Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes:
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are extremely powerful experiences that people may live through during a severe health crisis, frequently at the brink of death. Although they are marked by cultural influence, NDEs share a common core structure featuring several elements. For instance, many NDEs begin with an out-of-body experience (OBE) during which individuals perceive themselves or the scenery surrounding them from an elevated vantage point a few meters above their body. Sometimes, they even describe verifiable details in other rooms or outside the hospital building. In numerous cases, experiencers reported OBEs after cardiac arrests or other severe traumas that rendered the brain essentially deprived of oxygen. Obviously, NDEs and OBEs occurring in such critical near-death states are most relevant for the survival question. A very striking case was published by a Dutch team of physicians:
A man who had suffered a heart attack was found in a meadow and taken to hospital. He was “ice-cold” and already showed characteristic discolorations of his skin that occur at the earliest 20–30 minutes after circulatory arrest. He wasn’t breathing, and his pupils showed no reaction to light stimuli. He was considered dead. Nevertheless, resuscitation measures were performed, and after about 15 minutes, to the surprise of everyone involved, first signs of life appeared. Eventually, the patient’s condition stabilized. He later claimed having followed the entire treatment from outside his body, relating knowledge about details he could hardly have seen or guessed. For instance, in the course of the preparatory measures for the resuscitation, a nurse removed the man’s dentures from his mouth and put them onto a crash cart. But they somehow got lost afterwards. After more than a week, the nurse entered the room to administer medicine to the patient. The nurse had not seen him since the resuscitation measures during which he was deeply unconscious. Nevertheless, this patient now recognized the nurse as the one who had removed his dentures and put them onto the crash cart and inquired about their whereabouts.
Clearly, such reports challenge standard models of brain functioning. Even conceding that a residual oxygen supply might exist in the brain during such near-death states, it wouldn’t be sufficient to enable the accurate perception of events occurring in the surroundings, or to ensure the proper and indelible storage of experiential details in the brain’s long-term memory. But this is exactly what is reported again and again. Hence, such OBEs provide considerable evidence for the notion that in these situations, human consciousness operates independently of brain states. Therefore, NDEs indicate that at least during the initial stage of bodily breakdown, human consciousness might be able to continue.
But the typical NDEs of Western people contain a number of other interesting features. During an OBE, the scene may shift eventually towards more transcendental elements. Similar to a person experiencing an NDV, an NDEr might be drawn towards a bright and loving light, see otherworldly landscapes, hear ineffable music, and meet deceased loved ones, which suggests that they have survived physical death for prolonged periods of time. Upon awakening, the life of many experiencers is transformed forever.
After a 60-year-old patient who experienced a profound NDE regained consciousness, he was able to move his right hand that had been paralyzed since his birth. It remains a mystery how the muscles and tendons in his hand, but also the neuronal wirings in his brain, were reorganized during his NDE to render this hand permanently mobile thereafter.
Further evidence favoring the notion that brain chemistry cannot fully account for OBEs and NDEs comes from their occurrence in indistinguishable manners under conditions ranging from optimal oxygen supply in the brain to virtually no oxygen supply. From the neurophysiological perspective, one must assume that such drastic differences in brain chemistry will result in correspondingly drastic differences in experience. But obviously, just as in NDVs, this is not the case. Moreover, it is intriguing that blind people, even those blind from birth, report having NDEs that include visual imagery comparable to that in NDEs of those who can see. Such “mindsight” in the blind provides additional evidence suggesting these percepts were not obtained via physical senses. A comparably recent field of study that holds potential to advance our understanding of NDEs lends even more weight to this notion: It concerns shared death experiences in which healthy bystanders at sickbeds seemingly share the NDE content of the patient, thus resulting in a collective or intersubjective experience.
To conclude this inventory of remarkable NDE features, I’d like to add an astonishing but related episode reported from the mainstream setting.
In a book introducing his work with developing modes of communication with nonresponsive patients in vegetative states, neuropsychologist Adrian Owen described what happened to one of his patients, Juan. In order to gain detailed insights into the activity of the brain in nonresponsive patients, including its deeper layers, Owen used fMRI scanners. These highly sophisticated apparatuses enable physicians to evaluate whether there might be a conscious individual inside a nonresponsive body. In Juan’s case, repeated scans showed practically no sign of conscious awareness. The characteristic patterns of activity in brain regions signaling awareness in response to applied stimuli were almost completely absent although his eyes were open. Consequently, he was regarded entirely unconscious. Weeks later, however, Juan awoke from his coma. To the amazement of Owen, Juan had a full recall of his two visits to Owen’s laboratory. He was able to describe everything that happened correctly and remembered the physicians involved.
Juan’s case is exceptional in that it is the only case of which I am aware in which a person’s brain was monitored deep down into its depths and showed no sign of awareness—but the patient nonetheless remembered everything. Owen had no explanation for these occurrences. Such cases highlight that, at present, neurophysiological models cannot account for conscious awareness during apparent states of unconsciousness such as in critical NDEs or Juan’s evident coma.
The investigability of NDEs is “relatively high” (3) because they often occur in a well-controlled hospital setting accessible to different members of the medical staff. The repeatability of studies of NDEs is “relatively high” (3) as well, because these experiences occur on a regular basis all around the globe in quite comparable manners. The quantitative strength of NDEs with regard to the survival question is “relatively low” (2), however. Although NDEs comprise a whole set of features that pose severe challenges to the physicalist model of consciousness, even veridical OBEs are not directly related to survival after permanent bodily death. Similarly, the qualitative strength of NDEs is “relatively low” (2) because most are subjective experiences that take place during times of unconsciousness, and they are clearly culturally influenced. Even in the comparably few cases that combine veridical OBEs and critical brain conditions, there are usually only a few eyewitnesses who can support the statements of the experiencer in an unambiguous manner. Finally, because only a few features of NDEs are directly related to prolonged survival (e.g., the optional element of meeting deceased loved ones) and the experiencers always return to life after their experience, the relevance of NDEs for survival after permanent bodily death is only “relatively high” (3).
Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.
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