Today we're going to float around the operating room, look down at our own body lying there on the table, hear the heart monitor switch to a solid tone, and learn first-hand what some believe goes on during a near death experience. When a small percentage of people are near death or are temporarily dead, either from an accident or during emergency lifesaving treatment, they report eerie experiences that they interpret as having crossed the threshold into an afterlife. Some authors and researchers have catalogued these reports and concluded that the experiences must have been real, while some skeptical researchers have found that the experiences are the natural and expected result of low oxygen to the brain. It seems the perfect place to point our skeptical eye.
A favorite starting point when examining such tales is the application of Occam's Razor. This states that the explanation requiring the introduction of the fewest new assumptions about our world is probably the true one; in other words, the explanation that best fits our understanding of the way the world works. The supernatural explanation for near death experiences (NDEs) requires the existence of an afterlife, heaven or hell or whatever you prefer to call it. To science, which has never found any reason to suspect life might continue after the death of the body, such a place would be a major new assumption about our world. But to many people with certain religious beliefs, such a place is a given and the afterlife is real, and is thus not a new assumption. So to a lot of people, Occam's Razor does nothing to settle this particular question.
Probably everyone will agree to some extent that the brain is capable of generating surprising experiences, such as highly realistic dreams. We've all had faint or dizzy spells, and these can be pretty dramatic episodes even though, to an outsider, nothing notable happened physically. A bit later we'll talk about how all of the major events of an NDE are created in...