Soul Survival

Near-Death Experiences & the Evidence for Life After Death

Most near-death experiences (NDEs) occur in unplanned, chaotic circumstances as a medical team struggles to save a life. But one extraordinary case involved a brain death that was deliberately planned and carried out—almost like a scientific experiment— under meticulously documented circumstances. The patient had detailed and verified knowledge of events that occurred in the operating room during the time when she was documented to be brain-dead—when, in fact, all the blood had been drained from her brain.

The Pam Reynolds Case

In 1991, Pam Reynolds, a 35-year-old musician from Atlanta, developed speech and movement problems. Doctors found a dangerous aneurysm in her brain that could be fatal if it ruptured, but standard surgery was considered too risky. Reynolds was referred to Dr. Robert Spetzler, a leading aneurysm neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Spetzler determined her only option was hypothermic cardiac arrest, a procedure in which she would be anesthetized, her body cooled to 60°F (15.6°C), her heart stopped, and the blood drained from her brain while he fixed the aneurysm. This approach involved inducing temporary brain death through reduced body temperature and absence of blood circulation. It would provide Spetzler with a thirty-minute window to repair the aneurysm, minimizing the risk of damage to her brain when she was reanimated. Hypothermia and medication would shield her from lasting brain injury while she was brain dead. After her body was rewarmed and her heart restarted, the blood flow to her brain would be restored.

She agreed, and on the day of surgery she was taken to the operating room, where the medical team placed intravenous catheters and administered general anesthesia. The team then secured her to the table, closed and lubricated her eyes, and inserted a breathing tube. Over the next hour and twenty-five minutes, doctors and nurses connected monitors to track all her vital signs, including brain waves as well as significant physiological alterations necessitated by the procedure. Medical staff connected wires and catheters to track her heartbeat, blood pressure, blood oxygen, and body temperature; this allowed for controlled cooling of her body and minimized risks associated with temporarily stopping her heart during the operation. EEG electrodes were applied to her scalp to monitor brain activity and verify when it stopped.

To further confirm her clinical death during the surgery, doctors inserted earplugs into both of her ears. The earplugs emitted 100 dB clicks—the equivalent of a loud motorcycle engine—every second, and doctors recorded her brain waves to ensure that her brain was unresponsive. When her brain waves remained flat in response to these loud clicks, doctors would know that her brain was temporarily dead.

Her skull was fixed with a clamp to the operating table, and she was turned onto her left side to position her properly for the surgery. Except for the surgical site on the side of her skull and an opening at her groin, her entire body was covered with thick opaque surgical drapes. At this point, even if Pam Reynolds were conscious, she would not be able to hear anything in the room, nor could she see anything physically, because she was under heavy surgical drapes and her eyes were lubricated and taped shut.

More than twenty doctors, nurses, and technicians participated as the surgery started. Dr. Spetzler cut into her scalp and used a special drill—a Midas Rex surgical drill— to cut a window into her skull to expose the aneurysm in her brain. It was at this moment that her NDE, which she later described, began:

The next thing I recall was the sound: it was a natural D. As I listened to the sound, I felt it was pulling me out of the top of my head. The further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became. I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on.… I remember seeing several things in the operating room when I was looking down. It was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life.… I was metaphorically sitting on Dr. Spetzler’s shoulder. It was not like normal vision. It was brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision.… There was so much in the operating room that I didn’t recognize, and so many people.

When she looked down and saw her body on the operating table, she noticed that her head had not been entirely shaved, as she had expected. Only a small area on the side of her skull was shaved, which surprised her.

The saw thing that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it, a groove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the handle, but it didn’t.… And the saw had interchangeable blades, too, but these blades were in what looked like a socket wrench case.... I heard the saw crank up, I didn’t see them use it on my head, but I think I heard it being used on something. It was humming at a relatively high pitch and then all of a sudden it went Brrnrrrrrrrr! like that.

Dr. Spetzler opened the covering over her brain and dissected down to the aneurysm, while a female cardiac surgeon exposed the artery and vein in Reynolds’s right groin. These blood vessels proved too small to accommodate the catheters that would be needed when they stopped her heart. She then exposed Reynolds’s left groin arteries, which turned out to be big enough. Reynolds recalled hearing the matter discussed:

Someone said something about my veins and arteries being very small. I believe it was a female voice and that it was Dr. Murray, but I’m not sure. She was the cardiologist. I remember thinking that I should have told her about that.

Note here that because of the loud clicks in her ears, Reynolds could not through natural means have heard anything.

Next, Dr. Spetzler ordered that her body be cooled to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, that she be hooked to the heart-lung machine, and that her heart and circulation be completely stopped. Once all of her blood flow stopped, he raised the head of the operating table and drained the blood out of her brain. Her brain waves ceased, and the loud clicks in her ears no longer caused any electrical response in her brain stem.

At this point, Pam Reynolds was brain dead by standard medical criteria. There is no natural way that she should have been aware of anything. Yet she subsequently recalled:

There was a sensation like being pulled, but not against your will. I was going on my own accord because I wanted to go. I have different metaphors to try to explain this. It was like the Wizard of Oz—being taken up into a tornado vortex, only you’re not spinning around like you got vertigo. You’re very focused and you have a place to go. The feeling was like going up in an elevator real fast. And there was a sensation, but it wasn’t a bodily, physical sensation. It was like a tunnel but it wasn’t a tunnel.

She became aware of her deceased grandmother calling for her, and her grandmother’s voice was clearer than was possible with normal hearing. She went down the tunnel toward a bright spot of expanding light:

I noticed that as I began to discern different figures in the light—and they were all covered with light—they were light, and had light permeating all around them—they began to form shapes I could recognize and understand. I could see that one of them was my grandmother. I don’t know if it was reality or projection, but I would know my grandmother, the sound of her, anytime, anywhere. Everyone I saw, looking back on it, fit perfectly into my understanding of what that person looked like at their best during their lives. They would not permit me to go further.… It was communicated to me—that’s the best way I know how to say it, because they didn’t speak like I’m speaking—that if I went all the way into the light something would happen to me physically. They would be unable to put this me back into the body me, like I had gone too far and they couldn’t reconnect. So they wouldn’t let me go anywhere or do anything.

Back in the operating room, the aneurysm at the top of Rey­nolds’s brain artery deflated when her brain was drained of blood. Dr. Spetzler placed an aneurysm clip along its base to occlude it and then gently removed the aneurysm sac from a critical part of her brain. The cardiologists restarted the heart-lung machine to circulate and warm her blood and bring her back to life. Slowly the electrical signals in her brain returned. She recalled:

I definitely recall the sensation of being nurtured and being fed and being made strong. I know it sounds funny, because obviously it wasn’t a physical thing, but inside the experience I felt physically strong, ready for whatever.

As her body warmed, her heart began to fibrillate, so the cardiac team placed electrical paddles on her chest and shocked her heart, and it began to beat. This restarting of her heart seemed to correlate with an event in her near-death experience:

But then I got to the end of it and saw the thing, my body. I didn’t want to get into it.… It looked terrible, like a train wreck. It looked like what it was: dead. I believe it was covered. It scared me and I didn’t want to look at it.… The body was pulling and the tunnel was pushing.… It was like diving into a pool of ice water … it hurt!

As Reynolds’s body rewarmed, the doctors turned off the heart-lung machine, removed the catheters, and closed her wounds. Reynolds recalls hearing rock music in the background, including “Hotel California,” which features the line, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” She was right; they were playing that. She said later that, from her perspective at the time, it seemed “incredibly insensitive.” Of course, the operating room team never imagined that she could hear it.

Reynolds made an excellent recovery, and she shocked her surgical team when she told them about her experience during the surgery.

The Pam Reynolds Challenge

Pam Reynolds’s experience during her “standstill” surgery was fairly typical of those who have reported NDEs. What made her NDE so remarkable is that her absence of vital signs and brain function were measured and documented by highly sensitive instruments; we can say with medical certainty that her body was clinically dead when she had the experience—in fact, brain death was essential to her treatment. And yet she had profound experiences and verifiable perceptions, even when her brain was drained of blood.

There have been thousands of NDEs reported in medical literature,¹ and there are medical journals devoted to the study of this remarkable but rather common phenomenon. It’s estimated that 20 million Americans now living have had or will have an NDE, and about 20 percent of them will see and have knowledge which can be verified of events occurring around them during the time they are dead. Yet many scientists and some doctors refuse to acknowledge the most parsimonious explanation for these NDEs—that they are real experiences of survival of the soul beyond death.

Scientists, doctors, and skeptics who deny that NDEs represent genuine survival of the soul after death generally attempt to explain isolated aspects of NDE phenomena naturalistically, i.e., as either seizures, hallucinations, the effect of drugs administered during resuscitation, or endogenous chemicals produced by the dying brain, etc. Yet naturalistic explanations fail to provide a comprehensive explanation, and they especially fail to account for the scientifically verifiable characteristics of many NDEs.

Pam Reynolds’s experience was extraordinary because her vital signs and brain function were carefully monitored and her functional brain death was confirmed, yet many thousands of people have had NDEs that can be investigated objectively and scientifically. There are at least four lines of evidence that substantiate not only the reality of near-death experiences but also the soul’s survival after death. These pose difficulties for skeptics who propose naturalistic explanations for NDEs. So following is what I call the “Pam Reynolds Challenge”—facts about NDEs that materialist skeptics have to explain:

1. The clarity of NDEs. Experiences during NDEs are very clear and often highly organized. NDEs often involve a life review, which is not the kind of mental process we commonly observe from a brain that is hallucinating, a brain that lacks oxygen, or a brain that is dying. Dying doesn’t make the brain better. Skeptics have to account for the remarkable clarity and organization—even wisdom—of NDEs that is so unlike the disintegrating sensorium characteristic of brain injury and death.

2. The verifiability of details reported during NDEs. About 20 percent of people who have NDEs report out-of-body experiences during which they leave their body and see things that are happening in the room, and/or in the more distant environment, during the time when they had no heartbeat or circulation to their brain. For example, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia reports that he first started thinking about NDEs many decades ago when a young woman, rescued from suicide, asserted that she had seen a spaghetti stain on his tie during an out-of-body experience. She could not have known that he had gone to considerable pains to conceal the embarrassing mark from colleagues. Hundreds of verified NDEs have been reported in medical journals. These are called veridical NDEs; that is, the experiencer reports information that can subsequently be verified. Veridical NDEs can’t readily be explained as hallucinations or seizures, etc.

3. The uniform experience of meeting only persons who have died. All reports in the medical literature in which the experiencer meets people on the other side of the tunnel involve meeting deceased relatives and friends. There are not, to my knowledge, any medical reports of a near-death experiencer meeting a living person on the other side of the tunnel. There are several reports of near-death experiencers who met people they didn’t know were dead—for example, someone who had died very recently before the news had reached the experiencer. If NDEs were merely hallucinations or wishful thinking, how likely is it that all of them would only involve encounters with dead people?

4. The frequent transformation of the experiencer’s life. NDEs are very often life-transforming in a way that a hallucination or a seizure or even an ordinary brush with death would not be. Many people who have an NDE lose their fear of death and have a new sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. For example, people who have an NDE during a suicide attempt rarely attempt suicide again, despite the well-known high risk of a subsequent completed suicide for people who have attempted suicide in the past. This implies a concrete and significant behavioral change in near-death experiencers that is difficult to account for unless the NDE is essentially real.

The Scientific Challenge to NDE Skeptics

The scientific case for the reality of NDEs—and by extension for the fact that the soul can survive death—is quite strong. Skeptics who deny survival of the soul invariably cherry-pick isolated aspects of NDEs without honestly coming to grips with the body of evidence as a whole.

Nonetheless, profound questions remain. What metaphysical understanding of the soul, mind, and body best accounts for NDEs? Do NDEs really point to immortality of the soul, or merely to temporary survival after bodily death? What are the theological implications of these experiences? It is noteworthy that NDEs often don’t conform to traditional religious beliefs—including, notably, certain Christian beliefs.² What about negative experiences? What relationship do NDEs have to out-of-body experiences not associated with dying, or with mystical experiences?

One thing is certain—the study of NDEs cannot be brushed off as pseudoscience. There are thousands of scientifically verifiable accounts of NDEs. It’s ironic that the lived and verified experiences of thousands of people are dismissed by many in the scientific community while a few boxes of fossils are widely accepted as part of a wholly Darwinian explanation for life itself without serious scientific challenge. The denial of the reality of NDEs is the consequence of ideological bias, not objective scientific analysis.

There is a huge body of scientific evidence that points to survival of the soul after death, and materialists and atheists who deny the reality of NDEs need to take the Pam Reynolds challenge. Important and difficult questions remain about the phenomenology and implications of NDEs, but if not for the pervasive and unwarranted materialist bias in modern science, NDEs would be widely accepted by the scientific community as scientifically verified evidence for the survival of the soul after bodily death.

Notes
1. Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (2010).
2. Michael Zigarelli. “Near-Death Experiences and the Emerging Implications for Christian Theology,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 53(2), (Mar. 3, 2024), 75–97. Zigarelli concludes that NDE accounts support much of Christian teachings, including “consciousness surviving physical death and the existence of a supernatural realm, a supreme being of unfathomable love, an intercessor named Jesus, and an afterlife with both glorious and ghastly destinations,” but that they also raise questions that challenge traditional beliefs about “who is invited into heaven and whether a postmortem ‘second chance’ may be available.”