Wow! I can't say I am surprised. I recall when
I was a pre-teen, my Mom telling me she hovered above the room while
giving birth to me...and I often pondered my fate if she had not
returned to her body in time...though when mentioning this as an adult,
she had no recall of this..or more likely, blocked it out due to fear.
Anyway, a fascinating story here. -PB
New
science is shedding light on what really happens during out-of-body
experiences -- with shocking results. ~ by Mario Beauregard | SALON:
Near death, explained Saturday, Apr 21, 2012 04:00 PM EST
This article was adapted from the new book "Brain Wars", from Harper One.
In
1991, Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds felt extremely
dizzy, lost her ability to speak, and had difficulty moving her body. A
CAT scan showed that she had a giant artery aneurysm—a grossly swollen
blood vessel in the wall of her basilar artery, close to the brain stem.
If it burst, which could happen at any moment, it would kill her. But
the standard surgery to drain and repair it might kill her too.
With
no other options, Pam turned to a last, desperate measure offered by
neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in
Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Spetzler was a specialist and pioneer in
hypothermic cardiac arrest—a daring surgical procedure nicknamed
“Operation Standstill.” Spetzler would bring Pam’s body down to a
temperature so low that she was essentially dead. Her brain would not
function, but it would be able to survive longer without oxygen at this
temperature. The low temperature would also soften the swollen blood
vessels, allowing them to be operated on with less risk of bursting.
When the procedure was complete, the surgical team would bring her back
to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in.
Essentially,
Pam agreed to die in order to save her life—and in the process had what
is perhaps the most famous case of independent corroboration of out of
body experience (OBE) perceptions on record. This case is especially
important because cardiologist Michael Sabom was able to obtain
verification from medical personnel regarding crucial details of the
surgical intervention that Pam reported. Here’s what happened.
Pam
was brought into the operating room at 7:15 a.m., she was given general
anesthesia, and she quickly lost conscious awareness. At this point,
Spetzler and his team of more than 20 physicians, nurses, and
technicians went to work. They lubricated Pam’s eyes to prevent drying,
and taped them shut. They attached EEG electrodes to monitor the
electrical activity of her cerebral cortex. They inserted small, molded
speakers into her ears and secured them with gauze and tape. The
speakers would emit repeated 100-decibel clicks—approximately the noise
produced by a speeding express train—eliminating outside sounds and
measuring the activity of her brainstem.
At 8:40 a.m., the tray
of surgical instruments was uncovered, and Robert Spetzler began cutting
through Pam’s skull with a special surgical saw that produced a noise
similar to a dental drill. At this moment, Pam later said, she felt
herself “pop” out of her body and hover above it, watching as doctors
worked on her body.
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Although she no longer had
use of her eyes and ears, she described her observations in terms of her
senses and perceptions. “I thought the way they had my head shaved was
very peculiar,” she said. “I expected them to take all of the hair, but
they did not.” She also described the Midas Rex bone saw (“The saw thing
that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had
a dent in it … ”) and the dental-drill sound it made with considerable
accuracy.
Meanwhile, Spetzler was removing the outermost membrane
of Pamela’s brain, cutting it open with scissors. At about the same
time, a female cardiac surgeon was attempting to locate the femoral
artery in Pam’s right groin. Remarkably, Pam later claimed to remember a
female voice saying, “We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.”
And then a male voice: “Try the other side.” Medical records confirm
this conversation, yet Pam could not have heard them.
The cardiac
surgeon was right—Pam’s blood vessels were indeed too small to accept
the abundant blood flow requested by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine,
so at 10:50 a.m., a tube was inserted into Pam’s left femoral artery
and connected to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. The warm blood
circulated from the artery into the cylinders of the bypass machine,
where it was cooled down before being returned to her body. Her body
temperature began to fall, and at 11:05 a.m. Pam’s heart stopped. Her
EEG brain waves flattened into total silence. A few minutes later, her
brain stem became totally unresponsive, and her body temperature fell to
a sepulchral 60 degrees Fahrenheit. At 11:25 a.m., the team tilted up
the head of the operating table, turned off the bypass machine, and
drained the blood from her body. Pamela Reynolds was clinically dead.
At
this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death
experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and
traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and
friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this
tunnel. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and
loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that
everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of
God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s
deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as
“plunging into a pool of ice.”
Meanwhile, in the operating room,
the surgery had come to an end. When all the blood had drained from
Pam’s brain, the aneurysm simply collapsed and Spetzler clipped it off.
Soon, the bypass machine was turned on and warm blood was pumped back
into her body. As her body temperature started to increase, her
brainsteam began to respond to the clicking speakers in her ears and the
EEG recorded electrical activity in the cortex. The bypass machine was
turned off at 12:32 p.m. Pam’s life had been restored, and she was taken
to the recovery room in stable condition at 2:10 p.m.
Tales of
otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly
forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975
by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular
book Life After Life. He presented more than 100 case studies of people
who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during
“clinical death” and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their
experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term NDE to
refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and
scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with
the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death
Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the
scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and
consciousness.
NDEs are the vivid, realistic, and often deeply
life-changing experiences of men, women, and children who have been
physiologically or psychologically close to death. They can be evoked by
cardiac arrest and coma caused by brain damage, intoxication, or
asphyxia. They can also happen following such events as electrocution,
complications from surgery, or severe blood loss during or after a
delivery. They can even occur as the result of accidents or illnesses in
which individuals genuinely fear they might die. Surveys conducted in
the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of
the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more
than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50
years.
People from all walks of life and belief systems have this
experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not
influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education.
Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this
seems to be a matter of individual perception. Furthermore, researchers
have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an
NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those
studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist,
atheist, or agnostic.
Although the details differ, NDEs are
characterized by a number of core features. Perhaps the most vivid is
the OBE: the sense of having left one’s body and of watching events
going on around one’s body or, occasionally, at some distant physical
location. During OBEs, near-death experiencers (NDErs) are often
astonished to discover that they have retained consciousness,
perception, lucid thinking, memory, emotions, and their sense of
personal identity. If anything, these processes are heightened: Thinking
is vivid; hearing is sharp; and vision can extend to 360 degrees. NDErs
claim that without physical bodies, they are able to penetrate through
walls and doors and project themselves wherever they want. They
frequently report the ability to read people’s thoughts.
The
effects of NDEs on the experience are intense, overwhelming, and real. A
number of studies conducted in United States, Western European
countries, and Australia have shown that most NDErs are profoundly and
positively transformed by the experience. One woman says, “I was
completely altered after the accident. I was another person, according
to those who lived near me. I was happy, laughing, appreciated little
things, joked, smiled a lot, became friends with everyone … so
completely different than I was before!”
However different their
personalities before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar
psychological profile after the NDE. Indeed, their beliefs, values,
behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. Importantly,
these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes
one would expect if this experience were a hallucination. And, as noted
NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated,
these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.
Some
skeptics legitimately argue that the main problem with reports of OBE
perceptions is that they often rest uniquely on the NDEr’s
testimony—there is no independent corroboration. From a scientific
perspective, such self-reports remain inconclusive. But during the last
few decades, some self-reports of NDErs have been independently
corroborated by witnesses, such as that of Pam Reynolds. One of the best
known of these corroborated veridical NDE perceptions—perceptions that
can be proven to coincide with reality—is the experience of a woman
named Maria, whose case was first documented by her critical care social
worker, Kimberly Clark.
Maria was a migrant worker who had a
severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to
Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days
later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The
following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her
cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the
medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said
Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe
on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She
was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including
the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and
that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure
whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to
locate it.
Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described
by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital
room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But
upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The
only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she
had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis
shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very
concrete evidence for me.”
This case is particularly impressive
given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is
interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as
measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a
patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating
higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are
expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be
remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United
Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent
of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time
when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that
consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced
during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.
NDEs
experienced by people who do not have sight in everyday life are quite
intriguing. In 1994, researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper decided
to undertake a search for cases of NDE-based perception in the blind.
They reasoned that such cases would represent the ultimate demonstration
of veridical perceptions during NDEs. If a blind person was able to
report on verifiable events that took place when they were clinically
dead, that would mean something real was occurring. They interviewed 31
individuals, of whom 14 were blind from birth. Twenty-one of the
participants had had an NDE; the others had had OBEs only. Strikingly,
the experiences they reported conform to the classic NDE pattern,
whether they were born blind or had lost their sight in later life. The
results of the study were published in 1997. Based on all the cases they
investigated, Ring and Cooper concluded that what happens during an NDE
affords another perspective to perceive reality that does not depend on
the senses of the physical body. They proposed to call this other mode
of perception mindsight.
Despite corroborated reports, many
materialist scientists cling to the notion that OBEs and NDEs are
located in the brain. In 2002, neurologist Olaf Blanke and colleagues at
the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland
described in the prestigious scientific journal Nature the strange
occurrence that happened to a 43-year-old female patient with epilepsy.
Because her seizures could not be controlled by medication alone,
neurosurgery was being considered as the next step. The researchers
implanted electrodes in her right temporal lobe to provide information
about the localization and extent of the epileptogenic zone—the area of
the brain that was causing the seizures—which had to be surgically
removed. Other electrodes were implanted to identify and localize, by
means of electrical stimulation, the areas of the brain that—if
removed—would result in loss of sensory capacities, linguistic ability,
or even paralysis. Such a procedure is particularly critical to spare
important brain areas that are adjacent to the epileptogenic zone.
When
they stimulated the angular gyrus—a region of the brain in the parietal
lobe that is thought to integrate sensory information related to
vision, touch, and balance to give us a perception of our own bodies—the
patient reported seeing herself “lying in bed, from above, but I only
see my legs and lower trunk.” She described herself as “floating” near
the ceiling. She also reported seeing her legs “becoming shorter.”
The
article received global press coverage and created quite a commotion.
The editors of Nature went so far as to declare triumphantly that as a
result of this one study—which involved only one patient—the part of the
brain that can induce OBEs had been located.
“It’s another blow
against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate
from the brain,” said psychologist Michael Shermer, director of the
Skeptics Society, which seeks to debunk all kinds of paranormal claims.
“In reality, all experience is derived from the brain.”
In
another article published in 2004, Blanke and co-workers described six
patients, of whom three had experienced an atypical and incomplete OBE.
Four patients reported an autoscopy—that is, they saw their own double
from the vantage point of their own body. In this paper, the researchers
describe an OBE as a temporary dysfunction of the junction of the
temporal and parietal cortex. But, as Pim van Lommel noted, the abnormal
bodily experiences described by Blanke and colleagues entail a false
sense of reality. Typical OBEs, in contrast, implicate a verifiable
perception (from a position above or outside of the body) of events,
such as their own resuscitation or a traffic accident, and the
surroundings in which the events took place. Along the same lines,
psychiatrist Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia commented that
“We cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain
can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions.”
Materialistic
scientists have proposed a number of physiological explanations to
account for the various features of NDEs. British psychologist Susan
Blackmore has propounded the “dying brain” hypothesis: that a lack of
oxygen (or anoxia) during the dying process might induce abnormal firing
of neurons in brain areas responsible for vision, and that such an
abnormal firing would lead to the illusion of seeing a bright light at
the end of a dark tunnel.
Would it? Van Lommel and colleagues
objected that if anoxia plays a central role in the production of NDEs,
most cardiac arrest patients would report an NDE. Studies show that this
is clearly not the case. Another problem with this view is that reports
of a tunnel are absent from several accounts of NDErs. As pointed out
by renowned NDE researcher Sam Parnia, some individuals have reported an
NDE when they had not been terminally ill and so would have had normal
levels of oxygen in their brains.
Parnia raises another problem:
When oxygen levels decrease markedly, patients whose lungs or hearts do
not work properly experience an “acute confusional state,” during which
they are highly confused and agitated and have little or no memory
recall. In stark contrast, during NDEs people experience lucid
consciousness, well-structured thought processes, and clear reasoning.
They also have an excellent memory of the NDE, which usually stays with
them for several decades. In other respects, Parnia argues that if this
hypothesis is correct, then the illusion of seeing a light and tunnel
would progressively develop as the patient’s blood oxygen level drops.
Medical observations, however, indicate that patients with low oxygen
levels do not report seeing a light, a tunnel, or any of the common
features of an NDE we discussed earlier.
During the 1990s, more
research indicated that the anoxia theory of NDEs was on the wrong
track. James Whinnery, a chemistry professor with West Texas A&M,
was involved with studies simulating the extreme conditions that can
occur during aerial combat maneuvers. In these studies, fighter pilots
were subjected to extreme gravitational forces in a giant centrifuge.
Such rapid acceleration decreases blood flow and, consequently, delivery
of oxygen to the brain. In so doing, it induces brief periods of
unconsciousness that Whinnery calls “dreamlets.” Whinnery hypothesized
that although some of the core features of NDEs are found during
dreamlets, the main characteristics of dreamlets are impaired memory for
events just prior to the onset of unconsciousness, confusion, and
disorientation upon awakening. These symptoms are not typically
associated with NDEs. In addition, life transformations are never
reported following dreamlets.
So, if the “dying brain” is not
responsible for NDEs, could they simply be hallucinations? In my
opinion, the answer is no. Let’s look at the example of hallucinations
that can result from ingesting ketamine, a veterinary drug that is
sometimes used recreationally, and often at great cost to the user.
At
small doses, the anesthetic agent ketamine can induce hallucinations
and feelings of being out of the body. Ketamine is thought to act
primarily by inhibiting N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors, which
normally open in response to binding of glutamate, the most abundant
excitatory chemical messenger in the human brain. Psychiatrist Karl
Jensen has speculated that the blockade of NMDA receptors may induce an
NDE. But ketamine experiences are often frightening, producing weird
images; and most ketamine users realize that the experiences produced by
this drug are illusory. In contrast, NDErs are strongly convinced of
the reality of what they experienced. Furthermore, many of the central
features of NDEs are not reported with ketamine. That being said, we
cannot rule out that the blockade of NMDA receptors may be involved in
some NDEs.
Neuroscientist Michael Persinger has claimed that he
and his colleagues have produced all the major features of the NDE by
using weak transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the temporal
lobes. Persinger’s work is based on the premise that abnormal activity
in the temporal lobe may trigger an NDE. A review of the literature on
epilepsy, however, indicates that the classical features of NDEs are not
associated with epileptic seizures located in the temporal lobes.
Moreover, as Bruce Greyson and his collaborators have correctly
emphasized, the experiences reported by participants in Persinger’s TMS
studies bear little resemblance with the typical features of NDEs.
The
scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that
heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body
at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent
(such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that
blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with
an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep
psychological and spiritual changes.
These findings strongly
challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and
consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a
view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts
are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information
about objects or events remote from their bodies.
NDE studies
also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may
continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not
accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is
utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the
material world is the only reality.
~~~
Excerpted with permission
from “The Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the
Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives.” Courtesy
of HarperOne.
Mario Beauregard is associate research professor
at the Departments of Psychology and Radiology and the Neuroscience
Research Center at the University of Montreal. He is the coauthor of
"The Spiritual Brain" and more than one hundred publications in
neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry.
More Mario Beauregard.
