CrowdScience

BBC World Service

We take your questions about life, Earth and the universe to researchers hunting for answers at the frontiers of knowledge.

Categories: Science & Medicine

Listen to the last episode:

In your final moments, they say, you may walk down a tunnel of light. You might rise above your body, watching the scene below before passing into another world. Perhaps you’ll be met by glowing figures, see your life flash before your eyes, or feel a deep, unearthly calm.

These are the stories of people who’ve reached the edge of death and returned. They’re not rare, nor random, and they have a name: near-death experiences.

CrowdScience listener Steven in Chile first heard of them during a CPR class and wondered, are they fictitious?

Psychologist Susan Blackmore once had an out-of-body experience as a student in Oxford, UK — floating above herself before soaring over the rooftops and dissolving into the universe. That single moment changed everything. She’s spent her career trying to understand what happened, and she believes such experiences are explainable.

At the University of Michigan in the US, neuroscientist Professor Jimo Borjigin has done what few have dared: record the dying brain in action. Her studies show that even after the heart stops, the brain can produce powerful surges of coordinated activity, bursts that might explain the lights, the tunnels, and the sense of peace. She believes near-death experiences could become one of science’s most intriguing scientific frontiers for research into consciousness.

At University College London in the UK, neuroscientist Dr Christopher Timmermann is exploring similar states using psychedelics, pushing the boundaries between self and oblivion to identify what induces a near-death experience and what we can learn about our consciousness along the way.

Near death experiences, a paranormal mystery or explainable phenomenon?

Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Harrison Lewis Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo: Gap in the wall - stock photo Credit: peterschreiber.media via Getty Images)