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reported near-death experiences with twenty others who had not; he stuck electrodes on their heads overnight and recorded their brain activity as they slept. Five (21 percent) of the near-death experiencers recorded some mild anomalies in the left temporal lobe. Only one person (5 percent) in the control group exhibited these anomalies. They were not seizures, nor were they spikes; they wouldn’t draw as much as a second glance from a neurologist looking for signs of epilepsy. But, Britton concluded, near-death experiences may involve the temporal lobe. See W. B. Britton and R. R. Bootzin, “Near-Death Experiences and the Temporal Lobe,” Psychological Science 15, no. 4 (2004): 254-58.

5 G. M. Woerlee, “Cardiac Arrest and Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 22, no. 4 (2004): 245.

6 An intriguing scenario involved pilots in accelerator machines. They suffered blood loss to the head and felt some of the elements of a near-death experience: tunnel vision and bright lights, floating sensations, paralysis, “dreamlets” that featured family members. But these sensations were fragmented, and contained no life review or panoramic memory. See J. E. Whinnery, “Psychophysiologic Correlates of Unconsciousness and Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 15 (1997): 473-79. Susan Blackmore advances a variation on the dying-brain theme. A British parapsychologist turned skeptic who has written several books on the phenomenon, Blackmore argues that oxygen deprivation in the visual areas of the brain creates lights and tunnels. The brain releases endorphins, creating feelings of peace and euphoria, similar to a runner’s high. Seizures in the temporal lobe and limbic system trigger the life review, and out-of-body experiences arise when the brain attempts to reconstruct a plausible scenario of what happened, after the fact. I tried to interview Blackmore on the subject, but was politely rebuffed. I caught a note of exasperation in her e-mail of Nov. 4, 2006: “I am sure you will understand when I say that I am not prepared to talk about NDEs any more. You may have seen on my website that I gave up all my research and media work on the paranormal and related topics many years ago. http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/NS2000.html I am not going back on this. Media treatment of NDEs is (with very few exceptions) appalling. In every case I have been involved in the argument is polarised into ‘Yes/No,’ ‘Life after death/boring science.’ Over 30 years I failed completely to put over the alternative that NDEs are life-changing important experiences that tell us a lot about human nature and are therefore worth researching even though the idea of life after death is daft and entirely without evidence. Having been burned so many times,” she concluded, “I am not going to talk about it any more.”

Another controversial argument has been disavowed by its author, though it remains the favorite of many skeptics. It is this: Near-death experiences are the product of a hallucinating brain. Some scientists argue that the brain under stress creates a sort of organic LSD, triggering the visions, conversations, feelings, and story lines of near-death experiences. The strongest candidate is a neurotransmitter very similar to ketamine. Ketamine was used as an anesthetic on American soldiers during the Vietnam War, but was put on the shelf after they complained of bright lights and floating above their bodies. Dr. Karl Jansen suggested that the brain in distress might create a ketamine-like compound that would produce lights, and a sensation of floating. See K. L. R. Jansen, “The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-methyl-D-asparate Receptor,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 5-26. “It’s pure speculation at this point,” Bruce Greyson noted. “We don’t know of any such compound. It’s never been identified. So there may be a compound like this in the brain that may be produced under stress that may produce these effects. Well, yes, it may be. But if you look at ketamine experiences, they