Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (20 page)

During an NDE, however, people retain their identity and experience an enhanced reality, a clear consciousness and lucid thought, and potential out-of-body episodes. An NDE is nearly always accompanied by feelings of peace and love, is reported by as many men as women, and occurs irrespective of age. Depersonalization also fails to explain NDEs among people who are not in a life-threatening situation.

Dissociation

The scientific literature defines dissociation as an escape from the frightening reality of a trauma by “the disruption of the usually integrated functions of identity, memory or consciousness.” The definition makes no explicit mention of the possibility of verifiable perception from above and outside the body. This defense mechanism can kick in during physical or emotional abuse at a young age, such as sexual abuse or (the threat of) physical violence.

A study has shown that after a near-death experience some people are slightly more inclined toward dissociation, but never pathologically so.
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And like depersonalization, dissociation cannot explain NDEs in people who experience them while not in a life-threatening situation.

Personality Factors

Could people with certain personality traits be more likely to have an NDE than others? The big problem with such questions is that systematic research prior to the NDE is impossible. Information about personality and character traits derives from retrospective research, which is usually carried out a long time after the NDE. However, these studies do tell us that post-NDE changes have consequences for someone’s personality.

Generally speaking, NDEs occur in mentally stable people who function normally in everyday life and who, except in age, do not differ from control groups without an NDE.

Fantasies and Imagination

There has never been any evidence to suggest that before they had their experience NDErs were more inclined to fantasize. Nor does fantasizing explain why both children and adults across all ages and cultures have reported virtually identical NDEs. Similarly, the suggestion that an NDE is constructed on the basis of false memories or imagination can be refuted by the fact that people around the world report virtually identical NDEs.

The fact that some people are reluctant to share their profound and overwhelming NDE with others in the first few days after their experience and feel capable of disclosure only many years later does not necessarily mean that this experience is a false memory or fantasy. Evidence has shown that the content of an NDE, the words chosen to describe it, and the emotions it evoked remain essentially the same when, years later, people bring up their NDE again.

Fantasies During Out-of-Body Experiences

Some people continue to explain out-of-body experiences during an NDE as the product of fantasy and imagination. Those who are reluctant to accept a nonmaterialist explanation for the near-death phenomenon, especially, claim that reports of out-of-body experiences rest on fantasy and information about a resuscitation or operation shared by doctors and nurses afterward. In these critics’ opinion, perceptions during unconsciousness or coma are by definition impossible.
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Psychologist Susan Blackmore maintains that the content of an out-of-body experience is simply a combination of memories, fantasies, lucky guesses, and expectations. She is not alone in this. These skeptics also assume that hearing remains intact despite the fact that the loss of brain function has rendered the patient unconscious. When heart patients without an NDE were asked to describe their resuscitation, they always made one or more essential errors, unlike patients who had an NDE during their resuscitation and who were able to recall surprising details of this procedure.
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Reports of out-of-body experiences are also said to be reconstructions of perceptions made shortly before losing consciousness or immediately after waking. However, research has shown that people who wake from a coma have no memories of the period just before or after their period of unconsciousness. And it is even harder to find a materialist explanation for perceptions at a considerable distance from the hospital or for verified perceptions by visually handicapped or blind people.
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Reports of out-of-body episodes can include verifiable facts that people could not have seen or heard with their normal senses and that doctors and nurses never mentioned afterward. These reported perceptions usually take place from a position outside and above the body and sometimes even from outside the room where the body lies. As mentioned, medical and nursing personnel were usually stunned by the level of detail patients knew about their resuscitation and almost always responded with surprise or disbelief.
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The story of the dentures that were removed and stored during a resuscitation, which was published in
The Lancet
and told earlier, is inexplicable to most scientists because the patient knew details about his resuscitation and the appearance and actions of the doctors and nurses in attendance despite entering the hospital in a coma and being transferred to the intensive care unit for respiration while still comatose.

Out-of-body experiences are often difficult to corroborate if the NDEs took place many years ago. Additional prospective research is needed to verify out-of-body experiences shortly after resuscitation. But there are so many well-documented cases of people leaving their body, with a great many verifiable details, that it is virtually impossible to cast doubt upon them or to ascribe them to fantasy or imagination.

Memories or Fantasies During Surgery and Coma

Is it possible to experience consciousness during general anesthesia? Scientific research is divided on the question whether conscious memories of surgery under general anesthesia are possible. Memories of the surgical period are thought to be rare and usually conveyed in just a few simple words shortly after the operation. They tend to occur only after light sedation with a great deal of muscle relaxant.
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Registration of the electrical activity of the brain (EEG) in patients under general anesthesia has shown that unconsciousness during surgery is coupled with a clear change in the brain’s electrical activity, with lower frequencies and less extreme discharges. This is consistent with the neurophysiological hypothesis that brain function is completely disrupted and impaired under general anesthesia. This picture is also confirmed by studies among patients under general anesthesia, in which neurological imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show a functional loss of nearly all the major brain functions. The same is true for the findings of fMRI research among patients in a vegetative state or some other form of coma. Although sounds and other stimuli continue to enter the brains of these patients, they no longer trigger the kinds of responses that are registered during conscious experiences under normal circumstances because the connections in the brain have been severed and information can no longer be exchanged.
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From a scientific point of view it therefore seems highly unlikely that under properly administered general anesthesia patients can have memories of the surgical period with lucid consciousness, with thoughts and emotions, and sometimes with perceptions from a position above the operating table. The same is true for patients in a coma.

And yet this exceptional situation exists. For some time now patients under general anesthesia have been known to perceive what a surgeon or anesthetist has said. Because current medical science does not yet widely accept the possibility of a near-death experience or an out-of-body experience, their later memories are in the medical literature referred to as “awareness” during surgery. The common assumption is that these patients were given insufficient anesthetic, but this is not always the case. Some patients are known to have awoken from general anesthesia feeling very agitated after overhearing somber comments about their prognosis during the operation. Under hypnosis some even brought up things that were said during surgery but of which they had no conscious memories.
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Awareness during general anesthesia is also experienced by patients with an NDE caused by complications during surgery (severe blood loss or a cardiac arrest), which leaves them with detailed memories of the operation, sometimes even with visual perception despite the fact that their eyes had been taped shut and their head blanketed with a drape. The many reports of near-death collected at the University of Virginia suggest that 23 percent of people experienced their NDE while under general anesthesia.
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The fact that an NDE can be experienced during a coma, in which brain function is also seriously impaired, is an equally extraordinary phenomenon. When patients report memories of their operation or period of coma, we should not dismiss this as mere fantasy or question the amount of anesthetic administered or the coma diagnosis but instead seriously consider the possibility of an NDE.

Deceit

It has been alleged that NDErs tell deliberate lies to look interesting or to impress others. A personal meeting will quickly dispel such suspicions, not just because of what they say about the experience, but above all because of the obvious emotions and the struggle to find the right words when they share the experience. The fact that people often keep quiet for years for fear of rejection and that when they finally talk about their NDE they do so only reluctantly to a handful of friends also argues strongly against a deliberate lie to come across as interesting. Besides, it is tricky to fabricate a story about a different outlook on life and then actually show practical evidence of this change. Only a written and anonymous NDE account would make it harder to check whether and to what extent elements have been made up.

Memory of Birth

The description of a journey through a tunnel toward the light has prompted the suggestion that an NDE is a memory of birth or that it is an archetypical rebirth experience instead of a real memory. However, it is rare for an adult to be able to remember birth because the brain is believed to be insufficiently developed at birth. Besides, an NDE does not always involve a tunnel experience, and when it does it is as common among people who were delivered by natural birth as it is among those who came into this world via cesarean section.
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Hallucinations

Over the past thirty years there have been repeated claims that an NDE is a hallucination. A hallucination, however, is a sensory perception that is experienced as real by the hallucinating person but that is not rooted in reality. Hallucinations are unique and personal images with emotive elements, auditory impressions (sounds or voices), sensations of taste or smell, or visual images. Unlike an NDE, they contain no universal elements. A hallucination can feature vivid images and moving figures and can evoke a range of emotions, of which fear is usually the dominant one. A number of areas of the brain display an increased activity during hallucinations. But reports of a positive transformation are rare after such an experience. Hallucinations tend to be associated with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and psychoses but also with migraines, (excessive) drug use, and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. By contrast, most people with an NDE are emotionally stable and did not use alcohol, medication, or drugs before their experience.

A hallucination is an observation without a basis in reality. The fact that an out-of-body experience during an NDE involves verifiable perceptions means that an NDE is, by definition, not a hallucination. The possibility of meeting and communicating with deceased people, of whose death one could not have been aware, also argues against hallucination. And NDErs who once hallucinated as a side effect of medication say that the contents of a hallucination and a near-death experience are extremely different.
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Dreams

Could the NDE be a kind of dream? Dreams usually occur during the REM phase of sleep, during which the brain displays a great deal of activity. An NDE, by contrast, is sometimes experienced at a moment when all brain activity has ceased. People with an NDE say that during their near-death episode they experienced a vivid reality, which was fundamentally different from anything they ever experienced in dreams. Dreams combine recent experiences with (subconscious) memories, and this can be coupled with strong emotions (nightmares).

Yet there are certain analogies between an NDE and a dream, such as the absence of time and distance: in a dream everything appears to be happening in a split second. Consciousness is so greatly enhanced during a dream that time and distance become irrelevant. Like NDEs, some dreams also feature visions of the future. In these prognostic dreams people dream certain events, such as a funeral, which come true years later and are then experienced as déjà vu. Similarly, people can meet deceased persons in lucid dreams, just as in NDEs. I believe we should take a closer look at the potential role of the aforementioned DMT in the origins and content of dreams.

As well as some similarities, there are clear differences between a dream and an NDE: in contrast to an NDE, a dream is usually forgotten after a while and is generally not followed by a transformation. And a dream usually has no fixed elements, unlike an NDE.

A summary review of the psychological approaches described above prompts the conclusion that most of them (expectations, depersonalization/dissociation, personality traits, hallucinations, fantasies, deceit) fail to explain the empirical features of an NDE. One psychological factor that may contribute to an explanation is that NDEs are precipitated not only by an actual life-threatening situation but also by a situation that is perceived—and feared—as such. A second lead for further research is provided by the similarities between NDEs and dreams (especially lucid ones); the role of DMT in both phenomena merits further attention.