Near Death Research Enlivens Debate

Near-death experiences have long captured the public's imagination - bright lights, a journey through a tunnel and meeting deceased relatives are just some of the incredible reports people have brought back from ‘the other side'.

The term near-death experience (NDE), refers to an out-of-body experience (OBE) people have when close to death, or clinically dead.

They are often triggered by a traumatic accident, illness or a major operation and involve a person being consciously detached from their body, sometimes floating and looking down on it.

NDEs are quite common, with ten percent of people in Britain reporting having one, however they are recorded across many cultures and countries.

The accounts people bring back once revived are amazing and difficult to understand.

Experiences include meeting beings of light, hearing beautiful music, feeling an overwhelming presence of love, being shrouded in white light and having ‘life reviews' where their life flashes before them.

In other experiences, people hover over their bodies observing what is happening - some have been able to tell doctors and nurses what they said and did during their operation, even though they were clinically dead at the time.

Although experiences can be varied they all tend to be ordered and follow common patterns - the journey through a tunnel being a famous example - and are described as very clear, vivid and real.

NDEs have sat uneasily alongside traditional scientific understanding as they occur too often to be dismissed, yet there is no provable explanation for them. However, now even science is acknowledging their lack of answers to pressing questions.

Recently, researchers and medical scientists from the US, UK and Canada joined forces in the worlds' largest study into NDEs. The University of Southampton, UK, under the direction of Dr Sam Parnia, has just launched a three year study into this intriguing phenomena. "If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off, it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a seperate entity," Dr Parnia says. 

Numerous hospitals and medical centres throughout the world, and as many as 1 500 cardiac arrest survivors, will take part in the study, using technology to study the brain during cardiac arrest and test the validity of claims of being able to see and hear while 'out-of-the-body'.

It has long baffled scientists how people with no heart or brain activity can nonetheless be "conscious" outside their bodies, and it challenges our ingrained ideas about consciousness and the brain.

Under traditional scientific understanding, a person's consciousness is tied to the brain, and cannot function outside of it, but NDEs seem to fly in the face of that assumption.

Even though no study has proven consciousness is located in the brain, and all experiments designed to prove this have failed or been inconclusive, NDEs are often linked to brain activity, such as with a US study, led by Professor Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky, Lexington. This study, published in Neurology, examined the link between NDEs and a sleep condition known as rapid eye movement intrusion or ‘REM intrusion'.

The US study aimed to find a biological link between REM sleep intrusion and NDEs by comparing the sleep patterns of 55 people who have had NDE's to 55 who have not.

It found the NDE group had much higher rate of REM intrusion - 60 percent compared with 24 percent in the control group.

The researchers suggest NDEs have a biological basis and are caused by brain activity that blurs the boundary between sleeping and waking, with the same brain activity causing REM sleep intrusion also inducing NDEs.

Yet however plausible this explanation might seem, it does not explain how people with no brain activity at all have had NDEs, nor the many recorded examples of people waking from NDEs and accurately describing something that happened whilst they were ‘out cold' or clinically dead.

In one famous example explained by cardiologist Michael Sabom, patient Pam Reynolds underwent complex surgery during which she had no heart beat, no breathing and no activity in the brain or brain stem.

Despite this, and to everyone's astonishment, she was able to accurately relate details of the operation when she woke from her NDE, describing the obscure tools and equipment used, which she observed while out of her body.

But due to peoples accurate descriptions of real events after an NDE, and that many NDEs occur when there is no brain activity whatsoever, some scientists have theorized consciousness must not be generated by the brain, but rather the brain is a receptor for the consciousness.

Research by Scientist Pim Van Lommel, who published a famous study on NDEs in The Lancet in 2001, suggested consciousness could function outside the brain.

He explained the brain is to consciousness what a computer is to the internet; just as the internet continues when you switch off a computer, so does consciousness continue without the brain.

Although most scientists agree brain activity is associated with consciousness, not everyone agrees these brain patterns constitute consciousness itself, but most scientists agree NDEs can give insights on how the brain and consciousness works.

Yet attempts to study NDEs have proven difficult, because it requires people to be dangerously close to death and these situations are difficult to replicate and control.

Without scientific evidence for the cause of NDEs, people tend to stick with their beliefs and ideas about "life after death" and the latest study has reignited this debate.

Although the US study falls short of proving whether NDEs are real or just a product of people's minds, it does show the physiological effects they might have on the brain - in cases when the brain is functioning.

What seems certain from the study is that out-of-body experiences are in some way linked to dreaming.

Dreams are another scientific grey area with opinions varying on what they are, but they are generally treated the same as NDEs - as a product of peoples imaginations.

Yet if NDEs might be real, and consciously existing outside of our bodies is linked to dreaming, might dreams be real too?

British author Mark H. Pritchard, who writes with the name Belzebuub, has been examining the relationship between dreams and out-of-body experiences for over ten years and says dreams mean much more than we realize.

He says every night when we sleep, our consciousness detaches from our body to dream, and sends signals back to the brain, which we register as memories when we wake up having returned to our bodies.

But what most of us do not realize is that while dreaming we are actually outside of our bodies - just the same as with a NDE - only that we experience it unconsciously, seeing only our unconscious thoughts.

But in a conscious out-of-body experience, such as in a NDE, a person is consciously awake, that is, knowing they are outside their body, and by attaining this lucidity they can explore the mysteries of consciousness, life and death unbound by physical laws.

According to Mr. Pritchard, what scientists call REM intrusions occur when people gain clarity while dreaming outside their bodies and "wake up in a dream" and begin to see what is really there, which can be startling if people do not understand what is happening because they are such vivid and real experiences.

"These kinds of experiences are called out-of-body experiences and they may happen while dreaming or while consciously leaving the body; sometimes spontaneously, sometimes induced, or sometimes through situations such as near-death experiences," Mr. Pritchard explains.

"Although out-of-body experiences are fairly common...they are all too often not understood - not by the person who has one, not by friends, family, doctors, scientists, etc., although they are a real and very natural part of life."

Mr. Pritchard insists we can have safe, consciously controlled out-of-body experiences and we do not have to be near death to explore the realms beyond our body.

"There are four main ways to have an out-of-body experience," he says.

"The first is to project, the second is to wake up in a dream, the third is to have a near-death experience and the fourth is with death."

It is by the first means, to ‘project' which he focuses on in his bestselling book A Course in Astral Travel and Dreams.

By ‘project' he means astral projection - a self-willed out-of-body experience - which involves falling asleep consciously, to be awake during the process of sleep as we detach from the body and leave it behind.

He says astral projection can "change your whole view of life" because with it we can "discover secret knowledge" most people miss out on.

"You can...learn hidden wisdom about death, the process of awakening, get premonitions of the future, receive guidance, discover the purpose of life, discover what happens with death and much more," he says.

"You will be able to fly, go through walls and objects, meet people, travel to distant places in the world and beyond - it is a profound experience."

Mr. Pritchard explains that we can learn amazing information about life and death with astral projection and meet with the deceased as we will be awake and fully aware in the same place dead people go - we do not need to wait to have NDE to find out what happens when we die.

He says dreams are the link between our world and the next, but we need to learn how to use our time spent sleeping consciously to see what is really there.

Mr. Pritchard explains having out-of-body experiences is an "inner science" that is "only verifiable to those who do it."

He says conventional science can only go so far in studying out-of-body experiences - it can study people's brains as they sleep, record accounts of people's travels, but cannot measure the out-of-body experience itself.

"This is an internal science which involves study, experimentation, experience and the gaining of knowledge," says Mr. Pritchard.

"To do it you have to explore from within your own psyche and that is where contemporary science effectively leaves it."

Mr. Pritchard says it is difficult for science to study out-of-body experiences because it looks for physical means to measure something non-physical, and as our consciousness and psyche are essentially non-physical, the only way to know the truth of out-of-body experiences is to get out of our bodies and see for ourselves.

"Enough attempts have been made by people trying to prove that they can travel out of their bodies to show that it is futile to try and get widespread scientific acceptance for it, no matter how compelling the account of the traveller," he says.

"It remains for the individual to prove it for themselves."