Near Death Experiences and Out Of Body Experiences

Around one in five people who are declared clinically dead (because their heart has stopped beating) but who are then revived (resuscitated) report some kind of 'Near Death Experience'. Often this involves the sensation of leaving their body, and these 'Out Of Body Experiences' can occur at other times. NDEs often involve a tunnel with a bright light at the end, a feeling of intense calm, reduced fear of death, increased belief in an afterlife, a 'life review' and meetings with dead loved-ones and religious figures.

Most psychologists explain these as interpretations of hallucinations created by changes in the brain as it is starved of oxygen. Your textbook gives quite a lot of detail on this - you don't need to know this much but a couple of examples would be useful. Believers in an 'immortal soul' - the idea that 'we' continue to exist once our body is dead - point to NDEs and OOBEs, especially when they involve people seeing and hearing things that they otherwise couldn't have - as strong evidence for these beliefs.

Make sure you can describe the case study of Maria's 'tennis shoe' OOBE and the criticism of this as a piece of evidence. Read about this in detail here.

Here is an article in the Daily Mail about a very recent piece of scientific research into NDEs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-89926/Scientists-discover-near-death-evidence.html
These researchers claim that the fact not all the patients who were clinically dead then revived which they studied had NDEs is evidence that the explanation was not physiological, and instead supports the idea of an immortal soul.

You should also be able to describe Ehrsson's research (in your textbook) into artificially induced OOBEs - the point here is that the sense that we are inside our own bodies is actually created by the brain. This research suggests that it isn't that surprising that people can have a vivid experience of leaving their bodies when their brain is undergoing big changes.