A recent article on the SciAm web site examines the similarities between NDE experience reports and experiences on psychotropic drugs, e.g. LSD, mescaline, and especially ketamine. Recall that those drugs cause their vivid psychtropic experiences by attenuating or mostly shutting down the mind’s default mode network. I.e., normal self-identity is temporarily shut off; but somehow, vivid consciousness continues. Something like that may happen for some people in the dying process. Thus, NDEs are reported to be very profound and spiritual, as LSD trips often are.
According to SciAm, “NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death”. (Well yea – when the body is shutting down, the brain is going to be affected !!) “Many cultures employ drugs as part of religious practice to induce feelings of transcendence that have similarities to near-death experiences. If NDEs are based in brain biology, perhaps the action of those drugs that causes NDE-like experiences can teach us something about the NDE state . . . In a fascinating new study, NDE stories were compared linguistically with anecdotes of drug experience in order to identify a drug that causes an experience most like a near-death experience. What is remarkable is how precise a tool this turned out to be.”
The new study that SciAm refers to compared the stories of 625 individuals who reported NDEs with the stories of more than 15,000 individuals who had taken one of 165 different psychoactive drugs. The drug ketamine had the strongest similarity to NDE experiences. This may mean that the near-death experience may reflect changes in the same chemical system in the brain that is targeted by drugs like ketamine. Within the recollections of NDE survivors and ketamine users, the word most strongly represented in both NDE and ketamine experiences was “reality,” highlighting » continue reading …