French nuns persecuted for praying

Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Yes. You know, the near-death experience stuff has been around for a while. It actually goes back thousands of years, people reporting this phenomenology.

Then about 15 years ago, two studies in Europe, one by Peter Fenwick’s group in England and one by Pim Van Lommel in the Netherlands, looked at hundreds of patients who had cardiac arrests. They interviewed them. They were resuscitated.

Afterwards about 17% reported this near-death experience with very, very similar phenomenology of white light, a tunnel, a sense of calm, visits from dead relatives. In some cases, floating outside of their bodies, the so-called out-of-body experience. This is very, very consistent among all these patients in these two different studies. But again, it was all subjective and people kind of picked it apart.


Anyway, about two years ago now, two studies came out measuring brain activity at the end of life. One was from Dr. Chawla at George Washington University. He’s an anesthesiologist and a critical care guy who also does palliative care. So he takes care of dying patients.

He had a series of patients from whom support was withdrawn. They were on life support; they were terminal; they were pretty much hopeless; and they didn’t appear to be conscious. The families and the doctors decided to withdraw support, which is not uncommon.

So they did, but Chawla put the brain monitor that we use in anesthesia-actually, there are several of them-which measures depth of anesthesia. In just a rough sense it gives you this number 0 to 100 where awake/conscious would be between 80 and 100. An anesthetized patient should be between 40 and 60 and below that is insult to the brain in one way or another. So these patients were all at anesthetic or sub-anesthetic levels to start with.

As they went through the ventilation and the cardiac support, their hearts slowed down and eventually stopped and their blood pressure dropped. The brain activity number dwindled down toward 0 in almost all these cases, or near 0. Then when the heart had stopped or was about to stop, there was a burst of activity in the brain monitor up to conscious levels, at about 80, which lasted anywhere from 90 seconds to 20 minutes in one case. Then the patient died. Then it abruptly stopped again.

Chawla, in his article, suggested that maybe this was the correlate of this so-called near-death experience except obviously these patients did die. Perhaps had they come back they would have said, “Hey, I saw the white light, the near-death experience, and so forth.”
 
So in one of these instances they analyzed the raw data and how this number was derived and they found that it involved gamma synchrony, EEG 30 to 90 Hz electrical activity that correlates with conscious awareness. So he suggested this was some indicator that this was conscious activity or something like it that could be the near-death or maybe even out-of-body experience.