I thought
this was an interesting article about NDE's...
Near-death experiences have been reported across time and cultures. An astounding 5 to 10 percent of the general population is estimated to have memories of an NDE, including somewhere between 10 and 23 percent of cardiac arrest survivors. A growing number of scholars now accept NDEs as a unique mental state that can offer novel insights into the nature of consciousness. “Now, clearly, we don’t question anymore the reality of near-death experiences,” says Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. “People who report an experience really did experience something.”
Those who undergo an NDE also return with “this noetic quality from the experience, which very often changes their life,” adds neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle, who writes about NDEs and other states of consciousness in his 2024 book, Then I Am Myself the World. “They know what they’ve seen.”
A handful of researchers, mostly emergency room doctors, began collecting qualitative data about NDEs after the 1975 publication of psychiatrist and physician Raymond A. Moody’s book Life after Life, which detailed patients’ accounts of near-death experiences. Since then, only a few research teams have attempted to empirically investigate the neurobiology of NDEs. But their findings are already challenging long-held beliefs about the dying brain, including that consciousness ceases almost immediately after the heart stops beating. This discovery has important implications for current resuscitation practices, which are based on outdated beliefs about what happens to the brain during cardiac arrest, says neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan Medical School. “If we understand the mechanisms of death, then this could lead to new ways of saving lives.”
Like psychedelic drugs and other means of altering consciousness, NDEs could also serve as probes for revealing fundamental truths about the mind and brain. Such states are perturbations to the system of consciousness, “and when you perturb a system, you understand better how it works,” says Christopher Timmermann, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. “If we want to understand the nature of experience, we have to take into account what’s happening at the margins of nonordinary states.”
Moreover, there are important existential implications, although exactly what those might be continues to be debated in the scientific literature and at conferences, including at a 2023 meeting held by the New York Academy of Sciences. It explored consciousness through the lens of death, psychedelics and mysticism. “These transcendent experiences are found in the major world religions and traditions,” says Anthony Bossis, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, who helped to organize the conference. “Might they have some greater purpose for helping humanity cultivate understanding and awareness of consciousness?” he asks. The weightiness of such questions makes careful study of NDEs and their rigorous interpretation all the more critical, Martial says: “It’s important to disentangle empirical findings versus belief.”
Bolding is mine.
Somewhat surprisingly, religious people don’t seem to be more inclined toward NDEs. There is, however, preliminary evidence of another group being more likely to have NDEs: those who are prone to REM sleep intrusion, a condition that occurs when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep intrudes into wakefulness and blends elements of dreaming and waking. During the seconds or minutes it lasts for, people may have an out-of-body experience, sense that someone or something is in the room with them, or want to move but find that they can’t. In 2019 Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at the Copenhagen University Hospital network’s Rigshospitalet, and his colleagues recruited a sample of 1,034 adults from the general population in 35 countries. Ten percent of the study participants had experienced an NDE, and of those, 47 percent also reported REM sleep intrusion—a statistically significant association. Among the people who had not had NDEs, just 14 percent reported REM sleep intrusion.
Other scientists flatly disagree. “When you have an NDE, you must have a functioning brain to store the memory, and you have to survive with an intact brain so you can retrieve that memory and tell about it,” Kondziella says. “You can’t do that without a functioning brain, so all those arguments that NDEs prove that there’s consciousness outside the brain are simply nonsense.”
Kondziella, Martial, and others instead theorize that NDEs might be part of a last-ditch survival tactic. Species across the animal kingdom “play dead”—a behavior technically called thanatosis—when they perceive a mortal threat, typically from an attacking predator. If fight-or-flight fails, the instinct to feign death kicks in as an attempt to forestall the danger. The animal becomes immobilized and unresponsive to external stimuli—but with continued awareness so that, given a chance, it can escape. “Personally, I believe the evolutionary aspect really is the key to understanding what NDEs are and how they came about,” Kondziella says. “There is a perfectly valid biological explanation.”
In the study, 13 volunteers received intravenous DMT in a lab setting and rated their experience on a scale commonly used to measure NDEs, as developed by psychiatrist Bruce Greyson in 1983. The researchers compared the DMT group’s scores and subjective accounts with other people’s taken from an NDE database that Martial and her colleagues have been compiling since 2016. (The database includes around 2,000 accounts, accepted from anyone who contacts the Liège team claiming to have had an NDE and then fills out a lengthy questionnaire.)
They found “striking overlap” between the DMT and NDE groups, Martial says, with people in both describing a sense of entering into an unearthly realm, separating from their body, encountering mystical beings and seeing a bright light. People in both groups also reported feelings of peace, unity and joy. There was just one significant difference: those in the NDE group more frequently experienced reaching a border demarcating a point of no return.
Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who pioneered studies of psilocybin and who died in October 2023, reported similar findings with his colleagues in 2022. The authors compared 3,192 people who had undergone an NDE, a psychedelic drug trip or a non-drug-induced mystical experience. The team found “remarkably similar” long-term outcomes across subjects in all three groups, including a reduced fear of death and lasting positive effects of insights they had gained.
If Peterson is going to introduce his little audience to the notion of NDE's he should not be so careless as to just present them within the small and isolated context of 'life after death because God'. He should also draw their attention to the more likely explanations for them, as demonstrated when they are properly studied. To not do so is being a tad dishonest with his readership.
