Skeptics often argue that out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences are caused by purely physiological factors -- usually some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain. Various hypotheses have been offered over the years, with the current favorite involving ketamine or more precisely a ketamine-like substance. Ketamine, when injected, can indeed produce some of the symptoms of an NDE, though there is some dispute about how closely the ketamine symptoms parallel those of an authentic NDE. Ketamine is not produced by the body, but another chemical, which does occur naturally, is said to have similar binding properties and is hypothesized to be released under stress. For a detailed review of this viewpoint, see Karl Jansen's article here. (Hat tip to the reader who linked to this article on a comments thread.)
Personally I think it is entirely possible that a chemical imbalance can bring on at least a partial OBE or NDE - but not necessarily for the reason that materialists assume. My guess is that the brain acts as a kind of filter, straining out perceptions of a larger reality than we can ordinarily observe. When the brain is impaired in certain ways, the filter is shut off and more of this larger reality gets through, overwhelming us with transcendent experiences. Planes or dimensions of reality that we are unaware of in our everyday life suddenly impinge on our perception, often with life-altering results. Incidentally, the above-mentioned Karl Jansen seems to have come around to this perspective himself, after beginning with a more reductionist attitude. He notes this change of mind in the introduction to his article.
Regardless of the mechanism(s) by which an OBE or NDE takes place, the big question that remains to be answered is how a person who is deeply asleep, unconscious, sedated, comatose, or clinically dead can perceive his environment well enough to give accurate and verifiable descriptions of events that occurred around him. The usual answer offered by skeptics is that a seemingly unconscious person can sometimes hear what's happening in his vicinity, and that his mind creates visualizations that match the auditory content it is receiving. In other words, the person is not actually seeing anything; he is only hearing things -- snatches of conversation, noises made by electrical equipment, and so on -- and then imagining the appropriate images.
This explanation obviously does not cover cases in which the person remembers witnessing events that occurred well outside of his immediate vicinity, and such cases do exist. Skeptics chalk them up to coincidence, exaggeration, urban legend, etc.
But how about the far more common cases in which the person apparently observed what was being done in his presence while he was, to all appearances, completely out of it? Does the auditory-input theory really cover what the patients themselves have reported?
What follows are some excerpts from a report given by a 52-year-old night watchman interviewed by Dr. Michael Sabom for his book Recollections of Death (pp. 64-69). During open-heart surgery, the patient believed he was witnessing the operation. His recollections, to the extent that they could be checked against the operative report, proved accurate. (Sabom notes that the operative report had never been shown to the patient.) Unfortunately, Sabom does not seem to have attempted to confirm the non-medical details offered by the patient, even though some of these were quite vivid.
But what I would like you to focus on is the extremely visual quality of the patient's narrative. He certainly does not talk like someone who heard a few scattered sounds and tried to match them to a mental inventory of images. He sounds like somebody who was actually watching -- visually observing -- the events. (In these excerpts, all emphases are added by me.)
When I left that room [prior to surgery], I was totally unconscious and don't have any awareness whatsoever as I was transported from there down to where they do the operation until all of a sudden the room is lit up, not as bright as I thought it ought to be. Then I became aware but, in fact, they had already done some stuff to me. They had finished draping me, the anesthesiologist had started his stuff, and all of a sudden I became aware of it... like I was in the room a couple of feet or so above my head, like I was another person in the room... It was like I would think of something and I would see, in color and in a frame, what I wanted. I recall consciously... seeing two doctors stitch me up after the operation; Dr. C., I think it was because the hands were so large, injecting a syringe of something into my heart on two occasions, one on one side and another on the other side of the heart; the apparatus that they used to keep the ribs apart to make the aperture; some apparatus they put in this vein up here, some kind of readings that they were taking, an instrument up there; something shiny in his hand -- that was the anesthesiologist, I'm sure of that. I couldn't see it all. And the fact that my head was covered and the rest of my body was draped with more than one sheet, separate sheets laid in layers. I knew it was my body. I always imagined that the lights would be brighter, but it didn't seem that bright. More like banks of fluorescent lights rather than a big high-powered beam... I was amazed that I had thought there would be blood all over the place, but there really wasn't that much blood. Not what I expected it to be... A lot of it was draped. I couldn't see my head too much but I could see from about my nipples down better.... [Sewing him up] they took some stitches inside me first before they did the outside. And then it was just like they sew you up. The shorter doctor started down here and worked this way. The other doctor could have started in the middle and worked up. They had a lot of trouble right here, but the rest of it was pretty fast... And the heart doesn't look like I thought it did. It's big. And this is after the doctor had taken little pieces of it off. It's not shaped like I thought it would be. My heart was shaped something like the continent of Africa, with it being larger up here and tapered down. Bean-shaped is another way you could describe it. Maybe mine is odd shaped... [The surface was] pinkish and yellow. I thought the yellow part was fat tissue or something. Yucky, kind of. One general area to the right or left was darker than the rest instead of all being the same color... I could draw you a picture of the saw they used and the thing they used to separate the ribs with. It was always there and I can remember the details of that probably better than the other things. It was draped all around, but you could see the metal part of it. I think all they used that for was to keep it constantly open. They had instruments hanging around it that obscured it and they undid the clamps sometimes and stuck in sponges stuck on the clamps and there were hands so I couldn't see it constantly because it was obscured sometimes... It seems Dr. C. did most everything from my left side. He cut pieces of my heart off. He raised it and twisted it this way and that way and took quite a bit of time examining it and looking at different things ... That thing they held my chest open with, that's real good steel with no rust, I mean, no discoloration. Real good, hard, shiny metal... [Stopping his heart] I sensed they did it with the needle when they injected something into my heart. That's scary when you see that thing go right into your heart... All but one doctor had scuffs tied around his shoes and this joker had on white shoes which had blood all over them. I was wondering why this one doctor was in a pair of patent-leather white shoes in the operating room when the nurses and everybody had green covers that they put their shoes into and it was tied... I thought it was unsanitary. I don't know where he had been walking in those things, but it upset me. I thought he ought to be covered like everybody else... And there was a doctor who had a bad little finger and it looked like he was going to lose his nail. There was a blood clot under his fingernail on his right hand. I could see it through his gloves, which were more or less transparent. It was real dark and I recognized it for what it was. He was the one who did the stitching and was on the opposite side of the table from Dr. C.
This experience, by the way, was not technically an NDE, but rather an OBE, as Sabom notes. The patient himself said, "I didn't feel like I was going to die," and, "But this is distinctly different from that time I had a cardiac arrest [and an NDE].... In the first experience I died -- I mean, what there was left of me, whether it was my brain, my soul, my spirit. That's a different feeling. This is more earthly, just like I had two feet planted on the ground. I could sense things like I was consciously aware of them... I don't think I died like I died before."
As I said, Sabom was able to verify the medical details, though not the non-medical details like the white patent-leather shoe and the bloody fingernail. The patient did make one mistake, but it was simply an error of interpretation -- he assumed that when the syringe entered his heart, he was receiving an injection, when in fact the surgeon was evacuating air from the left ventricle. His description of his own heart was accurate; the "general area to the right or left [that] was darker than the rest" was the ventricular aneurysm, described in the operative report as being "very large." The patient reported that the surgeon "cut pieces of my heart off. He raised it and twisted it this way and that way..." The operative report says, "An incision was made over the most prominent portion of the aneurysm after the heart had been turned upside down in the pericardial wall... The entire aneurysm was resected." Sabom adds that "the patient's description of the shape and consistency of his heart after his chest had been opened is a classic."
Now, this patient, a night watchman in rural Florida, was not an educated man. There is no reason to think that he had any prior knowledge of surgical procedures or anatomy. Indeed, his observations contradicted his own expectations, as he pointed out more than once. And many of his observations were visual. He accurately reported the size, color, and texture, of his heart. He accurately reported the way his body was draped. He was so certain he had seen the saw and the retractor that he felt he could draw a picture of them. He complained that sometimes he couldn't see certain details because hands or draping or instruments got in the way. He noted the degree of brightness in the room, the shiny quality of the retractor that held his rib cage open, the relative lack of blood, even a doctor's uncovered, blood-spattered, white patent-leather shoes and another doctor's blood-clotted fingernail under his semitransparent glove.
I'm not suggesting that a determined skeptic, like any self-respecting member of the dream team, could not attempt to shoot down this report. Maybe the accurate visual details were only lucky guesses. Maybe the patent-leather shoes and the fingernail were purely imaginary; those details were not confirmed. Maybe -- even though he was anesthetized -- the patient could feel the injections and incisions and even the pressure of the sheets laid over his body. Maybe he constructed the entire event in his mind out of the overheard conversation of the surgical team.
Maybe.
But I doubt it.
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