ABSTRACT
Some people who are near death – or believe themselves to be – have found that the dying process is experienced not in terms of a painful and fearful catastrophic loss of function, but rather as a serene, perhaps even blissful, experience that includes coherent and meaningful elements that suggest to them that some aspect of the self continues to exist and to have experiences after the brain is no longer capable of supporting them. Such experiences have been termed near-death experiences (or NDEs for short). The contrast between our expectation that the effects of injury or disease upon the brain will include a severely diminished or impaired subjective experience and the reported experiences of NDEs is a puzzle for modern science to solve. In this chapter we will consider what the main features of the near-death experience seem to be, see whether some people may be more prone to have them than others, and assess the adequacy of the theories that have been put forward to account for them, either in natural or supernatural terms.
