NDES increased perception: Rawette excerpt #10

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness - "Another strike against the hallucination explanation for NDEs is the sheer number of cases in which NDErs experience increased perceptual abilities. While it frequently can’t be verified that this increased perception happened precisely at a time when their bodies were in cardiac arrest or had no brain function, the mere fact that, while their bodies were compromised in some way, they were able to experience more than they would be able to when their body is functioning normally is a crucial indication that perception and bodily function do not always go hand in hand, and can even be inversely correlated.

"For instance, in a case reported by Dr. John Lerma, an 82-year-old man had an NDE in which he experienced floating out of his body in the hospital trauma room. From a position near the ceiling, he saw a coin sitting on the right corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor. He could see that it was a quarter dating from 1985. After he was resuscitated, he asked his doctor, Lerma, to check whether the quarter was really there, so he could know whether his experience had been real. Using a ladder, Lerma verified that the 1985 quarter was just where the patient had seen it.

"In another case, this one reported by Drs. Kenneth Ring and Madelaine Lawrence in their article 'Further Evidence for Veridical Perception during Near-Death Experiences,' a patient at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut reported having an NDE in which she was pulled upward through the floors of the hospital until she was up above the roof looking at the city skyline and her attention was drawn to a red shoe. A skeptical physician later went onto the roof and discovered a red shoe there.

"Other NDErs have had verified perceptions of things as unexpected as their wife and daughter discussing taking cuttings from a tree in a hospital courtyard, a person they thought was a health nut buying a Snickers bar from a vending machine, both of their grandmothers suddenly taking up smoking, and details about the amputation of a leg in a nearby operating theater.

"Janice Miner Holden reviewed 93 reports of physical events observed during NDEs and found that 86 were fully accurate, 6 contained some error, and only 1 was entirely wrong. Some researchers have attempted to do controlled studies of perception during cardiac arrest by placing hidden targets high up on hospital shelves, out of the normal visual field of patients. So far, these studies have only had 12 patients who reported leaving their bodies during an NDE, and none of them reported noticing the target."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.