Death & What Follows
Near-Death Experience Research
A body of clinical research studying vivid, structured experiences — a sense of leaving the body, moving through darkness toward light, profound peace, a life review — reported by a meaningful minority of people who survive cardiac arrest or come close to death.
Proponents
Pim van Lommel, Bruce Greyson, Sam Parnia
Evidence For
A prospective 2001 study following 344 cardiac arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals, published in The Lancet, found consistent, structured reports of these experiences occurring during a period when standard measures suggested the brain should not have been capable of organized conscious activity.
Evidence Against
Neuroscientists have proposed several physiological mechanisms — surges of brain activity during the dying process, oxygen deprivation, or REM-intrusion phenomena — that could account for the reported experiences without requiring consciousness to be functioning independently of the brain, and the exact timing of when during the medical event the experiences occur remains genuinely difficult to pin down.
Transmissions
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