Every few weeks, an attention seeker – er, truth seeker – raves to a media outlet about what they experienced when they were ‘clinically dead’. In last week’s Daily Mail, it was the turn of Julia Poole, a 61-year-old ‘spiritualist’ from Cornwall, who suffered an overdose at the age of 21. Poole, who describes her job as ‘spiritual and personal empowerment coach, psychic, channeller, energy healer, hypnotherapist, law of attraction teacher and author’, states that she was ‘clinically dead’ for three days and was ‘taken to Higher Realms’ by angels, who told her it was not yet her time to die.
There are general features that appear common – the peace and harmony, the sensation of travelling along a tunnel towards a source of light, the flitting through of memories
If Poole had indeed been ‘clinically dead’ for three days, it would not just be her story that smelled decidedly off. Poole isn’t the only one. Former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken has spoken of ‘dying three times’ on the operating table during emergency bowel surgery. Of course, it is hugely stressful to be so ill that your heart stops beating in the normal fashion and you become at risk of death if not resuscitated. And it’s fascinating to hear people’s experiences of this parlous time. But while a deeply unpleasant or affecting experience, a cardiac arrest that ones survives is not dying.
Dying is a permanent, irreversible shutdown of all the physiological processes in the body. A near-death experience – floating, travelling through a tunnel, seeing angels and what not – may feel real in the same way that if you press your eyelids hard you see flashes of light, but that doesn’t mean it is.
Science has been able to explain many of the elements of the near-death experience, for example those who report their life flashing before their eyes. This is due to a desperate brain rifling through as many previous experiences from its memory banks as possible to try and alight on a way of surviving the current threat. The sensation of going through a tunnel can also be explained by the dying brain restricting blood flow to the eyes, which initially strikes the periphery of the retina. Many describe the feeling of leaving their body and watching proceedings from above. This sensation may be related to the catastrophic drop in blood pressure and subsequent decrease in brain oxygenation that occurs in these circumstances. Feeling lightheaded, faint, and as if one is dropping or leaving one’s body are all explicable as a result of the physiological processes that occur when this happens. Hearing is one of the last sensations to go when a patient is on the verge of dying. It’s for this reason that the relatives are encouraged to talk to them. I’ve watched my dying mother holding her ragged, rapid breath for a few seconds every time my brother spoke to and kissed her.
Near-death experiences have been reported for centuries. Sir Francis Beaufort, the British admiral who invented the Beaufort Scale for wind strength, described his, in which he felt the absence of pain and ‘perfect tranquillity’. He noted that his mind was alert and active: ‘thought rose after thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable.’ This hyper-alertness is common in most near-death experiences. The feelings of intense peace that often accompany near death are similar to those caused by the use of drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms). Studies comparing patients who had experienced near-death experiences at the time of cardiac arrest with those who had not had one show that the former group were left with less fear of death, increased belief in life after death, increasing acceptance of others, and more love and empathy for others.
People’s beliefs affect their experiences of near death. As with delusions in severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, people’s fixed convictions reflect their culture. Just as a strict Christian schizophrenic may wrongly believe that the voice in their head is Jesus, rather than the worshipped figure of another religion, it is unlikely that an uncompromising atheist will believe, in a near-death experience, that they are greeted at the pearly gates by angels or God. However, there are general features that appear common – the peace and harmony, the sensation of travelling along a tunnel towards a source of light, the flitting through of memories and, in the case of those in hospital, the sensation of observing the action as health workers struggle to resuscitate the person. One might expect patients who insist they were looking down from the ceiling to be able to identify objects on the top shelves of the room, but nope, no research has found that they are able to.
Many scientists have noticed similarities between near-death experiences and a form of epilepsy known as complex partial seizures. The latter, which can be stimulated with the use of electrodes placed on the involved brain region of sufferers, are often associated with vivid, heightened sensations and a feeling of ecstasy. The 19th-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky suffered temporal lobe epilepsy, and wrote about them through the protagonist of The Idiot, describing sensations of vigour and light, joy and hope, harmony and the absence of anxiety. These emotions are characteristic of most near-death experiences, and thus many scientists believe that they are partially caused by abnormal electrical activity in a part of the oxygen-deprived brain. It’s interesting to observe that oxygen deprivation in other circumstances can lead to these same euphoric feelings.
Although several aspects of near-death experiences are incompletely understood, the fact that physiology accounts for many of the sensations undermines the spiritual claims that sufferers often make. It’s reassuring for those of us who look for scientific explanations for human experience, but not such good news for Julia Poole, the ‘spiritualist’ in the Mail, who insists she died and went to heaven and is hoping to sell you her woeful books off the back of it.
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