“Fasten your seat belts ... it’s going to be a bumpy night.” – Bette Davis
IN HIS BOOK Life After Life, Dr. Raymond Moody tells of a dying girl who “went out of her body and into another room in the hospital where she overheard her older sister crying and saying, ‘Oh, Kathy, please don’t die, please don’t die.’ The older sister was quite baffled when, later, Kathy told her exactly what room she was in and what she had been saying.”
In his book After, Dr. Bruce Grayson quotes a 22-year-old named Colleen who hemorrhaged after giving birth. Colleen lost consciousness but recalls floating “up somewhere near the ceiling. I was watching the nurses and doctors rushing madly around the room…. My gynecologist was insisting that it was useless to try anything, because it was evident that I was in fact dead…. I most definitely owe my life to the anesthetist, who fought to bring me back to life. I can still see him screaming, ‘She’s just a kid. We’ve got to do something!’ And he urged the nurses to do some transfusions…. I remember being shocked at the swear words being used by the two doctors…. A few days later, I was in an intensive care unit, and a doctor came in the room. I recognized him immediately, and I thanked him for saving my life. It was the anesthetist. I recounted everything to him: how I had been present in the operating room and witnessed everything out of my body.”
Like these two examples, there are many documented, corroborated stories of near-dead patients who can recall details like specialized tools used during open heart surgery, stains on a doctor’s necktie, the color of a nurse’s shoelaces, and conversations that happened when they were unconscious or pronounced clinically dead. Is this proof? Well, maybe they obtained the information another way, hearing about it later from another source. Maybe trickery is involved, maybe lucky guessing, maybe coincidence.
However, there does seem to be something going on with our consciousness, not necessarily with our brain but with our consciousness, in these near-death experiences. Greyson’s research determined that NDEs were remembered as more real – with more detail, more clarity, more context, more intense feelings – than actual events.
As published in the September 2023 issue of Resuscitation, cardiac arrest survivors lucidly described the sensation of separation from their bodies while watching their own CPR and medical procedures – but without pain. The researchers observed brain patterns in scans linked to thought and memory up to an hour into CPR: “This is the first large study to show that these recollections and brain wave changes may be signs of universal, shared elements of so-called near-death experiences.”
I’ve been quoting Greyson’s writings throughout these columns about NDE but, in her 2005 book Spook, author Mary Roach actually went to the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia to visit with Greyson. (Mary is a funny, insightful science writer and a top-drawer researcher. If you haven’t read any of her investigations like Bonk, Fuzz, Grunt, Gulp, Packing for Mars or Stiff, read at least one of them right now. The books are page-turners, with a smile induced on every page.) Mary out-and-out asks Greyson: Is there life after death? Do we survive? “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we come up with evidence that we do survive,” he told her. “I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we come up with evidence that we don’t.”
Bottom Line: Near-death experiences are a relatively new area of scientific inquiry. (The term was invented only 50 years ago.) But new technologies, new ideas for measuring NDEs, and new research studies will eventually shed light on their existence. Or maybe not.
In the archives: Part I (the possibility of NDEs), Part II (Similar Sensations) and Part III (Aftereffects)
For more information, the International Association of Near-Death Studies is a good place to start. Every few days, a strange, new NDE appears on its website.
Bonus column on Thursday: Pascal’s Gambit
Next Sunday: The Tibetan Book of the Dead