Scientists validate near-death experiences
Compiled from articles by ABC News; Daniel DeNoon, WebMd; Jonathan Petre, Electronic Telegraph
 
When a car plowed into the vehicle in which she was riding, Leslie's chest was crushed, eight bones were broken, and her heart stopped beating for three minutes. Before she was revived, she says she glimpsed the afterlife.

"My next experience was really lying on the ground outside of the car, and it was actually an out-of-body experience that I had," says Leslie. "I was actually floating above my body, and I looked down, and I saw all these men working on this poor girl who was down below, about eight feet below me, and she was struggling."
 

An estimated 7 million people have reported hauntingly similar "near-death" experiences. And a new study in the British medical journal Lancet gives credence to such accounts, concluding they are valid.
 

The study looked at 344 patients in the Netherlands who were successfully resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest in 10 Dutch hospitals. Rather than using data from people reporting past near-death experiences, researchers talked to patients within a week after they had suffered clinical deaths and been resuscitated.
 

About 18 percent of the patients in the study reported being able to recall some portion of what happened when they were clinically dead. Most had excellent recall of the events, which undermines the theory that the memories are false, the study said.
 

What was it like?

• Half of the patients said they were aware of being dead.
• About one in four had an out-of-body experience.
• Nearly one in three said they met with deceased persons. More than one in five said they communicated with light.
• Nearly a third reported moving through a tunnel.
• More than one in 10 said they reviewed their lives.
• More than one in four said they saw a celestial landscape.
 

"I was looking down, and I saw my body, and I saw the doctors," said Jessie Lott, one woman who was resuscitated.
 

"I had come into this place of brilliant, beautiful life," said another, Dannion Brinkley.
 

"The feeling of peacefulness, the feeling of utter acceptance, utter … I mean, love … there aren't really good words to describe it," Leslie said.

Diane Morrissey described how she felt she was being pulled toward a giant tunnel. "I couldn't stop it. I was just pulled right through this enormous, infinite tunnel," she said.
 

Joyce Hawkes, a cell biologist with a PhD, had an accident that forever changed her life—and her view of science. She suffered a concussion from a falling window.
 

"I think that part of me—that my spirit, my soul—left my body and went to another reality," she said. She was surprised at the experience.
 

"It just was not part of the paradigm in which I lived as a scientist," Hawkes recalled. "It was a big surprise to me to have this sense of something different than the body—a consciousness different than the body—and to be in this wonderfully healing, peaceful, nurturing place." Hawkes now works as a spiritual healer.
 

The Dutch researchers found that people who had such experiences reported marked changes in their personalities compared with those who had come near death, but had not had those experiences. They seemed to have lost their fear of death, and they became more compassionate, loving people.
 

"I can hardly wait to die, and yet I don't have a death wish. I live my life a hundred percent more now because I have such a fine appreciation about what might happen to us and where we might go," said Morrissey.
 

The research is the most extensive scientific study of the phenomenon. It used the latest medical equipment to confirm no signs of pulse or brain activity in the patients who reported near-death experiences. Researchers say these patients should not have been able to perceive anything, and that their recollections are too structured to be hallucinations. The phenomenon defies normal medical explanation.
 

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related article: ◊ Life After Death - From the writings of DBB