Various visions are known: light, tunnel, faces of deceased relatives … How to explain this?
Remember, in the movie "Flatulent" with Julia Roberts, medical students decided to experience a state of clinical death. One by one, young doctors embarked on an unpredictable journey beyond life. The results were overwhelming: the "comatose" met THERE people whom they once offended …
What happens in those 5 - 6 minutes when resuscitators return a dying person from oblivion? Is the afterlife really beyond the thin line of life or is it "tricking" the brain? Scientists began serious research in the 1970s - it was then that the sensational book of the famous American psychologist Raymond Moody "Life After Life" was published. Over the past decades, they have made many interesting discoveries. At the conference "Clinical Death: Contemporary Research", held recently in Melbourne, physicians, philosophers, psychologists and religious scholars summed up the study of this phenomenon.
Raymond Moody believed that the process of "feeling out-of-body existence" is characterized by the following stages:
- stopping all physiological functions of the body (moreover, the dying person still has time to hear the words of the doctor, who states the death);
- growing unpleasant noises;
- the dying person “leaves the body” and rushes at high speed along the tunnel, at the end of which light is visible;
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- his whole life passes before him;
- he meets dead relatives and friends.
Those who “return from the other world” note a strange duality of consciousness: they know about everything that happens around them at the moment of “death”, but at the same time they cannot come into contact with the living - those who are nearby. The most amazing thing is that even people who are blind from birth in a state of clinical death often see bright light. This was proved by a survey of more than 200 blind women and men conducted by Dr. Kennett Ring from the United States.
When we die, the brain "remembers" our birth
Why it happens? Scientists seem to have found an explanation for the mysterious visions that visit a person in the last seconds of life.
1. The explanation is fantastic. Psychologist Payell Watson believes he has solved the riddle. In his opinion, when we die, we remember our birth! For the first time we get acquainted with death at the moment of a terrible journey, which each of us makes, overcoming the ten-centimeter birth canal, he believes.
“We’ll probably never know for sure what’s going on in the child’s mind at that moment,” Watson says, “but it’s probably reminiscent of different stages of dying. In this case, are not the near-death visions a transformed experience of birth trauma, naturally, with the superposition of accumulated everyday and mystical experience?
2. The explanation is utilitarian. Russian resuscitator Nikolai Gubin explains the appearance of the tunnel as a manifestation of toxic psychosis.
- It is somewhat similar to a dream, and in something to a hallucination (for example, when a person suddenly begins to see himself from the side). The fact is that at the time of dying, parts of the visual lobe of the cerebral hemispheres already suffer from oxygen starvation, and the poles of both occipital lobes, which have a double blood supply, continue to function. As a result, the field of view is sharply narrowed, and only a narrow band remains, providing central, "tube" vision.
Why do some of the dying see the pictures of their entire lives? And there is an answer to this question. The dying process begins with newer brain structures and ends with older ones. The restoration of these functions during revival proceeds in the reverse order: first, more "ancient" parts of the cerebral cortex revive, and then new ones. Therefore, in the process of returning to life of a person, the most persistently imprinted "pictures" first emerge in his memory.
How do writers describe the experience of death?
- The incident that happened to Arseny Tarkovsky is described in one of his stories. It was in January 1944 after the amputation of a leg, when the writer died of gangrene in a front-line hospital. He was lying in a small, cramped chamber with a very low ceiling. The light bulb hanging over the bed had no switch and had to be unscrewed by hand. Once, while unscrewing it, Tarkovsky felt that his soul spiraled out of his body, like a light bulb from a socket. Surprised, he looked down and saw his body. It was completely motionless, like that of a man sleeping in a dead sleep. Then for some reason he wanted to see what was going on in the next ward.
He began to slowly "seep" through the wall and at some point felt that a little more - and he would never be able to return to his body. It scared him. He again hovered over the bed and, with some strange effort, slipped into his body, like into a boat.
- In Leo Tolstoy's work "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", the writer amazingly described the phenomenon of clinical death: "Suddenly some force pushed him in the chest, in the side, stifled his breath even more, he fell into a hole, and there, at the end of the hole, it shone something. What happened to him in the railway carriage, when you think that you are going forward and going back, and suddenly you know the real direction … At that very time Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw the light, and it was revealed to him that his life was not what is needed, but that it can still be corrected … I feel sorry for them (relatives. - Ed.), we must do so that they do not hurt. Deliver them and get rid of their own suffering. "How good and how simple," he thought … He was looking for his usual fear of death and did not find it … Instead of death there was light."
By the way
But they didn't see it
Rant Bagdasarov, head of the intensive care unit of Moscow hospital No. 29, who has been returning people from the other world for 30 years, claims: during his entire practice, none of his patients saw a tunnel or a light during his clinical death.
Chris Freeman, a psychiatrist at Royal Edinburgh Hospital, believes that there is no evidence that the visions described by the patients occurred when the brain was not working. People saw “pictures” of the other world during their lifetime: before cardiac arrest or immediately after the heart rate was restored.
A study by the National Institute of Neurology, which involved 9 major clinics, showed that of more than 500 returnees, only 1 percent could clearly remember what they saw. According to scientists, 30 - 40 percent of patients depicting their travels in the afterlife are people with an unstable psyche.
Have you been in a state of clinical death?
Svetlana KUZINA