Near Death Experiences are Like Psychedelic Trips

If you want to write a best-selling book, get on the paid lecture circuit or become a celebrity, have an illness that brings you close to death. Then explain you were at the portal of heaven or talked to Jesus. You can fund your retirement.

For hundreds, maybe thousands, of years people have told others of experiences like this. Every new one is just like all those past. One interesting twist is that atheists have pleasant near death experiences but neither God nor the heave portal show up. What seems to show up for everyone is something they expected to show up. 

Science is now suggesting an explanation for these out of body experiences. There is a substance used by those wanting a "trip" or psychedelic experience that is abbreviated as DMT. Instead of using such people scientists recruited people who were given DMT under controlled circumstances. They then recorded what these people experienced in their minds. What they reported was nearly the same as what those who had near death experiences recalled. 

They also induced heart failure in rats and measured the amounts of DMT in rat brains. They found rats spiked in DMT as they neared death.

If it is true DMT is at the root of these reports of euphoric experiences, there are still questions. Is it actually more DMT or is the there is less of other fluids in the brain? As we approach death we no longer have our brains issuing commands to eat or walk.  So impulses and chemistry in the brain are different. It may be the same amount of DMT and less of everything else.

The DMT does not introduce any new thoughts. It takes thoughts or narratives that people have absorbed and puts a mental spotlight on them. When these are told afterwards to Christians who want to hear their favorite narrative told by someone different than they encounter every day, they buy the book.

While scientists cannot look into people's brains nor measure the chemical makeup of the brain at the nearly dead the DMT idea is an appealing explanation of the nonsense we here from people who were near death but recovered.