Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My name is Hoorge Champ, and today on the program, we're tackling the question are near death experiences real? A certain percentage of the population, when they're close to dying, report coming out of their bodies. Some feel like they enter a tunnel with a bright light at the end of it, and some report having vivid conversations with people that are already dead. But is it all real? Are they a
sign that there isn't afterlife or something beyond death? Or can it all be explained by science. We're going to hear from someone who's been through this experience, a psychiatrist that's been tracking this phenomenon for decades, and a neuroscientist who's going to tell us what happens to your brain during your last moments of life. So don't leave your body just yet. Stay with us as we answer the question are near death experiences real? Welcome to Science Stuff, Hi, everyone.
So they were tackling the tricky question of whether near death experiences are real. And it's tricky because it's a topic that is in that kind of gray area between science and nonscience. It dits a little bit into the paranormal, and it's also a deeply subjective personal experience, So we're going to do our best to keep this as scientific as possible. Now, a near death experience is something that happens to some people and they've come extremely close to dying.
Maybe their heart stops during a surgery, or maybe they're in a combat situation and they get shot and bleed out, or maybe they're involved in an accident or a drug overdose. But then they're brought back to life, and when they come back, the report having seen or felt things that are really interesting and unusual. This phenomenon has been studied by several people, but most notably by a psychiatrist named
doctor Bruce Grayson. Doctor Grayson is now a Professor Emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavior at the University of Virginia, and he has been collecting and cataloging accounts of near death experiences for almost fifty years. Here's how he explains getting interested in the subject.
I think as a psychiatrist who makes my living trying to help people change their lives. What captured me most about new death experiences is that their incredible ability to create profound changes in people's lives. It's much more powerful than anything the tools we have.
We asked doctor Grayson to be on the show, but unfortunately, due to a medical situation, he is unable to do an interview. But he did give us permission to use clips from one of his lectures and to talk about
his work. And his work is very interesting because in his career, doctor Grayson has collected accounts from hundreds of people who reported having near death experiences like this one he got from a man named Bill Hernlund, a crash rescue firefighter in the US Air Force who responded to a call about a burning airplane and nearly died when the plane exploded. Here's what he said. I was in darkness,
but fully conscious and vividly aware of my surroundings. I would say some kind of tunnel that looked like what a tornado funnel would be. From the inside. There was a light in the distance, and I saw the spiraling strings of blue green light coming and going like the Aurora borealis. The light was drawing me to it. I moved exceptionally fast down the tunnel. It seemed that time was different or non existent. There. Wherever there was the light was emanating from a being that was giving off
a very brilliant light as part of his essence. He was beautiful to look at and projected the feelings of unconditional love and peace. He asked, how do you feel about your life? And how did you treat other people? As he asked, every single event of my life, from earliest childhood to the plane crash projected in front of me. There were details concerning people and things that I had
forgotten about long ago. He told me to be in peace and said that my work in this world was not done yet and that I had to go back. Pretty wild stuff. So, after collecting hundreds of stories like these, doctor Grayson found that the stories had several things in common. And here I asked a few of my friends to read the accounts because I figured it'd be more interesting than just having me read them. Here's what doctor Grayson
found first. In about half of the near death experiences that he heard about, the person said that they were able to think clearer and faster than usual. For example, here's how a man named John Whittaker described to doctor Grayson what he saw when he almost died during pancreatic and liver surgery.
I was aware of an enhanced state of consciousness in which my mind was extremely active and alert to what I was experiencing. I was very observant during the state, and my thoughts seemed to go almost twice to the normal speed.
So some near death experiencers, even though they're usually in super stressful situations where they're literally dying, report feeling like they could think super fast and super clearly, almost like they're removed from the situation. Another thing in common that doctor Grayson found in all of these near death experiences was that three quarters of the people reported feeling a
change in their sense of time. For example, here's what a man named Rob told doctor Grayson about the time that he nearly died when he slipped and fell off a ladder.
The actual fall was slowed way down, almost like a series of camera steel pictures being taken a sort of clickficial progression, and then slowing down dramatically increased my thinking time, which resulted in me being able to size up how I could maneuver the ladder. Not only did the fall slow way down, but my thinking became very clear. There's wonderful slowing down which allowed me to think clearly and split seconds was phenomenal.
So during near death experiences, time slows down for some people, like the world goes into slow motion or bullet time from the matrix. Doctor Grayson also that in about two thirds of the near death experiences he collected, the person felt that they had extra vivid senses, meaning that they were able to see or hear super clearly, or that
they could see or hear unique colors and sounds. For example, here's how a woman named Jane Smith described to doctor Grayson what she saw when she almost died from a bad reaction to anesthesia when she was giving birth to her baby.
I found myself in a meadow, and this was a beautiful green meadow with beautiful flowers, lit with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we've ever seen. There was sky grass, and I remember so well looking at them and thinking I have never seen some of these colors. I realized I was seeing the inner light of all the growing things. It was not reflected light, but a gentle inner glow that shone from each and every plant. Overhead.
The sky was clear and blue, the light infinitely more beautiful than any light we know.
So some near death experiencers also get a heightened sense of awareness. They can see tiny little details all around them that they otherwise wouldn't even notice. They can see things much more vividly, even though again they're in an extremely dangerous and deadly situation. Next, doctor Grayson found out about a quarter of all the near death experiences involved a life review, which is basically when your life flashes
before your eyes. For example, here's what a man named Greg Nome told doctor Grayson that he saw when he almost drowned going over a waterfall.
The images began with the living color scenes of my childhood. It was as if someone else was running the projector I was looking my life objectively for the first time ever. I saw myself sitting in a baby's highchair and picking up some food with my hand and throwing it on the floor. Next, I saw myself at a lake in a summer vacation we took when I was about three or four years old. I was amazed at how many scenes I was seeing that had long since been forgotten.
I also saw traumatic events in various ways. The images continued at high speeds, Then the images ceased. There was only darkness and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.
Yeah.
So.
Near death experiencers also report seeing their life flash before their eyes. This is very commonly portrayed in movies and TV shows where someone's about to die and they suddenly see this collage or montage of all the scenes from their lives, and a lot of people report seeing things they thought they had forgotten or things they feel they
shouldn't be able to remember. Finally, according to doctor Grayson, about eighty percent of the people who report near death experiences say they had an out of body experience, where they say they could actually see their bodies from outside of themselves, usually from the ceiling. For example, here's what a woman named Jane told doctor Grayson about the time she almost died during labor.
My blood pressure dropped and nurses were in a panic. When I heard an nurse say, oh my god, we're losing her. I was out of my body at once and on the ceiling of the operating room, looking down watching them work on a body. It took me a while to recognize the person I was viewing was me. I watched my doctors arrive and procedures being done, heard conversations and saw my baby being born.
So some near death experiencers also reported out of body experiences, meaning they felt like they left their bodies and they floated up to the ceiling and they could see themselves being operated on or being resuscitated. So those are some of the common themes among the near death experiences or MDes like doctor Grayson recorded. Now, what's interesting about these near death experiences is that they seem to happen across
different cultures and across different times. Here's how doctor Grayson describes it.
We found over the past fifty years studying NDEs from different cultures, different religious groups, and throughout the centuries that the cultural background and your religious background do not affect whether you're going to have an experience or what type you're going to have, but it does influence the metaphors you use to describe it.
So what doctor Grayson is saying is that near death experiences seem to happen in different cultures, but different cultures might describe them in different ways. For example, people from one culture might describe the feeling of going through a tunnel and seeing a light at the end of it, but other cultures that are not as familiar with tunnels, might describe them as going into a well or a cave,
or even through a pipe. And what's even more interesting is that the people who report near death experiences, as strange as those experiences might be, say that they felt very real. In fact, some people say that their near death experience feels more real than real. Here's how doctor Grayson describes it.
I've had people look at me after an experience to say, my talking to God in the NDE is more real than my talking to you right now.
Now.
I'm not sure what that means. They don't know how to judge what's more real than something else, but they consistently say that.
Now.
Doctor Grayson and his team of researchers have tested people have had near death experiences with psychological tests that can measure to some degree whether a memory is real or whether you just dreamed it or hallucinated it. These are tests that are used, for example, to tell if a kid who says they've gone through a traumatic experience actually went through that experience or if they imagined it. Here's what doctor Grayson found.
We find that the memories of the NDEs are like the memories of real events, not at all as the memories of imagined events. In fact, on this objective scale, they look more real than the memories of real events. It's more real than real. We did this research at UVA. It was also replicated at the University of Liasian Belgium
and the University of Padua in Italy. And in fact, the Italian group also measured the brain waves of people as they are remembering their events, and they reported that the brain waves of people remembering NDEs look like people remembering real events, not like people remembering dreams or hallucinations.
So, as far as the researchers could tell, near death experiences are indistinguishable or basically the same as real experiences. Okay to recap. Near death experiences are strange and sometimes impossible experiences that happen to people as they're dying or as they're about to die, and they seem to be a consistent and widespread phenomenon. According to doctor Grayson and others, about ten to twenty percent of people who have close
brushes with dying report having a near death experience. Now, some people say that because these experiences happen to so many people and because they are sometimes inexplicable, they are a clue that there is something beyond death, that somehow our consciousness or our spirits can leave our body, or talk to dead people, or exist out of time. And others, of course, say that this can all be explained by
science and that there isn't anything supernatural going on. So we're gonna do two things for the rest of the episode. In the next segment, we're gonna talk to a neuroscientist who's gonna tell us what are some of the things in these near death experiences that science and brain science can explain. And then in the last segment, we're gonna talk about some of the things that science currently can't explain about near death experiences. So let's dig into the
science and the mystery of near death experiences. But first let's take a quick break. You're listening to science stuff. Hey, welcome back. So we talked about what near death experiences are, how often they happen, and how they feel more real than real to the people that have them. I mean though, that there are people whose consciousness has left their bodies or that have gotten a glimpse of the afterlife. Like
I said, we're gonna do two things. First, we're gonna talk to a neuroscientist to see what he thinks could be behind these experiences that some people have. And then later in the program, we're gonna talk about the things that science can't explain about near death experiences. So to break it down for us, I called my friend neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin. Doctor Godwin is a professor of neuroscience at Wake Forest University specializing in neurophysiology, addiction, epilepsy, and traumatic
brain injury. Doctor Godwin and I also co wrote a book together called Out of Your Mind, which you should check out. Here's my conversation with neuroscientists Dwayne Godwin. Thanks for talking with us today.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Have you had any near death experiences lately?
I try to.
Avoid those as much as possible. I think most people do well.
First of all, maybe for folks, what is a near death experience to a neuroscientist like you, Wow?
Well, you know.
Near death experiences are these events that happen to people where they see these really interesting and unusual things and they bring these stories back from this rush with their own potential death. There is this concept that it's probably based in something that is happening in your brain. At least, that's all that scientists can really speak to. It's not to say that people's experiences aren't real to them, but a lot of the evidence suggests that these experiences are
rooted in physical workings of the brain. You know, it's not that hard to explain that when something weird like that is happening to you, and especially when it's happening to your brain, that your brain is going to try to make sense of it, just like it tries to make sense of everything else.
Okay, here, doctor Godwin is talking about the idea that near death experiences are caused by what is happening to your brain in certain situations, because the one thing that all near death experiences have in common is that they happen near death. Here's how doctor Godwin describes it.
They happen under extreme stress, and what's more stressful than dying. So, you know, we're talking about things like oxygen deprivation, changes in brain chemistry, the electrical activity going haywire not functioning normally, so it's producing these weird sensations and perceptions. It's like, you know, imagine your computer suddenly losing power. You might get some weird glitches and error messages before it completely
shuts down. Is that kind of thing that's happening in the brain during a near death experience.
So near death experiences could just be how some people's brains react when they're dying. Now, this, of course is hard to prove because it's hard to predict when someone is going to have a near death experience, and so it's really hard to test for it, at least in a consistent and ethical way. But there is something scientists can do.
And there are several things that scientists have done to try to provide a neurological explanation. So, for example, there are overlaps with other brain states like those that are induced by certain drugs and even some forms of epilepsy, and all of those similarities suggest a common neurological mechanism.
So how scientists try to explain near death experiences is by pointing out common neurological mechanisms or things that happen in the brain that are similar to near death experiences, because then you can infer or reason that near death experiences are caused by the same thing. So we're going to break it down into two categories. The first is the out of body experience, and the second are the
visions that people have during near death experiences. We'll start with the out of body experience and actually scientists have a name for it. It's called autoscopy.
Autoscopy is this really interesting phenomenon where people have the sensation of seeing themselves from outside of their own body. So it's like you're watching a movie or yourself, but you're also somehow still in the movie.
This concept of otoscopy is important because you can get it, not just in near death experiences. For example, about six percent of people with epilepsy report feeling like they leave their bodies when they have seizures. And actually scientists think they found this specific part of your brain that gives you that out of body experience. Here's what doctor Godwin said.
Scientists have been studying otoscopy. They've penpointed a specific area of the brain that seems to be involved. And this area is really important because it helps you sort of synthesize, you know, your sense of body and the rest of your experiences. It's likely integrating the sense reinformation to create a coherent sense of their body in space. It's called the temporal parietal junction and it's located roughly above and behind your ears.
So this area of your brain, the temporal parordal junction, is a part of your brain that gives you that sense of being in your body. It takes everything your eyes and ears are seeing and hearing about the world, and everything your skin and muscles are feeling, and it tell us the rest of your brain okay, this is where you are. And scientists note, this is what that part of the brain does, because you can turn it off.
The note is that when people have epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, those people suddenly feel like they're leaving their bodies. They've also done experiments where scientists can scramble or tweak that brain area and cause someone to have an out of body experience. Here's how doctor Godwin explains it.
So there was this fascinating study where scientists use transcranial magnetic stimulation. I'll call it TMS just because it's a long word. TMS is basically a way to temporarily disrupt the activity of specific brain regions using magnetic pulses. And so these pulses scramble brain activity and when they targeted the temporal parietal junction, people have trouble sensing the position of their own limbs even when they could see them.
Wait, this sense like if I look at my arm, I can I have the feeling that it's my arm, that I can contry that it's a part of me.
Yeah.
Yeah, But when you take out this particular brain area in your ability to sort of integrate that sense of your body is disrupted.
So scientists can actually scramble this area of the brain called the temporal parietical junction using special electromagnets and give you that sense of not being in your body or not knowing where your body is. Could that be what's happening in a near death experience? And the idea is that maybe when your body is freaking out because it's dying or close to death, then somehow that part of the brain gets affected or what.
Yes, you know, nobody knows for sure, so we have to be very careful about that. But I would propose that TMS scrambling your brain is not that different than death kind of scrambling your brain.
Okay, So now the question is what could be scrambling that area during a near death experience? And this ties into what is happening to your brain? In general when you're close to dying.
Brain death is a very complex thing that even physicians don't always get right. They don't always make the call correctly. It's not even sure that the brain dies all at once, right, So some parts of your brain can die and other parts remain alive and kicking it. But generally what happens, though, is that the brain relies on a lot on a constant
supply of oxygen. The estimates are that the brain uses about twenty percent of the body's oxygen, and when that supply is cut off, things start to go downhill pretty quickly.
Without oxygen, doctor Godwin says, neurons lose the ability to control how ions like calcium and potassium go into and out of the neurons. And these are the same chemicals that neurons use to activate how they talk to each other. So basically, when you stop breathing or your heart stops, your brain cells go a little haywire. How haywire Here's how doctor Godwin puts it.
Well.
Recent research suggests that there's a surge of activity in the brain right around the time of death. You know, the brain doesn't just quietly fade away or just turn off. It's a complicated set of events happening as it shuts down. There's a lot of stuff happening with brain chemicals.
So when the neurons start to go hey wire, they cause other chemicals to go up, like the chemical serotonin.
Serotonin, for example. We know that those levels spike in the brain at the time of death, and this has been observed in animals. Scientists do these experiments where animals croak and when their heart ceases. They've observed that there have been these spikes and serotonin activity.
Your brain makes more serotonin or releases more Yeah.
Yeah, When I say spike, I mean like a rush of serotonin happens right around the moment of death. They've actually measured this increase as the animals were dying and serotonins. But it's also linked to sensory perception, and this is relevant because drugs like LSD act on the serotonin system.
And this is where things start to get a little trippy. We know that serotonin goes up in your brain when you're dying, and we know that drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms that give you hallacinations also affect how your body reacts to serotonin.
LSD and magic mushrooms, and these cause hallucinations. They affect serotonin receptors in the brain, so that spike, that big rush of serotonin at death is not that far fetched to think that, hey, you know, maybe my brain is tripping a little bit could be contributing to the altered perceptions and all of those weird, vivid experiences that people report with these near death experiences.
Meaning like, as my brain is shutting down dying, I basically have the same experience as if I just took a bunch of LSD or magic mushrooms. Yeah, okay, So to recap scientists like doctor Godwin think that near death experiences can be explained by what's happening in your brain.
When you die or are close to dying, things can go haywire, which might turn off the parts of your brain that give you that sense of being in your body, and your brain also gets flooded with serotonin, which acts on the same parts of your brain as LSD and
magic mushrooms. Another interesting clue is an experiment done in twenty eighteen that very directly tested whether drugs can give you the same experience as near death experiences, and this involved a chemical called dimethyl tryptomine, or DMT, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a psychedelic drink used in South American spiritual and shamanistic rituals. Here's how doctor Godwin describes it.
Yeah, so you had healthy volunteers given either a placebo or DMT. So what they found was that the experiences reported by people who took DMT had a really striking overlap with the experiences reported by people had near death experiences. Things like feelings of joy, a sense of timelessness, and even in some cases out of body sensations. These were more common in the DMT group compared to the placebo group, So,
you know, very telling. But it doesn't really prove that nds are solely caused by something like DMT, but it does suggest that similar neurochemical mechanisms might be at play, and it provides some additional evidence that the experiences are rooted in brain activity.
And so that basically explains what near death experiences are. But like I said before, there are some things about them that science can't explain. So when we come back, we're going to talk to doctor Godwin about what those things are and whether we'll ever solve those mysteries.
Stick with us.
You're listening to science stuff. Hey, welcome back.
Okay.
We talked about what near death experiences are and how science can explain a lot of things that people say happen to them when they're close to dying, and now we're going to talk about what science can't explain about near death experiences, because there are things people say are still inexplicable. The first is that about a quarter of near death experiencers report seeing or talking to people that
are dead. For example, here's a well known writer and war reporter, Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, describing what he saw when he almost died when he lost two thirds of the blood in his body due to pancreatic aneurysm.
I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left. The pit was the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all. It exerted a pole that was slow but unanswerable, and I knew that if I went into the hole, I was never coming back. And I was feeling myself getting pulled more and more sternly into the darkness. And just when it seemed unavoidable. I became aware of something else.
My father. He'd been dead eight years, but there he was not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left. My father exuded reassurance. It seemed to be inviting me to go with him. It's okay, there's nothing to be scared of. He seemed to be saying, don't fight it, I'll take care of you.
Why do the dying and only the dying, Sebastian Junger writes, keep seeing the dead in their last days and hours. The other thing people say can't be explained by science are when people who go through a near death experience
seem to know things they shouldn't know. For example, when someone has an out of body experience and they report knowing what was happening in the room or even in the next room when they were unconscious and dying, or when people are told secrets or things that haven't happened yet by dead people they meet in their near death experience. Here's doctor Grayson describing one such experience.
One fellow I interviewed was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, and he had one particular nurse, Anita, who was about his age and one day she told him she was going to be taking a long weekend off. While she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where he had to be resuscitated, and during that one he had a near death experience and he found himself in a beautiful pastoral scene. To
a surprise, Anita came walking towards him. She said, Jack, you need to go back to your body, and I want you to find my parents and tell them that I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB. When he later woke up back in his body, it turned that his nurse, Anita, had taken the weekend off to celebrate her twenty first birthday, and her parents surprised her with the gift of her
red MGB. She got excited, jumped in the car for a test drive, lost control and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly, just a few hours before his near death experience. Now, how would he have known that she died, or let alone how she died, and yet he did.
That is pretty spooky. So what does science make of examples like these? I asked doctor Godwin, and he didn't seem that concern about cases like these.
This is what he said, I would say there may be things about near death experiences that science can't yet explain, or for which there there's not enough information to form a rational hypothesis. Or maybe it's just that we don't have the tools yet necessary to ask the question.
Basically, doctor Godwin says, just because science can't explain a specific event, it doesn't mean that there isn't a reasonable explanation. Maybe we see dead people because we're primed to think about them if we are close to dying, or in the case of the man who saw his dead nurse, maybe he regained consciousness briefly and overheard someone talking about her. In those cases, it can't just be that we don't
have enough information. But it did get doctor Godwin to admit there is something science may never be able to explain about near death experiences, and that is why do we have them? Well, what would be the evolutionary basis for near death experiences? Like why would that be something that we evolved to have?
Yeah, I don't know that it necessarily conveys an evolutionary advantage because think about it, it would be very rare for someone during the course of evolution to be able to come back from death. It's only now, more recently, when we have all these wonderful machines and drugs that can help stimulate and bring us back, that we would even note that these experiences happen. So from an evolutionary perspective,
it's almost like it doesn't matter. I guess you could postulate that maybe some of those same genes that are producing hallucinations during death, or genes that were very important in life, and just at the end we get this nice, non selective experience that helps us make sense of things. What we can say, though, is that NDEs are real. You know, they're real in the sense that people genuinely
experience them. They come back from this brush with their own mortality with these stories, and there's no reason to feel or to expect that they're being dishonest about it. The emotions they feel when this happens to them, those
are real. They're not just making them up. But the dance suggests that these experience sorts, at least the ones that we can track down, seem to be rooted in how the brain works, not necessarily evidence of an afterlife or any sort of supernatural realm, but it's kind of a reminder of the incredible complexity of the brain and the way we have this amazing ability to create vivid and meaningful experiences.
All right, I think that's a pretty good answer to the question. Our near death experience is real, the real to the people that have them, even if it's all just happening in their brains. Thanks for joining us, See you next time. A big thanks to doctor Grayson and the University of Virginia Lifetime Learning Office of Engagement, and to Sebastian Junger. The audio excerpt is copyright twenty twenty four by Sebastian Junger and courtesy of Simon and Schuster.
Audio from the audiobook In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger, right by the author, published by Simon and Schuster Audio, a division of Simon and Schuster Incorporated. Used with permission and thanks to my friends for reading those near death experience accounts. Monica, Paul Andres Vivan and Suluka.
You've been listening to science stuff. The production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me Or hitch Ham, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram, and you can follow me on social media just search for PhD comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.