It was to have been a simple procedure to clear a blockage in an artery of her heart. No need for a general anesthetic, just something to make her drowsy. But when the job was done and Florence Cohen began to feel her senses sharpening, events took a turn for the odd.
Standing next to her bed in Sydney's St. Vincent's Hospital, her cardiologist asked her how she was feeling.
"I feel great," Florence said.
Noting, most likely, changes to her vital signs or coloring, he repeated the question.
"Terrible," came the reply.
A moment later, Florence went into cardiac arrest. She recalls, she says, the sounds of bells and sirens, being in a lift, and someone thumping her chest. But these memories are vague compared to her recollection of a subsequent scene. She was lying in surgery, surrounded by medical staff, yet she was not in her body but up near the ceiling, watching the activity below. She noted that her body on the bed wore a green gown with a split in the middle, and that she was otherwise completely covered. "I was calling out, 'Don't cut me. I'm still awake.' " She saw an incandescent light in the shape of a cone. "Then, boom," she says: her floating self rocketed to the cone's tip and . . . nothing.
That was 20 years ago. "I found it spooky," she says now. "I don't like to talk about it. It was the whitest light you could imagine. It wasn't a dream. It's still very, very vivid."
Florence had what's known as a near-death experience. But as strange as it was, it didn't contain all the elements of a classic NDE. As well as the bright light and out-of-body experience, other people, while clinically dead, see a tunnel, deceased relatives and divine figures. They may be guided by one of these spirits through a life review in which, some report, they feel again every emotion the past events aroused. Though they believe themselves to be dead, this cascade of feelings typically occurs against a prevailing sense of euphoria. At some point, they're told it's not their time and they return to the confinement of their body — most often through the top of the head. There's nothing hazy about the experience. On the contrary, it's reported as seeming more real than real life, whatever that means. Most NDEs change those who have them, dampening or obliterating any fear of death.
The conflict in science over NDEs centers not on whether they happen but on what they are. It's accepted, based on various studies, that between 4% and 18% of people who are resuscitated after cardiac arrest have an NDE. Researchers tend to fall into one of two camps. The first argues that an NDE is a purely physiological phenomenon that occurs within an oxygen-starved brain. "There's nothing mysterious about NDEs," says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. "Many people want it to be a religious, paranormal or supernatural phenomenon. The fact that NDEs can be explained scientifically detracts from the mystique."
The second camp is as adamant that no theory based purely on the workings of the brain can account for all elements of an NDE, and that we should consider the mind-bending possibility that consciousness can exist independent of a functioning brain, or at least that consciousness is more complex than we suppose. Though NDEs are driven in part by neurochemistry and psychology, says Auckland psychiatrist Karl Jansen, it has "underlying mechanisms in more mysterious realms that cannot currently be described."
These are the best of times in the NDE field, with research gathering pace and new insights emerging. University of Virginia psychiatrist Bruce Greyson reported recently on a tantalizing investigation into whether the observations people claim to make during an NDE (details of their resuscitation, the color of a nurse's shoes) are in fact accurate. Meanwhile, University of Kentucky neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson theorizes that NDEs are what can happen when a particular sleep state intrudes on the imperiled brain. "I wouldn't say it's definitive," says Nelson. "But it's an intriguing hypothesis that answers a great deal."
Entertaining the idea of mind-body duality invites the scorn of those who regard any attempt to dabble beyond the boundaries of conventional science as a waste of time. But that's the point, say others: NDEs don't fit into our current understanding of the brain. They shouldn't happen, yet they do. The task is to build new models in which they do fit.