The ambulance had arrived, and the attendants were checking for my absent pulse, which still eluded them. I tried to merge again with the body that was once mine but which now seemed like a foreign substance. This required a tremendous effort on my part, and the attendants placing me in the back of the ambulance only made the merging that more difficult. I hovered over my body in the ambulance, and for a brief instant rejoined it. I felt the surge of blood through my veins, and the attendant motioned to the driver that he had a pulse.
The pain of the physical was too much for me to stand, however, and I separated from the body again, hovering both inside and outside the moving ambulance. I watched as the young attendant in the back mouthed DOA (dead on arrival) to the driver about ten minutes into the drive. My mother’s pain at this announcement became my pain, and I was angered at the callousness of the ambulance attendant.
I continued watching from several feet above my body as I was wheeled into the emergency room and the first young doctor was unable to revive me again. . . . At that moment, my personal physician burst into the emergency room in his tuxedo, bag in hand.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“She was DOA,” the young doctor announced. . . .
“The hell she is!” shouted my doctor, a family friend of many years, and got down to the business of determining how many shots of adrenaline I had been given. He ordered that I be given up to six large injections of adrenaline, something the other doctors and nurses obviously considered very dangerous. He proceeded to pump me full of adrenaline and give heart massage until at last a pulse was perceived. It is interesting to note that I was fully aware of what was happening both physically and in the minds of those in the emergency room until I was revived, at which point I was very confused.
To the best of my knowledge, I was without a heartbeat approximately fifteen minutes. The incident left me with some minimal brain damage, the effects of which have been totally overcome, although to this day my reflexes reflect the damage.17
The effects of NDEs are intense, overwhelming, and real. A number of studies conducted in United States, Western European countries, and Australia have shown that most NDErs are profoundly and positively transformed by the experience. One woman says, “I was completely altered after the accident. I was another person, according to those who lived near me. I was happy, laughing, appreciated little things, joked, smiled a lot, became friends with everyone . . . so completely different than I was before!”18
After the NDE, however different their personalities were before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar psychological profile. Indeed, their beliefs, values, behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. These psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination.19 And, as noted NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated, these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.20 Let’s take a quick look at the various types of changes reported following NDEs.21
Most NDErs come back with a renewed appreciation for life and sense of purpose, an enhanced sense of wonder and gratitude for life itself. They are more capable of enjoying the here and now. They also feel that life is meaningful and purposeful. Often they come to realize that their main goal in life is to find and fulfill their mission.
NDErs frequently return with a changed self-image. In addition, they generally feel greater self-worth and self-confidence and become less dependent on the approval of others.
One of the most remarkable and consistent changes following an NDE is an increased compassion for other people. NDErs are now more capable of being of service to others. They are also more tolerant, more forgiving, and less critical of others. Experiencers spend more time with relatives and friends, and are more likely to donate to charities or to dedicate themselves to a humanitarian cause.
As NDErs become sensitive to the health of Earth’s ecosystem, their concerns commonly extend to all forms of life. They experience a reverence for life they may not have felt before.
NDErs regularly report a decline in religious affiliation but an increase in spirituality, with a greater interest in contemplative practices such as prayer, meditation, and surrender. Additionally, NDErs tend to assert that now they know with deep certitude that God exists, regardless of what they had believed before, and that life goes on after the death of the physical body.
Some NDErs yearn for knowledge. These individuals often attempt to recapture some of the knowledge they acquired during their experience, and lost on return to their bodies.
NDErs tend to perceive a life focused on materialistic pursuits as futile and empty. Many say that they can no longer compete with others for material successes. The goal of becoming eminent and powerful does not matter anymore.
NDErs commonly return with a whole gamut of psi abilities. These may include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and spontaneous OBEs.
If these transformational experiences sound worth dying for, you should be aware that NDEs do not have only positive consequences. Many NDErs are deeply shaken and struggle to accept and integrate their newly discovered insights. This is particularly true when their new insights elicit negative reactions and disbelief from family, friends, and health care professionals. In the first few years after the NDE, several experiencers report feeling depressed, lonely, and nostalgic.22
A minority of reported NDEs are disagreeable or frightening.23 They may, for example, feel out of control as they rush through the dark tunnel; or they may experience an absolute void. Each NDE is unique, and the number of features reported by NDErs varies considerably.
Some skeptics legitimately argue that the main problem with reports of OBE perceptions is that they often rest uniquely on the NDEr’s testimony—there is no independent corroboration. From a scientific perspective, such self-reports remain inconclusive.24 But during the past few decades, some self-reports of NDErs, such as that of Pam Reynolds, have been independently corroborated by witnesses. One of the best known of these corroborated veridical NDE perceptions—perceptions that can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical-care social worker, Kimberly Clark.25
Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observation that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel, and the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe and begged Clark to try to locate it.
Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. The details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned from the window of her hospital room. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”26
This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after ten to twenty seconds.27 In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered.28 Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands,29 United Kingdom,30 and United States31 have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.
Another example of a corroborated veridical NDE perception is that of Al Sullivan.32 In 1988, this fifty-six-year-old van driver went to Hartford Hospital with an irregular heartbeat. While Sullivan was being examined, one of his coronary arteries became obstructed. He was immediately rushed into the operation room for emergency coronary bypass surgery, during which he felt himself leaving his body and moving upward. He looked down and saw himself lying on a table, with his chest cut open. He also saw his cardiothoracic surgeon, Hiroyoshi Takata, “flapping his elbows” as if trying to fly.
Following the operation, Sullivan mentioned this odd observation to his cardiologist, Anthony LaSala, who confirmed that he, too, had observed Takata doing this. Nine years later, Takata told preeminent NDE researcher Bruce Greyson that it was indeed his regular habit to instruct medical personnel by pointing with his elbows so as not to touch anything in the operating room until the actual surgery.
Another corroborated veridical NDE perception, by a coronary care unit nurse, occurred during the pilot phase of the study carried out by Pim van Lommel and his colleagues in the Netherlands. The nurse recalls:
During a night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year-old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He had been found about an hour before in a meadow by passers-by. After admission, he receives artificial respiration without intubation, while heart massage and defibrillation are also applied. When we want to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the “crash cart.” Meanwhile, we continue extensive CPR. After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. I distribute his medication. The moment he sees me he says: “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are.” I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: “Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death. 4 weeks later he left hospital as a healthy man.” 33
NDEs experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper undertook a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind. They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to report on verifiable events that took place when he or she was clinically dead, that would mean something real was occurring. Ring and Cooper interviewed thirty-one individuals, of whom fourteen were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the participants had had NDEs; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly, the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern, whether they were born blind or lost their sight in later life. The results of the study were published in 1997.34
One of the most enthralling cases is that of a forty-one-year-old woman named Nancy, who had had a disastrous experience while undergoing a biopsy related to a possible cancerous chest tumor. During the surgical procedure, the surgeon accidentally cut her superior vena cava, a large vein located in the upper chest. Panicked, the surgeon sewed the vein shut—an additional error that resulted in a blockage of blood flow.
When Nancy woke up in the recovery room shortly after surgery, she started screaming, “I’m blind, I’m blind!”35 Her face and body were swollen and purple, and she stopped breathing and lost consciousness. Attendants strapped a respirator over her nose and mouth, and wheeled her out of the recovery room on a gurney to have an angiogram that would measure blood flow through the vein. In their haste, however, the attendants accidentally slammed Nancy’s gurney into a closed elevator door. At that point her NDE began. She first felt stepping out of herself on the gurney. In the OBE state, she looked down the hall about fifteen or twenty feet and “saw” two men standing there. One of them was her son’s father. The other man was her lover at the time. Then Nancy remembers moving toward a beautiful white light and entering the light. After a while, she felt urged to come back in her body.36
In Nancy’s medical records, Ring and Cooper found confirmation of her surgical misfortune. To corroborate her claims, they interviewed the two men Nancy claimed to have seen standing in the hall while her body was lying on the gurney and after she had lost her sight. The account given by her child’s father fitted globally with Nancy’s; but her lover, Leon, independently confirmed all of the essential details of Nancy’s story. Ring and Cooper also consulted an ophthalmologist, who agreed that the blockage of the superior vena cava could rapidly damage the optic nerve and lead to blindness.
After a thorough investigation of this case and a review of all relevant information, these researchers concluded that there was no possibility for Nancy to see these events with her physical eyes—which, in any case, were almost certainly sightless at that time. Yet all of the evidence indicates that she really did see.
Kenneth Ring also reported another intriguing case of apparent veridical perception by a woman called Anna, who was virtually blind at the time of her NDE.37 This case was communicated to Ring by Ingegard Bergström, a Swedish NDE researcher. Anna had the capacity only to distinguish light and darkness. She was not able to recognize silhouettes or walk in dimly lit corridors. One day, while sitting in the kitchen by her kitchen table, she had a cardiac arrest. At that moment, she suddenly saw the sink and a stack of dirty dishes, something that would have not been possible for her to see.
Anna said nothing at the time, but made that statement to Bergström in the presence of her husband, who reacted with surprise. Why had she not told him about this before? Because, she replied matter-of-factly, “You never ask me if I saw anything at the time my heart stopped.” She then told Bergström that unwashed dishes were piled up in the sink. In the written report Bergström provided to Ring, the husband was said to have appeared quite guilty, as it had been his responsibility to clean the dishes and put them away.
Based on all the cases they investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on the senses of the physical body. They proposed to call this other mode of perception mindsight.38
Despite corroborated reports, many materialist scientists cling to the notion that OBE and NDE experiences are located in the brain. In 2002, neurologist Olaf Blanke and colleagues at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland described in the prestigious scientific journal Nature the strange occurrence that happened to a forty-three-year-old female patient with epilepsy.39 Because her seizures could not be controlled by medication alone, neurosurgery was being considered as the next step. The researchers implanted electrodes in her right temporal lobe to provide information about the localization and extent of the epileptogenic zone—the area of the brain that was causing the seizures—which had to be surgically removed. Other electrodes were implanted to identify and localize, by means of electrical stimulation, the areas of the brain that—if removed—would result in loss of sensory capacities or linguistic ability, or even paralysis. Such a procedure is particularly critical to spare important brain areas that are adjacent to the epileptogenic zone.
When they stimulated the angular gyrus—a region of the brain in the parietal lobe that is thought to integrate sensory information related to vision, touch, and balance to give us a perception of our own bodies—the patient reported seeing herself “lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” She described herself as “floating” near the ceiling. She also reported seeing her legs “becoming shorter.”
The article received global press coverage and created quite a commotion. The editors of Nature went so far as to declare triumphantly that as result of this one study—which involved only one patient—the part of the brain that can induce OBEs had been located.
“It’s another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain,” said Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, which seeks to debunk all kinds of paranormal claims. “In reality, all experience is derived from the brain.” 40
In another article, published in 2004, Blanke and co-workers described six patients, of whom three had atypical and incomplete OBEs.41 Four patients reported an autoscopy—that is, they saw their own double from the vantage point of their own body. In this paper the researchers describe an OBE as a temporary dysfunction of the junction of the temporal and parietal cortex. But, as Pim van Lommel noted, the abnormal bodily experiences described by Blanke and colleagues entail a false sense of reality.42 Typical OBEs, in contrast, implicate a verifiable perception (from a position above or outside the body) of events such as their own resuscitation or traffic accident and the surroundings in which the events took place. Along the same lines, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia commented that “we cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions.” 43
Materialistic scientists have proposed a number of physiological explanations to account for the various features of NDEs. British psychologist Susan Blackmore has propounded the “dying brain” hypothesis,44 which states that a lack of oxygen (or anoxia) during the dying process might induce abnormal firing of neurons in brain areas responsible for vision, and that such an abnormal firing would lead to the illusion of seeing a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel.
Would it? Van Lommel and colleagues objected that if anoxia plays a central role in the production of NDEs, most cardiac arrest patients would report NDEs.45 Studies show that this is clearly not the case. Another problem with this view is that reports of a tunnel are absent from several accounts of NDErs. As pointed out by renowned NDE researcher Sam Parnia, some individuals have reported NDEs when they had not been terminally ill and so would have had normal levels of oxygen in their brains.46
Parnia raises another problem: when oxygen levels decrease markedly, patients whose lungs or hearts do not work properly experience an “acute confusional state,” during which they are highly confused and agitated and have little or no memory recall. In stark contrast, during NDEs people experience lucid consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning. They also have an excellent memory of the NDE, which usually stays with them for several decades. In other respects, Parnia argues that if the dying brain hypothesis was correct, then the illusion of seeing a light and tunnel would progressively develop as the patient’s blood oxygen level drops. Medical observations, however, indicate that patients with low oxygen levels do not report seeing a light, a tunnel, or any of the common features of an NDE.
During the 1990s, more research indicated that the anoxia theory of NDEs was on the wrong track. James Whinnery, a chemistry professor with West Texas A&M, was involved with studies simulating the extreme conditions that can occur during aerial combat maneuvers. In these studies, fighter pilots were subjected to extreme gravitational forces in a giant centrifuge. Such rapid acceleration decreases blood flow and, consequently, delivery of oxygen to the brain. In so doing, it induced brief periods of unconsciousness that Whinnery called “dreamlets.”47 Whinnery hypothesized that although some of the core features of NDEs are found during dreamlets, their main characteristics are impaired memory for events just prior to the onset of unconsciousness, confusion, and disorientation upon awakening. These symptoms are not typically associated with NDEs. In addition, life transformations are never reported following dreamlets.
So, if the “dying brain” is not responsible for NDEs, could they simply be hallucinations? In my opinion, the answer is no. Let’s look at the example of hallucinations that can result from ingesting ketamine, a veterinary drug that is sometimes used recreationally, and often at great cost to the user.
At small doses, the anesthetic agent ketamine can induce hallucinations and feelings of being out of the body. Ketamine is thought to act primarily by inhibiting N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors that normally open in response to binding of glutamate, the most abundant excitatory chemical messenger in the human brain. Psychiatrist Karl Jansen48 has speculated that the blockade of NMDA receptors may induce an NDE. But ketamine experiences are often frightening, producing weird images, and most ketamine users realize that the experiences produced by this drug are illusory. In contrast, NDErs are strongly convinced of the reality of what they experienced. Furthermore, many of the central features of NDEs are not reported with ketamine. That being said, we cannot rule out that the blockade of NMDA receptors may be involved in some NDEs.
Neuroscientist Michael Persinger has claimed that he and his colleagues have produced all the major features of the NDE by using weak transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the temporal lobes.49 Persinger’s work is based on the premise that abnormal activity in the temporal lobe may trigger an NDE. A review of the literature on epilepsy, however, indicates that the classical features of NDEs are not associated with epileptic seizures located in the temporal lobes. Moreover, as Bruce Greyson and his collaborators have correctly emphasized, the experiences reported by participants in Persinger’s TMS studies bear little resemblance with the typical features of NDEs.50
The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.
These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts, and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.
NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that is normally not accessible to our senses and awareness. This view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.
The reaction of scientists toward NDEs is to a large extent influenced by their views about religion and the afterlife. An article published in Nature in 1998 revealed that 93 percent of the most prominent and influential scientists in the United States (all members of the National Academy of Sciences) consider themselves nonreligious or nonspiritual and rejected the possibility of an afterlife. This survey can help us understand why these scientists so vigorously refuse to accept the implications of the research on NDEs.51
In the next chapter, we go deeper into the realm of mind beyond brain, exploring life-changing transcendent experiences that take us outside ourselves and bring us in touch with the fabric of the universe itself.