Getting Comfortable With Near-Death Experiences: Dutch Prospective Research on Near-Death Experiences During Cardiac Arrest.

In Dutch prospective studies on near-death experiences (NDE) in survivors of cardiac arrest, 18% of the 344 included patients reported such an experience of enhanced consciousness during the period of unconsciousness, during clinical death, during a transient functional loss of the cortex and the brainstem. An NDE seems to be an authentic experience which cannot be simply reduced to oxygen deficiency, imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, or the use of drugs, and people appear to be permanently changed by an NDE during a cardiac arrest of only several minutes duration.