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.
Dying in a Brain Scanner, Sort Of
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 en
tryway 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.
There we were greeted by Mario’s lanky, handsome researcher, Jerome Courtemanche. Ignoring the din created by the MRI machine, he explained the process to Jorge slowly and carefully. They would take images of Jorge’s brain in three states. Once he was lying comfortably in the brain scanner, Jorge was to relax and think of nothing in particular. This was the “resting state,” which would be the baseline to compare against the other brain images. After sixty seconds, Jerome would tell Jorge through a microphone in the control room to imagine a light generated by a lamp. This was the “control state,” which would theoretically activate the parts of Jorge’s brain that involve memory and vision. After another minute, at Jerome’s command, Jorge was to return to resting state. Then, a minute later, Jorge was to seek the “target state”—he must try to return to the “light,” the luminous presence he experienced two years earlier, when he had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. In this way, the researchers could determine whether the mystical state of seeing the light differed from the mental state of seeing a simple lightbulb. They would repeat this six times. If the two states appeared identical, that would suggest there is nothing inherently special about mystical experience. It is a person’s interpretation and not the event itself that infuses it with meaning—the way, perhaps, a sirloin steak tastes more succulent on the night your beau proposes marriage. The steak is not better than the one you had last Tuesday night but the context makes it so.
I watched from behind a plate of glass as Jerome led Jorge into a cold room. There, waiting ominously in the dim light, was the MRI machine. The brain scanner looked like a large oven, openmouthed and gaping for an object to be placed on the rack and inserted. I wondered if Jorge, already a victim of heat and fire, recognized the awful irony. If he did, he showed no sign: he merely stripped off his shoes, belt, watch, and any other metal object, and hoisted himself onto the gurney-like rack. Jerome fed him into the machine, a sacrificial offering to the gods of science, where enormous magnets would record blood changes in his brain.
Moments later, Jerome ordered the procedure to begin and a piercing ring filled the control room. It seemed unlikely than a yogi master could reach a transcendent state in this racket, much less a Mexican hotel worker who has never meditated a day in his life. I turned to Mario Beauregard, who was standing next to me watching through the glass.
“So, what do you think you’ll find?” I asked.
“I think we’ll see regions involved with positive emotions light up, of course, because it’s a very positive experience for a subject,” the neuroscientist speculated. “We should also see brain regions that are involved in self-awareness, because there’s a change in self-awareness during such spiritual states. And also, the body representation of the subject shifts and the subject becomes less in touch with his body, so we might see major changes in the parietal regions of his brain. But,” Beauregard said cheerfully, “that remains to be seen!”
Jorge Medina was the first of fifteen people to re-create his near-death experience in the brain scanner. Beauregard had no trouble recruiting subjects. A newspaper advertisement drew more than a hundred volunteers, allowing Beauregard to be selective. The subjects had to meet three criteria: when they had nearly died, they had lost consciousness and entered the “light”; they had returned with a transformed view of life; and they could still reconnect with the light.
In the control room, Jerome was saying, “Super, Jorge, we’re done,” and asking Jorge to rate how close he came to the light during his various target states, on a scale of one to five. Because Jerome has recorded the exact times Jorge was trying to achieve the target (near-death) state, he could later match Jorge’s subjective scores with the images of his brain during those moments. Jerome beamed like a proud parent: on a scale of one to five, Jorge had reported mainly fours and fives, a surprisingly strong intensity for a man lying in a metal casket with ringing sounds as loud as ambulance sirens going off around him. Jorge emerged, grinning.
“How was it?” I asked. “Did you connect with the light?”
“Yes, yes, yes, I feel a little bit today like my accident,” Jorge said.We sat down then, and Jorge described that moment as he lay in the ambulance, his body covered with third-degree burns.
“Peace—the peace that is like joy and like love,” Jorge whispered. His eyes welled up as he described his brush with death as “a nice experience.”
Jorge Medina had arrived in Canada seven years earlier, and began working a string of jobs as a cook and housekeeper in a hotel, sending money back to Mexico City, where his wife and children lived. On Sunday, August 1, 2004, he dragged home after a long shift at the hotel, fretful about his life, about money, about his son’s impending marriage. He relaxed in the living room, beer in one hand, cigarette in another, until sleepiness overcame him. He trundled off to bed, only to be awakened later by black smoke billowing through the apartment. The living room had turned into a furnace.
“I decided I needed to put it out,” he recalled, “and I began to get burned as I crossed the living room. I tried to grab the extinguisher, but I couldn’t because it was so hot. I felt the flames on my body but I didn’t realize I was on fire.”
Jorge ran down three flights of stairs, a live ball of flames, and reached the street. Neighbors doused him. He lay on the street, waiting for an ambulance that would take twenty minutes to arrive.
“They raised me into the ambulance, and I began to feel separate from myself,” he told me, reverting to Spanish to articulate the ineffable. “I felt like everything ended right there. And then I found myself walking toward a door, trying to open it and not able to do so. There was a very large window, with a lot of light in it. I think people were behind it. I felt like I needed to wait by the door for someone to open it for me. And someone said to me—well, it wasn’t a voice, it was ‘peace’ that said to me—‘Everything will be okay. You wait here.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I felt
extremely calm the entire time. I didn’t know anything of myself until I woke up three months later.”
Could it have been morphine? I asked.
Jorge said he asked the doctors the same question, and they told him they did not administer morphine until he arrived at the hospital. Beauregard, who was listening to the interview, said that morphine produces a different, more fragmented experience.
When you met the light, I continued, was it a person, was it God, was it Jesus, what was it?
“At first I thought it was God or some image of God, but now I think we will never truly be able to grasp what God is,” Jorge observed philosophically. “It can’t be described. It was a light, and it was peace.”
The doctors and nurses dubbed Jorge “the Mexican Miracle.” He survived nine surgeries, eleven blood transfusions, and months of painful rehabilitation. He stopped drinking and smoking. His family and his Catholic Church moved to center stage in his life. He grew less anxious about his problems with family, work, money. That moment in the light rewrote his vision of the future, and not just in this world.
“I used to believe there was life after death,” he said urgently. “I believed in God. But I lived like everybody—in between yes and no. Now I know there is something else.When I think about death, I think about how nice it is to be alive and to be with my family. At the same time, I don’t worry about what’s going to happen later. Everything will fix itself.”
“Can you tell me what happened in the brain scanner today?” I asked.
“I simply tried to recall the experience, and I began to see the light. I cannot say I saw God, but there was a state of peace, and I left my body. Time and space became relative. Oh, one other thing,” he said offhandedly. “Normally I have a lot of pain in my hand,” he said, rubbing it gently. “And at that moment in the light, it didn’t hurt at all.”
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