No, Sabom needed
external
evidence, something that could be corroborated. He settled on testing out-of-body experiences. Those are the moments before the famous “tunnel” and the white light and the conversations with dead relatives, when the heart has stopped, the patient is comatose, and, as he later claims, he leaves his body and hovers near the ceiling to watch the chaos below as doctors try to resuscitate him. If the patient’s visual description of those events matched what actually occurred on the table, Sabom figured, that would go some distance to proving that a person’s consciousness and identity do not depend on three pounds of tissue called the brain. It might throw a very heavy wrench into the materialists’ position.
Between 1976 and 1981, Sabom conducted what is still considered the most meticulous research on near-death and out-of-body experiences.
1
At the time he was a cardiologist at the University of Florida Health Science Center in Gainesville, and he interviewed every one of his patients who had suffered a cardiac arrest. His sample included others who heard about his study. Of the 116 patients who reported near-death experiences, thirty-two claimed to recall details of their resuscitation during an out-of-body experience. Sabom queried them about their memories, and because he had access to their records, he could check their descriptions against the reports of what actually occurred when they were revived.
Some patients gave descriptions too generic to be of value. But other patients remembered striking details. One man, a security guard, described his collapse in the hospital hallway, the doctors’ attempts to defibrillate him, how they plunged a needle into his heart “like an Az tec Indian ritual,” how they tried to start an IV on his left wrist, but, realizing that hand was broken, switched to the right. The records confirmed this scenario.
Another man described his experience from a few years earlier, when he was caught in a firefight with the Viet Cong. He said he watched from above his body as the enemy soldiers left him for dead, surveying the carnage of his lifeless buddies. He described the Army medics placing him in a body bag, transferring him to the truck and depositing him in the morgue. He watched as they cut off his bloody shorts and made an incision in his left groin, to inject the embalming fluid into his femoral vein. He recalled the relief he felt when the medic noticed he had a pulse and resuscitated him.
“At the end of the interview I said,‘Do you mind if I examine your left groin?’ ” Sabom recalled.“And so he said,‘Sure, that’s fine.’And sure enough, there was a scar right there where they had cut to go into the left femoral vein to go in to embalm him. So that was evidence to me that what he was telling he was not just making up.” Sabom also obtained the medical records, which confirmed this and other details.
A third man, a forty-four-year-old retired Air Force pilot, was transfixed not only by his own resuscitation—he saw them pounding on his chest, breaking a rib, placing a green oxygen mask on him—but also by the machinery. In May 1978, he suffered a massive heart attack. He described the dials on the defibrillator, how the doctor called out the “watt seconds” as a “fixed” needle determined the voltage the doctor wanted, and a “moving” needle told them when the machine was properly charged. The man claimed never to have heard these terms before, nor ever to have seen the procedure on television.
“Couldn’t he have heard the instructions and made a model in his mind?” I asked Sabom.
Not in this case, Sabom said, because auditory clues would not have been enough. “Somebody is not standing there saying, ‘Okay, now watch this one needle as it goes up . . . stops . . . okay now . . .’ That’s not being discussed, it’s just happening. So you either see it, or you don’t know about it, because it’s not verbal information that’s being discussed at the time.”
When conducting his research, Sabom did wonder if the patients might have made educated guesses—based either on their own experience with cardiac resuscitation or on television programs (although it would be a decade before realistic medical dramas took to the airwaves). To check that hypothesis, Sabom conducted a mini-study. He had in hand the interviews with the thirty-two patients who claimed they “watched” their resuscitation from outside their bodies. He then asked twenty-five “control” patients—individuals who had been resuscitated but remained oblivious throughout the procedure—to imagine being revived and tell him what that would look like.
“And twenty-three of the twenty-five [control subjects] made major mistakes in what they were telling me,” he reported.
They muffed details about how the paddles were used, the sequence of steps during the resuscitation, where needles were inserted, how nurses drew blood gases from the wrists. Then he compared those accounts with the descriptions by the people who had claimed to have watched their resuscitation.
“There was just no comparison at all,” he recalled. All in all, the group that claimed to have had out-of-body experiences was spot on. “Again, this is just some evidence to suggest what these people were telling me was coming from a different source of information than from something they knew about already.”
2
A skeptical scientist would likely say that no matter how it is acces sorized with medical reports and tables, Sabom’s research is only a pile of retrospective anecdotes. Therein lies the dilemma: How does a researcher
prove
that consciousness can gallop free, even when the brain is crippled or dead?
It took nearly fifteen years for researchers to arrive at a plan. It needed to be dirt cheap; after all, who would fund this research? And it should have a shot, at least, of building an airtight case that someone had left his body and perceived an object or event that he simply could not have seen otherwise.
I think of this plan as the “squirrel monkey test.” When I was about eight years old, my family owned a squirrel monkey, imaginatively named Monk. One morning, Monk disappeared, and an entire day’s search ended with the primate still missing. In the evening, my mother hatched an idea: Place a grape on the floor of every room, close the doors, and wait for a grape to disappear.Within minutes, the grape in the basement was gone. My brother then replaced the grape and hid behind a chair with the cage. The denouement occurred when Monk emerged to fetch that “target” grape, and the rest is, well, a blur of a leaping boy and a cage snapping shut and a startled monkey clinging to a grape that cost him his freedom.
In similar fashion, near-death-experience researchers decided to place a visual “target” in rooms (such as operating rooms) where people were likely to suffer cardiac arrests. Usually these were hung or placed below the ceiling but above the operating table—somewhere in the line of vision of an out-of-body-experiencer “hovering” near the ceiling. In one study, the target was a large laminated piece of cardboard with a pattern or a word on it that was changed every few days. In another, the researcher hung computer screens that displayed images of words or colors or pastoral scenes, rotating as in a photo gallery. The nurses and doctors who crawled up on a ladder to affix these targets hoped that a traumatized patient in the operating room would report floating above his body as the doctors worked on him, see the target, and then volunteer the information later.Would that not serve as irrefutable proof that the out-of-body experience had occurred? Wouldn’t that prove the monkey was in the basement?
“It was a lot of work,” Penny Sartori told me. Sartori, an intensive-care nurse, religiously rotated targets in the intensive-care unit at Morris-ton Hospital in Swansea (Wales) for five years.
“I had to decide how to do it,” the diminutive thirty-five-year-old said in a lilting cadence. “I had to decide on which signals I was going to use. I had to go to the trouble of getting them laminated. And then when I put them on top of the monitors, every month I’d have to clean them for infection-control purposes, and rotate each to a different bed area. It was a lot of work. And no one actually saw the symbols. So I was very disappointed, yeah.”
Out of five studies conducted in Europe and the United States, not one of the patients spotted the target.
Why, I asked Sartori, did she suppose, no patients spotted them?
“Well, a lot of the patients didn’t float high enough to see the symbol,” she said earnestly.“Some of them floated in directions opposite of where [the targets] were situated. And the patients who were high enough said they were so concerned with what was going on around their immediate body that they weren’t looking anywhere else. I’m sure I’d be the same,” she added, then smiled. “But one man did say to me, if I had known there would be a symbol there, I’d have gone up to it and looked at it and I would have come back and told you what it was.”
A comforting sentiment, that, but no monkey. Not yet, at least.
The White Crow
I realized before I wrote the first word of this book that I would never be able to “prove” that God exists, or that the soul survives death, or even that the universe is an intelligent, caring place. One arrives at those conclusions through personal experience, through an encounter with a dimension of reality that just does not fit Newtonian physics. But as I delved further into the research, I picked up the scent of a provable story: a case that demonstrates that one’s mind can be untethered from the body, and consciousness can fly free of the brain.
Harvard psychologist William James once said,“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough to prove one single crow to be white.”
3
I found my white crow.
On the day I visited Pam Reynolds, the sky sparkled porcelain blue, the last breath of gentle weather before winter took its hold. It was October 30, 2006. I turned onto the gravel road to find a large brown and tan touring bus parked in the driveway. This was Pam’s home. Pam is a musician, owner of Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta, which has recorded the music of Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Matchbox 20, among dozens of other musicians. Her son greeted me at my car cheerfully and opened the pneumatic door to the bus. I climbed the stairs and peered through the dim, smoky room, spotting a kitchenette with the remains of breakfast, a small table, couches lining one side of the bus, with a large-screen TV at the front.
“Hello, hello!” Pam called, a beacon of life in the dark interior. I made my way to the back of the bus. Michael Sabom had discovered Pam’s case and written it up in his book
Light and Death
, but I had no idea what to expect. There, sitting cross-legged on a double bed that filled the back room, sprawled a redhead with shoulder-length hair and a wry smile. The sheets were mussed, as if she had just risen, and she was gamely attempting to tie her sneakers.
She gave up on her shoes, and I noticed she was struggling to breathe as well.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, baby, I’m just fine. A little vertigo.You’re spinning in circles right now. And the adrenaline makes it hard to breathe. It’s a fight-or-flight thing—vertigo telling you you’re gonna fall, and the adrenaline kicks in, makes my heart beat too fast. It’s worse to watch it than experience it.”
Pam relaxed happily on the bed, not eager to move. She was fifty and looked far too young to have five children and four grandchildren. Her hair had turned gray after her near-death experience, she confessed, and now she dyes it reddish brown.
I asked if she ever goes on the road anymore, performing. She said she travels but can’t perform. She gets vertigo, faints easily, walks with a cane. Then we settled at the table by the kitchenette with a cup of tea and she told me about the time she died and came back.
“At twenty-five I was a singer, songwriter, did some production, classical composition,” she began.“I was busily being a mother and doing the suburban thing and working, and I began to experience excruciating headaches.”
They grew worse each year and medication brought no relief. In the summer of 1991, when Pam was thirty-five, she and her husband, Butch, were promoting a new record in Virginia Beach, “and I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I’ve got a big mouth and I never forget how to talk. I forgot how to talk.”
Pam and Butch rushed back to Atlanta. Her neurologist found a basilar artery aneurysm that was smack in the middle of her brain stem, the area that controls basic life functions, such as breathing and swallowing. And the wall of the aneurysm—like a bulge on a tire—was thinning. It was already leaking blood into her brain. As Pam put it, “there was a bomb in my brain that had already begun to explode.”
The doctor suggested she get her affairs in order. But Pam’s mother happened to hear of a “brilliant young man” in Phoenix who had pioneered a remarkable new procedure, and gave him a call. Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler urged Pam to fly out to Arizona. He would perform the surgery for free. Two days later, Pam arrived at the Barrow Neurological Institute early in the morning.
4
By seven-twenty on that August morning in 1991, a team of doctors had wheeled her into the operating room and the anesthesiologist was administering a cocktail of drugs.
Pam then began a surgically driven journey to the edge of life and back, called a “standstill operation.” In the next four hours, Dr. Spetzler, assisted by twenty doctors and nurses, taped Pam’s eyes shut and placed cooling blankets around her body, packing her with ice to put her in a deep freeze. As her body temperature began to plunge, the cardiac surgeon inserted a Swan-Ganz catheter—like a long piece of spaghetti—into her jugular vein and threaded it to her heart, then attached Pam to a heart-lung machine.
When her body dropped to around 80 degrees, Pam’s heart began to falter, at which point the doctors administered massive doses of potassium chloride. This stopped her heart completely, and left her wholly dependent on the machine. Pam’s body temperature continued to plummet.