Near Death Experiences- Are They Scientific?

When I was ten years old I read about a girl who had a near-death experience in a local newspaper. I was completely taken aback and couldn’t believe it was true. It intrigued me a lot and forced me to read a lot about parapsychology and experiences related to altered consciousness. The article in the newspaper was about a nine year old girl who fell inside a tree trunk, 30ft deep and survived remarkably without any injuries. The girl had a rare condition called pseudo-obstruction motility disorder since her birth and miraculously she got cured of that disease after she came out from the trunk. She also had a glimpse of her great-grandmother whom she had never met in real life during that altered state of consciousness and also mentioned seeing an angel (‘Miracles From Heaven’ By Christy Beam).

Anita Moorjani is another miracle. She was diagnosed with lymphoma and her doctors had informed her family that it was too late to save her. She was in a coma for 30 hours. Later when she came out of the coma, her tumours had shrinked upto 70% within four days and after five weeks she was cancer-free and released from the hospital. She explained that she had an out-of-the-body experience during the coma with observations and awareness of the physical surroundings(‘Dying To Be Me’ By Anita Moorjani).

Near-death experiences are defined by Dr. Raymond Moody who first conducted a research on it as an altered state of consciousness which occurs during an episode of unconsciousness as a result of a life-threatening condition. Under these circumstances, patients often report perceiving a tunnel, a bright light, deceased relatives, mental clarity, a review of their lives, and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in which they describe a feeling of separation from their bodies, the ability to watch themselves from a different perspective and the awareness of being dead. NDEs may occur in people of all genders and all ages, educational and socioeconomic levels, beliefs, and life experiences.

NDEs can be positive or negative. The former experiences the feeling of an overwhelming presence, something transcendent and divine. A clashing disconnect separates the massive trauma to the body and the peacefulness and feeling of oneness with the universe. Yet some NDEs can be frightening, marked by intense terror and despair. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist has classified NDE into 3 types: out-of-body; transcendental involving passage of consciousness into a foreign dimension and the combined experience. NDE survivors have also reported viewing resuscitation efforts from outside, meeting a ‘being of light‘ who helped them evaluate their lives and finally deciding to return to life rather than go into the bliss of death. A tryst with death reminds us of the precariousness and fragility of life and can strip away the layers of psychological suppression that shield us from uncomfortable thoughts of existential oblivion. For most, these events fade in intensity with time, and normality eventually reasserts itself but they are recalled with unusual intensity and lucidity over decades.

Although there are neuropsychological, neurochemical or neurohumoral hypotheses about NDE, yet it is reported to be a non-pathological experience that involves the psychological processes of dissociation as a response to trauma. Depersonalization has also been suggested as a possible explanation in the face of danger. Other theories of NDE include spiritual theories which presume that consciousness has an independent existence with a belief in after life or that NDE could be described as birth memories- cultural beliefs and expectations modify the accounts of NDE. Susan Blackmore, a Consciousness researcher has described that sometimes mind can acquire a mental model of reality assumed upon imagery and memory instead of sensory impressions. Plato and other philosophers have proposed many explanations regarding the relationship between perception and reality. The commonality of the experiences suggests that NDEs might arise from something more fundamental than religious or cultural expectations. Perhaps NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death. Numerous after-effects have been reported, such as the development of a higher spirituality, less materialistic values or a reduced fear of death.

The scientific literature attempts to explain NDEs as the result of physical changes in a stressed or dying brain, oxygen shortage, imperfect anaesthesia and the body’s neurochemical responses to trauma. Narrowing tunnel vision is caused due to reduced blood flow to the visual periphery of the retina. Near death experiencers dismiss these explanations as inadequate. The medical conditions under which NDEs happen, they say, are too varied to explain a phenomenon that seems so widespread and consistent. The problem with the lack of oxygen explanation is that when there is a lack of oxygen, our recollections are fuzzy and sometimes non-existent. The less oxygen one has, the less one remembers. But the people who have experienced near-death can recall their death travels, describe things in a very clear, concise, and structured way.

Such ecstatic and mystical experiences have been reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, DMT(N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), opiates and 5-MeO-DMT, consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices. This leads the scientific community to assume that NDE is nothing but an after-effect of the drugs which are given as a treatment to alleviate pain.

When the brain is starved of blood flow and oxygen, the patient faints in a fraction of a minute and the electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes flat. This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down and local regions of the brain go offline one after another. The mind, whose substrate is whichever neurons remain capable of generating electrical activity, does what it always does: it tells a story shaped by the person’s experience, memory and cultural expectations. Given these power outages, this experience may produce the rather strange stories that make up the NDE reports. To the person undergoing it, the NDE is as real as anything the mind produces during normal waking. When the entire brain has shut down because of complete power loss, the mind is extinguished, along with consciousness. If and when oxygen and blood flow are restored, the brain boots up, and the narrative flow of experience resumes.

Many neurologists have noted similarities between NDEs and the effects of a class of epileptic events known as complex partial seizures. These fits partially impair consciousness and often are localized to specific brain regions in one hemisphere. The seizure may be accompanied by changes in the perceived sizes of objects; unusual tastes, smells or bodily feelings; déjà vu; depersonalization; or ecstatic feelings. Neurosurgeons are able to induce such ecstatic feelings by electrically stimulating part of the cortex in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world. Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns—whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode—the subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin.

It is intriguing, though, that the outer limit of the spectrum of human experience encompasses other occasions in which reduced oxygen causes pleasurable feelings of jauntiness, light-headedness and heightened arousal for example in scuba diving, high-altitude climbing, sky-diving, etc. Why the mind should experience the struggle to sustain its operations in the face of loss of blood flow and oxygen as positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains mysterious.

Thank You.