Fingerprints of God (31 page)

For several days, I heard stories like Edward’s, all passionate, all spoken as divine revelation, all compelling.What I did not hear was airtight evidence that these mystical voyages did in fact take place—that they were something other than tricks played by a dying brain. The near-death-experience advocates desperately need that proof. For their claim challenges one of the foundational principles of modern science: that your consciousness depends entirely on your brain, and when the brain shuts down, so does your identity. These survivors who refused to die fervently believe that consciousness exists apart from the brain, and, by extension, that there exists another dimension beyond what we can see and hear and touch in this material world. That claim will not triumph without a fight.

Gerald Woerlee is spoiling for a fight. These “delusions,” the Australian anesthesiologist said, are “easily explained” from both a narrative and neurological point of view. It’s simply what a brain does when it is dying.

Woerlee argues that when a person’s heart stops beating, he will appear to be dead because he lacks enough oxygen in his brain to move or to see, even though the brain stem, which controls the most basic functions like breathing or swallowing, remains active. Because this brain is not functioning normally, Woerlee says, it sets off a cascade of neurological events that explain every part of the near-death experience. When the prefrontal cortex malfunctions, you have a sense of calm, serenity, peace, joy, and painlessness. When the primary motor cortex malfunctions, you can’t move.When the postcentral gyrus malfunctions, you can’t perceive touch or sensation.When the parietal cortex malfunctions, you can’t perceive where your body ends and the universe begins, making you feel at one with the universe. When the angular gyrus malfunctions, together with muscle spindles, you can believe you are moving or flying.

I can accept that someone could look lifeless and still remain conscious at some level. Who has not heard about people who emerge from a coma recalling the sounds and events around them? But the common experiences—the tunnel, the beings of light, the life review—how can these be explained away?

“The tunnel-and-light business is one of the easier bits to explain,” Woerlee replied.

A brain in distress—that is, a brain gasping for oxygen—releases adrenaline, which widens the pupils of the eyes. And when the pupils dilate, he said, they can let in a hundred times the amount of light that pupils do under normal conditions.

“And so, if someone has had a shock or their pupils dilate due to illness, disease, fear, drugs, or oxygen starvation, that person will actually say, ‘Hey, the room’s getting lighter.’ You look around and think, ‘He’s mad, the room isn’t any lighter.’ Of course it isn’t! His pupils are wider, that’s all.”

That may explain the infusion of light, I said, but what about the tunnel?

Simple,Woerlee said. It’s a matter of blood supply. Most of the blood goes to the central part of the retina, the part that focuses on objects, and when oxygen supply dwindles—as it does during cardiac arrest—“the bits that fail first are those that are furthest away from the center,” he said. “And so, gradually, you get a narrowing of your peripheral fields, until all you’ve got is a central spot of light, and if your pupils are wide open at the time, you see light pouring into a tunnel.”

It seemed to me that Woerlee made a persuasive case in describing generic experiences such as the light and the tunnel. But the cinematic experiences unique to each person—how would he explain that? How could generic brain activity manufacture an image that means something only to the dying person: seeing Uncle David in robust health, for example, or feeling pangs of guilt for ridiculing a shy little girl in fifth grade?

The brain gasping for oxygen, Woerlee said, is a little like the OK Corral—a desperate, frantic shootout in the brain. In fact, it resembles an epileptic seizure.

“And that stimulates all sorts of parts of your brain to do all sorts of wonderful things,”Woerlee argued. The brain in distress stimulates sections of the brain deep within the temporal lobe,
⁴
like the hippocampus and amygdala, which house your memories and emotions.“And in general, when you stimulate the amygdala and the hippocampus, you get memories of people, of events, of sounds, music, sometimes even deities, and also memories of past events—flashback, life review, and then your visions of relatives.”

“So all those visceral, meaningful events,” I asked, “they’re just in your memory bank, and they are roused when your brain is having a seizure?”

“Precisely.”

True, Woerlee conceded, this analysis may sound like “a modern form of phrenology,”
⁵
the pseudoscience in which bumps and fissures in the skull were said to indicate personality traits. In fact, some neurologists dub it “neurophrenology.” But he argued,“a veritable flood” of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies during the last fifteen years supports his theories.
⁶

This seems like a lot of heavy lifting for a brain in the throes of dying. It reminds me of those operatic death scenes in which the tubercular soprano trills away with perfect pitch and volume through her final aria.

Aware of these arguments, I sat down with Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist and fellow at the British Royal College of Psychiatrists. Fenwick specializes in treating epilepsy. He has never had a near-death experience himself but has researched it for the better part of twenty years.

“No epileptic seizure has the clarity and narrative style of an NDE,” he said. “And this is because all epilepsy is confusional. Epileptologists all agree that one thing that near-death experiences are
not
is temporal lobe epilepsy.”

What happens in a seizure, he told me, is that the electrical activity at that site
disrupts
the normal processing of the temporal lobe. When people report sensations from temporal lobe stimulation, they describe disjointed, isolated phenomena. Someone might say, “It feels as if I am leaving my body.” Or, “It sounds as if I’m hearing a symphony.” But these are isolated sensory phenomena, not coherent narratives.

Fenwick also dismissed the dying-brain argument. Twenty seconds after the heart stops beating, he said, a person is unconscious, period. You cannot argue that there are “bits” of the brain that are functioning.

“Everything that constructs our world for us is, in fact, ‘down,’ ” he stated. “There is no possibility of the brain creating any images. Memory is not functioning during this time, so it should be impossible to have clearly structured and lucid experiences.”
⁷

Bruce Greyson, a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia who is considered the father of modern research on near-death experiences, added that because of brain damage, a person should not be able to remember any experiences after his near death. “Even if you can establish that there is some residual brain function going on,” he said, “that’s not the same thing as saying there is enough integrated brain function to have elaborate thinking and memory formation during these procedures.”

It’s like saying that if an eight-year-old can pitch in Little League, then he can start for the Red Sox. An oxygen-deprived brain blurts out idiosyncratic hallucinations and leaves the survivor confused. But near-death experiencers tell coherent narratives and describe elaborate conversations with dead relatives, beings of light, or religious figures like Jesus. And even if those “memories” are not real accounts of actually meeting dead relatives in heaven but only a reconstruction from past events, that complex thought could not be formed while a person has only brain-stem activity or partial consciousness. Besides, the oxygen-deprivation argument cannot explain cases in which oxygen levels are normal upon death, as in a car accident.

Still, as I sat back and reflected on all these arguments, it seemed to me that the near-death-experience team has hit a couple of singles but not a home run. It is not that their arguments are unreasonable. It is that they are, at this point, speculation. How to directly test these experiences in, say, a brain scanner, is also problematic. Researchers can’t really say,
Mrs. Brown, you don’t have long now, may we just slide you into this MRI tube for the betterment of science?
Even if you could capture the experience in a neurological snapshot, what would that tell us? That various parts of the brain light up while Mrs. Brown is subjectively experiencing a near-death experience? We still would not know if the brain is
causing
the perception of something that is
not
happening, or leaving a
record
of something that
is
.

Bruce Greyson supplied what seemed to me the most honest and ultimately satisfying solution to this conundrum. I asked him if these near-death experiences point to a reality beyond our physical reality.

“There is absolutely no scientific evidence to make a compelling case one way or the other,” he said. But after researching the edges of death for thirty years, he believes the evidence in favor of unseen reality is “impressive.”

“We could be misinterpreting things, overemphasizing certain things. I would not be surprised at all if I’m wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think the evidence strongly points in the direction of there being more than just this material world.”

In thinking about two adjacent, perhaps overlapping worlds, I recalled something Pam Kircher told me at the Houston conference. Kircher is a physician at M. D. Anderson who specializes in helping patients at the end of their lives.Very ill patients train their senses on two different audiences, like an emcee who faces the audience on one side of the curtain, but occasionally pops his head through the curtain to see if the actors are ready. Kircher said when she started visiting dying patients, she noticed that they routinely talked with deceased relatives, the familiar “Aunt Sally,” as it were. At first, she thought they were hallucinating, so she constructed a test.

“I would interrupt the conversation with Aunt Sally,” she said. “I’d ask them their pain measurement on a scale of one to ten, or ask them what they had for breakfast. And they could tell me. They were polite; they would stop the conversation with Aunt Sally and tell me very logical answers to those things, and then go back and talk to Aunt Sally, who of course was much more interesting than I was.”

A person who is hallucinating cannot be pulled back to reality, Kircher explained. “They’re gone. They are not going to tell you what their pain level is. They’re in another stage of reality. But my patients could be pulled back.”

They have glimpsed behind the curtain to the stage she cannot see.

The Holy Grail for near-death researchers is a physical marker, like a stamp in a passport that testifies that Mrs. Brown crossed into sacred territory and returned. In thirty years of focused research, scientists have never located such a marker. Perhaps a marker exists, perhaps it doesn’t—but until recently, scientists lacked both the technology and the funding to even try.

Neurologist Peter Fenwick believes those markers do lie somewhere in the folds of the brain or the rhythm of its electrical current. Any major neurological event registers in the brain and then manifests itself in behavior. The brain images of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, show cerebral changes.

“So it’s likely that people who have a transcendent experience will also have changes in their brain as well,” Fenwick speculated. “This is shown really because they then have changes in behavior. With post-traumatic stress, it’s increased anxiety. In near-death experiences, it tends to be more social awareness, more spirituality, and so on. So these will in fact be accompanied by some cerebral markers. I’m sure we’ll find them when we start looking for them.”

Which brings us to the University of Montreal, where the hunt for a spiritual marker is in full cry.

Jorge Medina winced slightly as I shook his hand in the entryway of the University of Montreal Medical Center. We exchanged halting hellos—Jorge in his shy, stuttered English, his third language, after Spanish and French. I searched his face for some signature of trauma, and found wide brown eyes, a hearty black mustache, a face smooth and coppery and completely unmarred.

I unclasped Jorge’s hand, and let my gaze fall to his forearm. There lay a tapestry of mottled brown-and-white skin, as shiny and inflexible as vinyl. His arm was a partial road map of his journey through the flames. Fire had left ninety percent of Jorge’s body with third-degree burns, mercifully leaving his face unscathed.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. Now it was my turn to wince.

“No problem.” He smiled, and we turned to the task at hand—one of the most controversial studies ever conducted at Montreal’s illustri ous medical center.We were about to scan Jorge’s brain as he relived the moment he died.

Our guide was Mario Beauregard, a forty-something French Canadian neuroscientist. Beauregard was conducting cutting-edge research on the brain in mystical states.

Why, I asked him, would a promising young researcher risk his career by studying spiritual states and near-death experiences?

“Oh, that’s easy,” Mario had replied in his soft accent. He smiled shyly. “I’m a mystic.”

During my visit to Montreal, Beauregard elaborated. “When I was eight years old,” he said, “I had a kind of vision, and the vision became a certainty for me—that the brain was not the same as the mind and the soul. These things were different. And I decided then to become a scientist to demonstrate later on that this was the case indeed. That you cannot reduce a human being to a batch of chemicals and bones. And that became”—he searched for a word,
almost
getting it—“the motor, the starting point of the research that I’m doing right now.”

Now, on a beautiful July morning in Montreal, this mystic was unlocking a thick door meant to stop the electromagnetic field generated by the fMRI scanner from leaking out of the room, and leading Jorge and me into a clamor that only very large machines can produce.