The Bear Minimum

I find the NDE phenomena very interesting, so I though I would report on this recent small-scale study out of Slovenia.

I’ll give a brief run-down of what an Near-Death Experience (NDE) is before I go into the rest of my piece here today. An NDE occurs when a person has died for a short time and has returned by themselves or been resuscitated, and has had some sort of experience during this time. This can range from seeing some sort of tunnel with a bright light at the end, or a feeling of peace and happiness, or being free from one’s body and being able to move about the room and see things and hear things that they have no physical way of seeing or hearing, or going on an immense journey and meeting all sorts of figures from family to Angels, to Jesus and in some cases a God-like figure. Often these experiences will contain a ‘life-review’ where you look over the effects you’ve had on all the people you’ve come into contact with. No two NDEs are precisely the same, and some of them are amazing to read, and I heartily suggest everyone read a few of these: some are really quite profound.

Okay so now that you’ve an idea of what these are, I can talk about this study. To sum it up briefly, the University of Maribor in Slovenia has been researching into NDEs, and found that in the 52 cardiac-arrest patients they studied (a very small-scale study, indeed) the 11 who had reported having some form of an NDE had also had higher levels of carbon dioxide in their bodies than the other 41 patients.

On the one hand, that’s mildly interesting, and it would be great to understand the correlation. You can also see how those who don’t want to believe in NDEs for one reason or another may latch onto yet another ‘biological’ reason why people have these experiences.

On the other hand, the study is very limited, and it frustrates me somewhat that the content of the patient’s NDEs is left out entirely from the paper submitted by those doing the study. I find the content far more intriguing than the why of these phenomena, but I do see that it would still be beneficial to know why these events occur.

A study I’m more looking forward to seeing the results from is one conducted by Southampton University into whether or not cardiac arrest patients do have out-of-body experiences and to test this the researchers will be leaving images up on high shelves that can only be seen from above. When so many studies are looking to attribute the phenomena to a malfunctioning, dying brain, it’s nice when a study takes it a little further.