Experiences Significant : Science Taking a Serious Look at ‘Near-Death’
A man suffers a heart attack and for a few moments has no pulse. A team of paramedics works in hurried precision to revive him and succeeds. But the patient is never the same again.
For one thing, he no longer fears death. For another, he feels his life has been filled with empty striving. He thinks it may be time to make some changes.
He may not tell anyone, but he attributes his new outlook to something strange that happened right after he felt the vise of pain closing down on his chest during the heart attack.
As he fell to the floor, blackness closed in. He felt himself somehow lifted above his body, and he could see the emergency medical team come in and begin working. Then, he felt as if he were entering a dark tunnel at the end of which was a wonderful light. He felt great joy. But he also felt he was supposed to turn back. That he did, and he woke up in the hospital intensive care unit.
What the man underwent has come to be known as a near-death experience. The tunnel, the light, the out-of-body hovering are all classic examples of what many people in many cultures over many centuries have described in the aftermath of a disease, seizure or injury that brought them to the brink.
Psychological Research
The term was popularized about 10 years ago, but the whole idea engendered much skepticism in the medical community. Now, psychiatrists and psychologists are taking these experiences seriously--at least to the point of considering them worthy of research.
They do not agree about what the experiences mean. Some say the cause is biochemical, others say it is related to a higher state of consciousness or even constitutes evidence of life after death.
Still, the consensus, with a few notable exceptions, is that there is indeed something significant going on.
“Now there is good, solid, scientific methodology showing it is a pervasive experience that occurs in roughly half the people who experience cardiac arrest,” said Dr. Glenn Gabbard, a psychoanalyst at the Menninger Foundation. “Also, leading journals are publishing papers on the subject.”
One of the most recent of these appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The author, Dr. Bruce Greyson, a University of Connecticut psychiatrist, classified the experiences people have reported into four groups:
- Cognitive: thinking becomes faster, clearer. Patient may undergo life review.
- Affective: intense feelings of peace, joy; experience of brilliant light.
- Transcendental: other worldly perceptions, feelings of being in another realm; communication with other worldly beings or deceased relatives or friends.
- Paranormal: enhanced vision or hearing; apparent extrasensory perception; out-of-body experience; precognition.
“The hard evidence we have all points to the fact this is not fantasy,” Greyson said. “When it is possible to obtain people’s fantasies, they are different from what their experience is like. In some cases, the experience contradicts people’s fantasies.”
Poll’s Results
A Gallup Poll published in 1982 found as many as 8 million people have had a near-death experience at some level. As University of Connecticut psychologist Kenneth Ring put it, “They can’t all be making it up.”
Greyson, director of inpatient psychiatry at the University of Connecticut Medical Center, and others have also found that the experience often has profound impact on people’s lives.
“Probably the most profound change is that no matter what the experience is like and how they interpret it, people almost always say they are no longer afraid of dying,” Greyson said.
“Generally speaking, people become much less materialistically oriented, less concerned with personal power, much more concerned with what we call the spiritual side.
‘Not a Temporary Thing’
“We see people changing professions, dissolving relationships and forming new ones. It’s not a temporary thing,” he said.
There are several theories about what near-death experiences mean. One of the most controversial is espoused by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, author of “On Death and Dying,” who said she believes they are evidence the soul exists separately from the body after death.
Some of her colleagues scoff at this theory. Greyson, however, looks on Kubler-Ross as a pioneer who weathered attacks and cleared new territory for researchers.
Gabbard said the problem with many other explanations is that they can be disproved. For instance, some say the experiences are the result of cultural religious programming, yet children too young to have been subjected to such programming have also reported having them.
Some say the basis for near-death experiences is neurophysiological, caused by lack of oxygen or drugs. Gabbard said people who are undrugged and fully oxygenated have reported the experience.
Patient’s Invention?
As far as out-of-body experiences go, it is possible the patient -- even though unconscious--merely hears what is going on and invents the rest.
“My own feeling is that the near-death experience is a natural psychological defense against death,” Gabbard said. “It’s a reassurance that one is going to survive the trauma that is taking place to the body.”
“It’s probably fair to say most people who have done research do not feel there is any one explanation,” Ring said. “It really is a very complicated affair, and simplistic explanations simply don’t stand up.
“What I think these experiences represent is an awakening into a higher state of consciousness. This state is normally obscured to us during everyday life.”
One prominent skeptic is Dr. Nathan Schnaper, professor of psychiatry and the psychiatric branch of the Maryland Institute for Emergency Services, the university’s shock trauma unit.
The majority of people he talked to who remembered anything resembling a near-death experience saw it as unpleasant. Those who claimed to have “observed” what went on during rescue were wrong. Any recollection of pleasantness came a long time after the experience.
Denying Death
“It gets turned around. We don’t want to remember what’s unpleasant. A lot of people make it sound godlike and (filled with) light because they think, ‘Thank God I’m not dead.’ It’s a way of denying death by saying it’s pleasant.”
“When asleep, we dream,” he said. “We disguise the dreams when we wake up. We can do crazy things. To me, this is the explanation.”
Robert Sullivan, founder of the Thanatology Institute, an organization training health care professionals in death-related concerns, admitted that “there may be more negative experiences out there than we hear about.”
On the other hand, many positive experiences may be going untold.
“It’s amazing how many millions of people have had them and don’t realize it’s OK to have these experiences,” Sullivan said. “Many have tried to mention it to a spouse, physician or chaplain or somebody who should be supportive and open but received derogatory comments.”
“Nurses have said, quote, ‘You better shut up, or we’ll bring in a psychiatrist,’ ” he said. “I heard of a case like that in Boston.”
Combat Veterans’ Experiences
In interviews with combat veterans, Sullivan has found that even those who were in extreme danger of death or were seriously injured have had similar experiences.
He cited the case of two World War II flyers who had bailed out. One was being fired upon from the ground and felt he was going to be killed; another was in danger of being gunned by a German plane. They went through the classic experiences of traveling through a tunnel, entering a light area, feeling peace and joy.
“The near-death experience begins to unfold when there’s severe physical trauma or anticipation of severe physical trauma,” Sullivan said. “We’re stuck with this label of near-death, and it probably isn’t the correct label. It’s probably far broader than just near death in the physical sense.”
Some traditional scientists have objected to research in the field because it must rely on memory, the memories have so much emotional content and because memories can be distorted over time.
Difficult to Study
The experiences often occur when patients are not being closely monitored by medical equipment, so it may be impossible to verify whether they are near death. The circumstances of the whole experience, physical and mental, cannot be controlled, as in traditional laboratory studies. Studying brain chemistry during such an experience is difficult.
“The research has sometimes been looked down upon because we’re not dealing with fine measurements on brass instruments,” Sullivan said. “The same problems plagued psychology when it got going.”
Sullivan himself has encountered difficulties trying to get coherent accounts of the experience. Sometimes vocabulary does not exist to describe the colors and sounds.
“One of the problems is that individuals describe in a linear fashion, but when you question them you find everything was occurring simultaneously,” he said. “In other words, taking place outside of time. Neither you nor I can grasp that.”
Bush said the whole area may be considered to be at the “fringes” of science--or at the cutting edge. Either way, she said, “It’s altogether fascinating.”
Said Michael Mufson, a staff psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Harvard Medical School instructor: “I think that it’s clear we cannot always be aware of what the mind’s capable of.”
