You remember being knocked off your bike by an oncoming bus, but wonder why you are looking at the crash scene from atop a neighboring building. You notice your body lying motionless as paramedics’ race to your side. Your surroundings dim as the brightness of the sun begins to envelope your entire being and a sense of peace and oneness ensues, when suddenly pain washes over your body. A paramedic explains to you that you had been clinically dead for over five minutes. You have just had a near death experience.
While this event may sound spooky, research suggests that as many as 10 per cent of cardiac arrest survivors report similar experiences.
The controversy arises when an individual claims such an incident “proves” the existence of an after life, or that consciousness can exist irrespective of the body. By suggesting such things, one challenges the empirically well-founded assumption that the mind requires the brain to exist.
For the past few decades, the conventional scientific explanation for near-death experiences has proposed that when individuals approach the moment of death, their brain starts to malfunction, causing hallucination-like experiences via the abnormal release of various neurochemicals. Recently, some researchers have called into question the validity of the “hallucination” hypothesis.
In 2001, Dr. Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick from the Southampton General Hospital in the UK conducted a large-scale review of literature on near death experiences. Published in the medical journal Resuscitation, their article argued, via the invocation of physiology research, that it is unlikely that biologically-mediated hallucinations occur following clinical death. Their research states that following cessation of the heartbeat, the brain ceases to function within around 10 seconds. This has been measured in various studies involving animals and humans.
Without brain function, the cascade of neurochemicals hypothesized to be released could not translate into near death experiences, as the brain cannot mediate experiences under such deteriorated conditions. Nevertheless, near-death experiences are recalled by patients as occurring over the time period in which they are clinically dead. Furthermore, Drs. Parnia and Fenwick noted anecdotal stories in which patients perceived themselves as floating above their clinically dead bodies in the emergency room, and upon being revived, were able to remember specific details of the time in which they were “dead.” During an interview for Skeptiko in 2008, Dr. Fenwick noted a case in which an individual was in cardiac arrest and had an EEG connected to his head that showed no brain activity. Upon being revived, the individual accurately recalled and verified specific details of the procedure, claiming he saw the whole thing from the ceiling above. As such near-death experiences are noted for both their clarity and cohesiveness, questions remain as to why individuals with no brain activity are still capable of perception and cognition.
At first glance, these anecdotal stories, in conjunction with the physiological research suggest the mind or “soul” may be capable of existing irrespective of the brain. But studies into near-death experiences have limitations. For example, numerous after-the-fact anecdotal stories cannot be substituted for true science and well-structured experiments. To claim that a clinically dead individual maintains existence outside of their body, one would need a way to verify this is not a near-death illusion.
In 2008, a new five-year large-scale study was initiated, involving 25 hospitals worldwide, and 1500 patients. The participating hospitals place images and objects only viewable from a top-down ceiling perspective, to see if clinically dead individuals are actually separating from their bodies and floating to the ceiling. They would be expected to see these images, and be able to report them if revived. As the results of this study will not be published until 2013, answers to the question of the existence of the soul and the after life will need to wait.
