Why People Believe Weird Things

Near death experiences are purely biological, and can be explained.

It’s a marvel of modern medicine that many people survive severe accidents or life-threatening comas where they technically “die,” but there’s still some mystery: many of these survivors report the same experience. They say they felt they were leaving their body, and moving through a tunnel toward a light.

The similarities between these testimonies are one of the driving forces behind religions, mysticism and spiritualism. But while believers view the accounts as proof of life after death, scientists have found rational explanations for them.

Some hallucinations caused by chemicals are remarkably similar to reports of near death experiences. “Out of body” sensations can be induced by dissociative drugs such as ketamine or LSD. People feel they’re leaving their body, and they might even watch themselves from across the room.

The fact that we have receptors in our brains for these artificially produced chemicals means that our bodies must produce them as well. So we can deduce that near-death out-of-body experiences are probably similar to those that people experience on drugs.

The common vision of the tunnel can also be explained. Many people who’ve experienced this tunnel (and some of those who haven’t) believe it’s a transition between life and death. However, the tunnel isn’t a gate to heaven. We can actually explain it biologically. It’s caused by abnormal cell activity in the visual cortex – the area of the brain where information from the retina is processed.

Hallucinogenic drugs or a lack of oxygen can interfere with the nerve cells in the visual cortex by making them fire at different rates. This produces lines and patterns that move across the cortex. The brain “sees” these patterns as spirals, and then connects this information with the bank of familiar images we store in our memories, to try to understand what they are. The nearest thing we have to these moving spirals is a tunnel – hence all those tunnels to the afterlife.