Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States.

The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.)

Many patients reported that they had Near death experiences NDE. Doctors were able to bring some heart attack patients back from the dead.

Some reported Seven flavors of death.

50% of the of those who had the NDE could recall something they saw.

dream-like or hallucinatory scenarios that doctors categorized into seven major themes Those seven themes were:

– Fear , Seeing animals or plants , Bright light, Violence and persecution ,Deja-vu ,Seeing family , Recalling events post-cardiac arrest

These mental experiences ranged from terrifying to blissful. There were those who reported feeling afraid or suffering persecution, for example some patients said , “I had to get through a ceremony, and the ceremony was to get burned,” one patient recalled. “There were four men with me, and whichever lied would die .I saw men in coffins being buried upright.” Another remembered being “dragged through deep water”, and still another was “told I was going to die and the quickest way was to say the last short word I could remember”. Others, however, experienced the opposite sensation, with  “a feeling of peace or pleasantness”. Some saw living things: “All plants, no flowers” or “lions and tigers”; while others basked in the glow of “a brilliant light” or were reunited with family. Some, meanwhile, reported a strong sense of deja-vu: “I felt like I knew what people were going to do before they did it”. Heightened senses, a distorted perception of the passage of time and a feeling of disconnection from the body were also common sensations that survivors reported.

 Doctors also points out  from many studies that it’s very likely that more people have near-death experiences than the study numbers reflect. For many people, memories are almost certainly wiped away by the massive brain swelling that occurs following cardiac arrest, or by strong sedatives administered at the hospital.Even if people do not explicitly recall their experience of death, however, it could affect them on a subconscious level.

Doctors  hypothesizes that this might help explain the wildly different reactions cardiac arrest patients often have following their recovery: some become unafraid of death and adopt a more altruistic approach to life, whereas others develop PTSD. 

To some people, this is simply further evidence that the mind must be able to exist independently of the body—or else where does it go when the brain is dead? To materialists, it is evidence of the opposite: the mind doesn’t “go” anywhere, any more than the image from a slide projector goes somewhere when you switch the projector off. Rather, it shows that the mind and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain, knitted together somehow by all the physical and chemical processes in our nervous system.