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NDEs reflected three of these components related to perception and consciousness, religion and ceremony, disease state, and drug preparation.
Again, ketamine had the greatest overlap with NDEs in this type of analysis. The famous hallucinogen LSD was as similar as ketamine to NDEs when the near-death event was caused by cardiac arrest. DMT is a hallucinogen found in South American plants and used in shamanistic rituals. It is not known, however, whether levels of DMT change in a meaningful way in the human brain near death, so its role in the phenomenon remain controversial. This study has significant weaknesses because it is based on purely subjective reports—some taken decades after the event.
Similarly, there is no way to substantiate the accounts in the Erowid collection as there is no way to prove that any individual took the drug they claimed or believed they were taking.
This makes it all the more remarkable that a linguistic analysis of stories derived in this manner could discriminate among different drug classes in their similarities to NDEs. Linking near-death experiences and the experience of taking ketamine is provocative yet it is far from conclusive that both are because of the same chemical events in the brain.
The types of studies needed to demonstrate this hypothesis, such as measuring neurochemical changes in the critically ill, would be both technically and ethically challenging. The authors propose, however, a practical application of this relation. Those benefits need to be weighed against the risks of potential ketamine side effects, which include feelings of panic or extreme anxiety, effects that could defeat the purpose of the intervention. More important, this study helps describe the psychological manifestations of dying.
That knowledge may ultimately contribute more to alleviating fear of this inevitable transition than a dose of any drug. Robert Martone is a research scientist with expertise in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking and translating Renaissance Italian literature. Already a subscriber?
Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. But it is not a drug without risks. Ayahuasca could trigger issues in those who are predisposed to mental health problems and four years ago, a year-old British backpacker died following an ayahuasca ceremony. Human trials involving illegal drugs demand a strict ethical and regulatory framework and the express permission of the Home Office.
Imperial College's Psychedelic Research Group has consistently met the requirements for such trials. They are recording the effects of the drug in new ways, thanks to advancements in brain mapping technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI.
Iona describes some of this "disorder" as feeling detached from her body and says she quickly found she was experiencing a strange, unfamiliar detachment from her sense of self too. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling.
Iona struggles to put into words exactly what she experienced. But towards the end of the test, she remembers an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that she had survived and a strange sense of reassurance.
Ego death is like being awake and having no sense of personal identity. The dose of DMT used in the study is a tiny fraction of the toxic dose — so participants were not on the verge of death, even when they felt they were.
This feeling, known as "ego death", has been reported by many people experiencing intense psychedelic experiences. It can be described as a total loss of a sense of self which happens to the subject while they're still conscious, according to Chris's fellow researcher Robin Carhart-Harris.
He says it's like being awake and having no sense of personal identity. It may not be like dying at all. Clearly, nobody who's actually died can ever come back to tell the tale. Moody studied 50 people who experienced 'clinical death' but were subsequently revived, identifying common elements: a bright light, a sense of detachment from the body, feelings of security and warmth and encounters with spiritual beings such as angels. In the years since, the study of brain activity at the point of death has been an area of scientific interest, with findings suggesting unusual biological processes seem to take place — although none of these studies has provided any evidence of an afterlife.
Eben wrote a book called Proof of Heaven, which described a quasi-celestial encounter with millions of butterflies and a vision of his late sister — arising from a bout of bacterial meningitis. To this day, Eben defends his NDE claim, saying there is no scientific explanation for his experiences, which he says should not have been possible due to the level of impairment of his brain function.
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