Word: cardiac
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What a brilliant science writer is Daniel Williams. He has written about the complex phenomenon of near-death experiences in layman's terms [Sept. 10]. I had a cardiac arrest in 2003 and was resuscitated by well-trained paramedics. I did not have a near-death experience, just the total blankness of a deep sleep. I believe NDEs are caused by malfunctions of consciousness arising from an oxygen-starved brain. The forms NDEs take are influenced by culture and by religious beliefs. I don't think any non-Christian, for example, would see a tunnel lit by brilliant white light...
...irrelevant. To this day, Van Lommel can't explain why some people have NDEs and most don't. But the fact the experience isn't universal undermines, to his mind, a purely physiological explanation: if lack of oxygen were the cause of NDEs, then all survivors of cardiac arrest should have...
...Outside of cardiac arrest and the injection of ketamine, NDE-type phenomena can occur in many circumstances, including fainting spells, serious disease and in the seconds before potentially catastrophic accidents, like falling off a cliff. While that doesn't suck the mystery from the phenomenon, it does suggest that NDEs are a flawed pointer to what might await us in death as opposed to the process of dying or a really hairy moment...
...Greyson wanted to settle. Are NDErs up there on the ceiling or aren't they? In 2004, he began a study that he hoped would provide the answer. At the university's electrophysiology clinic, surgeons implant cardioverter-defibrillators in patients at high risk of sudden death. In the process, cardiac arrest is induced. Greyson arranged for a laptop computer, displaying a series of images, to be stationed near the ceiling, where only an elevated being could see the screen. As ingenious as it was, the investigation flopped. Greyson and his team reported last December that while cardiac arrest had been...
...Nelson's theory goes some way toward explaining how NDEs can seem to occur when the brain is down. The sleep/wake switch is in the brainstem, which helps control the body's most basic functions and stays active for longer than the higher brain in cardiac arrest. "It's likely that the transition to brain death is, in fact, gradual," says Mahowald, "and NDEs occur during this transition." As for people reporting accurately on events that went on around them while they were apparently unconscious, Nelson says "they may be seemingly out of it but still processing in a very...