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That may explain the infusion of light, I said, but what about the tunnel?

Simple,Woerlee said. It’s a matter of blood supply. Most of the blood goes to the central part of the retina, the part that focuses on objects, and when oxygen supply dwindles—as it does during cardiac arrest—“the bits that fail first are those that are furthest away from the center,” he said. “And so, gradually, you get a narrowing of your peripheral fields, until all you’ve got is a central spot of light, and if your pupils are wide open at the time, you see light pouring into a tunnel.”

It seemed to me that Woerlee made a persuasive case in describing generic experiences such as the light and the tunnel. But the cinematic experiences unique to each person—how would he explain that? How could generic brain activity manufacture an image that means something only to the dying person: seeing Uncle David in robust health, for example, or feeling pangs of guilt for ridiculing a shy little girl in fifth grade?

The brain gasping for oxygen, Woerlee said, is a little like the OK Corral—a desperate, frantic shootout in the brain. In fact, it resembles an epileptic seizure.

“And that stimulates all sorts of parts of your brain to do all sorts of wonderful things,”Woerlee argued. The brain in distress stimulates sections of the brain deep within the temporal lobe,4 like the hippocampus and amygdala, which house your memories and emotions.“And in general, when you stimulate the amygdala and the hippocampus, you get memories of people, of events, of sounds, music, sometimes even deities, and also memories of past events—flashback, life review, and then your visions of relatives.”

“So all those visceral, meaningful events,” I asked, “they’re just in your memory bank, and they are roused when your brain is having a seizure?”

“Precisely.”

True, Woerlee conceded, this analysis may sound like “a modern form of phrenology,”5 the pseudoscience in which bumps and fissures in the skull were said to indicate personality traits. In fact, some neurologists dub it “neurophrenology.” But he argued,“a veritable flood” of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies during the last fifteen years supports his theories.6

This seems like a lot of heavy lifting for a brain in the throes of dying. It reminds me of those operatic death scenes in which the tubercular soprano trills away with perfect pitch and volume through her final aria.

Aware of these arguments, I sat down with Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist and fellow at the British Royal College of Psychiatrists. Fenwick specializes in treating epilepsy. He has never had a near-death experience himself but has researched it for the better part of twenty years.

“No epileptic seizure has the clarity and narrative style of an NDE,” he said. “And this is because all epilepsy is confusional. Epileptologists all agree that one thing that near-death experiences are not is temporal lobe epilepsy.”

What happens in a seizure, he told me, is that the electrical activity at that site disrupts the normal processing of the temporal lobe. When people report sensations from temporal lobe stimulation, they describe disjointed, isolated phenomena. Someone might say, “It feels as if I am leaving my body.” Or, “It sounds as if I’m hearing a symphony.” But these are isolated sensory phenomena, not coherent narratives.

Fenwick also dismissed the dying-brain argument. Twenty seconds after the heart stops beating, he said, a person is unconscious, period. You cannot argue that there are “bits” of the brain that are functioning.

“Everything that constructs our world for us is, in fact, ‘down,’ ” he stated. “There is no possibility of the brain creating any images. Memory is not functioning during this time, so it should be impossible to have clearly structured and lucid experiences.”7

Bruce Greyson, a psychiatry professor at the University of Virginia who is considered the father of modern research on near-death experiences, added that because of brain damage, a