The 44-year-old man who had collapsed in a meadow was brought to a hospital, unconscious and with no pulse or brain activity. Doctors began artificial respiration, heart massage and defibrillation.
A nurse trying to feed a tube down the man's throat saw that he wore dentures and removed them. The patient was moved to the intensive care unit.
A week later, the nurse saw the man again. The man immediately recognized the nurse as the person who had removed his dentures and also remembered other details of what had happened while he was in a deep coma. He said he had perceived the events from above the hospital bed and watched doctors' efforts to save his life.
This account would be standard fare in a supermarket tabloid, but recently it was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal. It's the latest in a long series of efforts to either document or debunk the existence of "near death" experiences, something that for the most part has remained in the realm of the paranormal.
The new study, conducted in the Netherlands, is one of the first so-called prospective scientific studies. Instead of interviewing people who reported near- death experiences after the fact, researchers followed hundreds of patients who were resuscitated after suffering clinical death as their hearts stopped. It was hoped this approach might provide more accurate accounts by documenting the experiences as they happened, rather than basing them on recollections.
About 18 percent of the patients in the study reported some recollection of the period when they were clinically dead, and 8 percent to 12 percent reported going through near-death experiences, such as seeing lights at the end of tunnels or "crossing over" and speaking with dead relatives and friends.
The researchers say the evidence supports the validity of near-death experiences and suggests scientists should rethink theories on one of the ultimate medical mysteries: the nature of human consciousness.
Skeptics, however, maintain the Dutch researchers provided no evidence to buttress any extraordinary claims, certainly nothing as dramatic as proof of an afterlife.
Most neuroscientists believe consciousness is a by-product of the physical brain, that mind arises from matter. But if near-death experiences are really what those who experience them say they are, does that mean people can be conscious of events around them even when they're physically unconscious, when their brains show no signs of electrical activity?
How can consciousness be independent of brain function?
Compare it with a TV program, suggests Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist at the Hospital Rijnstate in the Netherlands and the lead investigator of the research. "If you open the TV set, you will not find the program. The TV set is a receiver. When you turn off your TV set, the program is still there but you can't see it. When you put off your brain, your consciousness is there but you can't feel it in your body."
The study, he said, suggested that researchers investigating consciousness "should not look in the cells and molecules alone."
Although he said the research did not address whether there was such a thing as the soul or God or the afterlife, many remained skeptical. In an accompanying article, Christopher French, director of the Anomalistic Psychology Research unit at Britain's Goldsmiths College, said questions persist.
French pointed out that some study participants who reported near-death experiences said in follow-up interviews that they hadn't had them, while a few who had said they experienced nothing said later that they now remembered them. He said this could suggest that false memories were at play.
