VIDEO: These People Were Really Close to Death
These people were really close to death, but they were also very, very lucky!
People who’ve had near death experiences usually think of them as positive experiences. Most of them start appreciating life more, which actually makes sense if you think about it.
Even scientists have taken an interest in the subject and have conducted a bunch of research regarding it.
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According to Wikipedia, contemporary interest in this field of study was originally spurred by the writings of Raymond Moody such as his book Life After Life, which was released in 1975, brought public attention to the topic of NDEs.
This was soon to be followed by the establishment of the International Association for Near-Death Studies in 1981. IANDS is an international organization that encourages scientific research and education on the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual nature and ramifications of near-death experiences.
Among its publications are the peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies and the quarterly newsletter Vital Signs.
Bruce Greyson (psychiatrist), Kenneth Ring (psychologist), and Michael Sabom (cardiologist), helped to launch the field of near-death studies and introduced the study of near-death experiences to the academic setting.
From 1975 to 2005, some 2,500 self-reported individuals in the US had been reviewed in retrospective studies of the phenomena with an additional 600 outside the US in the West, and 70 in Asia.
Prospective studies, reviewing groups of individuals and then finding who had an NDE after some time and costing more to do, had identified 270 individuals. In all, close to 3,500 individual cases between 1975 and 2005 had been reviewed in one or another study.
All these studies were carried out by some 55 researchers or teams of researchers. The medical community has been reluctant to address the phenomenon of NDEs, and grant money for research has been scarce.
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Melvin Morse, head of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and colleagues have investigated near-death experiences in a pediatric population.
Major contributions to the field include Ring’s construction of a “Weighted Core Experience Index” to measure the depth of the near-death experience, and Greyson’s construction of the “Near-death experience scale” to differentiate between subjects that are more or less likely to have experienced an NDE.
The latter scale is also, according to its author, clinically useful in differentiating NDEs from organic brain syndromes and non-specific stress responses. The NDE-scale was later found to fit the Rasch rating scale model. Greyson has also brought attention to the near-death experience as a focus of clinical attention.
The main argument in support of the psychological theories was that many people who had had a close encounter with death, such as those involved in near-fatal accidents, had described experiencing many of the features of a near death experience just prior to the accident.
This had been a feature of the cases described by Albert Heim,[56] the nineteenth-century geologist who had collected over 30 cases of mountaineers who had been involved in near-fatal accidents.
The former of the two review articles, explains that NDE experiencers (NDErs) do not differ from the population at large as far as anxiety, intelligence, neuroticism, extraversion and Rorschach indicators. NDErs have been found to be healthy psychological individuals.
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