The Near-Death Experience: A Reality Check?

Near-death and out-of-body experiences do not prove existence without a functioning brain. Despite expectations that cardiac patients would report seeing strategically placed markers during resuscitation, no corroborative empirical evidence for extra-corporeal cognition has emerged. These experiences occur as consciousness returns, not during brain death, and the memory required for recall is set down at that return. Most recollections are geo-physical, anthropomorphic, banal, and dream-like, offering nothing revelatory about life without a brain. With prevalence rates below 1% globally, subjects may have predisposed brains, and the experience itself may be a transient epiphenomenon similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper critically reviews assertions that near-death and out-of-body experiences (ND/OBE) offer proof of extra-corporeal existence when the brain is supposedly “dead”. While this field has almost moved away from mere anecdotal recording, the current trend is focussed on demonstrating existence without functional brains. These endeavours have fallen far short of anticipated results—that cardiac patients would report on strategically-placed markers around acute resuscitation units. Two problems arise: a failure to produce corroborative empirical evidence for extra-corporeal cognition (a) when the brain is “dead”, (or “clinically dead”, so-called) and (b) how the memory required for recall could paradoxically be set down at that critical time-point. The view advanced here is that ND/OBE occur as subjects’ states are returning to complete resumption of conscious-awareness and which, from several published accounts, is particularly abrupt but which nevertheless accounts perfectly for memory—and recall. Similar transcendental adventures accompanying returns to conscious-awareness occur with other preceding states of reduced consciousness. Most recollections are intensely geo-physical, anthropomorphic, banal and illogical: their dream-like fantasy provides nothing revelatory about life without a brain, or importantly, about other supposed cosmic contexts. Additionally, it is proposed that since prevalence rates are so extremely low (<1% globally), the few subjects undergoing ND/OBE may have predisposed brains, genetically, structurally or resulting from previous psychological stress. In a somewhat similar vein to post-traumatic stress disorder, subjects with predisposed brains exhibit markedly changed post-experiential phenotypes, so that the ND/OBE itself could be viewed as a transient, accompanying epiphenomenon.