UVa hopes to participate in near-death experience

By Scott Shenk

Published: November 30, 2008

File cabinets in Dr. Bruce Greyson’s Charlottesville office contain 30 years of interviews with people who say they’ve undergone near-death experiences.

He has studied and written extensively on the subject. Much of his professional and scholarly life has been dedicated to near-death studies.

Yet Greyson, psychiatry professor and director of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, is still perplexed by the phenomenon.

“I can’t say I understand it,” he said recently in his office downtown. But so many have experienced near death and described it consistently, and “it has a profound effect on them.”

Being AWARE

Greyson is not alone.

The enigmatic phenomenon has prompted a group of international scientists and physicians known as The Human Consciousness Project to launch AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), which it bills as “the world’s first large-scale scientific study of what happens when we die and the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death.”

The UVa Medical Center is one of numerous U.S. and European hospitals that will participate in the study. Greyson and UVa’s Dr. Robert O’Connor are running the research locally.

The study will involve patients who go into cardiac-arrest and whose hearts stop and are artificially restarted. Researchers will monitor the extent of “brain death” in the patients. They will also place items in locations visible only from high above the patients — aimed at determining if they undergo out-of-body experiences during resuscitation.

The patients who later agree to take part in the study will be interviewed. Dr. Sam Parnia, honorary research fellow at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, where the study is based, could not be reached for comment on this story. He has said the project could challenge social and scientific beliefs about death, according to news reports.

The study will push the boundaries of science and test the common perceptions of death, he said in a Time magazine Q&A. For instance, the socially accepted belief is that death is a moment, Parnia said. The clinical definition of death “is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working,” he said in the article.

A “new science is needed” regarding what happens when we die, Parnia said in the Q&A.

“With our study,” he said, “for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us. Does something continue?”

Study yet to begin

The study has not yet begun at UVa. Greyson is working on a proposal to present to the hospital’s Institutional Review Board, which has to sign off on the study. He hopes to submit the proposal by year’s end.

The study could lead to better care for critically ill patients, and perhaps help those who undergo near-death experiences more easily face the aftereffects.

The study might even help untangle the conundrum of the mind-brain relationship.

It has long been assumed that mind and brain are one and the same, Greyson said.

“We’ve always assumed that … thinking, wishing, desiring … take place in the brain,” he explained.

Near-death experiences often involve patients whose brains are not functioning, yet they later report being conscious. So this suggests that some mental processes and emotions arise elsewhere, he said.

Though the phrase “near-death experience” was coined in the 1970s by Raymond Moody, a UVa graduate who has written extensively on the topic, the phenomenon has been reported for centuries, according to Greyson.

No longer taboo

The subject was still taboo when he began studying near-death experiences.

In 1980, when UVa’s perceptual studies department began talking of near-death experiences at American Med-ical Association conferences, no one spoke about their own experiences with such patients, Greyson said.

“And now it happens all the time,” he said, noting that doctors and nurses openly talk of their experiences.

The subject has even crept into the social consciousness, Greyson suggests with a smile. “Even Homer Simpson has had a near-death experience.”

Scientific studies on near death also have improved, he said.

Numerous studies on near-death experiences have been conducted in recent years, including one done at UVa Hospital by Greyson in 2001.

During the 30-month study involving 1,595 people, researchers found that 10 percent of cardiac-arrest patients reported near-death experiences.

Greyson hopes the new study will reveal more information, but he understands the complexity of the subject.

“There are a lot of things you can’t study directly,” he said. “You can’t study love directly, you can’t study anger directly. But you can study their effects and make inferences about them.”