Jeremy Renner and the science of extraordinary experiences with near-deather

A little more than two years ago, the actor Jeremy Renner was run over A seven tons of snow plow. In a new memoir he wrote that he, while he was almost dead, experienced something extraordinary.

He could see his entire life at the same time and felt a “exciting peace” and a connection with the world. He also saw family and friends prepared for him and told him not to let go.

“What I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Mr. Renner wrote. “There was no time, place or space, and nothing to see, except for a kind of electric, two-way vision made of strands of that unthinkable energy, such as the lashes of the rear lights photographed by a time-lapse camera.”

What Mr Renner described is ‘classic for near-death experiences’, the term researchers use for such events, Dr. Jeffrey Long, the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.

Dr. Long’s Foundation has collected more than 4,000 accounts that are comparable to Mr Renner. Some people who got close to death have told a sense of energy, peace and absence of time, as Mr Renner did. Some have also described to view their body from above, by moving a tunnel to a light and even god.

The general public is perhaps familiar with these events by a genre of memoirs that present near-death experiences as proof of a Christian afterlife. But they have been reported about countries, demography and religions, as well as by atheists, and have been A subject of scientific research Decades long.

There is no scientific consensus about what causes near-death experiences. But whatever their business is, they can change people’s lives. Some lose all death; Others change career or leave relationships behind. The reactions to experiences almost seem to exceed what researchers have seen in people who almost die but do not have such an experience.

For those people: “Usually it is, yes, you almost died, so you become more appreciation for life,” said Marieta Pehlivanova, a research assistant professor of psychiatry and neuro behavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, He investigates near-death experiences.

But, Dr. Pehlivanova said: “The changes we see with these people who almost died but had no NDE are much more subtle and do not go on so long.”

Why do these experiences happen?

Near-death experiences are difficult to study because the catastrophic injuries and diseases that can lead do not lend themselves to controlled experiments. But neuroscientists have proposed a series of theories about what causes them, and many believe that the experiences arise from a complex cascade of neurological and physiological processes.

In a paper Published in MarchSeven researchers suggested an explanation of those near-death experiences associated with an eruption of brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, and an activation of specific receptors in the brain that produces a feeling of calm and lively images. The newspaper also states that near-death experiences can occur when partially conscious people go through aspects of sleep of fast eye movements, that is when the most robust and complex dreams take place.

The theories of other scientists are one that includes the same neural receptors that facilitate the effects of ketamine.

Another suggests that aspects of NDEs can arise from dysfunction in the field of the brain responsible for combining sights, sounds, movement and our innate feeling of where we are in a single sensory experience.

That could explain one of the most curious parts of near-death experiences: that some people later say that they have looked at their bodies from above and are able to describe details about what happened around them that it seems like they should not know.

Dr. Kevin Nelson, a professor in neurology at the University of Kentucky, who was the author of the March study, noticed that people might even hear if they apparently do not respond, and that patients were often open during resuscitation efforts.

So in real time they can sound and sound, but because their brains are disturbed by a lack of blood flow, they remember it from a perspective above their body.

Processing a life -changing experience

Some researchers and a large number of people who have had near-death experiences that none of the proposed scientific statements can explain all elements, and that these experiences are real encounters with an afterlife.

That idea is an anathema for many neuroscientists for whom a fundamental prescription that comes from the brain comes from the brain.

“Faith and science often get confused about this subject, partly because it has such a profound emotional valence,” Dr. Nelson. But he added: “There is no scientific evidence that we can have human experience outside the brain.”

But Dr. Long, whose medical training and practice are in radiation oncology believes that people’s consciousness leaves their bodies during near-death experiences in a way that neurosciences cannot explain. He is particularly convinced that science cannot explain the accuracy and details of what patients have seen and heard from outside their bodies.

Dr. Pehlivanova and her colleagues from the Institute of the University of Virginia also believe that the experiences can entail a real separation between consciousness and the brain, although they have not rejected the possibility of neurological or physiological statements.

Dr. Bruce Greyson, an emeritus professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences in that institute, has been studying near-death experiences for 50 years. Nowadays he is not focused on causes, but on how medical professionals can best help through these experiences they have experienced what they have experienced.

Doctors and nurses are usually the first people for whom patients describe their experiences, hoping to get some perspective, “Dr. Greyson. And sometimes those professionals react negatively.

“For almost all near-death experiences, they consider this one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, that happened in their lives,” he said. “And although it may not seem consistent for the care provider, it is not at all for the experience.”