More on NDEs

One of the more fascinating developments in neuroscience and philosophy of mind over the last decade or so is the increasing credibility researchers are imputing to what they call Near Death Experiences (NDEs).

What makes these experiences so fascinating is the credence they give to the belief that human beings are more than just their physical, material body and that there's something else about us, something which is conscious and can have subjective experience, that survives the death of the body.

One explanation of these events, which are sometimes experienced after clinical death, is that they're really just hallucinations, but a recent study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences discounts this possibility.

The article is not free, but according to a summary at a site called Brain Tomorrow the main finding is that these events don’t have much in common with the experiences someone has if they’re hallucinating or using a psychedelic drug.

The study found that people who recount an NDE typically report the occurrence of five different events:

• A separation from their body with a heightened, vast sense of consciousness and recognition that they’re dying
• They “travel” to a different location
• A meaningful and purposeful review of their life, involving a critical analysis of all their past actions — basically, their life flashes before their eyes
• Going to a place that feels like “home”
• Returning back to life

Hallucinatory phenomena aren't so consistent over diverse individuals nor do they usually trigger a positive and long-term psychological transformation in the person, but hallucinations do.

One aspect of the study that might bear on whether these experiences are truly out-of-body or whether they're explicable in terms of a still functioning but flat-lined brain is that, according to one of the researchers, “...brain cells do not become irreversibly damaged within minutes of oxygen deprivation when the heart stops. Instead, they ‘die’ over hours of time.”

In any case, as NDEs become more widely studied and as medical technology allows the resuscitation of more people whose bodies die, it will be interesting to see whether the evidence continues to lead away from a materialist explanation of the human person or whether it will lend increasing support to the view that we have a mind or soul and that our existence continues beyond our physical death.

For more on this topic see here.