IANDs

Declared dead, a man allegedly viewed the hospital in spirit, returning to tell what he saw. His surgeon was unable to provide a conventional explanation.

When people report having profound out-of-body experiences during close brushes with death, skeptics often attribute it to physiological and psychological factors.

“And suddenly I was ejected from my body and I wasn’t angry anymore,” she said. A blaze of light appeared and she felt an energy pervading everything, including herself.

Some elements of out-of-body experiences can be traced to the brain, but not all, say researchers.

Whether someone is crazy or not can be officially determined by a manual widely used to diagnose mental illness. If psychologists were to all take the extreme materialist perspective and label any belief in a spiritual side of existence as delusion, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists alike could all be considered mentally ill.

In some cases, what out-of-body experiencers have seen can be verified; researchers then try to determine whether the person could have seen these events or objects through normal means, without having left the body.

You can’t easily produce a near-death experience in a laboratory—or at least not without some serious ethical issues. There are, nonetheless, some methods for studying this phenomenon.

Dr. Jim Kwako is interested in dreams that are “not dreams in the usual sense,” he said. People commonly have dreams in which they talk to dead loved ones, or seem to presage some events in their lives, or have some other experience that has a profound effect on them mentally and emotionally.

Some people have described in detail what they saw after they seemed to leave the physical body. Details were later verified.

Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot has spent decades contemplating the conundrums of physics, along with the enigma of human consciousness.

Soldiers don’t want to seem crazy by talking about having visited the afterlife, but openly discussing their near-death experiences could help greatly, says Diane Corcoran, a retired U.S. Army colonel.

Leading near-death experience researchers discuss the next steps for investigating this phenomenon, including legitimizing the study in the scientific community.

Erica McKenzie is a registered nurse who has not only seen many patients come back from the brink of death with reports of experiencing the other side, but who has also had her own profound near-death experience.