| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
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The boundaries between Life and Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends, and where the other begins?
– Edgar Allen Poe
In death, science is pitted against the equivalent of the astronomer’s black hole: an impenetrable information barrier. A black hole is encircled by an “event horizon,” a boundary beyond which the speed needed to escape from the black hole is greater than the speed of light – the fastest that any material object can travel. When we die, each of us makes a solo flight across the event horizon of death and gives up in that final, involuntary act all possibility of sending back news of what we find.
Or do we? Claims to the contrary, that contact can be established with those beyond the grave, have been made on and off for many years, most forcefully by the Victorian spiritualists. Volumes have been written on the exploits of those early mediums, who insisted they were in touch with the spirit world. But sadly there is no credible evidence to back them up. On the contrary, the field is littered with the names of scientists who have been duped or beguiled by professional illusionists.
One of the first to succumb was Sir William Crookes, a brilliant and innovative chemist and physicist. In the early 1870s, long before he became president of the Royal Society, Crookes conducted experiments with the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Homes and attested to the veracity of a ghost called Katie King materialized by the young and attractive medium Miss Florence Cook. His involvement lent respectability and weight to the early spiritualist movement. But, in fact, Crookes was the not the impartial observer that appearance suggested. Almost certainly he was Florence Cook’s lover and, being married with a large family, was in no position to destroy her reputation even had he wished to do so.
By the turn of the last century, spiritualism had been largely discredited. Medium after medium confessed or was exposed as fraudulent, and sober minds must have begun to wonder how so many people had been taken in by the paraphernalia of the séance, with its conveniently darkened rooms and absurd manifestations. The English biologist Thomas Huxley scoffed: “The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of ‘spiritualism’ is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper here than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium,’ hired at a guinea a séance!”
Few things change, and even today – especially today – we are not immune to far-out claims by those ready to profit from our gullibility. Pyramidology, ancient astronauts, the Bermuda triangle, flying saucers and the rest are all hugely popular with those seeking escape from the banalities of the workaday world. The message is clear: if we want to believe in something badly enough, imagination will fill in the blanks and make even the flimsiest of accounts, the most dubious of evidence, seem plausible.
Who knows? Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in some of the phenomena that today might come under the loose headings of fringe science or the paranormal. Ghosts, poltergeists, telepathy, and such may eventually be found to have some basis in reality. But we are wasting our time in building theories of what they may be or how they may fit into a wider scheme of nature until the evidence is more compelling.
Death seems to be truly like a black hole. Once across the threshold we are forever out of touch with the universe to which we belonged.
And yet, there may conceivably be a way around this news censorship. At least in principle, we could send spacecraft on data-gathering missions to within a hair’s breadth of the black hole’s event horizon without actually passing over. In a similar way, individuals who come near to death but then unexpectedly survive give us an opportunity to study at close range the boundary between life and what may lie beyond. They effectively serve as human sample-return probes to the mysterious frontier between this world and the next.
By good fortune, aided in recent years by improved resuscitation techniques, people do occasionally come very close to death before going on to make a spectacular and complete recovery. It may be that for periods lasting from a few seconds up to extreme cases of an hour or more, their breathing and pulse stop and they show no trace whatsoever of being conscious. They may even have been diagnosed and pronounced clinically dead. Yet, in many cases, having revived, near-death patients report having had a most remarkable experience during the very time when their vital signs were undetectable. Despite all outward appearances, they recollect being totally aware of everything happening around them. Moreover, they tell of having made a most extraordinary journey – floating above their body, traveling along a tunnel, reviewing their past life, and encountering a benign intelligence. For many, indeed, the near-death experience stands as the most powerful and convincing testimony yet for the existence of an afterlife.
Unusual experiences close to death have been reported on and off throughout history. Saint Paul wrote of the occasion when he felt himself snatched up into “third heaven”: “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I know not: God knoweth.”
The nineteenth-century explorer David Livingstone also recalled a near-fatal encounter:
Starting and looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me... He caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground... The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though I was quite conscious of all that was happening... This singular condition was not the result of any mental process... [It] is probably produced in all animals killed by carnivora; and, if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death.The concept of an almost universally peaceful end to life, even under traumatic conditions, was perhaps less well appreciated in the past than it is now. Before the advent of modern resuscitation methods, fewer people returned from the shadowy transition zone between life and death, and probably only a small fraction of those that did went on to voice their experiences. It would have been difficult to fit any sort of pattern to such sporadic accounts. Doom-mongers, of which there were plenty, could still warn solemnly of the impending “agony of death” despite counterclaims by some experienced physician-surgeons, such as Sir William Osler (1849-1919), that this was nonsense.
But today there is nothing unusual in patients being revived following cardiac arrest – the so-called Lazarus syndrome. Those who can recollect all or part of the time when their heart was stopped recall no sensation of pain, fear, or anguish. On the contrary, their overwhelming impression is one of total quietude. As Livingstone suggested more than a century ago, it seems that man (and probably other higher animals) is equipped to shut off unnecessary distress close to death. Apparently, we do have a kind of physiological switch that, when thrown, allows us to carry on to the end in a haze of tranquility. In particular, the release into the brain of natural opiates called endorphins is known to block the experience of pain. But this being so, if we are equipped with a mechanism to make death easier, then how did it come about?
Evolution is not compassionate. It operates under no obligation to make life more comfortable just for our convenience. Simply, it nurtures the development of those characteristics that, from the outset, serve to improve an individual’s chances of surviving long enough to breed. There can be no survival benefit whatsoever in a mechanism whose sole function is to make death easier to bear. From an evolutionary standpoint, a dying individual is irrelevant, the fate of his genes already sealed. Yet not so irrelevant is the ability of individuals to cope with, and thereby survive, extreme pain or injury during the normal course of life. And here we begin to see a possible origin for our near-death ameliorative.
Pain is the body’s way of telling the brain that something is wrong, that corrective action is needed – fast. But too much pain is itself harmful. If part of the body is very badly damaged, then it may be counterproductive to keep on flooding the brain with pain signals. Far better, surely, to disconnect the pain and allow an already overloaded system the chance to recover in peace. Given that such a safety cutoff mechanism has evolved, it could well be that it is evoked, as a matter of course, during the final and irrevocable breakdown of the organism close to death. The autonomic systems of the body do not actually “know” they are dying; they merely react to severe internal disruption in the only way they can – by shutting off all tactile signals to the brain.
So, we can readily put together a working hypothesis of why the process of dying should seem generally peaceful, and even pleasant. Other aspects of the near-death experience, though, are not so easily resolved. How can it be, for instance, that patients who outwardly appear deeply unconscious, who may even have been pronounced dead by a qualified physician, are able to see and hear every event happening around them? How is it that such people can apparently be aware of their surroundings, not from the familiar vantage point of their bodies, but from an elevated view, outside themselves? And how can we account for the other, still more extraordinary experiences associated with the near-death state – the tunnel, the being of light, and so on? Such experiences are not rare, nor are they exclusively a modern phenomenon. Yet it is only within the past three decades or so that they have attracted serious scientific attention.
The spotlight of science, and the awareness of society in general, was first turned on near-death experiences by a psychiatrist from Georgia, Raymond Moody. In his bestselling book Life After Life, originally published in 1975, Moody presented extracts from more than a hundred cases of patients who had recovered after having been pronounced dead. These reports seemed to show that there is a remarkably consistent core of elements to the near-death experience. Moreover, unbeknownst to Moody before the publication of his book, two investigators had been engaged in similar work and had come to virtually the same conclusions. They were Ralph Noyes, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a leading pioneer in psychiatric theory relating to dying patients.
Noyes had been steadily accumulating case histories over a number of years. After analyzing them, he resolved that there were three main stages to the near-death experience. The first, exemplified by a struggle for survival, he called “resistance.” This was followed by “review” – an episode, often accompanied by an out-of-body sensation, during which the victim saw incidents from his personal past. Stage three, or “transcendence,” involved a hard-to-describe feeling of oneness with everything, combined with that of moving toward some unknown destination.
In 1972, Noyes suggested that a better understanding of this final mystical experience might help physicians in dealing with terminally ill patients. It might, as it were, take the sting out of death by offering some credible evidence of a life to come. Kübler-Ross subsequently threw her support behind this idea, pointing out that she had heard similar accounts of NDE’s from her own patients. As early as 1968, she claimed, she had become aware of the phenomenon but was reluctant to talk about it for fear of ridicule.
Drawing together these early findings of Moody, Noyes, Kübler-Ross and others, it was possible to see within the overall near-death experience a number of recurrent themes. While not all these themes occur together in every instance, they do seem to crop up time and again within any given sample of subjects. A typical “full-blown” NDE might run something like this:
A patient has just been rushed into the emergency room of a hospital having suffered a massive heart attack. She is aware of herself lying on a table, surrounded by medical staff and various life-support equipment. She feels acute and rising discomfort. At the moment of greatest physical distress, she hears herself pronounced dead. Immediately, all pain and fear disappear and are replaced by an extraordinary sense of peace and well-being. The patient is surprised to find herself apparently floating several feet above her own lifeless body. In this detached state, she is able to watch and listen with unusual clarity to the medical team at work. Later, she will be able to recall every detail of the resuscitation procedure and the conversation of her attendants. She will be able to describe details of the intravenous injection of drugs, the heart massage, and the use of a defibrillator, even though she was not previously familiar with these techniques.Inspired by Moody’s accounts, Kenneth Ring, a psycholoogist at the University of Connecticut, was encouraged to check the findings through research of his own. After interviewing 102 people who through accident, illness, or attempted suicide had come close to death, he published his results in the book Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience, published in 1980. Just over half of his subjects recounted experiences that matched some or all of the aspects of a classic full-blown NDE. Ring went on to identify five key elements of the NDE, which, he found, tended to occur in the same order. These were: a feeling of peace, an out-of-body sensation, the tunnel, the light, and penetration of the light. Each successive stage was less frequently reported than the one before: peace (60 percent), out-of-body (37 percent), tunnel (23 percent), light (16 percent), and penetration of light (10 percent). Ring’s findings confirmed and, in a sense, legitimized Moody’s earlier work.
A new sensation takes over. The subject feels as if she is moving along a dark tunnel. Ahead, at the end of the tunnel, is a white light. This grows increasingly bright, until it is indescribably brilliant though somehow not blinding. Gradually, the light resolves itself into a humanoid shape and the subject is overwhelmed by the love and benevolence that this being of light seems to radiate. In some nonverbal way, the being communicates with the subject and asks her, in effect, whether her life has been well spent. There then follows a rapid review of the subject’s life, in which the most important events appear as if projected onto a panoramic screen. Although extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive, the whole review seems to take only a few seconds.
By this stage, the subject is reluctant to give up her newfound state of peace and serenity. So content is she that she does not want to go back. However, at the last moment, she encounters a barrier beyond which she feels certain there could be no reprieve. The being of light indicates that she must return, and with that the subject is abruptly jolted back into her own body.
In 1982, a Gallup poll suggested that 8 million adult Americans, or roughly one in twenty, had gone through a near-death experience. Of those interviewed, fully half of those who had at some point been near death reported having had an NDE. For the purposes of the poll, the experience was broken down into ten (not necessarily consecutive) elements, with the following results: peace (32 percent), life review (32 percent), entering another world (32 percent), out-of-body (26 percent), accurate visual perception (23 percent), encountering other beings (23 percent), audible sounds of voices (17 percent), light (14 percent), tunnel (9 percent), and subsequent incidences of precognition (6 percent). The Gallup poll figures were not in close agreement with Ring’s, but that is not surprising. In such a subjective area as this, wide statistical variations are to be expected.
Since the Gallup poll was conducted, more and more people have become interested in NDE’s, until today there is a large number of societies, journals, and self-help groups devoted to them. The growing body of evidence seems to rule out the possibility of mistake or hoax. Even so, a certain amount of skepticism is healthy. When such large numbers of people (including respected scientists) have already been taken in by hysteria over spiritualism and, more recently, by flying saucers, the “Geller effect,” ancient astronauts and crop circles, it pays to be constantly on our intellectual guard. Millions can be wrong. Millions can be persuaded by media hype and self-proclaimed experts that something is genuine when, in fact, it is merely wishful thinking.
Yet, in the case of NDE’s, it would be churlish to deny that there is real substance to the claims. Too many people, most of whom have nothing to gain from sensationalism, are involved. Too many people have apparently undergone profound personal transformations as a result of NDE’s for the phenomenon simply to be dismissed out of hand.
A study of 344 NDE patients by Peter Fenwick, an eminent neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, showed that no fewer than 86 percent felt that their experience had made them more religious. Following an NDE, most people claim to be less materialistic, more grateful for life and more concerned with the welfare of others. Melvin Morse, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, has focused especially on near-death experiences of children. He comments that NDE patients “have a zest for living which is hard to describe.” Similarly, Kenneth Ring has found that “As a result of their experience they often exhibit a joie de vivre, a greater feeling of self-worth and a more compassionate concern for others... They frequently develop a strong belief in God – even the atheists can identify with the light – but they tend to move away from the mainstream churches and to see truth in all religions.”
What, then, are we to make of the NDE? Taking the phenomenon as a whole, it is as if there were some predetermined sequence of events waiting to unfold the closer a person comes to death. The great question is, do these events signify a genuine afterlife or are they somehow projections of the dying brain?