High on Death - A Texas professor searches for the human soul

[Dover]

High on Death
A Texas professor searches for the human soul

"I think death is an illusion. I think death is a really nasty bad lie. I don't see any truth in the word death at all."

This is the conclusion of Pam Reynolds, a singer-songwriter. She spits out her defiance softly while recalling her vivid brush with death during an interview for the BBC documentary The Day I Died. Her near-death experience is near-boilerplate: the feelings of euphoria, the separation from the body, the rush through a dark tunnel toward a bright white light, the life review, the encounters with dead loved ones.

Yet Reynolds' experience is different. In 1991, doctors found a gargantuan aneurysm lodged at the base of her brain. In a last-ditch effort, she submitted to doctors at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix and a radical surgical procedure where her heart was stopped and her brain was shut down.

Shortly after her recovery, her doctors were baffled when she accurately described her surgery: the saw used to carve up her head, the box of saw bits held in reserve, the urgent conversations between doctors and nurses. Yet such recollections were impossible not only because her eyes were taped shut, her face shrouded and her ears plugged, but because her brain had ceased functioning.

Such bizarre phenomena have long aroused the curiosity of Jan Holden, a professor of counseling at the University of North Texas and president of the International Association of Near Death Studies. Holden says her interest in near-death research was aroused after reading The Great Soul Trial, an account of the estate of an Arizona prospector who disappeared in 1949. State officials opened his safe deposit box and found roughly $200,000 along with a crudely written will that instructed the money be channeled into research to find "some scientific proof of a soul of the human body which leaves at death." ...cont'd

http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2004-12-16/news/news.html