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More recently, Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, has mimicked temporal lobe seizure phenomena by electromagnetic stimulation. He has his subjects sit in the dark (wearing goggles) in a special chamber. With the subject wearing a special helmet, weak magnetic fields are then applied across the temporal plane, and during a 20–30 minute exposure, the subject reports his or her experiences, which are recorded.
The most common reported experiences were feeling “dizzy or odd” and “tingling sensations,” although 55 percent did report feeling “as if somewhere else” and 39 percent reported feeling as if they left their bodies or were somehow “detached.”
Other commonly reported experiences were “vibrations” and feelings of fear. The most common experiences, dizziness and tingling, are not characteristic of near-death experiences. And “vibrations,” “fear or terror,” “odd tastes,” and “odd smells” are also rarely (if ever) reported as part of the NDE.
Furthermore, the subjects in his experiments are able to converse with the experimenter and report their experiences as they occur—in other words, they remain very much “in this world” and do not experience a sense of shifting to another reality.
In 2004, a Swedish team attempted to replicate Persinger’s findings using equipment borrowed from his lab. The team, at Uppsala University in Sweden, headed by Pehr Granqvist, tested 89 undergraduate students, some who were exposed to the magnetic field, and some who were not. The Swedish team also consulted Persinger’s collaborator Stanley Koren to ensure that conditions for replication were optimal.
Granqvist’s team found no effect from the magnetic fields whatsoever. The only characteristic that predicted what the subjects reported was personality: Subjects who were rated “highly suggestible” on the basis of a questionnaire reported strange experiences when they were wearing the helmet, whether the current was on or off. Granqvist and his team concluded that the well-established psychology of suggestion was the best explanation for Persinger’s results.
Finally, how closely do actual seizures resemble the NDE? Ernst Rodin, medical director of the Epilepsy Center of Michigan and professor of neurology at Wayne State University, clarifies the issue in the paper “Comments on ‘A Neurobiological Model for Near-Death Experiences’” published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in 1989:
“The hallmarks and nuclear components of NDEs are a sensation of peace or even bliss, the knowledge of having died, and, as a result, being no longer limited to the physical body. In spite of having seen hundreds of patients with temporal lobe seizures during three decades of professional life, I have never come across that symptomatology as part of a seizure.”
In contrast with the peace and joy found in most NDEs, seizures are accompanied by feelings of fear, loneliness, and sadness. And seizures and electrical stimulation of the cortex do not evoke images of communicating with deceased relatives in another world.
I examined all of the other attempts to explain away the NDE as the product of a malfunctioning brain, and ultimately not one stood up to critical scrutiny. The conclusion I finally arrived at was that the NDE is exactly what it appears to be: a genuine separation of mind from body during the early stages of biological death.
Chris Carter was educated at Oxford University in Philosophy and Economics, and is the author of “Science and the Near-Death Experience.” For more information about the book, please visit http://www.scienceandtheneardeathexperience.com/
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