What is your near-death experience? According to a Gallup poll, around 3 percent of the US population say that they have gone through a near-death experience.
Near-death experiences, or NDEs, have gotten a lot of publicity recently in both media and in the scientific field. Books like Heaven Is For Real, Proof of Heaven, and To Heaven and Back have all been very popular in recent years. These novels often vary in the details of the experiences, but the overall tenor of the experiences is remarkably similar.
For example, a striking majority of these stories often involve the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s body. Many also involve entering an otherworldly realm. Others experience a reunion with long-lost family members. However, one thing that all these NDE’s shared was that fact that their experience did not feel like a dream or hallucination,
Near-death experiences are often thought of as a phenomenon, but modern science has been revealing scientific explanations behind the common features of the recorded near-death experiences. These include the sensation of being dead, a feeling that the soul left the body, a voyage through a bright tunnel, and a departure to another reality.
There have been several attempts to explain the different causes of NDEs. Some have asserted that they are caused by oxygen shortages, imperfect anesthesia, or a traumatic response. However, the main reason why researchers have dismissed these reasons is that the phenomenon is too widespread and consistent for the proposed medical conditions.
Recently, a series of studies have been revealed that propose potential explanations for such a mystical experience. "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained," says neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Mobbs and Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh.
For example, Cotard syndrome, also known as “walking corpse syndrome, is a remarkably similar disease that allows patients to hold the false belief that they are deceased. Although the mechanism behind the syndrome itself is still unclear, some believe that it is caused by the patients trying to understand what is going on. The disorder commonly follows a traumatic experience and has often been linked with the parietal cortex and prefrontal cortex regions of the brain. The parietal cortex plays a function of attention in the brain and the prefrontal cortex plays the role of creating delusions when the host is under conditions such as schizophrenia. Both of these combine to potentially cause the Cotard syndrome, giving the delusional belief of post-death experiences.
What about the serene experiences that NDEers have reported to have? As mentioned previously, many NDEers have said that they have been able to meet the deceased in their experiences. One possible explanation could be Parkinson’s disease. Patients with Parkinson’s disease have most commonly reported visions of ghosts and monsters while in an unconscious state. The explanation behind this could be the fact that Parkinson’s affects the functioning of dopamine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter that evokes hallucinations. When the brain is going through a serene experience such as an NDE, the brain releases dopamine and other stress hormones, which could possibly explain the visions that the NDEers have had.
Recent studies have even discovered that experiences very similar to NDEs could be triggered artificially through drugs. Drugs such as anesthetic ketamine has been reported to be able to mirror the euphoria experiences, including experiences of leaving the body and hallucinations. Ketamine works by affecting the opioid system of the brain, which sets off trauma in the brain.
What about the infamous hallucination of flying through a tunnel of bright light? Although many explanations remain unconfirmed, the tunnel vision may be caused by a sudden loss of blood and oxygen in the eye. This is highly likely to occur because of the extreme fear and loss of oxygen experienced by the patients, which both are common to dying.
Although there have been a couple of proposed explanations behind these near-death experiences, it still remains a very mystical phenomenon. The biggest obstacle that we face in understanding these experiences is doing the actual research on the near-death experiences and being able to do feasible analysis on them. However, when we are able to understand the process of dying, we humans might finally be able to come to terms with the inescapable conclusion to our lives.
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