How a Suicidal Patient Taught Dr. Bruce Greyson About the Afterlife | NDE Research & Consciousness

Almost 50 years ago, a woman who had just tried to kill herself told me something that challenged everything I knew about science, about life and death, about the mind and the brain. The fork full of spaghetti was almost to my mouth when the beeper, the pager on my belt went off, launching the fork into the air. I've been concentrating on the emergency psychiatry handbook propped up between my cafeteria tray and the napkin holder when the pager went off, shocking me. I dropped the fork, and I noticed that when I hit the plate it spilled some spaghetti sauce on the open page. I reached down to turn the annoying beeper off and noticed a spot of spaghetti on my tie as well. After cursing under my breath, I dabbed at it and then wet a napkin and tried to clean it off, which made it less colorful but maybe a little larger. I was a few months out of medical school, desperately trying to look more professional than I felt. I went over to the cafeteria wall where there was a telephone, and I called the number on the pager display, and it was the emergency room. There was a patient who had just overdosed, and her roommate was there waiting to talk to me. So I figured that was enough spaghetti for me. I'll just go down and see the patient. I didn't want to bother to go across the parking lot to the on-call room where I had a change of clothes, so I just got my white lab coat from the back of my chair and buttoned it up to cover the stain. When I got to the ER, I went over to the head nurse there, and she said that the patient was in exam room 4, and she was out cold, but her roommate was waiting for me down in the family lounge at the far end of the emergency room. I went to see the patient, and she was, in fact, unconscious. I went over to her and touched her lightly on the arm and called her name. I'll call her Holly. I called her, and she didn't respond at all. There was a sitter in the corner, which is a standard precaution for psychiatric patients in the ER who have overdosed, and he confirmed for me that she had not stirred a bit since she was admitted. So I left her, and I walked down the hall to the family lounge where her roommate, Susan, was pacing the floor. I introduced myself and invited her to sit down. She sat on one end of the couch, and I pulled up a chair next to her. By this time, I was starting to sweat in heat of a late-summer Virginia, and there was a standing fan nearby. The room was not air-conditioned. This was back in the 70s. I pulled the fan next to us and unbuttoned my lab coat. And then I asked Susan what had happened. She said that she had come home from a late afternoon class and found Holly unconscious on the couch and unable to be aroused. So she called the dorm advisor and then the rescue squad and then followed the rescue squad to the hospital in her car. She said that she had no idea what drugs Holly might have taken, but she did tell me about the things that were stressing Holly lately and the fact that she did seem more anxious than usual. When she finished with everything she knew, I thanked her for staying to talk to me, and I walked her to the door. And as I reached out to shake her hand, I noticed the stain on my tie again. So I quickly buttoned the coat so the ER staff wouldn't see it. I then went back to see Holly, and she was, in fact, still unconscious, totally unresponsive. So I talked to the medical intern who had admitted her to the ER, and he said he was going to keep her in the intensive care unit overnight because she was still having irregular heartbeats. So relieved that I wouldn't have to do the work up, I went to my on-call room and got some sleep. When I went early the next morning to the intensive care unit to see how Holly was doing, the nurse there said that she was now awake but quite drowsy. So I went into her room and knocked on the door, walked over to her bed. By this time, she had a tube in her nose, IV in her arm, EEKG leads going to a monitor. And I again touched her lightly on the arm and said, Holly? And without opening her eyes, she nodded. I said, Holly, I'm Dr. Grayson. I'm from psychiatry. And without opening her eyes, she said, slightly slurred, I know who you are. I remember you from last night. Well, that kind of threw me for a loop here because as far as I could tell, she hadn't seen me last night. So I thought about that for a minute. And I said, gee, I thought you were asleep when I saw you last night. I didn't know that you could see me. And she opened one eye and said, not in my room. I saw you talking to Susan on the couch. So that really stumped me. I thought about it and I decided maybe I misunderstood. So I said to her, you mean the staff told you I talked to Susan? She opened both her eyes, made eye contact for the first time, and said very clearly, no, I saw you. I hesitated. Here I was, a new intern. My job was to figure out why she tried to kill herself and what was going on in her life. And she was talking about something that was really throwing me off my balance. She sensed my hesitation and said to me very clearly, you were wearing a striped tie with a red stain on it. The only thing that came to me to say was, what? She repeated it. And then went on to tell me about my conversation with Susan, the questions I asked, Susan's responses. And she also mentioned Susan pacing the room and me pulling the standing fan over to us. Now I was really shaken up. But I had a job to do. I was there to deal with Holly's confusion and Holly's problems, not mine. So I quickly assessed that she was medically stable, didn't need to be in the ICU anymore. And I called the people on the psychiatric inpatient unit and told them all about her, did not mention her seeing me. I didn't tell anybody about that. I had to figure it out for myself first before I mentioned anybody else. And I arranged for her to be admitted to psychiatry. She stayed there for about a week and then was discharged to outpatient care. I couldn't explain this, but I couldn't really take the time to think about it. I was a new intern. I had a lot of work to do. It took me the next half century to come to terms with this. I'd been raised by a no-nonsense, skeptical father for whom life was chemistry. And I followed his lead in becoming a mainstream scientist for my career. Nothing in my background or training to that point would allow me to understand how Holly could possibly have seen me. That would have required that something about her left her body and followed me down to the other room. And that clearly made no sense at all. The world in which I grew up consisted of molecules and energy, physical energy, and nothing more. We never talked about spiritual things in my house. As far as I could tell, the word soul meant only one thing. Growing up in this scientific household, my father taught me to love science. But he also taught me that science is always a work in progress. No matter how firmly we're attached to our worldview, we have to be prepared to let it go if new evidence comes up that challenges it. And that happens when we look at things we don't understand. I soon found out that there were lots of things that are going on around me that could not be explained in terms of physical particles and physical forces, and yet they're still there. If we try to deny them or ignore them, that's not being scientific. That's just reinforcing our ignorance. It wasn't until several years after this encounter with Holly that I met Raymond Moody, and I first heard about near-death experiences. Raymond started his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia the same year I started teaching there on the psychiatric faculty. His first clinical rotation was in the emergency room, which I was then running, and one of my jobs there was to supervise all the young interns there. One afternoon, when it was quiet in the ER, we got to talking about Raymond's background. Now, I knew he had written a book when he was still a medical student. That was pretty unusual for medical students, and I didn't know what it was about. So we got to talking about his background, and he told me about this book he'd written called Life After Life, in which he used the term near-death experience to describe strange things that happened to people when they were on the threshold of death. And as he's talking, it dawned on me that this was similar to what Holly was talking to me about years ago. Now, I didn't know whether Holly had any other features of near-death experiences. I knew she claimed to have left her body and seen me quite a ways away. But I didn't know at the time to ask her about other features of NDEs. She might have had them? Maybe not. I'll never know. Within a year, a New York publisher reissued Raymond's book as a mass-market paperback, and it became a nationwide bestseller. And lots of people from all over the country wrote to Raymond, including dozens of researchers, doctors, nurses, sociologists, psychologists, who wanted to study NDEs. Raymond was an intern. He didn't have time to do this. So he decided to bring them all together to the University of Virginia to talk amongst themselves about how we do this. So we got about 15 or 20 of these potential researchers together at the University of Virginia for a meeting. And of that group, four of us, that's psychologist Ken Ring on the lower left, sociologist Joan Odette behind him, cardiologist Mike Sabob on the right, and me, the four of us started an organization to study NDEs. And we called it the International Association for Near-Death Studies, INES. For me, NDEs were a natural intersection of unexplained experiences, which I was really eager to look into, and the close brushes with death, which I was seeing in the emergency room every day. So it seemed a natural place for me to go. Since that time, I've done research with hospitalized patients who had come close to death from cardiac arrest, illnesses, accidents, assaults, suicide attempts, complications of surgery. And I've also done research with thousands of near-death experiences all over the world who have written to me and volunteered to participate in my research. And some of you who are in the audience now have been filling out questionnaires for me for decades, and I wouldn't be here now if not for you. I thought when I accepted enough of these accounts, I would begin to see patterns that would help us understand it. And I knew that we had to look at the more puzzling parts of the NDE in order to find the patterns that would really help us explain what's going on. The first thing I noticed about these experiences that was puzzling was the incredible clarity and speed of thought. This is not what I would expect from an experience when your brain is not getting much oxygen. And yet, 80% of the NDEers I talked with described their thoughts being faster than ever and clearer than ever. Related to your thoughts going fast is a sense of time slowing down. The most extreme example of this is complete timelessness, a sense of time no longer existing. Three-fourths of NDEers said time changed for them, and more than half said it disappeared entirely. They were in a complete state of timelessness. In addition to their thoughts being more vivid than usual, they often report their senses are more vivid. Two-thirds of NDEers said their senses like hearing and seeing were much more vivid than usual. They report seeing colors they'd never seen on Earth, hearing sounds they'd never heard before. Occasionally you hear someone talk about unusual smells or tastes, but usually it's vision and hearing. One more unusual thing is the very detailed life review that people often report. Maybe a quarter of NDEers report this. The majority describe it as much more vivid than their usual memories. Many report that it's like re-experiencing the event, not just remembering it. They feel it with all the same emotions they had when it first happened. Three out of four said that it changed the way they think about things that happened to them. It changed their ideas about what's important in life. More than half reported that they saw these past events not only through their own eyes, but from the perspectives of other people involved in the incidents. They felt the feelings of the other people involved. These are all things that are hard for physical scientists to understand. How do we explain them? Are they just psychological defense mechanisms we developed to get some closure before we die? Are they something somehow related to brain malfunctioning as we're dying? Or are they something completely different? At this point, I didn't have the tools I needed to study NDEs more rigorously. Early NDE research, including mine, basically consisted of collecting first-person accounts. The problem was that each one of us who was doing near-death research was working in isolation, and we didn't know what other people were doing. So we didn't know if there was any consistency between what Researcher A and Researcher B were doing. For example, one who was interested in how clear our thoughts were when you have an NDE may not have thought to ask about out-of-body experiences. Someone who's interested in afterlife visions and communication with God may not have thought to ask about changes in mood and thinking. So we didn't know whether researchers in other parts of the country were studying the same experience we were. We needed some way to get them all on the same page. In the early 1980s, I developed the NDE scale to bring some consistency to how we define, how we describe the near-death experience. I started by collecting everything people had written about NDEs to that point, and I found 80 common things people reported in NDEs. That's too much to ask someone about. I sent this list to a bunch of NDEers and asked them to comment on them. Which ones did they experience? Which ones did they think made sense to them? And they started whittling the list down, and then I sent it to researchers, and then back to NDEers, and back to researchers, and eventually whittled it down to a manageable list of 16 items. These included changes in thinking, like your thoughts being fast and having a life review, changes in emotions, such as intense peace and unconditional love, extraordinary experiences, like seeing things from an out-of-body perspective and seeing visions of the future, and otherworldly perceptions, like seeing deceased loved ones or religious figures or coming to a border or point of no return. Now, this scale was very helpful in allowing us to compare between researchers, but it's not helpful for any individual NDE. I found that there were lots of NDEs that scored pretty low on the scale that nevertheless caused life-changing spiritual transformations. So the scale isn't really helpful in evaluating an individual NDE. It's a tool to allow researchers to compare experiences across researchers. And in the 25 years since it's been published, 35 years, make that, it's been accepted worldwide, published in more than 20 languages, and used in hundreds of studies around the world. But despite the acceptance of this NDE scale, I knew it was missing a lot. Questionnaires can tell us a lot, but they also miss a lot. And NDEers kept telling me that I'm missing something with this scale. There's a richness to the NDEers' first-person accounts, to their own words, that you can't get in a short-answer questionnaire. So I knew I had to dig deeper. Al Sullivan was a 56-year-old truck driver who showed up one night at an NDEer support group we had at the University of Connecticut. He told us a story about having intense chest pain one Monday morning. So he called his dispatcher who said, get to the emergency room real fast. He did. And in the emergency room, as they were doing diagnostic testing on his heart, one of the major arteries to his heart became completely blocked. They rushed him to the operating room for emergency surgery, which turned out to be quadruple bypass surgery. Now, Al didn't know that. What Al knew was that when he awoke, he was looking down on the operating room. And there, to his great surprise, on the operating table was him. He could see his chest cut open and his heart inside the cavity. And he also saw his doctor, who just a few minutes earlier was telling him what was going to happen. His doctor was standing there, over the table, looking a little confused, Al thought. And Al told me he was flapping his wings like he was trying to fly. I didn't know what he meant by that. So I asked Al, what exactly was he doing? And Al demonstrated. He said he was flapping his wings like trying to fly. At this point, I had been in lots of operating rooms, seen lots of operations. I had never seen a surgeon do that before. And you don't see doctors on TV shows doing that either. So I said to Al, did you ask your doctor about this? Al smiled and said, yeah. About a week later, when he came to see me in the hospital, I asked him about it. I said, how come you were flapping your wings? And he said, the doctor got very angry. He thought I was accusing him of something. And he said, I must have done something right. You're here, aren't you? And he stalked out of the room. I still didn't know what happened. So I said to Al, would you mind if I talk to your doctor? Al said, sure, go for it. So I called the doctor. He was a Japanese-American cardiac surgeon with an excellent reputation. Not the type of guy you'd expect to play jokes in the emergency room, in the operating room. And I told him that Al had given me permission to talk with him. And he was eager to talk to me. He wanted to hear how I was. This was about six months after the operation. He was eager to get some feedback on how Al was doing. So I met with the surgeon and explained to him what Al had told me. And he gave me a very rational explanation for what happened. He said that in Japan, where he had trained, he had developed this habit that he had never seen any American doctor do. After he had scrubbed in, was wearing sterile gloves, sterile gown, he went into the operating room where his interns were starting the procedure. And while he watched them do the preliminary parts of it, he didn't want to risk touching anything that wasn't sterile and contaminating the sterile gloves. So he put them where he knew they wouldn't touch anything, against his sterile gown. And then he would supervise, pointing out things to the interns with his elbows. So that's something else that was hard to explain. But I found that Al's experience was not at all unique. Eighty percent of the NDEers I've talked to describe leaving their bodies. Many are quite surprised to look down and see their bodies. And in fact, some don't recognize it at first, until they see a wedding ring or something like that, that tells them who it is. Are they all as accurate as Al's? Well, for most, we don't know. But about 15 years ago, Jan Holden did a survey of 93 different reports of out-of-body experiences during NDEs. She found that 92 percent of them were completely accurate. That is, confirmed by someone else who witnessed the events. Six percent were partly right, but had some inaccuracies in them. And only one percent was wrong. So the accuracy of these out-of-body visions makes it very difficult to keep insisting these are hallucinations. Still, they're just anecdotal accounts that we collect after the fact. If this is really happening, can we design an experiment to test whether NDEers can actually see things accurately from an out-of-body perspective? Well, actually, since 1990, there have been six published studies in which researchers placed visual targets somewhere hidden in a room where NDEs were likely to occur, like emergency rooms, operating rooms, cardiac care units. These six studies turned up a total of only 12 people who reported leaving their bodies. And of those 12 who reported leaving their bodies, not a single one saw the target. When I described this research at an earlier IONS conference several years ago, the NDEers in the audience thought this was the most ridiculous thing they'd ever heard. They said, imagine yourself finding yourself out of your body for the first time, and they're trying to resuscitate you. Are you going to look around the room for some meaningless target that has no relevance to you at all, that some researchers said is the target? This is a study that sounded fantastic to researchers, but made no sense when they actually tried to do it. We often find that things that look great on paper don't work out in real life. So how big a problem is it that we are relying on anecdotal evidence for this information? Well, what makes any research science is rigorous observation, systematic observation. It does not have to be in a double-blind, controlled experiment. There are several sciences where laboratory experiments are impossible. Archaeology, astronomy, geology. You can't do controlled experiments with these things, and yet they are rigorous sciences. So how do we explain NDEs scientifically? There have been several theories that have been proposed based on the biology of the brain. Maybe it's because there's too little oxygen getting to the brain. Maybe it's because there's too much carbon dioxide getting to the brain. Maybe it's because of drugs given to patients who are near death. Maybe it's due to chemicals that are produced by the brain when you're dying. Maybe it's due to abnormal electrical activity in the brain. So far, there is no evidence, no evidence, that any of these things plays any role in a near-death experience. And in fact, there's a fair amount of evidence disproving most of these theories. It reminds me a bit of the Indian parable of the blind man and the elephant. A group of blind men who have never encountered an elephant are taken to one. And one grabs the trunk and says, Oh, an elephant is like a snake. Another grabs the tusk and says, No, an elephant is like a spear. Another grabs the leg and says, No, an elephant is like a tree. And on and on. None of them are wrong. They're all describing accurately what they feel. But they're all missing the point of the elephant. None of them can understand what an elephant is like. And that's where we are with explanations of the NDE. Different researchers latch on to one particular aspect of it and find a good analogy. Oh, it's like endorphin bursts. Or it's like wishful thinking. And maybe a small part of the NDE is like that. But none of them come close to explaining the whole experience. So how do we explain it? We need to make a distinction here between the mind and the brain. The mind is that part of you that experiences consciousness. Your thoughts, your feelings, your hopes, your desires, your fears. Your brain is that mass of pink-gray tissue inside your skull. What's the relationship between the mind and the brain? People have been arguing about this for centuries. And they still do because we still have no idea. Most people today assume that your brain creates all of your thoughts and your feelings. That the mind is, as skeptics like to say, what the brain does. The problem is that there's a lot of evidence from NDEs that shows that it's not that simple. The brain does not create all our thoughts and feelings. So what is the connection? Steve Luting had an NDE when he nearly drowned at age 8. He had gone to a local park with some friends to swim in a lake. And he was lying down in the sand getting a suntan and fell asleep and badly burned his back. A terrible sunburn. He didn't realize that. When he woke up, his friends were out on a raft in the middle of the lake motioning him to come join them. So Steve waded into the water and swam out to the raft. His friends, who were a little older than he was, were doing cannonballs off the raft. They would jump off the raft, tuck into a ball, and make as big a splash as they could. Steve had never tried this before. He was only 8. But it looked like fun. So he tried it. Jumped off the raft, tucked into the ball, and chickened out. And he tried to open up, and landed flat on his back on his badly sunburned back on the water. Totally knocked the air out of him. This is how he described what happened next. As I continued to sink, I tried moving, but couldn't. I was panicked. As the water grew colder near the bottom, the pain lessened. I started breathing small amounts of water, thinking maybe it was possible to get air from water that way. Then, as part of me realized I was about to die, I began shattering to myself. Over and over. Do something. Anything. Then this absolute shift happened. I seemed to be changing points of view, as if moving about the room. One second, I was a terrified person. Then I was the other, a calm one, watching the terrified one. I was both, and yet not. The real I was the calm one, but I had always identified myself with the other one up until then. My mind expanded to that of an adult capacity, and then beyond. I suppose without the limitation of a child brain, it allowed my true nature to express itself again. It made me think that our usual understanding of the brain is backwards. The brain filters everything, and doesn't help our thinking, but hinders it, slows it down, focuses it. So Siv described his brain as filtering out or focusing his thoughts. This, and other NDEs like it, suggest that the mind, the part of you that experiences consciousness, is not the same as your brain, the mass of pink-gray matter inside your skull. In fact, it suggests that the mind, or consciousness, is actually better, functions better, when it's free of the limitations of the brain. Now this model, that the brain creates the mind, is a good working model for everyday life. When you have too much to drink, or get hit on the head, or have a stroke, your thinking suffers. It may help to think of these models as tools for dealing with the world around us. And you may need different tools for different tasks. For example, a hammer is an excellent tool for driving a nail into a piece of wood. It's not a great tool for screwing a nut onto a bolt. In the same way, the model that the brain creates the mind is a good working model for everyday life. It doesn't work for explaining NDEs. What's a different model? A different model is basically what Steve Luding said. It happened when he was eight. That the brain receives the thoughts from the mind, and somehow filters them, selects the ones that are important for the body's survival, and then converts those into signals, electrical and chemical, that the body can understand. Think of a radio receiver. There's lots of stations broadcasting all the time. If you heard all the radio stations that were available, you wouldn't be able to hear anything. You need the radio receiver to filter them out, so you only hear the one that you want to hear. Without that, you couldn't hear them all. This is not a new idea. The Greek physician Hippocrates wrote about this more than 2,000 years ago. He said the brain is the interpreter of consciousness. Throughout the centuries, different scientists have described this model in different ways. They said the brain is a filter, a gate, a reducing valve, or a prism, something that takes the raw thoughts and converts them into something that's been processed that we can then use. Think about if I were to call you on your cell phone. You would hear my voice coming through the cell phone, but you would know that the cell phone wasn't creating my voice. I was speaking, and the sound of my voice was converted to radio waves. Your cell phone picks up the radio waves and converts them back into sound so you can hear them. Now, what happens when your cell phone is damaged or runs out of power? You can't hear my voice anymore, or you hear it in a groveled way. But my voice is still there. I can still talk. But without the active cell phone, you can't make sense of what I'm saying. And that is why when the brain is damaged, your thoughts don't come through as clearly to your body. It should not be surprising that the brain may filter our thoughts. All of our senses do this. Your eyes transmit light to you. That's not all they do. They also filter out the ultraviolet, the infrared, all those frequencies that are irrelevant to your survival. And just let you see a small portion of a possible light spectrum that's important to you. Your ears transmit sound to you, but not all sounds. You don't hear what dogs and cats hear. The ears filter out those frequencies that are not relevant to your physical survival and just let in what's important to you. So it's consistent with what we know about neurobiology that the brain should filter out thoughts that are not important to your physical survival and just let in those thoughts that your body needs to keep going in the physical world. So coming back to the puzzling NDE features, one more that I want to mention is seeing deceased loved ones. Many, many NDEers report meeting deceased people in their NDEs. And this is usually dismissed as being wishful thinking. This is what you expect and hope will happen when you approach death. But some visions of the deceased can't be washed away so quickly. For example, when you meet somebody who is deceased, who you thought was still alive, when Jack Bybee was a 26-year-old computer engineer in his native South Africa, he came down with a really bad case of pneumonia and he went into respiratory arrest and he was hospitalized. In fact, he was in and out of seizures in the hospital. He developed a fairly close relationship with one particular young nurse named Anita and he, in fact, flirted with her when he was feeling good enough. One Friday afternoon, she told him that it was her 21st birthday and she was going to be taking the weekend off. Her parents were coming in from the country to celebrate with her so he wouldn't see her for several days. So he wished her a happy birthday and off she went. The next day, his condition deteriorated again and he went back into respiratory arrest and had to be resuscitated. And during that period, he had a very vivid near-death experience in which he saw nurse Anita. He was stunned and he said, Anita, what are you doing here? She said, I've just come to fluff up your pillows again. She said, Jack, you have to go back and tell my parents that I love them very much and that I'm sorry I crashed the red MGB. Jack told me that at the time, in South Africa, MGBs were very unusual cars to have. When he came out of the NDE, he remembered this vividly and he told the first nurse that he saw about meeting Anita on the other side. That nurse started to cry and ran out of the room. Jack later learned that Anita's parents had surprised her for her birthday with a red MGB. And in her excitement, she jumped in the car, sped off down the road, skidded off the road into a telephone pole and died instantly. There's no way Jack could have known that. He couldn't have known she died and he couldn't have known how she died. And yet he did. Half of all NDEers report seeing deceased loved ones. I no longer automatically assume these are hallucinations because I know that can't explain visions like Jack's where they see someone who they didn't know was dead. There are also lots of reports where people see deceased people that they didn't know existed. These are not common reports. We don't often have people see deceased loved ones that they didn't know had died. But the fact that they occur at all needs to be explained. I recently published a paper that reviewed 28 cases of this type. Some go back to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder in the first century. And many of them go up to the present day. These suggest that our ability to think and feel may persist long after the body dies. One of the most striking things about NDEers to me as a psychiatrist is their ability to change people's lives. Now as a therapist, I know how hard it is and how long it takes to make fairly small changes in someone's life. And here's an experience that in a matter of seconds can totally transform someone's attitudes, beliefs, personality, behavior. How could this possibly be? I should say that although it changes them in seconds it may take them years then to integrate that into their lives. These are often radical changes. People report dramatic increases in their spirituality. Increases in their sense of compassion and concern for others. Increases in their appreciation for life. Increased sense of meaning and purpose in life. And increased belief in survival after death. Now some of these things may happen just because you've come close to death even without having an NDE. For example, almost everyone who comes close to death appreciates life more but they don't have all the other changes that NDEers have. At the same time, NDEers also report decreases in their fear of death in their interest in material possessions their interest in personal power, prestige status, and competitiveness. NDEers tend to feel that they're integral parts of a benevolent and purposeful universe in which getting ahead at someone else's expense makes no sense. They feel we're not alone in this world but we're part of something greater than ourselves. They tend to be less addicted to worldly things to money, power, prestige that doesn't mean they're not interested in them. They still enjoy all the physical things in life. In fact, they enjoy life more because they're not afraid of dying and therefore not afraid of taking risks and living life to the fullest. We also find that family and friends of the NDEers also find themselves changing because of being in close contact with the NDEer. And I've found over the decades this is true of near-death researchers as well you can't immerse yourself in NDEs for so long and not have it change your view of the world and our role in it. It became clear to me that our worldview had to be changed to accommodate NDEs and particularly our view of how the mind and brain relate. And I'm not the only scientist to reach this conclusion. A recent survey of 250 Scottish university students found that two-thirds thought the mind and brain were separate things. A survey of 2,000 Belgian doctors found that the majority thought the mind and brain were separate. And a similar study of 600 Brazilian psychiatrists found that most of them thought the mind and brain worked separately. So scientists around the world are coming to understand that the mind is not just what the brain does but it's something totally separate. A hundred years ago physicists realized that the classical Newtonian physics they were using wasn't the whole story. As we started getting into subatomic particles and speed of light speeds we found that Newtonian mechanics wasn't working. So they merged relativity and quantum physics into the old classical Newtonian physics to get a better picture of reality. It's not that the old classical physics was wrong it was just limited. It only described everyday life and it did that very well. But it doesn't describe the motion of very small particles or very fast speeds. Likewise, the idea that the brain creates the mind is a good working model for everyday life but it's limited. It doesn't work when you get to some of the extreme situations like when the brain is really impaired. Really impaired. Mild impairment, like when you get drunk interferes with the mind. But severe impairment, like when the brain stops frees the mind. So sometimes we look at the world as if the brain creates the mind and sometimes we look at it as if it doesn't. We need to use both models when it's appropriate. This is a drawing from the 19th century of a duck and a rabbit. If you look at it as an animal facing left, you see a duck. If you look at it as an animal facing right, you see a rabbit. Which one is right? Well they both are. Neither one is wrong, but neither one captures the whole story. Same way with NDEs. You can look at them as something related to the brain malfunctioning or you can look at it as a psycho-spiritual event. And neither one is totally wrong but neither one may capture the whole thing. Are NDEs the result of chemical and electrical changes in the brain? Or are they spiritual gifts? Is it a duck or a rabbit? You have to choose. It's plausible to me that NDEs happen when you leave your body at the point of death. But that that's made possible by certain chemical or electrical changes in your brain. That you need both to have an NDE. There's no conflict between the two models. They each describe different parts of the NDE or different aspects to it. So why are these important? Not just to the NDEers but to all of us. If you understand the lessons that NDEers bring back from the experience shouldn't that have an effect on how you lead your life on what you think is important? One thing that I've heard repeatedly from NDEers is that we should live in the present and enjoy life to the fullest. John Van Lewis was poisoned by a thief on a bus in southern Thailand. The doctors didn't think they could revive him but after seven hours he did revive after a very profound NDE. But his life was never the same. He described it this way. Although I get more pleasure now than before from good experiences like sunsets, birdsong, great art pleasant people or good food I also get much more pleasure from things that in my old state I would have called unpleasant. For example, the Thai hospital room or a wet day or a heavy cold. This last discovery that I could positively enjoy a cold get a kick from the unusual sensations in my nose and throat was a big surprise. Around that time I found that the tinnitus, the ringing in my ears that I've had for some years had changed from being a mild annoyance to a positively delightful sound which I actually welcomed when the old friend forced itself on my attention. I actually started to enjoy the tiredness and the many minor pains that afflict the 60-year-old body. Then came my first post-NDE cold a hitherto unexpected potential for pleasure. A second consistent message I hear from NDEers is that we're all interconnected. This is essentially the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Every major religion has some variant of this as a basic precept. Fran Sherwood described this when she had NDE during emergency abdominal surgery. She said, All of this had and still has a profound effect on my life and I have not been the same since. Yet I'm still me. Perhaps a freer person than before, but still me. All my values have changed and are still changing becoming clearer, though not all at once. And all along with this is the daily routine of living of doing what we must do to try to improve whatever you can, wherever you can and to spread the message of love in all the small ways that we do. The experience is valid and there's a certain joy and awe in sharing it but the moment comes when the experience ceases to be the focal point. You have to really look at it as only a beginning a new birth, if you will and from that point on you begin to grow. This growth is a new reality. It permits you to become involved with others. The self begins to dwindle away and though you may try to hang on to the near and dear of self you really have to let it go. Over and above the talking the sharing has to then come the action. Not that you have to stop talking and sharing but now included in that is the action the action of doing what we were sent back for. It may have been presented to each of us in different ways but the same message comes out loud and clear. We all know what it is and though it can be said in many thousand ways there's only one word that says it all love. And the message is just as I have loved you, you must love one another. This is an irrevocable truth. Many NDEers talk about re-remembering these lessons as if we knew them all along. In fact, most of these lessons from NDEs are things that have been taught by all our major religions that death is not to be feared that life doesn't end at death that there's meaning and purpose to life and that love is more important than material possessions. If you look at all the evidence from NDEs the enhanced thinking when the brain is stopped the out-of-body perceptions the seeing deceased loved ones who you thought were still alive the logical conclusion is that our thoughts and feelings are not created by the brain but are independent of them and therefore may persist when the body dies. This has tremendous implications for how we lead our lives and for what's important to do in life. So what do we do with this? I want to give the last word to Joe Gerasi who was a 36-year-old policeman he had an NDE when he bled out following surgery he said, I think our society is very negative don't do this, don't do that a very black and white closed system my focus is positive if people just loved and cared there'd be no concern about all the don'ts there just wouldn't be I know that sounds very idealistic and unpractical but this is the approach to life that works for me I'm very human and in my attempt to love I can still hurt someone but it's unintentional and it bothers me a great deal when it happens I believe love can be just as infectious as hate it has to turn around and to do that, people have to start somewhere on a small scale, just me telling you about my experience and someone hearing you retell it, as I am now it multiplies quickly and I'm not the only one to experience this there are millions of us all around the world multiply my story by millions and you see how quickly it can grow it can be done in fact, it's already started thank you