On Near Death Experiences

Craig Shearer - 25 September 2023

There was a recent RNZ interview done as part of their Expert Feature series, which runs on Monday afternoons with host Jesse Mulligan.

One of our correspondents emailed the committee alerting us (after the fact) to the interview and asking whether we thought RNZ handled the topic well.

The interview is described as follows:

“Maybe you’ll see a bright light, a tunnel, or speak to someone you know who has already passed away… We don’t know exactly what will happen to us when we die, but there are patterns and similarities between what people experience when they’re on the precipice of death and come back to talk about it.”

You can listen to the interview and judge for yourself.

The interview was with Associate Professor Natasha Tassell-Matamua from Massey University’s School of Psychology.

I listened to the interview and did some background reading. To be fair, the segment is designed around interviewing an expert in a particular topic, so naturally we’re going to get that person’s perspective on their topic. But, it did give me the impression that she was very pro the supposed spiritual aspects of near death experiences (NDEs).

NDEs are characterised by recollections after somebody has come out of their experience. The implication is that what they remember experiencing is close to what would be experienced by another person who actually died and didn’t come back to tell the tale.

NDEs were popularised by the work of psychiatrist Dr Robert Moody back in the 1970s. Moody interviewed 150 people and identified a common set of experiences that defined an NDE. He wrote a book Life After Life, in which he concluded that NDEs are proof of an afterlife, which naturally skeptical people would disagree with.

In the interview, Tassell-Matamua described her own experiences of supposedly having an NDE while a student at university. From her description it sounds like that would have been back in the 1990s. She described her experience as being very sick one day and had the experience with the characteristics that are normally associated with NDEs such as the tunnel, and the white light, and seeing dead relatives. What was interesting about her own experience is that it didn’t fall into the traditional definition of an NDE, which seems to be strongly associated with some sort of medical experience in which there are medical professionals involved. I wonder whether she just had a bad, fever-induced dream, and decided that it was an NDE. (From my personal experience as a child, I remember that whenever I was sick and had some sort of fever, I’d invariably have this weird dream of four evil Koala bears sitting around a table!)

Anyway, Tassell-Matamua went on to claim that NDEs weren’t very well known back then – at least she’d never heard of them. I think perhaps that is only her perspective as the Raymond Moody book was pretty sensational back in the 70s. And, I recall going to see the pretty awful movie Flatliners which was released in 1990. That particular movie had medical students exploring near-death experiences by stopping their hearts then being revived and relating their experiences to their peers.

What we do know, from a medical perspective, is that death isn’t a single instant, but a process of the body shutting down. As we became more sophisticated in our understanding of how the body works, we came to understand that death wasn’t just the heart stopping. Medical intervention has often brought people back after cardiac arrest, so a stopped heart isn’t necessarily the definition of death anymore. Obviously, we progressed to recognise that brain activity, once we were able to measure it with an EEG, was also involved. It was possible to have the heart stop, but brain activity continue for some period.

And, it appears that the heart being stopped for an extended period doesn’t mean it can’t be restarted. There are various reports of people having their heart stopped for hours before it was restarted with no after effects. The Guinness World Records has that as 8 hours and 42 minutes, though in exceptional conditions – up in the Italian Dolomites – where the temperature had dropped to 0 degrees Celsius. In another case, a woman survived after 6 hours, again in extreme cold.

But, barring extremes of cold, it does seem that usually, a few minutes of lack of oxygen to the brain is enough for it to be the end for you.

The interview took a particular perspective on NDEs with both Mulligan and Tassell-Matamua putting forward the idea that NDEs could be viewed as people being primed to expect certain experiences, in hindsight (nobody, apart from the fictional characters in Flatliners, is going into this sort of thing with knowledge in advance!). She challenged this view by saying that people from many different backgrounds and walks-of-life had had similar experiences.

I found that the interview quite pro the position that NDEs are something to be explained by things outside of our current science. Indeed, towards the end of the interview, Tassell-Matamua mentioned her training in psychology, and that she was “taught that consciousness is manufactured by the brain” and that “NDEs call that into question.”. Well, do they? Might there not be some other explanation that doesn’t require that our consciousness can separate from our physical body?

RNZ takes text messages during their interviews, and a listener, Tom, wrote in with a skeptical perspective:

“I hope your discussion on NDEs is going to include perfectly rational explanations as well as supernatural. We all have the same brain structure and brain chemistry. Why would we be surprised if people had similar experienced with near death? The tunnel and the light is more likely to be the brain shutdown sequence.”

Well done Tom! Alas, most of the interview concentrated on the more spiritual side of things, with Tassell-Matamua stating that she’d not seen evidence for effects of a brain shutdown.

Another aspect of NDEs that was discussed was the recollections of having an out-of-body experience (OOBE) where one thinks they’re floating above their body and able to observe what’s going on during their resuscitation. The claim is that people’s spirits are literally separating from their physical bodies and are able to see and hear – senses we usually associate only with our eyes and ears – and record these as memories.

The AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation) was run at 25 hospitals in the US where they attempted to study the awareness of people during cardiac arrest, including the purported OOBEs. While some people claimed to have these OOBEs there they floated above their body in the hospital room, none of them reported the intriguingly positioned notes atop cabinets in the hospital room, which would have been easily visible were they actually having a physical OOBE.

And, Occams Razor would easily cut through all of this. Are we to believe that the consciousness or spirit or soul has the independent ability to see and hear that is separate from our body? Might there be simpler explanations?

While no firm conclusions can be drawn given the nature of the experience, in that it’s entirely subjective, it is possible to provide rational explanations as to what might be going on.

We know that during these episodes, the brain is in a traumatic state, deprived of oxygen through lack of a blood supply. During CPR, the flow of blood to the brain is around 20% of its normal level. The idea is that this can keep brain cells alive, preventing them from the catastrophic effects of oxygen starvation, but isn’t enough to allow for full consciousness. But, with this reduced supply, some parts of the brain will experience adverse effect of this. Additionally, patients are often under the influence of powerful drugs which may have hallucinogenic effects.

Recall of these NDEs obviously happens after the person has “come back”. We know that memories are very malleable, and it is certainly possible that the brain will “fill in the gaps” during a break in its consciousness with a combination of expectation and perhaps actual experiences. We also know that the brain won’t be aware of the length of time that it was out but will fill in the details to its satisfaction. We also don’t have the evidence to know that memories recalled were recorded during the episode of the NDE and could therefore be confabulations after the event. Memories can also be contaminated by interactions with others after the event, and by expectations. For example, people recalling floating above their bodies and seeing relatives in an adjacent room in tears are easily produced by expectation and conversations with those relatives after the event.

Then there’s the cultural aspects of NDEs. Many of us are brought up under the influence of various religious traditions, most of which are strongly oriented around the idea of a continuation of life after physical death. I’m sure that these traditions influence how people recall their experiences. If you’re brought up believing that you’ll see your dead relatives after you die, or that God is watching over your life, or that you’ll go to hell for your sins, then it’s not unexpected that your recount of an NDE will include some of those aspects.

Commenting on the effects of NDEs on people that experienced them, Tassell-Matamua claimed that they had significant changes in their lives, with people becoming more humble, less materialistic, and less consumption-orientated after the event. She also used the oft-encountered claim that people “aren’t religious but are spiritual”.

As always, Dr Steven Novella, from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, has a good view of what’s going on.

Ultimately, Tassell-Matamua’s research is interesting from a social perspective, but interviewing people about their subjective experiences isn’t likely to get to the bottom of what is going on physically with NDEs. She seems to be in the true believer camp, looking for justifications of her existing spiritual beliefs.