Well, to begin with you would have to start nearly killing people. If it doesn’t happen in a controller environment, the collected data doesn’t mean much.

So I ask the scientifically trained what the real answer is, because obviously I missed something in all the data on NDEs that I’m simply too dense to figure out.

I’m not in the cohort you’re asking, but Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) had an interesting talk on one of his “Tested” Q&A shows about a myth they were testing that dealt with electric shocks to human. I think this is key the nature of your question:

There is no absolute scientific agreed upon “moment of death”.

Sure, if your body is finally burned up in a crematorium there’s no question you are dead, but when did you actually die? Was it from the moment you take your last breath? When your heart stopped? When your brain activity reaches zero? Something else entirely? There is no universal criteria that the entire scientific community agrees upon for the “moment of death”. So with that, this goes to the root of your question about “near death experiences”. How near are they? No one actually knows. So how can any of the reported experiences even be called “near death” to become accepted as legitimate?

Not so! There’s been a lot of research done on near death experiences, many books written by distinguished scientists, over the last 30 years I have followed this field with great interest. The issue is: any phenomenon in NDE is easily explicable. Rather mundane theories suffice to describe what the brain goes through neurologically when they die. To be honest, after reading all the evidence, NDE theories belong in the realm of TCM, astrology, homeopathy and other human constructs: intriguing yet Hokuspokus.

All I can say is that the brain produces DMT when near death, and I have done DMT. Not a ton, but I have.

Until that is properly studied, we can’t know much more about NDEs, in my opinion.

I’m sure DMT is but a small piece of that puzzle, but the feeling (whether real or chemically induced) of being in contact with cognizant entities on DMT is not uncommon.

Personally, I’m an agnostic atheist. I think we are entities that end. But I’m not so stubborn to consider that there is more to reality than what I know.

So I am inclined to dismiss NDEs and the like as being some kind of transcendent contact. Just full disclosure, no disrespect intended.

I don’t know the numbers but I don’t immediately believe that all or most people report these events.

To my knowledge most people report no memory of “being dead”, or only remember what are likely akin to dreams from a wider period of time when they were mostly unconscious but alive.

If my computer’s power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn’t working. I’d consider that an oddity. I wouldn’t say “Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all.”

Hard disagree with that analogy.

You are not “working” as a human just because you have supposed memories of the time when you were dead.

The idea of a soul is very spiritual and links only come up in fields that are not generally deemed well established, therefore the existence of a soul is a different discussion.

While I agree NDEs are interesting, they are really hard to research. As other comments are saying, there’s no controlled environment. Also the only source of information are the people’s memories, there’s no other way to understand their experience, and memories can be very unreliable as every lawyer will be able to tell you. Also consider for a second the idea that every human who shares these experiences is talking about a time where their whole buddy was neither in a normal functioning state, nor even alive. They did come back to, but in that timeframe their brain might as well have produced absolute garbage to fill in gaps of their memory. I wonder how different short and long-term memories are of that same time frame.

If we consider your analogy why not change it. Imagine you run your PC and then your power goes out. Your PC is out for 3 minutes, afterwards it turns back on. It will boot fresh (“wake up”), tell you it knows something’s wrong because it never properly shut down, and maybe some programs will greet you with error messages. I file you wrote at that exact moment not has gibberish in it because encoding errors destroyed the legible parts of it when your PC crashed from the blackout. But would you consider that document a normal representation of what the PC “saw” during the blackout? What it “experienced”?

Of course people with NDEs telling you what they remember can be valuable and interesting, but unless you can validate that from the outside, their memories are first party accounts of their experience at best and “encoding errors” at worst, so taking them at face value with no ability to cross-check is a no-go for scientists.

It’s too much room for subjectivity and wrong inferences, and we already know that when we look of the people associated with the idea of NDEs.

The brain is very good at making sense on nonsense. That’s why pareidolia is a thing. While your brain suffocates, it starts misfunctioning, but die a while there’s still energy going through it, for cereal minutes. When you get resuscitated it tries to make sense of the corrupted data it collected during the time it was “dead” and that’s most likely where those stories come from.

It really does require non scientific information to address.

Consciousness is not fully understood. Without that, anything regarding consciousness is still at least a little unanswerable. You can’t point to when and where consciousness ends if you don’t know what it is, what defines it in the first place. Death isn’t exactly at consensus either.

That means NDEs can’t be pinned down with 100% accuracy yet.

Here’s what I know. Nobody that has had the cells of their brain break down, as in begin decomposition, has ever come back.

So, based on that, I think the NDE experience is going to be based in some kind of brain activity. If the neurons are “melting”, they can’t function if enough of them aren’t melting and you can jump start things again, they weren’t dead at all. That, to me, is the definition of death that matters: if you can come back, it ain’t death.

Considering the general amount of precise experimentation in measuring the brain and body during the process of dying is extremely thin and limited by the very process, I don’t think we have the right tools to measure anything that would “prove” anything about NDEs, only indicate some probabilities.

But those probabilities lean much harder to it being a chemical and/or electrical event.

Now, if you want to bring souls into it, you aren’t dealing with science in the first place because it is currently impossible to even detect whether or not souls exist, it is a matter of faith. It’s essentially impossible to prove they don’t exist, but there’s absolutely nothing ever measured that points to anything resembling credible proof that they do. So souls just don’t matter for NDE discussions in a framework of science. You might as well factor in what granfaloon a person is mixed up with as a soul.

I’m not saying you can’t believe in souls and still attempt science regarding death, just that souls aren’t studyable with science.

Since nothing in any NDE has ever been unique to NDEs, it does make it harder to put faith in them as something other than a physical process. Everything anyone has ever described (at least in any useful setting) as happening has also happened with the influence of drugs, magnetic fields, meditation, or spiritual practices. Probably others my brain isn’t pulling up as well that aren’t under one of those headings, but I think it shows what I mean well enough.

And that point is that if the experiences aren’t different from things you can experience while alive, why would they be useful for determining if the person had died?

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