What happens when we die? Eleanor Peake reflects on her near death experience and speaks to the neuroscientists looking for answers
‘As a small child, I had a strange thought: I am happy here. This is death, and it’s beautiful’ beach resort, took off my armbands and jumped into the deep end of the hotel’s swimming pool. I thrashed around. I gasped for air, and I watched as confused adults looked down at me, wondering whose responsibility I was. And then I gave up.
Given my age, I have often wondered whether these memories have been borrowed; perhaps taken from fragments of my dad’s retelling, and yet only I remember the woman who looked down at me in the pool and only I remember the sheer terror which turned to intense peace the moment I realised I was about to drown.“Yes, yes,” Gigi Strehler nods, as I explain. “That feeling is common.” This is something Strehler has heard many times before.
When David Ditchfield was dragged under a moving train for 13-and-a-half seconds in 2006, it wasn’t the injuries that changed his life, but his death. He was conscious when he lay under the train. Moments earlier, his heavy coat had become stuck in between the vehicle’s doors as he got off the train. The engine started and he realised what was coming. He lost his footing and was instantly dragged under the train’s wheels.
He searched for a scientific answer. “I asked for my incident report and doctor’s notes while I was unconscious. They’d actually written down at what point I was given certain medications, and they hadn’t given me any strong drugs at that point,” he says. “So it wasn’t just a hallucination.” For Ditchfield, now 63, it was a wholly spiritual experience. He believes it is something that science need not understand.at the University of Michigan, believes we are about to.
Other parts of the NDE experience can also be seen playing out in the brain. “Empathy, which is on the right, gives you the ability to think in somebody else’s shoes, to guess somebody else’s action. Or guess what they’re thinking. In patient one, that area in control of empathy in the brain was at a level of activation that was so high that I believe it would leave a memory in the brain. If they had survived, it would have changed their behaviour and mental state permanently.
She has heard from many people who have felt completely severed from their religious faith as a result. “ don’t follow man-made religion in the way we understand it,” she says. “They realise Hitler isn’t burning in hell. That realisation can be really difficult for people.”
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