Are near-death experiences real? Here’s what science has to say. | Dr. Bruce Greyson for Big Think

when i first started looking into near-death experiences back in the late 1970s i assumed that there would be some physiological explanation for that [Music] what i found over the decades was that the various simple explanations we could think of like lack of oxygen drugs given to the people and so forth don't pan out

the data do not support them and furthermore the phenomena of ndes of near-death experiences seem to defy a simple materialistic explanation when we first started presenting this material in medical conferences there will be a polite silence in the audience and now in the 21st century when we do this it's rare that doctors don't stand

up in the audience and say let me share my experience with you so it's pretty well accepted now that these are common experiences that people have all the time and that have profound effects there's still of course a lot of controversy about what causes them but not about the fact that they exist and are fairly common

[Music] i'm bruce grayson i'm a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virginia medical school and i've recently come out with a book called after a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond near-death experiences are profound subjective experiences that many people have when they come close to death or

sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead and they include such difficult to explain phenomena as a sense of leaving the physical body reviewing one's entire life encountering some other entities that aren't physically present and at some point coming to a point of no return beyond which they can continue and still come back to life when they return they