The cluster of reported experiences during cardiac arrest or comparable physiological crisis, named by Raymond Moody in Life After Life in 1975 and studied since: the sense of separation from the body, the tunnel and light, the encounter with figures, and the life review in which the subject reports experiencing their own actions from the point of view of the people they affected.
The research position
Prospective hospital studies exist, most influentially Pim van Lommel’s in The Lancet in 2001 and the AWARE work led by Sam Parnia, and they establish that the reports are common, structured and not predicted by medication, oxygen level or duration of arrest. They do not establish that anything left the body, and the physiological accounts, cortical disinhibition, temporal lobe activity, the surge of coherent brain activity observed after cardiac arrest, cover a good deal of the phenomenology.
Why it is in this vault
It is one of the two places where the consciousness turn in the UAP literature acquires an actual research base, the other being the Experiencers work of John E. Mack. The Simulation Hypothesis ends on the life review, arguing that if consciousness is the player rather than the character then the review is a real feature of the system, and draws from that an unexpectedly plain conclusion about being kind to people. Forbidden Science 7 arrives at the same territory from the other side.
Connections
The Simulation Hypothesis · Rizwan Virk · Experiencers · John E. Mack · Forbidden Science 7 · Jacques Vallee · DMT · Christopher Green