Countless People Claim Near-Death Experiences; Are the Glimpses of Afterlife Just Hallucinations?

A review of a study exploring what people experienced when close to death led scientists to one essential conclusion: that "near-death experiences" are real even if they are unexplainable.

As specified in a Brain Tomorrow report, the question: "What happens when we die?" now arises, a question individuals have been asking throughout time, and the answers remain a mystery.

Countless people claim that their life "flashed before their eyes" because they left their bodies and traveled somewhere while they were near death.

Critics have identified such experiences as "hallucinations or illusions," although researchers from NYU Grossman School Medicine have indicated something else.

Near-Death Experience

A team of researchers from several medical disciplines, including critical care, neurosciences, psychiatry, humanities, psychology, and social sciences, has come up with several scientific conclusions following a review of unexplained lucid episodes involving a heightened state of consciousness.

The main finding, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, is that these occurrences do not have much in common with experiences an individual has if he is hallucinating or using a psychedelic drug.

Rather, people with near-death encounters usually report different events that happen. One of the experiences, as specified in the study, is the separation from the body with a "heightened, vast sense of consciousness and recognition" that a person is dying.

Another experience is that one travels to a different location. Essentially, a purposeful and meaningful review of a person's life involves a critical analysis of his past actions; basically, his life is flashing before his eyes.

A Positive and Long-Term Psychological Transformation

Study authors noted that the near-death experience typically stimulates a positive and long-term psychological transformation in an individual. The team also noted that people who had adverse and distressing experiences near death did not encounter such occurrences.

A similar Fanverse.org report said that the team discovered more to a near-death encounter than simply the stories each individual is telling.

It turns out that scientists can see physical changes in the brain when a person is close to death. Researchers discovered, too, the presence of gamma activity "and electrical spikes when people are technically dying."

'Doorstep of Death'

The study investigators noted that the advances in medicine over the past century have brought back countless people from the so-called "doorstep of death."

Many of these patients return with stories of unexplained occurrences, which until now have not been examined in detail. In a media release, lead author Sam Parnia said the cardiac arrest is not a heart attack although it's representing the final stage of a disease or occurrence that's causing an individual to die.

Parnia continued the advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR, showing that death is not an absolute condition; instead, it is a process that could be reversed in some individuals even after it has begun.

Essentially, scientific research on death enables that brain cells do not turn irreversibly impaired within minutes of oxygen deprivation when the heart stops.

Rather, they die over hours. This enables scientists to objectively study the physiological and mental occurrences that occur in association with death.

A report about life after death is shown on The Study Finds Guy's YouTube video below:

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