Romand Raymond, Ehret Günter
Faculty of Medicine, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
Institute of Neurobiology, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 18;13:846159. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.846159. eCollection 2022.
Near-death experiences (NDEs) including out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have been fascinating phenomena of perception both for affected persons and for communities in science and medicine. Modern progress in the recording of changing brain functions during the time between clinical death and brain death opened the perspective to address and understand the generation of NDEs in brain states of altered consciousness. Changes of consciousness can experimentally be induced in well-controlled clinical or laboratory settings. Reports of the persons having experienced the changes can inform about the similarity of the experiences with those from original NDEs. Thus, we collected neuro-functional models of NDEs including OBEs with experimental backgrounds of drug consumption, epilepsy, brain stimulation, and ischemic stress, and included so far largely unappreciated data from fighter pilot tests under gravitational stress generating cephalic nervous system ischemia. Since we found a large overlap of NDE themes or topics from original NDE reports with those from neuro-functional NDE models, we can state that, collectively, the models offer scientifically appropriate causal explanations for the occurrence of NDEs. The generation of OBEs, one of the NDE themes, can be localized in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of the brain, a multimodal association area. The evaluated literature suggests that NDEs may emerge as hallucination-like phenomena from a brain in altered states of consciousness (ASCs).
濒死体验（NDEs）包括离体体验（OBEs），对于经历者以及科学界和医学界来说，一直都是引人入胜的感知现象。在临床死亡到脑死亡期间记录大脑功能变化方面的现代进展，为探讨和理解意识改变状态下大脑中濒死体验的产生开辟了前景。意识的改变可以在严格控制的临床或实验室环境中通过实验诱导产生。经历这些变化的人的报告可以说明这些体验与原始濒死体验的相似性。因此，我们收集了包括离体体验在内的濒死体验的神经功能模型，其具有药物使用、癫痫、脑刺激和缺血应激等实验背景，并且纳入了迄今为止在重力应激导致头部神经系统缺血的情况下战斗机飞行员测试中大量未被重视的数据。由于我们发现原始濒死体验报告中的濒死体验主题或话题与神经功能濒死体验模型中的主题或话题有很大重叠，我们可以说，总体而言，这些模型为濒死体验的发生提供了科学合理的因果解释。离体体验作为濒死体验的主题之一，其产生可能定位于大脑的颞顶联合区（TPJ），这是一个多模态联合区域。评估的文献表明，濒死体验可能是意识改变状态（ASCs）下大脑产生的类似幻觉的现象。
