Life After Death
From the Reader's Digest
September 2003 edition


The scientific case for the human soul
By Anita Bartholomew

In the summer of 1991, Pam Reynolds learned she had a life-threatening bulge in an artery in her brain. Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, told the 35-year-old Atlanda mother of three that in order to operate he would have to stop her heart. During that time her brain function would cease. By all clinical measures, she would be dead for up to an hour.

While Reynolds was under anaesthesia, leads from a machine that emitted a clicking sound were plugged into her ears to gauge her brainstem function (the brainstem plays a part in controlling hearing as well as other involuntary activities). Additional instruments tracked heartbeat, breathing, temperature and other vital signs. Her limbs were restrained; her eyes were lubricated, then taped shut.

As Spetzler powered up the surgical saw to open the patient's skull, something occurred that never registered on any of the sophisticated monitoring devices. Reynolds felt herself "pop" out of her body. From a vantage point . just above Spetzier's shoulders, she looked down on the operation. She "saw" Spetzier holding something that resembled an electric toothbrush. A female voice complained that the patient's blood vessels were too small. It appeared to Reynolds that they were about to operate on her groin.

That couldn't be right, she thought. This is brain surgery. Reynolds then assumed that whatever they were doing inside her skull had triggered a hallucination.

But even though her eyes and ears were effectively sealed shut, what she perceived was actually happening. The surgical saw did resemble an electric toothbrush. Surgeons were, indeed, working on her groin: Catheters had to be threaded up to her heart to connect to a heart-lung machine.

Spetzier gave the order to bring Reynolds to "standstill" - draining the blood from her body. By every reading of every instrument, life left Reynolds's body. And she found herself travelling down a tunnel towards a light. At its end, she saw her long-dead grandmother, relatives and friends.

Time seemed to stop. Then an uncle led her back to her body and told her to return. It felt like plunging into a pool of ice-cold water. After she came to, Reynolds told Spetzier all that she'd seen and experienced.

"You are way out of my area of expertise," Spetzier said. And 12 years later, he still doesn't know what to make of it.

Reality or Illusion?

Today, medical advances have allowed doctors to resuscitate people who in earlier times would have been irretrievably dead. In effect, medical intervention has pushed back the boundaries of what we call death. (See notes after this article!) Nobody anticipated the number of patients who would come back with tales like Pam Reynolds' - tales of out-of-body experiences, journeys down tunnels and encounters with angels or deceased loved ones. This phenomenon has been labelled near-death experience (NDE).

At first, virtually all doctors dismissed such reports. The conventional medical explanation was hallucination, brought on by changes in the dying brain. Yet there was a problem with this interpretation. Such hallucinations could only occur if the brain maintained some function. Once flat lined, the brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn't hallucinate; it couldn't do anything at all.

That apparent paradox - that perceptions occur during NDEs when there is no functioning brain through which to perceive them - has scientists, theologians and ordinary people groping for answers. Such experience should simply not happen if currently accepted scientific theories about life death and consciousness are accurate The NDE, some argue, should move science to make room for the possibility of a soul.

Others are still skeptical. I asked British researcher Susan Blackmore Ph.D., what she made of Pam Reynolds's NDE. "If the case you describe is true," Blackmore wrote back via e-mail, "the whole of science would need rewriting."

Blackmore, however, assumes the account isn't accurate. Citing nearly 30 years of research into paranorma claims, she says that in every earlie case she's investigated, the evidenci simply wasn't there or she found an alternative explanation. "I can only say that my expectation is that this case did not happen like that." In her book about NDEs, Dying to Live, Blackmore notes that aspects of the near-death experience, including the tunnel and out-of-body experience, can be induced by strictly physiological events. During brain surgery, for instance, under local anaesthesia, patients sometimes report seeing things from an "out-of-body" perspective. Others have reported similar experiences under the influence of LSD, opium, hashish and anaesthetic drugs. Blackmore points out that the brain is awash in its own opiate-like substances, called endorphins, during periods of stress. She contends that evidence leads to the conclusion that out-of-body experiences and all other components of NDEs, no matter how real they seem, begin and end with a dying brain. But cardiologist and NDE researcher Michael Saborn compared what Reynolds said she saw and heard with Spetzier's surgical transcript and found that, during the period Reynolds experienced the tunnel, she had no brain activity at all. Like the unplugged computer mentioned before, for all intents and purposes, Pam Reynolds' brain was dead. And a dead brain can't misfire. Neither can it hallucinate or react to anaesthesia or other drugs. "She met all clinical criteria for death," according to Saborn. "She had no blood in her body. She had no vital signs at all. So, was this death? And, if it was death, what was this experience that she had while in this state?"

"It's Not Me, It's Just My Body"

Barbara Rommer, an internist in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, first encountered a patient who had had an NDE during her residency in the early 1970s. Since 1994, she has interviewed more than 600 people who reported having near-death experiences and has written a book on the topic. Her view may not fit that of many of her peers in the medical profession, but the interviews convinced her there is something that lives on after we die. "As I was interviewing these people, they wanted to speak to others who had had the same experience," she says. In response, she began a monthly support group for people who have had NDEs, one of the largest such groups in the world. I wanted to hear their stories, so I attended one of the support-group meetings. Dozens of ordinary-looking, mostly middle-aged men and women gathered to share experiences about what, for many of them, was a life-altering spiritual journey.

Robert Milham says his heart stopped during a heart attack: "The pain was gone. I was suspended over my body. I was looking at myself lying on the gurney and they were putting paddles on me." After a life of selfishness, he says his brush with death made him a more giving person.

Soft-spoken technology entrepreneur Ken Amick tells of an NDE after an allergic reaction during which he reports he stopped breathing and turned blue. "I could see in colour. I could hear. I could feel emotions like fear, like relief." He pauses, as if experiencing it again. "So, what's that blue thing lying on the table? That's me. I know that's me. It scares me to look at it. But it's not really me, it's just my body."

These people do not offer medical documentation that they were clinically dead, but that is somewhat beside the point. It is the near-death experience and what it means that fascinates them. Rommer says that these people find comfort in knowing they're not alone and not crazy. Their stories may sound bizarre, but they're not all that unusual. They echo the tales of NDEs told by people around the globe.

New Evidence, New Theories

While most medical researchers wouldn't be caught dead uttering the word soul, some find the idea that NDEs are triggered by the failing brain to be inadequate. They speculate that NDEs may be evidence, not of an afterlife, but of something just as stunning: Consciousness does not reside solely in the brain.

In a study published in December 2001 in the British medical journal The Lancet, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel recounts the NDE of a clinically dead, 44-year-old cardiacarrest victim. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where doctors restarted his heart with defibrillators. A nurse removed the man's dentures so a breathing tube could be inserted in his throat. Once stable, the man was moved to intensive care.

A week later, the man saw the nurse who had removed his false teeth and recognised her - though during their only prior encounter, his condition had ranged from coma to clinical death.

"You took my dentures out of my mouth," he told the nurse, and went on to accurately describe other details he claimed his disembodied self had viewed.

In an attempt to gauge the frequency of NDEs, van Lommel and his fellow researchers interviewed others .who had suffered cardiac arrest and survived. "Eighteen per cent have a story of a very clear consciousness," van Lommel says. These patients described everything from a general feeling of peace to full-fledged NDEs.

A study by British researchers at Southampton General Hospital, published in the journal Resuscitation, found that 11 per cent had memory recall of the unconscious period. Six per cent of those resuscitated after cardiac arrest reported NDEs. Both van Lommel and the British researchers believe that these findings suggest consciousness could exist in the absence of a functioning brain. "You can compare the brain to a TV set," says van Lommel. "The TV programme is not in your TV set." So where is consciousness? Is it in every cell of the body? "I think so," says van Lommel. "We know that each day, 50 billion cells die." He points out that this intensive cell turnover means that, eventually, almost all the cells that make up "me" or "you" are new. And yet, we don't perceive ourselves as being any different from what we always were. To van Lommel, it follows that "there must be a kind of communication between all our cells." In other words, all our cells - not just brain cells, but trillions of others in muscle, skeleton, gut, skin and blood - "talk" to one another in a kind of network that keeps our experience of consciousness going seamlessly even as billions of cells die and billions of others are produced. If that's so, then those cells still alive when someone is declared brain-dead may perceive events that are otherwise inexplicable. That hypothesis may lead us away from the interpretation of NDEs as evidence of an afterlife. But it opens up fascinating horizons and a Pandora's box of its own.

What does it mean if the mind persists after the brain is dead? Should we, for instance, rethink the harvesting of organs for transplant from the "brain-dead"? The NDE may force us to re-examine questions we thought we had the answers to: What is death? Where is consciousness? And can science find the soul?

End of Article

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WHEN DO YOU DIE?

Just as there is no consensus about when conscious life begins, there is none about when it ends. Determining the precise time of death is, in fact, medically and scientifically impossible, says Atlanta cardiologist Michael Saborn. "It used to be thought that the point of death was a single moment in time," says Saborn. "It is now thought that death is a process, not a single moment." We need something to go by, though. So our society has come up with various legal and social definitions to give us a sense of finality.

Here are terms we're most familiar with:

Clinical Death

Breathing and heartbeat have stopped. A person might still be able to be resuscitated with CPR or other means, depending on why the vital signs ceased and under what conditions.

Brain Death

The lower brain, or brainstem, which controls automatic body functions, stops working. A person can be kept alive only with the help of life- support machines. The length of the period that the brainstem must be inactive before a person is declared legally dead varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Complicating the issue, the same person can be considered legally dead if about to become an organ donor, but legally alive if not.

Persistent Vegetative State/Death of the Higher Brain

The brainstem still functions, keeping the heart, lungs and digestive system working, but the sensing, thinking part of the brain has shut down. It may be possible to keep the body functioning for long periods with life-support systems.

Whole Brain Death

Both lower and higher brain functions have ceased.

As if these definitions were not confusing enough, some religious leaders and experts in various disciplines question whether consciousness or the "soul" has truly departed - a body that meets any of the above criteria for death.

The End....!! ===================================================================================================== LOUD AND CLEAR

My grandmother attended my secondary-school recital. The first number was a piano duet. The lights dimmed, and in the hush that followed the two girls seated themselves at their instruments. "Well," my hard-of-hearing grandmother whispered distinctly, "this shouldn't take too long if they run them off two at a time." JOANNE NESSLEF

WORD WIZARDRY

Did you solve our RD Challenge on page 144? Don't peek if you have not read that far yet! Answers: 1. feel/zeal; 2. stew/glue; 3. sign/ swine; 4. sway/neigh; 5. dune/spoon; 6. buys/prize; 7. scuff/tough; 8. fist/hissed; 9. strait/freight; 10. bruise/snooze; II. grown/throne; 12. caret/parrot; 13. litre/beater; 14. truce/loose; 15. Titan/brighten.