Cheating Death

by Sanjay Gupta

  Less obvious but equally true is the fact that memory is distorted by stress. Under stress, the body releases certain hormones, like cortisol, which trigger activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is about the size and shape of an almond. It plays a vital role in transforming short-term memories into long-term ones. When there’s too much activity, the process is impaired. This means that under stressful conditions, people are far less likely to recall the details occurring around them. This has major real-world implications. For example, memory experts say that eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, even if courts and juries have been slow to recognize this.

  Many people mistakenly think their memory of a stressful event is excellent. That’s because the emotional aspect of the memory is so strong. This also goes back to the amygdala. Along with helping the memory process, the amygdala plays a key role in the limbic system—the system we talked about earlier that regulates our emotions. Stress might keep us from remembering the details, but we never forget how we felt at certain times, whether it’s a first kiss or a firefight in Baghdad. Post-traumatic stress disorder is essentially a memory problem; the terrifying aspects of an experience are seared in the victim’s mind, a painful memory that gets stronger each time it’s recalled. 30

  So what does all this have to do with NDEs? Well, a life-threatening emergency can be pretty frightening. Even if you don’t panic, it’s hard to imagine a more emotionally charged situation. If we think about memory under stress, it’s easy to see how people might vividly recall the experience, even if they don’t accurately remember all the details. The details of NDE accounts seem especially shaky in a case where the patient was not only stressed out, but oxygen deprived and maybe even pumped full of powerful medication.

  If this casts doubt on the reality of NDEs, it also seems to pose a challenge to the scientific explanations. Let’s say you did have a dreamlike experience. How would you remember it when you were in cardiac arrest and your brain had no oxygen?

  Here’s the thing: A memory, even of a real event, isn’t a perfect snapshot that we’ve filed away. It’s a puzzle of different parts—sights, sounds, emotional content, and other details. Each time the memory is recalled, the different parts of the puzzle are called up and patched together, and each time the memory is remade, the connections in the brain are reinforced and the memory gets stronger. The problem is, it isn’t always accurate. Each memory is, in a sense, being rebuilt from scratch every time, and new puzzle pieces can get thrown in by mistake—or even on purpose. Countless experiments show that it’s incredibly easy to induce false memories by making a few simple suggestions. In the same way, a real memory can be distorted by suggestion after the fact—for example, a vague memory of darkness and light might over time become a vivid memory of a tunnel, as the story is told again and again. 31

  Another distortion that might be relevant to NDEs involves time. Unless there are specific cues to prompt us, we often remember events as happening in a different order than they really did. It’s possible that Pam Reynolds accurately remembered part of a conversation among her doctors, but inaccurately recalled that it took place while she was “dead,” when in fact they were talking a few minutes before she became unconscious.

  One thing that’s clear: whether or not near-death experiences are real, they usually have a profound effect on the people who have them. This holds true whether someone nearly dies under carefully recorded conditions in a hospital or in a setting where the person merely came close to physical harm.

  Pam Wedding, now sixty-two, was a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Georgia when she agreed to go white-water rafting with a friend named Jim. 32 Wedding loved to spend time hiking and camping, but she wasn’t an experienced rafter. Nevertheless, she and Jim launched their boat on a section of the Ocoee River that was favored by expert kayakers. Making matters worse, there had been heavy rains the night before. Almost immediately after pushing off into the water, they lost their paddles and found themselves in serious trouble. Holding on for dear life, Wedding and Jim rode the river around a bend, past a large, rocky outcrop. Says Wedding, “I saw these people waving. That’s what I thought at first. But they were really saying, ‘Go back!’ ”

  She soon could see why. Over the roar of the river she made out an even louder sound. It was water spilling over a low-head dam, dangerous in any circumstance, since the water falling over the edge forms what rafters call a hydraulic, a circular current of water going back toward the dam face. Worse for Wedding and her friend, the swollen river had actually broken off a portion of the dam, causing a powerful current that had them hurtling straight for the gap.

  “I went into some kind of shock. I remember [Jim] saying ‘Hold on!’ The funny thing is—I wasn’t scared. I was just, you know, holding on,” she said. The roar of the river faded in her ears as the boat shot over the edge of the dam. Caught in the hydraulic, Wedding could barely move a muscle against the powerful current that held her, churning, underwater.

  “I just stayed under, and when I went down, it was just dark. Just dark,” she recalls. I would imagine an unbelievably terrifying experience, but Wedding says she felt no sense of panic. Time seemed to slow, and each thought came to her as clear as crystal. “I was thinking, very clearly, ‘It’s dark and I’m underwater.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna breathe in.’ And I could breathe in, and I could breathe out, and I thought, ‘Well, this can’t be happening, because I can’t breathe in the water. And so I thought I was dead.’

  “And then I started to get these little vignettes coming in. I saw myself there as a young child, with my father who died when I was seven and a half, and with my brother, who’s still alive.” The images drifted by, and a sense of peace filled her body. “It was just holy, absolute peace,” she said.

  To be clear, Wedding may have been in grave danger but she certainly wasn’t near death from a physical standpoint. She wasn’t even unconscious. She did experience a feeling of intense clarity and a sense that time had slowed. Kevin Nelson suggests that this bodily reaction to danger may be an evolutionary adaptation, akin to the fight-or-flight response that may immediately precede it. Says Nelson, “You have to calm down in order to take appropriate action. If you hear a lion’s roar or you spot a lion, you have to find a tree to climb.” You can’t do that if you’re in a state of panic. “You can’t be looking all over. You have to focus on your escape route.”

  When we find ourselves in danger, a brain center called the locus coeruleus releases adrenaline, which makes us more alert and gives us a jolt of energy. When the neurons of the locus coeruleus are firing fast, we’re highly aroused. When they slow down, we’re calmer and more focused on the task. 33 That’s old news to neurologists, but Nelson sees a new twist. You see, in animal experiments, the only time the neurons of the locus coeruleus stop firing completely is during REM sleep. If Nelson’s theory is right, the high stress of a near-death situation triggers REM stage, which leads to the overwhelming sense of peace and clarity found in NDEs. It’s a tantalizing connection. Nelson admits he’s going out on a limb, but if he’s right, it might explain the common threads between true NDEs and other similar experiences.

  Pam Wedding saw the light—a classic near-death experience. “There was the light they always talk about,” she continued her story. “A light just started seeming like it was coming from in front of me, filling up the space. It was just so beautiful, so inviting. I just knew that whatever it was, it was all good.

  “I thought, ‘It’s okay. I’m dead, and it’s going to be fine.’ And then, somebody just grabbed me around the waist. A hand came around my waist and pulled upward, and I just shot up. And when I reached the surface, there was Jim, my friend, pulling me over to the side.”

  The experience was too overwhelming to describe at the time, so Wedding didn’t say anything about it when she crawled out of the water. She and Jim just asked each other if they were okay, nodded, pulled out the boat, and went home. Though they staye
d in touch after college, they didn’t discuss the incident for more than thirty years, until Jim was visiting Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics. Over dinner, Wedding mentioned to Jim’s teenage son that his dad was a hero for pulling her out of the water. Jim just stared at her across the table. At first, she thought he didn’t know what she was talking about, and then he spoke. Quietly he said he didn’t pull her up but just helped her to the side of the river once she was free of the churning hydraulic. He said, “We thought you were dead. And then you literally came flying out of the water!”

  I asked if maybe it wasn’t just the action of the spinning water, throwing her to safety. No, she was certain. “I know it sounds crazy, but a hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the water,” says Wedding. “On some level I thought maybe it was my father [who had died twelve years before]. I swear, as much as I’m sitting here, I felt that happen, like ‘You’re not ready to go anywhere!’ ”

  The trigger of an NDE doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to the long-term impact. It doesn’t seem to matter whether physical death actually occurrs for a few seconds or minutes or if the person simply undergoes a terrifying experience, like going over a waterfall and being held underwater for a few minutes. The near-death experience has a profound effect. Several long-term studies document that most people who report an NDE emerge with a sense of knowledge or enlightenment. One NDEer who suffered a near-fatal heart attack told me that even though he’s not religious, he returned to life with a sense that he had just received a message—“I just don’t know what it is.” 34

  According to Jeffrey Long, this sense of meaning doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, he says the changes in personality and outlook take seven years on average to reach their peak. And sometimes longer. Pam Wedding spent most of her adult life in the corporate world, but shortly after discussing the near-drowning incident for the first time—thirty-one years after it happened—she traveled to Tibet, became a Buddhist, and started volunteering at a hospice, where she continues to this day.

  Pam Reynolds certainly felt a transformation. On her website, Reynolds writes that she no longer has a fear of death and that she’s become so “sensitive” that going out in large crowds makes her feel uncomfortable. She feels more compassion and understanding for others: “I’m slow to anger and I have the patience of Job.”

  Pim van Lommel reinterviewed his study participants two years after their cardiac arrests, and again six years after that. At both junctures, people who went through an NDE were less afraid of death, more likely to believe in the afterlife, more likely to say they understood the purpose of life, and more likely to appreciate “ordinary things.” What’s more, their questionnaires showed them to be more “loving” and “empathetic”; more involved with their families; and ranking higher on measures of understanding others, sensing inner meaning, and showing their own feelings. 35 A skeptic might say that people who are most likely to report an NDE are the same people who might already be interested in the afterlife and to feel empathy toward others. Fair enough, but in study after study, similarly dramatic results have been found.

  Long says these transformations generally happen only when a person believes that what they experienced while “dead” was real. He says, “They know there’s some different realm, some different aspect of their existence. That’s why they have the changes. They don’t fear death. They know there’s an afterlife, and they think it’s wonderful. You just have to listen to them.” Long’s biggest beef with mainstream researchers, he says, is that scientists like Nelson miss the main point: that to truly understand what’s going on, you need to listen to the experiences.

  Still, Long doesn’t dismiss the REM hypothesis, and he’s eager to see it tested by a definitive study. That would certainly be a monumental task. At a major hospital or hospitals, anyone entering over the course of a year would be asked a set of detailed questions to determine if they would qualify for a diagnosis of REM intrusion disorder. Meanwhile, anyone who suffered a cardiac arrest while in the hospital would be quizzed about whether they’d had a near-death experience—and asked to describe it in detail. If it turns out that people who report REM intrusion beforehand are more prone to a near-death experience, that would support Nelson’s theory. Fascinating, but it seems unlikely that any such study will be done in the foreseeable future.

  Pim van Lommel insists that the true explanation for NDEs lies outside the brain. Our brains, in his view, don’t produce consciousness but tune in to an outside, preexisting consciousness found in electromagnetic fields all around us. He believes that people who experience an NDE are somehow able to bring in the signal, even as their own brain ceases to function. 36 “I think that death is another kind of consciousness, a change of the level of consciousness, like Buddha said,” says van Lommel. “Death is death of the physical body, but not the end of the essence you are. You have your consciousness, and that remains.”

  In mainstream medical circles, this theory is controversial to say the least, but van Lommel is supremely confident. In a 2007 paper, he wrote that it is “inevitable” to conclude that consciousness and the brain are separate and that this understanding “might well induce a huge change in the scientific paradigm in western medicine.” 37

  In 2008, Sam Parnia finally launched what he hopes will be a more definitive experiment, involving more than two dozen major medical centers in the United States and Europe. 38 Much like his earlier work in Southampton, Parnia’s researchers are asking patients who survive a cardiac arrest what they remember of the experience. Parnia wants to determine once and for all whether it’s possible for the mind to continue to function, even when the brain no longer does. He thinks the new study will go a long way toward pinning down what’s really going on with these lights, tunnels, and out-of-body experiences.

  “I’m still very skeptical about the whole thing, but until we can verify these things objectively, we can’t say they don’t happen,” says Parnia. “Is it a false memory? My personal view [is] that probably that’s what we’ll find. But if we find that mind and human consciousness could be separate, that people somehow see things from the ceiling, then we have an amazing discovery.”

  Nearly dying was a spark for Duane Dupre. He left the stressful work of managing supermarkets to focus on spending more time with his four grandchildren and doing good works. Along with ten of his pals, Dupre started a foundation called Ten Friends Cooking, which caters big events and gives all the proceeds to charity. He knows what he saw while he was dead and says he knows it was a miracle, even if he isn’t quite sure what happened to him: “People say you must have been dreaming. You must have just imagined it. And maybe they’re right. We’ll see.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What Lies Beneath

  No event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death… . What I have now to tell is of my own actual knowledge—of my own positive and personal experience.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”

  DR. MARK RAGUCCI was so far gone, his doctors thought he’d never come back. For nearly two months after a surgery that went badly awry, Ragucci was completely unresponsive, dead to the world in his hospital bed. “They said I had irreparable brain damage from having no oxygen to my brain,” he recalls. “They said I showed no response to stimuli. That means they could shine a light in my eyes, poke me with a needle, whatever, it wouldn’t register. I was a vegetable.” 1

  For two months he lay in a darkened room while his mother, father, and wife kept vigil, all waiting for a miracle. The head of the unit, a physician with an elite medical education and more than a decade of experience in one of the country’s top hospitals, told them to forget it. So did two other doctors with the combined weight of half a century of medical experience. The doctors in the crisp white coats, the medical literature on which they relied, all gave his family the same simple message: pull the plug. 2

  Up to this point, w
e’ve been talking about death as stoppage of the heart. That’s been the meaning of death almost as long as humans have been around. But in an American hospital today, that’s not what doctors mean by death: They’re talking about whether the brain can function in a meaningful way, about whether consciousness is irretrievably lost. They’re talking about brain death. And here, the line between life and death is shifting just as much, if not more, as it is for the doctors who try and keep our hearts beating and the blood pumping through our veins.

  You won’t find a better example than Ragucci. His doctors might have given up, but he can tell the story today because one doctor didn’t—and because something inside Ragucci was able to bounce back, something that gave him the strength to cheat death: brain death.

  The concept of brain death first gained popularity among a small group of surgeons in the 1950s. They were transplant surgeons, intent on taking body parts from a patient with no hope of survival and giving them to one who might be saved. Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, these surgeons made tremendous technical advances toward the removal and implantation of kidneys, hearts, and livers in animals. But except for the use of a single kidney—which could be removed without killing the donor—they were forbidden from trying human transplants. No hospital would allow a body part to be removed from an organ donor until the patient’s heart stopped beating on its own. Any doctor who defied these guidelines might be prosecuted for murder. Of course, once the heart stops, tissues throughout the body begin to die, so the restriction against taking organs from a living body meant that surgeons were limited to using organs damaged by the lack of oxygen. In leading hospitals, surgeons would hover around a dying man or woman, anxiously watching the monitor that would tell them when his or her heart stopped, so the transplant operation could begin. Not surprisingly, survival rates in early transplant cases were poor.