Author discusses the theories of Clinical Death, Afterlife, and Near-Death Experience
By Nazarul Islam | USA
We have come across amazing stories of people who passed away in hospitals. After experiencing clinical death, their ‘souls’ had freed themselves from their mortal remains, journeying through unknown realms bordering the afterlife. Most of them returned back to their bodies because some unseen force overcame consciousness, suggesting them to do it. Their time to die had not arrived. Therefore, consciousness and life had been restored back into their bodies.
The medical fraternity recognizes this phenomena as the near-death experience (NDE). This is a conscious, semi-conscious, or recollected experience reported by individuals who have approached or temporarily entered the process of dying, such as during a cardiac arrest followed by resuscitation.
While each NDE is unique, several common elements are frequently reported. Common features reported during an NDE include feelings of peace and well-being. Individuals have described experiencing an overwhelming sense of peace, love, and comfort, sometimes described as bliss or euphoria.
What are ‘Out-of-body’ experiences (OBE)? In medical terms, it involves the sensation of detaching from the physical body and observing surroundings from an outside perspective.
In some cases, individuals reported seeing and hearing events around them while clinically unconscious, and these accounts were later verified.
Many NDEs involve a sensation of being drawn into a dark environment or moving through a tunnel, often with a light at the end. What is the bright light in the realm of peace and calm, that is reportedly encountered? This light is often described as brilliant, loving, and is deemed to be a source of peace.
Some individuals have also reported encountering deceased relatives, friends, or other entities perceived as religious figures or spiritual guides. A rapid, vivid recollection of past life events, sometimes experienced from a third-person perspective and including an awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others.
In their journey of peace and tranquility, the concept of time and motion remain frozen. The feeling of time had remained distorted and many individuals perceived themselves in a timeless state or an environment that feels beyond the earthly realm.
How are we mortals who are waiting to depart from earthly abode, impacted by the stories shared by time travelers?
While many people find spiritual meaning in NDEs, scientific explanations are also being explored. Some theories suggest NDEs might be caused by changes in brain function during near-death states of existence such as a surge in electrical activity or the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain.
However, these theories do not fully explain the phenomenon. The interpretation of NDEs often reflects a person’s cultural, philosophical, and religious background.
We need to examine the potential for negative experiences. Although generally positive, NDEs can sometimes be frightening or distressing.
What about the transformative effects? NDEs frequently lead to lasting changes in a person’s outlook on life, including reduced fear of death increased sense of purpose, greater compassion, and altered value.
Do these experiences lead us to the age old belief in the existence of afterlife? From a scientific perspective, NDEs do not definitively prove the existence of an afterlife or the continuation of consciousness after death. However, these experiences have challenged current understandings of the mind-brain relationship.
Today, the new study of near-death experiences continues to be a field of active research and debate, offering valuable insights into the complexities of human consciousness as well as the experience of dying.
End of life caregivers have reflected that as some people come close to death, they go through a profound experience that may include a sense of leaving the body and entering some other realm or dimension, transcending the ordinary confines of time and space.
Although these events had been identified as a discrete syndrome as early as 1892, it was not until 1975 that Moody introduced the term near-death experiences (NDEs) for these phenomena.
Dr. Raymond Moody is a prominent figure in the study of end-of-life experiences, particularly near-death experiences (NDEs) and shared-death experiences (SDEs). He is widely recognized as the leading authority on NDEs, having coined the term in his groundbreaking 1975 book, Life After Life. Dr. Moody’s work has significantly shaped our understanding of death, dying, and grief.
Further, Moody described the characteristic features commonly reported by survivors, including ineffability, overwhelming feelings of peace, seeing a tunnel, a sensation of being out of the body, meeting nonphysical beings including a “Being of Light,” reviewing one’s own life, a border or point of no return, and coming back to life with marked changes in attitudes and with knowledge not acquired through normal perception.
A recent review of the accumulated findings from thirty years of research since Moody’s seminal work, has essentially confirmed his original description.
An analysis of the incidence of NDEs among critically ill patients as documented in prospective studies in four countries has yielded an average estimate of 17 percent.
With advancements in medical resuscitation techniques, the frequency of NDEs has increased, and thus about 9 million people in the United States alone have reported this kind of experience.
In the last 30 years, the near-death phenomenon has been investigated extensively. Near-death experiences are important to physicians for three reasons:
First, NDE precipitate pervasive and durable changes in beliefs, attitudes, and values.
Second, they may be confused with psychopathological states, yet have profoundly different sequelae requiring different therapeutic approaches.
Third, clarification of their mechanisms may enhance our understanding of consciousness and its relation to brain function.
One of the problems with research into NDEs is that, with a few notable exceptions, almost all NDE research has been retrospective, raising the question of the reliability of the experiencer’s memories.
Autobiographical memories are subject to distortion over years, and memories of unusual or traumatic events may be particularly unreliable as a result of emotional influences. However, memories of NDEs are experienced as “more real” than memories of other events, and memories of NDEs have been shown to be unchanged over a period of 20 years.
Studies of near-death experiencers have shown them collectively to be psychologically healthy individuals who do not differ from comparison groups in age, gender, race, religion, religiosity, mental health, intelligence, neuroticism, extroversion, trait and state anxiety.
A plausible hypothesis postulates that near-death experiences are products of the imagination, constructed from one’s personal and cultural expectations, to protect oneself from facing the threat of death. Comparisons of NDE accounts from different cultures suggest that prior beliefs have some influence on the kind of experience a person will report following a close brush with death.
However, individuals often report experiences that conflict with their specific religious and personal expectations of death; people who had no prior knowledge about NDEs describe the same kinds of experiences as do people who are quite familiar with the phenomenon, and the knowledge individuals had about NDEs previously does not seem to influence the details of their own experiences; experiences that were reported before 1975.
Moody’s first book coined the term NDE and made it a well-known phenomenon, do not differ from those that were reported since that date; and young children, who are less likely to have developed expectations about death, report NDEs with features similar to those of adults.
Cross-cultural differences in NDE accounts suggest that it is not the core experience that differs but the ways in which people interpret what they have experienced in terms of the images, concepts, and symbols available to them.
Some authors have suggested that NDEs, with their dark tunnel, bright light, and going to another realm, could represent memories of one’s birth.
However, newborns lack the visual acuity, spatial stability of their visual images, mental alertness, and cortical coding capacity to register memories of the birth experience, and reports of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and passing through a tunnel to another realm are equally common among persons born by Caesarean section and those born by normal vaginal delivery.
A common assumption has been that anoxia or hypoxia, as a common final pathway to brain death, must be implicated in NDEs. However, NDEs occur without anoxia or hypoxia, as in non-life-threatening illnesses and near-accidents, and hypoxia or anoxia generally produces idiosyncratic, frightening hallucinations, and leads to agitation and belligerence, quite unlike the peaceful NDE with consistent, universal features.
Furthermore, studies of people near death have shown that those who have NDEs have oxygen levels the same as, or higher than, those who do not have NDEs. Likewise, some authors have suggested that hypercarbia may contribute to NDEs; but several studies have reported carbon dioxide levels to be normal or below normal during NDEs.
NDEs have been associated with intrusion into waking consciousness of cognition typical of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. However, the REM intrusion hypothesis is contradicted by the common occurrence of NDEs under conditions that inhibit REM, such as general anesthesia, and by the finding of reduced REM in near-death experiencers.
The experiences of the newly discovered realm have been dismissed as elaborate hallucinations produced either by medications given to dying patients or by metabolic disturbances or brain malfunctions as a person approaches death.
However, many NDEs are recounted by individuals who had no metabolic or organic malfunctions that might have caused hallucinations, and patients who receive medications in fact report fewer NDEs than do patients who receive no medication.
Furthermore, organic brain malfunctions generally produce clouded thinking, irritability, fear, belligerence, and idiosyncratic visions, quite unlike the exceptionally clear thinking, peacefulness, calmness, and predictable content that typify the NDE.
Visions in patients with delirium are generally of living persons, whereas those of patients with a clear sensorium as they approached death are almost invariably of deceased persons. Patients who were febrile or anoxic when near death report fewer NDEs and less elaborate experiences than do patients who remain drug-free and are neither febrile nor anoxic.
That is, drug- or metabolically-induced delirium, rather than causing NDEs, in fact inhibits them from occurring or being recalled.
NDEs have been speculatively attributed to a number of neurotransmitters in the brain, most frequently endorphins or other endogenous opioids, a putative ketamine-like endogenous neuroprotective agent acting on N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, serotonin, adrenaline, vasopressin, and glutamate.
These speculations are based on hypothetical endogenous chemicals or effects that have not been shown to exist, and are not supported by any empirical data.
NDEs have also been speculatively linked to a number of anatomic locations in the brain, including the frontal lobe attention area, the parietal lobe orientation area, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the amygdala, the hippocampus, Reissner’s fiber in the central canal of the spinal cord, and most often the right temporal lobe, based on purported similarity of NDEs to temporal lobe seizure phenomena.
However, NDE-like phenomena are almost never seen in temporal lobe seizures, and electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes typically elicits fragmented bits of music, isolated and repetitive scenes that seemed familiar, hearing voices, experiencing fear or other negative emotions, or seeing bizarre, dream-like imagery, in addition to a wide range of somatic sensations that are never reported in NDEs.
These putative neurological mechanisms, for which there is little if any empirical evidence, may suggest brain pathways through which NDEs are expressed or interpreted, but do not necessarily imply causal mechanisms.
Regardless of their cause, NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter the individual experiencer’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. The literature on the aftereffects of NDEs has focused on the beneficial personal transformations that often follow.
A recent review of research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain, recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for, life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater appreciation for nature.
These after effects have been corroborated by interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by long-term longitudinal studies.
Although NDErs sometimes feel distress if the NDE conflicts with their previously held beliefs and attitudes, the emphasis in the popular media on the positive benefits of NDEs inhibits those who are having problems from seeking help.
Sometimes people who have had NDEs may doubt their sanity, yet they are often afraid of rejection or ridicule if they discuss this fear with friends or professionals. Sometimes NDErs do receive negative reactions from professionals when they describe their experiences, which discourages them even further from seeking help in understanding the experience.
Read: A time to mourn loneliness
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
