A study on near-death experiences was published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2001. The study interviewed 344 patients who had a close encounter with death, generally through cardiac arrest. 62 of those reported some kind of near-death experience. 15 reported an out-of-body experience, 19 reported moving through a tunnel, 18 reported observation of a celestial landscape, 20 reported meeting with deceased persons, and 35 reported positive emotions.
The AWARE study was published in 2014 in the journal Resuscitation. It was entitled, “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study.” The URL can be found here.
The AWARE study name is an acronym for awareness during resuscitation – the type of resuscitation that takes place when a person has a heart attack (cardiac arrest) and almost dies. The study collected data at 15 different hospitals, and was carried on over the course of four years. The study attempted to gather accounts of people's recollections in hospitals after they had very close encounters with death, typically during a heart attack or cardiac arrest. Over 2000 cardiac arrest cases were studied, and there were only 330 who survived to leave the hospital. Of those 330, only 101 met eligibility requirements, agreed to be interviewed, and also agreed to “stage 2” interviews.
So the study ended up with a group of only 101 persons who had experienced a close encounter with death, generally because of a cardiac arrest. Of this pool of 101 persons, 22% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness?” 13% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you feel separated from your body?” 13% answered “Yes” to the question, “Were your senses more vivid than usual?” 8% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice?” 7% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?” Only 3% answered “Yes” to the question, “Did you see deceased or religious spirits?”
These results are corroboration of published accounts of what typically happens in a near-death experience, although the numbers are smaller than those reported in the Lancet study. As discussed here, the AWARE study does quote one respondent who gives an account very much like what has been published in previous books on near-death experiences:
"I have comeback from the other side of life. ..God sent (me) back,it was not (my) time — (I) had many things to do. ..(I traveled) through a tunnel toward a very strong light, which didn’t dazzle or hurt (my) eyes. ..there were other people in the tunnel whom (I) did not recognize. When (I) emerged (I) described a very beautiful crystal city. .. there was a river that ran through the middle of the city (with) the most crystal clear waters. There were many people, without faces, who were washing in the waters. ..the people were very beautiful. .. there was the most beautiful singing. ..(and I was) moved to tears. (My) next recollection was looking up at a doctor doing chest compressions."
While the AWARE study did not find a very large number of cases of near-death experiences, the study did seem to “hit the jackpot” in regard to one case of a 57-year-old patient who said that he floated out of his body while being revived from his cardiac arrest. The man said that a woman appeared in a high corner of the room, beckoning him to come up to her. He said that despite thinking that was impossible, he found himself up in the high corner of the room, looking down on the medical team trying to revive him. The man described specific details of the revival efforts, including the presence of a bald fat man with a blue hat, a nurse saying, “Dial 444 cardiac arrest,” his blood pressure being taken, a nurse pumping on his chest, a doctor sticking something down his throat, and blood gases and blood sugar levels being taken.
Here is what the AWARE scientific paper said in regard to the accuracy of these recollections:
"He accurately described people, sounds, and activities from his resuscitation...His medical records corroborated his accounts and specifically supported his descriptions and the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Based on current AED algorithms, this likely corresponded with up to 3 minutes of conscious awareness during CA [cardiac arrest] and CPR."
So here is a man who had a heart attack, and should have been unconscious during the medical efforts to revive him. Instead he accurately describes the details of what happened. Moreover, he claims that he observed these details while in a position above his body, in the high corner of the medical room. What we have here is what seems like a good-as-gold vintage “out of the body experience,” one with details that have been verified. This is an example of what is called a veridical near-death experience – one with observations that were subsequently verified.
In terms of its credibility and evidence value, the case may rival the famous Pam Reynolds case. At the time of her brain operation, the late Pam Reynolds was a 35-year old who had a large brain aneurysm. She underwent a very complicated operation that involved pumping out her blood and chilling her body temperature to only 60 degrees. Some twenty medical personnel worked on the complex operation.
After the successful operation was over, Reynolds reported having a near-death experience during the operation. She reported floating out of her body, and witnessing her operation. She accurately reported details of some medical equipment that was used to cut her skull open, describing it as a “saw thing...like an electric toothbrush,” with “interchangeable blades” that were stored in “what looked like a socket wrench case.” She reported someone complaining that her veins and arteries were too small. These details were later verified. This was despite the fact that during the operation Reynolds eyes were covered throughout the operation, and her ears were plugged with earplugs delivering noise of 40 decibels and 90 decibels (not to mention that her body was chilled to a level at which consciousness should have been impossible).
Reynolds said that she then encountered a tunnel vortex, saw an incredibly bright light, heard her deceased grandmother calling her, and encountered several of her deceased relatives. Reynolds says she was told by her uncle to go back through the tunnel, and to return to her body. These details were originally reported in the 1998 book Light and Death by Michael Sabom MD. That book includes diagrams of the medical equipment used to cut open Reynold's skull. They match her descriptions very well.
Many people have heard of one or two of these veridical near-death experiences, perhaps the Pam Reynolds case or the often-told story about “Maria's shoe.” But judging from the book The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences, these veridical near-death experiences may not be so rare. That book describes many cases similar to that of the Pam Reynolds case. My post here gives a summary of the main cases that book discusses. That post discusses many cases in which people correctly observed things during near-death experiences that should have been quite impossible for them to have observed, given their location and medical condition.
A phenomenon that overlaps with near-death experiences is out-of-body experiences, in which a person reports either leaving his body and going far away from it, or viewing his body while not in his body. The diagram below roughly shows the relation between near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. A person can have an out-of-body experience without being close to death. The fraction depicted below (about 25%) roughly corresponds to data from the AWARE study, in which there were 55 subjects reporting awareness during a cardiac-related near-death experience, and 13 of them answered "Yes" to the question "Did you feel separated from your body?"
The diagram above merely shows a rough estimate of the percentage of people having near-death experiences who report out-of-body experiences. The question of what such a percentage may be is clouded by the fact that those having near-death experiences may report being in a kind of different body from their earthly body.
In the paper The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences by Bruce Greyson and Ian Stevenson, which examined in depth 78 near-death experiences, we have this very interesting quote: "The impression of having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body was reported by 58% of our respondents (77% of those reporting out-of-the-body experiences)."
Pages 34-38 of the book Out of Body Experiences; A Handbook describes how out-of-body experiences have been reported for centuries in cultures all over the world. We read, "In 1978 a cross-cultural study by Shiels revealed that only three of 44 societies did not hold a belief in OBEs." There is a large body of literature involving people who claimed to have had out-of-body experiences. Many accounts can be found in the various editions of the Journal and Proceedings of the British Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research (including the account described here). A long account of out-of-body experiences was given in the 1929 book The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan J. Muldoon, which you can read here. In the 1960's and 1970's the scholar Robert Crookall PhD collected many accounts of out-of-body experiences. His works on the topic include these:
- The Supreme Adventure (1961), which you can read here.
- The Techniques of Astral Projection (1964), which you can read here.
- More Astral Projections (1964), which you can read here.
- Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1970), which you can read here.
The More Astral Projections book gives about 160 cases of out-of-body experiences. In the accounts collected by Crookall, a large fraction or most of those reporting out-of-body experiences reported being in a kind of second body (what can be called a soul-body), with such a thing often mysteriously connected to the physical body by a kind of kind of link or cord, one often described as elastic.
A very important point to remember is that in general neuroscientists are almost never serious scholars of paranormal phenomena. So if you ever hear a neuroscientist make generalizations about near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences, with very high likelihood you will be hearing someone talking about a topic he has not seriously studied.
Misleading Claims in Attempts to Neurally Explain Near-Death Experiences
There are two ways in which materialists attempt to deal with reports of paranormal phenomena:
(1) They may pretty much ignore the phenomena, say little or nothing about it, and hope that the public pays no attention to it.
(2) They may attempt to offer some evidence that they think may help to explain away the phenomena.
Materialists have figured out that method (1) above does not work for near-death experiences, because near-death experiences are too well known. So they have made some attempt along the lines of method (2) above. There is a tiny mini-body or micro-body of papers and articles attempting to offer evidence for a neural explanation or some kind of neural account for near-death experiences. A typical feature of such papers and articles in dishonesty and distortion.
Let's look at some of the papers most commonly cited in articles attempting to make it sound like there is some neural account to be told clarifying near-death experiences. Most of these articles cite a 2013 paper with the very misleading title "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." The paper makes a misleading use of the technical EEG terms "coherence" and "connectivity."
An EEG is a device for measuring brain waves, one requiring the attachment of multiple electrodes on the head. In the technical jargon of EEG analysts, "coherence" means some length of time in which you are getting the same type of brain waves from two different regions of the brain. The paper here states, "Coherence is one mathematical method that can be used to determine if two or more sensors, or brain regions, have similar neuronal oscillatory activity with each other." There are different ways in which the term "connectivity" is used by neuroscientists. One of these ways is "structural connectivity" meaning the number of connections between brain cells. But, according to that paper, there's another way in which "connectivity" is used: "Functional connectivity identifies activity brain regions that have similar frequency, phase and/or amplitude of correlated activity."
So given such speech customs, a neuroscientist analyzing the ups and downs of brain waves can claim "coherence" or "connectivity" as long as he sees any type of similarity between different regions of a brain giving the same kind of EEG readings. This is what the authors of the 2013 paper did. What they observed was simply the brain waves of rats quickly dying off to become a flat line. But because the brain waves from each regions quickly trailed off and died off in the same way, the authors have called this behavior "coherence" and "connectivity."
While this may not be a very clear case of an outright lie (given the speech habits of EEG analysts), the title of the paper is misleading, because it creates a very false impression in the minds of 95% of the people who read it. 95% of the people reading a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" will think that some indication was found of increased cognitive activity in dying brains. The paper found no such thing. The "coherence" and "connectivity" supposedly found was not a surge but merely a blip, and it did not involve anything like some surge of mental activity. Nothing whatsoever was found that can help to neurally explain near-death experiences. In fact, there is every reason to think that the at time when this little blip of claimed "coherence" and "connectivity" occurred, all of the rats were unconscious.
Figure 1 of the paper is shown below. We see EEG brain wave signals from rats who were injected with a chemical causing the heart to stop.
Nothing impressive is seen. It's just what you would expect: brain signals trailing off and dying out very quickly after the heart stops. This data offers no justification for a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." An honest title of the paper would have been: "Brain waves very quickly trail off and die out after hearts stop in rats."
After this paper with a misleading title was published, we had innumerable misleading citations of it in the articles of materialist or mainstream writers, claiming or insinuating that the paper showed or suggested something it did not either show or suggest. An example was a National Geographic article with the misleading title "In Dying Brains, Signs of Heightened Consciousness." The 2013 "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" paper had not anything whatsoever to show "signs of heightened consciousness" in the dying rats it studied. Similarly, a 2017 Big Think article linked to the 2013 paper and claimed, "One 2013 study, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found that the rodents entered a hyper-alert state just before death." This claim is totally false, and the paper suggested nothing of the sort.
These days this kind of thing goes on constantly in the world of science journalism and materialist apologetics:
(1) Scientists often give their papers titles that are not justified by anything they observed (partially to maximize their chance of getting the paper citations that scientists crave).
(2) Journalists adding an additional layer of hype, distortion and misrepresentation, by claiming the papers showed or suggested something that the papers did not provide any good evidence for. It's a "give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile" kind of situation. For example, if a scientific paper mildly suggests that just maybe some odd observations could have been produced by extraterrestrials, the paper will be mentioned in dozens of new stories breathlessly claiming that scientists have shown extraterrestrials exist.
The 2013 paper was discredited by a 2017 paper "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death." That 2017 paper studied the brain waves of four humans who died after their hearts stopped. Referring to the 2013 paper, the 2017 paper stated, "We also did not observe any well-defined EEG states following the early cardiac arrest period as previously reported in rats." But in the articles of those trying to portray some neural explanation for near-death experiences, we read no mention of this 2017 paper. Such articles keep citing the 2013 study involving rats, but won't tell us about a more relevant 2017 study involving humans.
An outrageous 2022 example of fake news was a recent story in the British new source The Independent, a story with the phony headline, "Brain scan reveals patient’s ‘last thoughts’ just before they died in landmark study." Below are some of the reasons the headline and the story are as phony as a three-dollar bill: A Frontiers press release is guilty of getting the ball rolling on this fake news story, by suggesting the utterly groundless idea that the EEG readings from a seizure-wracked dying patient in a coma did something to suggest the patient was recalling events in his life. Here is a quote from the press release:
" 'We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,' said Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, who organised the study. 'Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.' Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks. 'Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,' Zemmar speculated. "
Notice the nonsense reasoning here. It's basically this:
(1) People have different types of brain waves, which occur when they do various things like thinking, recalling, meditating (which does not involve recall), and perceiving.
(2) Some brain waves were measured in a person who died.
(3) So maybe he was recalling important life events.
This is nonsensical logic. The study has not provided the slightest reason for thinking that the dying person was remembering past events in his life. To the contrary, we can think of the strongest reason why a person would not be recalling important life events after having a sudden heart attack. The sudden heart attack would produce great pain and great distress, and under such conditions if you were conscious you would be no more likely to be recalling past life events than you would be if someone suddenly stabbed you in the chest. In fact, sudden fatal heart attacks instantly produce unconsciousness which should prevent anyone from engaging in thinking about past events.
The scientific paper describes the patient's condition before death, and we learn of a state so dire that any speculation about the patient reliving past memories seems supremely absurd. We are told the patient was a 87-year-old who had suffered a fall, and who was in a coma (rating 10 on the Glascow Coma Scale, meaning a moderate coma). Here is how the paper describes the patient's death.
"An electroencephalography (EEG) was obtained, which showed non-convulsive status epilepticus in the left hemisphere. There were at least 12 identified electrographic seizures, after which a burst suppression pattern spontaneously developed over the left hemisphere (Figure 2A). Shortly thereafter, electrographic activity over both hemispheres demonstrated a burst suppression pattern, which was followed by development of ventricular tachycardia with apneustic respirations and clinical cardiorespiratory arrest. After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the 'Do-Not-Resiscitate (DNR)' status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."
Given such a patient state, it is obvious folly to be speculating that such a patient was reliving past memories just before death. Status epilepticus is a life-threatening seizure of particularly long length. Apneustic respirations are a kind of gasping suggesting death is very near. Twelve seizures would have produced a "witch's brew" of brain signals showing up on EEG readings, and from such a thunderstorm of brain signals nothing reliable can be inferred about what a patient was thinking or recalling. Since the patient was in a coma and plagued by a dozen seizures that disrupt mental processes such as recollection if it is occurring, it makes no sense at all to speculate that the patient was thinking about or recollecting anything.
Giving us a headline as phony as the headline quoted above from the Independent, the Daily Mail gives us this fake news headline about this patient: "Our lives really DO flash before us: Scientists record the brain activity of an 87-year-old man at the moment he died, revealing a rapid 'memory retrieval' process." This headline is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Zero evidence has been provided in the scientific paper of any memory retrieval around the time of death, and the patient's condition gives the strongest reason for disbelieving that any such thing was occurring. A similar fake news headline occurs on www.bbc.com, showing that once an expert lights a fake news match, the fake news fire will spread even to sources the average person regards as having high journalistic standards. Dozens of news site repeated the groundless claim that neuroscientists had used medical technology to show that someone's life flashes before their eyes when they are dying.
There is an abundance of reliable evidence that people have extraordinary near-death experiences after their hearts have stopped. Such experiences often include what are called life-review experiences, in which a person may recall important moments from his life. Neuroscience has done nothing to explain such near-death experiences, nor has neuroscience provided any evidence that such life reviews occur. We know they occur solely because of eyewitness testimony.
The paper here casts cold water on the "Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain" paper discussed above, implying that whatever it observed may have been an artifact of muscle movement, which produces confounding signals in EEG readings.
Misleading Claims in Attempts to Neurally Explain Out-of-Body Experiences
Misstatements about out-of-body experiences are common in papers and articles written by those trying to naturally explain such experiences. An example is to be found in the paper "The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction." The authors make this very erroneous claim: "OBEs have been observed predominantly in patients with epilepsy and migraine." No, out-of-body experiences do not mostly occur in people who have epilepsy or migraines.
The attempt of the authors to justify such a claim suggests a great shortfall of scholarship on this topic. After making the extremely untrue statement above, they try to justify it by claiming this: "Thus, Lippman (1953) reported two migraine patients with OBEs, and Green (1968) reported that 11% of the OBE subjects that participated in her survey suffered from migraine headaches." Any person who seriously studied out-of-body experiences would have found out that surveys report them occurring in significant fractions of the human population, and would realize the utter folly of trying to justify a claim that out-of-body experiences are caused mainly by migraines or epilepsy by citing a mere two patients having migraines and out-of-body experiences. And anyone writing carefully would have realized the folly of trying to justify a claim that most out-of-body experiences are produced by migraines or epilepsy by citing some person claiming that merely 11% of some group of people having out-of-body experiences had migraines.
Trying to claim that out-of-body experiences are largely caused by migraine headaches makes no sense. In a book about near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences (OBEs), Dr. Peter Fenwick states, "A prominent feature of OBEs is that pain is entirely absent." But since migraine headaches are episodes of intense pain, it makes no sense to claim they are the cause of painless out-of-body experiences. The source here discusses a variety of surveys taken to try to determine how common out-of-body experiences are. It gives numbers which suggest that out-of-body experiences occur to significant fractions of the human population, something like between 10% and 20%.
When materialists attempt to offer natural explanations for out-of-body experiences, what very often goes on is that experiences that are not out-of-body experiences are described as out-of-body experiences. The materialist is very eager to claim as many naturally-explicable experiences as out-of-body experiences. So he will try to use the term "out-of-body experience" to describe very many things, often things that do not have the characteristics of out-of-body experiences.
In psychiatry and neuoscience, there is a term "autoscopy," A paper states, "Autoscopy is thought to be a rare phenomenon in which a person visualizes or experiences a veritable hallucinatory image of his double." A paper states, "there is no disembodiment in autoscopy and always disembodiment in OBEs," although the later part of this statement is not correct, because in out-of-body experiences a person may report a kind of different body other than his physical body. A type of misleading statement that sometimes occurs is when materialists describe mere cases of autoscopy (which should not be called out-of-body experiences) as out-of-body experiences. These attempts to use evidence for autoscopy as part of trying to explain out-of-body experiences are misleading and also futile, because of the extreme rarity of reported cases of autoscopy, and the high incidence of cases of out-of-body experience.
Another example of misleading claims in attempts to naturally explain out-of-body experiences is when a researcher claims to experimentally produce an out-of-body experience. An example is the paper "The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences." The paper describes a fancy high-tech experimental setup in which subjects are given something like virtual reality goggles. We read this:
"In the first experiment, participants sat on a
chair, wearing a pair of head-mounted displays
that were connected to two video cameras placed
side by side 2 m behind the participant’s back
(Fig. 1A). The images from the left video camera
were presented on the left eye display and the
images from the right camera on the right display.
Thus, the person would see his or her back with
the perspective of a person sitting behind him or
her with stereoscopic vision."
The author gives no justification for his claim that this very fancy high-tech setup produced any out-of-body experience. The paper gives no account by anyone describing an out-of-body experience. What is going on here is some high-tech setup designed to create perceptual confusion in subjects. Since the high-tech setup bears no resemblance to anything people would experience in normal life, the experiment in worthless in explaining out-of-body experiences, which do not occur when people are wearing virtual reality goggles. The author should not have given his paper his paper the misleading title "The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences." An honest title would have been something like "Induction of Perceptual Confusion by Special Goggles."
Another misleading and irrelevant paper claiming to have experimentally produced an out-of-body experience is the paper "Experimental Elicitation of an Out of Body
Experience and
Concomitant Cross‐Hemispheric
Electroencephalographic Coherence." This ethically questionable paper involved zapping the brain of a single subject with some special hat containing "64 solenoids (see Figure 1) obtained from
Radio Shack," until a headache was produced in the subject. Experimenting with crudely constructed brain-zapping devices not approved by the FDA was morally dubious. The paper gives no quotation from the subject describing an out-of-body experience. We read this:
"The experience culminated with the
subject feeling his head was floating above the
spot where his body was sitting. He could not
distinguish between his limbs, his torso, or the
surrounding space and objects in the room.
During this intense experience, he considered
asking the experimenter to terminate the
procedure. Following the experience there was
noticeable fatigue and a headache developed."
This is a description of severe disorientation, confusion and pain, not matching what is reported in out-of-body experiences, in which people report painless clear perception of their body from a spot outside of their body. Since the paper does not include a first-hand account of the user's mental experiences, but merely a second-hand account of someone's mental experiences (one that may be biased by the experimenters' desire to report an out-of-body experience), the paper fails to provide any good evidence that an out-of-body experience occurred. Since the paper involves some high-tech brain-zapping setup unlike anything existing when ordinary people have out-of-body experiences, such a paper is worthless in explaining out-of-body experiences.
A similar paper (authored by one of the authors of a misleading paper mentioned above) is entitled "Stimulating illusory out-of-body experiences." The paper has some quotes by a subject in whom the authors had brain-zapped with electricity, by inserting electrodes in her brain. The authors have attempted to portray this as evidence of an artificially induced out-of-body experience. But the only sentence that the paper quotes from the subject is one that does not indicate a full out-of-body experience. That sentence is this: "I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." That sounds like some weird electricity-induced perception anomaly that is not properly described as an out-of-body experience. During an out-of-body experience a person will typically report leaving his body and seeing his entire body (not just the legs and lower trunk) from outside of the body. Eager to report some experimental induction of an out-of-body experience, our authors seem to have taken some account that does not match those of out-of-body experiences, and called that an out-of-body experience. The authors make this claim: "Two further stimulations induced the same sensation, which included an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' 'about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling." Since this is not an actual full-sentence quote from the subject, it has no value as evidence. A second-hand account of a person's experience during brain zapping (by some other person who did not have that experience) is worthless as evidence. What would we have read from a transcript of what the subject said? We have no idea.
With the misleading stories and papers I have cited, neuroscientists and materialists are trying to make it look a little bit like they have some neural or natural explanation for near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences. They have no such thing. The phenomena of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are utterly inexplicable under the dogmas and assumptions of most neuroscientists and materialists, such as the dogma that the brain produces the mind or the dogma that mind states are mere brain states. All the things we see occurring in near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are things that should not be occurring if such dogmas and assumptions are correct. Near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are evidence that such dogmas and assumptions are incorrect. It would be hard to imagine a more resounding refutation of the dogma that your brain makes your mind than what is reported in out-of-body experiences: people observing their bodies from outside of their bodies.
