The Near Death Experience as a Product of Isolated Subcortical Brain Function

This paper attempts to show that the sequence of a typical near death experience (NDE) is predictable and reproducible, enough to suggest that the NDE is a symptom of a specific altered mental state seen in a large number of medical and surgical conditions. I attempt to explain on an anatomical, physiologic, and psychological basis how NDEs might be caused, and suggest that NDEs might even be the basis of religion. I also describe an NDE of a 38-year-old insulin-dependent diabetic who developed hypoglycemia secondary to a lack of caloric intake to support her daily insulin usage. She did not appear to be life-threatened from a cardiovascular standpoint. During the hypoglycemic spell, the patient appeared to be in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Following resuscitation with an intravenous injection of dextrose, the patient returned to a normal mental status, but recounted a typical NDE. Unusual psychic experiences associated with life-threatening medical and surgical conditions, involving reversible near-death situations, have become commonplace in a number of popular books written over the past two decades. The first such book, Raymond Moody’s bestseller, Life After Life (Moody, 1975), and At the Hour of Death (Osis and Haraldsson, 1977) by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, documented hundreds of medical cases involving patients who had been pronounced clinically dead following cardiac arrest or overwhelming trauma, but survived with the help of medical and surgical interventions. More recently, personal near-death experiences (NDEs) were chronicled in the bestsellers Embraced by the Light (Eadie and Taylor, George E. Wettach, M.D., is Clinical Instructor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Reprint requests should be addressed to Dr. Wettach at P.O. Box 395, Moffett Field, California 94035-0395; e-mail: [email protected]. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 19(2) Winter 2000 C © 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 71