The operation is a defibrillator insertion. Defibrillators are most recognizable as those electrified paddles you see being slapped on patients’ chests during cardiac arrest scenes on ER. Nowadays they make defibrillators the size of cell phones and—if you’re prone to dangerous heart arrhythmias—sew them right inside the chest.
The almost-killing is being done to test Wes’s newly implanted defibrillator. An electrical charge will hit his heart at the crest of a specific EKG peak, derailing the beat and rendering the organ a quivering (fibrillating) lump of tissue incapable of pumping blood. With no oxygen being delivered to his brain, Wes will be clinically dead within seconds. (As long as a heart begins beating again within about four minutes, no permanent brain damage occurs.) It’s then up to Wes’s new defibrillator to jump-start the beat. Patients like Wes are ideal subjects for a study of near-death experiences.
Outside of the alpine panorama, Room 1 is a fairly standard operating room. There is the operating table, bulky and complicated. There is the towering bank of cardiac monitors, the anesthesiologist’s station, the whiteboard on the wall (“21 Days to National Nurses Week!”). You would have to be looking carefully to notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s up near the ceiling. Taped to the top of the highest monitor is an open laptop computer, as if perhaps they’d run out of study carrels over at the science library and were packing the students in wherever they could fit them. The computer belongs to Professor Bruce Greyson, who works a few blocks away, in the university’s Department of Psychiatric Medicine.
Greyson has been studying near-death experiences (referred to by those who study them as NDEs) for twenty-nine years. It is difficult to sum up the NDE in a sentence. On a very nuts-and-bolts level, it’s an experience in which a person who came close to dying recalls having been someplace other than blacked out inside his or her body. Some recall traveling no farther than the ceiling, rising away from themselves like a pocket of hot air; others remember hurtling through a sort of tunnel, often toward an all-encompassing light and sometimes toward family or friends[43] who have died. Patients who recall hovering near the ceiling sometimes report having watched their operation or resuscitation from above. Though their descriptions can be remarkably detailed and accurate (more on this later), some people argue that the patients might have been extrapolating from things they heard or felt, or unconsciously incorporating memories of TV medical dramas or previous hospital visits.
Greyson is trying to find out: Were they up there or not? In a study begun in early 2004, he hopes to interview eighty defibrillator insertion patients just after they come out of anesthesia. If they mention a near-death experience that included an out-of-body experience, he will ask them to describe everything they saw from up above. Appearing on Greyson’s flat-open laptop during the operations is one of twelve images, in one of five colors, randomly selected by a computer program. The objects depicted are simple and familiar—a frog, a plane, a leaf, a doll. They are brightly colored and animated to help attract the patient’s eye (or whatever it is you use to see when you’ve left your visual cortex behind). It’s an ingenious setup: Since the laptop’s screen faces the ceiling, the images can’t be seen from below.
I rarely get excited about parapsychology experiments, but if this one produces even a single person who accurately describes the image, I’ll be up there on the ceiling, too. So far, none of the subjects interviewed has reported any type of near-death experience. Working against Greyson is the cocktail of anesthesia used on the patients; it includes a drug that interferes with their memory of anything they might experience (pain, fear, a field trip to heaven) while they’re under. “Though if the consciousness is leaving the brain, then would memory matter?” mused Greyson as we walked here today. He shrugged. “I don’t know.” In a similar study four years back—done at Southampton General Hospital in England by cardiologist Sam Parnia and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick—only four of sixty-three cardiac arrest survivors interviewed recalled a near-death experience and none reported seeing things from an out-of-body perspective.
Greyson is working in tandem with a team of UVA cardiologists led by Paul Mounsey. (Mounsey declined to speak with me.) Interestingly, cardiologists—not parapsychologists—have published some of the most widely read studies on near-death experiences. A notable example was the study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, published in the Lancet in 2001. His primary aim was simple, if ambitious: to find out what causes the near-death experience.
Theories abound. Oxygen deprivation and the drugs used in anesthesia are commonly suggested, and indeed, both drugs and lack of oxygen can trigger elements of the near-death experience—including the tunnel and the light and the out-of -body experience—when death is not near. (Pot, hash, LSD, ketamine, mescaline, and fighter pilot training blackouts have all been known to induce NDE-like experiences.) Intense stress or emotional states have been cited, as have endorphins and seizures. And then there’s the theory Greyson is testing for: the preposterous, marvelous, mind-whirling possibility that the patient’s consciousness somehow exits, and operates independently of, his body.
Van Lommel and his team interviewed 344 cardiac arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. All the patients had been clinically dead (defined by fibrillation on their EKG), and all interviews were done within a few days of the resuscitation. Eighteen percent reported at least one aspect of the typical near-death experience. Van Lommel marvels at the medical paradox of the cardiac arrest NDE: Consciousness, perception, and memory appear to be functioning during a period when the patient has lost, to quote van Lommel, “all functions of the cortex and the brainstem…. Such a brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn’t hallucinate; it couldn’t do anything at all.”
The fact that only eighteen percent of resuscitated patients have any type of near-death experience led van Lommel to rule out medical explanations such as lack of oxygen to the brain. “With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia…” he wrote, “most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.”
Van Lommel found that his subjects’ medication was statistically unrelated to their likelihood of having a near-death experience. (On the topic of anesthesia as an NDE inducer, Bruce Greyson makes the point that people under anesthesia but not close to death have far fewer NDEs than people who come close to death without being under anesthesia; so, as he puts it, “it’s hard to see how the drugs can be causing the NDE.”)
Fear was also unrelated to frequency of NDE (as was religious belief, gender, and education level). One of the explanations left standing was the last explanation you’d expect to read about in a copy of the Lancet: that perhaps the near-death experience was, to quote van Lommel’s paper, a “state of consciousness… in which identity, cognition and emotion function independently from the body, but retain the possibility of nonsensory perception.” Van Lommel ended his paper by encouraging researchers to explore, or at least be open to, the possibility that the explanation for NDEs is that the people having them are undergoing a transcendent experience. That is to say, their consciousness exists in, as van Lommel described it in a more recent paper, some “invisible and immaterial world.”
Greyson and Mounsey are exploring it. It took some doing. The hospital’s human subjects committee was uncomfortable with the study. To avoid upsetting his subjects, Greyson was asked to remove the word “death” from the consent forms and study title, a tricky undertaking when your study is on near-death experiences. Bear in mind, these are people with life-threatening heart conditions, people who are entering the hospital to have their hearts stopped. Greyson smiles. “And now for the dangerous part: I’m going to ask you if you remember anything.”
43
Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear.