At the University of Virginia Health System’s Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, scientists are studying an array of anomalous phenomena, including near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and memories of past lives. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at UVHS and director of DOPS, is a pioneer in the study of near-death experiences. First described in ancient times, near-death experiences, or NDEs, happen when patients are critical or when their hearts have briefly stopped. Typically, they describe seeing visions of a bright light and feeling themselves carried down a tunnel toward it. Along the way deceased relatives or spiritual figures may appear offering comfort. It is by almost all reports a transformative experience.
This is what Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi terms the “Big Wow,” shorthand for her description of the connection between “the very early quantum computing universe and our mind.”
Greyson, a soft-spoken man who has studied NDEs for 30 years, explains that although he does not necessarily believe in the existence of the soul, that possibility inspires his curiosity. “I believe that our current understanding of humans is woefully inadequate,” he says. “I think the spiritual traditions that we have are good starting points for researchers to look at what might be going on. I don’t accept them as definitive answers. I accept them as starting points for developing hypotheses that we can test, but I’m not happy with the answers we have now, either from science or from religion.”
Greyson reports that about 10 percent of the people who go into cardiac arrest have an NDE and report knowing details of activities that occurred while they were unconscious. Frequently, individuals tell of watching from above the operating table as doctors and nurses work on their bodies. From a scientific standpoint, the most significant aspect of many NDEs is that the individual’s brain should not have been functioning at the time of the event. “We have a lot of well-documented cases where we have EEG and other evidence that the brain is not functioning, and yet people will say, ‘I was thinking clearer than I ever have before,’” Greyson says.
Dutch cardiologist and near-death researcher Pim van Lommel notes that, at the moment of an NDE, “these people are not only conscious, their consciousness is even more expansive than ever. They can think extremely clearly, have memories going back to their earliest childhood, and experience an intense connection with everything and everyone around them. And yet their brain shows no activity at all.”
If consciousness is the product of brain activity, near-death experiences should not happen. At the very least, the contrary evidence suggests that the standard understanding of consciousness is incomplete. Peter Fenwick, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London, wrote in a paper, “The brain-identity theory says that consciousness ends with brain death. But if it can be shown that people can acquire information when they are unconscious and out of their body, it would be indisputable evidence that consciousness is separate from the brain.”
Again, the question comes back to the definition of evidence. Greyson attempted to document an NDE by programming a laptop computer with simple colored images (an airplane, a sailboat, a butterfly, a flower, a kite), one of which was displayed on the computer screen at random. He placed the laptop on top of a monitor about 10 feet off the floor of an operating room, beyond the view of patients undergoing heart surgery. In this operation, doctors induced cardiac arrest in the patient. If any of the patients had been able to escape their bodies and observe the room from above, they would have been able to see the computer screen and describe it later.
Greyson ran his experiment on 50 patients, but not one of them reported having an NDE. On the other hand, most denied that they had ever been unconscious at all. “One of the factors involved is that, before their cardiac arrest was induced, these patients were all given medication that inhibited them from forming memories of the procedure,” Greyson says. “We underestimated how complete the drug-induced memory inhibition would be.”
