“It’s worth paying attention to the fact that people who have had these experiences are changed, and universally so,” says Bellg, who interviewed many such people for her book Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them. They feel less caught up in everyday worries and cares, and they have a new or heightened sense of altruism, or selfless concern for others. Often, people who have had an NDE say they no longer fear death. How such experiences happen may be less important than the impact that they have, says Laurin Bellg, MD, a critical care doctor at ThedaCare Health System in Appleton, WI. The light may simply be the last thing the eyes are capable of seeing before unconsciousness sets in. It happens when a patient’s vision narrows so that it resembles a tunnel. He explains that the sense of seeing a tunnel with a bright light at the end, for example, comes from the lack of blood flow to brain. Some parts of the experience may be easier to explain, Nelson says. The fact that you have people who can fully recall something, who appear to have full consciousness, when the brain is shut down, suggests that consciousness may be a separate entity from the brain." “In our study, we had confirmed consciousness present for at least 3-5 minutes,” he says. Parnia’s research, however, does not support that conclusion. People are not having experiences when there’s a true flatline EEG.” “We don’t know if the EEG is actually flatlined, and, if it is, we don’t know that the conscious experience takes place during the flat line. “Wires get jiggled, signals cross,” he says. People are scrambling around equipment gets bumped, which can throw off later analysis. The chaos of an emergency room can make it difficult to pinpoint when the heart or brain might stop working. He points out that electroencephalograms (EEGs), which monitor brain activity, can be very difficult to interpret during resuscitation. Nelson says these can be powerful, sometimes life-changing events for patients, but he's skeptical that they happen when the brain has completely shut down. “Many out-of-body experiences can be explained by triggering REM consciousness,” says Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky and author of The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience. His research has led him to conclude that people who have had NDEs have brains that are more likely to blend waking consciousness with REM consciousness, the phase of sleep when dreaming happens. Neurologist Kevin Nelson, MD, also investigates near-death experiences. An encounter with a spirit, such as a deceased relative or divine being.A sense of being in a different, unearthly place.Feelings of being separated from the body.Patients must meet certain criteria, which include: The Greyson scale lists 16 things common to NDEs. The author of that last study - Bruce Greyson, MD - developed the tool used to establish NDEs. Researchers at the University of Virginia found that NDEs happened in 11 of the 116 cardiac arrest patients who took part in their 2003 study, published in General Hospital Psychiatry.In 2001, researchers in the Netherlands reported that 41 of their 344 study participants, who had each had a cardiac arrest, had an NDE.One of those patients, the researchers verified, accurately recalled events that occurred minutes after cardiac arrest. Nine had had an NDE, while two of the patients were able to describe events happening while doctors attempted to resuscitate them. In a 2014 study, Parnia and his colleagues interviewed 101 people who had been revived after cardiac arrest. Though unable to explain how patients in this state can have such vivid experiences, some research supports their claims. “They really have gone biologically beyond death.” Previous Studies Offer Clues “In the context of cardiac arrest, they are not near death,” says Parnia. Patients are unconscious, and their brains register no activity. When the brain stops, blood quickly stops flowing to the brain. “These are anecdotal reports, but there are a large number of them going back decades, and these testimonies suggest that something is going on,” says Parnia. In some cases, people whose hearts have stopped beating describe out-of-body experiences, in which they feel like they’ve left their bodies and seen the efforts to revive them. These incidents often feature tunnels leading to a bright light, spiritual encounters, meetings with deceased loved ones, and other things that seem mystical. The stories that some of them share are often called near-death experiences, or NDEs. Each year, as many as 1 out of 5 people whose hearts stop will be revived.
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