Can near death experiences (NDEs) contribute to the debate on consciousness?

Abstract

The NDE is an altered state of consciousness which in the West has stereotyped content and emotional experience. Some features of the experience are trans-cultural and suggest either a similar brain mechanism or access to a transcendent reality. Individual features of the experience point more persuasively to transcendence than to simple limited brain mechanisms. Moreover there are, so far, no reductionist explanations which can account satisfactorily for some of its features; the meeting of dead relatives, the apparent "sightedness" in the blind during an NDE, the apparent acquisition after an NDE of psychic and spiritual gifts, accounts of healing occurring during an NDE, and of veridical experience during the resuscitation after a cardiac arrest. Although non-local mind would explain many of the NDE features, non locality is not yet accepted by mainstream neuroscience. Only those theories based on a wider understanding of mind could fully explain the subjective experience of the NDEr.