Exploring the Unusual: A Journey Into the Psychology of the Strange

There are 5 aspects of the near-death experience and the accompanying out-of-body experience (OBE) that are intriguing for three reasons: 1) These experiences are common to most who have gone through the process of dying (as defined by the brain's lack of activity) 2) They are so specific and 3) the reported details are exactly what you would expect if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, but separate from the brain. Near-death experiences are controversial because they are so subjective and one must accept NDE stories without evidence. This is generally not acceptable to a scientist. The hypothesis that consciousness is not dependent on the brain has been put forth for centuries, but here I argue that this hypothesis makes predictions that are witnessed in the shared experiences of NDEs. This does not just support NDEs as a phenomenon that is worthy of scientific study, but also suggests that what near-death experiencers report are grounded in reality, and not just hallucinations.

5 Reasons Near-Death Experiences are Real: Consciousness Survives Death.

She Found The Impossible (Amazing NDE Evidence )

This is Maria’s fascinating story about a near-death experience she had while flatlining in the hospital after a heart attack. She arrived at the ER of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, not expecting that she would come out of her body and watch the medical team try to revive her. According to Kimberly Clark Sharp, her social worker at the time, Maria’s OBE allowed her to float outside the hospital and notice that there was a blue tennis shoe sitting on a ledge outside a third-floor window. Sharp searched for the shoe and found it, apparently validating Maria’s story. Could this finally be a veridical NDE? Do we have proof that NDEs are real due to the fact that Maria saw a shoe during an out-of-body experience that she could not have seen otherwise? Years later, graduate students visited the hospital and attempted to debunk Clark’s story in a paper that they published in the Skeptical Enquirer. Here, I investigate the claims of both Sharp and the students to evaluate whether Maria’s OBE could be verified.