Visions of the dying: Taylor excerpt #8

Death-bed visions are experiences in which a dying person sees already-departed loved ones – and also on some occasions, what appear to be otherworldly entities such as ‘angels’ – visiting their bedside in the hours, days, and sometimes weeks leading up to their passing. These incorporeal visitors are said to have come to greet the dying individual and guide them into the afterlife. For example, a recent account from a palliative carer told how a woman...

...about an hour before she died said, "they’re all in the room; they’re all in the room.” The room was full of people she knew and I can remember feeling quite spooked really and looking over my shoulder and not seeing a thing but she could definitely see the room full of people that she knew.

They are extremely common experiences, found across cultures worldwide, and have remained remarkably consistent across time. As the writer Frances Cobbe explained in The Peak in Darien – her 1882 book that discussed strange phenomena reported by the dying – over and over again death-bed visions are described “almost in the same words by persons who have never heard of similar occurrences, and who suppose their own experience to be unique.” Dying patients recount these visions calmly and rationally to others at the bedside such as family or carers; so much so that they are often observed to be almost living in two worlds, swapping nonchalantly between chatting to those in the here-and-now, and then with already-dead loved ones, or being immersed in an alternate reality full of love and light.

Sir William Barrett

One account related a century ago by the British physicist Sir William Barrett offers a fine example. Hattie Pratt was a schoolgirl who passed away from diphtheria in the early 1900s. As her family gathered around during her final hours, another family member –already deceased – appeared to greet young Hattie and guide her onwards. Hattie’s brother recounted that while Hattie’s throat “was so choked up” it required close attention to catch all of her words, “her mind seemed unusually clear and rational”:

She knew she was passing away, and was telling our mother how to dispose of her little personal belongings among her close friends and playmates, when she suddenly raised her eyes as though gazing at the ceiling toward the farther side of the room, and after looking steadily and apparently listening for a short time, slightly bowed her head, and said, “Yes, Grandma, I am coming, only wait just a little while, please.” Our father asked her, “Hattie, do you see your grandma?” Seemingly surprised at the question she promptly answered, “Yes, Papa, can't you see her? She is right there waiting for me.” At the same time she pointed toward the ceiling in the direction in which she had been gazing. Again addressing the vision she evidently had of her grandmother, she scowled a little impatiently and said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming, but wait a minute, please.” She then turned once more to her mother, and finished telling her what of her personal treasures to give to different ones of her acquaintances. At last giving her attention once more to her grandma, who was apparently urging her to come at once, she bade each of us good- bye. Her voice was very feeble and faint, but the look in her eyes as she glanced briefly at each one of us was as lifelike and intelligent as it could be. She then fixed her eyes steadily on her vision but so faintly that we could but just catch her words, said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming now.”

Hattie’s brother remarked that her clear-headedness during her final minutes, and alternation of attention between her dead grandmother and the rest of her still-living family (what Barrett calls ‘double consciousness’), “were so distinctly photographed upon the camera of my brain that I have never since been able to question the evidence of the continuance of distinct recognizable life after death.”

Hattie Pratt’s experience is just one of many cases discussed by Barrett in his seminal 1926 book Death-bed Visions. In researching the phenomenon, Barrett was particularly impressed by the commonalities related by those of a younger age, who would likely not have had a cultural expectation of the visions they saw. In fact, in several cases, the dying visions of children categorically did not agree with what their Christian upbringing had primed them to expect. For instance, 10-year-old Daisy Irene Dryden exclaimed during a death-bed vision in the final days of her illness, “We always thought the angels had wings! But it is a mistake; they don't have any.”

Like NDErs, the dying describe the realm they will soon move to as being bathed in love, light and peace. For example, in Italy a wife ran to her dying husband’s side only to be told by him that her mother – who had died 3 years previously – was “helping me to break out of this disgusting body. There is so much light...so much peace.” Furthermore, Dr Peter Fenwick points out, those having death-bed visions also sometimes experience other elements of the archetypal NDE, such as a life review and a border that must be crossed to transition to the afterlife realm. The similarities between NDEs and ELEs, Fenwick says, “suggest that both could be experiences of the same after-death reality.”

Frances Cobbe

And there is a category of death-bed vision that is similar in evidential value to the veridical NDE, offering even further support that what these people are seeing is real. In The Peak in Darien, Frances Cobbe wrote of an incident “of a very striking character”: a dying lady suddenly became joyful, and told those at her bedside that, one after another, three of her dead brothers had appeared in the room. Then, strangely, a fourth brother appeared alongside the others, despite being believed by all present to be alive and well at his residence in India. As this occurred in the late 19th century, there was no way of instantly checking on the brother, but letters were subsequently received informing the family of his death – at a time before his dying sister saw him in her vision.

Though Cobbe’s book covered a variety of strange phenomena, its title has become the unofficial name for this specific type of death-bed account, in which the dying are visited by an individual who was believed by them to be alive, but were actually deceased at the time of the vision: Peak-in-Darien experiences. Sir William Barrett believed such experiences provided “one of the most cogent arguments for survival after death, as the evidential value and veridical (truth-telling) character of these Visions of the Dying is greatly enhanced when the fact is undeniably established that the dying person was wholly ignorant of the decease of the person he or she so vividly sees.” Barrett’s contemporary Professor Charles Richet, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1913, noted that “among all the facts adduced to prove survival, these seem to me to be the most disquieting, that is, from a materialistic point of view.”

Like veridical NDEs, there are a surprisingly large number of Peak in Darien experiences recorded in the literature. Sir William Barrett devoted an entire chapter of his book Death-Bed Visions to cases of this type. One well-documented example was a woman named 'Mrs. B' (also referred to as 'Doris'), who had just given birth to a baby, but died shortly after from heart failure. Lady Florence Barrett was present as the attending obstetrician, and after she told her husband what happened, he investigated further and gathered testimony from others present during the incident.

As she began to slip away, Mrs. B had gripped Lady Barrett’s hand tightly and asked her not to leave, saying “It’s getting so dark...darker and darker.” Mrs. B’s husband and mother were sent for, but her desperation suddenly turned to rapture. Looking across the room, a radiant smile lit up her face. “Oh, lovely, lovely,” she cried. When asked what she was seeing, Mrs. B replied “Lovely brightness, wonderful beings.” Lady Barrett was shaken by the conviction with which she said this, noting it was difficult “to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision.”

Mrs. B then focused on a particular point in the air and cried joyously when a deceased loved one appeared to her: “Why, it’s Father! Oh, he’s so glad I’m coming.” Mrs. B spoke to her father, saying, “I am coming,” before turning to her mother at the bedside to tell her, “Oh, he is so near.” On looking back to the vision of her deceased father, she then said, with a puzzled expression, “He has Vida with him.” Vida was Mrs. B’s sister, whose death three weeks previously she had not been informed about, so as not to cause any aggravation to her own health. Mrs. B died within the hour.

A similar example from more modern times is that of a Chinese lady, terminally ill with cancer, reported by hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley in their 1993 book Final Gifts. The dying lady had been having recurrent visions of her deceased husband, who was calling her to join him:

One day, much to her puzzlement, she saw her sister with her husband, and both were calling her to join them. She told the hospice nurse that her sister was still alive in China, and that she hadn’t seen her for many years. When the hospice nurse later reported this conversation to the woman’s daughter, the daughter stated that the patient’s sister had in fact died two days earlier of the same kind of cancer, but that the family had decided not to tell the patient to avoid upsetting or frightening her.

As with veridical NDEs, the sheer number of Peak-in-Darien cases provides evidence that cannot be brushed away simply as chance occurrences.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

End-of-life experiences: Taylor excerpt #7

Greg Taylor writes: On their own, near-death experiences – especially veridical NDEs – provide compelling evidence that during brushes with death our consciousness can separate from the body and continue on in some form. However, there are a number of other anomalistic experiences regularly reported as occurring at the actual end of someone’s life – often grouped under the umbrella term ‘end of life experiences’ (ELEs) – that add to that body of evidence and provide even more support for the hypothesis. These include: 

• death-bed visions or dreams in which the dying person encounters and often communicates with deceased loved ones, and transitions to and from afterlife-like realms which feature feelings of love and light
  
• strange phenomena experienced by family and carers attending to the dying
  
• death-bed coincidences or ‘crisis apparitions’, in which someone emotionally close to the dying person becomes aware of them at the moment of their death
  
• ‘terminal lucidity’, in which patients with severe impairment suddenly and unexpectedly become aware of their environment and interact with family and carers.

Like NDEs, these experiences are not rare occurrences – in fact, ELEs are exceedingly common, and have been reported in the deaths of well-known figures including George Harrison, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. 

In a 2010 study lead by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Peter Fenwick, researchers found that almost two-thirds of doctors, nurses and hospice carers reported witnessing ELEs with dying patients. The survey confirmed the findings of previous studies: an Irish study of carers in 2009 also found that around two-thirds of respondents witnessed end-of-life experiences in their patients, while another study in the U.S. in 2007 had found that more than half of the 525 surveyed carers reported instances of a dying person having a death-bed vision. It is worth remembering that all these surveys are only of carers and family reporting ELEs – the number is likely to be much larger as they don’t include data from the people actually going through the dying process.

Just as we saw with NDEs, ELEs do not seem to be an hallucinatory by-product of a malfunctioning brain: the vast majority of the carers interviewed in Fenwick’s study “agreed that ELEs were not due to confusional states resulting from either medication or the toxic processes involved in dying,” and “usually occurred in clear consciousness.” In fact, research has found that dying patients were less likely to have ELEs if they were medicated with drugs, or suffering from an illness which affected their normal state of consciousness.

What’s more, carers consider these end-of-life experiences “to be profoundly subjective and meaningful events” that often “helped the individual to let go of life and lessened the fear of dying.” Rather than being confusing hallucinations, ELEs were seen as important ‘spiritual’ events, imbued with personal meaning, which helped ease the distress of dying. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Veridical NDEs: Taylor excerpt #6

Greg Taylor writes: Veridical accounts are hardly a rare occurrence: Researcher Janice Miner Holden surveyed the NDE case literature and collected some 107 cases where impossible observations reported by the person having the NDE were later verified. She concluded that “the sheer volume of anecdotes that a number of authors over the course of the last 150 years have described suggests [veridical NDE perception] is real,” and furthermore that “the cumulative weight of these narratives [should be enough to] convince most skeptics that these reports are something more than mere hallucinations on the patient’s part.”

 

For example, the case of ‘Dentures Man’ consists of evidence of such high quality that it was included in a paper in the respected medical journal The Lancet. In this case from 1979, a 44- year-old man (‘Mr. B’) was brought into the emergency department at Canisius Hospital in the Netherlands by ambulance, after being discovered comatose, hypothermic and without a pulse in a cold, damp meadow in the middle of the night. Hospital staff, including the senior nurse (‘T.G.’), were beginning resuscitation when T.G. noticed that Mr. B was wearing dentures, so removed them and placed them on the ‘crash cart’ so that he could put a ventilation mask on the unconscious man. After Mr. B was successfully resuscitated, he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit; as such, T.G. did not see the man again until a week later while doing rounds distributing medication. T.G. was astonished when, as he walked into the room, the patient he had brought back to life exclaimed “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are!” Seeing the look of surprise on T.G.’s face, Mr. B explained himself: since coming back to consciousness, he had been looking for his dentures. “You were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that cart,” he said. “It had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.” T.G. was confused by this, as he remembered that he had done this when the patient was unconscious and undergoing CPR to bring him back to life:

 

When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient’s prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death. Four weeks later he left hospital as a healthy man.

 

To be clear: according to the medical professionals working on Mr. B, everything he witnessed during his NDE took place when he was unconscious, with no blood circulation and thus no brain activity. According to currently accepted medical science, he could not have observed the removal of his dentures in any normal way, even by some reconstruction through imagination and memory based on touch and sounds, as his brain was shut down at the time the dentures were removed. And yet Mr. B. accurately related multiple details of the room, the people in it, and what was occurring, as he saw it from a vantage point near the ceiling.

 

Another example is that of Al Sullivan. During emergency quadruple bypass surgery in 1989, Sullivan felt his consciousness separate from his physical body, and after traveling through a “black, billowy smoke-like atmosphere,” found himself near the ceiling of the OR looking down upon his own life-saving surgery:

I was laying [sic] on a table covered with light blue sheets and I was cut open so as to expose my chest cavity. It was in this cavity that I was able to see my heart on what appeared to be a small glass table. I was able to see my surgeon, who just moments ago had explained to me what he was going to do during my operation. He appeared to be somewhat perplexed. I thought he was flapping his arms as if trying to fly...

 

Sullivan also noticed that his own chest cavity was being held open by metal clamps, and was puzzled by the fact that two other surgeons were working on his leg, rather than his heart. He was then distracted by a “most brilliant yellow light” coming from what appeared to be a tunnel to his lower right-hand side (as is common in NDE descriptions of the light, Sullivan noted that although it was “the brightest I had ever looked into, it was of no discomfort to the eyes at all”). He then experienced “warmth, joy and peace and a feeling of being loved” followed by an encounter with his deceased mother, who had died at age 37 when he was just 7 years old.

 

All at once my mother’s expression changed to that of concern...she left my side and drifted down toward my surgeon. She placed the surgeon’s hand on the left side of my heart and then returned to me. I recall the surgeon making a sweeping motion as if to rid the area of a flying insect. My mother then extended one of her hands to me, but try as I might I could not grasp it. She then smiled and drifted back toward the lit tunnel.

 

Dr. Anthony LaSala

Upon regaining consciousness, Sullivan told his cardiologist Dr. Anthony LaSala of his NDE, and some of the confusing details he had noticed during the surgery. Initially skeptical, Dr. LaSala paid more attention when Sullivan described the ‘flapping elbows’ of the cardiac surgeon, Dr. Hiroyoshi Takata, as this was an idiosyncratic habit of his that Dr. LaSala had witnessed himself – after scrubbing in, Dr. Takata would point at things using his elbows to avoid contamination of his hands, giving the impression that he was impersonating a bird attempting to fly.

 

NDE researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson investigated this report and spoke to both doctors involved in the surgery. Dr. LaSala confirmed that Sullivan had recounted his NDE immediately after regaining consciousness, noting the ‘flapping’ elbows of Dr. Takata – and confirmed that he had never seen any other surgeon do this. Dr. Takata also confirmed that during the operation he stood with hands on chest, pointing with his elbows. Greyson also noted that Sullivan’s OBE observations of the open chest cavity and surgeons working on his leg – which he later learned was the stripping of a vein out of his leg to create the bypass graft for his heart – offer a ‘time anchor’ which confirmed that “Mr. Sullivan’s observation of Dr. Takata flapping his arms occurred when he was under general anesthesia and, at least to observers, unconscious.”

 

We could go on at length; as mentioned earlier, more than one hundred veridical NDE cases have been identified in the literature thus far. Suffice to say, they are not rare enough to be easily explained by lucky guesses or chance. Research backs that up: cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom surveyed patients who had undergone a resuscitation – including both those who had reported an NDE, and those who hadn’t – asking them to describe what their resuscitation ‘looked’ like. He found that the descriptions of 25 cardiac patients who did not report an NDE were significantly less accurate than the accounts of the 32 near-death experiencers (NDErs) he interviewed. Sabom’s research showed that 80% of those who didn’t have an NDE made at least one major error in their description, but none of the NDErs did so. Furthermore, 6 of the 32 NDErs went even further in describing unexpected events that occurred during their resuscitation, that they wouldn’t have been expected to have any recall of. Sabom’s conclusion? NDErs do indeed seem to be describing actual observations of their resuscitation, rather than recreating them from their imagination and sensory cues.

 

And we could go farther back in history: more than a century ago, Scottish surgeon Sir Alexander Ogston (ironically, himself no stranger to skepticism from the establishment – his paradigm-breaking discovery of the Staphylococcus bacteria in the 19th century was met with disbelief and in some cases outright hostility by medical authorities) reported a veridical NDE during the South African War. Admitted to hospital suffering from typhoid fever, Ogston reported that as he lay in a stupor, his mind and body became two separate entities. “I was conscious of the body as an inert, tumbled mass near a door, it belonged to me but was not I,” Ogden noted. “In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the walls of the building, though I was aware that they were there and that everything was transparent to my senses.” Ogden recalled that during his OBE he saw “a poor Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon, of whose existence I had not known, and who was in quite another part of the hospital, grow very ill and scream and die; I saw them cover his corpse and carry him softly out on shoeless feet, quietly and surreptitiously, lest we should know that he had died, and the next night I saw him taken away to the cemetery. Afterwards when I told these happenings to the sisters, they informed me that all this had happened just as I had fancied.”

 

If there were only one or two cases of veridical NDEs, skeptics of the survival of consciousness might just be able to rely on ‘reasonable doubt’ to dismiss the evidence. However, the cumulative weight of cases – and quality of the investigations ruling out alternative explanations, can only be seen as convincing proof that consciousness does in fact separate from the body when close to death.

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

NDEs weight of evidence: Taylor excerpt #5

Greg Taylor writes: One experience related by Greyson illustrates this and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view. 

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that? 

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny.

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events,it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” 

 

A subsequent study by researchers from the One experience related by Greyson illustrates this, and begs the question as to whether the mind and the brain are really the same thing: the NDE of a man who overdosed on medication in a suicide attempt, and began hallucinating small humanoid figures surrounding him. After taking the overdose he had second thoughts and was trying to make it to the telephone to call for help when he had an OBE, during which his thinking became clear and the humanoid figures disappeared from view

 

At that point he drew out of his body, and from a position about 10 feet behind his body, his thinking suddenly became crystal clear. And he looked at his body, and his body was looking around confusedly. And from where he was, 10 feet behind, he could not see these humanoid figures. But he remembered being in the body hallucinating. So here we have a brain that's still hallucinating, while the subject, the person, out of the body, is not hallucinating. So how does medical science make sense of that?

 

The point that Greyson and his fellow researchers make clear in their paper is that in isolation, individual elements of the near-death experience could possibly be described by one or another of the theories put forward by skeptics, even though there is very little evidence supporting them. But “when several features occur together...and when increasing layers of explanation must be added on to account for them, these hypotheses become increasingly strained.” Their conclusion on skeptical explanations for the NDE? “Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE.”

 

In short, just as we saw with 17th century science’s approach to meteors, in the case of NDEs we have masses of people through history reporting the same things – in this case, mind separating from body, and a transition to another realm equivalent to an afterlife – that skeptics and scientists insist is a delusion, even though their own solutions to the mystery do not hold up to scrutiny. 

 

Not that it is a mystery to those who have undergone NDEs themselves: they are almost unanimously convinced that their experience was real, and their consciousness survived their physical death. Studies back up their surety: When experiencers were given a questionnaire designed to differentiate memories of real events from memories of imagined events, it was found that they remembered their NDE “with more clarity, more detail, more context, and more intense feelings than real events from the same time period” – they were, in effect, recalled as “realer than real events.” A subsequent study by researchers from the University of Padova using electroencephalography (EEG) to compare characteristics of NDE memories with memories of both real and imagined events found similarly. 

 
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.  

Research on NDEs: Taylor excerpt #4

Greg Taylor writes: Throughout history, we find the same elements repeating again and again in the testimony of people who have had a brush with death. What could explain these commonalities? For skeptics, the heavenly visions of the NDE can be explained simply as a delusion: hallucinations brought on by the various physical and/or psychological burdens put on the brain by its imminent demise. But just as we saw with early scientific opinions regarding meteors, this seems to be more a way of trying to explain it away, rather than valid science. Veteran NDE researchers Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. Emily Williams Kelly and Dr. Edward Kelly analyzed the explanations put forward by skeptics and found that not only are none of them supported by any research evidence, but also that most are in fact contradicted by the evidence.

Bruce Greyson

In their 2009 paper “Explanatory Models for Near-Death Experiences,” the researchers systematically worked through the list of possible ‘solutions’ offered thus far, “paying special attention to how well they can account for the various features of NDEs.” These skeptical explanations can be separated into two groups – psychological-based theories, and those focusing on physiological factors. In the former category we find offerings such as the ‘expectation model’ (in which NDEs are products of the imagination, created to protect ourselves when facing threat of death, and which conform to personal or cultural expectations); depersonalization (feelings of detachment and removal from reality when facing threat of death); ‘the birth model’ (the suggestion that the tunnel, bright light and otherworldly realms of the NDE are memories of our birth experience, reproduced at death); and personality factors (susceptibility to hypnosis and dissociation, fantasy proneness, absorption, dream recall, etc.). Physiological-based explanations for NDEs include altered blood gas levels (lowered levels of oxygen, known as hypoxia or anoxia, or increased levels of carbon dioxide, known as hypercarbia); neurochemical theories (the release of endogenous endorphins, opioids or psychedelic-like chemicals such as ketamine or DMT during times of stress); neuroanatomical models (abnormal activity in parts of the brain, such as the limbic system and temporal lobes, brought on by stress and/or altered gas and chemical levels); and rapid eye movement intrusion (mentation typical of REM sleep intruding into waking consciousness).

But the researchers found that while many of these might seem like worthwhile candidates, the evidence did not support them. For instance, the birth model is contradicted by the fact that NDE accounts featuring ‘travel through a tunnel to another realm’ were just as common among those born by Caesarean section as with those born by normal vaginal delivery. Meanwhile, the expectation model is confounded by NDEs reported by children too young to have formed afterlife expectations, and also by NDEs in adults that often run sharply counter to the experiencer’s beliefs about death and the afterlife. Brain stimulation studies have not provided the support for neuroanatomical models that supporters claim, with experiences reported in such situations bearing little resemblance to NDEs. And the altered blood gas levels theory falls flat as well as NDEs sometimes occur in situations where there are no changes in blood gas levels. Furthermore, as other researchers have pointed out, “any acute alteration in cerebral physiology such as occurring in hypoxia, hypercarbia, metabolic, and drug induced disturbances and seizures leads to disorganized and compromised cerebral function [and] impaired attention,” but the NDEs reported by those who have suffered cardiac arrest “are clearly not confusional and in fact indicate heightened awareness, attention and consciousness at a time when consciousness and memory formation would not be expected to occur.”

“Almost all NDErs (near-death experiencers) report that their thinking processes were ‘faster and clearer than they ever have been before’,” Dr. Bruce Greyson notes, “despite their brain being impaired – for example, in cardiac arrest.” Indeed, one analysis of 653 NDE reports of cardiac and/or respiratory arrest patients for unprompted, spontaneous references to quality of conscious mentation during an NDE found that both figurative and abstract mentation were reported to be either preserved or markedly improved. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Near-death experiences (NDEs): Taylor excerpt #3

Greg Taylor writes: Near-death experiences (NDEs) first gained widespread public attention in 1975, with the release of Raymond Moody’s bestselling book Life After Life. In that book, he described many of the elements reported during an NDE with the following idealized example (most NDEs will not include every single aspect): 

 

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval. 

 

...Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before – a being of light – appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events in his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time of his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives. 

 

...the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life. 

 

Researchers estimate that 10-20% of people who come close to death report NDEs, and they have been recorded throughout history and across cultures worldwide. And while interpretations of the experience vary, the core elements remain the same. For instance, some 2000 years ago the Roman historian Plutarch mentioned the experience of one Aridaeus of Soli, who “fell from a certain height upon the nape of his neck and died...he was carried away to be buried when he came back to himself and rapidly recovered.” Aridaeus told how, having ‘died’, he felt his spirit body exiting his physical body through his head, after which he had an out-of-body experience (OBE). His sense of vision when in this new ‘spirit body’ was augmented – sharper, and strangely capable of viewing “around in all directions at once” – and he could now “move in all directions easily and quickly.” A deceased relative who had died at a young age then appeared before him, showing Aridaeus the inner workings of the afterlife realms. Upon reviving from death, Aridaeus transformed himself, becoming purer of heart and helpful in his community. 

Despite occurring two millennia in the past, the story of Aridaeus could be lifted straight from Moody’s Life After Life. In fact, it even contains aspects that were not mentioned by Moody, but have since been found in multiple modern NDE reports. For example, Aridaeus spoke of being able to see “in all directions at once”; a recent account describes it in those exact words: “I could see in three dimensions...I could see all directions at once.”  Another modern NDE explicitly notes “I could see 360 degrees around me at the same time.”

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

A scientific paradigm shift: Taylor excerpt #2

Greg Taylor writes: The people of every time have tended to regard their science as the apotheosis of all knowledge, but time and again history has proven that not to be the case. In ancient times, we had the very sensible, to the eye of the observer, Ptolemaic system of astronomy which described the strange motions of the planets that revolved around the obvious center of the cosmos – Earth – only for it to be replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus. In the late 19th century, many scientists believed that the field of physics was almost complete: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,” experimental physicist Albert A. Michelson announced in a speech in 1894, “and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” A little more than a decade later, both quantum physics and relativity had completely upturned our models of how the cosmos works.

In his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, physicist Thomas Kuhn described these always incomplete and erroneous to some degree scientific frameworks that we live and work within at a certain time as paradigms, and the change from an outdated paradigm to a new one he named a paradigm shift. Within a paradigm, a certain model of ‘what reality is’ exists and dominates – and is somewhat self-supporting, as those embedded within the paradigm often believe that model to be the only possible ‘reality’, and thus reject alternative models and anomalies that don’t agree with that model. Over time, however, those anomalies accumulate, until a scientific revolution occurs that upends the previous model and supplants it with a new one.

In this essay, we will present a large set of anomalies that challenge the current scientific paradigm – in which physical matter is ‘reality’, consciousness is just a by-product of the brain, and we do not survive death – and suggest a new one.

The reason most people are not familiar with this mass of extremely convincing evidence is, as Kuhn noted, because ‘normal science’ is “predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like,” and it thus “often suppresses fundamental novelties” because they are subversive. So, in reviewing this evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death, one of the highest hurdles that must be cleared is the bias of modern science’s negative opinion on the possibility. And one of the tactics used in suppressing the evidence, by skeptics invested in defending the current paradigm, is to only accept evidence from multiple replications of lab studies by scientists using ‘blind protocols’ (and, truthfully, even then they probably still wouldn’t accept it). However, this is not generally how science actually works when it comes to spontaneous, anomalous phenomena. In these areas, often it is eyewitness testimony that provides the most convincing and useful evidence. 

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay may be downloaded with all its references at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.