Irreducible Mind

Although the widespread impression is that NDEs occur among patients who have been clinically dead and then resuscitated, they in fact occur in a wide variety of medical circumstances. An examination of medical records in cases in our collection (all of them experiences reported to us retrospectively) showed that slightly more than half of the patients, although ill enough to have been hospitalized, were at no time in danger of dying (Owens, Cook [Kelly], & Stevenson, 1990; Stevenson, Cook [Kelly], & McClean-Rice, 1989–1990); NDEs may therefore occur when patients fear they are dying even if in fact they are not. Moreover, NDEs can also occur when patients are suddenly confronted with death but escape unharmed, as in falls or near-accidents (e.g., Heim, 1892/1972).3
Nonetheless, there remain a substantial number of cases in which patients were clinically near death, such as during cardiac arrest or some other, usually sudden, loss of vital functions (Finkelmeier, Kenwood, & Summers, 1984; Greyson, 2003; Owens et al., 1990; Parnia et al., 2001; Sabom, 1982; Schoenbeck & Hocutt, 1991; Schwaninger et al., 2002; van Lommel et al., 2001). These include some in children who suffered cardiac arrest (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984, pp. 154–156; M. Morse, 1983, 1994a, pp. 67–69, 1994b; Serdahely, 1990). In one recent prospective study of 344 cardiac arrest patients, 62 reported NDEs following resuscitation from cardiac arrest (van Lommel et al., 2001). In our own collection of retrospectively reported NDEs, out of 114 cases for which we have obtained and rated medical records, 35 were rated “4” on a 4-point scale of severity of condition, meaning that there was some documentation of loss of vital signs, often including cardiac arrest

Many experiences called “near-death” experiences have occurred when the person was not physiologically near death, and individual features associated with NDEs occur in a wide variety of conditions in which the person is also clearly not near death. We believe that the difficulties in explaining, and even in defining, the NDE stem at least in part from the failure to examine this phenomenon within the context of this larger family of related experiences

It was only the investigation of extraordinary circumstances, involving extremely small or large distances, speeds, or mass, that revealed the limits of the Newtonian model and the need for additional explanatory models. So too with the question of the mind-brain relationship: As Myers understood in urging his colleagues in psychology to study subliminal and other unusual psychological phenomena, exploration of extraordinary circumstances may reveal limitations of the current model of mind-brain identity and the need for a more comprehensive explanatory model.