We’re back in Greyson’s office, on the first floor of a creaky, converted Charlottesville house with a wide, inviting porch that no one has time to sit on. Greyson squeezes his near-death research in amid his teaching duties and his private psychiatric practice. I frequently get office e-mails back from him when it’s 9 p.m. in his time zone. I’m not sure whether he has a family. On a shelf at his other office, at the hospital, there is a framed photograph of a child and another of some goats. “Is this your little girl?” I had asked him. He said no. I didn’t know what to say next. “Are these your goats?” is what I came up with. He explained that he shared the office. Greyson is dressed today in a deep green button-down shirt and casual dress pants. He wears wire-frame glasses and an even brown mustache. His hair sits neatly on his head, and his hands rest mainly in his lap. There’s a single barbell in the corner under a cabinet. I try, and fail, to picture him using it. Not that he seems unathletic. I just don’t envision him in motion. I envision him sitting. Working. Working and working.
We’ve been talking about the stigma of parapsychology. The University of Virginia is one of only three American universities with a parapsychology research unit or lab. Do they ever regret it? Greyson says there was a fair amount of debate as to whether to accept the original gift with which the parapsychology unit was founded. In 1968, Xerox machine inventor Chester Carlson, upon his wife’s urgings, bequeathed a significant number of his millions to the University of Virginia for research on the question of survival of consciousness after death. The university seems to have made peace with their decision, and with the department. “Though if you talk to individuals,” Greyson says, “you get the whole spectrum. Some people think this research is a waste of time and resources, and others think it’s a valuable contribution to medical science.” Though Greyson probably gets more respect from his parapsychology colleagues than from his peers in psychiatry, he seems to be held in high regard as a researcher here. On his mantel is a bronze bust—the university’s William James Award for best research by a resident. I had never realized how much William James looks like Thomas Jefferson.
“That is Thomas Jefferson,” says Greyson. “That’s the only bust you can get in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
THE FIRST CARDIOLOGIST to get involved in NDE research was Michael Sabom, currently in private practice in Atlanta. Sabom had read the work of psychologist Raymond Moody, Jr., who coined the term “near-death experience” and presented a series of cases in a 1975 book entitled Life After Life. Sabom was intrigued but skeptical. He was dissatisfied with Moody’s anecdotal approach and the fact that no attempt had been made to independently verify the things that people had reported seeing while seeming to be outside their bodies.
Sabom, then a professor of medicine and cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta, decided to do a study of his own, a controlled study. Of 116 cardiac arrest survivors he interviewed, he found six who could recall specific medical details they’d seen during their near-death out-of-body experience. The six patients’ descriptions of what they’d observed during their resuscitation were then compared to the report of the incident in their medical file. In no instances did the medical report contradict statements in the patient’s description. Nor were there any medical errors.
This was not the case with Sabom’s control group. Curious to see whether any old heart patient could come up with a convincingly detailed description of a cardiac resuscitation, Sabom interviewed twenty-five people who had spent time in coronary care units under similar circumstances to those of his subject group. All of them were familiar with the visuals of cardiac emergency: EKG monitors, defibrillator paddles, IV poles, crash carts. The controls were asked to describe, in as much detail as possible, what they would expect to see if their heart stopped beating and hospital staff attempted to resuscitate them. Twenty-two of the twenty-five descriptions contained obvious medical gaffes. Defibrillator paddles were hooked up to air tanks or outfitted with suction cups. The imaginary doctors were punching patients in the solar plexus and pounding on their backs instead of their chests. Hypodermic needles were being used to deliver electric shocks. It was as though chimps had been let loose in the emergency room.
Below is a passage from Sabom’s interview with one of the six NDE patients who’d described the specifics of their resuscitations. It is fairly representative of the level of detail and seeming cohesiveness of these people’s memories:
Where about did they put those paddles on your chest?
Well, they weren’t paddles, Doctor. They were round disks with a handle on them…. They put one up here, I think it was larger than the other one, and they put one down here.
Did they do anything to your chest before they put those things on your chest?
They put a needle in me… They took it twohanded—I thought that was very unusual—and shoved it into my chest like that. He took the heel of his hand and his thumb and shot it home….
Did they do anything else to your chest before they shocked you?
Not them. But the other doctor, when they first threw me up on the table, struck me…. He came back with his fist from way behind his head and he hit me right in the center of my chest…. They shoved a plastic tube like you put in an oil can, they shoved that in my mouth.
Another patient describes a pair of needles on the defibrillator unit, “one fixed and one which moved,” which was typical of 1970s-era defibrillators. (The man’s heart attack happened in 1973.) Sabom asks him how it moved, to which he replies, “It seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter, or something registering…. The first time it went between one-third and one-half scale. And then they did it again, and this time it went up over one-half scale.” Though the man had been an air force pilot, he had never seen CPR instruments during his training.
Of course, it’s possible Sabom’s subjects were extrapolating from things they’d felt and heard, either just before their heart stopped or some time afterward. (The interviews were done years after the incidents had taken place, so doctors couldn’t be relied upon to verify the timing of specifics.) It’s possible the patients could have heard what the doctors and nurses were saying and subconsciously fabricated visual details to match. Hearing is the last sense to disappear when people lose consciousness. Dozens of articles have run in medical journals over the years addressing concerns about anesthetized patients hearing the things said about them during surgery.[44] Not just things like, “Nurse, more suction.” Things like, “This woman is lost” and “How can a man be so fat?”—both actual examples reported by patients in a 1998 British Journal of Anaesthesia article.
If it’s possible the patients heard things, it’s also possible they might have partway opened their eyes and seen things. And the things they saw could then have been incorporated into the viewpoint of being up above the scene. A couple of years back, epilepsy researchers at the Program of Functional Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne stumbled onto a site within the brain that, when stimulated, reliably caused the perception of looking down on one’s body from above. So convincing were the images that the patient in question pulled back when asked to raise her knees, because it appeared to her that her knees were about to hit her in the face. The visuals were limited to the person’s own body, however, and not the furniture or equipment or researchers around it. Still, one can imagine a blending of this viewpoint with information gleaned from things heard or seen.
44
My favorite being “The Anesthetized Patient