Near-Death Experience…or Psychedelic Trip?

Photo credit: natasaadzic

Photo credit: natasaadzic

Photo credit: natasaadzic

From Popular Mechanics

You feel yourself rising out of your body…calm and distant, traveling through the darkness towards a light. You feel, for a moment, enlightened, fully awake. Later you come back to the rude reality of consciousness, life. People who undergo near-death experiences often report a similar narrative. And, it turns out, they’re not the only ones. According to a new study from the Imperial College London (ICL), users who take DMT, an intensive psychedelic drug, often seem to experience the same thing.

According to the research, DMT can also produce mystical experiences that users describe as “realer than real,” much like near-death experiences. For the study, 13 participants underwent two trials separated a week. In one trial, they received a placebo saline injection. In another, an injection of DMT. The research subjects completed a questionnaire after their psychedelic experiences. The questionnaire, called the Near Death Scale, was created in 1983 to validate near-death experiences.

Their responses showed strong correspondence to reports from the scale, and also compared favorably with answers from a set of participants that underwent actual near-death experiences. In particular, DMT users and those who grazed death both reported mystical feelings of being “at one” with the world around oneself.

“This study provides initial evidence linking these altered states of consciousness and grounds them similarly in terms of changes in brain activity,” Chris Timmermann, the lead author of the study, told Wired. Does this mean that a spiritual, often life-changing encounter with death could potentially be replicated with a drug? What does this suggest about the spiritual dimensions of near-death experiences? While the study can’t speak on claims about these experiences as proof of the afterlife, Timmermann says, “we can certainly ground such experiences in terms of brain activity. These are experiences that can be explored when people are not dead.” Meaning: in the future, DMT could be used to further study the biology (and psychology) of death.

source: Wired

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