8 - The Seattle Study Revisited

After eight years of scientific research into near-death experiences in children, I decided to re-interview the original group of patients from the Seattle study. When I first spoke to them, they had never before shared their entire experience.

Back then they were shy and sometimes reluctant to talk about "floating on air" or about a "man who glowed like a light bulb." Sometimes the only way -I could get them to speak about their NDEs would be to hand them paper and crayons and let them draw a picture of it.

Now, almost ten years later, I wondered what these kids would be like. Had they adjusted well with their peers? Were they ahead of their classes academically? Did they have a perspective on the world that differed from their friends? Or did their profound spiritual experience make no difference at all?

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Knowledge by suffering entereth; And Life is perfected by Death

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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I found that these children have become special teenagers who have excellent relationships with their families. They share a maturity and wisdom that is humbling.

This group from the Seattle study displays a conspicuous absence of drug abuse and even experimentation. They exhibit little rebellion against authority, no excessive risk taking, and no teenage pregnancies. These people were selected for the study because they had survived cardiac arrest. Yet instead of the brain damage and retardation that usually result from such a traumatic event, they had good grades and fine behavior.

I spoke to each and every child from the original study and found these traits in all of them. Here is some of what I discovered when I visited these special kids.

Patient One - "More Serious ... A Lot Happier"

For instance, Patient One in my study is now twenty years old and vividly remembers his experience. He left his body when his heart stopped and watched as physicians worked frantically to save him. His experience had been impressive to me because of the wealth of detail he was able to remember from his own resuscitation. Everything he described was entirely accurate, including snatches of conversation, precise details of how a jelly was applied to his body, how physicians cleared others from the metal bed before pushing the buttons on the cardioversion paddles, and how his clothing was cut with scissors to expose his arms, legs, and chest.

His experience had been so authentic that it is hard to explain unless he actually was on the ceiling watching his own resuscitation.

Patient One does not see his near-death experience as a religious one. He doesn't even see it as proof of life after death. He didn't even know he'd had an NDE until he heard me talking about them on a radio show. Yet still this experience has had a deep effect upon the way he thinks and lives.

He describes himself as being "more serious than most kids my age, but a lot happier." He feels that he understands the meaning of life and what his purpose is, even though he cannot put it into words: "I developed diabetes as a teenager, and my experience helped me deal with that. It kept me from being discouraged, and it made me aware of how precious life is."

His philosophy of life is simple and serene. He has a vision of what he wants to do and is working hard to achieve it. He wants to get married and have a family, and he wants to work in a trade that he can count on for work.

He ended our conversation with virtually the identical words of so many other children of the Light: "I know one thing. I am not afraid to die. My near-death experience has made me more aware of life. It has kept me from being interested in drugs or driving around in cars and getting high like my friends do."

Patient Six - "I Feel Calmer And More In Control"

Michelle (patient six in the Seattle study) was the eight-year-old who nearly died of a diabetic coma. She left her body and was able to identify accurately many details of her resuscitation. Then she saw a box in front of her with a red and a green button.

Behind her stood tall beings in white that she later called doctors. Although they coaxed her to push the red button, she chose the green instead and returned to her body.

Although she called these beings doctors, they glowed from an inner light and had the same characteristics that other children describe as angels. Michelle also had to make a decision about crossing a barrier, which in her case was choosing the correct button. All of these were clearly the NDE's core experience.

How did this NDE effect Michelle? She says that it caused her to "see life differently than most people. Little things that bother others don't really bother me. I feel calmer and more in control."

Michelle sees her NDE as "a special happening." She is a vegetarian because she doesn't want to do anything that might hurt animals. She has a deep belief in God, but does not attend church on a regular basis.

Michelle's mother calls her "serene" and "very mature for her age." And as with the others in the study, Michelle doesn't fear death, but wants to make sure that she lives life to the fullest.

Patient Three: "Cant You Feel It?"

Dean (patient three in the study) has now had a second near-death experience as a result of his chronic kidney problems.
Dean's two NDEs coupled with his chronic kidney problems helped him put his life into perspective. Once the rebel of the family, Dean has now embraced his family's faith in Christ, becoming a devout Christian.

His transformation has helped his family deal with the incredible strain of raising children with kidney problems.

Dean's younger brother died of kidney failure, and to stay alive he and his sister spend twelve to eighteen hours a week attached to a home dialysis machine. The divorce rate in such situations is well over seventy-five percent. Yet this family, for all intents and purposes, leads a fairly normal life.

Have Dean's NDEs helped them achieve that normalcy? "These things have helped me gain comfort through God," Dean said. "Can't you feel it? The spirit is everywhere in this house."

I have to admit that I did feel a rare spirit of family and a joy with these fine people.

These children have grown up to become remarkable teenagers. Not rocket scientists, not high priests in robes, just positive and upbeat kids with a joy that is inspiring. They have not become involved with drugs or alcohol. They have not gotten pregnant and they rarely—according to their parents—get out of line.

Their actions speak louder than words about the reality of the near-death experience.

A Transformation For Me, Too

And how has a decade of near-death research affected me and the way I approach medicine? It has changed everything in my life, including my views on medicine, the way I see society, and even the way I deal with my family.

When I began my studies eight years ago, I was in mainstream medicine. I laughingly referred to myself as a "rodent brain surgeon" who researched the effects of radiation therapy on a child's brain.

I undertook near-death studies as a sideline to an already busy schedule. I was fascinated by the subject, but always felt that we would demonstrate that a particular drug or disease process was responsible for this phenomenon. When I accepted Dr. Raymond Moody's challenge to study NDEs scientifically, I felt certain that science would explain them.

All these years later, I accept what the ancients knew: All men must die and death is not to be feared. There is a Light that we will all experience after death, and that Light represents joy, peace, and unconditional love.

These children have taught me that we each have the ability to experience the Light and that the Light teaches us that we are each important in our own way.

Our research brought together new and preexisting information that revealed a genetically imprinted circuit in the brain that can generate the near-death experience. The existence of that area has caused me to include the concept of the soul in my medical thinking. Why? The simplest, most logical way to explain our current knowledge of man's consciousness is the hypothesis that there is actually a soul within each of us, independent of brain tissue.

I have re-examined a generation of scientific research into higher brain function and have found that the soul hypothesis explains many "unexplained" events. It explains out-of-body experiences, the sensation of leaving the body and accurately describing details outside of the body's field of view. Events such as floating out of the physical body and giving accurate details of one's own cardiac arrest—things a person couldn't see even if their eyes were open—are virtually impossible to explain if we do not believe in a consciousness separate from our bodies that could be called a soul.

I have documented that we have an area in the brain, the right temporal lobe, that some researchers describe as the seat of the soul. It is connected to the hippocampus, which serves as the brain's master control, sorting out thousands of pieces of sensory input and deciding which of them should be acted upon.

It contains our unconscious desires and our ability to dream. Without this area, we would be like robots, unable to initiate purposeful activity and not caring about the passage of time.

The hippocampus has been called "the man in the machine" by some neurologists. It is directly connected to areas in the right temporal and occipital lobes that contain the neuronal circuitry to create near-death experiences. The collapse of the visual fields to create the tunnel experience occurs in the occipital lobes. The sensations of leaving the body, seeing dead relatives, hearing heavenly music, speaking with God, and reviewing one's own life are part of our genetic makeup, "hard-wired" into each of us.

Right now, science does not attempt to explain NDEs. It relies instead on vague allusions to "endorphins at the point of death," as if that could somehow explain everything. The problem is that science tries to explain all mysterious brain activity with current catch-phrases, endorphins, and other neurotransmitters.

The near-death experience is the first psychological experience to be located within the brain. Others soon will follow. Several excellent research studies document the effects of emotions upon disease. For example, if an anesthesiologist whispers "You will get well soon" in the ear of a patient during surgery, that patient will leave the hospital an average of two days sooner than a control group that has not been given such tender loving words. This is fact. Such information is not routinely used in surgery because surgeons tend to reject the psychological. If such words were pills, they would be ordering thousands of them.

By locating the area for NDEs within the brain, we have anatomy to back up the psychological experience. We know where the circuit board is. Now neurologists can accept the spirituality of the NDE because we know where they are generated within our brains. This acceptance is important. Since medical professionals deal with people in spiritual as well as physical crisis, it is important for them to be able to accept and explain a wide variety of phenomena not found in most medical textbooks.

Near-death experiences are an example of a psychological experience that can be anatomically located within the brain. Since they are often profound and mystical experiences, the study of NDEs will help to reunite the centuries-old split of science and spirit. I once heard a minister preach that a small piece of God is in every one of us. I thought to myself: "God is in each and every one of us, and the ability to perceive God is located in the right temporal lobe, within the Sylvian fissure." I do not think that my anatomical restatement of his message detracted in any way from it.
There are many examples of psychological experiences that have been found to be located in specific areas in the brain.

Specific areas in our limbic systems, an ancient area of the brain located deep within the cortex, code for the emotions of rage and anger. The same hormones which generate these emotions have been found to have specific effects on our immune systems. Endocrinologists will soon be able to describe the exact biochemical pathways by which anger and rage lead to increased infections and cancer.

Dr. Vernon Neppe, the director of the Division of Neuropsychiatry at the University of Washington, has documented that experiences such as deja vu experiences and precognitive dreams and intuitions are also located with the temporal lobe. He agrees that the value of these experiences is to recognize that an experience such as deja vu, which the majority of human beings will have at some point in their lifetime, is therefore a natural and normal experience, and not paranormal at all.

He describes a patient who thought that she was crazy because she occasionally saw halos of light around certain friends, and had precognitive dreams which seemed to come true. He feels that he prevented her from having a psychotic breakdown by simply reassuring her that these experiences are common and normal, and were not, in her case, symptoms of being crazy.

Physicians often ignore well-documented proof of the effects of the mind on the body. Several studies have shown the value of simply talking to patients before surgery about post-operative pain and the normal healing process. These patients are sent home an average of two days earlier than patients who do not receive this treatment for the mind. Many studies show that making positive statements about how well the patient is doing and how quickly they will heal in the operating room will result in a decreased need for pain medications and an earlier discharge date.

If I were to market a pill to surgeons that would result in less post-operative pain and a faster surgical recovery, I would be selling them in dump-truck loads. A pill that heals is far more acceptable than words that can have the same effect.

The real value of my research team's results is that we have established that the near-death experience is a natural and normal event that happens to human beings when they die. They are not an obscure psychic phenomena to be lumped together with UFO sightings and Bigfoot. The understanding of how emotions can effect our ability to fight disease, or how mentally preparing a patient for surgery can lead to faster post-operative healing, will be made easier once we change our perception of how the mind and body interrelate.

For medical scientists, the anatomical localization of an out of body experience to the temporal lobe makes NDEs more understandable and study of these experiences more respectable. I predict that twenty years from now many such psychological processes will be anatomically localized within the brain, and that we will see a re-integration of man's spirit with his technological genius.

When I present the anatomical location of near-death experiences at various talks and lectures, I am often told by those who have had these experiences that they resent my attempts to localize NDEs in the brain. To them, attempting to scientifically explain these events is the same as attempting to debunk them, to imply that they are not real.

Near-death experiences do not need science to prove that they are real. Whether or not there is some part of man that can leave the physical body is for each person to decide for himself. The fact that science cannot measure the soul in the laboratory does not mean that it does not exist.

One of the nurses at Valley General Hospital told me of her grandmother who had a near-death experience after surviving a heart attack. Andriette's grandmother told her that she had been to heaven, and was no longer afraid to die. Andriette asked me if I thought that the fact that children had NDEs was proof that there is life after death. She was searching for reassurance that her grandmother had in fact seen heaven. I told her that I have agonized over that very question, and have concluded that science cannot answer it.

Several weeks later she told me that her grandmother had had a second heart attack, and had been resuscitated, but was being kept alive by life-support machines. She asked her grandmother if she had returned to heaven, after the second attack. Her grandmother nodded her head to indicate "yes." Andriette then asked her grandmother if she was afraid to die, and she shook her head "no." Her grandmother then peacefully died with a look of joy on her face.

I asked Andriette if she now believed that her grandmother had truly gone to heaven, and she said, "Well, my grandmother believed she did, and that is [proof] enough for me." Like Andriette, I also believe in the reality of the near-death experience. The effects that such events have on the lives (and deaths) of those who have them are "proof enough" for me.

My research team has documented the transformative power of NDEs in the people who have them. These transformations are healthy ones, emphasizing a joy and devotion to life. One person told me that her experience taught her that "grief is growth." Another person learned that everything in the world is interconnected and that whatever problems one faces, there is a reason for that problem. The knowledge that a loving bright light awaits us all at the point of death seems to generate an excitement and dedication to living life to its fullest before joining that light.

Fertile Area For Research

Psychologist Carl Jung felt that therapy and psychoanalysis rarely change one's life. Changes only occur, said Jung, through experiences such as a mystical conversion.

Near-death experiences certainly represent such a conversion. Their ability to transform should not be ignored. Because of their mystical qualities, NDEs are often dismissed by physicians who feel a need to quantify everything. Research into the transformative qualities of the near-death experience could have a tremendous impact upon our healthcare system.

Perhaps a joint effort by neurochemists and psychiatrists could be initiated to learn other ways of accessing this area of the brain. Many of our health problems have roots in the mind, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity. Alcoholism is virtually untreatable by medication, psychiatry, or behavioral control.

Imagine if the transformative reaction to NDEs could be available to anyone who wants the power to change his life for the better.

Other Research Possibilities

Another possibility for near-death research would be through blood analysis. Since we know that a large number of people having cardiac arrests will have near-death experiences, why not draw some extra blood from them for analysis? These patients have a considerable amount of blood drawn anyway. It would be easy and ethical to draw an extra tube to analyze for evidence of which, if any, of sixty neuropeptides might be involved in triggering NDEs. We could also examine this blood for elevated levels of serotonin and endorphins.

This information could then be used to design new drugs that could activate the areas of the brain responsible for this transformation.

Such an experiment would be a joint effort between psychiatrists, who could collect and quantify the clinical data; neurologists, who could identify specific areas of brain function; and neurochemists, who could design ways of biochemically marking neurochemical activity.

Another research project could utilize specialized EEGs to document the activity of the hippocampus. These EEGs read the P-300 brain wave, which can tell such remarkable things as a person's leadership abilities, likelihood of becoming an alcoholic, or ability to pay attention to the world.

Since patients who have had NDEs often report that the world looks fresh and new, their P-300 brain waves could be compared with those of the general population to discover any difference.

The brain waves of NDEers could also be compared with people who report ecstatic states and out-of-body experiences through meditation in order to see if there are any similarities.

In a more basic realm, few studies currently exist in the medical literature to document the psychological effects of simply discussing death and dying with terminal patients and their families. Isn't that a shocking commentary on how far we have fallen from the time-honored deathbed scene in which the dying person was in control? Not only are most dying patients completely dependent on physicians and nurses for their every need, but we have them in a position of psychological dependence.

By discussing pre-death visions, near-death experiences, and death itself with dying patients and their families, we can take grief out of isolation and stop ignoring this difficult yet inevitable event. By discussing the dying process, we will learn to heal ourselves, families will learn from the grieving process, and physicians and nurses will prevent the burnout of working with the dying. This is strictly my opinion. No data exist to support or deny that opinion.

Many other research opportunities exist, all of them valuable in advancing medicine:

# We need to survey the attitudes that nurses and physicians have about life and death. Knowing these belief systems would help us understand how the attitudes of the care-givers can influence what the patients are willing to share with them.

# Do the pre-death visions or near-death experiences of a dying patient help the surviving spouses or parents deal with their grief? These events may offer valuable opportunities to resolve grief that are being ignored.

# It is well known that widows and widowers often die within one year of the death of their spouse. Can aggressive intervention with a discussion of near-death experiences decrease this mortality rate? One family told me that when their son died a minister told them: "Your son is all right. He is in heaven now. I know because I have been there myself." He then told them of his own NDE. It proved to be a great relief to the family.

# Does this type of counseling help or hurt those who are grieving? No studies currently exist to let us know.

# Do open discussions of pre-death visions help to prevent physician and nurse burnout in intensive care units and on wards with high mortality rates?

Dr. Karen Ollness, professor of pediatrics at Rainbow Babies Hospital in Cleveland, told me of an innovative program she started at Milwaukee Children's Hospital. The hospital staff held weekly meetings to discuss ways in which reverence for the human spirit could be integrated into the hospital routine. This informal weekly workshop became very popular and has had an impact on the entire hospital.

For example, seminars on death and dying are held for the housekeepers and janitorial staff in an effort to create a total climate for the healing process. When a patient dies, the hospital staff routinely attends memorial services and funerals. These practices help care-givers cope with the loss of a patient.

These support groups and procedures would be easy to duplicate in hospitals around the country. All it takes is a few people willing to talk about these subjects in a loving and open manner.

• Does counseling about near-death experiences in terminally ill patients in hospitals or in hospices create a better environment for them? Do they require as many drugs? Does helping patients die in control and with dignity, including a deathbed scene in which they are coherent and not heavily sedated, heal the grief of surviving family members? Studies need to be done to find these answers.

• Are there ways to encourage patients to have pre-death visions? For instance, can hypnosis help the patient have a therapeutic pre-death vision?

This isn't as peculiar as it might seem. Dr. G.G. Gardner, a psychologist at the University of Colorado Children's Hospital, actually accomplished this with a patient she calls David.

This thirteen-year-old boy was dying of leukemia. Dr. Gardner became involved when she was asked to teach David self-hypnosis in an effort to control his painful vomiting and retching. She did so with great success. Soon David and the rest of his family wanted to know other ways they could use hypnosis. David was so enthralled with the process that he even tried to hypnotize the family dog.

When it became clear that David had only a few months to live, Dr. Gardner asked him to think of an image or symbol that could help him deal with the anxiety of death. David chose an eagle, which could soar through the air—away from his pain-filled body—to a place of peace and love. His family used this image to prepare him for death. In the final days of his life, his father would whisper, "Soar, David, go to that special place."

He died in his father's arms, flying from his pain one last time.

David's image of the soaring eagle was an archetype that arose from his unconscious during hypnosis. The types of pre-death vision I presented earlier have been of a very different nature: visions of heaven or spirit guides that arise spontaneously, not out of guided meditations.

I predict that any person who is willing to listen to a dying patient will hear that patient speak of a vision that has the power to heal. They may speak of an eagle soaring to a private and secure place. They may speak of a land of deja vu where they can experience the pleasures of sex (as one of my teenage patients did), or they may speak of a wonderful summerland in which there is a crystal castle.

These visions are real to the person having them and shouldn't be treated as examples of "disorientation" or "confusion." Words like these lead physicians to medicate the visions right out of a dying patient.

It has been well documented that as a patient approaches death he becomes more and more isolated from family and medical team. Physicians actually spend less time at their bedside. Family members visit less frequently and for shorter periods of time. Once the diagnosis of a fatal illness is made, there is a dramatic decrease in visits, phone calls, and nurse or physician time.

Can education and counseling about near-death experiences reverse this pattern and give the dying patient support when they most need it? Maybe. Let's study the question and find out.

Lessons In Compassion

There is one important lesson I have learned from a decade of near-death studies: Listen, be compassionate, and understand that people—including children—have a need to feel in control.

This lesson has been brought home to me many times, including once by Mr. Rogers. This popular star of television's Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood came to Children's Hospital and shared many stories of how listening to children gives them control over their own healing processes.

Mr. Rogers told of one girl who was in a total body cast as a result of multiple injuries sustained in an automobile accident. She could not move her arms or legs and had to spend her days staring at the ceiling.

She became deeply depressed and refused to eat. Then "a kind and sensitive person" thought of giving her a New Year's Eve party favor that whistled and unrolled when blown. The girl loved this toy and soon drove the staff pleasantly crazy with the endless sounds of the noise-maker.

This newfound sense of control helped her regain her appetite and speed her healing process.

Another young patient was forced to have strict bed rest for rheumatic fever. She became severely depressed and refused to allow doctors to examine her or to draw the necessary blood samples.

Once again, "a kind and thoughtful person" did an unorthodox thing: He gave her a water pistol. Now, when the doctors and technicians came into the room, they had to be shot with water before they could stick her with a needle. Once again, control; the type that can only work when such powerful figures as doctors are willing to be shot with a stream of water.

Once we physicians start listening to patients and respecting and sharing with them, they will give us extra tools to help in the healing process.

Let me give an example of another healing vision from my own practice. Upon learning of my interest in near-death experiences, a patient shared with me a vision she had about her son who died at age ten.

When he was six months old, she found out that he had cerebral palsy. She was informed of this diagnosis in a horrible way. After an extensive series of tests at a large city hospital, a nurse approached her and said, "Has anyone told you yet?" She replied, "No, what do you mean?" The nurse simply handed her a piece of paper with "cerebral palsy" written on it.

She was distraught. She received no counseling, no compassionate shoulder to cry on, just the words "cerebral palsy" written on a piece of paper.

That night she saw a vision of her son at the age of ten. He was smiling, beautiful, and healthy and seemed to be saying to her, "Look, Mom, I'm all right." She clung to the memory of that vision throughout her life. Although he could not eat, speak, sit up, or walk, she continued to see him as happy and well as he had appeared that one mystical night.

At the age of ten, he died in his sleep. It was then that she realized the meaning of her vision: He was free of a body crippled by cerebral palsy.

She didn't come to me asking if I believed in life after death or if I thought her son was happy now. The vision had answered both of those questions for her. All she needed was comfort and assurance that what happened was "meant to be."

Why she had a premonition of what was "meant to be," I do not know. Perhaps it all comes down to the words of psychotherapist Carl Jung, who said: "We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgement of the intellect is, at best, only the half of the truth."

After ten years of listening to the near-death experiences of children, I find myself agreeing with Jung: Science—as great as it is—tells only half the story about life beyond and the human soul. The children of the Light tell the rest.

Listen to what they have told me:

"I have a wonderful secret to tell you. I have been climbing a staircase to heaven."
"I just wanted to get to that Light. Forget my body, forget everything. I just wanted to get to that Light."
"There were a lot of good things in that Light."
"I was told that life is painful and that I had to go back anyway."
"I heard a voice say, 'Go back, Bobby. You have a job to do.' "
"There was a beautiful Light that had everything good in it. For about a week, I could see sparkles of that Light in everything."
"Before falling asleep at night, I could see that Light."
"I wasn't afraid to live again because I knew that someday I would be with that Light."
"When you hurt yourself, everything is hurt."
"You'll see. Heaven is fun."