Word: nelsons
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...What science has lacked until recently is an overarching theory that might explain why NDEs seem so coherent. In two articles published in Neurology, the second in March, a team of University of Kentucky researchers led by Nelson proposed that NDEs occur in a dream-like state brought on when crisis in the brain trips a predisposition to a type of sleep disorder. It's an hypothesis that's quickly gathered heavyweight support: "I think Dr. Nelson's REM-intrusion theory to explain NDEs is the actual physiologic explanation," says Minnesota sleep expert Mahowald...
...disorder in which the sleeping person's mind wakes up before his body does. He feels awake, yet the muscle paralysis of REM can remain; he may also hallucinate until mind and body get back in sync. "Lay people think you're either awake or asleep," says Nelson, "but you needn't go directly from one to the other...
...Some years ago, while studying first-hand accounts of NDEs, Nelson read the story of a woman whom medical staff had written off as dead and whose attempts to protest were thwarted by paralysis. Paralysis? As happens in REM intrusion! The seed of a new theory - that there was a link between REM and NDEs - grew in Nelson's mind...
...tested it by comparing the frequency of REM intrusion in 55 people who'd had NDEs with 55 controls. The results were striking: 60% of the first group reported some history of REM intrusion; 24% of the second. Nelson postulates that both REM intrusion and NDE involve a glitch in the arousal system that causes some people to experience blended states of consciousness. He stresses that he doesn't consider NDEs to be dreams, rather that the NDEr "engages through the REM mechanism regions of the brain that are also engaged during dreaming" - regions that infuse both dreams and NDEs...
...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...