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WillowOne's Positions

Near-Death Experiences

My Positions

  1. Near-death experiences are real experiences. They are not evidence of an afterlife.
  2. They are what a brain under extreme stress produces, and every reported feature has been reproduced in people who were in no danger of dying.
  3. A person who reports a near-death experience did not die. The word "near" is doing all the work.

Notes

  1. The features and their variation. The tunnel, the light, the feeling of peace, the life review, the sense of leaving the body, the meeting with dead relatives or a religious figure. These are common but not universal, and they vary by culture in a way that a real place would not: Indian reports feature the messengers of Yamraj and clerical errors in the book of the dead; Christian reports feature Jesus; children's reports feature living teachers and pets. People see the afterlife they were told to expect, which is what one would predict if the brain were generating it.
  2. Mechanisms. Cerebral hypoxia produces tunnel vision as the periphery of the retina fails first. Fighter pilots subjected to high G-forces in centrifuge training lose consciousness and report tunnels, bright lights, euphoria, out-of-body sensations and vivid dreamlets, with no religious context at all. Direct electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus produces out-of-body experiences on demand. Ketamine and DMT produce the full sequence. People prone to intrusion of REM sleep into waking are markedly more likely to report near-death experiences. Rats in cardiac arrest show a surge of organised gamma activity in the seconds after the heart stops, which is the opposite of the "flat brain" the afterlife interpretation requires.
  3. The veridical perception claims. The strongest form of the argument is that patients saw things, while clinically dead, that they could not otherwise have known. The AWARE study (2014) tested this directly: shelves bearing images visible only from the ceiling were placed in resuscitation rooms across fifteen hospitals. Of 2,060 cardiac arrests, 140 survivors were interviewed, nine reported a near-death experience, two reported awareness, and none identified a shelf image. The anecdotal cases (a trainer in a hospital stairwell, a patient under "standstill" surgery who recalled the sound of a saw) dissolve on inspection into ordinary hearing under light anaesthesia, information available beforehand, and recollection shaped afterwards.
  4. The publishing industry. The best-selling accounts do not survive scrutiny. The subject of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven (2010) wrote in 2015 that he had made it up: "I did not die. I did not go to Heaven." The neurosurgeon author of Proof of Heaven (2012) claimed his cortex had been "shut down" for a week; his own medical records, examined by a journalist in 2013, showed he had been placed in a medically induced coma and that his doctors did not share his account.
  5. Even granting the experience, the inference fails. "I had an experience I cannot explain, therefore I visited another realm" is the Appeal to Ignorance. The brain-based explanation accounts for the same data with one fewer universe (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony). And a brain that has not died cannot tell us what happens to one that has.

Sources

  • Parnia, S. et al., "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study", Resuscitation 85 (2014)
  • Blanke, O. et al., "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions", Nature 419 (2002)
  • Whinnery, J. E., "Psychophysiologic correlates of unconsciousness and near-death experiences", Journal of Near-Death Studies 15 (1997)
  • Nelson, K. R. et al., "Does the arousal system contribute to near death experience?", Neurology 66 (2006)
  • Borjigin, J. et al., "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain", PNAS 110 (2013)
  • Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (1993)
  • Dittrich, L., "The Prophet", Esquire (July 2013)
  • Malarkey, A., open letter to Christian publishers, January 2015

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