ANALYSIS:
Near-death experiences reveal some recurring themes and are much more common than you might think. By Marc Wilson
For fun, every three years, I teach a fourth-year class called "The Psychology of Superstition". I became interested in "fringe" beliefs (which a startling number of people endorse) because they're a great vehicle for teaching the scientific method: how do you design a rigorous experiment to test for precognition (guessing things before they happen), for example?
Indeed, one of my students, Marco Zdrenka, has recently completed a thesis investigating not whether ESP exists but what predicts performance in precognition tasks (guessing what is on a card before the envelope is opened, for example). When he finished, I needed an examiner. It was not an easy task to find someone in Aotearoa who is broadly familiar with the research.
I was fortunate that Natasha Tassell-Matamua agreed to fill the role. This story had a happy ending, as Zdrenka passed his oral exam.
Tassell-Matamua doesn't research precognition but, among other things, she is our local expert on the phenomenology (the experience of thinking and being from the perspective of the individual) of near-death experiences, or NDEs as they're called by those in the know.
Many of us will know someone who has had an NDE. That's because improvements in medical care over the past 100 years mean that if you're going to keel over, now is the best time to do it, because we have the means of dragging you back from death's door. About a fifth of people who almost die have an NDE. As hundreds of millions of people have almost died, this is a surprisingly large number.
NDEs have been a subject of interest throughout history, but a particular topic of research for the past 50 years or so. A few weeks ago, a group of interdisciplinary researchers, led by Sam Parnia at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, published a consensus statement in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences outlining a set of guidelines and standards for NDEs.
Parnia is the director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU, and this is important because that's where an increasing number of accounts of NDEs come from – not NYU specifically, but from people who have been successfully resuscitated from near death.
Parnia and his colleagues note that we're in a great position to learn about NDEs because we now know that brain cells are rather more resilient than we had previously thought. It was once thought that, deprived of blood and oxygen, cellular death within the brain was swift and irreversible. Instead, researchers have found cellular viability within the brains of pigs up to four hours post-mortem.
Importantly, in their review of existing research on NDEs, Parnia and his fellow researchers concluded that the characteristics of NDEs don't share a lot in common with hallucinations or LSD-like psychedelic drug experiences. Instead, they tend to share a common structure of feeling separated from one's physical body, a sense of travelling to a "destination" and feeling like being "home".
NDEs also typically include some kind of life-flashes-before-the-eyes evaluation. It is extremely common that having an NDE is followed by a re-evaluation of one's priorities and approach to life.
The majority of the research on NDEs has been conducted with Western, often English-speaking, people. This is where Tassell-Matamua's work comes in. She has collected hundreds of accounts of NDEs from people in New Zealand – the most extensive account of its kind in our neck of the woods.
The characteristics of NDEs reported by Kiwis are generally similar to those reported in other "Western" samples, but one difference was that people who identified as Māori reported more intense NDEs. This variation may well reflect particular cultural differences. As in many things, we're largely similar, but also excitingly different.
• Marc Wilson is a professor and associate dean at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Psychology
