Hmmm, seems inconclusive.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

long article. bad article.

Agreed though I liked those three paragraphs above. 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/15/377589757/boy-says-he-didn-t-go-to-heaven-publisher-says-it-will-pull-book

And that's kind of the point. 

What people think they see in near death experiences are similar to what people think they see when brain activity is impaired. Add that a lot of people make things up, and everything is questionable. 

mystery meat machines!

I had this article flipboarded on the topic from Sunday...so I will post here instead of new post. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/03/the-science-of-near-death-experiences/386231/

Good article!

But none of Reynolds’s reported veridical perceptions happened while her EEG recorded a flat line. They all took place before or after, when she was under anesthetic but very much alive. “Anesthesia awareness” is generally estimated to affect roughly one in 1,000 patients. (See “Awakening,” by Joshua Lang, in the January/February 2013 Atlantic.) Therefore, the skeptical argument goes, Reynolds could have heard snatches of conversation; she might have deduced some things about the bone saw from the noise it made or the vibration of it against her skull; and she might have reconstructed some false memories out of details she’d noticed before or after the operation.

Anesthesia awareness sounds like a nightmare!!! I am so so so glad I cannot remember a single thing that happened in the operating room.

Ugh, 1 in 1000 people get anesthesia awareness. That's way more common than I realized.

No wonder so many "near death experience" stories surface!