Scientists: Near death experiences hallucinations

Mem­o­ries of “near-death ex­pe­ri­ences”—such as as the pro­ver­bi­al light at the end of the tun­nel sensed dur­ing a brush with death—have qual­i­ties of true mem­o­ries, a study has found.

Re­search­ers said these un­usual mem­o­ries, of­ten de­scribed by peo­ple re­vived af­ter mor­tal situa­t­ions or close en­coun­ters with them, are even more de­tailed than nor­mal mem­o­ries for real events.

That does­n’t mean the near-death “events” really oc­curred, they added, but it does sug­gest there has been a “hal­lu­cina­t­ion” re­sem­bling the re­ported ex­pe­ri­ence. These mem­o­ries may al­so be ex­am­ples of “flash­bulb mem­o­ries,” they said—mem­o­ries formed when “a highly emo­tion­al, per­son­ally im­por­tant, and sur­pris­ing event” is seared in­to the brain in un­usu­ally de­tailed and lasting form.

Near-death ex­pe­ri­ences are a widely doc­u­mented phe­nom­e­non in which peo­ple re­port sensa­t­ions such as see­ing a bright light, go­ing through a tun­nel, end­ing up in an­oth­er “real­ity” or leav­ing their own body af­ter be­ing close to death. Of­ten these sensa­t­ions are de­scribed as deeply mean­ing­ful or mys­ti­cal.

The new find­ings, by sci­en­tists at the Uni­vers­ity of Liège in Bel­gium, were pub­lished on­line March 27 in the re­search jour­nal PLoS One.

Near-death ex­pe­ri­ences have gen­er­at­ed be­liefs and the­o­ries of eve­ry kind. They have been all the more dif­fi­cult to study be­cause the ex­pe­ri­ences arise dur­ing cha­ot­ic con­di­tions, which make in­ves­ti­gat­ing them in real time al­most im­pos­si­ble, the sci­en­tists not­ed. They, there­fore, tried an un­usu­al ap­proach.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors spe­cial­iz­ing in co­ma sci­ence and cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy col­la­bo­rat­ed to look in­to the near-death ex­pe­ri­ence mem­o­ries with the no­tion that if the mem­o­ries of were pure prod­ucts of the ima­gina­t­ion, their char­ac­ter­is­tics should be clos­er to those of ima­gined mem­o­ries. But if the near-death pro­cess is ex­pe­ri­enced in a way si­m­i­lar to that of real­ity, their char­ac­ter­is­tics would be clos­er to the mem­o­ries of real events.

They com­pared the re­sponses pro­vid­ed by three groups of pa­tients, each of which had sur­vived a co­ma in a dif­fer­ent way, and a group of healthy vol­un­teers. They stud­ied the mem­o­ries of near-death ex­pe­ri­ences and the mem­o­ries of real events and ima­gined events with the help of a ques­tion­naire.

The brain is prey to cha­os dur­ing the near-death events, the sci­en­tists said. Phys­i­o­lo­gi­cal and phar­ma­co­log­ical mech­a­nisms go out of whack. Some sci­en­tists have pro­posed phys­i­o­logical ex­plana­t­ions for com­po­nents of the near-death ex­pe­ri­ences. For in­stance, “out-of-body ex­pe­ri­ences” have been at­trib­ut­ed to dys­func­tions in a brain ar­ea called the tem-p-oro-parietal lobe. The new study sug­gests these same mech­a­nisms could al­so could al­so cre­ate a per­cep­tion of “real­ity,” which would thus be pro­cessed as com­ing from the real world.

.Culled from World Science journal, written in collaboration with the University of Liège staff