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NEAR - DEATH EXPERIENCES

explain why people who say they had an NDE
report that what they experienced seemed more

real than the physical world.”
Jimo Borjigin, one of the rat study re-

searchers, echoed that idea. An NDE, she says,
“perhaps is really the byproduct of the brain’s
attempt to save itself.” Even then, concluding

that an NDE might be the result of a brain-wave
blast doesn’t mean an NDE isn’t real.
Parnia claimed the rat test was inconclu-

sive. Rats aren’t humans, he noted. No one would ever be able to figure out
if a rat had an out-of-body experience, met rats who had died before, or
had a review of its life. It’s also unlikely that any such test might be done on

humans. Deliberately letting a human subject die, or even approach death,
as part of a test would be considered unethical.

It so happens, though, that human brain activity during death actually
has been studied in a small sample. Four terminally ill patients in an inten-
sive care unit at Canada’s University of Western Ontario were tracked in

the minutes until and after their hearts stopped beating. One of the patients
showed brain activity 10 minutes after death at a level similar to that of

deep sleep. The four patients showed that brain activity ceases at different
rates. This suggests that the experience of dying might be significantly dif-
ferent from one person to the next.

Scientists will never draw broad conclusions from so few subjects, Despite multiple efforts
to determine the validity
though. In fact, the apparent variations in how brains continue to work of NDEs, we might not
ever know the answer to
after death raise all kinds of other questions. The first, obviously, is how this mystery.

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