What would you think if somebody recovering from cardiac arrest described an object they apparently couldn’t have seen from their hospital bed…and somebody then went looking for it and found it?
Well, that is reportedly what happened to a cardiac arrest patient known only as “Maria” in 1977. She was a migrant worker treated at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. During her cardiac arrest and resuscitation, she claimed to have had an out-of-body experience that allowed her to spot a single tennis shoe sitting on a third-floor exterior ledge of the hospital.
She apparently described specific details about it to Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social worker at the hospital, including a worn area near the toe and a shoelace tucked beneath the heel. Clark Sharp went looking for it and said she found a shoe matching Maria’s description.
There is an important complication, however. Most of what we know about the incident comes from Clark Sharp’s account, and later investigators were unable to locate Maria or her medical records. That makes it impossible to independently reconstruct exactly what happened decades later.
Pam Reynolds had a strange NDE experience of her own.
In 1991, she underwent major surgery for a brain aneurysm. During the procedure, she said she floated out of her body and could see what the surgeons were doing to her. Reynolds described the unusual appearance of the surgical saw and recalled a conversation about the size of her blood vessels. Details of both matched events that occurred during the operation.
But it is important to allow for more ordinary possibilities. Anaesthesia awareness or some form of auditory perception has been proposed as an explanation for at least some of what Reynolds remembered. Crucially, the observations she described appear to have occurred before the later stage of the operation when her circulation was completely stopped. So the popular claim that she made these observations while experiencing total circulatory arrest is ambiguous.
Although this next section is not about one particular case, it is worth looking at NDEs that have not been peaceful at all. We tend to associate near-death experiences with bright lights, serenity and comforting encounters. But research has also documented experiences involving fear, a sense of entering an endless void and even explicitly hellish environments or beings.
A 2019 study examining 123 NDE narratives found that 14% were distressing. Researchers identified eight experiences they classified as “inverse,” eight as hellish and one involving a void. Earlier research had divided distressing NDEs into roughly three types: familiar NDE phenomena experienced as frightening rather than comforting, a sense of non-existence or an eternal void, and explicitly wretched experiences.
Finally, there is the 2014 AWARE study. Researchers examined 2,060 cardiac arrest events across 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. A small number of survivors reported explicit memories of seeing or hearing events connected to their resuscitation. In one case, researchers were able to verify details from the patient’s recollection against what had actually happened during the resuscitation.
But there is an asterisk!
Researchers had also placed hidden visual targets in some hospital areas specifically to test whether somebody reporting an out-of-body experience could perceive something that would only be visible from above. Nobody effectively identified one. More importantly, the patient whose resuscitation memories could be verified had suffered their cardiac arrest in an area where no visual target was present. So rather than disproving the claim, that particular part of the experiment is essentially uncertain.
Are near-death experiences simply unusual things the brain does under extreme stress, or are some people genuinely perceiving something they shouldn’t be able to? For now, the evidence seems to leave that question frustratingly open.
Leave a comment