Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (21 page)

5) Several
of these instances have been mentioned in the NDE studies I read. Sartori
mentions and documents deathbed visions where people “report meeting relatives
or friends who they did not know to be deceased at the time they saw them.”
6) Ring addresses NDEs with corroboration in
The Handbook of Near-death
Experiences
, p. 231, referencing K. Clark, in B. Greyson and C.P. Flynn,
Eds.,
The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives
(Springfield,
Illinois: Charles C. Thomas,
1984) 242-55; Ring and Lawrence “Further
Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences,”
Journal of
Near-Death Studies
11:223-29, (1993); Sartori, Badham, and Fenwick, “A
Prospectively Studied Near-Death Experience with Corroborated Out-of-Body
Perceptions and Unexplained Healing,
Journal of Near-Death Studies
25:69-84 (2006). Sartori notes that “NDErs have also reported discovering
solutions to problems or possessing knowledge previously unknown following the
NDE,” citing K. Ring,
Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the
Near-Death Experience
(New York: William Morrow, 1984), 165-92.

7) Susan
Blackmore suggests that a part of these claims can be attributed to guessing.
Dying
to Live
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), 115.  

8)
“Perhaps they’re just good guesses” some will say. But several studies (such as
Sartori’s and Sabom’s prospective studies) tested this with control groups who
did not have NDEs. In van Lommel’s research, among his NDErs, “92 percent were
completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error and only 1% were completely
erroneous.” (
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 20)  

9) Penny
Sartori,
The Near Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients:
A Five-Year Clinical Study
, (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008)
212-215. She concluded, “…this research has demonstrated that those who
reported OBEs gave more accurate descriptions of events and equipment used than
those who were resuscitated, but did not report a NDE/OBE. This lends further
support to the possibility of consciousness existing apart from the brain.”(273,274)
See also P. Sartori, P. Badham, and P. Fenwick, A Prospectively Studied Near-Death
Experience with Corroborated Out-of-Body Perceptions and Unexplained Healing,
Journal
of Near-Death Studies
25:69-84, (2006), 3. Cardiologist Michael Sabom also
tested the hypothesis that out of body “observations” were merely retrospective
reconstructions. Twenty-five of his cardiac patients who did not have NDEs were
asked to guess about what happened in their procedures. Eighty percent made at
least one
major
error. Furthermore, Sabom noted that among the patients
who reported veridical perception, that their observations were often specific
for their particular resuscitation and would not have accurately described the
resuscitation of another one of his patients. Example: one reported seeing
doctors give him a “shot in the groin,” which was accurate for his procedure,
but wasn’t done in other cases where patients reported veridical perception (
Recollections
of Death
, 83-87,113,114).

10) Michael
Sabom,
Light & Death
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 12.

11)
Consciousness
Beyond Life
, 19,158. As Greyson, Kelly and Kelly put it in their review of
explanatory models, “The real challenge of explanatory models of NDEs lies in
examining how complex consciousness, including thinking, sensory perception,
and memory, can occur under conditions in which current physiological models of
mind deem it impossible (
The Handbook of Near-death Experiences
, 234).
12)
Consciousness Beyond Life
, 161-204. Note this reprise article by
Worlee against van Lommel -
http://www.neardeath.woerlee.org/setting-the-record-straight.php
.
13) R.H. Sandin,
et al
., Awareness during Anaesthesia: A Prospective Case
Study,
The Lancet
, Volume: 355   Issue: 9205   pp.
707-711 (Feb. 26, 2000).
14) Ibid.  
15)
“
Unresponsiveness is thought
to almost universally occur at the time of cardiac arrest, as a consequence of
a precipitous drop in cerebral perfusion. The first action that Basic Life
Support (BLS) and Advanced Life Support (ALS) trainees are taught to perform is
to check for unresponsiveness. It is theoretically possible, however, to
maintain awareness following cardiac arrest if cerebral perfusion is maintained
by the use of highly effective chest compressions and in the presence of
adequate oxygenation. Reports of such retained awareness during cardiac arrest
in the literature are sparse.” Shailesh Bihari and
Venkatakrishna Rajajee,
Neurocritical Care
,
Prolonged
Retention of Awareness During Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation for Asystolic
Cardiac Arrest
Neurocritical Care
,
Volume 9, Number 3
, Pages 382-386 (2008).
16) Pim van Lommel, Setting the Record Straight: Correcting Two Recent Cases of
Materialist Misrepresentation of My Research and Conclusions,
Journal of
Near-Death Studies
, 30(2),107-119, Winter 2011. When a patient’s EEG
(measuring brain activity) has been monitored during cardiac arrest, it
flat-lines after an average of 15 seconds (113). Thus, “it seems rational to
assume that all 562 survivors of cardiac arrest in several recently published
prospective studies on NDE should have had a flat EEG, because no patient had
been resuscitated within 20 seconds of cardiac arrest onset.” Now it’s true
that a flat-line EEG doesn’t rule out any brain activity whatsoever. Some kind
of electrical activity that an EEG can’t register may continue somewhere deep
within the brain. Yet, consciousness can be maintained only when large portions
of the brain (e.g., the brainstem, cerebral cortex, hippocampus and thalamus)
are functioning properly and working together. Since the EEG shows primarily
electrical activity in the cortex, a flatline EEG indicates an unconscious
state. “The issue is not whether there is any non-measurable brain activity of
any kind whatsoever but whether there is measurable brain activity of the
specific form, and in different neural networks, as regarded by contemporary
neuroscience to be the necessary condition of conscious experience. And it has
been proven in several studies in patients with induced cardiac arrest that
there was no such measurable and specific brain activity during cardiac
arrest.” (115) Neither does such unified brain activity occur during deep sleep
or successful anesthesia(116). A publication by the National Institutes of
Health (2010) puts loss of consciousness during cardiac arrest at 10 seconds
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/heartattack/ct139105.pdf
(p. 7). According to Dr. Sam Parnia, “an alternative explanation is that the
experiences reported from cardiac arrest, may actually be arising at a time
when consciousness is either being lost, or regained, rather than from the
actual cardiac arrest period itself. Any cerebral insult leads to a period of
both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. In fact memory is a very sensitive
indicator of brain injury and the length of amnesia before and after
unconsciousness is a way of determining the severity of the injury. Therefore,
events that occur just prior to or just after the loss of consciousness would
not be expected to be recalled.
(Do Reports of Consciousness
during Cardiac Arrest Hold the Key to Discovering the Nature of Consciousness?
Medical Hypotheses
69(4):933-937)
17) Greyson, Kelly and Kelly (
The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences)
have
a particularly good discussion of the hypothesis that NDEs occur as the brain
shuts down or as brain function returns, on pp. 229-231 of their chapter,
Explanatory Models for Near-Death Experiences. In brief, patients’ memories from
just prior to loss of consciousness or just after regaining consciousness are either
completely absent or confused. (M.J. Aminoff,
et al
., 1988.
Electrocerebral accompaniments of syncope associated with malignant ventricular
arrhythmias.
Annals of Internal Medicine
108:791-96 (1988); S. Parnia,
and P. Fenwick, 2002. Near death experiences in cardiac arrest: Visions of a
dying brain or visions of a new science of consciousness?
Resuscitation
52:5-11. See also
The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
, 230.)
            While partial awakening has been reported in 0.1 to 0.3 percent of
general surgeries, the experiences are “generally extremely unpleasant,
frightening, and painful and not visual – extremely different from NDEs. (
The
Handbook of Near-death Experiences
, 230) Yet, the patient reported that,
during her NDE, her vision “was brighter and more focused and clearer than
normal vision” and that her hearing “was a clearer hearing than with my ears.”
(
Light & Death
, 44) Sartori dismisses the suggestion that blood flow
during CPR gives the brain enough blood to sustain partial consciousness. (
The
Near Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients
, 68,69) Sartori
later has an extended, documented discussion on “When did the NDE/OBE occur?”
(260-264). She concludes, “This research confirms Fenwick’s point; it appears
that consciousness can exist independently of a functioning brain.” (264)
18) This remarkable NDE was originally published in
Light and Death
, 37-47;
184-190. It was discussed further in van Lommel, 173-178; see also
The
Handbook of Near-death Experiences
, 191-193, where Holden examines the
criticisms of this NDE by Augustine and finds them wanting. Augustine holds
that since 2 out of 1000 patients experience some type of awareness during
anesthesia, that she could have overheard some of the conversations. But those
rare cases are typically explained by someone being under-anesthetized. In this
case, her anesthesia was deep and closely monitored in three different ways. Also,
the constant, loud clicking in the molded ear plugs would rule out anything
being heard, whereas the eye coverings would keep her from seeing anything.
Augustine maintains that she consolidated a coherent memory over a period of
three years by things she learned over time. But van Lommel and others found
that people’s NDE stories stayed consistent from the first report in the
hospital setting to years later when followed-up upon. There’s no tendency
toward embellishment. While other challenges have been forwarded against this
case, in my opinion, they always fall short. For a good back and forth debate
on this case, see G.M. Woerlee, Could Pam Reynolds Hear? A New Investigation
into the Possibility of Hearing during this Famous Near-Death Experience.
Journal
of Near-Death Studies
, 30: 3-25 (2011), and responses by Hameroff and
Carter in the same journal.

19) Vivid
consciousness should not occur during general anesthesia or cardiac arrest,
since the mind is quickly and severely impaired. For example, cardiac arrest
causes instantaneous circulatory arrest, so that blood flow to the brain
ceases. Even if certain low-level brain activity could remain, it isn’t
sufficient for conscious experience. Yet, “in five published studies alone,
more than 100 cases of NDEs occurring under conditions of cardiac arrest have
been reported” (
The Handbook of Near-death Experiences
, p. 227.)
According to Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick [Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac
Arrest,
Resuscitation
52:5-11 (2002)], “…NDEs in cardiac arrest are
clearly not confusional and in fact indicate heightened awareness, attention
and consciousness at a time when consciousness and memory formation would not
be expected to occur.” According to Greyson, Kelly and Kelly, “An analysis of
520 cases in our collection showed that 80 percent of experiencers described
their thinking during the NDE as ‘clearer than usual’ or ‘as clear as usual.’
Furthermore, in our collection, people reported enhanced mental functioning
significantly
more
often when they were actually physiologically close
to death than when they were not” (
The Handbook of Near-death Experiences,
p. 229). The 11-year-old I interviewed told me very specifically the colors of
the flowers he saw in his NDE and even what colors he
didn’t
see in his
NDE. It was a very vivid experience, with a very vivid, intact memory. It
appeared from my conversation that he could retrieve the scenes from his NDE and
review them at will, although when he experienced them he had stopped breathing
and lay unconscious under a pile of snow.  Nelson (
The Spiritual Doorway to
the Brain
) argues, “The characteristics of near-death experiences measured
by the Greyson scale…combine to tell us that wide expanses of the brain are
engaged during these experiences.” (p. 117) Yet, such “wide expanses” should be
picked up easily on an EEG. According to Nelson, the brain is “
alive
and
conscious
” during NDEs.” (132) See also p. 214 – he believes that “part
of the dreaming brain erupts in a brain already awake,” creating “experiences
that are realistic and memorable.” Yet, this again seems to require a fully
functioning brain, which is clearly contraindicated in cardiac arrests and
general anesthesia.  

20)
According to Sabom, unlike dreams, “The NDE…is perceived as stark reality both
during the experience and later in reflection. In addition, the extreme
variability of dream content from person to person and from night to night
contrasts with the consistency of events in the NDE. It is thus unlikely that
the NDE can be explained as being a dream” (
Recollections of Death
, 166).
Let’s imagine that I’m feeling jittery and take a Valium to relax me. In about
an hour I’m feeling very relaxed and fall asleep on my couch. Now it’s quite
possible that, going to sleep in such a relaxed state, I might have a dream
that features relaxation as I picture it, such as reading a book on a porch in
a mountain chalet or building a sandcastle on a beach. What we don’t hear is
that everyone who takes Valium has extremely similar dreams with one or more of
15 common elements.