Neurophysiologists were the first to trace near-death experiences and found that almost all people experience three of the same sensations - the feeling of peace, flight through a tunnel and bright light, but the order of their appearance is unique for each person, according to an article published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
“We have found that deathbed visions of people can contain all or some of their typical elements, and that their order is often arbitrary. Despite the fact that some visions were common to all people, and were probably generated by the same processes, the differences in the time of their occurrence make us think about how common they are for us,”says Charlotte Martial (Charlotte Martial) from the University of Liege (Belgium).
Many people who have become clinically dead during operations or as a result of an overdose of drugs or drugs, talk about how in the dying state they "went" outside their body, flew through an endless tunnel and saw the light. The similar nature of these memories led scientists to pay serious attention to them and try to understand how they arise.
Today neurophysiologists believe that such "visits" to the other world are the product of two things - a lack of glucose and oxygen in the blood, which makes brain neurons "starve" and produce a large number of chaotic impulses, and the appearance of a large number of molecules of psychoactive and hallucinogenic hormones in the brain in response to extreme stress.
According to Martial, despite dozens of serious studies of this phenomenon, most of them were fixed on isolated cases of such experiences and did not try to check how much they were the same for all people who experienced clinical death.
Belgian neuroscientists have decided to fill this gap by studying all known cases of near-death visions that have been monitored by medical professionals in the past two decades. In total, they were able to obtain detailed data and analyze 156 such cases and highlight their common and unique features.
It turned out that most of these people really experience very similar sensations - about 80% of the survivors said that they moved through the tunnel and felt peace, and another 64% of the participants talked about meeting with spirits or a light source. Least of all, they talked about the fact that time sharply accelerated its run, or that they began to see the future.
On the other hand, the order in which these sensations appeared was quite different. More often than not, people first felt outside the boundaries of their bodies, then began to move through the tunnel, saw the light and felt peace, but such a "scenario" of near-death sensations was typical for only 20% of the surviving survey participants.
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All this, as scientists note, suggests that near-death visions are most likely unique for each person and are not the same for all people who have experienced clinical death. This, in turn, indicates complex mechanisms of their occurrence, which will be very difficult to "untangle". Scientists are now planning to compare memories of the "light at the end of the tunnel", written in different languages, to test how culture and language can influence what a person remembered from their dying experiences.