“I didn't know who or what I was or even if I was.  I was simply there, a singular awareness in the midst of a soupy, dark, muddy nothingness. How could I not realize that on earth I was a doctor, husband and father? I was in a position similar to that of someone with partial but beneficial amnesia. That is, a person who has forgotten some key aspect about him or herself, but who benefits from having forgotten it. I had come from nowhere and had no history, so I fully accepted my circumstances… And because I so completely forgot my mortal identity, I was granted full access to the true cosmic being I really am.”

Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and author

I know this sounds right out of some mystical, supernatural textbook but believe me when I say this is a verbatim account of famous American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who worked at Harvard Medical Facility for over 15 years and is also New York Times Best Seller author. Eben Alexander was suffering from bacterial meningitis, a extremely rare disease and was put under a medically induced coma for this own safety. It was during this coma that he is said to have experienced what the medical community terms as a Near Death Experience (NDE).

The term near-death experience (NDE) was coined by philosopher Raymond Moody more than 40 years ago. NDEs typically occur in truly life-threatening situations such as cardiac arrest, traumatic injury, intracerebral hemorrhage, nearly drowning, or asphyxia. The descriptions usually include feeling a sense of joy, peace, and love; the detachment from own physical body (out-of-body experiences), travelling along a region of darkness toward a light at the end, visions and communications with deceased relatives and friends or “beings of light”. 90% people who experience NDE also describe an altered perception of time while in the mystical realm, reporting that everything seemed to be happening at once, or that time lost all its meaning.

NDEs are measured by NDE rating scale (Greyson 1983) which consists of several measurements, resulting in a total score representing the global intensity of the experience as well as scores for four subscales: Cognitive, Affective, Transcendental, Paranormal. A total score higher or equal to 7 is considered the threshold for a NDE.

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris was someone particularly interested in NDE, especially its relation with a drug DMT. Professor and Head of department of Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, he was conducting research on defamed psychedelic DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) which belongs to a class of serotonergic (serotonin-affecting) psychedelics that also includes Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and Psilocybin. Amazonian tribes routinely consume ayahuasca (‘the wine of the soul’), a brew made from leaves of P. viridis plant which have been shown to contain DMT.

Unlike other psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, DMT is also endogenously produced in animals including humans. DMT has also been found in small amounts in human brain tissue and larger amounts in cerebrospinal fluid, a clear fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

He, while conducting the research on DMT noticed that descriptions of drug-induced experience by users of the drug closely matched descriptions by people who had experienced Near Death Experience (NDE). ​​Evidence from studies involving DMT has repeatedly shown that the experience of ego dissolution (i.e., a disruption of ego-boundaries which leads to a partial or complete blurring of the distinction between the self and the rest of the environment), a feeling of transcending one’s body and entering into an alternative ‘realm’, perception of a high pitched ‘whining/whirring’ sound, perceiving and communicating with ‘presences’ or ‘entities’, plus reflections on death, dying and the after-life.

Dr. Robin and his team at Imperial College London took thirteen healthy volunteers participants to participate in a placebo-controlled study aimed to directly measure the extent to which intravenous DMT given to healthy volunteers in a laboratory setting could induce a near-dear type experience as determined by a standard NDE rating scale (Greyson, 1983). An important part of the study was to address how these experiences compared with a sample of individuals who claim to have had ‘actual’ near-death experiences.

Participants were enrolled for 2 dosing sessions in which placebo (i.e. nothing) and DMT were administered. During the first dosing session, all participants received placebo (i.e. nothing), and 1 week later, DMT. Participants were unaware of the order in which placebo and DMT were administered. The order was fixed in this way to promote safety by developing familiarity with the research team and environment prior to receiving DMT, and to avoid potential carry over effects from receiving DMT first.

Following each dosing sessions, participants completed questionnaires enquiring about subjective experiences during the DMT and placebo sessions. The Greyson NDE scale served as the primary outcome measure.

When these DMT data were compared with those from a matched sample of ‘actual’ NDEs, a comparable profile was evident. Not to Dr. Robin’s surprise, all participants scored above the conventional cutoff (above or equal to 7) for a (DMT-induced) near-death experience. To add to this, no significant differences were found between DMT administration and ‘actual’ NDEs.

Subtle differences that were apparent between the DMT condition and ‘actual’ NDEs may be explainable by the very different contexts in which these experiences occur (e.g., DMT was given here with prior screening, psychological preparation and consent in a safe laboratory setting vs. an NDE occuring during an illness or unexpected accident) as much as differences due to the inducers themselves or their associated neurobiologies.

Dr. Robin’s hypothesis is that the brain releases a rush of DMT at death. After all, DMT is proven to be found in our brain too.
Similar study in University of Michigan witnessed this happen in rats. They directly measured brain levels of DMT as rats suffered cardiac arrest and saw the substance spike up to ten times above baseline levels, enough to trigger psychedelic effects. If a similar increase also occurs in human it might just account for NDEs and vivid dreaming near death.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, who oversaw the study said: “These findings are important as they remind us that near-death experiences occur because of significant changes in the way the brain is working, not because of something beyond the brain.”

So just a small hit of brain-produced DMT could make our final minutes on Earth a psychedelic adventure.

“I’d be scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared of dying, I guess. Of falling into the void.”
“They say you fly when you die.”
- Feature film: ‘Enter the Void’