The Reality of a Near-Death Experience - Essay Example

The Reality of a Near-Death Experience School The Reality of a Near-Death Experience A near death experience, as the term implies, is anexperience of life after death without being practically dead. They are “primarily mental images experienced on the threshold of death” (Bailey and Yates, 2013). Collection and analysis of the scanty accounts of near death experience suggests that the individual who has a near death experience feels like the soul has departed from the body and reached a bright light thus dismissing into another reality with the all-encompassing sensations of love and bliss (Fowler, 2008). However, findings of the research to date are contrary to this popular belief and deny the existence of anything paranormal about near death experiences (Mobbs and Watt, 2011). Firstly, the number of people that have had a near death experience is so small that any evidence collected from them is just too insufficient to render the opinion reliable. According to Shmeid et al. (1999), only 3 per cent Americans have come up with a declaration of having a near death experience. The vast majority of people have no clue as to what a near death experience feels like, and so there is a clear void of near death experience being established as a supernatural experience through a majority. “[T]he low occurrence rate and miscellaneousness of [near death] experiences refute any argumentation…” (Engmann, 2014). Most survivalists report having gone through the near death experience from mostly one to very rarely three times in their whole life (Serrano, 2013). Scientific knowledge implies that in order for an individual to be able to remember any experience, the experience needs to be encoded and represented in the memory (Braithwaite, 2008). However, when this principle is applied to near death experience, all accounts of witnessing supernatural activity on the part of the survivalists appear doubtful because it is not possible to have the memory of an experience that does not involve the use of memory in the first place; “sufficient neural activity to encode the experience, to represent the experience, and to store the experience” (Braithwaite, 2008) is needed to record an experience which is simply absent in the case of near death experience. Secondly, there is a lot of discrepancy among the signs of supernatural activity narrated by the survivalists of near death experience. In the study conducted by van Lommel et al. (2001) on the survivalists of near death experience, 50 per cent of the witnesses reported being aware of the state of death, 32 per cent said that they remembered having met dead people, 31 per cent expressed the memories of moving through a tunnel, and 24 per cent explained how they had an out-of-body experience. In addition to that, while near death experiences are commonly associated with positive experiences of bliss and euphoria, 44 per cent of the witness in van Lommel et al’s (2001) study associated their near death experiences with negative experiences and feelings, which suggests that near death experiences are of two types; pleasurable and distressing (IANDS, 1996). The majority of survivalists of near death experiences are the ones who have gone through some form of trauma including accident, surgery, or anesthesia (Holzer, 2003), so their account of near death experience is most likely an interpretation of their traumatic experience and the feelings and sensations underpinning it. Thirdly, neuroscience has explanation for the signs of supernatural experience narrated by the witnesses of near death experience. In light of neuroscience, near death experiences are a result of normal brain’s function when it goes awry in the course of a traumatic and not necessarily harmful event. For example, ‘walking corpse’ or ‘Cotard’ syndrome explains the survivors’ awareness of being dead as was reported in Lommel et al’s study. Cotard syndrome is an intriguing syndrome which generates a feeling of being dead. McKay and Cipolotti (2007) reported the experience of LU, a 24-year old patient who had Cotard delusions. Although she was in National Hospital, Queen Square, in London, yet she believed she was in heaven and suspected flu to have caused her death. It took her a week for the delusions to diminish. Anatomically, Cotard syndrome is linked with prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex (Feinberg and Keenan, 2005) and can occur after trauma while the patient is in the advanced stages of multiple sclerosis and typhoid. The reasons behind occurrence of Cotard syndrome are still not known, though they might be the patient’s attempt to sensitize the absurdity of experience. Different experiments have been conducted to date as part of scientific research to generate the feelings, signs, and symptoms of near death experience in the participants. One such experiment was conducted by a California organization studying lucid dreaming that conditioned the volunteers to dream of near death experiences one of which required them to fly all the way to a light pouring in from the end of a tunnel (Wolchover, 2012). Their experiment led the researchers to the conclusion that the heavenly visions experienced by the volunteers must be produced by their minds and not by means of a supernatural phenomenon. Four groups of volunteers were trained in the sleep experiment carried out at the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles so that they become able to perform mental steps during night-awakening from the sleep, which are typical of out-of-body experiences (Wolchover, 2012). After they managed to separate themselves from their bodies, the experiment participants were conditioned to dream of flying inside a tunnel toward a light displaying at the end. 18 participants managed to successfully dream of this experience. In a press release, the center leader reported, “Some of the test subjects not only succeeded in reproducing the out-of-body flight through a tunnel, but also enjoyed the ecstasy typical of the experience, and even flew all the way to the light and met their deceased relatives there” (Raduga cited in Wolchover, 2012). Out-of-body experiences are interpreted in terms of feelings of the soul fleeing outside the body. These experiences are seen in the patients of interrupted sleep patterns instantly before they sleep or wake up. For example, in sleep paralysis, the patient has awareness of the external world; the condition is associated with hypnagogia in which the patient has dreamlike tactile, visual, or auditory hallucinations, and the sensation is out-of-body experience as the patients report floating above their bodies (Cheyne and Girard, 2009). Olaf Blanke and colleagues have reported the possibility of artificially inducing the out-of-body experiences through stimulation of the right temporoparietal junction (Blanke and Arzy, 2004). Out-of-body experiences happen in the case of failure of integration of an individual’s body with multisensory information that causes phenomenological aspects of self-representation to be disrupted. Contrary to the general perception that out-of-body experiences occur when a person nears death, these experiences are seen in people when they are “relaxed, asleep, dreaming, medicated, using psychedelic drugs, anesthetized, or experiencing seizures or migraine headaches” (Lilienfeld et al., 2011). Similarly, neuroscience offers explanation for the very popular tunnel experience of the survivalists; “A great deal of what happens in the brain during near-death experiences comes about because of a reaction to the crisis of having low blood flow, regardless of how briefly” (Nelson, 2011). As blood drains from the head instantly before the loss of consciousness, it is the retina that is the most sensitive to failure rather than the brain. Failure of the retina causes darkness to ensue and the failure takes place outside inwards, which explains the signature tunnel experience reported by the survivalists. Feelings, signs, and symptoms associated with near death experiences have also been indicated by patients of different conditions and diseases. For example, migraine headaches produce hallucinations which include witnessing dazzlingly bright shimmering light. One of the patients of migraine headache described this experience in these words, “It expanded, becoming an enormous arc stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp, glittering, zigazgging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors” (Sacks cited in Shermer, 2013). This description is quite comparable with the description of a survivor of near death experience, “[I was] in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them” (Alexander cited in Shermer, 2013). To conclude, there is nothing supernatural about a near death experience. Accounts of supernatural experiences from the scanty witnesses of a near death experience can be explained in the light of neuroscience. Common feelings and sensations reported by the survivalists of near death experience include out-of-body experience, experience of flying toward a bright light at the end of a tunnel, and euphoria. Experimental studies to date have successfully generated same experiences artificially in the subjects. Neuroscience offers rational explanations for almost all feelings and signs traditionally associated with near death experiences. Most of these feelings and sensations are a product of the activity of brain, nervous system, and different states of consciousness that an individual experiences while being alive. It is, therefore, irrational to conceive the accounts of survivalists of near death experiences supernaturally. References: Bailey, L. W., and Yates, J. (2013). The Near-Death Experience: A Reader. Routledge. Blanke, O. and Arzy, S. (2004) The out-of-body experience: disturbed self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. Neuroscientist. 11, 16–24. Braithwaite, J. J. (2008). Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of the Dying Brain. The Skeptic. 21(2). Retrieved from http://www.skeptic.org.uk/magazine/onlinearticles/497-braithwaite-dying-brain. Cheyne, J. A., and Girard, T.A. (2009) The body unbound: Vestibularmotor hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. Cortex. 45, 201–215. Engmann, B. (2014). Near-Death Experiences: Heavenly Insight or Human Illusion? Springer Science & Business Media. 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The God Impulse: Is Religion Hardwired into the Brain? Simon and Schuster. Schmied, I. et al. (1999) Todesna¨heerfahrungen in Ost- und Westdeutschland – eine empirische Untersuchung. In Todesna¨he: interdisziplina¨ re Zuga¨nge zu einem außergewo¨hnlichen Pha¨nomen (Knoblaub, H. and Soeffner, H.G., eds), pp. 217–250, Universita¨tsverlag Konstanz. Serrano, A. (2013). The End of Death: How Near-Death Experiences Prove the Afterlife. John Hunt Publishing. Shermer, M. (2013, Mar. 19). Why a Near-Death Experience Isn’t Proof of Heaven. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-near-death-experience-isnt-proof-heaven/. van Lommel, P. et al. (2001). Near-Death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. Lancet. 358, 2039–2045. Wolchover, N. (2012, Mar. 16). Near-Death Experiences are Lucid Dreams, Experiment Finds. Livescience. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/19106-death-experiences-lucid-dreams.html. 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