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.
A particularly astonishing
facet of NDEs consists of inexplicable physical healings that take place during
or immediately after the experience. A very remarkable case was recorded in a
prospective study on NDEs performed by Penny Sartori in Ireland.
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.
