Bright light, a feeling of calmness and tranquility, observing your body from the outside - most often these phrases are present in the stories of people who have had to experience the terminal state. Researchers were divided into two camps: some take the side of the storytellers, agreeing that such phenomena exist and they are poorly studied by science, others explain what they see with hallucinations.
Paranormal experience
Terminal state - a state in which the human body is on the verge between life and biological death. It lasts from several seconds to several minutes, although more prolonged cases are known. The world literature describes a lot of examples when people who returned to life after clinical death talked about an extraordinary adventure - a flight to infinity in a bright primordial light, a meeting with long-dead loved ones and a voice that comes not from a specific point, but from all sides.
Many saw their earthly shell from the outside, resuscitation measures carried out by medical personnel and much more. Sometimes the "resurrected" could exactly repeat all the actions and words of the doctors in those minutes when they were seemingly unconscious. Many consider these stories to confirm that there is a different energetic life beyond the threshold of biological existence.
People who have experienced clinical death often exhibit paranormal abilities. They claim that they can hear the voices of the dead, see ghosts, the future, i.e. communicate with the spirit world.
A scientific look at the problem of near-death experience
Researchers are trying to figure out what people actually see at the time of clinical death. First of all, it is worth noting that clinical death is officially considered a reversible stage, and not something out of the ordinary. At these moments, there is a lack of breathing, cardiac arrest, and lack of pupil response to stimuli. Cases of restoration of all vital functions after a short-term death are not uncommon in world practice, but only a small percentage of patients claim that they saw something “on the other side”.
Several factors play an important role here: tissue acidosis and cerebral hypoxia, religious beliefs, and self-belief. In the first two cases, at the time of clinical death, a powerful release of endorphin is observed in a person, which plays the role of opiates in the body. Under certain conditions, there is an increase in its concentration in the neurons of the brain: it eliminates pain, allows you to stay in euphoria and gives a feeling of happiness. Hence the "state of rest", "pacification", "love" and "flight". Cerebral hypoxia, in turn, creates noise effects in the auditory receptors, which intensify at the time of clinical death.
Auditory hallucinations play the most important role in building the whole picture. In fact, a person does not see anything and cannot see, but conditions are created in his auditory receptors for the occurrence of sound effects, which the brain can interpret at its own discretion. Those. “Visual experience” is not even a hallucination, but a fantasy of an inflamed imagination in response to an auditory hallucination. Some have compared the near-death experience to the so-called lucid dreaming, a condition that occurs during REM sleep. Almost the same phenomena are observed here as at the time of clinical death.
It is not possible to convince these people of lying. What happened to them on a biological and chemical level is certainly true, their hallucinations are undeniable, but is it worth taking this experience as proof of life outside the body?
On the other hand, after experiencing hallucinations, a person is confident in the existence of life after death, his religious beliefs in this matter are unshakable. Having experienced a terminal state, he unconsciously convinces himself that he saw “with his own eyes” the afterlife. Further, his brain completes the scattered puzzle into a whole picture largely thanks to the media and the stories of "eyewitnesses" in the pseudo-scientific literature. In this case, the words of the survivor of clinical death copy another story heard earlier.
