Earlier today, we looked at the recent Scientific American article on efforts to understand near-death experiences (NDEs) by comparing them to drug trips. That’s probably because many researchers are uncomfortable with the idea that such experiences might signal something beyond nature. For example, Grossman School of Medicine pulmonologist Sam Parnia, who researches NDEs, offered some thoughts as what is happening physically that enables a near-death experience:

When someone starts dying, Parnia says, the brain becomes dysfunctional. Some actions are immediately lost, such as brain stem reflexes, but others that are normally suppressed to optimize performance for ordinary life suddenly become disinhibited because the brain’s natural braking systems are no longer working. As a result, “your entire consciousness comes to the fore,” Parnia says. The purpose of this change, he suggests, is to prepare the person “for a new reality”—the transition from life to death, a condition in which, Parnia believes, consciousness endures.

Rachel Nuwer, “Lifting the Veil on Near-Death Experiences,” Scientific American, May 14, 2024

As Nuwer reports, other scientists working in the area “flatly disagree” with him. They will have none of the “new reality” part and offer an unusual alternative hypothesis.

Playing dead?

Reaching into the Darwinian evolution grab bag,

Kondziella, Martial, and others instead theorize that NDEs might be part of a last-ditch survival tactic. Species across the animal kingdom “play dead”—a behavior technically called thanatosis—when they perceive a mortal threat, typically from an attacking predator. If fight-or-flight fails, the instinct to feign death kicks in as an attempt to forestall the danger. The animal becomes immobilized and unresponsive to external stimuli—but with continued awareness so that, given a chance, it can escape. “Personally, I believe the evolutionary aspect really is the key to understanding what NDEs are and how they came about,” Kondziella says. “There is a perfectly valid biological explanation.”

Nuwer, “Lifting the Veil”

The thanatosis hypothesis to account for NDEs seems an odd choice. In the entry in Current Biology on thanatosis, we learn that it is “of widespread occurrence in the arthropods and in all the classes of vertebrates, possibly including humans (hence ‘scared stiff’).”

But wait. “Scared stiff” is an image; it is not thanatosis, as in, say, the opossum’s reflex actions that mimic death:

The “playing possum” routine includes drooling and excreting foul odors.

Although the Current Biology entry says that thanatosis “possibly” occurs in humans, no specific evidence is offered. It’s also not clear what it has to do with NDEs among people who are actually dying, as opposed to feeling threatened by predators.

One explanation offered by Kondziella, Martial, and others is that “the acquisition of language enabled humans to transform these events from relatively stereotyped death-feigning under predatory attacks into the rich perceptions that form near-death experiences and extend to non-predatory situations.” (The paper is open access.)

In the paper, the authors provide a number of accounts from people who experienced altered consciousness when under attack by large animals. But it’s hard to see any clear link between that state of mind and whatever is going on in the mind of a foul-smelling, apparently dead opossum.

Hypotheses based on Darwinian evolution claims sometimes show a striking feature: They can proceed without the need to establish basic evidence — for example, whether “play dead” thanatosis is a common feature of humans (it isn’t) or whether near-death experiences generally focus on getting away from danger (they don’t). This feature, while handy for some purposes, does not add to the credibility of evolution theory in general.

Seeing random objects while clinically dead

That said, Charlotte Martial and her colleagues are also currently testing the ability of some NDE experiencers to see things while they were unconscious that are later verified. They hide unusual objects and images in the resuscitation room and play audio clips every minute, to test whether any NDE experiencers will recall them.

That’s an interesting research-based approach. Of course, in veridical near-death experiences (where the experiencer’s account of an object or event is later confirmed), such recollections are usually of minor interest to the experiencer. The intense focus is typically on a brief reunion with deceased loved ones or an overwhelming sense of the need to change one’s attitude to life. So if an experiencer does report a remembered detail, it might turn out to be corroborated later — but not part of the test evidence. But we shall see.

You may also wish to read: Scientific American: Near-death experiences compared to drug trips. Now that NDEs are accepted as a clinical fact, more effort is underway to account for them as part of physical nature, like hallucinogenic chemicals. There are significant differences between NDEs and drug trips, as psychologist Steve Taylor notes.