“A bright light at the end of the tunnel”, “the feeling of crossing over to the other side”, “another dimension” … Yes, yes, these are “well-known” signs of the borderline between life and death, “when the soul seems to leave the body”. The stories of survivors of clinical death have been picked up by popular culture, and now the "light at the end of the tunnel" can be found even in pornographic anecdotes. What does science say about near-death experiences? The stories of "eyewitnesses" are not questioned, but it is still not very clear where these experiences and impressions come from. Let's assume that there is no “other side”. Then what is it - a hallucination, psychological defense, a consequence of organic brain damage?..
The phenomenon of experience outside the body, despite all the interest in it, is extremely difficult to study, and it is understandable why: you cannot set up an experiment here. You can, of course, rely on evidence, but, firstly, how to evaluate them, and secondly, these are still stories about what happened, that is, in real time, in the laboratory you still will not see it.
However, researchers at the University of Liège have been able to come up with a method by which it is possible to determine whether the impressions of the survivors of clinical death are real, or were exclusively products of their imagination. The idea was to test what features are characteristic of the memory of these experiences. It is known that we can remember both real events that happened to us, and imaginary ones - our own thoughts and feelings that revolve only in our head. Both of these types of memory have their own features, that is, we remember the real in one way, and the imaginary in another.
But when Marie Tonnard and her colleagues tried to apply this approach to out-of-body experiences, the result was amazing. The researchers worked with coma patients. They were asked about real impressions from life, about the experience of being close to death, and all this was compared with the testimony of ordinary people who never fell into a coma. So, it turned out that there are no signs of memory about the imaginary in the experience outside the body, that is, on the one hand, the dying person really sees what he sees. But when compared with the memory of real events, it turned out that the experience outside the body is more real than reality itself. And this means that the brain does not just remember near-death impressions as if they were real, it remembers them in more detail, better.
Here, generally speaking, you need to understand that the brain in such a state should be immersed in chaos. When a person dies, physiology and biochemistry fail, and this also applies to the brain. In theory, at such a moment one cannot expect superfine work from him. However, the nature of the memories suggests that at this moment the brain functions more clearly than when the person was healthy and nothing threatened his life at all.
In an article published in the Internet edition of PLoS ONE, the authors offer the following explanation. It is known that the feeling of being out of the body occurs due to malfunctions in the work of the temporoparietal lobe. That is, leaving the body has a smack of reality due to neuronal dysfunction, and you don't need to blame everything on a violent imagination. The brain lies, but this deception turns out to be such an important and new experience, so unlike everything that a person has experienced, that the memory remembers it in every detail.
However, such explanations proceed from the fact that we have a clear boundary between brain organic matter and imagination. However, a debate on this topic would take us too far. In the meantime, it is worth noting that the near-death experience seems to be quite real, although its reality lies exclusively within the brain itself. If someone is not satisfied with this reality and would like to hear about the "otherworldly", we consider it our duty to remind that the opinion of researchers who take the positions of purely materialism does not necessarily have to coincide with the opinion of idealistic readers.