How are NDEs to be explained?

On the basis of current science, neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick concludes, NDEs are inexplicable. “Consciousness is maintained by a delicate global system which enables all the cortical model-building structures, including memory, to be excited and active. If this system goes down we lapse first of all into confusion and then into gradually deepening coma.

“This is the real paradox of the NDE. If someone is unconscious they cannot model-build. If they build an NDE model, they cannot be unconsciousness. If they are in a precomatose confusional state, any models they build should also be confused. Also, “memory does not function in unconsciousness. Even if someone who was unconscious could somehow build models, these models should not be remembered. So how is it that when an NDE occurs during unconsciousness it is remembered—and remembered so clearly—afterwards?

”From the point of view of both memory and model-building, it should be quite impossible to have an NDE when brain function is really very seriously disordered or the brain is seriously damaged. If science fails to provide an adequate explanation, then we shall be forced to consider another possibility: that in some way not yet understood, mind and brain are different, and mind can exist independently of brain.

He acknowledges: “There is some evidence to support the view that endorphins may be involved in the NDE” but concludes “even if we accept endorphins as a partial explanation, we have to argue that very special brain states are required if they are to lead to the bliss of the NDE, or, alternatively, that only some personality types respond to endorphins by experiencing bliss. And this seems like special pleading.” Fenwick also notes there are “clues which point in the direction of right-hemisphere involvement” in NDEs but he concludes: “this gives us nothing like a complete answer.”

“Change the way the brain works and you change the way you see the world. Disorders of mood can actually change the way the brain works; if you are very depressed, for example, you will tend to select sad memories and notice sad events all around you. And unhappiness seems to be quite a common trigger for the near-death experience.

Constance Cawthorne: My NDE occurred forty years ago and arose because of a strong overpowering urge to get to the other dimension. I was twenty-eight years old at the time, with two children. I had been in a state of despair through seeking a meaning to life and not getting any answers. I prayed to die—and one day I did!

I traveled at terrific speed down the tunnel with a tiny light ahead, which got bigger as I approached it. I felt utter joy as I knew when I reached it I would find what I had been seeking. However, before I ‘passed over’ I seemed to be in the presence of formless (but not faceless) spiritual beings who transferred to me the thought that I must go back—my family needed me, and I had not finished what I needed to do.

“We can’t,” Fenwick says, explain experiences like this “by suggesting the cause may be drugs or brain damage, too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide. All that we are left with is an overpowering, life-numbing sadness. These brains are certainly capable of making models. But why should the models they make be almost identical to the NDE?"

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).