by Mary C Neal
Fortunately, my vision and thinking skills quickly made a full recovery. As soon as I had the stamina to do it, I began my search—at first slowly, but then with increasing focus. This chapter is the story of that quest—part survivor story, part medical sleuthing, and all incredibly important for beginning a conversation about NDEs that is grounded in facts. For some, the science-focused content of this chapter may seem daunting, even unnecessary. For others, it will be the single most important chapter in the book.
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
At the time of my NDE, I felt alone in my experience. Now, of course, I know that many, many people have had NDEs, and that profound commonalities mark our experiences. But back then, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what the term meant. Early on in my search, I might have been persuaded to agree with the blogger who, in May 2013, wrote in response to Ben Breedlove’s online sharing of his NDE: “While I truly believe Breedlove saw those bright lights and felt that deep sense of calm, I don’t believe that what he saw and felt were ‘evidence’ of another realm. Rather, they were the dreams and hallucinations so often brought on by brain malfunctions, powerful drugs, and our own rich imaginations in the midst of life-threatening illness or trauma.”4
The blogger supported her position by describing an allergic reaction she had had to peanuts in which she “experienced an extreme sense of calm” and a vision of her own funeral from beneath a table. She wrote that she did not see angels, bright lights, tunnels, or staircases to heaven. In her view, NDEs are “colored entirely by our own unique backgrounds, philosophies, personalities, and values.” She concluded, “When faced with our own mortality, Breedlove and I both imagined what comes after death. He’s religious; I’m not. He saw an after-life. I saw a funeral.”5
Another blogger concluded his discussion of NDEs by writing, “Therefore, whatever at your deepest core you expect to happen when you die….Congratulations, that’s what’ll happen….Every religion was right.”6
While these opinions may be interesting, they were not helpful to me in trying to understand my own experience. I really hadn’t had any expectations about what death would be like or what would happen afterward. As such, how could my subconscious have created either the scope or the details of my experience? As a spinal surgeon, I’d been around death in my education, training, and practice but had yet to personally suffer the loss of a loved one. What’s more, I had never really considered my own death. Other than saying that I believed in a God, and thinking there was probably “something more” after death, I had no preconceptions about what death would be like, and really didn’t give it any thought.
Besides, as my family and coworkers could tell you, I have always seemed to be missing the imagination gene. A friend who has known me for twenty years told another friend that what I had written in my first book “must be true” because he “knew me to have no creative ability whatsoever.” He didn’t mean it as a criticism, but merely an observation that compelled him to both read my account and reconsider his own views on death after doing so.
Rather than accepting the cynical, dismissive, and anecdotal conclusions of people like the bloggers I mentioned, I wanted to systematically evaluate as much data as possible before forming conclusions. Understanding the nature of my experience was of paramount importance to me, and not just for clinical reasons. This was personal, I’ll admit, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. A huge part of me desperately wanted to find a reason to not believe the reality or details of my experience and, therefore, to not believe the things I had been told. Finding a reasonable explanation would allow me to return to the ordinary life I had known. It would allow me to forget what I had been told about my son’s future. I certainly did not want to face the challenges that had been set before me and did not relish the idea of sharing my experiences with others.
In any case, I pressed on. As a first step, I “came out” to one of my medical partners about my experiences because I thought he would listen rationally and critically. He listened intently as I spoke but then began to cry. He told me he was crying out of envy. This was definitely not the reaction I expected, and his response made me less inclined to share my experience with anyone else. I never even told the entire “story” to my husband. He was already so overwhelmed with the heroic task of caring for me, our young children, and running our medical practices that I didn’t want to add to his burdens. For many months, perhaps years, he was also filled with terror at having almost lost me and consumed with guilt for not having protected me.
So instead of talking more, I kept my head down and stuck to my research, beginning with what happened at the river.
DID I ACTUALLY DROWN?
I pored over my medical records, spoke with the people who had been at the river and with those who received me into the emergency room, and I tried to corroborate as many details as possible. I read a great deal about drowning, the physiology of a dying brain, and the phenomenon of NDEs.
I knew there had been no air pocket, aerated water, or other source of oxygen to readily explain my survival, so I first considered whether a mammalian diving reflex could have been responsible. This survival reflex, which is triggered when very cold water splashes the face of aquatic mammals, and diving birds, causes the heart rate to slow and can initiate a redistribution of blood, sending more of it to the brain and heart. This physiologic response decreases the oxygen requirements of these animals, allowing them to spend a greater length of time under the water. In my experience, this “cold water reflex” seems to be the “go-to” explanation given when people try to explain survival after prolonged drowning.
I was no different in my assumptions, and thought this reflex might explain both my survival and lack of neurologic impairment. The problem I encountered is that the actual data did not support this conclusion.
This generally held belief that water temperature makes a significant difference for most drowning victims is basically an urban legend that arose after a somewhat cursory 1987 study observed a small neurological benefit that occurred in young children, with little body fat, who underwent very rapid cooling in water temperatures of less than 5 degrees Celsius (40 degrees Fahrenheit). Although it might seem like stories of toddlers being revived after falling into an icy lake abound, there are actually few written reports. The 1987 study showed that even under these ideal conditions, when a child fell into an icy lake and almost immediately became hypothermic, 35 percent died and 33 percent had serious neurologic aftereffects.7
A more complete 2002 study from Dr. Suominen, et. al., in the departments of Anesthesia and Intensive Care at the Helsinki University Hospital for Children and Adolescents evaluated the effect of age, submersion time, water temperature, and emergency room body temperature on survival rates in cases of near drowning. Their data showed the only significant predictor of survival and neurologic disability was submersion time. Even with submersion times of less than ten minutes, fewer than 2 percent of people survived more than one month, regardless of age.8 The conclusion that submersion time is the only significant predictor of outcome and that water temperature offered no significant protection to the drowning victim has been supported in more recent studies, including a comprehensive 2014 study done at the University of Washington.9
Even if I decided to completely ignore the data and conclusions of these scientists, and ignore the fact that I was neither young at the time of my drowning nor submerged in freezing water, the reflexive redistribution of blood that occurs in the diving reflex is meaningless if the blood sent contains no oxygen. The diving reflex does not change the basic physiologic process of anoxia—aquatic mammals cannot stay under the water indefinitely. The eventual absence of oxygen reaching vital organs leads to death—so even this grasped-for explanation was implausible. And it did nothing to explain what came next for me.
WAS IT JUST MY IMAGINATION?
Maybe my subsequent out-of-body experiences were just the result of being given some “really good” drugs
while in the hospital. But my medical records showed that I didn’t get any sort of medication, let alone ones that could cause hallucinations. Cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel’s 2001 study showed that it would not have made a difference anyway, that the administration of medications had absolutely no influence on the likelihood of a person experiencing an NDE.10
I then wondered if my NDE was a subconscious creation resulting from a dream or stress-related hallucination. Both dreams and hallucinations typically deny reality, and most of us have experienced the fantastical creatures and impossible activities that often materialize within dreams. We have likely experienced the sensation of flying, time travel, talking animals, and sudden transformations of both people and objects. As Dr. Allan Hobson, a well-known dream researcher, writes, “Dreams are illogical in their content and organization, the unities of time, place, and person do not apply, and natural laws are disobeyed.” He goes on to write that dream content is often mysterious and puzzling and rarely follows a logical sequence of events.11
This is in contrast to the typical NDE. There, as in my experience, events proceed in a logical and organized manner, even while there is a shift in time and dimension. Rarely does the content of NDEs seem strange or bizarre, despite most experiencers’ recognition that they have left their body and are probably dead. Unlike a typical dream or hallucination, reality is also not distorted or denied in an NDE—it is just perceived as another reality superimposed on this one.
Hobson points out that dreams and hallucinations often contain intense emotions of anxiety, fear, and surprise. NDEs, on the other hand, are usually devoid of these emotions. In fact, experiencers typically describe feelings of intense peace, calm, and love. Despite the bizarre and fantastical elements of many of our dreams, if we can remember the experience, we can put it into words. But this is not typical of the otherworldly aspects of an NDE. Language simply comes up short. This is why the descriptions of near death and other spiritual experiences are so filled with analogies, similes, and metaphors.
Another hallmark of dreams, hallucinations, and delirium is that the details of these experiences are poorly recalled—and the further we get away from the event, the more the details fade. Ninety-five percent of all dreams are forgotten entirely upon awakening. Even when bits and pieces of a vivid dream are written down, details become only vaguely remembered over the course of hours and days and years.
One of the aspects of NDEs that I find truly fascinating is that the detailed memory of them simply never fades or changes. A not-uncommon testimonial goes like this: “That happened thirty years ago, but today the clarity of the experience remains as strong as the day it occurred.”
WAS IT A SEIZURE?
But could my experience have been the result of a “short circuit” in my brain—for example, a combination of abnormal electrical signals or perhaps seizure activity?
At first, this line of questioning seemed more promising. Children who suffer from reflex anoxic seizures occasionally report feelings of flashes of light, smells, tastes, tunnels, sensations of floating or flying, distortions of body image, feelings of leaving one’s body, or memories of events from the past. Specifically, however, these children never report beings of light, seeing deceased friends or relatives, angels, or pets, or any of the beautiful and inspiring scenes typically reported in childhood NDEs.12, 13
We know that whether naturally or surgically stimulated, the abnormal electrical stimulus of seizures certainly can cause people to have visual hallucinations, experience explosions of light, or have a feeling of being dissociated from their body.14 Stimulation of a part of the right temporal lobe has reportedly produced visions of God, hearing beautiful music, and even seeing dead friends and relatives.
I wondered if all this could explain what Christians believe about the scriptures being God-breathed? What if the disciple Matthew merely had a seizure when he described an angel of the Lord as having an appearance like lightning and clothing as white as snow (Matthew 28:2–3)?
But this is a stretch and really doesn’t make sense. While seizure-induced hallucinations can be vivid, the memories are always fragmented, nonsequential, never include elements that are unknowable to the experiencers, and have never produced the profound life reviews or transformational changes that are routinely observed in experiencers of NDEs.15
WAS IT OXYGEN DEPRIVATION?
Are you ready for a brief but illuminating Science of Drowning class? You might not consider yourself scientifically inclined in the slightest, but I encourage you to stay with me as I share with you the process and sequence of the body’s response when its life-giving supply of oxygen is suddenly and completely shut off.
If you stay with me, despite the occasional unfamiliar word, I promise you’ll never think about an NDE the same again.
Underwater and unable to breathe, my body’s hungry use of the remaining oxygen within my bloodstream should have caused my carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to rise. Yet I never felt the panic or intense sense of air hunger this would normally create.
Within a minute of my drowning, the amount of oxygen in my bloodstream would have dropped to almost zero. But although I may have felt like I was free of the need for oxygen, I definitely still needed it to keep my brain functioning. I should have lost consciousness, but that is not what happened. I only remember being conscious, followed by being more conscious.
Denying oxygen to the brain is like denying coal to a steam engine—it just isn’t sustainable. A continuous supply of oxygen is needed by the human brain to convert glucose, a simple sugar, to adenosine triphosphate (ATP), and ATP is critical for the transfer of energy within cells for metabolism. Think of it as the coal that provides the energy (heat) that converts water to steam, which is then harnessed to move the wheels of the train. So no coal means no heat means no steam. And without steam, even the mightiest steam engine is soon reduced to a silent, motionless collection of metal parts.
Similarly, the ATP generates the power needed to move electrically charged ions back and forth across cell membranes. This back-and-forth movement powered by ATP initiates the brain’s release of more than a hundred known chemical messengers (neurotransmitters), which tell the rest of the body what to do. But without oxygen and glucose, there is no ATP. With no ATP, there is no power source. With no power, there is no brain activity. Lights out.
Within two to three minutes of my drowning, my laryngospasm (a reflexive closing of the back of the throat that typically occurs with drowning) would have released, causing an influx of water to my lungs. When my presumed laryngospasm released, and I felt the movement of water into my lungs, I felt inexplicably free. I imagined myself as a manta ray, which so beautifully and silently propels itself through the ocean depths.
This inhaled river water in my lungs would have caused hemolysis (a bursting open of the red blood cells), further increasing the potassium level in my bloodstream. In turn, this would have altered the electrical activity in my heart muscle, and in combination with increased acidosis from the accumulation of lactic acid and rising CO2 levels, along with no signals from my brain, my heart would have stopped beating. Without a pump, blood would no longer even circulate through my vessels or within my brain.
Rebuttals to the NDE phenomenon often vaguely refer to a presumed residual activity in the brain’s cortex, but they offer no explanation as to how this activity might be powered. This explanation requires a suspension of logic, and the rejection of the well-documented physiological processes I’ve just described.
Think about the implications of that for a moment: Wouldn’t it be nonsensical to believe that a brain with no power, no electrical activity, and no function can independently form new, lucid, and complex memories that are precisely remembered for a lifetime?
One description of an NDE memory after drowning that struck me as quite representative came from Dr. Pim van Lommel’s book Consciousness Beyond Life:
I had an NDE when I “drowned” at the age of five. I am now ne
arly eighty-two. Suddenly, an unspeakably beautiful spectrum of light surrounded me. It was wrapped by a most peaceful loving presence, remaining unchanging for a “long time” before I returned to earthly reality with a terrible thud and then heard excited human voices and a banging on my body. Today the clarity of the experience remains as strong as the day it occurred. Consciousness does survive death in all probability. I am an anesthesiologist.16
Predictably and quickly, death ensues when no oxygen is forthcoming. It’s accurate to describe death as a process as well as an event. So, to find the answers we’re looking for, I want to further describe what happened during my process of dying (or anyone’s, for that matter) in slow motion.
With no oxygen supply, no power to keep the cell membranes charged, and no circulation, there would be no energy to keep the neurons (nerve cells) in my brain polarized (just as it takes effort to keep two magnets away from each other, it takes energy to keep differently charged chemicals on different sides of a cell membrane). Without continued polarization of the membrane, my neurons would have uncontrollably dumped their neurotransmitters directly into my brain’s synaptic clefts. These synaptic clefts are the gaps between neurons—the gaps through which communication must travel.
Imagine two brothers (neurons) standing on each side of a river (the cleft). They want to communicate but are too far apart to directly talk, so they solve this problem by asking a friend (a neurotransmitter) to deliver messages back and forth by swimming across the river.
