Tunnel Visions

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Tunnel Visions

by Anita Bartholomew

In the summer of 1991, Pam Reynolds learned she had a life-threatening
aneurysm (a bulge in an artery) in her brain.

Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, M.D., director of the Barrow
Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, told the then 35-year-old
Atlanta, Georgia, mother of three that, in order to operate on her, he
would have to stop her heart. Once the delicate procedure was
completed, he would revive her again.

By all known measures, she would be dead until resuscitated.

Under anesthesia, leads from a machine that emitted a clicking sound
were plugged into her ears. When her brain stem no longer responded to
the sound, the machine would alert the surgical team that all lower
brain functions had ceased. Electrodes from the EEG to her scalp
performed the same task regarding higher brain functions. Numerous
other instruments tracked heart, temperature, breathing, and other
vital signs. Her limbs were restrained; her eyes were lubricated, then
taped shut.

Spetzler powered up the surgical saw to open her skull. At that point,
something odd occurred that never registered on the sophisticated
monitoring devices. "I popped out the top of my head," Reynolds
claims.

It seemed to her as if she were watching the activity in the scrowded
operating room from a vantage point just above Spetzler's shoulders.
Spetzler held something that looked like an electric toothbrush. A
female voice complained that the patient's blood vessels were too
small. It appeared to Reynolds as if they were about to operate on
her groin.

That couldn't be right, Reynolds recalls thinking. This was brain
surgery. With ears plugged and eyes taped, there was no possibility
of her hearing or seeing anything via ordinary senses.

Reynolds assumed that whatever they were doing inside her skull had
triggered a weird hallucination. What she couldn't know is that
everything she saw and heard was actually happening.

The surgical saw resembled an electric toothbrush.

A female cardiovascular surgeon had indeed spoken of difficulty with
Reynolds's small blood vessels.

And surgeons in the operating theater were inserting catheters in her
groin which, threaded up to her heart, connected to the heart-lung
machine.

Spetzler gave the order to bring Reynolds to "standstill." Her blood
was siphoned into the heart-lung machine where it was cooled to 60
degrees Fahrenheit, then pumped back into her body. Intravenous
potassium chloride stopped her heart's last spasms; the EKG flatlined.
Higher brain activity ceased; the EEG flatlined. Lower brain
activity stopped; the electrogram connected to the plugs in her ears
flatlined. Doctors then drained her blood into the heart-lung machine.
This caused the bulging aneurysm to collapse, allowing Spetzler to
snip away the damaged portion of the artery.

By every reading of every instrument, the life had left Reynolds's
body. Yet, she was not without consciousness. Instead, her odd
experience intensified.

She found herself traveling down a tunnel toward a light. At its end,
waited her long-dead grandmother and other relatives.

Time seemed to stop. Then an uncle led her back to her body and
instructed her to return. Reynolds recalls that it felt like plunging
into a pool of ice water.

As she came to, Reynolds told Spetzler about her hallucination.

Is that what it was? Or did some non-physical part of her — spirit,
consciousness, essence —uncouple from her body and go traveling?

Reality or illusion?
In recent years, medical advances have allowed doctors to resuscitate
clinically dead people who, in other times, would have been
irretrievably lost. What nobody could have anticipated is that a
surprising number come back with tales of near-death experiences
(NDEs) such as the one reported by Pam Reynolds. Out-of-body
experiences, travels down tunnels and visits with deceased loved ones
are common manifestations, although not all experiencers report all
components.

At first, virtually all doctors brushed off such reports. Everything
they knew of medicine told them their patients had to be confused,
first, about what happened to them and second, about when it happened.
The only rational explanation for the NDE was hallucination, brought
on by changes in the brain. Further, the only time the patient could
have created such a fantasy was when the brain still maintained some
function, however impaired. Once flatlined, the brain would be roughly
analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its
circuits detached. It couldn't do anything at all — not even dream.

But Pam Reynolds is one case that's made some scientists wonder.
Reynolds's brain was monitored during every moment of her procedure,
providing information that was never available to researchers studying
other NDEs. She couldn't possibly have seen and heard through ordinary
means. Further, she reported her experience immediately upon
awakening, so she couldn't have guessed what happened in the operating
room through clues she picked up later on.

Cardiologist and NDE researcher Michael Sabom, M.D. compared what
Reynolds claims she saw and heard with Spetzler's surgical transcript.

During the period she experienced the tunnel, "She met all clinical
criteria for death," according to Sabom. "She had no brain activity.
She had no blood in her body. She had no vital signs at all. So, is
this death? And if it is death, what was this experience that happened
while she was in this state?"

I wondered if Reynolds' experience might have been triggered by the
surgery, which, after all, involved poking around in her brain. But
Reynolds' neurosurgeon, Robert Spetzler said no — at that moment,
there was no working brain in which anyone could trigger anything.
"The brain waves were completely gone," he explained. "If you examine
this patient with any of our techniques that we would normally use,
EEG, pulse monitor, that patient would be dead… It's almost impossible
to conceive that you would perceive through the brain itself what she
has observed."

Yet Spetzler has no better explanation. "To me it's completely
perplexing. But I'm not arrogant enough, having seen so many things
that I cannot understand and dealing with the brain day in and day
out, to say that something isn't possible."

British researcher Susan Blackmore, Ph.D., has made a career of
debunking experiences like the NDE so I wanted to know what she made
of Pam Reynolds's NDE.

"If the case you describe is true," Blackmore responded via email,
"the whole of science would need rewriting."

Blackmore, however, assumes the account isn't accurate. Citing 30
years of research into all manner of paranormal claims, she says that,
in every earlier case she investigated, the evidence simply wasn't
there or she found another explanation. "I can only say that my
expectation ... is that this case did not happen like that."

In her book about NDEs, "Dying to Live," Blackmore pointed out that
aspects of the near-death experience, including the tunnel and
out-of-body experiences, can be and repeatedly have been induced by
strictly physiological events. During brain surgery, for instance,
under local anesthetic, patients sometimes report seeing things from
an "out-of-body" perspective. Blackmore herself had an out-of-body
experience after taking the drug ketamine (Special K), which she
chalks up to vivid hallucination. Others have reported similar
experiences under the influence of LSD, opium, hashish and anesthetic
drugs.

In "Dying to Live," Blackmore points out that the brain is awash with
its own opiate-like substances, called endorphins, during periods of
stress. She contends that all evidence leads to the conclusion that
out-of-body experiences and all other components of NDEs, no matter
how real they seem, begin and end in a misfiring brain. Still, that
doesn't explain how Reynolds could have retained consciousness with no
brain function at all.

"It's not really me; it's just my body."
Dr. Barbara Rommer, M.D., an internist in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
first encountered a patient who had an NDE during her residency in the
early 1970s. Since then, she has interviewed more than 300 people who
reported having near-death experiences. Although her view doesn't fit
that of peers in the medical profession, these interviews convinced
her that there is something more, something that lives on after we
die.

"As I was interviewing these people, they wanted to speak to other
people who had had the same experience, " she says. In response, she
began a monthly support group for people who have had NDEs, one of the
largest such groups in the world.

On an early November evening, I play fly-on-the-wall as dozens of
ordinary-looking, mostly middle-aged men and women trail in to the
support group to share their stories and ponder what, for many of
them, was a life-altering spiritual journey.

Robert Millman's heart stopped during a heart attack: "The pain was
gone. I was suspended over my body. I was looking at myself, actually
laying on the gurney and they were putting paddles on me." He says his
brush with death made him more giving after a lifetime of selfishness.

Plump, animated Hedy Cushman, who nearly died during a cesarean
section, recalls meeting with a panel of celestial judges: "They
started to talk to me and they said, 'We're sending you back because
you haven't learned your lessons in life.'"

Soft-spoken technology entrepreneur Ken Amick tells of having an NDE
after an allergic reaction caused him to stop breathing and turn blue.
"I could see in color. I could hear. I could feel emotions like
fear, like relief." He pauses, as if experiencing it again. "So,
what's that blue thing lying on the table? That's me. I know that's
me. It scares me to look at it. But it's not really me; it's just my
body."

Rommer says that members of this group find comfort in knowing they're
not alone — and they're not crazy — especially since acquaintances,
family and friends often greet reports of NDEs with skepticism or even
ridicule.

With new evidence come new theories
While most researchers wouldn't be caught dead uttering the word
"soul," some find the brain-based theories of NDEs inadequate to
explain the phenomena. They speculate that NDEs may be evidence, not
of an afterlife, but something just as stunning: that consciousness
can exist apart from the brain.

In a study published in December 2001 in the British medical journal,
The Lancet, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, M.D., recounts the NDE
of a clinically dead, 44-year-old cardiac arrest victim. He was rushed
by ambulance to a hospital where doctors re-started his heart with
defibrillators. A nurse removed the man's dentures so a breathing tube
could be inserted in his throat. Once stable, the man was moved to
intensive care.

A week later, the man saw the nurse who had removed his false teeth.
And he recognized her, although during their only prior encounter, his
condition had ranged from clinical death to coma.

"You took my dentures out of my mouth," he told the nurse, accurately
describing other details he claimed his disembodied self viewed while
floating above.

Cardiologist van Lommel and his fellow researchers interviewed this
man and 343 others whose hearts had arrested — every patient in each
of ten Dutch hospital who had suffered cardiac arrest and had survived
— in an attempt to gauge the frequency of NDEs. Strictly brain-based
NDE explanations don't appear to apply to the findings. That's
because, as van Lommel explains, when the heart stops pumping
oxygen-rich blood to the brain, the brain stops working within
seconds. "We know that all the patients who had a cardiac arrest
because of myocardial infarction must have had flatline," says van
Lommel. These patients weren't simply unconscious; their brains were,
to return to the computer analogy, temporarily "unplugged."

Yet, in this state where nothing physiological or psychological could
happen by any known mechanism, "Eighteen percent have a story of a
very clear consciousness," van Lommel says.

The patients in van Lommel's study described everything from a general
feeling of peace to full-fledged NDEs. A smaller study done by British
researchers at Southampton General Hospital, and published in the
journal, Resuscitation, found more than 11 percent of those
resuscitated after cardiac arrest reported NDEs.

These findings suggest to van Lommel that consciousness can exist in
the absence of brain activity.

"You can compare the brain with a TV set," says van Lommel. "The TV
program is not in your TV set."

So where is consciousness? Is it in every cell of the body?

Van Lommel says he believes it is, explaining that, each second, tens
of thousands of cells die and this intensive cell turnover means that,
eventually, almost all the cells that make up "me" or "you" are new.
And yet, we don't perceive ourselves as being any different than what
we always were. To van Lommel, it follows that, "There must be a kind
of communication between all our cells."

But if the death of consciousness can occur later than the death of
the brain, what does that mean in practical terms? Should we re-think
the harvesting of organs for transplant from the "brain-dead"?

And the theory, however intriguing, doesn't address the most puzzling
aspect of the NDE: what, if anything, leaves the body? Is this merely
illusion, created by the remnants of consciousness? Or is there
another piece to the puzzle, something that survives death?

The questions raised by the NDE have scientists, theologians and
ordinary citizens groping for answers. It does not fit into our
rational view of life, death and consciousness. And yet, we will have
to make peace with our uncertainty. Because, as medical science
advances, more of those who would have died in earlier times will be
resuscitated. And more will come back with such stories.

NOTE: A different version of this story was published in the Reader’s Digest

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