Science
Decoding Near-Death Experiences
NPR has been doing a series on the science of spirituality. I’ve only caught a couple of the broadcasts, but I found the final installment completely engrossing. [Mental note: renew NPR membership] I find the concept of this series incredibly fascinating, but there have to be a few caveats.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the series correspondent, grew up in Christian Science and has written a book on the power of prayer and healing. I am very skeptical of her expertise on this subject as a journalist, but she usually does very well at these kinds of stories, so I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
NDE Synopsis
Pam Reynolds, the near-death experiencer, had a near death experience when doctors chilled her body down to drain the blood from her head and cut out an aneurism. Reynolds remembers floating above the table, hearing and seeing the bone saw, and seeing twenty doctors. Then she went on and chatted with dead relatives who guided her back to the operating room and let her reenter her body and wake up while they were playing “Hotel California.”
She didn’t share any of this with the doctor until a year later. Incredibly, his memory of the surgery jibed with her anecdote. The neurosurgeon has no medical or scientific explanation for her NDE. She was under anesthesia and her eyes were taped shut. Her ears were fitted with molded speakers to produce loud clicking to help the doctors monitor brain activity during the operation.
Enter Dr. Woerlee, an Australian NDE debunker. (Gotta love those Aussies) Everything in Reynolds’ NDE could be accounted for psychologically and scientifically. Her brain could have turned off listening to the clicking and she heard the doctors and the song in the room. Her brain extrapolated the sound of the bone saw as being similar to a dental drill. She also could have seen what the bone saw looked like and how many people were in the room before they taped her eyes shut, especially since she was most likely conscious through the entire operation, though under anesthesia.
According to Barbara Bradley Hagerty, it’s common for people to be conscious under anesthesia. I remember being conscious for parts of both times I underwent anesthesia, so I tend to believe her.
Another researcher in Canada (I love Canada too) has been recruiting NDE candidates for a study to monitor brain functions as they relive their NDEs through meditation. He has concluded that the NDE essentially rewires the brain, and it can continue to work in this new way because of the oxygen being cutoff. It’s a similar process to that of religious practioners like monks and nuns who disconnect themselves from their bodies mentally.
The conclusion, it’s all perfectly scientific, and it’s not really evidence of a spiritual conciousness.
Now, of course, NDEs are always heartwarming, but no one ever has a bad one. It seems as though all people were going to heaven through some tunnel of light or whatever. But even as Barbara, the reporter pointed out, ALL NDEs, every single one is anecdotal. You cannot run clinical trials on someone without actually killing them. (She mentions the movie Flatliners.)
I admire Barbara for doing good, objective reporting on this story, in spite of her affinity for spirituality. This is a very laudable effort for putting spirituality and faith quite literally under a microscope.
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Tags: anesthesia, barbara bradley hagerty, belief, death, dying, faith, nde, near death experience, neuroscience, npr Discussion
5 comments for “Decoding Near-Death Experiences”
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Of all the near-death experiences I’ve read about, the reports all seem so generically similar: the person had an out-of-body experience, saw what was going on in the operating room, saw a bright light, saw relatives.
If they are truly having an out-of-body experience, why do they never drift up or down a floor and report what was going on in the room above or below?
Why do they only meet their relatives, rather than, say, Vlad the Impaler, or Archimedes?
I can poke my eye and see bright lights, why does the ‘bright light’ in a near-death experience somehow supposedly supply evidence that there is some kind of an afterlife?
And in the specific case mentioned in the article, why in hell do they think specific details of memories reported a year later can be trusted to be accurate?
It assumes she never discussed with her doctor what was going to be done to her. It assumes she’s never looked at her medical records after the operation. It assumes she’s never read reports or stories of similar procedures done to other people.
And knowing there were exactly 20 doctors? Please. When there are more than about five objects in a group, people have to actually count each individual item to know exactly how many items there are. So, are we to believe that while she was having this extraordinary out-of-body experince, that one of the things that she absolutely had to get done was count the number of doctors in the room?
I’m glad to hear the operation was a success. I’m not glad to hear that it’s being used to lend credence to an afterlife or OBE.
You are precisely right about the OBE angle as well. I think the reporter may be trying to give credence to her Christian Science woo, but she did a really good job of bringing in the skeptical point of view.
I thought this was too apropos not to include with this post.
Brilliant!
Most people are probably curious about what lies ahead after death, beyond the border of death. This may be a reason why they seek knowledge from spiritism sessions or books that discuss this issue. Many have also had personal close-to-death experiences – i.e., experiences when their heart has stopped in the hospital or in connection with an accident and when they may have seen themselves as if from the outside; they may have seen the operations done to them or the entire operating room. Some may have also seen in connection with their experiences a being of light that seems to be full of ‘love and compassion’.
The major topic as comes to this conversation is indeed generally connected with the question of whether all near death experiences are positive and will everybody end up fine beyond the border in spite of the way they have lived on the Earth. Many researchers want to believe this but is it true?
http://koti.phnet.fi/elohim/Border_of_death_experiences