After years of ridicule and denial, scientists and doctors are
finally beginning to take near death experiences (NDEs)
seriously, as shown by a report in the December 15 issue of
the respected English medical journal The Lancet.
In a recent study conducted in the Netherlands, Dr. Pim van
Lommel and colleagues studied 62 patients who said they
had a near-death experience after going into cardiac arrest.
They found that factors such as medication and the duration
of unconsciousness did not explain the phenomenon. ?Our
results show that medical factors cannot account for
occurrence of near-death experiences,? says van Lommel.
A small number of people who survive life-threatening
circumstances report having had ?an extraordinary
experience,? says van Lommel. These experiences often
involve visions of a light or a deceased relative, flashbacks of
life events or an out-of-body sensation.
Researchers in the past have dismissed these experiences as
being caused by brain cells dying from lack of oxygen. Others
point to psychological factors such as fear of death, or to
the changing state of consciousness people may go through
in a life-threatening condition.
NDE researchers usually ask survivors to tell them about the
events long after they occurred. The investigators tried to
overcome this problem by interviewing cardiac-arrest
survivors within days of being resuscitated and again 2 and 8
years later. In the first interviews, 62 of 344 survivors (18%)
reported near-death experiences. All 344 had been clinically
dead, meaning they were unconscious due to a lack of blood
and oxygen to the brain.
The patients? near-death experiences varied, with 41 having
a deeper experience and the rest reporting more superficial
events. Two years later, 6 out of the second group decided
they had not had a NDE. But the patients who did have one
were able to recall it ?almost exactly? 8 years later, the
researchers found. In contrast with cardiac arrest survivors
who did not have a NDE, they were less afraid of death and
had a stronger belief in an after-life. They also were more
interested in the meaning of life and in showing love and
acceptance to others. However, getting through their
hospital experience was much more complicated for NDE
patients. Their positive changes were more obvious after
eight years than they were after two years.
?The long-lasting transformational effects of an experience
that lasts for only a few minutes of cardiac arrest is a
surprising and unexpected finding,? says van
Lommel. ?Society?s negative response to NDE ... leads
individuals to deny or suppress their experience for fear of
rejection or ridicule. Thus social conditioning causes NDE to
be traumatic, although in itself it is not a psychotraumatic
experience...Only gradually and with difficulty is an NDE
accepted and integrated.?
A nurse said that one patient was in a coma when she
removed his dentures. Later the patient identified her as the
person who knew where to find his dentures, and he
accurately described where they were-- in the drawer of a
medical cart. He said he had seen the events from above the
hospital bed and watched doctors? efforts to save his life.
Half the patients said they were aware of being dead, and
about one in four had an out-of-body experience. Nearly one
in three said they met deceased people. More than one in
five said they communicated with light, and nearly a third
reported moving through a tunnel. More than one in 10 said
they reviewed their lives, and more than one in four said they
saw a celestial landscape.
The researchers could not find any clear explanation for why
a small percentage of patients had a near-death experience
while most did not. If ?purely physiological factors? like a
cutoff of oxygen to the brain were the cause, most of the
study patients should have had an NDE. ?We did not show
that psychological, neurophysiological, or physiological
factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest,? the
researchers say.
Most neuroscientists believe that consciousness is a
byproduct of the physical brain, that mind arises from matter.
But if near-death experiences are real, this means that
people can be conscious of events around them even when
they are physically unconscious and their brains do not show
signs of electrical activity. How can consciousness be
independent of brain function?
?Compare it with a TV? program, says van Lommel. ?If you
open the TV set you will not find the program. The TV set is
a receiver. When you turn off your TV set, the program is still
there but you can?t see it. When you [turn] off your brain,
your consciousness is there but you can?t feel it in your
body.? He says his study suggests that researchers
investigating consciousness ?should not look in the cells and
molecules alone.?
Dr. Christopher C. French of the University of London thinks
NDEs could be false memories and says, "Recent
psychological studies have shown conclusively that simply
imagining that one has had experiences that had in fact
never been encountered will lead to the development of false
memories for those experiences.? He suggests that this may
happen due to patients? natural tendency to try to fill in gaps
in their memory caused by their brush with death.
?We have understandable and natural urges to believe we will
survive bodily death and we will be reunited with our
departed loved ones,? French says. ?So anything that would
support that idea -- reincarnation, mediums, ghosts --
presents evidence of the survival of the soul. It?s something
that we would all desperately like to believe is true.?
Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville, says that current experiments are
being done in which tiny signs are placed on the ceilings of
hospital rooms, so that if people are genuinely having out-of-
body experiences and hovering over their beds, they will be
able to see the signs and provide proof of the
phenomenon. ?Brain chemistry does not explain these
phenomena,? he says. ?I don?t know what the explanation is,
but our current understanding of brain chemistry falls short.?
For a discussion of the near-death experience and ?life
between lives,? listen to the December 22 Dreamland archive
and read ?Destiny of Souls? by Michael Newton. For more
information,click here.
For more information, click here.
