The psychology of life after death.

Traditionally, people's concern with an afterlife has been of interest only to philosophy and religion. The recent explosion of popular articles and books about life after death has now reached medical and psychiatric journals, in which scientific reports cite evidence from survivors of clinical death and from deathbed visions of terminal patients, among other sources of data. This article critically reviews evidence in light of ethological, anthropological, and psychological findings. The similarity of afterlife visions to drug-induced hallucinations invites a rational framework for their experimental analysis. From observations of animals burying their dead, through awareness of seasonal rebirth of nature, to recognition of inherited characteristics, early homo sapiens developed concept of life after death in an effort to explain these behaviors and their underlying feelings. Cross-cultural studies confirm that experiences of dying and visiting the other side involve universal elements and themes that are predictable and definable. These phenomena arise from common structures in brain and nervous system, common biological experiences, and common reactions of central nervous system to stimulation. The resultant experience can be interpreted as evidence that people survive death, but it may be more easily understood as a dissociative hallucinatory activity of brain. The time is 1920. Thomas Edison had always been a believer in electrical energy. He once wrote that when a person dies, a swarm of highly charged ^ energies deserts body and goes out into space, entering another cycle of life. Always scientist, Edison felt that some experiment demonstrating immortal nature of these energies was necessary. In an interview in October 1920 Scientific American he stated, I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed onto another existence or sphere. . . . I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter does affect matter. If we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in next life, such an instrument ought to record something. Edison never built his machine, but on his deathVol. 35, No. 10, 911-931 bed he had a vision of next life and remarked, It is very beautiful over there (quoted in Sandberg, 1977, p. 65). The time is 1973. Based on pioneering research started at University of California, Los Angeles, Raymond Western had just completed development of a vast electronic computer nicknamed MEDIUM. Operating on complex electromagnetic principles, MEDIUM was designed to communicate with unique electromagnetic configurations orbiting in a space-time continuum separate from that which we call reality. These unique configurations were energies of departed human personalities. Although Western did not like word soul, he agreed with theologians and scientists who tried his device that communication with dead was possible. Life after death was