UK concluded that “only
9 per cent had experiences compatible with
NDEs and 2 per cent
exhibited full awareness
compatible with Out
of Body Experience’s
(OBE’s)
with explicit
recall of ‘seeing’ and
‘hearing’ events?”5 But
do we believe these seeing and hearing events
are hallucinogenic rather than imagined?
Janice Holden answers
these remaining questions by confirming,
“First, these phenomena are rare and elusive. For example,
for my chapter in The
Handbook, I combed
the professional literature through 2006 and
could find only a little
over 100 cases. Second,
I have conducted two of
the six studies, and one
of the many challenges
is to find a target of a
nature and in a location
that the NDEr would (a)
be able to perceive, (b)
would notice, and (c)
8
would remember, and
also have evidence that
the NDEr perceived it
while they were well
past cardiac arrest
but not yet resuscitated. Until recently, we
believed that our best
hope was in a multihospital study, but Sam
Parnia’s study has so
far not yielded a clear
case. As to whether
these failed attempts
mean that veridical
perception does not
exist: It might. On the
other hand, as illustrated in my chapter in
The Handbook, several independently verified anecdotal accounts
exist, which suggests
that the phenomenon
may simply be rare and
elusive. A very rare
phenomenon that has
not yet been observed
under controlled conditions may be assumed
not to exist--or may be
assumed to exist but be
very difficult to capture.
For now, the question