The Science of Near-Death Experiences

Much has been written about the science of near death experiences, much of it beside the point. As a social scientist I look first to the stories of near-death experiences that have been collected by researchers. I observe that there are more than 5,000 standardized interviews with people who report a near-death experiences, most from North America but also many from all over the world. A standardized interview schedule is important because it allows for the comparison of cases that have been collected, asking the same questions in the same way and in the same order. That comparison of the results of these 5,000+ responses in these interviews reveals a remarkable consistency in what people see hear and feel during the course of these experiences and after. Among social scientists and human beings in general, if one person sees something, we can dismiss it as an hallucination. If two people see the same thing we give it much more credibility. Moreso if 3, 4, 5, people or more see the same thing. If more than 5,000 see the same thing, in human affairs, what they see is real, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There is also corroborating evidence from those who have had out-of-body experiences and described what they saw, for example, in a hospital setting where  such observations can be corroborated in great detail.  For example, there is the experience of Rajiv Parti, who rose up to the ceiling in the room where he was being operated on for prostate cancer and saw one of the surgeons had made a number of incisions in his abdomen and was sucking pus out with a syringe. He could also smell the pus and heard the anaesthetist make an off color joke in response to the smell, all of which was confirmed later. And there is evidence from those who meet family and loved ones whom they didn’t know existed. Finally, the reality of these experiences is confirmed by the complete certainty of subjects, 96% of whom say that they saw, heard and felt was definitely real, more real that our everyday reality, and at how they were fundamentally transformed by the experience.  

This is all according to the standards of social science, which treats what people, that is, conscious and aware human beings, say about what they’ve seen and heard, along with corroborating evidence where possible. This is the same for medical research, where every medical treatment begins and ends with the testimony of the patient – what symptoms does the patient describe, what causes can be attached to those symptoms, with the treatment being deemed successful when the patient reports that the symptoms are gone. In medical research, if a significant number of research subjects report the beneficial effects of a particular treatment, that treatment is considered to be valid and reliable.

Many equate science with what might be called physical or material science, or “objective” science. This version of science employs basically the same methodology as social or medical science in terms of careful, consistent and accurate observation and description. However, unlike medical or social science research, it does not recognize the testimony of conscious, sentient human beings of what they see and hear as valid data. Human consciousness is considered a kind of epiphenomenon, a byproduct of brain activity that ends when the brain stops working, as it does when people die. As stated by neurobiologist Dick Schwab, “just as the kidneys produce urine, the brain produces consciousness.” So you can’t expect the brain to produce consciousness when the brain is not functioning, any more than you can expect the kidneys to produce urine after it has stopped functioning.

When studying near-death experiences from the perspective of material science, we must therefore begin with the assumption that what near-death experiencers describe as conscious awareness of what they see as real, more real than anything they’ve experienced before, must in fact be some kind of hallucination or wishful thinking. Therefore, the scientific enterprise becomes one of finding those anomalous events that could conceivably cause someone’s conscious awareness to leave their body and travel to another realm, or as described from this perspective, have an hallucination of same because we “know” that the former cannot be real.

Explanations based on this a perspective include the operation of a primitive brainstem program with the function of easing pain and suffering. A second explanation cites the distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the limbic system such as the lateral amygdala. The NDE experience has also been attributed to an endogenous glutamate blockade with excitotoxicity that mimics the hallucinatory anesthetic, ketamine, which has also been described as the drug that most closely simulates the near-death experience. Finally the release of DMT, a naturally occurring serotonin agonist that causes vivid hallucinations and a dreamlike state has been proposed.  Note that all of the above are possible explanations for hallucinations, with their chaotic and unpleasant nature, but not the joyful, complex, emotionally rich, kind of interactive experience that constitutes a near-death experience.

They end up not saying anything about the NDE experience as a rich, fully conscious human experience because they’ve believed from the start that the experience could not be that. On the other hand, the link between the brain and human consciousness has never been proven. Therefore, we don’t know what any neurological activity, chemical process in the brain, or particular part of the brain have to do with the production of consciousness. So, the suggestion that any of these kinds of processes, chemicals or parts of the brain have anything to do with the production of conscious awareness is pure speculation. Nevertheless new hypotheses keep appearing that argue for some other neurological or chemical process that can be identified as being present at the time of death, and therefore must be the cause of near death experiences, because we all know that it can’t be what it appears to be and what the people who have the experience believe it to be.

What we need is a new paradigm that incorporates human consciousness as a reality in its own right and recognizes that while consciousness is inextricably entwined with the brain in this life, it also, ultimately, exists separately from the brain. This reality has important implications for the scientific enterprise in general as well as anyone who’s interested in what it means to be human.