Epoch Times - What Near-Death Experiences Tell Us | Dr. Michael Egnor

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Dec. 5, 2025 - Epoch Times

07:57

What Near-Death Experiences Tell Us | Dr. Michael Egnor

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	In some ways, the paradigmatic near-death experience in modern times.
	That was a Pam Reynolds.
	And then I can talk about the implications of that.
	Pam Reynolds is a woman who, in her mid-30s, was found to have an aneurysm at a major blood vessel at the base of her brain.
	And the aneurysm at the time, this was in 1991, was inoperable through ordinary means and she would die soon from rupture of the aneurysm.
	She came to Phoenix, as it turns out, to Dr. Robert Spetzler, who is a neurosurgeon here in Phoenix, who was the world's expert in aneurysms.
	And he had an operation he called a standstill procedure, which was a very radical procedure for treating certain kinds of aneurysms.
	And the problem with her aneurysm is that it involved the basar artery at the base of her brain, which is a critical artery.
	And the aneurysm was this ballooning, kind of asymmetrical enlargement of the artery that was about to burst.
	And the artery had to be reconstructed.
	But the process of reconstructing the artery could not be done while it had blood flowing through it.
	So there had to be some way to stop the blood flowing through it.
	But if you stop the blood flowing through it, you die.
	So what Spetzler worked out was an operation, and he did it a number of times on Reynolds and other patients, and it was quite successful, where he would put them under anesthesia, open their head, expose a region of the aneurysm, cool their body down to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, put them on a heart-lung machine, stop their heart, raise the head of the bed, drain the blood out of their brain, and he had about 30 minutes to rebuild the artery.
	So we could open the artery, the person was as dead as it gets, and he could then rebuild the artery, and then once the artery was rebuilt, he would then restart their heart, then put them back in a heart-lung machine, restart their heart, warm their body back up, close the operation.
	And so he did this with her.
	During the process, she was heavily monitored, meaning that they had to make sure that her brain was dead, because that actually protected her brain when it was cooled down and everything was stopped, which gave him more time to operate.
	And after her surgery, and she made an excellent recovery, the aneurysm was fixed.
	She said, you know, I watched the whole surgery.
	So he said, you couldn't have watched the whole surgery.
	You were brain dead.
	You were under surgical drapes.
	So she then told him all about the surgery, the details she saw.
	She said that what happened was when her heart stopped, she was a musician.
	She said she heard a natural D, was the way she described it.
	It was like a hum.
	And then all of a sudden she felt that she popped out of her body and she could see her body and she could see the room.
	And she said she went up to the ceiling and she could see everyone there.
	She could see Spetzler.
	She could see the instrument.
	She could see herself, all the other people there.
	And then she hovered over his shoulder and watched him operate on her.
	And she described his instruments to him in some detail, in things that she could not have known unless she was the surgeon in the operating room.
	That is, there are details of the structure of the instruments.
	He had custom-made instruments.
	And she described conversations that he had, word by word, that he was talking about.
	She described issues that arose during the surgery and conversations between doctors.
	She described the music they were playing in the operating room while she was brain dead.
	She said that while she was watching, she then saw a tunnel, and she felt herself being pulled down the tunnel.
	So it was this very pleasant feeling.
	It wasn't like she was being dragged.
	And at the other end of the tunnel, she saw this beautiful world, and she saw, I think it was her grandparents who had passed away.
	And her grandparents told her that it wasn't her time yet, and that she had children to raise, and she had to go back.
	So she went back down the tunnel, and she went back into her body when her heart restarted.
	And she said it was like diving into ice water.
	She said it was extremely unpleasant.
	Which, yeah, it was 60 degrees.
	It was very cold, actually.
	And her near-death experience is undoubtedly the best documented near-death experience in medical history because it was almost an experiment.
	It was almost like a prospective study where they actually did it on purpose.
	Usually when people have near-death experiences, it's chaos.
	They're in a hospital, their heart stops, people are desperately trying to resuscitate them.
	For her, it was all very carefully planned.
	So she became very famous.
	She wrote a book.
	She was on 60 Minutes.
	Spetzler has been interviewed extensively in the press about it.
	He says, I can't explain it.
	He says, you know, she told me what I said, and I don't know how she knew, you know.
	For people who deny the reality of near-death experiences, usually materialists who say it's just brain chemistry, it's some hallucination or something, I have what I call the Pam Reynolds challenge, meaning that it may be that some near-death experiences are hallucinatory experiences or seizures or some kind of thing, but there are four characteristics of many near-death experiences that have to be explained.
	And the first characteristic is that the experiences are very often very clear, very coherent, very detailed.
	People often have a detailed life review during it.
	And brain death doesn't make you better.
	It doesn't make you clear and coherent.
	I mean, I've seen thousands of people who had serious brain problems.
	It doesn't make you think more clearly.
	But near-death experiences are remarkably clear.
	The second characteristic of near-death experiences that warrant an explanation is the out-of-body experience.
	That there are at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people reported in the medical literature who observe things during a near-death experience that they could not have observed in the body.
	You know, they're on a table, people are pumping away on their chest, and they'll see name tags of people on the other side of the room.
	There are people in near-death experiences who see things in distant cities that can be confirmed.
	There's a lot of that.
	So there are out-of-body experiences that are called veridical, meaning that they correspond to confirmed testing.
	The third characteristic of near-death experiences, which I think is absolutely fascinating, is that as far as I know, in all of the literature of near-death experiences in the scientific literature, there's never been a report of somebody who's gone down the proverbial tunnel and seen a living person at the other end of the tunnel.
	The people you encounter on the other side are always dead people.
	And if these were hallucinations or wishful thinking, at least once in a while you would...
	Yeah, once in a while you'd run into your husband or wife who's still living just because you're looking for someone to comfort you.
	And there are well over a dozen reports in the medical literature of people encountering dead people on the other side of the tunnel that they didn't know were dead.
	Either they had died like a couple days before the near-death experience and they hadn't been told of their relatives' death.
	There are situations, several, of people in car accidents where multiple people were injured in the car accident and they're sent to different hospitals.
	And one person will have a near-death experience at a hospital and see another person who was in the car who died at another hospital and they had no way of knowing that they had died, but they don't see the people who lived.
	And the fourth characteristic of near-death experiences is that they are often transformative.
	People are different people afterwards.
	They lose their fear of death.
	They're very different people.
	So any materialist explanation, and the materialist explanations, there are dozens of all kinds of stories that materialists make up.
	Well, it is encephalins or like a brain chemical or it's endorphins, another brain chemical, or it's a seizure, or it's a hallucination, or it's wishful thinking, or whatever.
	You have to explain all four of those things.

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