Although no one knows what awaits us after life, numerous stories of near-death survivors create stable ideas about this. We are already mentally prepared for a long tunnel and an extraordinary glow at its end. The stories of those who have returned from the other world sound encouraging, although, of course, they describe only the first stage – the “reception room” and the general feeling of a pleasant bright place.
Polish artist Alicja Zentek, who experienced clinical death during pregnancy, describes in her memoirs: “I could see, hear and feel the world around me, but people from this world did not see, hear or feel me! Then a radiant white beam appeared. He descended to me, not blind and not burning. I realized that the ray was calling to itself, promising liberation from isolation. Without thinking, she walked towards him. I moved along the beam, as if to the top of an invisible mountain.
For believers, such stories serve as proof of the existence of God and the other world. For psychologists and culturologists, it is evidence of how strongly religious and mythological archetypes are rooted in our psyche. After all, if we consider that the narrator who came back to life describes an encounter with God, then we must admit that everyone describes God and his abode according to the ideas of his culture.
Muslims talk about luminous ornate doors, like in a mosque, Indians talk about a meeting with the god of death, Yama. Since all kinds of tattoos have long been common in India, those who have returned “from the other world” often claim that after a temporary death, new signs appeared on their bodies. Children, for whom ideas about the supreme being are still of a fairy-tale nature or mixed with the image of an authoritative, strict adult, talk about a meeting with a wizard, teacher, or doctor.
What actually happens after cardiac arrest?
It is important for neuropsychologists to understand what processes occur in the human brain after cardiac arrest. Approximately within ten minutes after the onset of clinical death, the brain is still alive, but is in a state of severe functional disorder caused by oxygen starvation due to cardiac arrest.
Oxygen starvation can lead to hallucinations and even cause feelings of euphoria. Hallucinations can also explain the feeling that a person leaves his body and soars above it. The same feeling occurs in women during childbirth: almost every tenth at some point feels out of the body and begins to see herself as if “from under the ceiling”. In this sense, there is nothing surprising in the flights that the human consciousness or its soul makes during clinical death – they have a completely scientific explanation.
The temporoparietal ganglion of the brain is responsible for the lighting effects during clinical death.
Recent experiments by the Belgian neurologist Stephen Laureis show that the temporoparietal ganglion of the brain is responsible for the lighting effects during near-death experiences. Usually it is busy processing visual and tactile signals and determines the location of the body in space. When in extreme situations this node does not have time to process the information received, it can send the wrong signals to the brain.
During the experiment, Laureis found that the temporoparietal node remains active even during coma and at the time of cardiac arrest. But why this happens, the scientist could not explain.
Numerous testimonies of the “omniscience” of the dying remain inexplicable – or rather, their awareness of some extraneous circumstances that could in no way be accessible to their vision.
Someone, lying on the operating table, “flies” home and sees how the daughter broke the cup, someone looks out of the window of the ward and notices the lost shoe, which then, thanks to the hint of the one who returned from the other world, manages to find.
Science cannot accompany the dying on a journey beyond life.
Of course, these stories cannot be subjected to experimental verification. Science cannot go with the dying on a journey beyond life. The maximum that she is capable of is to try to fix what happens to him in the first minutes of dying, when the brain is still able to give signals.
For example, Dr. Lakmir Chawla of George Washington University was able to use an electroencephalogram to detect high-frequency waves in dying people that come precisely at the moment when blood pressure can no longer be measured. Chakla suggested that these waves could be a neurological correlate of what a person saw during near-death experiences.
Science, studying the phenomena accompanying clinical death, does not try to argue with religion. She simply studies and fixes what she is able to study today. However, regardless of whether we believe in the other world or not, we can count on something interesting waiting for us after death. At least in the first minutes.