The seven ways to have a near-death experience

Seeing a light and a tunnel may be the popular perception of death, but as Rachel Nuwer discovers, reports are emerging of many other strange experiences.

In 2011, Mr A, a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to Southampton General Hospital after collapsing at work. Medical personnel were in the middle of inserting a catheter into his groin when he went into cardiac arrest. With oxygen cut off, his brain immediately flat-lined. Mr A died.

Despite this, he remembers what happened next. The staff grabbed an automated external defibrillator (AED), a shock-delivery machine used to try to reactivate the heart. Mr A heard a mechanical voice twice say, “Shock the patient.” In between those orders, he looked up to see a strange woman beckoning to him from the back corner of the room, near the ceiling. He joined her, leaving his inert body behind. “I felt that she knew me, I felt that I could trust her, and I felt she was there for a reason [but] I didn’t know what that was,” Mr A later recalled. “The next second, I was up there, looking down at me, the nurse and another man who had a bald head.” 

Hospital records later verified the AED’s two verbal commands. Mr A’s descriptions of the people in the room – people he had not seen before he lost consciousness – and their actions were also accurate. He was describing things that happened during a three-minute window of time that, according to what we know about biology, he should not have had any awareness of.  Mr A’s story – described in a paper in the journal Resuscitation – is one of a number of reports that challenge accepted wisdom on near-death experiences. Until now, researchers assumed that when the heart ceases to beat and stops sending vital blood to a person’s brain, all awareness immediately ends. At this point, the person is technically dead – although as we learn more about the science of death, we are beginning to understand that, in some cases, the condition can be reversible. For years, those who have come back from that inscrutable place have often reported memories of the event. Doctors mostly dismissed such anecdotal evidence as hallucinations, and researchers have been reluctant to delve into the study of near-death experiences, predominantly because it was viewed as something outside of the reach of scientific exploration.  

But Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, along with colleagues from 17 institutions in the US and UK, wanted to do away with assumptions about what people did or did not experience on their deathbeds. It is possible, they believe, to collect scientific data about those would-be final moments. So for four years, they analysed more than 2,000 cardiac arrest events – moments when a patient’s heart stops and they are officially dead.

Of those patients, doctors were able to bring 16% back from the dead, and Parnia and his colleagues were able to interview 101 of them, or about a third. “The goal was to try to understand, first of all, what is the mental and cognitive experience of death?” Parnia says. “And then, if we got people who claimed auditory and visual awareness at the time of death, to see if we are able to determine if they really were aware.”  

Seven flavours of death

Mr A, it turned out, was not the only patient who had some memory of his death. Nearly 50% of the study participants could recall something, but unlike Mr A and just one other woman whose out-of-body account could not be verified externally, the other patients’ experiences did not seem to be tied to actual events that took place during their death.

Instead, they reported dream-like or hallucinatory scenarios that Parnia and his co-authors categorised into seven major themes. “Most of these were not consistent to what’s called ‘near-death’ experiences,” Parnia says. “It seems like the mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been assumed in the past.”

Those seven themes were:

Fear 

Seeing animals or plants
Bright light
Violence and persecution
Deja-vu
Seeing family
Recalling events post-cardiac arrest

These mental experiences ranged from terrifying to blissful. There were those who reported feeling afraid or suffering persecution, for example. “I had to get through a ceremony … and the ceremony was to get burned,” one patient recalled. “There were four men with me, and whichever lied would die … I saw men in coffins being buried upright.” Another remembered being “dragged through deep water”, and still another was “told I was going to die and the quickest way was to say the last short word I could remember”.

Others, however, experienced the opposite sensation, with 22% reporting “a feeling of peace or pleasantness”. Some saw living things: “All plants, no flowers” or “lions and tigers”; while others basked in the glow of “a brilliant light” or were reunited with family. Some, meanwhile, reported a strong sense of deja-vu: “I felt like I knew what people were going to do before they did it”. Heightened senses, a distorted perception of the passage of time and a feeling of disconnection from the body were also common sensations that survivors reported.

While it is “definitely clear that people do have experience at the time that they’re dead”, Parnia says, how individuals actually choose to interpret those experiences depends entirely on their background and pre-existing beliefs. Someone from India might return from the dead and say they saw Krishna, whereas someone from the Midwest of the US could experience the same thing but claim to have seen God. “If the father of a child from the Midwest says, ‘When you die, you’ll see Jesus and he’ll be full of love and compassion,’ then of course he’ll see that,” Parnia says. “He’ll come back and say, ‘Oh dad, you’re right, I definitely saw Jesus!’ But would any of us actually recognise Jesus or God? You don’t know what God is. I don’t know what God is. Besides a man with a white beard, which is just a picture.  

“All of these things – what’s the soul, what is heaven and hell – I have no idea what they mean, and there’s probably thousands and thousands of interpretations based on where you’re born and what your background is,” he continues. “It’s important to move this out of the realm of religious teaching and into objectivity.”

Common cases

So far, the team has uncovered no predictor for who is most likely to remember something from their death, and explanations are lacking for why some people experience terrifying scenarios while others report euphoric ones. Parnia also points out that it’s very likely that more people have near-death experiences than the study numbers reflect. For many people, memories are almost certainly wiped away by the massive brain swelling that occurs following cardiac arrest, or by strong sedatives administered at the hospital. Even if people do not explicitly recall their experience of death, however, it could affect them on a subconscious level. Parnia hypothesises that this might help explain the wildly different reactions cardiac arrest patients often have following their recovery: some become unafraid of death and adopt a more altruistic approach to life, whereas others develop PTSD.

Parnia and his colleagues are already planning follow-up studies to try to address some of these questions. They also hope their work will help broaden the traditionally diametric conversation about death, breaking it free from the confines of either a religious or sceptical stance. Instead, they think, death should be treated as a scientific subject just like any other. “Anyone with a relatively objective mind will agree that this is something that should be investigated further,” Parnia says. “We have the means and the technology. Now it’s time to do it.”

The team that keep a watchful eye on the ISS

Richard Hollingham meets the team who keep astronauts safe - and tidy - as they cope with the daily challenges of conducting science in space.

In a darkened room, deep within the high-security perimeter of Redstone Arsenal, a US army base in Huntsville, Alabama, eight men and women sit behind concave banks of computer monitors, streams of data reflecting across their faces.

One of the women will occasionally speak into her headset, although she speaks so quietly it is difficult to make out more than a few words.

Along the wall in front of them, screens display images of the Earth, graphs, timelines and – as we watch – an astronaut’s backside as he floats through a hatch 400 kilometres above the planet.

Staffed round the clock, this is Nasa’s Payload Operations Integration Center – the control hub for all the science experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). Here, every working minute of the orbiting astronauts’ days are accounted for, monitored and – if necessary – adjusted. Houston may get all the glory but this little-known control room, part of the Marshall Space Flight Center, is the hub of space station science.

“We are the go-betweens,” says payload communications manager Sam Shine. “We are the interface between the scientists and the crew on board the space station.”

‘Very tricky’

In fact Shine is one of the few people on Earth – along with the Capcom (Capsule Communicator) in Houston – able to talk directly to the crew on the ISS, looking after them as they work through their daily science routines.

“It’s very tricky,” says Shine. “We have language barriers, we have time zone differences – sometimes trying to work with an Italian principal investigator and get the information they need up to, perhaps, a German crew member can be a bit tricky.”

Since its completion in 2011, the $100bn (£64.5bn) ISS has been all about the science. The walls, ceiling and floor of its US, Russian, European and Japanese laboratories are crammed with experiments, and astronauts spend an increasing amount of time as orbiting research technicians.“If you name a discipline of science, we are probably doing that kind of experiment on board,” says Shine. Studies in this unique microgravity research lab range from investigating plant growth to understanding the properties of liquid metals.

Much of the science overseen from the control room in Alabama is concerned with studying the effects of space on the astronauts themselves, such as the bone and muscle wastage they experience. This is essential research if humans are ever to leave their home world for any length of time.

Scientists are also studying the psychological challenges of living away from Earth in an isolated metal box, eating reconstituted meals, drinking recycled urine, with only work colleagues for company.

One of the most intriguing of these experiments – Astro Palate – has been devised by food and nutrition scientists at the University of Minnesota. Among other things, it seeks to understand how food can be used to reduce stress. In other words, when living for a long time in space, is comfort food good for you?

“We may have astronauts do a task they don’t enjoy such as vacuuming the space station,” says Shine. “We then have them take a survey to see how they feel about it, then let them eat some comfort food – perhaps chocolate pudding – and take another survey.”“We’re starting to understand ways of making our crews feel at home as they’re in space for longer and longer durations,” she adds.

Another study involves astronauts keeping journals of their life on board the station – an attempt to get honest accounts of their feelings, stresses, tensions or homesickness. Because only the researcher compiling the results of the project reads them, the hope is that the crew are more likely to be candid.“One of the most interesting findings is that the fourth month of the mission is when the crew is most likely to want to come home,” says Shine. “They’re getting tired of being on the space station and they want to see their families.”

As most missions to the ISS are now between six months and a year in duration, Nasa may therefore want to consider sending up some more chocolate pudding.

Lost in space

To help cope with the daily frustrations of living on board a cluttered orbiting laboratory, the Alabama team is even responsible for the astronauts’ lost property. It is the job of the Stowage Officer to keep track of every item on the ISS. Shine describes it as “one of the hardest jobs in the space programme”.“Sometimes astronauts don’t put their things away, just like us down here on Earth,” says Shine. “They’ll call down looking for a wrench or something and it’s not where we thought it was, so it’s the job of the stowage officer to go back through the history of where it was last seen and locate it.”

It is the space equivalent of losing your keys and trying to remember where you last had them. The problem is that if you put down your spaceship keys, there is a good chance they will float off somewhere else.

“We’re looking over the astronauts’ shoulders so if we see something float away we’ll let the crew know,” says Shine. “A lot of the time we find things collected in vents.”

It’s always been the case that behind every astronaut there are thousands – if not tens of thousands – of support staff. The difference today, as we enter an era of longer duration missions, is that they are just as likely to be an expert on comfort food or space station storage as a rocket scientist.