by Mary Roach
THE FIRST CARDIOLOGIST to get involved in NDE research was Michael Sabom, currently in private practice in Atlanta. Sabom had read the work of psychologist Raymond Moody, Jr., who coined the term “near-death experience” and presented a series of cases in a 1975 book entitled Life After Life. Sabom was intrigued but skeptical. He was dissatisfied with Moody’s anecdotal approach and the fact that no attempt had been made to independently verify the things that people had reported seeing while seeming to be outside their bodies.
Sabom, then a professor of medicine and cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta, decided to do a study of his own, a controlled study. Of 116 cardiac arrest survivors he interviewed, he found six who could recall specific medical details they’d seen during their near-death out-of-body experience. The six patients’ descriptions of what they’d observed during their resuscitation were then compared to the report of the incident in their medical file. In no instances did the medical report contradict statements in the patient’s description. Nor were there any medical errors.
This was not the case with Sabom’s control group. Curious to see whether any old heart patient could come up with a convincingly detailed description of a cardiac resuscitation, Sabom interviewed twenty-five people who had spent time in coronary care units under similar circumstances to those of his subject group. All of them were familiar with the visuals of cardiac emergency: EKG monitors, defibrillator paddles, IV poles, crash carts. The controls were asked to describe, in as much detail as possible, what they would expect to see if their heart stopped beating and hospital staff attempted to resuscitate them. Twenty-two of the twenty-five descriptions contained obvious medical gaffes. Defibrillator paddles were hooked up to air tanks or outfitted with suction cups. The imaginary doctors were punching patients in the solar plexus and pounding on their backs instead of their chests. Hypodermic needles were being used to deliver electric shocks. It was as though chimps had been let loose in the emergency room.
Below is a passage from Sabom’s interview with one of the six NDE patients who’d described the specifics of their resuscitations. It is fairly representative of the level of detail and seeming cohesiveness of these people’s memories:
Where about did they put those paddles on your chest?
Well, they weren’t paddles, Doctor. They were round disks with a handle on them…. They put one up here, I think it was larger than the other one, and they put one down here.
Did they do anything to your chest before they put those things on your chest?
They put a needle in me … They took it twohanded—I thought that was very unusual—and shoved it into my chest like that. He took the heel of his hand and his thumb and shot it home….
Did they do anything else to your chest before they shocked you?
Not them. But the other doctor, when they first threw me up on the table, struck me…. He came back with his fist from way behind his head and he hit me right in the center of my chest…. They shoved a plastic tube like you put in an oil can, they shoved that in my mouth.
Another patient describes a pair of needles on the defibrillator unit, “one fixed and one which moved,” which was typical of 1970s-era defibrillators. (The man’s heart attack happened in 1973.) Sabom asks him how it moved, to which he replies, “It seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter, or something registering…. The first time it went between one-third and one-half scale. And then they did it again, and this time it went up over one-half scale.” Though the man had been an air force pilot, he had never seen CPR instruments during his training.
Of course, it’s possible Sabom’s subjects were extrapolating from things they’d felt and heard, either just before their heart stopped or some time afterward. (The interviews were done years after the incidents had taken place, so doctors couldn’t be relied upon to verify the timing of specifics.) It’s possible the patients could have heard what the doctors and nurses were saying and subconsciously fabricated visual details to match. Hearing is the last sense to disappear when people lose consciousness. Dozens of articles have run in medical journals over the years addressing concerns about anesthetized patients hearing the things said about them during surgery.* Not just things like, “Nurse, more suction.” Things like, “This woman is lost” and “How can a man be so fat?”—both actual examples reported by patients in a 1998 British Journal of Anaesthesia article.
If it’s possible the patients heard things, it’s also possible they might have partway opened their eyes and seen things. And the things they saw could then have been incorporated into the viewpoint of being up above the scene. A couple of years back, epilepsy researchers at the Program of Functional Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne stumbled onto a site within the brain that, when stimulated, reliably caused the perception of looking down on one’s body from above. So convincing were the images that the patient in question pulled back when asked to raise her knees, because it appeared to her that her knees were about to hit her in the face. The visuals were limited to the person’s own body, however, and not the furniture or equipment or researchers around it. Still, one can imagine a blending of this viewpoint with information gleaned from things heard or seen.
The holy grail of NDE research, then, the best evidence that what seemed to be an extrasensory perception was indeed extrasensory, would be a deaf and blind patient: someone who “sees” things during a near-death experience that are later verified and that couldn’t have been inferred from something he or she saw or heard—because he or she can’t see or hear.
The closest Sabom has come to this is a woman named Pam Reynolds, who, in 1991, underwent brain surgery with her eyes taped shut, and molded, clicking inserts inside her ears. (Watching the brain stem’s responses to clicks is a way of monitoring its function.) Despite this, and despite the fact that her EEG was flat, meaning all brain activity had stopped (surgeons were repairing a massive aneurism and had drained the blood from her brain), she reported having “seen” the Midas Rex bone saw being used on her skull. She said it looked like an electric toothbrush and that its interchangeable attachments were kept in what looked like a socket wrench case. I went on the Midas Rex web page to have a look at their bone saws. Indeed, bone saws look nothing like any saw I’ve ever seen. They do look like electric toothbrushes—not the kind you or I might use, but the kind dentists use, with interchangeable heads and a metal handle attached to a long flexible tube that leads to a motor housing. After I’d recovered from reading the copy (“true high-speed bone-dissecting performance”! … “For cutting, drilling, reaming …”), I clicked on the Instrument Case page, where the various attachments were shown in a box resembling nothing so much as a socket wrench case.
But why was Reynolds unable to describe any of the people in the room? Sabom nominates “weapon focus phenomenon,” which you can read all about in a 1990 issue of the Journal of Law and Human Behavior. Research has shown that victims of armed criminals are able to accurately recall the weapon used on them ninety-one percent of the time, and the guy holding it only thirty-five percent of the time. So perhaps the bone saw had hijacked Pam Reynolds’s attention. Or, who knows, perhaps she paid a visit to the Midas Rex web page, too. This is the trouble with anecdotes.
Though there is no deaf-blind NDE study, there is a study of blind people who have had NDEs. Psychology professor and International Association for Near-Death Studies cofounder Kenneth Ring and then–psychology Ph.D. candidate Sharon Cooper contacted eleven organizations for the blind, explaining that they were looking for blind people who had had near-death or out-of-body experiences. They ended up with thirty-one subjects (and a book, called Mindsight, published in 1999). Twenty-four of these subjects reported being able to “see” during their experiences. Some “saw” their bodies lying below them; some “saw” doctors or physical features of the room or building they were in; others “saw” deceased relatives or religious figures.
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br /> Strangely, the subjects who reported “seeing” these things included people who had been blind from birth: individuals whose dreams almost never contain visual images, just sounds and tactile impressions. An example is a man named Brad, who reported having floated up above the building, where he could see snowbanks along the streets, of “a very soft kind of wet” slushy snow. He saw a playground and a trolley going down the street. When asked if perhaps he did not see but somehow sensed these things, Brad replied, “I clearly visualized them. I remember being able to see quite clearly.” (Others were less decisive: “It was seeing but it wasn’t vision,” said a woman named Claudia.) Understandably, the experience was confusing and, in one woman’s words, frightening. “It was like hearing words and not being able to understand them,” she told Ring, “but knowing they were words.”
I was mainly interested in whether any specific, unique details of what the blind people had “seen” could be verified by others who had seen these details, too. The book includes a chapter on corroborative evidence, but it is a bit disappointing. Often the people who could have verified what the blind people said they’d seen were impossible to track down, or did not recall any details of the events. One exception was a woman named Nancy, who lost her sight as a result of surgical complications. (They accidently cut and then sewed shut a large vein near her heart.) After the mishap, on her way into emergency surgery, she “saw” both her lover and the father of her child standing down the hallway from where her gurney was being wheeled toward an elevator. Ring tracked down both the lover and the dad, and both confirmed that they had watched her gurney go by from down the hall. However, there was some question as to exactly when she had gone blind (i.e., was it before or after the gurney ride?). And it’s hardly the kind of whiz-bang dazzle shot—to borrow Gary Schwartz’s terminology—that you hope for. You’d want the two men, or at least one of them, to have been “seen” (and then verified by someone else) doing something unique, something other than just being there—eating a banana, say, or tripping over an IV pole.
The most impressive near-death dazzle shot I’ve come across was not something reported by a blind person. It was a sneaker, seen by a migrant worker named Maria, who had a heart attack in Seattle. Maria told her ICU social worker—a woman whose parents did her the gross disservice of naming her Kimberly when her last name was Clark*—that she had not only spent time watching herself being worked on by the ER team, but had drifted out of the building and over the parking lot. It was from this perspective that she noticed a tennis shoe on a ledge on the north end of the third floor of the building. Later that day, Kimberly Clark went up to the third floor and found a tennis shoe where Maria had reported seeing one. Unfortunately, she didn’t bring along a witness.
The sneaker story eventually made its way to Kenneth Ring. In much the same way as unverified anecdotes of blind people’s near-death “sights” prompted his Mindsight study, Ring set out in search of other “cases of the Maria’s shoe variety,” cases he would then attempt to verify. He found three, which he describes in a 1993 article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Oddly, two of the three incidents involve shoes. In the first anecdote, Ring communicated with an ICU nurse who had returned to work from vacation wearing a new pair of plaid shoelaces. A woman she helped resuscitate saw her the next day (presumably in a different pair of shoes) and said, “Oh, you’re the one with the plaid shoelaces.” When the nurse expressed surprise, the woman said, “I saw them. I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died.” Another out-of-body heart attack patient reports to a nurse that he saw a red shoe on the hospital roof; a skeptical resident gets a janitor to let him up onto the roof, where he finds a red shoe (and loses his skepticism). No doubt someone out there is working on a journal article about “shoe focus phenomenon,” but until then, the out-of-body traveler’s affinity for footwear must remain a mystery.
Ring interviewed both these nurses, though apparently could not track down any third parties to corroborate the stories. It’s possible the patients had somehow seen these items before surgery. It’s also possible, in the case of the shoe on the roof, that it’s a coincidence. You can’t be sure. You’re relying on one person’s claim. The danger of that is best expressed in the form of a hand-glued last-minute errata slip in Ring’s book:
Readers are advised to disregard entirely the … Appendix, in which a case of a blind woman who purported to have an NDE is described…. We discovered, to our chagrin, that this case has fraudulent aspects. Dr. McGill, who offered this account to us in good faith, now believes she was deceived by the woman in question.
That’s why I like the computer-near-the-ceiling project. It’s a study, not an anecdote. Unfortunately, it’s a slow-moving study. Because of limitations imposed by the human subjects committee, Greyson has interviewed fewer than thirty subjects to date.
Is there any other experimental avenue for proving that a mind (soul, personality, consciousness, whatever) can travel independent of its body? There is, though it’s not an avenue along which mainstream researchers would be willing to stroll. It involves people who claim to be able to will them-selves to have out-of-body experiences—simply pull their consciousness out of the garage and take it for a ride.*
If you wanted to prove that it’s possible for some version or vestige of the self to exist independent of body and brain, you could try to set up some sort of detector in a room far away from one of these purported free-floaters, and instruct him or her to head on over. It’s a jump to further conclude that this is what we do when we die, but it would make it easier—for me, anyway—to accept that NDEs are something other than a neurological/psychological phenomenon.
In 1977, a group of parapsychologists undertook just such a project, on the campus of Duke University. I was pleased to see that the main author on this study was the late Robert Morris, of the University of Edinburgh. I’d written an article on Morris’s telepathy work years ago; I liked the fact that he had cooperated with the skeptics group CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in designing the experimental protocol.
Morris and his colleagues worked with a single subject named Stuart Harary, who had participated in previous out-of-body experience projects at Duke. Harary was instructed to leave his body and travel to one of two detection rooms, either fifty feet or a quarter mile away. To determine whether he could actually do this, Morris stationed people in the detection room and had them try to sense Harary while he “visited.” The results were no better than chance. There were about as many reports of detection during control periods as when Harary believed he was out of his body.
Surmising that animals might be more keenly attuned to extrasensory presences, Morris next did a series of trials using snakes, gerbils, and kittens as detectors. The cages were set up on top of an activity platform that registered movements on a polygraph, whose readout could then be compared to the timing of Harary’s “visits.” As anyone who’s been to a herpetarium could have predicted, the snakes did not work out. They didn’t move around when Harary was visiting the room, and they didn’t move around when he wasn’t. The gerbils proved similarly apathetic. “The rodents spent most of their time either chewing on the cage bars or resting quietly,” wrote Morris.
Morris eventually settled on a kitten that had seemed to show an affinity for Harary. The kitten was not caged but let loose in a corralled area with a grid taped out on the floor; in this case the behavioral measure was the number of squares entered per one hundred seconds and the animal’s vocalization rate. Disappointingly, the kitten seemed to be reliably less active when Harary indicated he was “there,” leading some of the researchers to wonder whether they’d gotten the protocol backward. Perhaps Harary’s presence wasn’t stimulating the animal but calming it. Morris and his colleagues went through a half dozen methodological variations, including one in which the kitten was sequestered under an inverted box until Harary “arrived,” whereupon the box, which was h
ooked to a pulley, would slowly and dramatically rise like a stage curtain. It is around this point that I like to insert the image of a group of white-haired Duke alumni wandering into the building on a homecoming tour.
The experiment dragged on so long that around page 11, Morris begins referring to the kitten as a cat, noting that it had by then grown to maturity. He reported a number of anecdotal occurrences—frustratingly, a couple of casual bystanders proved better at sensing Harary than the official “human detectors”—that would seem to indicate something was up, but overall there was little to suggest that Harary had been anywhere but inside Harary’s head. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time, and scientific literature is the richer for the introduction of the measurement unit “meows per second.”
A few years later, a team of non-university-affiliated paranormal researchers tried a similar experiment, with strain gauges in place of kittens and gerbils. Here our out-of-body traveler was an amateur parapsychologist from Maine named Alex Tanous. For clarity, Mr. Tanous referred to his out-ofbody self as Alex 2, and his stay-at-home self as Alex 1, and so I will, too. Alex 2’s mission was to travel six rooms distant, enter a suspended (to keep floor vibrations from setting off the strain gauges) eighteen-inch cube, and view one of five randomly generated images, which would appear in one of four colors and four quadrants. Meanwhile, Alex 1 would tell the researchers what he sees. A tape was kept running, so that the researchers could see if the strain gauges were registering force specifically when Alex 2 was correctly reporting what he “saw,” as this would suggest that he had actually been inside the cube—rather than knowing the target remotely, via some more ordinary, garden-variety ESP.
Head researcher Karlis Osis, who died in 1997, reported that Tanous had 144 hits and 83 misses. Does this mean that Tanous got all three aspects (color, quadrant, image) of the target correct sixty-three percent of the time? When chance would dictate a correct guess only once in eighty tries? Why hasn’t this guy been on the news? Why hasn’t he turned the world upside down? Osis further claimed that when Alex 2 was seeing the targets correctly, the mean activation level of the gauges inside the chamber was significantly greater than when he wasn’t seeing the target correctly. “Therefore,” concludes the paper, “it is our opinion that the [strain gauge] results can most likely be attributed to the subject’s out-of-body presence in the shielded chamber.”
