Here’s Why No Near Death Experience Can Ever Convince a Skeptic
It’s not the experience we doubt. It’s your brain.
My girlfriend and I watched Netflix’s documentary series “Surviving Death” a few months back. It was a decent six-part tour of all the various sorts of (inadvertent) quackery that pervades the sort of after-hours, hushed-tone conversations that many of us are wont to have.
What about life after death? What about reincarnation? What about kids who remember their past lives? What about haunted houses? Yeah, sure, most are fake — but there’s that one, isn’t there? Could be true, couldn’t it?
One of the most prolific topics of this sort of conversation is the near-death experience, or NDE.
You know the sort I’m talking about: middle-aged woman goes in for heart surgery after a string of cardiac events. It’s routine, but it goes wrong: her heart stops during the op. She feels something change; she is floating out of her body, above the table now, looking down on the doctors as they operate. They put the scalpel there, they pick up that piece of equipment, they say Oh my gosh this is terrible! to the nurse who is standing on their left.
The whole time, a feeling of bliss and utterly transcendent happiness is washing over her — perhaps even accompanies with…
