Tomorrowland (6 page)

If you want to investigate this adventure, a good place to start is with Dr. Melvin Morse. In 1982, while working as a brain cancer researcher and finishing up his residency in pediatrics at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, Morse made extra cash moonlighting for a helicopter-assisted EMT service. One afternoon, he got a call to fly out to Pocatello, Idaho, to perform CPR on eight-year-old Crystal Merzlock, who had spent a little too long at the bottom of a community swimming pool. When he arrived on the scene, Crystal had been without a heartbeat for nineteen minutes, her
pupils already fixed and dilated, but Morse was good at his job. He got her heart restarted, climbed into the chopper, and headed home. Three days later, Crystal regained consciousness.

A few weeks passed. Morse was back at the hospital where Crystal was being treated, and they bumped into each other in the hallway. While they’d never met while Crystal was conscious, the girl still pointed at Morse, turned to her mother, and said, “That’s the guy who put the tube in my nose at the swimming pool.”

Morse was stunned. He didn’t know what to do. “I had never heard of out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences. I stood there thinking: How was this possible? When I put that tube in her nose, she was brain-dead. How could she even have this memory?”

Morse decided to make a case study of Crystal’s experience, which he published in the AMA’s
American Journal of Diseases of Children
. For categorization purposes, he labeled the event a
fascinoma
, which is both medical slang for an abnormal pathology and a decent summary of the state of our knowledge at the time. But Morse was still curious. He didn’t mind that his was the first published description of a near-death experience in a child; to him it seemed like an interesting first step into a longer research project.

He started by reviewing the literature, discovering that while out-of-body experiences are defined by a perceptual shift in consciousness, near-death experiences start with this shift and head on down that now-famous dark tunnel and into the light. Along the way, people report love, peace, warmth, welcome, the reassurance of dead friends, dead relatives, and the full gamut of religious figures. Occasionally, there’s a whole life review, followed by a decision of the
should I stay or should I go
variety. Morse discovered that the near-death experience’s classic explanation as delusion had been recently upgraded to a hallucination produced by a number of different factors, including fear, drugs, and hypoxia, a shortage of oxygen to the brain. But it was drugs that
caught his eye. Morse knew that ketamine, used as an anesthetic during the Vietnam War, frequently produced out-of-body experiences. Other chemicals were also suspected triggers. Morse decided to study Halothane, another common anesthetic, believing his research might explain the frequent reports of near-death experiences trickling out of emergency rooms. “It’s funny to think of it now,” Morse told me, “but really I set out to do a long-term, large-scale debunking study.”

Morse’s 1994 research, commonly referred to as the Seattle Study, spanned a decade. He interviewed 160 children who died and were later revived while in intensive care at Seattle Children’s Hospital. All of these children had been without pulse or breath for at least thirty seconds, some for as long as forty-five minutes. The average was ten to fifteen minutes. For a control group, he used hundreds of other children, also in intensive care, also on the brink of death, but whose pulse and breathing had not been interrupted for more than thirty seconds. That was the only difference. In every other category — age, sex, drugs administered, diseases suffered, and setting — the groups were the same. In setting, Morse not only included the intensive care unit itself, but also intimidating procedures such as the introduction of a breathing tube and mechanical ventilation. These are important additions, since fear has long been considered a trigger of out-of-body and near-death experiences and, as Morse later explained, might have been responsible for what happened to me while skydiving.

Morse graded his subject’s experience according to a sixteen-point questionnaire designed by University of Virginia psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson that remains the benchmark for determining whether or not an anomalous experience should be considered a near-death experience. Using the Greyson Scale, Morse found that out of 26 children who died, 23 reported a classic near-death experience, while none of the other 131 children in his control group experienced anything of the kind. He later videotaped these children recalling these events and making
crayon drawings of what they saw once outside their bodies. Many of these pictures included the standard fare: long tunnels, giant rainbows, dead relatives, deities of all sorts. But some also included pictures of the exact medical procedures performed, including elaborate details about doctors and nurses whose only contact with that child took place while that child was dead.

In the years since Morse did this work, other scientists have since duplicated his findings. Most recently, Pim van Lommel, a researcher at Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, conducted an eight-year study, involving 344 cardiac arrest patients who died and were later resuscitated. Out of that total, 282 had no memories, while 62 reported a classic near-death experience. Just as in Morse’s study, van Lommel examined the patient’s records for any factors traditionally used to explain near-death experiences — such as setting, drugs, or illness — and found no evidence of their influence. He too found death the only possible causal factor. He too found people with difficult-to-explain memories of events that happened while they were dead.

In other words, what Morse discovered and van Lommel verified is the same lesson I learned while skydiving: Out-of-body and near-death experiences are very real and very, very mysterious — but this latter fact, well, that’s now starting to change.

3.

The first clues to the biological basis of these extreme states turned up in studies conducted in the late 1970s, when the Navy and Air Force introduced a new generation of fighter planes that generated tremendous g-forces that, in turn, were pulling too much blood out of pilots’ brains and causing them to black out midflight. The problem, known as G-LOC, for gravity-induced loss of consciousness, was serious, and James Whinnery, a specialist in aerospace medicine, was the man charged with solving it.

Over a sixteen-year period, working with a massive centrifuge
at Brooks Airforce Base in San Antonio, Texas, Whinnery spun over 500 fighter pilots into G-LOC. He wanted to figure out at what point tunnel vision occurred, how long it took pilots to lose consciousness under acceleration, how long they remained unconscious after that acceleration ceased, and how long they could be unconscious before brain damage started. Along the way, he discovered that G-LOC could be induced in 5.67 seconds, that the average blackout lasted 12 to 24 seconds, and that 40 of those pilots reported some sort of out-of-body experience while unconscious. Not knowing anything about out-of-body experiences, Whinnery called these episodes
dreamlets
, kept detailed records of their contents, and began perusing all the available literature on anomalous unconscious experiences. “I was reading about sudden-death episodes in cardiology,” recounts Whinnery, “and it led me right into near-death experiences. I realized that a smaller percentage of my pilot’s dreamlets, about 10 to 15 percent, were much closer in content to a classic near-death experience.”

And then Whinnery went back over his data and realized there was a correlation: The longer the pilots were knocked out, the closer they were to brain death. And the closer they were to brain death, the more likely it was that an out-of-body experience would turn into a near-death experience. This was the first hard evidence for what had been long suspected: that the two states are not separate phenomena, but two points on a shared continuum.

Whinnery also found that if G-LOC was gradually induced it produced tunnel vision. “The progression went first to gray-out [loss of peripheral vision] and then to blackout,” he says. “This makes a lot of sense. We know that the occipital lobe [the portion of the brain that controls vision] is a well-protected structure. Perhaps it continues to function when signals from the eyes are failing due to compromised blood flow.” He also learned that upon waking up, his pilots reported a feeling of peace and serenity. In other words, Whinnery found that the pilot’s transition
from gray-out to blackout resembles floating peacefully down a dark tunnel, an experience much like the defining events of a classic near-death experience.

The simplest conclusion to draw from these studies is that, give or take some inexplicable memories, these phenomena are simply normal physical processes that occur during unusual circumstances. After all, once scientists set aside the traditional diagnosis of delusion as the source of these states and began looking for biological correlates, there were plenty of possibilities. Compression of the optic nerve could produce tunnel vision and neurochemicals like dopamine and endorphins could help explain the euphoria, while the neurochemical serotonin is known to produce vibrant hallucinations — but no one has directly tested these hypotheses.

What researchers have studied are the powerful after-effects of the near-death experience. Van Lommel conducted lengthy interviews and administered a battery of standard psychological tests to his cardiac arrest study group. The subset who had near-death experiences reported more self-awareness, more social awareness, and deeper religious feelings than the others. Van Lommel then repeated this process after a two-year interval and found the near-death group still had complete memories of the experience, while the other’s recollections were strikingly less vivid. He also found that the near-deathers had an increased belief in an afterlife and a decreased fear of dying, while those without the experience showed the exact opposite effect. After eight years, he repeated the process and found those earlier effects significantly more pronounced. Compared to normal people, the near-death group was much more empathetic and emotionally vulnerable and often showed evidence of increased intuitive awareness. They still had little fear of death and held a strong belief in an afterlife.

In follow-up research done long after the Seattle Study, Morse too found similar long-term impacts. To confirm this finding, he also did a separate study involving elderly people who had a
near-death experience in early childhood, but were now well into old age. “The results were the same for both groups,” said Morse. “All of the people who had near-death experiences — no matter if it was ten years ago or fifty — were still absolutely convinced their lives had meaning and that there was a universal, unifying thread of love that provided that meaning. Matched against a control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity, and took fewer medications. There’s no other way to look at the data. These people were just transformed by the experience.”

4.

In the mid-1990s, Melvin Morse’s work caught the attention of Willoughby Britton, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona interested in post-traumatic stress disorder. Britton knew that most people who get up close and personal with death tend to have some form of PTSD, while people who had a near-death experience have none — meaning, people who have a near-death experience have an atypical response to life-threatening trauma.

Britton also knew about work done by legendary neurosurgeon and epilepsy expert Wilder Penfield in the 1950s. Penfield, one of the giants of modern neuroscience, discovered that stimulating the brain’s right temporal lobe — located just above the ear — with a mild electric current, produced out-of-body experiences, heavenly music, vivid hallucinations, and the kind of panoramic memories associated with the life review portion of the near-death experience. This helped explain why right temporal lobe epilepsy was a condition long defined by its most prominent symptom: excessive religiosity. And given what Whinnery had found about hypoxia, it is possible that his pilot’s out-of-body dreamlets were related to moments when blood flow to the right temporal lobe was seriously compromised.

Britton hypothesized that near-death experiencers might show the same altered brain firing patterns as right temporal lobe epileptics. The easiest way to determine this is to monitor brainwaves during sleep. So Britton recruited twenty-three people who had near-death experiences and twenty-three who had not. She then hooked these subjects up to an EEG and recorded everything that happened while they slept.

When the experiment was complete, Britton asked a University of Arizona epilepsy specialist to analyze the results. Three things distinguished the near-death group from normal people: They had unusual temporal lobe activity, needed far less sleep than controls, and went into REM sleep far later than controls. This was a startling finding.

When she examined the data, Britton found evidence that the near-death experience rewires the brain: 22 percent of her near-death group showed temporal lobe synchronization, the exact same kind of firing pattern associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and the mystical experiences it produces. “Twenty-two percent may not sound like a lot of anything,” says Britton, “but it’s actually incredibly abnormal, so much so that it’s beyond the realm of chance.”

More important was what the sleep data revealed. “The point at which someone goes into REM is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” said Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.”

Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. It works the same in the other direction. Happy people go into REM around 100 minutes. Britton found that the vast majority of her near-death group entered REM sleep at 110 minutes — a rating that is nearly off-the-charts for overall life-satisfaction and a neurophysiological correlate
that supports the anecdotal evidence that these strange states are literally and completely transformative.