There is often a change in the way that people who have experienced NDEs approach life afterwards, regardless of culture or religion. They claim to be less materialistic, more interested in mystical spirituality, more altruistic, less afraid of death.  They may sometimes dramatically change their lifestyle by, for example, changing careers.

However NDEs were long treated as a taboo subject (especially within the scientific and medical communities y), which meant that patients were reluctant to talk about them.  Are things different now?  Undoubtedly. however, integrating these kinds of experiences into daily life is still challenging for some of them and this might be particularly because of the opinions and behaviours of those around the NDE experiencer

Talking points

Theories seeking to explain NDEs are often grouped into three main categories: transcendental, psychological, and neurological. The main criticism of the first category is obviously that they aren't based on rigorous science. "Up to now, no one has ever been able to prove that conscious perception could occur in the absence of neuronal activity," says Steven Laureys. "Some people continue to promote "magical" claims using the argument that science doesn't understand everything about consciousness. A well-known case of shoddy intellectual work comes from Dutch clinical cardiologist and best-selling author Pim Van Lommel. He uses NDEs to assert that the brain is nothing but a sort of "radio receiver" and that consciousness can be dissociated from brain activity and present in all human cells.  I challenged him to go further, to use the scientific method to take measurements and demonstrate the validity of his assertions."

Others insist that examples of people who have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and report having looked down over their own resuscitation efforts lend support to the hypothesis of a soul outside of the body. As we have mentioned, all the evidence points to a physiological basis for the phenomenon - a lesion in the right temporoparietal region. In 2002, surgeons at the Geneva University Hospital provoked an OBE in an epileptic patient by accidentally stimulating that area of his brain. Five years later, a team in Antwerp achieved the same result experimentally when they stimulated the same region using transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Additionally, some researchers in Scandinavia decided to hide images near the ceilings of operating rooms. If any patients had seen them, it would have suggested that consciousness could most likely be disassociated from the body. But no one has ever mentioned the images... "A similar international experiment involving 25 hospital facilities was launched in 2008, with the same negative results up to now," says Steven Laureys.

Brain damage

There are several psychological interpretations of NDEs. According to one of them, these experiences are a form of depersonalisation, the loss of a sense of reality that could serve as a defence against impending death. In a way, our subconscious creates an entirely new "fable" to deny our imminent disappearance. "This hypothesis cannot explain all NDEs, since some of them occur in situations where there is no risk of death," explains Marie Thonnard, doctoral candidate in psychological sciences and the main author of the PLoS One article.