Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (10 page)

A study of life reviews was one of the earliest NDERF research projects.
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This study was conducted by Jody Long, who serves as the NDERF webmaster. She confirmed the importance of the life review in the NDEr’s life by reviewing 319 NDEs from people who submitted NDERF case studies. Jody reviewed their narrative responses from the original NDERF survey’s question about the life review: “Did you experience a review of past events in your life?”

The answers to these life review questions were studied. Here they are, along with the results:

The life review helps the NDEr understand his or her purpose in life. And it is this understanding about who they are that helps them make significant life changes. Here are a few examples of what NDErs experienced during their life reviews.

While in the light I had a life review and saw everything I… ever did in my life; every thought, word, deed, action, inaction was shown to me.

The review was very fast, but I seemed to comprehend everything easily despite the speed. At that moment, I’m not sure exactly when, someone or something began giving me an examination of conscience, and in the blink of an eye images from my life began passing before me, beginning with my childhood. Each image had its counterpart, or as if the actions of my life were being put into a balance.

Everything I ever thought, did, said, hated, helped, did not help, should have helped was shown in front of me, the crowd of hundreds, and everyone like [in] a movie. How mean I’d been to people, how I could have helped them, how mean I was (unintentionally also) to animals! Yes! Even the animals had had feelings. It was horrible. I fell on my face in shame. I saw how my acting, or not acting, rippled in effect towards other people and their lives. It wasn’t until then that I understood how each little decision or choice affects the world. The sense of letting my Savior down was too real. Strangely, even during this horror, I felt a compassion, an acceptance of my limitations by Jesus and the crowd of others.

All of a sudden in my mind from left to right like an IMAX movie, I saw all the very important moments of my life up to that present time. Most of the earlier moments in my life … I had long forgotten about until this happened. I had mixed feelings about this but mostly was peaceful.

I saw my childhood and felt the emotions my actions created in others. I learned that many of the things I thought I did “wrong” were not necessarily wrong. I also learned of opportunities to love others that I passed up. I learned that no matter what has been done to me, there is more to the story that my ego might not see or understand. My life has [changed] because I take into account more the feelings of others when I act.

If NDEs are real experiences, we should expect that the events seen in life reviews really happened even if some of them were forgotten. Conversely, if NDEs are not real, we can expect that there is significant error in their content and perhaps even hallucinatory features.

To explore the realness of the life review, NDERF studied the reality of the content of life reviews in NDEs. As part of this study, we looked for any content in the narratives of life reviews that appeared to be unrealistic. If unrealistic content was never or rarely found, we reasoned that the content of life reviews as a whole could be considered real.

To help determine the reality of the content of life reviews, I studied the same 617 NDEs that were discussed in chapter 4, where I reviewed these NDEs to determine the accuracy of out-of-body observations. For each NDE containing a life review, I asked, “Is there any reason to doubt, for either you personally or the experiencer, that any of the content of the scenes of [that person’s] past life was real?” If
any
part of the life review appeared to contain observations that appeared unrealistic to either me or the NDErs, that case was put into the “unreal” category.

A total of 617 NDEs were studied. A life review was described in 88 NDEs (14 percent). The results of this study were convincing.
None
of the life reviews contained content that was considered unrealistic, either to the NDErs or to me.

People who had near-death experiences were often impressed that their life review contained real details of their life that they had long forgotten. For example, this man was sleeping in the backseat of a car when the driver slammed into the back of a truck. He went from sleeping to traveling up to meet a cluster of beings. The way he describes it,

The sensation was of apiece of a metal being swept into a magnet. The emotion was overwhelming, with incredible love associated with the magnetic effect. I sensed I always knew them [the beings], but when I came upon one being, I wasn’t sure who it was. I left and returned to my body, which seemed as if I were putting on soiled clothes.

He was then treated to a life review in which

[e]verything in my life, including long-forgotten details, made sense.

Lisa said about her life review:

The being of light knew everything about me. It knew all I had ever thought, said, or done, and it showed me my whole life in a flash of an instant. I was shown all of the details in my life, the one I’d already lived, and all that was to come if I returned to earth. It was all there at the same time, all the details of all the cause-and-effect relations in my life, all that was good or negative, all of the effects my life on earth had had on others, and all of the effects the lives of others that had touched me had had on me.

The NDERF study makes it clear that the events seen in the NDEr’s life review are real. Our finding that NDEs contain consistently realistic life reviews are further strong evidence for the reality of near-death experiences.

Skeptics have proposed alternative explanations for the life reviews. The two main alternative explanations are

1. the life review is a psychological defense mechanism, and
   
2. the life review results from the dying brain producing electrical discharges in the part of the brain responsible for memories.
   

Neither of these alternative explanations stands up well under scrutiny.

Dr. Susan Blackmore, a leading NDE skeptic, attributed the life review to a psychological defense mechanism at the time of a life-threatening event that involves a retreat into a timeless moment of pleasant, prior memories.
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The explanation seems plausible until one begins encountering NDE memories that are
not
pleasant. Such content would not be expected if the life review were simply a pleasurable psychological escape from unpleasant circumstances.

Many NDEs have been reported in which the life-threatening event was sudden, unexpected, and occurred with immediate unconsciousness, such as an unanticipated car crash. The NDEs would have unconsciousness occur so rapidly that a psychological defense mechanism would not have time to develop.

And then there are NDEs and subsequent life reviews that take place under general anesthesia. No theory can ex- plain NDEs that occur under general anesthesia because the NDErs should perceive nothing.

The second suggestion from skeptics is that the life review is only a product of a dying brain, one that is producing electrical discharges in the brain’s memory centers. Writing in the magazine
Skeptical Inquirer,
Blackmore wrote: “The experience of seeing excerpts from your life flash before you is not really as mysterious as it first seems. It has long been known that stimulation of cells in the temporal lobe of the brain can produce instant experiences that seem like the reliving of memories. Also, temporal-lobe epilepsy can produce similar experiences, and such seizures can involve other limbic structures in the brain, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, which are also associated with memory.”
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Is this really true? Let’s first look at the claim that stimulation of the brain can produce prior memories similar to life reviews in NDEs or any other element of near-death experiences. “Stimulation” of the brain refers to electrical stimulation of the brain, which may be done as part of a specialized neurosurgical procedure. The brain has no sensory pain nerves in it, so the procedure is generally painless. The brain electrical stimulation studies of neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield are often quoted by skeptics as reproducing many of the elements of near-death experiences, including life reviews. Noted NDE researcher Dr. Emily Williams Kelly and her coresearchers, Bruce Greyson, MD, and Edward F. Kelly, PhD, reviewed Dr. Penfield’s published reports of electrical brain stimulation and found the following:

Most of the experiences Penfield reported in fact bore little resemblance to actual NDEs. They consisted of hearing bits of music or singing, seeing isolated and repetitive scenes that seemed familiar and
may
[emphasis added] have been fragmentary memories, hearing voices, experiencing fear or other negative emotions, or seeing bizarre imagery that was often described as dream-like.
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There have been others who reported the experiences of their patients undergoing procedures similar to those used by Dr. Penfield, including electrical stimulation of the brain’s temporal lobes. Drs. Kelly, Greyson, and Kelly, commenting on these further studies of electrical brain stimulation, continue:

Subsequent studies have found similar experimental phenomena, especially fear or anxiety and fragmented, distorted experiences quite
unlike
NDE phenomenology.
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More recent studies by Dr. Olaf Blanke and associates suggest that they were able to produce OBE-type experiences with electrical brain stimulation.
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,
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The first patient they reported described a purported OBE that involved seeing herself from above, but only her lower trunk and legs. She reported visual distortions, which included seeing her legs getting shorter and moving toward her face. This type of OBE with partial body visualization and hallucinatory features is essentially never reported in out-of-body experiences occurring during near-death experiences. I coauthored a paper that documented other discrepancies between the Blanke account and true OBEs.
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Blackmore and other skeptics have claimed that seizures, especially those associated with temporal-lobe epilepsy, can produce experiences similar to life reviews or other NDE elements. However, the evidence indicates this is not true. As neurologist Dr. Ernst Rodin stated,

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 [of NDEs] as part of a seizure.
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Other researchers have documented that the experiences produced by electrical brain stimulation or seizures are almost always unlike any element of near-death experiences.
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At NDERF we have case reports from epileptics who had frequent seizures but no near-death experience until an exceptionally severe seizure became a life-threatening event.

The best evidence points to the conclusion that electrical brain stimulation and seizures do not consistently reproduce
any
elements of NDE. The skeptical argument that NDEs are somehow related to electrical brain stimulation or seizures needs to be relegated to the status of urban legend.

Accurate and transformative life reviews are a hallmark of NDEs, and they point to a reality beyond what we know from our earthly existence. They provide important evidence for the reality of an afterlife.

Many near-death experiences describe dramatic and joyous reunions with people known to them who died long before their near-death experience took place.

One such story came from a Finnish woman named Anitta, who had a heart attack. Anitta found herself zooming up a tunnel toward a bright light. “Someone” took her by the arm and made her feel peaceful. Anitta’s life came back to her “like a film.” As Anitta recounted on the NDERF site:

Then I saw my father, just like he was when he lived, and he said to me, “Come here; here is good to be.” I wanted to run to him, but I could not because there was a border between us. I cannot describe the border. It was like a wall that I could see through. Then I heard a dark voice that seemed to be everywhere, asking, “Who?” They meant my identity. And then [came] the words: “not yet.”

… Then I was obliged to turn back, which I did not want, because I had such a good feeling there. Again I was in the tunnel, coming back very fast, and at the same time the pain in my body came back. I had cried, “No, no,” when I was coming back to consciousness. For many days afterward I had a strange feeling, [like,] where am I? And I missed my father a lot, whom I had seen.

This NDEr, Anitta, had an experience that is representative of those in the NDERF study who encountered deceased relatives or friends during their near-death experience.

Why should seeing deceased friends or relatives be evidence of life after death? Because if NDEs were only a product of brain function, then one would expect that beings encountered during the NDE would be those most recently familiar to the NDEr. In other words, one would expect NDErs would most likely see people recalled from recent memory, such as the emergency personnel who helped them or the bank teller they had made a transaction with right before being hit by a car. Instead, they see friends and relatives who have died, in many cases people they haven’t thought about in years or even decades.

The percentage of deceased individuals seen during NDEs, especially deceased blood relatives, is so high that I believe that encounters with deceased loved ones are not the random products of a frightened, confused, or dying brain but instead are a strong line of evidence for the reality of near-death experiences.

A study that best illustrates this was conducted in 2001 by Emily Williams Kelly, PhD, of the department of psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia.
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She compared 74 NDErs who had encounters with the deceased during their NDE with 200 NDErs who did not have awareness of deceased individuals.

The Kelly study found that 95 percent of the deceased individuals encountered were relatives, while only 5 percent were friends or acquaintances. Only 4 percent of the NDErs in the study met beings who were alive at the time of the NDE. Other studies have shown that in dreams or hallucinations, the beings encountered are much more likely to be people who are still living.

As part of the NDERF study, I reviewed NDEs that described meeting individuals known to the NDErs from their earthly life. For this part of the study, I reviewed the same group of 617 NDEs that we discussed in chapters 4 and 7. This review excluded living people seen by the NDErs only during out-of-body observations of earthly events, and familiar beings seen only during life reviews.

In our study group, 97 NDEs, or 16 percent, described meeting one or more beings familiar to them from their earthly life. Of these 97 NDEs, 13 were excluded from further analysis because the beings who were met were not described as being either alive or deceased at the time of the NDEs. Most of these excluded NDEs described grandparents and, less commonly, parents. With this information, and from the context of the NDE narratives, it is likely that the great majority, and possibly all, of the beings encountered in these 13 NDEs were deceased at the time of the NDEs. There were 84 NDEs where the beings encountered were described as being either alive or deceased at the time of the NDEs. Of these 84 NDEs, there were only 3 (4 percent) where the beings encountered were definitely alive at the time of the NDEs. In all 3 of these NDEs, only one being known to the NDErs from their earthly life was present. Two of these beings were their fathers, and one was a doctor. This remarkably low percentage of living beings encountered during the NDE is consistent with the findings of the Kelly study and is additional strong evidence for the reality of NDEs and the existence of an afterlife.

In the study group of 617 NDEs, there were 91 NDEs that described meeting beings familiar to them from their earthly life that also indicated whether these beings were direct family relatives or friends. Of these 91 NDEs, 74 (81 percent) encountered only relatives and 7 (8 percent) encountered both relatives and friends. The finding of a preponderance of deceased relatives during NDEs is similar to what Kelly found in her study.