The Mystery Science Can’t Explain — Near-Death Experiences

The following is a transcript of this video.

It is common to believe that when we die, we cease to exist. Yet some people who have come close to death, or who have been revived following a clinical death, have reported intensely lucid and profound experiences, known as near-death experiences. Near-death experiences, or what are called NDEs, raise the possibility that personal consciousness continues after the expiration of the physical body. In this video, we examine these experiences and explore how they challenge some of the deeply held convictions of mainstream science. 

“Near-death experiences are the reported memories of extreme psychological experiences with frequent “paranormal,” transcendental, and mystical elements, which occur during a special state of consciousness arising during a period of real or imminent physical death.”  

Janice Holden

Reports of near-death experiences have appeared across cultures and throughout recorded history. However, the incidence of NDEs has increased as advances in life-saving medicine have brought more people back from the brink of death.  

“The occurrence of such experiences is far more common than anyone who hasn’t studied them would guess…Most researchers estimate that between 10 and 20 percent of people who come close to death report NDEs—or about 5 percent of the general population.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

What is particularly intriguing about near-death experiences is that there are striking similarities between the NDEs of different people. While no two are exactly alike, researchers who have analyzed thousands of NDEs have identified a number of recurring stages and patterns. Or as the NDE researcher and psychiatrist Raymond Moody explained in his book Life After Life: 

“What has amazed me since the beginning of my interest are the great similarities in the reports [of near-death experiences], despite the fact that they come from people of highly varied religious, social, and educational backgrounds.” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

Before examining these similarities, it is important to keep in mind that people who have near-death experiences say that what happened to them can’t be adequately expressed in words. They describe the experience as so profound, and so different from ordinary consciousness, that they feel the need to use metaphors and analogies that offer only a faint approximation of what they experienced. Greyson quotes a 46-year-old businessman who had an NDE during surgery for a ruptured appendix: 

“Try to draw an odor using crayons. You can’t even begin to try, no matter how many crayons you have in your box. That’s what it’s like describing NDEs with words. No matter how many words you use, you can’t really describe what an NDE is like.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

A first common element of the NDE is the out-of-body experience. When an accident or serious illness brings a person close to death, or leaves them clinically dead, some people report the sensation of being outside their physical body and observing it from an external vantage point, most often from above. Raymond Moody shares the experience of a woman whose heart stopped while in hospital: 

“I could feel myself moving out of my body…Then, I started rising upward, slowly… I drifted on up past the light fixture…and then I stopped, floating right below the ceiling, looking down. I felt almost as though I were a piece of paper that someone had blown up to the ceiling. I watched them reviving me from up there!” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

What makes these reports intriguing is that they do not appear to be hallucinations, as some people who report being outside their body have accurately described resuscitation attempts and other events that occurred while they were unconscious or clinically dead. As Greyson explains: 

“How common is it for people who’ve had NDEs to describe accurately what happened around them while they were unconscious? Counseling professor Jan Holden reviewed ninety-three reports of out-of-body perceptions during NDEs. She found that 92 percent were completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent were completely erroneous.”  

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

When hovering above their physical body, some people report experiencing themselves as disembodied consciousness. Others describe occupying some kind of body, though one radically different from the physical body. This new body can pass through physical objects and walls and move from one place to another almost instantaneously.  They also describe it as lacking the dense or heavy sensation associated with the physical body.  

Another common element of NDEs is an extraordinary degree of mental clarity. People report that their thoughts become unusually clear and rapid. One man recalled that “I was aware of an enhanced state of consciousness, in which my mind was extremely active and alert…my thoughts seemed to go almost twice the normal speed, although very clear in nature.” And as Bruce Greyson writes: 

“One of the near-death-experience features that I found most puzzling was the extreme clarity and speed of thought. This is not what I would have expected of an experience that often occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Many people also report a powerful sense of sight. Some describe panoramic, 360-degree vision, while others claim the ability to see through physical objects and walls. 

“One man says that while he was “dead” his vision seemed incredibly more powerful and, in his words, “I just can’t understand how I could see so far.” A woman who recalled this experience notes, “It seemed as if this spiritual sense had no limitations, as if I could look anywhere and everywhere.” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

Another common element of the NDE is the experience of moving rapidly through a dark space or void, sometimes described as a tunnel. One man who went into respiratory arrest after an allergic reaction to an anesthetic recalled: 

“I went through this dark, black vacuum at super speed. You could compare it to a tunnel, I guess. I felt like I was riding on a roller coaster train at an amusement park, going through this tunnel at a tremendous speed.” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

This rapid movement through a tunnel comes to an end with the appearance of a brilliant light that seems to be emanating from some kind of being. As one man recounted:  

“I was in some kind of tunnel that looked like what a tornado funnel would be from the inside: there was a light in the distance…The light was drawing me to it. I moved exceptionally fast down the tunnel and it took no time at all to reach it…The light was emanating from a being that was giving off a very brilliant light as part of his essence…I could not take my attention from the Light Being.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

The encounter with a Being of Light is the most reported element of the near-death experience. According to Bruce Greyson, nearly 90 percent of people who report an NDE describe encountering some kind of luminous being. About one third identify this being in terms consistent with their religious beliefs, while two thirds say that conventional ideas of God are inadequate to describe what they experienced. One man said that “the term ‘God’ seemed too puny a word” for what he encountered. Or as an agnostic woman who had an NDE following a serious accident recalled: 

“I felt completely surrounded and taken up in an indescribably warm and loving Omnipresence of Light. The serenity and unconditional love emanating from it through me is beyond verbal description…IT was me and IT was not me. I was IT and I was not IT. I was in IT, of IT, yet still simultaneously my individual unique beingness. I knew myself to be preciously priceless to this Presence of Light, as if I was an atom of IT.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

The life review is also common in an NDE. The individual is presented with a vivid recollection of the events of their life and sometimes relives the thoughts and emotions they experienced at the time. Although re-experiencing moments of moral failure, or seeing the pain one caused others, can be distressing, people describe the life review as unfolding within an atmosphere of acceptance and unconditional love. 

“Some people characterize this as an educational effort on the part of the being of light.”, writes Raymond Moody. “As they witness the display, the being seems to stress the importance of two things in life: Learning to love other people and acquiring knowledge.” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

In some cases, the review unfolds in chronological order, while others claim the events of their life were presented to them all at once. Or as Moody continues: 

“This review can only be described in terms of memory, since that is the closest familiar phenomenon to it, but it has characteristics which set it apart from any normal type of remembering. First of all, it is extraordinarily rapid. The memories, when they are described in temporal terms, are said to follow one another swiftly, in chronological order. Others recall no awareness of temporal order at all. The remembrance was instantaneous; everything appeared at once, and they could take it all in with one mental glance. However it is expressed, all seem in agreement that the experience was over in an instant of earthly time.” 

Raymond Moody, Life After Life

Deceased friends and loved ones are often encountered in a near-death experience. There are even reports of people encountering someone they did not know had died, only to learn afterward that the person had recently passed away. In the book Closer to the Light, one woman described encountering a friend during her near-death experience. And as she noted: 

“It was three weeks later that my husband decided I was well enough to be told that my dear friend had died in an accident earlier on the day [of my near-death experience].” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

And as Greyson continues: 

“NDEs in which the experiencers are surprised to meet a loved one they had not known had died are not common, but they do occur.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

For some people, an encounter with a deceased loved one marks the final stage of the near-death experience. They report being told that they must return to their physical body because they still have an important purpose to fulfill on earth. Others say they do not know how or why they returned to life, only that the near-death experience suddenly ended and they found themselves back in their physical body. 

Researchers have measured the brain activity of people recounting the events of an NDE and found patterns more consistent with remembering real events than imagined ones. This aligns with the reports of people who say their near-death experience felt more real than ordinary waking life . “My death experience is more real to me than life,” stated one woman. Or as another woman put it: “This was more real than anything on earth. By comparison, my life in my body had been a dream.” And as Greyson continues: 

“Memories of NDEs look like memories of real events, not like memories of fantasies or imagined events. Our brains process NDEs like events that really happened, not like dreams or hallucinations.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

How can we make sense of near-death experiences? Within the dominant scientific paradigm, which holds that consciousness is produced by the brain, they are impossible to explain. They are typically dismissed as hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation or some other biological process of a dying brain. Yet these neurophysiological explanations leave unresolved how, after the heart stops, oxygenated blood no longer flows to the brain and detectable electrical activity has disappeared, people report lucid and vivid experiences and later accurately describe events that occurred around them. 

“If the mind were in fact produced by electrical and chemical changes in the brain, then near-death experiences that happen when the brain is not functioning should be impossible. If the mind is completely dependent on the brain, how could you have vivid and even heightened feelings, thinking, and memory formation when your heart has stopped and your brain activity is largely gone?” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Near-death experiences have led some to consider different theories of consciousness, one of which is the filter theory. A useful way to understand this theory is through the analogy of a radio. A radio does not produce the signal it receives; it picks up a signal that is produced elsewhere and tunes it to a particular frequency. According to the filter theory, the brain functions in a similar way. Rather than producing consciousness, the brain localizes and focuses and limits a consciousness that is produced elsewhere, in ways that are relevant to our individual existence. The great 20th-century American psychologist William James was one of the early proponents of this view, and as he wrote:  

“[The] brain [is] an organ for limiting and determining to a certain form a consciousness elsewhere produced…Consciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo [from scratch] in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the world.”  

William James, Immortality

Many scientists and philosophers of mind claim that the effects of brain damage, senility, and drugs on our experience is evidence that the brain produces consciousness. But the filter theory is also compatible with these effects. Returning to the analogy of the radio, damaging a radio can distort or eliminate the sound it produces without affecting the signal itself. In the same way, brain damage, senility, or drugs may impair the brain’s ability to filter and express consciousness without affecting the consciousness that, according to this theory, exists independently of the brain. 

The filter theory also offers a framework for understanding near-death experiences. For consciousness may be tied to the brain during our physical existence yet continue to exist after the body dies. As William James hypothesized: 

“And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.” 

William James, Immortality

Or as Greyson explains: 

“The questions NDEs raise about how our thoughts and feelings relate to our brains may make you think about whether we are just biological machines, or something more than that. Whether or not the idea of a mind functioning independent of a brain makes sense to you, NDEs should make you skeptical about our current models of how the brain and mind work, and whether there may be more to our thoughts and feelings than electrical and chemical changes in our brain cells…We may eventually come up with another explanation, but until then, minds and brains as separate things, with brains acting to filter our thoughts and feelings, seems to be the most plausible working model.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Although the filter theory of consciousness remains a theory, and the objective reality of near-death experiences may never be established with scientific certainty, this does not mean that we must remain skeptics. For as Carl Jung noted: 

“There is a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe.” 

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Jung believed this is especially true of ideas about life after death. Even if such ideas cannot be proved with certainty, he maintained that forming some positive conception of what happens when we die has great psychological benefits. Or as the psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz explained: 

“Despite the fact that we all know that the question of life after death…can never be answered rationally with any final certainty, according to Jung it is of tremendous importance, if not absolutely essential, that we try to form some idea about it. If a person has no myth about such a question, he is psychically dried up and impoverished and is likely to suffer from a neurosis.” 

Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths

Research supports this view. Studies have found that people who have near-death experiences undergo profound and lasting positive changes in their personality and outlook on life. Some of these changes can be attributed to the fact that their experience left them convinced that there is life after death. Yet studies also suggest that, even among people who have never had an NDE, simply learning about near-death experiences and remaining open to the possibility that our personal consciousness continues after the expiration of our body greatly improves psychological well-being. And as Greyson concludes: 

“So it makes sense to me to live our lives as if this is really the way things are—that we are more than our physical bodies, that some part of us may continue after our bodies stop working, and that we may be intimately connected to something greater than ourselves…My own subjective judgment is that there is a world beyond death. I find no merit in neurophysiological explanations.” 

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Further Readings