My near-death experience
SIMON EDGE hasn’t had one but some intriguing scientific research about the phenomenon gave him an idea for a novel
BACK in 2004 when I was a feature writer on the Daily Express one of my editors chucked a magazine at me, as is the way of editors, saying: “Have a read of that and see if you can get any ideas out of it.” It was the first-ever issue of a magazine called Phenomena – still going strong today – and its subject was the paranormal. I’m a committed rationalist so this would not have been my first choice of reading material. Cover lines, such as Alien Abduction In Brazil and The CIA And Noah’s Ark, frankly made me wince.
The cover story, subtitled Into The Tunnel Of Light, was about near-death experiences and claimed to present “compelling evidence of real-life NDEs”. It recounted the studies of a medical doctor who had heard resuscitated patients talk of looking down on their own bodies and travelling up tunnels of light, as the 16th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch seemed to show in his celebrated painting Ascent Of The Blessed.
He had then embarked on a research project to find out if there was any truth in patients’ reports of being able to see and have consciousness during cardiac arrest – particularly from vantage points outside the body.
If so, it would give credence to the religious view that we have selves – or souls – that can exist independently of our bodies. This is something that millions, if not billions, of people already believe because it is an obvious precondition for a meaningful afterlife. However, it is not something that science has ever proved.
As an atheist I have no spiritual or paranormal beliefs that I need to square with scientific knowledge. It would disturb my world view if it turned out that our souls really could leave our bodies, look down on them and accurately report, say, the title of a book on a top shelf next to the bed, which could only be seen when looking down from the ceiling.
My eye was therefore drawn to a section of the article headed Sceptical Voices. It actually quoted only one such voice, belonging to Dr Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England. She herself had had an out-of-body experience (OBE) as a young woman so her starting point was that any such reports are honest and sincere accounts of what genuinely seems to have happened to people, rather than hoaxes or mistaken accounts.
As a scientist she had investigated with an open mind, actively wanting to discover if there was an astral plane on which the self could have consciousness outside the body. With regret she had concluded that there was no evidence of any such thing.
SHE had gone on to look for – and claimed to have found – a neurological explanation for the sensations of gazing down on your own body and travelling up a white tunnel towards a bright light, amid the feelings of euphoria that are also frequently reported by people who have had such experiences.
To me this was the really interesting part. If Dr Blackmore was right, it meant that anyone, irrespective of religious belief, could have one of these experiences and they could be explained AUTHOR: Simon Edge