A Fifth Challenge

Yesterday I posted Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's four challenges to skeptics of Near-Death Experiences. Today I want to post his fifth challenge. It involves the remarkable story of a woman named Pam Reynolds.

Here's Egnor's description of Pam Reynolds' experience (slightly edited for clarity):

Pam Reynolds was a woman who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain and needed a special kind of neurosurgery.

It was done in 1991 in Phoenix. What they had to do was stop her heart. They had to drain the blood out of her brain. They cooled her body temperature down to about 60° F, and they had to repair the aneurysm.

They had to open the artery at the base of her brain with no blood flowing. They monitored her brain to prove that she had no brain waves. She had no brain stem activity. And she had a near-death experience when she was proven to be basically clinically dead during the operation.

She popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling. She watched the operation. She was able to describe the surgeon's instruments rather precisely afterwards. She described the conversations the surgeons had. She described who entered and left the room. She described the music that was playing.

She went down a tunnel. She saw her dead relatives. It was a beautiful place, a beautiful scene. She realized she had to return to raise her three children. She came back down the tunnel. Went back into her body. And when she went back into her body, she said it felt like diving into ice water because her body temperature was 60 degrees.

A slightly more detailed account of Ms Reynolds' experience can be found here. Egnor continues, "[This] is a very well-documented near-death experience, and there have been hundreds of people in the medical literature who have had experiences similar to that."

So, people who deny the reality of near-death experiences have to explain how Pam Reynolds saw the things she saw when all the blood was drained out of her brain and her body chilled to 60° F during surgery.

P.S. In yesterday's post I noted that skeptic Michael Shermer claimed that there've been no instances of NDErs seeing numbers or symbols that would've been out of view of everyone in the room. I mentioned that that claim is not correct, but neglected to give any examples. I've since corrected the oversight on that post.