When Your World Goes Dark... Then What? Quiz

Answer: "The Republic" by Plato

The final section of book 10 of Plato's "The Republic" finishes with the tale of Er, son of Armenius. In the account, Er was described as slain in battle and decaying for 10 days when he came back to life to tell how his spirit left his body and traveled to a place of judgement. He observed some ascend to a paradise world while others descended to a world of misery. Unlike the Christian faith, the judgements were not final. After a time, the spirits would come back to decide on which life they wanted to experience next. Er's tale goes on to tell that many who had spent the time in the paradise world made poor choices on their next life which would increase their chances of a negative judgement the next time. However, the ones who had spent time in penance often made wiser choices and chose more humble lives the next time.

The Bible concludes with the Revelation of John which also tells of a mystical experience with a judgement seat. "The Iliad" concludes with Priam asking for Hektor's body so he can provide his son a proper burial. The "I Ching" is a book used for predicting the future, rather than telling stories about the afterlife.

Answer: 1970s

Dr Raymond Moody, MD, was the first person to use the term "near-death experience" in his book "Life After Life" in 1975.

In 1892, Professor Albert von St Gallen Heim collected several accounts outlining experiences of people who had near fatal falls which spoke of extraordinary experiences. His work was published as "Remarks on Fatal Falls" which was eventually translated into English in 1972. Up until the early seventies, talking about death was taboo in western cultures. "Remarks on Fatal Falls", along with a few other works, were on the forefront of patient accounts being taken seriously. Dr Moody's book was the first to catch the media's attention and made the field suddenly sensationally known to the public, though it still struggles to be taken seriously by many scientists.

Answer: International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)

IANDS was created in 1981 by a committee headed up by Kenneth Ring. It was decided early on that using an organized scientific approach would be critical if the field was to maintain any credibility. In 1982 a peer reviewed journal was established by Kenneth Ring titled "Anabiosis" and then later in 1987 the title was changed to "Journal of Near-Death Studies". Most of the leaders in the near-death field are either physicians or psychologists.

The IANDS website "iands.org" has extensive resources for questions about near-death experiences.

Answer: believable component

The Greyson scale has four component categories: cognitive, affective, paranormal and transcendental. The scale has a range of 0 to 32. For an event to be considered "near-death", the experience must score at least a 7 on the scale.

An example of a question on the form is: "Did time seem to speed up or slow down?" There are three possible choices to answer this question. So, If the answer is "no" 0 points are given for that question. If the answer is "time seemed to go faster or slower than usual" then 1 point is given. Lastly, if the answer for the event is "everything seemed to be happening at once, or time stopped or lost all meaning" then 2 points are given.

Another question on the survey is "Did you see, or feel surrounded by, a brilliant light?"

By using this scale each experience can be easily cataloged and studied in groups.

Greyson, B. (1983). The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, reliability, and validity. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 171, 269-375.

Answer: A near-death memory

Moore found that overwhelmingly the memories of the near-death events were much more vivid and more real than real life memories. The study also found that real life memories were more vivid than imagined memories. This is consistent with other research results. When questioned, near-death experiencers overwhelmingly believe their experience was real. Palmieri, et al. found in their research that when participants underwent EEG and recalled their near-death events and imagined events the near-death waves were more consistent with true memory while imagined events result in completely different wave patterns.

Moore, L.E., Greyson, B. (2017). Characteristics of memories for near-death experiences. Consciousness and Cognition 51, 116-124.

Answer: NDE happen at the same rate to every group

Amazingly, after collecting thousands of experiences, Dr. Greyson writes that all groups of people have an equal likelihood to have a near-death experience. Interestingly, the person who judges they were not doing as well as they should in life are usually the ones who completely change their life to focus on doing better. Almost all believe the experience was very real and take it as a sign of how they should live the rest of their lives.

Greyson, B (2014) "chapter 12: "Near-Death Experiences. Cardenza, E. et. Al. "Varieties of Anomalous Experience: examining the scientific evidence." Pp 333-367.

Answer: Lazarus syndrome

"Lazarus syndrome" is indeed rare with less than 100 verified cases in the first 30 years since it was coined in 1982. In all cases, the patient had been declared dead by both brain and heart activity and all life support had been removed. The possibility of autoresuscitation does add challenges to how long a medical team should wait before harvesting organs, or indeed sending a body to the morgue.

Answer: The act of the spirit separating from the dying body causes hyperawareness

In her book, Dr. Blackmore does not write about the spirit being a material part of the body and spirit is not a part of her description of what happens at death. There are several other factors that can trigger near-death like effects including hypercarbia (which can lead to feelings of cosmic importance) and temporal lobe seizures (which can give the feeling of an out of body experiences and the impression of hearing music). Hypercarbia is an abnormally high carbon dioxide level in the blood. Dr. Blackmore has devoted her career to studying consciousness.

Answer: Ketamine

Ketamine is most commonly used medically to anesthetize animals for operations. While ketamine does not have the respiratory complications of many other anesthetics, it does have a strong hallucinatory component which makes it unsuitable for human use. Unfortunately, this hallucinatory tendency results in abuse. Ketamine is a controlled substance in the United States.

As for reported human experiences, ketamine induces hallucinations with similar characteristics to near-death, leading some researchers to speculate that maybe during the stress of dying the brain releases its own ketamine-like chemicals. So far there is no proof for this as no ketamine-like substances have been found in the brain postmortem. As a big difference, Atwater points out only 30 percent of ketamine experiences feel real to the user as opposed to nearly 100 percent of near-death experiences feeling real.

Cocaine, diclofenac and amoxicillin use have not resulted in near-death like experiences.

Answer: It is proof heaven and hell must exist

Being able to have an out-of-body experience would not prove the existence of a heaven or a hell. One of the great mysteries in life is what happens to us after death: do we cease to exist as many in the scientific community believe or do we go on to an afterlife like many religious believe. If there is proof that an out-of-body experience really can happen, this calls into question the theory that the mind must be tied to the flesh and thus die with the flesh. If consciousness does not require the brain, or the body, then where does the conscious mind live? It may sound unbelievable to the empirical scientist, but more and more verifiable veridical cases are reported each year.

Dutch researchers Titas Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf Smit have gathered together over 100 cases of third party verified veridical perception cases in their book "The Self Does Not Die", published in 2019. Veridical means truthful. What the researchers mean by "third party" is a confirmation by an outside person that the subject's body is not able to physically hear or see the situation the experiencer relates upon reviving. They usually have zero brain activity, yet they can report about things that happened in another room out of sight or ear shot. In many of these cases, the experiencer tells about a full conversation that had taken place in another part of the building or tells about a physical object, in great detail, out of sight of the patient's room. For the experience to be verified by a third party, a person outside the family must confirm that they did indeed hear or see the event retold by the experiencer. This would strongly suggest that only an out of body conscious experience could give the patient this kind of knowledge, which would mean the conscious mind can exist outside the body and actively perceive the world even when a person is considered clinically dead.