Evolution of love

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

Most near-death experiencers are convinced that during the NDE they were temporarily separated from their physical bodies, and therefore that they may also survive the more permanent separation at death. It comes as no surprise that there have been numerous attempts to explain NDEs in terms of conventional biochemical or neurobiological mechanisms, acting either alone or in conjunction with other putative mechanisms. The inability of any one conventional physiological or psychological hypothesis to account for all NDEs or even all features of NDEs has led many researchers to propose theories that combine psychological and physiological mechanisms ad lib.

The need, however, for increasingly complicated and composite explanations, together with the lack of an adequate empirical foundation for any of them, has led us to suggest that we should not rule out categorically that NDEs are essentially what many experiencers think they are — namely, evidence that they have temporarily separated from their body and, moreover, may survive the permanent separation that occurs at death. . . When each is examined alone and in isolation, the features [of NDEs] may seem potentially explainable by some psychological or physiological hypothesis, despite the paucity of supporting evidence. When several features occur together, however, and when multiple layers of explanation must be added on ad hoc to account for them, these explanations become increasingly strained. (IM, p. 391‒392)

A recent analysis of cases in the authors’ collection showed that 48% of the respondents reported seeing their physical bodies from a different visual perspective, and many of them reported witnessing events going on in the vicinity of their body, such as the attempts of medical personnel to resuscitate them.7 Another challenge to ordinary psychological or physiological theories of NDEs comes from cases in which experiencers report that, while out of the body, they became aware of events occurring at a distance or that in some other way would have been beyond the reach of their ordinary senses even if they had been fully and normally conscious. The greatest challenge, however, lies in accounting for one central feature that in the authors’ opinion makes NDEs uniquely important in any contemporary discussion of the mind-brain problem: the occurrence of vivid and complex mentation, sensation, and memory under conditions in which current neuroscientific models of the mind deem conscious experience of any significant sort impossible.

The stark incompatibility of NDEs with current models of mind-brain relations is particularly evident in connection with experiences that occur under two conditions — general anesthesia and cardiac arrest. In both of these situations much more is at issue than the mere incompatibility between the characteristics of the mentation that occurs and the physiological conditions under which it occurs.

7 Sabom (1982, pp. 87‒115) interviewed 32 patients who reported NDEs in which they seemed to be watching what was going on around their body. Most were cardiac patients who were undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at the time of their NDE. Sabom also interviewed 25 “seasoned cardiac patients” who had not had an NDE during their previous cardiac-related crises. He asked them to describe a cardiac resuscitation procedure as if they were watching from a third-person perspective. Among all these patients, 80% of the “control” patients made at least one major error in their descriptions, whereas none of the NDE patients made any.