Van Lommel and his team interviewed 344 cardiac arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. All the patients had been clinically dead (defined by fibrillation on their EKG), and all interviews were done within a few days of the resuscitation. Eighteen percent reported at least one aspect of the typical near-death experience. Van Lommel marvels at the medical paradox of the cardiac arrest NDE: Consciousness, perception, and memory appear to be functioning during a period when the patient has lost, to quote van Lommel, “all functions of the cortex and the brainstem…. Such a brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn’t hallucinate; it couldn’t do anything at all.”
The fact that only eighteen percent of resuscitated patients have any type of near-death experience led van Lommel to rule out medical explanations such as lack of oxygen to the brain. “With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia…” he wrote, “most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.”
Van Lommel found that his subjects’ medication was statistically unrelated to their likelihood of having a near-death experience. (On the topic of anesthesia as an NDE inducer, Bruce Greyson makes the point that people under anesthesia but not close to death have far fewer NDEs than people who come close to death without being under anesthesia; so, as he puts it, “it’s hard to see how the drugs can be causing the NDE.”)
Fear was also unrelated to frequency of NDE (as was religious belief, gender, and education level). One of the explanations left standing was the last explanation you’d expect to read about in a copy of the Lancet: that perhaps the near-death experience was, to quote van Lommel’s paper, a “state of consciousness…in which identity, cognition and emotion function independently from the body, but retain the possibility of nonsensory perception.” Van Lommel ended his paper by encouraging researchers to explore, or at least be open to, the possibility that the explanation for NDEs is that the people having them are undergoing a transcendent experience. That is to say, their consciousness exists in, as van Lommel described it in a more recent paper, some “invisible and immaterial world.”
Greyson and Mounsey are exploring it. It took some doing. The hospital’s human subjects committee was uncomfortable with the study. To avoid upsetting his subjects, Greyson was asked to remove the word “death” from the consent forms and study title, a tricky undertaking when your study is on near-death experiences. Bear in mind, these are people with life-threatening heart conditions, people who are entering the hospital to have their hearts stopped. Greyson smiles. “And now for the dangerous part: I’m going to ask you if you remember anything.”
We’re back in Greyson’s office, on the first floor of a creaky, converted Charlottesville house with a wide, inviting porch that no one has time to sit on. Greyson squeezes his near-death research in amid his teaching duties and his private psychiatric practice. I frequently get office e-mails back from him when it’s 9 p.m. in his time zone. I’m not sure whether he has a family. On a shelf at his other office, at the hospital, there is a framed photograph of a child and another of some goats. “Is this your little girl?” I had asked him. He said no. I didn’t know what to say next. “Are these your goats?” is what I came up with. He explained that he shared the office. Greyson is dressed today in a deep green button-down shirt and casual dress pants. He wears wire-frame glasses and an even brown mustache. His hair sits neatly on his head, and his hands rest mainly in his lap. There’s a single barbell in the corner under a cabinet. I try, and fail, to picture him using it. Not that he seems unathletic. I just don’t envision him in motion. I envision him sitting. Working. Working and working.
We’ve been talking about the stigma of parapsychology. The University of Virginia is one of only three American universities with a parapsychology research unit or lab. Do they ever regret it? Greyson says there was a fair amount of debate as to whether to accept the original gift with which the parapsychology unit was founded. In 1968, Xerox machine inventor Chester Carlson, upon his wife’s urgings, bequeathed a significant number of his millions to the University of Virginia for research on the question of survival of consciousness after death. The university seems to have made peace with their decision, and with the department. “Though if you talk to individuals,” Greyson says, “you get the whole spectrum. Some people think this research is a waste of time and resources, and others think it’s a valuable contribution to medical science.” Though Greyson probably gets more respect from his parapsychology colleagues than from his peers in psychiatry, he seems to be held in high regard as a researcher here. On his mantel is a bronze bust—the university’s William James Award for best research by a resident. I had never realized how much William James looks like Thomas Jefferson.
“That is Thomas Jefferson,” says Greyson. “That’s the only bust you can get in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
THE FIRST CARDIOLOGIST to get involved in NDE research was Michael Sabom, currently in private practice in Atlanta. Sabom had read the work of psychologist Raymond Moody, Jr., who coined the term “near-death experience” and presented a series of cases in a 1975 book entitled Life After Life. Sabom was intrigued but skeptical. He was dissatisfied with Moody’s anecdotal approach and the fact that no attempt had been made to independently verify the things that people had reported seeing while seeming to be outside their bodies.
Sabom, then a professor of medicine and cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta, decided to do a study of his own, a controlled study. Of 116 cardiac arrest survivors he interviewed, he found six who could recall specific medical details they’d seen during their near-death out-of-body experience. The six patients’ descriptions of what they’d observed during their resuscitation were then compared to the report of the incident in their medical file. In no instances did the medical report contradict statements in the patient’s description. Nor were there any medical errors.
This was not the case with Sabom’s control group. Curious to see whether any old heart patient could come up with a convincingly detailed description of a cardiac resuscitation, Sabom interviewed twenty-five people who had spent time in coronary care units under similar circumstances to those of his subject group. All of them were familiar with the visuals of cardiac emergency: EKG monitors, defibrillator paddles, IV poles, crash carts. The controls were asked to describe, in as much detail as possible, what they would expect to see if their heart stopped beating and hospital staff attempted to resuscitate them. Twenty-two of the twenty-five descriptions contained obvious medical gaffes. Defibrillator paddles were hooked up to air tanks or outfitted with suction cups. The imaginary doctors were punching patients in the solar plexus and pounding on their backs instead of their chests. Hypodermic needles were being used to deliver electric shocks. It was as though chimps had been let loose in the emergency room.
Below is a passage from Sabom’s interview with one of the six NDE patients who’d described the specifics of their resuscitations. It is fairly representative of the level of detail and seeming cohesiveness of these people’s memories:
Where about did they put those paddles on your chest?
Well, they weren’t paddles, Doctor. They were round disks with a handle on them…. They put one up here, I think it was larger than the other one, and they put one down here.
Did they do anything to your chest before they put those things on your chest?
They put a needle in me…They took it two-handed—I thought that was very unusual—and shoved it into my chest like that. He took the heel of his hand and his thumb and shot it home….
Did they do anything else to your chest before they shocked you?
Not them. But the other doctor, when they first threw me up on the table, struck me…. He came back with his fist from way behind his head and he hit me right in the center of my chest…. They shoved a plastic tube like you put in an oil can, they shoved that in my mouth.
Another patient describes a pair of needles on the defibri
llator unit, “one fixed and one which moved,” which was typical of 1970s-era defibrillators. (The man’s heart attack happened in 1973.) Sabom asks him how it moved, to which he replies, “It seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter, or something registering…. The first time it went between one-third and one-half scale. And then they did it again, and this time it went up over one-half scale.” Though the man had been an air force pilot, he had never seen CPR instruments during his training.
Of course, it’s possible Sabom’s subjects were extrapolating from things they’d felt and heard, either just before their heart stopped or some time afterward. (The interviews were done years after the incidents had taken place, so doctors couldn’t be relied upon to verify the timing of specifics.) It’s possible the patients could have heard what the doctors and nurses were saying and subconsciously fabricated visual details to match. Hearing is the last sense to disappear when people lose consciousness. Dozens of articles have run in medical journals over the years addressing concerns about anesthetized patients hearing the things said about them during surgery.* Not just things like, “Nurse, more suction.” Things like, “This woman is lost” and “How can a man be so fat?”—both actual examples reported by patients in a 1998 British Journal of Anaesthesia article.
If it’s possible the patients heard things, it’s also possible they might have partway opened their eyes and seen things. And the things they saw could then have been incorporated into the viewpoint of being up above the scene. A couple of years back, epilepsy researchers at the Program of Functional Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne stumbled onto a site within the brain that, when stimulated, reliably caused the perception of looking down on one’s body from above. So convincing were the images that the patient in question pulled back when asked to raise her knees, because it appeared to her that her knees were about to hit her in the face. The visuals were limited to the person’s own body, however, and not the furniture or equipment or researchers around it. Still, one can imagine a blending of this viewpoint with information gleaned from things heard or seen.
The holy grail of NDE research, then, the best evidence that what seemed to be an extrasensory perception was indeed extrasensory, would be a deaf and blind patient: someone who “sees” things during a near-death experience that are later verified and that couldn’t have been inferred from something he or she saw or heard—because he or she can’t see or hear.
The closest Sabom has come to this is a woman named Pam Reynolds, who, in 1991, underwent brain surgery with her eyes taped shut, and molded, clicking inserts inside her ears. (Watching the brain stem’s responses to clicks is a way of monitoring its function.) Despite this, and despite the fact that her EEG was flat, meaning all brain activity had stopped (surgeons were repairing a massive aneurism and had drained the blood from her brain), she reported having “seen” the Midas Rex bone saw being used on her skull. She said it looked like an electric toothbrush and that its interchangeable attachments were kept in what looked like a socket wrench case. I went on the Midas Rex web page to have a look at their bone saws. Indeed, bone saws look nothing like any saw I’ve ever seen. They do look like electric toothbrushes—not the kind you or I might use, but the kind dentists use, with interchangeable heads and a metal handle attached to a long flexible tube that leads to a motor housing. After I’d recovered from reading the copy (“true high-speed bone-dissecting performance”!…“For cutting, drilling, reaming…”), I clicked on the Instrument Case page, where the various attachments were shown in a box resembling nothing so much as a socket wrench case.
But why was Reynolds unable to describe any of the people in the room? Sabom nominates “weapon focus phenomenon,” which you can read all about in a 1990 issue of the Journal of Law and Human Behavior. Research has shown that victims of armed criminals are able to accurately recall the weapon used on them ninety-one percent of the time, and the guy holding it only thirty-five percent of the time. So perhaps the bone saw had hijacked Pam Reynolds’s attention. Or, who knows, perhaps she paid a visit to the Midas Rex web page, too. This is the trouble with anecdotes.
Though there is no deaf-blind NDE study, there is a study of blind people who have had NDEs. Psychology professor and International Association for Near-Death Studies cofounder Kenneth Ring and then–psychology Ph.D. candidate Sharon Cooper contacted eleven organizations for the blind, explaining that they were looking for blind people who had had near-death or out-of-body experiences. They ended up with thirty-one subjects (and a book, called Mindsight, published in 1999). Twenty-four of these subjects reported being able to “see” during their experiences. Some “saw” their bodies lying below them; some “saw” doctors or physical features of the room or building they were in; others “saw” deceased relatives or religious figures.
Strangely, the subjects who reported “seeing” these things included people who had been blind from birth: individuals whose dreams almost never contain visual images, just sounds and tactile impressions. An example is a man named Brad, who reported having floated up above the building, where he could see snowbanks along the streets, of “a very soft kind of wet” slushy snow. He saw a playground and a trolley going down the street. When asked if perhaps he did not see but somehow sensed these things, Brad replied, “I clearly visualized them. I remember being able to see quite clearly.” (Others were less decisive: “It was seeing but it wasn’t vision,” said a woman named Claudia.) Understandably, the experience was confusing and, in one woman’s words, frightening. “It was like hearing words and not being able to understand them,” she told Ring, “but knowing they were words.”
I was mainly interested in whether any specific, unique details of what the blind people had “seen” could be verified by others who had seen these details, too. The book includes a chapter on corroborative evidence, but it is a bit disappointing. Often the people who could have verified what the blind people said they’d seen were impossible to track down, or did not recall any details of the events. One exception was a woman named Nancy, who lost her sight as a result of surgical complications. (They accidently cut and then sewed shut a large vein near her heart.) After the mishap, on her way into emergency surgery, she “saw” both her lover and the father of her child standing down the hallway from where her gurney was being wheeled toward an elevator. Ring tracked down both the lover and the dad, and both confirmed that they had watched her gurney go by from down the hall. However, there was some question as to exactly when she had gone blind (i.e., was it before or after the gurney ride?). And it’s hardly the kind of whiz-bang dazzle shot—to borrow Gary Schwartz’s terminology—that you hope for. You’d want the two men, or at least one of them, to have been “seen” (and then verified by someone else) doing something unique, something other than just being there—eating a banana, say, or tripping over an IV pole.
The most impressive near-death dazzle shot I’ve come across was not something reported by a blind person. It was a sneaker, seen by a migrant worker named Maria, who had a heart attack in Seattle. Maria told her ICU social worker—a woman whose parents did her the gross disservice of naming her Kimberly when her last name was Clark*—that she had not only spent time watching herself being worked on by the ER team, but had drifted out of the building and over the parking lot. It was from this perspective that she noticed a tennis shoe on a ledge on the north end of the third floor of the building. Later that day, Kimberly Clark went up to the third floor and found a tennis shoe where Maria had reported seeing one. Unfortunately, she didn’t bring along a witness.
The sneaker story eventually made its way to Kenneth Ring. In much the same way as unverified anecdotes of blind people’s near-death “sights” prompted his Mindsight study, Ring set out in search of other “cases of the Maria’s shoe variety,” cases he would then attempt to verify. He found three, which he describes in a 1993 article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Oddly
, two of the three incidents involve shoes. In the first anecdote, Ring communicated with an ICU nurse who had returned to work from vacation wearing a new pair of plaid shoelaces. A woman she helped resuscitate saw her the next day (presumably in a different pair of shoes) and said, “Oh, you’re the one with the plaid shoelaces.” When the nurse expressed surprise, the woman said, “I saw them. I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died.” Another out-of-body heart attack patient reports to a nurse that he saw a red shoe on the hospital roof; a skeptical resident gets a janitor to let him up onto the roof, where he finds a red shoe (and loses his skepticism). No doubt someone out there is working on a journal article about “shoe focus phenomenon,” but until then, the out-of-body traveler’s affinity for footwear must remain a mystery.
Ring interviewed both these nurses, though apparently could not track down any third parties to corroborate the stories. It’s possible the patients had somehow seen these items before surgery. It’s also possible, in the case of the shoe on the roof, that it’s a coincidence. You can’t be sure. You’re relying on one person’s claim. The danger of that is best expressed in the form of a hand-glued last-minute errata slip in Ring’s book:
Readers are advised to disregard entirely the…Appendix, in which a case of a blind woman who purported to have an NDE is described…. We discovered, to our chagrin, that this case has fraudulent aspects. Dr. McGill, who offered this account to us in good faith, now believes she was deceived by the woman in question.
That’s why I like the computer-near-the-ceiling project. It’s a study, not an anecdote. Unfortunately, it’s a slow-moving study. Because of limitations imposed by the human subjects committee, Greyson has interviewed fewer than thirty subjects to date.