Near-Death Experiences and the Neuroscience of The Esoteric

In life-threatening situations we often go through shaking experiences; intense hallucinations, vivid illusions and strong emotional and mystical feelings can be associated with such experiences.

In medical terminology this is known as a near-death experience, or NDE.

Conditions, medical or not, in which NDEs usually happen are: cardiac arrest, electrocution, perioperative or post-partum complications, anaphylactic shock, apnoea, asphyxia, cerebral infarction, brain damage, coma from traumatic brain injury, and a whole host of others.

Bruce Greyson wrote in a scientific paper he published in 2003 that the general features of NDE include:

• feeling that your are outside of your body
• having visions of religious figures
• seeing deceased relatives
• transcending space, time, and ego.

Research conducted in the field of neuroscience considers such NDEs as hallucinatory states caused by numerous psychological and physiological factors.

I think NDEs are the result of profound alterations in brain chemistry. Let me give some thoughts to this...

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Near-Death Experiences - What they are Not

I'll start with the formal definition. The term 'near-death experience' has been coined by the psychiatrist Raymond Moody in his 1975 book Life after Life. According to Moody, an NDE is:

"any conscious perceptual experience which takes place during ... an event in which a person could very easily die or be killed ... but nonetheless survives."

Nelson and colleagues (2007) describe NDEs as:

"responses to life-threatening crises characterized by a combination of dissociation from the physical body, euphoria, and transcendental or mystical elements."

Even though every person's recollection of an NDE episode is different, there are some features that are common among most testimonies:

• feeling aware of being dead
• painlessness, sense of wellbeing
• intense feeling of acceptance and unconditional love
• an out of the body experience
• seeing a life review
• experiencing going through a tunnel or rapidly moving toward a powerful light
• and others.

I remember having this recurring dream a few years back:

At night, I would find myself on an empty field. The sky was clear. I would be sucked from the ground-up towards the sky. My ascension would be slow in the beginning but it would accelerate very rapidly. I would wake up...

These dreams were really intense but I assume they were nothing compared to an NDE.

Most reports and anecdotes I found talk about NDEs as being positive, but Robert T. Carroll shows us a different perspective in his book The Skeptic's Dictionary:

"Yet there are numerous reports of bad NDE trips involving tortures by elves, giants, demons, and so on. Some parapsychologists take these good and bad NDE trips as evidence of heaven and hell. They believe that some souls actually leave their bodies and go to the other world for a time before returning to their bodies."

For one reason, I don't like the idea of being tortured by an elf...

Moreover, there are experiences similar to NDEs which come from different origins:

"These mimicking experiences are often the result of psychosis (due to severe neurochemical imbalance) or usage of drugs such as hashish, LSD, or DMT (dimethyltryptamine). Moody thinks that NDEs prove the existence of life after death. Skeptics believe that NDEs can be explained by neurochemistry and are the result of brain states that occur due to a dying, demented, or drugged brain."

There has been a lot interest in this subject ever since the early 1980s. See the research section and build your way up from there - if you're interested.

Most of the top scientific journals in the field of neuroscience do not publish research on NDEs. Is it because of the possible lack of quality of such research?!

For one reason, I think there's too much testimony/anecdotal evidence for NDEs and little strong research. There are journals, though, which publish research on NDEs regularly. But they are not as reputable as the top peer-reviewed ones.

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What do I think?

I am inclined to take the side of skeptics here. Furthermore, research done by Susan Blackmore of The University of Bristol adds more evidence:

"If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer. . . . [T]he tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger. . . . If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light."

Similarly, the blissfulness state has been attributed to the release of endorphins as a result of the extreme stress incurred by the situation. So much for the mysticism of the experience...

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But wait, there's more...

Near death experiences have been reproduced entirely by the administration of ketamine, which is a short-acting, dissociative anaesthetic. Ever since the mid 1990s Dr. Karl Jensen has studied how ketamine induces NDEs. From Rob Carroll's book:

"According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, OBEs, and strange noises. This does not prove that there is no life after death, but it does prove that an NDE is not proof of an afterlife. In any case, the so-called typical NDE is not typical of anything, except the tendency of parapsychologists to selectively isolate features of a wide array of experiences and shoehorn them to a paranormal or supernatural presupposition."

Research has shown that electrically stimulating certain parts of the temporal lobe is known to induce memory flashbacks, out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), and hallucinations. In a study from 2005, Chris French notes that the:

"The temporal lobe is almost certain to be involved in NDEs, given that both damage to and direct cortical stimulation of this area are known to produce a number of experiences corresponding to those of the NDE, including OBEs, hallucinations, and memory flashbacks."

Thus, similar to NDEs, there are out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and autoscopy (AS):

• OBE: a person sees their body from a location outside of their body
• AS: a person experiences the environment from a position outside of their body

Here's a graphical depiction of autoscopy, from a patient's testimony (drawn by the patient himself):

According to the study:

"The patient divided his experience in two periods (A,B).

In the initial period, he experienced being elevated in his living room chair into the air by ∼3 m in the direction of the arrow (A).

In the second period, he experienced a ‘second’ body, which continued to be elevated, but left the patient’s body from the elevated position in the chair (see text).

(C) depicts the visual scene as Patient 4 experienced seeing it from his elevated position in the chair. Numbers indicate the dimensions of the patient’s living room in metres.

The position of the patient’s wife is indicated by (A) and the successive locations of Patient 3 during the he‐autoscopic period by (B), (C) and (D)."

The patient in cause (patient 4) has been hospitalized for venous thrombosis and diminished visual acuity. It is not clear how and why his autoscopic episode emerged.

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Ending Thoughts

In my opinion, it really doesn't matter much the mysticism, religion, and anyother esoteric and non-scientific attributions to these phenomena. What matters is that they are real, they receive some scientific attention, and they can lead to deep personality changes.

Many people who experiences NDEs radically change their approach to life, and most of them do it in a positive manner: increased self-esteem, more appreciation for life, less concern with material wealth, heightened compassion, increased sense of purpose, and so on.

But, as pointed out by Greyson and other researchers, not all after-NDE-effects are beneficial. In his paper he describes situations where patients end up having more psycho-spiritual and psycho-social problems, one of them being the adjustment to normal life after such an intense NDE.

If you know someone who went through such an experience, you could help them. The first thing would be to better understand these phenomena. And for that matter, I'd recommend reading/researching more on the topic.

One of my suggestions is Chapter 23 in the 2009 textbook The Neurology of Consciousness. The chapter title is:

Chapter 23 - Leaving body and life behind. Out-of-body and near-death experiences

You can read it for free here.

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Credits for Images: here and here.

#psychology #neuroscience #extreme

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author