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A 25-year-old fellow was in the hospital with severe pneumonia, and the nurse who was working with him was about his same age. They were flirting a lot. One day she told him she was going to be taking the long weekend off, and she took off, and while she was gone, he had a respiratory arrest, had to be resuscitated, and had a near-death experience. And in his near-death experience, he saw her, and she came walking towards him, and he said, you know, what are you doing here? He said, well...

I want to tell you that you can't stay here with me, but I want you to go back and find my parents and tell them I love them very much and I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB." Now this happened in the 1970s and he was actually living in South Ivory where there weren't a lot of MGBs. But when he became awake again in his hospital bed, he started telling this story to the first nurse that walked into his room and she got very upset and left.

And what happened was his regular nurse who had taken the weekend off had done so to celebrate her 21st birthday. And her parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB, which she jumped in, took for a test drive and really smashed into a telephone pole and died just a few hours before his near death experience. There's no way he could have known that she had died or expected that she had died. She was a young, healthy person. They couldn't have known how she died. And yet he did.

And we have case after case after case of this type of thing. So it's not a new phenomenon by any means. That's psychiatrist Bruce Grayson, author of the book After, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. You'd be forgiven for thinking this all sounds a little implausible. But as Bruce says, there's a lot of documentation out there about these experiences. And he would know.

Over the past 40 years, Bruce has collected thousands of accounts of near-death experiences, or NDEs, and published over 100 research papers in peer-reviewed medical journals, all in an attempt to understand these seemingly baffling experiences better.

Today, we're going to talk with him about what he's learned from his work, including the profound effects NDEs have on people, both during and after the experience. We'll also explore the bigger questions NDEs raise about the nature of the brain, human consciousness, religion, and maybe reality as a whole. I'm Dave DeSteno, and this is How God Works.

How do you define a near-death experience? What is it? Near-death experiences are profound events that happen to people when they are close to death or sometimes pronounced dead.

that have transcendental experiences, like a sense of leaving the body, communicating with non-physically present beings, often deceased loved ones, sometimes reviewing your lives, and feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and well-being. And again, this is the context of being close to death, which is often painful and terrifying.

And one of the most remarkable things to me as a psychiatrist is that these experiences routinely change people's lives. They change their attitudes, beliefs, values in ways that hallucinations just don't. Not everyone who nearly dies has an experience like this. And we don't know why some people do and why others don't. But they're common enough that a quick search online will turn up hundreds of first-person accounts from all kinds of people.

religious and atheist, young and old, and from all walks of life, even celebrities like Sharon Stone.

I had all of these things that most people talk about, where you see this kind of light that you leave your body, that you have this feeling of being pulled outward and upward. I had a sense of seeing people that had gone before me. And one thing you'll notice once you start watching these videos is that they'll often have quite a few things in common. I never felt alive and then dead.

conscious and then unconscious. I felt conscious and then more conscious, alive and then more alive. It was as if I were not just conscious, I was massively conscious. It was as if by comparison, I had never been conscious before.

There are many different lists of possible features of near-death experiences. One of them are the changes in thought processes. People say their thinking is faster and clearer than ever before. They often have this life review of their entire life that takes place in a matter of seconds in our time. They often say there's no sense of time over there. That's another typical thing. They feel like there's no sense of time in this other realm.

that they see past, present, future all happening at once. I was in a realm of reality in which there was no time and in which there was no space. There was no limitation that we experience in this reality. The spiritual world's time is different. I could experience all of eternity in every moment. They also report a feeling of

knowing everything, about having no barrier to knowledge. They also have very intense changes in their emotional states, very strong emotions, often blissful, joyful experiences. I was in this white space where I felt like I was formless.

and I felt light as a feather. I felt free. It was the most wonderful, peaceful feeling I had ever felt. And I just let myself float in this for a while, this love and light. It was as if every atom or molecule in this room had been electrified with love. They also are things that

go beyond this physical world that we may call transcendental or mystical. A sense of being no longer in the physical world, but seeing in some other realm or dimension of being, which seems just as real to them as this world is. They may encounter deceased loved ones or other beings they can't identify.

I was greeted by this group of, I don't know what, people, spirits, beings, I don't know what to call them. But I knew that they were all people who were important in my life story. I now think of them as helpers. I think they were waiting for people like me who had kind of accidentally stumbled in maybe. Sometimes they seem like they're deities, some gods of some type, and they often feel

Like there's an encounter with this being of light that radiates unconditional love and acceptance to them. They have what we call paranormal phenomena, for lack of a better word, that involves a sense of leaving the physical body, having something like extrasensory perception, being aware of things outside your range of senses that you shouldn't know about. Sometimes being aware of events that are going to happen in the future.

And they also come to a point of no return or a border that they can't cross and still return to life. And often they're told, "It's not your time. You must go back. You've got more work to do." Sometimes they're given a choice and they choose to come back. He transmitted to me mentally, I guess, "You will not be staying here because it isn't time for you to be here yet."

Then I was back in the room and it was very clear that I had chosen to be back in the room and not chosen to continue on that journey, that outward, upward, away journey.

You know, we hear the same experiences around the globe from different cultures. And if you look back in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, you see accounts of near-death experiences there as well, which predate certainly Christianity. And they're the same experience that we have today. So it does not seem to be culturally determined. It seems to be something that's universal to all humans, whether that means it's biologically determined or psychologically determined.

or it's just another aspect of reality that we encounter. It's hard to say. But while the most common features of NDEs are pretty universal —

That doesn't mean the way people interpret them is. Take the tunnel you always hear about. You know, the one with the bright light at the end. Americans say tunnel. People from third world countries don't use that word. They say, I went into a cave or I fell into a well. I interviewed one truck driver who said, I got sucked into a tailpipe. You know, that was, it's a long, dark, enclosed space. In their attempts to understand what's happening, here a long, dark space,

People rely on what's most familiar to them. But those different ways of interpreting the same features can also influence the kind of experience people have. While most NDEs are blissful,

Some are scary, and up to 20% can have at least some unpleasant parts. Your culture determines, for some extent, how you interpret what happens to you. Some just have the same phenomena you have in other near-death experiences, but they're perceived in a frightening way. One of the typical things you hear from Americans in an unpleasant NDE is that, "I was in a black void with nothingness."

no sight, no sound. An idea of being in that state for eternity with nothing to relate to was terrifying to me. But I've heard the same thing from Hindus who said, "I had this wonderful experience of being in a black void, and that was my, I thought it was nirvana."

It was wonderful. Since your work relies on people volunteering and coming forward to share their responses with you, it's not a randomized sample, as we researchers like to say. Do we know anything about

What types of people have these that is is it more one type of person than the other who might have an NDE as far as you can tell? As far as we can tell there's no way of predicting who's going to have a near-death experience or what kind they're going to have We look at simple things like age gender race religious belief religiosity

those have no effect at all on the near-death experience or whether you're going to have a positive or a negative one or what the content is going to be. When we first started doing this work, we were, of course, dependent on people coming forward and saying, "Let me tell you about my experience." And I worried as a scientist about the bias in that, you know, these are only people who want to talk about it. I assume, for example, that people who didn't want to talk about their near-death experiences may have had a very different kind.

So I started doing research in the hospital population where I work, looking at all patients who came in, for example, with cardiac arrests or with overdoses or with seizure disorders and interviewing them about their experiences when they were unconscious. And I found basically the same phenomena.

Now, there were some differences, for example, in people who you see in the hospital. You see a wide range of verbal eloquence, whereas people who come to you and say, let me tell you about my experience, those are usually much more verbal people who are very good at describing what happened to them. It's not unusual for people to say in the hospital, yeah, I left my body and saw my dead father. I said, great, tell me about that. He said, I just did. We just don't have time to talk about these things.

But you do hear the same type of phenomena from people who come to you randomly and people who you seek out. And is there any link at all with people who have any type of mental illness diagnosis? There is no connection between mental illness and near-death experience. As a psychiatrist, that was one of my first thoughts. So the first thing I did was give a large sample of psychiatry

several hundred near-death experiencers a screening exam for mental illness. And they showed about the same rate of illnesses as other people, mostly like 5% had some depression in their history, some had anxiety and so forth. But I also did a study of patients in the hospital psychiatric clinic

And for a whole year, I sampled everybody who came to the clinic seeking help, which is about 600 people. And I asked them about their experience with coming close to death in the past, and if so, what their experience was. And I found that about 20% of them described a new death experience, which is about the same as the number of people who have a cardiac arrest. So there didn't seem to be any connection there.

Not only was there no connection, there also seemed to be an unexpected benefit to having an NDE. Among Bruce's patients who had almost died, those who had an NDE were much less likely to experience PTSD or anxiety afterward. And this pattern doesn't just hold for psychiatric patients.

Across all people who nearly or briefly die, those who have NDEs are much less likely to later develop anxiety and depression, withdraw from social life, or have post-traumatic stress symptoms. They tend to cope with life better after their NDE and generally describe their experience in very positive terms. They say that they now have a different perspective

on life than they had before. The problems they had before are still there, but they feel they're more than just this bag of skin that may be having trouble finding the next meal and so forth. They're part of something that's much greater. It has a meaning and a purpose. And they feel that the problems they have in this life are not things to be run away from, but something you need to struggle and grow from and learn from. And they find a meaning there that wasn't there before.

My experience radically changed my understanding of what it means to be here. I mean, life is this incredible opportunity and incredible adventure, and we're not meant to be here and just waste it away.

People are never the same after a near-death experience, and they describe different things about it. The most common thing we hear is that they are no longer afraid of death. Even those who have a frightening, unpleasant experience say, "I'm not afraid anymore. I've been there and back. I know what it's like. I know how I can change my life to make it better next time. I know that something better is waiting for me." There's no doubt in their minds that there is something after death.

I am definitely no longer afraid of death. And that was something that I had feared my entire life. And what I learned is that that fear of death really prevents you from truly living. They also become much more spiritual. And I don't mean religious by that. I mean, they feel much more connected to other people.

I saw the earth as a single living organic whole. I could see and feel and beat with the same heart as every individual that was living on this planet. And I knew it wasn't just the core of me. It was the core of human beings. We are that piece of God ourselves. That is who we really are. They feel much more

a part of something bigger than themselves. And that makes them also less invested in material goods, in power, prestige, fame, things of this world that you don't take with you when you die. Part of this change may be the result of something that happens to a lot of people during near-death experiences. Part of many near-death experiences, not all, is a life review where you go back over your life and review what happened

And a fair number of people described going through the review, not only from their own perspectives, but from other people who were involved in their activities. So if someone may talk about getting in a fight and feeling the fight from the other person's perspective. One person talked about remembering being beaten by her mother as a child and remembering it from her mother's perspective and what it felt like for the mother.

And that makes them come back here with a sense that we're all part of the same thing. We're all in this together. And if you're unkind to other people, you're unkind to yourself. And if you're nice to other people, you're being nice to yourself as well. And this leads them to basically the golden rule, which is something that's a part of every religion we have. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But for them, they say it's not a guideline we're supposed to follow. It's the law of the universe.

This is what I experienced in my NDE, that when you hurt someone else, you're hurting yourself. I experienced, sort of in a holographic awareness, how every action that one takes is like a stone cast in the water. Every action has a reverberating effect upon every single one of us on the face of this planet. Okay, so people come back from NDEs saying they believe in the Golden Rule.

but does that actually change how they behave there have been a lot of studies measuring traits like compassion love generosity kind of thing and near-death experiences usually score very highly on those more than than comparison groups but that doesn't measure behavior and behavior is much harder to get at and we certainly can and have asked significant others

How has the near-death experience changed since you knew them? And we get very reassuring answers about that, that they have tremendously changed and not the same at all. For example, I knew one fellow who was a career military officer, and he was shot in Vietnam and kind of thought to be dead. He had shrapnel all over his chest. He was air-evac'd to the Philippines to a hospital. And during the surgery, he had a near-death experience.

and it was a typical you know blissful experience sent back by a deceased uncle and so forth but when he came back he could not go back into command he couldn't lead his forces anymore he found he could not shoot again even in self-defense and he was totally worthless as a marine so he ended up leaving the force coming back to the states and ended up training as a medical technician

I found account after account for that, not only from military officers, but from police officers who found they just couldn't continue in that role anymore. And people who were in cutthroat businesses where they got ahead of someone else's expense and no longer made sense to them anymore. And they either changed the way they did their business or they just left business entirely.

and many of them go into helping professions, to teaching, clergy, social work, medicine, that kind of thing. One of the things I find most interesting about NDEs is that the big lessons people take away from them sound really similar to the basic precepts of most world religions. Practice the golden rule. Don't bother so much about material things. Death is not the end of the soul. And yes, you will need to reckon with your actions on Earth. It's enough to make you wonder...

Are people's pre-existing beliefs influencing what they experience during NDEs? Or is it possible that near-death experiences have helped shape the world's spiritual traditions? There's no way to know for sure, of course, but there is a good case to be made for the latter. Historian of religion Gregory Shushan did a comparative study of afterlife beliefs across many ancient civilizations and found that all of them had beliefs similar to the common features of NDEs.

He also collected NDE accounts from indigenous peoples in Africa, America, and the Pacific, focusing especially on those that would have been available before too much contact with colonizers and missionaries. Not only were the descriptions similar,

But several of them made an explicit connection between NDEs and their religious beliefs. Among Native American accounts, for instance, close to half said that they held certain beliefs based on the experience of a person who had gone to the other world and come back. Whether you want to say that people who have NDEs are tapping into some universal knowledge, or simply having similar brain-based experiences, the influence on the development of religions would be the same.

These truths, wherever they're coming from, might not be based on religion, so much as informant. If that's right, we might expect some cultures not only to consider NDEs valuable providers of spiritual information, but also to look for ways to access similar states of consciousness on a regular basis.

I think that many religions who have developed technologies for altering their mental status and having spiritual experiences have done so, particularly to get people

this other perspective on life, this broader perspective. And many cultures have developed techniques to induce these extreme experiences in particular people who are going to be the spiritual leaders. Certainly the shamans in many cultures are people who have had near-death experiences either induced or spontaneous. The ancient Egyptian mystery religions used to actually bury people for a day or so and then dig them up.

And the Greek mystery religions would have people inhale these toxic fumes. So there are various ways people try to induce these altered states, which give you access to this other way of thinking about the universe. NDEs clearly have common elements across cultures and times, and they seem to offer a broader perspective on the meaning of life and death to a lot of people.

They also seem to enhance people's well-being and encourage them to become a force for good. But here's the big question. Where do they come from? We could just assume there's some biological mechanism causing these experiences, whether for an evolutionary purpose or just the result of the mind running on overdrive, trying to survive while it's shutting down. But what, then, are we supposed to make of all this talk about the mind being separate from the body?

There are many examples of people who claim they left their bodies during any death experience and saw or heard things that were not only unavailable to them because they were unconscious, but beyond their range of vision and hearing. People report going to other locations and seeing things and reporting them accurately. For example, people seeing mismatched shoelaces on the nurse in the operating room.

or one person reported seeing her mother smoke during her operation. And she said, "My mother's not a smoker. She never smoked in her life." But as it happened, when I talked to her mother, her mother got so anxious about her daughter's operation that she bummed a cigarette from someone and tried smoking it. Jan Holden at the University of North Texas looked at about 100 of these cases.

And she found that in 92%, they were entirely accurate. 6% had some inaccuracies, and only 1% was really, really way off. More impressive to me, though, are people who say, yeah, I saw my uncle as if he were dead, but I didn't know he was dead. In fact, no one knew he was dead. Now, most people who describe people

seeing deceased loved ones are just dismissed as saying, well, that was wishful thinking. You know, you thought you were dying. Of course, you want to be reassured by your grandmother. But there are a number of documented cases in which people encounter people who were dead but who were not yet known to have died. Like that 25-year-old fellow in the hospital we heard at the beginning of this episode. But here's the thing. Right now, we don't know of any commonly accepted mechanism by which this can happen.

by which the mind can perceive things beyond what's available to the brain through our senses. You know, I've tried over the decades to find a materialistic explanation for near-death experience based on what's going on in the brain. And no matter what we look at, whether we're looking at oxygen supply to the brain or drugs given to the brain,

or electrical activity in the brain or different parts of the brain being activated. When you look at the data, they just do not pan out. They are not correlated. For example, if you look at blood levels of oxygen, they're actually higher in people who have near-death experiences than in people who don't.

So it's not lack of oxygen. And the same thing with drugs. The lower drugs people are given as they're approaching death, the less likely they are to have a near-death experience or to talk about it. Obviously, the brain is involved, and yet we're saying that in this near-death experience, the brain is not causative. Not causative in the usual sense, that is.

When your brain is working on something under normal conditions, it requires increased blood flow. The lit-up areas you typically see in all those fMRI images show where blood and the oxygen it carries are flowing to support activity in certain parts of the brain. But that's not what's happening during NDEs. When the brain is demonstrably not functioning, for example, in cardiac arrests where there's no blood flow to the brain or deep anesthesia,

When we know the brain is not functioning as usual, people have what they say is the most vivid experience of their life. And they form memories which do not change. Most memories do change over decades, particularly memories of traumatic events. But near-death experiences do not change over decades. And we have talked to people 20, 30 years after we originally saw them. And that's been to repeat their experience to us. It hasn't changed a bit. So these are really profound experiences that don't change over time.

So what do we make of that? Well, obviously, since the brain is involved, but isn't, we think, causative, what is the role of the brain? And one of the theories that's been put forward is that the brain is a mediator or translator of this experience.

The mind, that which thinks and feels, is not in the brain. It's somewhere out there. Where? Who knows? We don't know of a physiological mechanism for the brain to access information that's not coming through our physical senses. And yet, it seems to happen, and it's always been a part of our heritage. 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates said that the brain is the interpreter or messenger of the mind.

So is the brain just a receiver that translates the thoughts for us? Well, it's not that surprising that that might happen because our bodies are designed to help us survive in the physical world. So, for example, our eyesight sees all the wavelengths that are possibly out there.

but they're not important to us to survive so it filters out those that in the infrared and ultraviolet that we don't need and just lets in the small visible spectrum and likewise

We don't need to hear all the sounds that bats or dogs do, so our ears filter out all those sounds that are not relevant to us and just listen to a small sample of it. Our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are biological machines that were evolved to function in the physical world. They didn't evolve to function in the non-physical world, so they're really designed to filter out all that stuff. When you look around you, it looks like the world is flat.

And that's a perfectly good model for everyday life. You don't need to know that it's really a sphere unless you're going way above the earth and looking down on it. The table I'm sitting next to, it feels solid to me. But we know that it's not, that 95% of it is air between the molecules. But we can't perceive that. We perceive it as a solid thing. So our brain constructs this physical world for us so we can negotiate it.

but that's not really what's out there. So your brain is constantly taking input and filtering out stuff that's irrelevant, just letting in the important stuff. So in day-to-day life, when you're trying to find food and shelter and avoid predators, you don't need to be talking to deceased loved ones or to a deity. So the brain, if it has access to those things, filters it out and just lets in information about the physical world you need to survive.

And when the brain is shutting down, which can happen in near-death experiences, then all this other stuff comes in. To some, this might sound a little far-fetched, but the idea that there could be parts of reality beyond what we usually perceive isn't outside the realm of scientific possibility. So if information from departed loved ones, divine consciousness, or the like exists, and granted, that's a big "if."

NDEs might offer a special kind of access to it. As Bruce said, there are lots of signals in the world to which we're usually not privy. It's when we learn of them, often through technology, that our reality changes. But if and when a brain, the thing that constructs reality for us itself, starts to function differently, in a way that's not typical, a way, say, that occurs when it's dying,

it is theoretically possible that the information it has access to can also change. And if it does, reality can change along with it. The things we usually pay attention to and the lenses we use to understand them are shaped by our biology and our culture. Those are the things our brain deems relevant to daily life. But across the globe and throughout history, when some people are near death,

what seems most relevant to them changes. They feel they've touched universal truths, ones that are common to most faiths. And so they not only lose their fear of death, they often become more spiritual, and in some cases, religious. Of course, this brings us back to the hardest questions: Where do those truths come from? And can our minds, our consciousness, really exist beyond our bodies? When we die, do we somehow go on?

As a scientist, it's here that I get stuck. We have no mechanism to explain this, no evidence that such a thing is possible. Yet we have data that we also can't explain: the shared features of NDEs, people knowing things that they shouldn't be able to know. It's a conundrum, and one that leads to some of the most common questions religions have tried to answer: Is there an afterlife? And if so, is it like our usual conceptions of heaven?

Or, given what people see in some scarier NDEs, hell? Stories would be told of somebody who died and went to hell and came back and told the story. And preachers would use these accounts to terrify people. This was part of the Christian preaching, is that if you didn't believe Jesus and accept his death and resurrection, that you would be eternally damned. I certainly don't have the answers to that. But what I can tell you is that whether or not heaven and hell exist,

What we think about them shapes our lives and our societies in big ways. And so next time on How God Works, that's what we'll explore, especially when it comes to the bad place. As human beings, we do respond to fear. And when you offer up images of hellfire, of burning, all of us can imagine the terror of our skin burning. And that terror

focuses the mind and attention. Without a concept of God or religion or hell, you run the risk of creating hell on earth. That's next time. And that's all for today's show. If you'd like to hear more from the people talking about their near-death experiences on this episode, you'll find links to all of the original videos in the show notes.

How God Works is hosted by me, Dave DeSteno. This episode was written by Sophie Eisenberg and me. Our senior producer is Josie Holtzman. Our producer is Sophie Eisenberg. Our associate producer is Emmanuel Desarme. Executive producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Merit Jacob is our mix engineer and composed our theme, which was arranged by Chloe DeSteno. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez.

This podcast was also made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation. To learn more about the show and access episode transcripts, you can find our website at howgodworks, all one word, dot org. And for news and peeks at what's coming, feel free to follow us on Instagram at howgodworkspod or me on X or Blue Sky at David DeSteno. ♪