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Near-death experiences have been studied by scientists for decades. The new theory assumes that among the images that appear before the eyes of a dying person, there may also be visions of the future.
- NDE (near-death experiences) may occur e.g. during a heart attack, but also during clinical death
- The NDE survivor is, among others Tony Kofi, who gave an interview to the British BBC
- Kofi saw future events in his visions. Steve Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University, believes the man could actually see what was yet to come
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Near-death experiences and visions of the future. The psychologist explains
Tony Kofi is a British saxophonist and one of the most famous people in the UK who has described his near-death experiences to a wider audience. As a young boy, Kofi fell from the third floor. During a tragic event, the musician was to experience a vision of the future.
– I’ve seen a lot of things: children that I haven’t even had yet, friends that I have never seen, but are now friends of mine. The thing that really stuck in my memory was playing the saxophone, admitted Tony Kofi. It was the NDE that was supposed to push the musician to learn to play this instrument.
Upon arriving at the hospital, Tony felt like a different person and no longer wanted to go back to his former life. Over the next weeks the images returned to him, and Kofi felt that the visions were supposed to make him aware of something. After leaving the hospital, the man bought a saxophone with insurance money and became a successful jazz musician.
- See also: Clinical death – what it is, symptoms, chances of survival. Clinical death and biological death
And although the most obvious explanation seems to be that Kofi suggested his vision, and thus the mechanism of a self-fulfilling prophecy was at work, there was someone who believed that the musician could see future events. This is Steve Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University, UK, who wrote an article about his theories in The Conversation.
– Since the development of the theory of relativity, some physicists have adopted a spatial view of time. They claim that we live in a static “block universe” where time is spread out in a kind of panorama, where the past, present and future coexist simultaneously – explained Steve Taylor. In his opinion, time is a human construct that our brain sees in a specific way – from the past, through the present, to the future. Albert Einstein, Immanuel Kant and Carlo Rovelli had a similar view.
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According to Taylor, a different view of time may explain where experiences such as the “movie of life”, which are recorded in many cases of near-death, come from. The psychologist admits that in Tony’s case it is also possible, of course, to explain the vision in a prosaic way.
– There are some mundane interpretations of Tony’s experiences. Perhaps he only became a saxophonist because he saw himself playing the saxophone in his vision. But I don’t think it’s impossible for Tony to actually see things to come. If time does exist in a spatial sense – and if it is true that time is a construction of the human mind – then perhaps somehow future events may already be present, just as past events are still present.
What do scientists say about NDE?
For years, scientists have been trying to investigate the issue of near-death experiences in order to give unequivocal answers as to the nature of this phenomenon. A 2014 study showed that among people who almost died, NDE occurred in 17 percent. They were, as the author Dr. Jeffrey Long writes, children, but also adults. Including: “scientists, doctors, priests, ministers, religious and atheists from countries around the world”. Among the typical experiences, the common point was
- feeling that you can see and hear yourself outside your body
- entering or going through a tunnel
- mystical light
- intense and mostly positive emotions
- «Movie from life»
- meeting with deceased relatives
- decision to return
A 2008 study, in turn, was to determine whether patients are aware during CPR. The researchers analyzed 2060 people from 15 hospitals in the UK, USA and Austria.
“Death is not a specific moment, but a potentially reversible process that occurs when a serious illness or accident causes the heart, lungs or brain to stop working,” said one of the authors of the study, Dr. Sam Parnia of New York State University. – If action is taken to reverse this process, we are talking about “cardiac arrest”. At the same time, if these attempts fail, we speak of “death”. In the study, we wanted to move beyond the emotionally charged but insufficiently defined term NDE to investigate objectively what happens when we die.
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39 percent patients in cardiac arrest reported the sense of awareness but could not recall specific events.
‘This suggests that more people may experience mental activity, but lose those memories as they recover due to brain damage, drugs or memories,’ explained Dr Parnia.
The study also found that 46 percent. of respondents had memories related to one of the identified leitmotifs: fear, animals or plants, bright light, violence, deja vu or family. In 9 percent scientists confirmed NDEs, while 2 percent. in fact, he was aware of what was happening to them during the resuscitation. One person experienced a period of conscious awareness at a time when consciousness should not have occurred.
In 2017, researchers from the University of Virginia wanted to check whether the consciousness that arises when brain function is disturbed during an NDE could simply be a figment of the imagination. The researchers studied 122 people who reported near-death experiences. It turned out that memories of near-death experiences were described as more vivid than real or imagined situations. For these people, the borderline experiences seemed more real than reality.
Also read:
- What does death look like? «Your chin is sunken, you gasp for air»
- Change to soap, squeaks and excretions. This is how our body behaves after death
- The rattle of death. We make a disturbing noise just before we die