Near death experiences: Interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

Time Magazine's M.J. Stephey asks Sam Parnia," a fellow at New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center and a leading expert on the study of death, What happens when we die?" (September 18, 2008). Parnia has announced:

a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S., and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest.

He talks about the people he has met who have had near death experiences:

... first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about five hundred or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than ten years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also get the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on.

Well that should be interesting. One thing Mario and I noted in The Spiritual Brain is that near death experiencers tend to change their priorities, whether they are religious believers or not. They tend to focus more on relationships, and they lose their fear of death.