Understanding Near-death Experiences: Can They be Simulated?

Is there an afterlife? Many people who have recovered from life-threatening injuries have said they experienced their lives flashing before their eyes, saw bright lights, left their bodies, or encountered angels or dead loved ones. These phenomena are usually reported after an individual has been pronounced clinically dead, hence the term near-death experience (NDE).

Such out-of-body sensation of near-death experiences are regarded by some people as evidence of an afterlife.

According to conventional science, when people’s hearts stop beating and they stop breathing, the brain shuts down and consciousness disappears. Therefore, many in the scientific community regard the experiences as hallucinatory. During cardiac arrest and resuscitation, blood gases such as CO2 rise or fall because of the lack of circulation and breathing. The researchers say that anything that damages the brain’s ability to manage impulses— physical brain injury, drugs, CO2 overload and delirium—can produce near-death sensations.

Source: NationalGeographic Channel

A team led by Dirk De Ridder of the Antwerp University report in the New England Journal of Medicine that they were trying to cure the man of tinnitus in one ear when they found that the electrodes they had inserted made the man feel like he was floating above the body.

Brain disorders such as epilepsy, and brain stimulation can also simulate the out-of-body experiences, the scientists report.

Although the mechanism for the dying process in the brain can be quantified, do they prove that NDEs are merely a vision produced by the brain which ends upon permanent brain death? Science cannot prove that consciousness can survive death, and if it does, it has to do a lot of explaining. For example, though everybody has high CO2 during cardiac arrests, only 10 percent have NDEs. There is no coherent cerebral activity in heart attack patients, yet NDE experiencers report high degree of clarity in those flashes of images.

Research is currently underway right now that may provide scientific evidence that consciousness can exist outside of the body.

Dr. Ken Ring published a paper in the Journal of Near-Death Studies (Summer, 1993) concerning near-death experiencers who, while out of their bodies, witness real events or hear conversations that occur far away from their dead body. Sometimes, during their NDE, they actually appear in spirit to a loved one. These events were later verified to be true. If such events can be scientifically controlled, they can provide absolute scientific proof that consciousness is not localized to the brain and when the brain ceases functioning, the mind can continue to exist.