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What Near-Death Experiences Teach Us About the Brain
New research may shake up science’s understanding of the brain and consciousness
The truck driver’s story sounded far-fetched.
The man claimed that in the middle of his quadruple bypass heart surgery — during which he was fully anesthetized and his eyes were taped shut — he had “come to” and found that he was looking down at his own body and the doctors preparing to operate on it. He described the scene in detail, and he recalled that his surgeon had waved his elbows in the air as if he were mimicking a bird flapping its wings.
Later, when asked about his patient’s peculiar account, the truck driver’s surgeon confirmed that he had indeed waved his elbows in the air. He explained that, in order to avoid contaminating his gloved hands before a procedure, he would place his palms on his chest and point with his elbows — an uncommon practice that his patient couldn’t have seen or anticipated.
Bruce Greyson, MD, is a professor of psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia. In his new book, After, he describes the truck driver’s near-death experience (NDE) and many others like it. Greyson spoke with both the truck driver and with his surgeon, and he tried to pin down the source of the man’s uncanny recollections. But his efforts only deepened the mystery of the man’s apparent out-of-body perceptions.
After studying NDEs for decades, Greyson says that much of what he’s learned has been hard to square with prevailing notions of how the mind and brain work. “Our common assumption is that the mind, or consciousness, is just what the brain does,” he says. In other words, the mind and the brain are one and the same. They’re inseparable. “There’s a lot of evidence for this,” he adds. “When you get drunk or you get hit on the head, you don’t think very well.”
But, paradoxically, NDEs often occur when the brain is heavily disabled or even measurably inactive. “The evidence we have from NDEs seems to suggest that the mind and brain can dissociate under extreme circumstances,” he says. “Somehow, the mind can continue to function when the brain seems to stop.”
“People who have had both an NDE and a psychedelic drug trip say that they are not the same experience. The accurate out-of-body perceptions — you don’t have those with drug trips.”
What we know about NDEs
For one thing, they’re surprisingly commonplace. Estimates vary, but most research efforts have found that somewhere between 10% and 20% of people who come close to death — for example, they suffer a perilous accident, or their heart stops — say that they experienced one or more features of an NDE.
For a 2014 study in the journal Resuscitation, researchers found that roughly one in 10 people who survived a cardiac arrest episode reported an NDE. Furthermore, 2% of these survivors were able to recall some of what was happening as doctors worked to save them — recollections that the study’s authors could not explain.
NDE’s are not only common, but their features are also fairly consistent. The sense of floating above one’s body, and also the ability to recall in detail events that took place during periods of apparent unconsciousness, are not rare. Some other distinctive features of NDEs include an awareness of being dead or near death, a surge of pleasant or euphoric sensations, the perception of time slowing down, encounters with god-like entities or deceased loved ones, and lucid recall of memories — almost like a detailed highlight reel of one’s life.
Not all of these experiences are unique to NDEs. Some researchers have drawn parallels between near-death experiences and REM sleep disturbances, which can likewise induce vivid hallucinations and out-of-body sensations. Other experts have highlighted the apparent overlap between NDEs and the experience of taking psychedelic drugs such as ketamine and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Like NDEs, these drugs can induce the sensation of leaving or transcending one’s body, of time slowing down, and of perceiving or communicating with supernatural entities.
Some have pointed to these parallels as evidence that, while bizarre, NDEs are surely the output of neurochemical processes or other conventional brain operations. “Near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry,” wrote the authors of a 2011 study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
While this seems almost self-evident, Greyson disagrees with this conclusion. He says that scientists who take this view tend to simply ignore the many documented NDEs in which people describe, in startling detail, events that took place around them during periods of unconsciousness. “People who have had both an NDE and a psychedelic drug trip say that they are not the same experience,” he adds. “The accurate out-of-body perceptions — you don’t have those with drug trips.”
Far from establishing that NDEs can be firmly tied to the brain, he says that the research on psychedelics leads one in a different direction. “Studies on psychedelics consistently show that the more elaborate mystical experiences are associated with decreased brain activity, not increased, which is the opposite of what you’d expect,” he explains. He also brings up a documented phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, in which people who have severe brain disorders — such as those with end-stage dementia — somehow regain their ability to communicate, to remember, and to think clearly shortly before they die. These are people who have brains that are sometimes visibly ravaged and disfigured by neurological illness. “There’s no medical explanation for how they can regain lucidity,” he says.
All this evidence has led him and others to consider alternative explanations for NDEs — including some that fundamentally challenge the relationship between the brain and the mind.
If consciousness is not a product of the brain, then where exactly does it come from?
The brain as a ‘filter’ for consciousness
If NDEs are not the result of “normal brain function gone awry,” what are they?
Greyson says one theory is that the brain, rather than creating consciousness, is more like a filter for conscious experience — a filter that blocks out some information while letting other bits through. He says it’s possible that, during an NDE, the brain’s filtering ability may “break down” in a way that somehow allows consciousness to expand.
Other researchers are more vociferous proponents of this filtering theory. When it comes to consciousness, “our brain has a facilitating function, not a producing function,” says Pim van Lommel, MD, a Dutch cardiologist, NDE researcher, and author of Consciousness Beyond Life.
Van Lommel says that contemporary neuroscience regards activity in the brain — and, specifically, in the brain’s cerebral cortex — as a “necessary condition” of conscious experience. And yet for people who experience NDEs during cardiac arrest, research has found that consciousness seems to persist — and even broaden — despite an absence of measurable brain activity.
All of this is controversial, to say the least. But if consciousness is not a product of the brain, then where exactly does it come from? While Greyson punts — “I don’t have an answer for that,” he says — van Lommel proposes a theory that he and others have termed “nonlocal consciousness.” The gist is that consciousness comes from “informational fields” that exist outside of our minds and bodies — and even outside of time and space. In some of his published work, he compares the brain to a television set; just as a TV can convert electromagnetic waves of information into sights and sounds, perhaps the brain and body are mere conduits for consciousness. This, he says, could explain many of the features of NDEs that science’s current conceptions of the brain fail to elucidate.
Many scientists surely scoff at van Lommel’s ideas or dismiss them out of hand. But Greyson doesn’t. He also doesn’t endorse them. He says that his research on NDEs has taught him to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty — especially when it comes to the human mind.
“I think we’re still at the very beginning of understanding the brain and what it does,” he says. “In 100 years, I think people are going to look back at today’s models and laugh at how naive we were.”
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Curbar Gap in the Peak District National Park, England. Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
When my family moved from the United States to the north of England a few years ago, we soon adopted the local custom of going for a weekend walk in the Peak District National Park. These ‘walks’ typically involve a semi-strenuous hike to the summit of a not-quite mountain, where one enjoys a homemade sandwich while taking in a panoramic view of the surrounding scenery. Depending on the conditions and location, you might enjoy jagged cliff faces, rolling hills or deep valleys. If you’re lucky, you can sometimes be swept up in a feeling of awe that’s difficult to convey to others.
These walks are now a staple for our family of four. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, for me personally, they’ve become more than this. As strange as it might sound, these rambles have been an irreplaceable mechanism for maintaining a sense of connectedness to other people beyond my family, and have helped me maintain a spiritual vitality that could otherwise have flickered and died in these times of social distancing.
It turns out that I’m not alone. Psychological research increasingly reveals that experiences of awe in nature can boost both our feeling of connectedness to others and also a sense of spiritual fulfilment. What’s more, this work illuminates how all of us, whether religious or not, can actively harness the power of natural experiences to improve these dimensions of our lives. A key fulcrum in the story connecting nature, transformation and spirituality is the emotion of awe.
Awe is a powerful emotion typically experienced in the presence of something great or vast. Researchers refer to it as an ‘epistemic’ emotion because the kinds of objects that induce awe are rich in information: that is, awe often challenges a person’s existing understanding of things and motivates a search for explanations, both scientific and religious. Awe is associated with a dropping of the jaw and an open, gaping mouth. When we experience awe, we’re stunned by something, enraptured by it. Such experiences are typically positive, and people typically want them to continue.
Scientists and philosophers continue to debate the evolutionary origins of awe. One well-known theory proposes that its original function was to reinforce social hierarchies. Our ancestors would experience awe mainly in the presence of socially dominant others, and this would help them find their own place within the social hierarchy, thereby increasing their fitness.
Other scholars, though, object to this account of awe’s primordial function. They say it doesn’t explain why natural beauty, especially panoramas, are among the most common objects of awe. They suggest instead that awe arose as a response to sweeping views: in a hunter-gatherer context, it would be very beneficial for small groups to find and maintain a safe haven from which they could see approaching enemies. So tending to have an enjoyable experience of awe, directed toward sweeping views, could prompt behaviours that knit the group tightly together and kept it in an elevated location, all of which would be highly adaptive.
This ‘nature-first’ theory of the origins of awe might also go some way toward accounting for its connection to spirituality. The quintessentially spiritual effort involved in seeking to understand and appreciate one’s place within a larger whole might have reinforced a group’s attachment to a particular place. Worship has long been associated with ‘high places’, and many deities exhibit special concern for particular places. Situating oneself in a larger story that ties identity to a specific, safe place, and to others in that place, could have been a survival advantage for early humans.
When we’re awe-struck, we experience ourselves as smaller and the world beyond us as larger
Whatever awe’s evolutionary origins, research shows that today it’s associated with both personal transformation and spiritual fulfilment. People with stronger tendencies to experience awe are rated as more humble by their friends, display more generous behaviour, and are more helpful toward others. When experiences of awe are experimentally induced, such as by having participants stand in a grove of towering trees, they lead people to present a more balanced account of their own strengths and weaknesses, display more helpful and less aggressive behaviour toward others, and be less willing to endure unpleasant experiences in order to gain money.
It might seem striking that awe has these significant social effects. After all, any of us might experience awe on a mountaintop alone, or with only a few others. And while awestruck, we might be paying little mind to those around us, being caught up in the experience itself. The experience of awe needn’t be especially social, yet the effects of the experience seem to be.
The leading account of how awe prompts these social effects concerns the ‘small self’. When we’re awe-struck, we experience ourselves as smaller and the world beyond us as larger. That can be literal: people who experience awe judge their own bodies to be smaller in size. Yet it’s also figurative: the self and its concerns are less salient, while the world beyond the self becomes more significant.
Crucially, in awe, we also see our smaller self as more connected with the larger world. People who experience awe report feeling themselves to be ‘part of a greater entity’. They also report a greater sense of connection to groups they belong to, to their nation, and to their species. Experiences of awe induce a greater sense of oneness with others and friends, and make people feel more integrated into their communities. Astronauts who feel awe in spaceflight report a greater sense of connection both to other people and to the Earth in general. In this sense, awe is referred to as a ‘self-transcendent’ emotion: when we encounter it, we transcend ourselves by experiencing our small selves as connected to larger wholes.
In light of this, it’s unsurprising that awe is intimately intertwined with spirituality. When people are asked to recall and write about a spiritual experience, this act leads them to experience awe. Likewise, when experiences of awe are induced, people report more belief in the supernatural, and say that they prefer visiting spiritual destinations, such as Tibet, over vacation destinations. People who are more spiritually inclined tend to experience more awe and other self-transcendent emotions; and the link between awe and spirituality helps to account for why spirituality boosts wellbeing.
It’s significant that this spiritual function of awe isn’t limited to people who are religious. In fact, scholars have proposed that, by studying the roles of awe and the small self, we can better understand what spirituality is all about – whether that spirituality is connected to religion or not. The psychologist William James wrote in 1902 that the only thing religious experience ‘unequivocally testifies to’ is that ‘we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace’. The research reviewed here suggests that we might say very much the same of spiritual experience.
Some psychologists and philosophers go even further, suggesting that spirituality is a universal human virtue much like fairness or compassion, which the religious and non-religious alike can cultivate. So perhaps we can understand the particular virtue of spirituality as involving a developed capacity for achieving self-transcendence in the presence of the awesome. To put it more colloquially, those who are ‘good’ at spirituality will be good at having experiences of awe that enable them to transcend themselves and become better people.
People who become more absorbed in their experience are more likely to experience awe
If we think of spirituality in this way, then – just as for other virtues – we can do things to get better at it. In line with this idea, research does reveal that some people are more prone to experience awe than others are. And, very practically, it shows that there are specific techniques that enhance your chances of having awe-inspiring, self-transforming experiences when you encounter natural phenomena.
Absorption is key here, for people who become more absorbed in their experience are more likely to experience awe. To become absorbed is to become fully immersed in what is happening, so that other practical concerns recede to the background, and your attention focuses on your present experience with minimal distractions. This is familiar from research on ‘flow’ states that occur when people become fully captivated in performing a task. But here the ‘task’ is simply taking in the experience of nature.
Techniques that enhance absorption can enhance awe. They can be fairly simple: just following a set of instructions to focus one’s attention on the details of a natural environment has been shown to promote absorption. Another, more demanding practice is mindfulness meditation. This involves turning your attention to your current experience, resisting distractions that would lead you away from this focus, catching yourself when you begin to become distracted, and returning to focus on the present. It thus involves effortful attention. Because practising mindfulness trains you to attend to your current experience, it’s been described as ‘the exercise of choice’ for facilitating absorption and awe.
There’s also evidence that actively using imagination helps with absorption. Some people are categorised as more prone to absorption than others – they are high in what’s called ‘trait absorption’. Trait absorption, however, is partly a tendency to actively engage one’s environment through the use of the imagination. Those high in absorption are more prone to engage in fantasy and to use mental imagery. These kinds of techniques, too, might make it more likely that one will experience awe in nature. While meditation can reduce distractions that detract from awe in nature, imagination might enhance active engagement with the experience. In both cases, absorption is amplified and awe is a more likely result.
During the pandemic, many of the conventional tactics for building personal relationships and maintaining spiritual pursuits were stripped away. Even before lockdown, reliance on digital communication was leading to more social isolation – so if and when things become ‘normal’ again, the experience of awe atop mountains will be as necessary as ever. There at the summit, with a clear vision of your surroundings, you can become small while the world expands; you can see yourself as connected with the wholes of which you are a part; and maybe you can even imagine a divine love embracing it all.
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