Out of their bodies, or out of their minds?
Doctors who studied 344 heart attack survivors found more than one in 10 had experienced emotions, visions or lucid thoughts while they were ‘clinically dead’ – unconscious with no signs of pulse, breathing or brain activity. This two-year study in 10 Dutch hospitals is the largest study into the phenomenon. It found that 12 per cent of cardiac arrest survivors reported having various ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) before being resuscitated.
Some reported having ‘out-of-body’ experiences. This included one man who remembered, a week after his heart attack, that one nurse treating him removed his dentures while he was unconscious. He believed he had seen this while floating above his body and watching the doctors working on him.
The research, by a Dutch team, will be seized on by academics who support the theory that the mind can continue to work after the brain has stopped. It is being held up by some as proving that the mind – or soul, can survive death. This study also showed that patients felt better about death and more spiritual for as long as eight years after their NDE. Over the last few years various research teams from different universities and hospitals have been trying to make sense of NDEs.
Last year it was reported that doctors at the University of Southampton had spent a year studying patients who were resuscitated in the city's general hospital after suffering a heart attack. The people brought back to life were all, for varying lengths of time, clinically dead with no respiration, no pulse and fixed dilated pupils. EEG studies have confirmed that the brain's electrical activity, and hence brain function, ceases during this time. Out of 63 patients who survived their cardiac arrest, seven recalled emotions and visions while they were 'dead'.
In this study, the heart attack survivors were interviewed within a week of their cardiac arrest and asked if they remembered anything during their period of 'death'. Some recalled feelings of joy and peace, lost awareness of body, heightened senses, time speeded up, seeing a bright light, entering another world, encountering a mystical being or deceased relative and coming to a point of no return.
Not all NDEs are alike – and some are not positive experiences at all. Typically they involve feelings of deep peace, followed by sensations of floating up through a tunnel towards a bright light and into a beautiful kingdom. However, it has become clear that other NDEs involve terrifying accounts of being pulled downwards – towards a pit inhabited by demons. An article in The Telegraph called, ‘Patients near death see visions of hell’, focussed on the research of Tony Lawrence, lecturer in psychology at Coventry University who has probed the nature of negative NDEs. There was a startling account of a woman who fought for life after a miscarriage: ‘It was an awful feeling – like I was going down a big hole and I couldn’t get up. I was going into this big pit. I was going further and further down, and trying to claw my way back up and kept slipping.’
But what do the results of all these studies show? The cardiologist who led the Dutch research team, Dr Pim van Lommel says it, ‘pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain.’
Dr Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at London University, told The Sunday Telegraph, ‘If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about the continuation of consciousness after death. It also raises questions about a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose rather than a random universe.’ For him, the evidence points to the existence of human consciousness without a body – in other words, a soul.
The question is: Are these people out of their bodies, or out of their minds? Perhaps the drugs given to the patients can explain their experiences. However, researchers at the Southampton hospital were able to rule out claims that unusual combinations of medications were to blame, because the resuscitation procedure was the same in every case. Other critics have suggested that these experiences were the result of a collapse of brain functions caused by a lack of oxygen. Yet an examination of the medical records of the Southampton cases reveals that none of those who had these experiences had low levels of oxygen. The Lancet report also mentions that epilepsy and electrical stimulation of the brain may possibly be the cause.
Dr Fenwick as says, ‘In a coronary, the brain goes down within 16 seconds and it then stays offline until you recover slowly. Now, either these accounts arise because brain and consciousness become split or because they are a retrospective construction of the experience of unconsciousness. I would probably go for a splitting.’
Dr Parnia, a clinical research fellow and registrar at Southampton Hospital said, ‘I started off as a sceptic but, having weighed up all the evidence, I now think that there is something going on. Essentially, it comes back to the question of whether the mind or consciousness is produced from the brain. If we can prove that the mind is produced by the brain, I don’t think there is anything after we die because essentially we are conscious beings.’ ‘If, on the contrary, the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind, like a television will act as an intermediary to manifest waves in the air into a picture or sound, we can show that the mind is still there after the brain is dead. And that is what I think these near-death experiences indicate.’
However, Dr Sue Blackmore, a psychiatrist who has made a special study of these phenomena has said that although this research is very good work, ‘It proves absolutely nothing about the soul. All claims about this being evidence for consciousness existing without a brain are unfounded, baseless rubbish.’
The problem with near-death experiences is that they are exactly that - near-death experiences and not death experiences. The difficulty is in assessing when the brain, an organ we hardly understand, actually dies. Does the cessation of electrical activity, of necessity mean that the person is dead, or are they actually in the process of dying? Body tissues are sensitive, and real death very quickly brings irreparable damage. The fact that these patients were resuscitated means that that damage had not occurred and therefore begs the question as to whether they actually did die. All that may have happened is that one of our measurements of life could no longer be detected.
As to the question of the emotions and visions, which the patients experienced, the difficulty is in understanding what happens to the brain when it is nearly dead. When some cells die, others become damaged and brain chemicals are no longer controlled, what sort of hallucinations are possible?
The fact that many people who testify to having NDEs have similar experiences needs to be taken seriously, but this might simply be a common psychological phenomenon, which occurs as the mental software begins to crash.
The essential point is that, even if we give credit where the evidence is at best dubious, such experiences can provide no reliable information about an after-life. An after-life is by definition in another dimension, and we can have no confidence that the tools and methodology of our science applies - the laws of that universe might be totally different from ours. When trying to explore that other dimension, which many call the spiritual dimension, we have to use a totally different approach.
The Bible's claim is that it is a source-book, provided by God to reveal certain aspects of that different dimension to us. God uses it as a dimension-crossing-communication-device to show us spiritual realities.
It is interesting to note that the Bible records a story, told by Jesus, which touches on the whole area of people bringing back revelation from the grave. The story goes like this:
There was an evil rich man and a good poor man who both died. The rich man was in torment an cried out to Abraham for the poor man to rise from the dead and warn his five brothers, ‘so that they will not come to this place of torment.’
‘Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.”
“No father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”’ Abraham’s response is shocking: ‘”If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”’
In telling this story Jesus was saying that, if people don’t accept Moses and the Prophets (that is, the Scriptures), they will certainly not be convinced by someone coming back from the dead. There was a bitter irony in that statement, for Jesus knew that he would soon die, and then on the first Easter morning, rise from the dead himself.
And the ironic point is this: most people didn’t – and don’t - believe him. Near-Death-Experiences are certainly interesting, but probably do not prove much about an after-life. But even if they did, I doubt if it would make any difference to most people.