Why ndes are different

Eben Alexander, and those of a young boy, the son of a Use this link to get back to this page. Heaven only knows: near-death experiences and the problem of account incongruence.

Author: Cory Markum. Date: Spring Document Type: Article. Length: 2, words. Lexile Measure: L. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. In our never-ending quest to understand what happens to us after we die, humans have long seen the rare phenomenon of near-death experiences as providing some hints.

A near-death experience is a profound psychological event with mystical elements. It typically occurs in people close to death , or during situations of intense physical or emotional pain, but may also happen after heart attacks or traumatic brain injuries , or even during meditation and syncope loss of consciousness due to a fall in blood pressure. Common characteristics people report are feelings of contentment, psychic detachment from the body such as out-of-body experiences , rapid movement through a long dark tunnel, and entering a bright light.

Culture and age may also influence the kind of near-death experience people have. For example, many Indians report meeting the Hindu king of the dead, Yamraj , while Americans often claim to have met Jesus. Most reported near-death experiences are positive, and have even helped in reducing death anxiety, affirming life, and increasing well-being. However, some near-death experiences are negative and include feelings such as lack of control, awareness of nonexistence, hellish imagery, or perceived judgement from a higher being.

Mary Neal was, a few years before her NDE, the director of spinal surgery at the University of Southern California she is now in private practice. It was Alexander who really upped the scientific stakes.

He studied his own medical charts and came to the conclusion that he was in such a deep coma during his NDE, and his brain was so completely shut down, that the only way to explain what he felt and saw was that his soul had indeed detached from his body and gone on a trip to another world, and that angels, God, and the afterlife are all as real as can be.

Alexander has not published his medical findings about himself in any peer-reviewed journal, and a investigative article in Esquire questioned several details of his account, among them the crucial claim that his experience took place while his brain was incapable of any activity. To the skeptics, his story and the recent recanting of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven are just further evidence that NDEs rank right up there with alien abductions, psychic powers, and poltergeists as fodder for charlatans looking to gull the ignorant and suggestible.

Yet even these skeptics rarely accuse experiencers of inventing their stories from whole cloth. There is something about NDEs that makes them scientifically intriguing.

A small, lucky handful of people have made full or nearly full recoveries after spending hours with no breath or pulse, buried in snow or submerged in very cold water. All of this makes NDEs perhaps the only spiritual experience that we have a chance of investigating in a truly thorough, scientific way.

It makes them a vehicle for exploring the ancient human belief that we are more than meat. And it makes them a lens through which to peer at the workings of consciousness—one of the great mysteries of human existence, even for the most resolute materialist.

I wanted to know: What makes a person start believing that he has truly seen the other side? The conference had the joyous, clubby atmosphere of a reunion; many of the people had clearly known one another for years. The scale assigns a score of 0 to 2 for each count, allowing for a maximum possible score of A 7 or higher is classified as an NDE, and according to one study, the average score among people who report such an experience is about These include heightened sensitivity to light, sound, and certain chemicals; becoming more caring and generous, sometimes to a fault; having trouble with timekeeping and finances; feeling unconditional love for everyone, which can be taxing on relatives and friends; and having a strange influence on electrical equipment.

The scattered audience chuckled approvingly. Corcoran herself wore two name badges. She first encountered NDEs when, as a junior nurse, she served at Long Binh, the largest army base in Vietnam, in More recently, she had been trying, with difficulty, to find veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who were willing to talk about any NDEs they might have had.

Written accounts of near-death experiences—or things that sound like them—date back at least to the Middle Ages, and some researchers say to ancient times. The medical journal Resuscitation recently published a brief account of the oldest known medical description of an NDE, written by an 18th-century French military doctor. But the modern era of research into near-death experiences is generally said to have begun in That was the year Raymond A.

Moody Jr. Since then, a small community has emerged of psychiatrists, psychologists, cardiologists, and other specialists. The leading members of this coterie have distinguished careers at respectable universities and hospitals. Of those books, probably the single best overview is The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation , an anthology published in As The Handbook outlines, by dozens of studies involving nearly 3, subjects who reported having had NDEs had become material for some scholarly articles.

But many others are in mainstream medical publications. That poses a couple of problems, scientifically speaking. It means the subjects were self-selecting, so they might not be representative. Most of the interviews took place years after the fact, so memories might have been faulty. About a dozen prospective studies have been published, several of them in recent years. In these, researchers typically arrange for every consenting patient who survives a specific medical emergency such as a cardiac arrest at a hospital to be interviewed as soon as possible thereafter.

The patients are asked open-ended questions about what, if anything, they experienced while doctors were trying to revive them. If they report anything unusual, the researchers check their medical records and the accounts of people who treated them, looking for things that might explain the experience or show that their brain was shut down at the relevant time.

All told, these studies have collected the near-death experiences of just under people. As the only stage in an NDE that involves perceiving the physical rather than the spiritual world, an out-of-body experience has the most potential to convince skeptics. If you could prove that someone saw or heard things that brain science says they could not have seen or heard, you would have, at the very least, evidence that our understanding of the brain is even more incomplete than we thought, and at most, a sign that a conscious mind can exist apart from a living body.

As a result, reports of veridical perception have a totemic significance among NDErs. She later told her social worker that while doctors were resuscitating her, she found herself floating outside the hospital building and saw a tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge, which she described in some detail. The social worker went to the window Maria had indicated, and not only found the shoe but said that the way it was placed meant there was no way Maria could have seen all the details she described from inside her hospital room.

That social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, is now a bubbly something with a shock of frizzy hair who acted as my informal press officer during the conference. A few years after being treated, Maria disappeared, and nobody was able to track her down to further confirm her story.

A case with a lot more evidence is that of Pam Reynolds, a singer-songwriter. In Reynolds, then 35, underwent surgery to remove a huge aneurysm at the base of her brain.

The cooling would prevent her cells from dying while deprived of oxygen. Gleaming marble facades no longer disguise an atmosphere of greed and avarice. Bricks no longer hide dens of despair and rage. But likewise, when we come to a place where unconditional love shines, that, too, is tangible and remarkable.

Arguably, where one goes is where one has practiced living. If we are used to pouring love and understanding onto others, where are we likely to go? That said, there's a lot of spiritual range to each one of us. In daily life we may traverse through realms of fear to realms of hope to realms of confusion just in the course of one TV broadcast.

And if Earth is any guide, there can be a mixture of good and evil spirits hanging around the same places even if in statistically predictable ratios. Thus, we may still encounter beings who seek to project a false image.

Therein lies danger. In one NDE I read recently, the writer describes seeing a smiling figure. But then another being confronts the first one, and the smiling figure becomes angry.

The smiling figure was probably a deceptive spirit. In Howard Storm's NDE, he was first approached by beings who lured him away from his starting point, and took him deeper into darkness. Only then did they turn on him in a vicious and violent manner. I read somewhere that we need to look into the eyes of any spirit, as the evil ones' eyes will tend to glitter or glow red.

Why red? I don't know; it probably has to do with cultural indoctrination as well as something to do with red being a longer wavelength lower energy, lower vibrational color, but that seems a fairly consistent description of negative intention.

Darkness, when talking about distance from the Light of all truth and love, may be considered a measure of falsehood and lack of love. In other words, where there is not the spiritual Light of truth, what is there instead is not-truth.