3 March 2015
The seven ways
to have a near-death experience
Rachel Nuwer
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(Getty Images)
Seeing a light
and a tunnel may be the popular perception of death, but as Rachel Nuwer
discovers, reports are emerging of many other strange
Drinking a few cups of coffee a day may help people avoid clogged
arteries - a known risk factor for heart disease
In 2011, Mr A, a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to
Southampton General Hospital after collapsing at work. Medical personnel were
in the middle of inserting a catheter into his groin when he went into cardiac
arrest. With oxygen cut off, his brain immediately flat-lined. Mr A died.
"The mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been
assumed" — Sam Parnia, researcher
Despite this, he remembers what happened next. The staff grabbed an
automated external defibrillator (AED), a shock-delivery machine used to try to
reactivate the heart. Mr A heard a mechanical voice twice say, “Shock the
patient.” In between those orders, he looked up to see a strange woman
beckoning to him from the back corner of the room, near the ceiling. He
joined her, leaving his inert body behind. “I felt that she knew me, I felt
that I could trust her, and I felt she was there for a reason [but] I didn’t
know what that was,” Mr A later recalled. “The next second, I was up there, looking
down at me, the nurse and another man who had a bald head.”
Hospital records later verified the AED’s two verbal commands. Mr A’s
descriptions of the people in the room – people he had not seen
before he lost consciousness – and their actions were also accurate. He was
describing things that happened during a three-minute window of time that,
according to what we know about biology, he should not have had any awareness
of.
Mr A’s story – described in a paper in the journal Resuscitation – is one of a number of reports that challenge
accepted wisdom on near-death experiences. Until now, researchers assumed that
when the heart ceases to beat and stops sending vital blood to a person’s
brain, all awareness immediately ends. At this point, the person is technically
dead – although as we learn more about the science of death, we are beginning
to understand that, in some cases, the condition can be reversible. For years,
those who have come back from that inscrutable place have often reported memories
of the event. Doctors mostly dismissed such anecdotal evidence as
hallucinations, and researchers have been reluctant to delve into the study of
near-death experiences, predominantly because it was viewed as something
outside of the reach of scientific exploration.
But Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and director of resuscitation
research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, along with
colleagues from 17 institutions in the US and UK, wanted to do away with
assumptions about what people did or did not experience on their deathbeds. It
is possible, they believe, to collect scientific data about those would-be
final moments. So for four years, they analysed more than 2,000 cardiac arrest
events – moments when a patient’s heart stops and they are officially dead.
Of those patients, doctors were able to bring 16% back from the dead,
and Parnia and his colleagues were able to interview 101 of them, or about a
third. “The goal was to try to understand, first of all, what is the mental and
cognitive experience of death?” Parnia says. “And then, if we got people who
claimed auditory and visual awareness at the time of death, to see if we are
able to determine if they really were aware.”
Seven flavours
of death
Mr A, it turned out, was not the only patient who had some memory of his
death. Nearly 50% of the study participants could recall something, but unlike
Mr A and just one other woman whose out-of-body account could not be verified
externally, the other patients’ experiences did not seem to be tied to actual
events that took place during their death.
Instead, they reported dream-like or hallucinatory scenarios that Parnia
and his co-authors categorised into seven major themes. “Most of these were not
consistent to what’s called ‘near-death’ experiences,” Parnia says. “It seems
like the mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been assumed in
the past.”
Those seven themes were:
Fear
Seeing animals or plants
Bright light
Violence and persecution
Deja-vu
Seeing family
Recalling events post-cardiac arrest
These mental experiences ranged from terrifying to blissful. There were
those who reported feeling afraid or suffering persecution, for example. “I had
to get through a ceremony … and the ceremony was to get burned,” one patient
recalled. “There were four men with me, and whichever lied would die … I saw
men in coffins being buried upright.” Another remembered being “dragged through
deep water”, and still another was “told I was going to die and the quickest
way was to say the last short word I could remember”.
Others, however, experienced the opposite sensation, with 22% reporting
“a feeling of peace or pleasantness”. Some saw living things: “All plants, no
flowers” or “lions and tigers”; while others basked in the glow of “a brilliant
light” or were reunited with family. Some, meanwhile, reported a strong sense
of deja-vu: “I felt like I knew what people were going to do before they did
it”. Heightened senses, a distorted perception of the passage of time and a
feeling of disconnection from the body were also common sensations that
survivors reported.
While it is “definitely clear that people do have experience at the time
that they’re dead”, Parnia says, how individuals actually choose to interpret
those experiences depends entirely on their background and pre-existing
beliefs. Someone from India might return from the dead and say they saw
Krishna, whereas someone from the Midwest of the US could experience the same
thing but claim to have seen God. “If the father of a child from the Midwest
says, ‘When you die, you’ll see Jesus and he’ll be full of love and
compassion,’ then of course he’ll see that,” Parnia says. “He’ll come back and
say, ‘Oh dad, you’re right, I definitely saw Jesus!’ But would any of us
actually recognise Jesus or God? You don’t know what God is. I don’t know what
God is. Besides a man with a white beard, which is just a picture.
“All of these things – what’s the soul, what is heaven and hell – I have
no idea what they mean, and there’s probably thousands and thousands of
interpretations based on where you’re born and what your background is,” he
continues. “It’s important to move this out of the realm of religious teaching
and into objectivity.”
Common cases
So far, the team has uncovered no predictor for who is most likely to
remember something from their death, and explanations are lacking for why some
people experience terrifying scenarios while others report euphoric ones.
Parnia also points out that it’s very likely that more people have near-death
experiences than the study numbers reflect. For many people, memories are
almost certainly wiped away by the massive brain swelling that occurs following
cardiac arrest, or by strong sedatives administered at the hospital. Even if
people do not explicitly recall their experience of death, however, it could
affect them on a subconscious level. Parnia hypothesises that this might help
explain the wildly different reactions cardiac arrest patients often have following
their recovery: some become unafraid of death and adopt a more altruistic
approach to life, whereas others develop PTSD.
Parnia and his colleagues are already planning follow-up studies to try
to address some of these questions. They also hope their work will help broaden
the traditionally diametric conversation about death, breaking it free from
the confines of either a religious or sceptical stance. Instead, they think,
death should be treated as a scientific subject just like any other. “Anyone
with a relatively objective mind will agree that this is something that should
be investigated further,” Parnia says. “We have the means and the technology.
Now it’s time to do it.”
Massimo 
