A near-death experience cannot be replicated in a laboratory setting. However, there are some methods for studying this phenomenon.
People who have experienced a near-death experience reported that they hovered above their physical body, seeing it from the side, saw the afterlife, and experienced other mystical experiences.
The study of this phenomenon faces serious difficulties.
This is not least due to the fact that spiritual experience is difficult to squeeze into the framework of modern scientific methods. Scientists who spoke at the IANDS 2014 conference dedicated to near-death experiences talked about the main difficulties.
Yana Holden, Robert Mays and Mitch Lister speaking at the 2014 IANDS Conference Photo: Tara MacIsaac / Epoch Times
A rare spontaneous occurrence
Promotional video:
It is very difficult to find a near-death experience that can be independently verified. Some scientists focus on the phenomenon of true perception, when a person leaves the business during a near-death experience and sees some real objects, because it can be verified.
Robert Mays has been doing near-death experiments for 30 years, he studied the statistics of the AWARE project. Tags are being placed in hospitals around the world in the hope that patients who leave the body can see them. They are outside the field of ordinary vision, so if the NDE patient correctly describes them, this will confirm the phenomenon.
However, there is only one scientifically promising near-death experience for thousands of deaths. Mace illustrates the statistics. How many people will survive cardiac arrest? How many of them had near-death experiences? How many of those who experienced this left their body?
Not all of these patients experience out-of-body travel and see their physical body from the outside. Some only see scenes in other dimensions, in heaven, or relive a retrospective of their lives. Among those people who have had an out-of-body experience, what percentage will notice the marks and remember them after resuscitation?
As part of the AWARE project, several near-death experiences were recorded when patients left the body and saw things in the real world, but no tags were placed in these hospitals.
Mace calculated that in 7,500 cases of cardiac arrest, there is one near-death experience that meets the necessary criteria. He noted that this is a very rough and rough estimate.
Finding parameters for research
Mitch Lister, a psychiatrist and physician based in Colorado, says a major medical problem is that “NDEs are difficult to fit into traditional medical experiences. For example, you cannot use a double-blind method, as in the study of the placebo effect. If a person has died, then he has already died, this is obvious."
Lister is interested in studying the electromagnetic side effect of the near-death experience. Some patients reported that after it, charges were released from their bodies, which affected electrical appliances.
“What frequency or interval should you choose, how to measure them? Lister asks. "In such experiments, it is difficult to set the parameters."
When studying near-death experiences, much attention is paid to the similarity of such experiences in people from different cultures. “But I think this approach leaves out a lot of people who have had atypical near-death experiences,” he says.
Fear
At least one promising NDE study has been thwarted by scientists' fear of such a controversial topic. Yana Holden, a professor at the University of North Texas, editor of IANDS magazine and former president, spoke about an experiment planned 20 years ago.
The philanthropist asked her and a group of scientists to find people who, during their near-death experience, gained access to a kind of source of unlimited knowledge. The idea was to ask them about a rare disease. Perhaps they could provide some information on how to treat him. Holden managed to find one such person. They used hypnosis so that he could recall information about this disease that he received during a near-death experience.
What he said was consistent with the existing knowledge of the disease. He correctly noted that it is associated with two chromosomes, is genetically transmitted through the maternal line and correctly named other features of the disease.
But he was an artist specializing in stained glass, lacking scientific knowledge to understand everything he saw. Holden decided to involve biologists to help interpret his visions during the near-death experience.
“All biologists were scared of the proposal to participate in such a“crazy”enterprise. They feared they might lose funding from the National Science Foundation if someone found out that they were involved in such experiments,”said Holden. Even when she invited them to take part in it on Saturdays as a small private project, they refused.
The main problem is financing
With the financial resources available, a solution can always be found despite obstacles. But the constant lack of funding is holding back NDE research. During the discussion, a proposal for public funding was made. Mace says this can be used to translate a book about true perception.
This book is currently only available in Dutch and contains 78 cases of true NDE perception. Voluntarily donated funds can also be used to make a film about NDEs.
Big questions
The study of near-death experiences raises broader questions about the role of human consciousness in science, Lister notes. “How should we study consciousness? Consciousness is difficult to define, let alone study. But, perhaps, it is the study of consciousness that will make it possible to better understand near-death experiences."