1- Near-death experiences include veridical perceptions. It is true that there are few cases found in prospective studies, but the amount of anecdotal evidence supported by independent witnesses and among those independent witnesses are people who have no religious biases, many of them are well-educated (ICU doctors and nurses/psychiatrists) makes them credible.
Because it is highly implausible that all these people are having false memories or fabricating unfounded stories, and not a single case among these such as the famous 12-digit near-death case or Dr. Lloyd Rudy’s case happened as described.
As Gary Habermas says:
“Although critics note that no prospective study has yet produced a fully verified identification of random numbers by NDErs, several evidential NDE cases have already succeeded in identifying specific numbers (including a 12‑digit numeral, a four‑figure number, and other smaller or five‑figure numbers) or spotting objects placed overhead that could only be seen from a ceiling-level perspective. Similar cases involving correctly identified unusual objects (e.g., coins later retrieved) further weaken skeptical criticisms, and skeptics should be more cautious given these comparable, already-observed results.”
And:
“Naturalistic explanations face a central problem: there are 300+ cases of externally corroborated details in NDE reports—some from the immediate vicinity, some from distant locations beyond anyone’s senses, some involving blind NDErs, shared experiences, or information from deceased individuals. If even a small fraction of these cases are accurate, purely subjective theories cannot account for them. Objective, externally verified data cannot be dismissed by internal, psychological explanations, and for naturalistic views to succeed, virtually all 300+ corroborated accounts would have to be mistaken—an implausible claim given prompt collection, multiple witnesses, and careful checks. Naturalistic positions are thus forced into the weaker stance of denying all external evidence, while the evidential ground clearly favors the reality of at least some veridical NDEs.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/chapter-epub/10.1002/9781119468004.ch14
2- In a nutshell, if brain activity = mind, then we should expect lower or disordered brain activity to produce chaotic, fragmented, and disorganized experiences. Yet NDErs often report the opposite: hyper-lucid thought, clear moral evaluation of their actions, detailed life reviews, and an experience that feels “realer than real.” Many even describe their consciousness as becoming more expansive, clearer, and more lucid.
So how can a brain with absent or severely reduced blood flow and oxygenation produce a level of consciousness that is apparently higher and more coherent than that of a normal waking brain?
You do not need to establish zero brain activity for the argument to have force.
The point is comparative: if consciousness is entirely produced by brain activity, then significant deterioration or disruption of brain function should generally correspond to diminished, fragmented, or disorganized consciousness, not consistently reported experiences of unusually vivid, coherent, expansive, and hyper-lucid awareness.
As Roland Karo says:
First of all, as Parnia elegantly argues, if one were to maintain that these perimortem bursts of activity come together to form an integrated and hyperlucid conscious experience, then according to textbook neurology, the brain would need a lot of energy and metabolic input. But during CA, there is none. Unless one speculates that the needed energy comes from an unknown external source (which is actually the view Parnia himself defends), this argument runs directly against everything we think we know about the basics of human physiology (Parnia 2024, 104–5). Metaphorically, accepting this hypothesis would mean buying into the argument that a car with an empty tank, dead battery, and missing driver can still go for a ride. Moreover, going along with this explanation would render the whole scholarly pursuit for the neural correlates of consciousness useless. Because the entire program relies on close correlations between patterns of cerebral blood flow and differential activity in particular brain areas.
In fact, I suspect that buying into this hypothesis leads to a reductio ad absurdum of the naturalist explanations of consciousness. Because essentially it would mean that live brains and dead brains can create similar consciousness, where dead brains may actually be better at it, given the hyperlucid quality of NDEs in comparison with normal waking consciousness. For the naturalist interpretation of the gamma burst theory to work, its proponent should (a) show that the perimortem bursts of activity are really gamma, clearly and recognizably patterned and engaging the whole brain; (b) prove that these bursts are comparable in intensity to the electrical patterns typical of normal waking consciousness; and (c) explain how the brain can give structured and continued output with no metabolic input.
A successful naturalist answer to (c) would be a pyrrhic victory because it would result in having to rewrite the basics of textbook neurology. As to (a) and (b), the existing evidence is controversial, to say the least. As pointed out earlier, the whole theory is derived from Borjigin’s et al.’s (2013) original experiments with rodents. The importance of gamma in the theory—as Parnia (2024, 67) puts it—lies in the (reasonable) speculation that hyperlucid consciousness should be associated with even higher frequencies of electrical activity in the brain than the normal beta rhythm of everyday waking consciousness. However, as Nigel Shaw (2024, 674) points out, the etiology and electrogenesis of the gamma rhythm is unclear. So is its relation to cognitive processes. There exists a body of experimental results that links hyperlucid consciousness to slow theta activity instead (for a relevant discussion and further references, see Baijal and Srinivasan 2010). While AWARE-II revealed some measurable activity during CA, none was in the gamma spectrum. Moreover, as Greyson and Pim van Lommel (2024, 109924) argue, in all likeliness, this activity was a measuring artifact related to chest compressions, because none of the subjects in whom Parnia and colleagues found perimortem electrical brain activity actually reported an NDE. From Chawla and colleagues’ aforementioned case report on seven dying patients, only one is said to have had activity in the “high” frequency range.
As to Vicente and colleagues’ famous case report, it has been heavily critiqued. Greyson, van Lommel, and Peter Fenwick (2022) have shown that the gamma activity in the patient was not, in fact, a burst. What is reported by the Vicente and colleagues is rather enhanced gamma in comparison with alpha, beta, and theta, which was, further, only measurable against the background of the relative electrocerebral silence associated with CA. They also hypothesize that the gamma activity the researchers found may not have been at all be related to cognitive functions. Again, it may just as well have been related to residual muscle contractions in the body of the patient. In addition, different measures used in the case report cannot be precisely time matched, and it is difficult to decide when exactly the heart stopped relative to the enhanced gamma activity (Greyson et al. 2022, 1–2). Shaw also suspects that the perimortem bursts of activation may be artifacts reflecting residual muscle tensions. His own proposal is that the gamma bursts reported by the researchers are actually of amygdalar origin. If so, it is highly unlikely they can be used to explain the nuanced and lucid phenomenology of NDEs (Shaw 2024, 674).
Taken together, I do not think the naturalist interpretation of the gamma burst hypothesis is defendable. It is much more likely that the perimortem bursts represent (random?) residual activity in the dying brain that may or may not have something to do with consciousness. Greyson et al. (2013, 47) are even more skeptical, arguing that Borjigin’s original findings and the resulting explanatory hypotheses have no relevance to NDEs at all. The core NDE is far too multilayered, complex, and nuanced to be explained away by random(ish) flashes of dying neurons (in other words, dismissed as complex hallucinations created by the dying brain). Also, if viewed in the light of the another-day-at-the-office model, it is at once clear that the naturalist interpretation of the gamma burst theory also falls into this class. But, to repeat it one more time, NDEs are not another day at the office. They deserve much more credit than the naturalists are willing to grant them.
3- Experiences arising from hallucinations and delusions are different from near-death experiences in terms of their subjective phenomenology.
Conscious experiences associated with hallucinations and delusions are often characterized by confused and disorganized consciousness, with less clarity, and they are often quickly forgotten and do not leave a lasting impact on the personality of the person who experienced them. Near-death experiences, by contrast, are characterized by exceptionally clear and heightened consciousness. People often describe their awareness as being far more lucid than their ordinary waking consciousness.
These experiences can also have profound and lasting effects on the people who undergo them, sometimes lasting until death. They can make people lose their fear of death almost entirely and give them a sense that their lives have meaning and purpose. Life is no longer seen as merely a matter of living, eating, and reproducing, but as something meaningful in which one should do good for others.
There are also atheists who undergo NDEs and subsequently become believers, or at least experience a major disruption of their confidence that there is nothing after death.
Moreover, experiences associated with hallucinations and delusions do not display the same kind of cross-cultural or universal consistency as NDEs. Each person may report something entirely different. One person might say, for example, “I saw a dragon,” another might say, “I saw my legs growing,” and another might say, “I saw a dinosaur,” and so on.
“Unlike ICU dreams, delusions, and delirium, or drug-induced hallucinations, these recalled experiences of death follow a specific narrative and are associated with transcendence, ineffability, and positive transformation.”
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.14740
That’swhy, there are now many scientific papers published in high-impact scientific journals arguing for a mind independent of brain function.
“The results of studies of consciousness during cardiac arrest have been proposed to support the philosophical view that the mind or consciousness is a separate entity that interacts with, but is not produced by, the brain”
https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/110/2/67/2681812
“In conclusion, brain activity during CA and CPR tends to be suppressed or markedly disturbed, yet NDEs appear to occur during CA and unconsciousness, that is, at the very period when the brain can no longer support consciousness. This analysis provides an empirical argument supporting the view that consciousness can exist separately from the brain/body (van Lommel, 2010, 2023). This argument has implications for the question of the continuation of consciousness after death, as part of the evidence for this possibility (Moreira-Almeida et al., 2022). As CA may be regarded as ‘reversible death’ (Parnia et al., 2023), NDE can be assumed as evidence for the persistence of conscious awareness after death.”
