Illustration by Marian Bantjes
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What’s With That White Light?
By Anne Casselman, September & October 2007
A look at near-death experiences
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Can you die and live to tell the tale? Some people come awfully close, and a few return with a remarkable story: of euphoria, a bright light (sometimes at the end of a tunnel), encounters with dead relatives, or an out-of-body experience, in which they feel as if they’re hovering over their physical body. Scientists call these near-death experiences, or NDEs; polls show 4 to 5 percent of Americans say they’ve had one.
Some experts dismiss NDEs as nothing more than an altered state of consciousness. “It’s very likely that REM [rapid eye movement] sleep and the arousal system of the brain are contributing to NDEs,” says Kevin Nelson, M.D., a University of Kentucky neurophysiologist. His research suggests that people with NDEs have a “different brain switch” that blends sleep with wakefulness—which reduces the ordeal of dying to a dreamlike state.
But lots of people believe NDEs are glimpses of the afterlife—and there’s some data to indicate there’s something happening beyond the realm of physiology.
Some of the most intriguing findings come from Pim van Lommel, a retired cardiologist from the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, Netherlands, who followed 344 survivors of cardiac arrest; 18 percent reported having had NDEs while their brains showed no wave activity. This perplexes van Lommel because, he says, “according to our current medical concepts it’s impossible to experience consciousness during a period of clinical death.”
“The out-of-body component of the NDE is actually verifiable,” says Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., a critical-care physician at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medical Center. He says patients who report watching their own resuscitation from above may have had visions—or they may be recollecting false memories. He plans to place markers, visible only from the ceiling, in emergency rooms across the United Kingdom, then quiz patients who report having had NDEs.
“If they correctly identify these targets,” says Parnia, “that suggests the experience was real.”
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