Science or Supernatural? Near Death Experiences Explained

April 12, 2010— -- Barbara Harris Whitfield has heard 22 scientific explanations for near-death experiences like the one she had in 1975. So far, she isn't satisfied by any of them.

"Yes it was brain chemistry that might have fine tuned my ability to pick up this," said Whitfield, 67, an author and therapist in private practice in Atlanta, Ga. "I think the brain is like the radio, and what [science is] explaining is the hardware of the radio, but what we can't explain is the broadcast."

Whitfield doubts science can ever completely explain her experiences when a ventilator malfunctioned as she recovered from spine surgery.

Yet scientists continue to search, and some are intrigued by a small study of cardiac arrest survivors that shows there may be a physical link between carbon dioxide in the blood and the likelihood that someone will wake up remembering floating above their body and moving towards a peaceful light.

The study, published in the journal Critical Care, surveyed 52 people in local hospitals who were revived from clinical death. Eleven people or 21 percent of the group, remembered experiences commonly reported in nearly all near-death experience descriptions. The survivor's religious beliefs, age or sex weren't statistically significant influences on whether they had a near-death experience or not.

But the higher the carbon dioxide level, the more likely the person was to report a near-death experience.

"I think that science can find physical explanations to a lot of questions, but, at the moment, I don't think that near-death experiences are one of them," said Dr. Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, lead author of the study and member of the department of family medicine at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. "They are connected to consciousness -- and the relationship between body and mind is not clear."

Klemenc-Ketis said it is not clear from her research whether the high carbon dioxide levels caused a near-death experience.

"It may simply reflect the fact that higher carbon dioxide levels during resuscitation reflect better blood flow through the brain -- and these people might simply have a better memory of the near-death experience," said Klemenc-Ketis.