Does the study of clinical death fulfill the scientific criteria? Is there such a phenomenon as near-death experiences at all, and how can it be scientifically proven? Such questions are faced by many scientists who devote their efforts to this phenomenon. Birk Engmann, a researcher at the Karl-Sudhoff-Institute of the History of Medicine at the University of Leipzig, is the latest to try and unravel these issues.
According to the researcher, one of the main problems in the assessment of near-death experiences is the absence of the confirmed fact of clinical death in the selected participants. Most of the stories presented in scientific papers are based on an experienced coma or short-term loss of consciousness in intensive care, as well as under the influence of anesthesia.
Some of these reports are made many years after the experience when the subject’s memories can no longer be called reliable. Moreover, they are selected according to how highly they score on the Grayson scale. That is, scientists deliberately look for descriptions of supernatural experiences of the afterlife in the participants’ questionnaires. However, if you look at this question more broadly, signs of near-death experience are much more varied than that, and the participants’ unique experiences may differ significantly from the picture of the “other world” drawn by scientists.
Finally, scientists tend to rely on EEG reports at the time of death. However, EEG registers only the surface activity of the brain and does not reflect its deeper processes. Therefore, we cannot say that the brain is not functioning, at some capacity, even when the EEG flatlines.
To sum up, Engmann notes that modern studies of near-death experience are far from reliable, in terms of the data provided, and therefore do not meet the criteria for scientific accuracy. According to the researcher, future studies need to have a stricter approach to selecting the sample by conducting a comprehensive analysis of whether the participants actually had a near-death experience.
If the conclusions of this work are correct, we should expect many new discoveries in the field of near-death experiences alongside debunking of what we currently consider as “facts.”
The article was published in January 2020 in the journal Advanced Studies in Medical Sciences.
