A graveyard of a Kurdish family estimated to be 10,000 years old was found in Iraq with traces of pollen suggesting that even the Neanderthal man believed in life beyond physical death [1]. Life after death has been a contentious topic amongst the metaphysical and physiological community for a long time, owing to the religious taboo correlated with death and the intrinsic biases instilled in us by our grooming. A classic example of this is the unsettling feeling pre-graduate medical students experience upon first entering an anatomical lab, on being surrounded by cadaver[2]. This could be because death violates our perceptual expectation of mobility and response, and confronts the ultimate truth of our mortality.
Another rationale explaining the terror of death and what could be beyond is our morbid fascination with it which drives us to binge-watch clinical web series and wild animals brutally massacring their prey[3].
I firmly believe that the concept of afterlife is nothing but a pseudoscientific byproduct of our desire to continue living, elucidating human’s obsession over spiritual and biological immortality. Even after proper empirical research, no concrete results other than the underlying common characteristics of NDE experiences have been reported. NDE experiences, I believe, can be defined as hallucinatory experiences that occur during immense neurochemical stress. I do not believe in the article of faith that is Afterlife.
Plato, in his logic and reason, was a doctrinaire of the immortality of the soul as depicted in the ending of his greatest political treatise ‘Republic’ where he outlines the peculiarities of the world beyond, in the myth of Er, accounting a soldier’s journey to the afterlife. Plato also postulated the incorporeal part of our anatomy that was not bound by “restrictions” (like time) that our flesh is binded by. But he admits two drawbacks in his philosophy of dualism (Life after life pg.106):
Our physical perceptions like sight, sense and sound often disillusion us into seeing and comprehending matter in fictitious ways compared to what is actually true.
Isn’t the body an obstacle when one associates with it in the search for knowledge? I mean, for example, do men find any truth in sight or hearing, or are not even the poets forever telling us that we do not see or hear anything accurately, and surely if these two physical senses are not clear or precise, our other senses can hardly be accurate, as they are all inferior to these.
Phaedo 102, 65a-c
Plato feels that our language is not adequate to articulate complex ideas and models. Words are a stripped-down skeletal version of the true idea, he broaches in his dialogues of the Sophist.
“All that you and I possess in is the name. The thing to which each of us gives that name we may have perhaps privately before our minds”
Plato, Hamilton, Cairns 960
I will be using these 2 disadvantages to complement my current supposition and invalidate the paranormality of NDE experiences by citing neurochemical and psychological models and my theory in application.
Out of Body experiences-
Let us take the example of Andrew Clover and his OBE experience that he shared with the Guardian[4].
He had tripped in the muddy woods, hit his head on a stone and slowly he felt light as though out of his body. He recalled memories with his daughter, their trip to Disneyland, and his grievances. Undoubtedly he also sighted light, gliding in warm waters.
An OBE illusion is a sensory deception and arises in the brain’s temporoparietal region. The innate feeling of losing kinesthetic control could come due to a lack of oxygen-flow (hypoxia or anoxia) or blood (ischemia) to the brain. When our electroencephalogram (EEG) becomes flatlined, the brain slowly starts switching off, and the parts that remain electrically active create stories out of expectations and desires[5], which results in -vivid dreams, paralysis, seeing family members, euphoria and pleasurable sensations. That is perhaps why he remembered his daughter Iris and later felt a sense of calm and peace. Plato’s first defect which states the noticeable falsity of cognitively fiddled perception and its role in deluding our senses makes an appearance in the case of Clover.
Whinnery created a model, where pilots experienced the same characteristic as NDEs due to rapid acceleration hypoxia while flying. Tunnel visions, bright lights, beautiful places, vivid memories, incapacitation, pleasant experiences, memory alterations and light were some common characteristics in both[6].
Andrew Clover presumably experienced short-term anoxia, affecting his bilateral frontal and occipital (According to Pathoclisis theory, as the brain is heterogeneous in its composition, the vulnerability of each part varies. Thus during conditions of low oxygen, various hallucinatory phenomenons can be experienced usually in the Temporal and Occipital lobe[7]) predominantly the right temporal-parietal junction (causing deficiency of multisensory integration) which generally characterizes out of body experiences and sensation of flying.
Tunnel visions identically are experienced due to a decrease in blood flow to our retinas principally in the periphery of our retinas, thus compressing our vision and effectuating it to appear like a tunnel[8].
Another important theory to take note of is the use of Ketamine as an anesthetic drug, which is given to most resuscitated individuals. This drug is said to hamper our conscious senses and create illusions similar to the ones described by the resuscitated patients[9].
The Ineffability of Dying-
Expanding upon Plato’s second restriction, many infirms expressed ineffability in narrating their otherworldly anecdotes. Our linguistic boundaries only encompass experiences and emotions that the common man has undergone. But the common man has not encountered afterlife yet. Thus it is inevitable to feel the stifling of true idiosyncratic narration by the borders of our dictionary. Even with verbal dexterity, one might find it difficult to explain abstract memories that blend in together yet feel so clear. Though we use the same words, it could mean distinctly to all of us. One woman interestingly told Moody that she needed 3 dimensional words to tell her account. She says our world is three dimensional but the next one definitely isn't. She couldn’t tell the complete picture as she needed to use words similar to what we learn in geometry[10]. This is a good example of how our language feels truly not sufficient to articulate a nexus of ideas and visions, that is afterlife.
Psychological explanatory model:
Raymond Moody, in his empirical research, has segregated some common underlying themes that he noticed usually appeared chronologically in all the patients he had interviewed. Not one account has all the characteristics observed by him, but there are amalgamations of many depending on the person’s age and religious beliefs. I have discussed the most popular physiological theories explaining these paranormal activities, as they call it, of the brain but there is another branch of science (social science to be specific) that can potentially explain these baffling occurrences in our brain. That is psychology. Now there are theories hitherto listed out like Depersonalization by Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti. By interweaving these theories, and appending ideas that I developed on my own during research, I will be modeling a psychological theory of my own.
Near Death Experiences, psychodynamically, can be attributed as a reward from our belief system that after all the struggle and pain, there is peace to come. It is a way for our brain to fulfill our intrinsic psychological desires[11]. That could explain why in moments of great panic, panoramic views of our life and evocations with our loved ones crawl out. Memories that we associate with pleasure and excitement erode the possibility of our own death and serve as a self-satisfactory confabulation. The axiom that our perception can be altered to fit the needs of our faith and credence can be considered adequate to comprehend the afterlife. This is why humans, belonging to different regions see their respective gods and preachers upon dying, as it is what has been ingrained in their systems. Our fear of death is what embeds most of these cognitive manifestations of what the end might look like.
The tranquility associated with NDE experiences like tunnel visions, being of light, empyrean dreams, and meeting your loved ones amplifies that these experiences are a result of the brain's defense mechanism against the fear of the unknown.
Out of Body experiences, according to the depersonalization model, are a ramification of our detachment from consciousness[11]. Consider it to be a pacific feeling (as if floating) that helps to contravene the need to endure physical suffering and vexation.
Duncan Mc Dougall in 1907 conducted an experiment where he weighed six patients’ bodies at the time of death, contemplating if the soul could be a gravitative matter. From the experiment, he concluded that the soul weighs 21 grams but he contradicted his statement by saying that the experiment will have to be conducted multiple times for the observations to prove credible[12]. The scientific community as expected rejected the theory, rightly disapproving the idea of our psyche having mass and occupying space. This hypothesis only added to the ineffectuality of OBE experiences.
Most near death experiences repudiate the verity of irreversible death. Again a substantial illustration of Plato’s 1st disadvantage of how our perception is superintendent by our personal beliefs can be noted. Consequently, we can conclude that if perceived psychologically afterlife is a paradise, an escape from the bodily dysfunction and mental anguish of death.
Summarizing, I believe that After Life experience is nothing but a physiological and psychological phenomenon that depends on the individual conjectures that we have fostered throughout our lives. Afterlife does not exist and most of the common NDE accounts are derivations of chronological isoelectric flatlining of our brain that stimulates its parts to create images and episodes that satisfy our desire to live infinitely or die joyously.
Bibliography:
1. University Of Cambridge on Neanderthal man https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/shanidarz
2. Fear of Death and Examination Performance in a Medical Gross Anatomy Course with Cadaveric Dissection, Anatomical Sciences Education DOI:10.1002/ase.2092
3. A Reflection of Morbid Curiosity in Television Consumption-
4. Andrew’s OBE experience- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/02/my-out-of-body-experience
5. Scientific american- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-near-death-experiences-reveal-about-the-brain/
6. Aerospace Gravitational Effects -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430768/
7.Pathoclisis- Brain Edema XII: Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium : Hakone, Japan, November 10-13, 2002
9. Neuroscience and the near-death experience: roles for the NMSA-PCP receptor. DOI: 10.1016/0306-9877(90)90048-j
10. Raymond Moody’s Life after Life- pg.23
11. The Psychodynamics of NDEs, journal of nervous and mental disease, vol.171-https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE9.pdf
12. Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence Of Such Substance by Duncan MacDougall M.D. in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1907- https://diogenesii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/duncan_macdougall_1907_-_21pp.pdf
