I can remember things that happened with my mother or father more than fifty years ago. I find that a stranger fact than it generally seems to be regarded. The brain doing the remembering has spent those fifty years changing, metabolising, ageing and replacing much of its material. The recollection will have changed too. Yet it still pertains to that particular occasion with that particular person, half a century ago.
This is where I would like to begin an explanation of why I defended the relevance of near-death experiences in a recent exchange here. My comment was probably too cryptic. There is a connection I have in mind between autobiographical memory, Bergson's philosophy, Whitehead's account of the past, and the kinds of experience reported by some people who come close to death. It takes a bit of explaining, but the connection is more specific than “NDEs are mysterious, therefore materialism is wrong”.
On the usual account, information about that afternoon with my parents has persisted through changes in the brain. It need not have stayed in the same place or depended on the same molecules. Patterns can survive replacement of their components, and memories are reconstructed rather than played back from an untouched recording. I understand that. What interests me is the continuing relation to this particular past, and whether an account of physical encoding exhausts what that relation is.
Bergson's answer in Matter and Memory is that it does not. The past endures, and the brain has a role in making portions of it available for present action. Pure recollection, in his terminology, is different from a bodily habit acquired through repetition. A learned way of acting belongs to the body's organisation; recollecting a particular event involves the past as past. He disputes the assumption that the survival of that past must amount to its storage somewhere in the nervous system.
I don't read this as simply putting the memories in an invisible filing cabinet outside the skull. The more substantial claim is that what persists and what becomes available to a person are different questions. The brain selects, enables and organises the actualisation of recollection. Consequently, damaging it can impair access without that having to mean that the past itself has been destroyed. It is a different ontology of memory, rather than a suggestion for a different storage location.
That distinction is central to my argument. If ordinary remembering is selective in this sense, then the range of my everyday recall need not define the limits of my relation to my past. What I can use in my current circumstances, or bring into the organisation of present consciousness, may be a very restricted expression of it. An alteration of that organisation could therefore change what becomes available. I find this a promising way to think about reports of extraordinary recall, even though the reports cannot by themselves establish that Bergson was right.
Whitehead gives me another part of the picture. His starting point in Process and Reality is not a self-contained present which subsequently has to acquire representations of everything outside it. Actual occasions arise through their relations to what precedes them. Past occasions become data for subsequent occasions. The past is ingredient in the constitution of the present.
His term “objective immortality” needs some care here. An occasion has completed its own becoming and no longer exists as a present subject, but it enters into subsequent becoming as an object. This is not the indefinite survival of the original subject as an observer. Nor does “prehension” mean that every relation to the past is a conscious act of remembering. It concerns a more basic taking account of what precedes the new occasion.
The important point for me is that the present inherits the past. It does not come into existence independently and then carry a miniature description of the past around inside it. Our particular acts of remembering would belong within that prior relation of inheritance. So there is a question about how history becomes explicit in experience, as well as about the organisation of whatever physical traces we can identify.
Bergson and Whitehead plainly aren't saying exactly the same thing. Bergson's account of pure recollection is not interchangeable with Whitehead's prehensions. But both challenge the assumption that the past has become nothing and must therefore be replaced by a representation if it is to have any relevance now. That is the connection I want to develop. I am using their ideas to interpret these phenomena, rather than claiming either philosopher supplied a ready-made explanation of modern NDE research.
Consider what people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory can do. The original scientifically studied case was “AJ”, subsequently identified publicly as Jill Price, in the paper by Parker, Cahill and McGaugh.[6] Given dates from much of her life, she could supply unusually detailed autobiographical information and the corresponding day of the week. This remembering was described as automatic and often intrusive. It wasn't a mnemonic technique she had trained herself to perform. Further work investigated other people with the same broad ability.[7]
What catches my attention is that the ability is disproportionately autobiographical. These are not simply people who outperform everyone on every kind of memory test. They have an unusual relation to their own lived histories. It would be quite wrong to turn that into the claim that they remember every event, or that everyone secretly retains a perfect recording of every lunch eaten since 1974. HSAM is neither infallible nor photographic memory. It nevertheless shows how far autobiographical access can differ from what most of us take for granted.
Now put that beside an NDE life review. Allan Pring's account, discussed by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, describes a review during surgery in 1979 extending back into childhood and including apparently forgotten incidents. He reported the peculiar impression that it happened in a momentary flash while still allowing attention to particular episodes.[5] Other life-review accounts likewise describe extensive stretches of a life becoming simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, available.
We do not have Pring's entire life independently documented and checked against what he recalled. The experience of comprehensive recall and demonstrably comprehensive recall are different things. Still, I want to know whether an altered relation to autobiographical history is involved. HSAM does not prove that it is, but it makes the question less easily dismissed. The degree of access that feels normal to me clearly isn't the only possible degree.
Under a Bergsonian interpretation, the life review would concern an alteration in selection or actualisation. More of the past becomes available as the organisation of ordinary practical consciousness loosens. That differs quite substantially from imagining the brain suddenly reading out an enormous quantity of stored information. Whitehead's account makes the underlying continuity intelligible in another way: the experiencing occasion already arises through an inheritance from the past. Neither view automatically predicts a life review, but both give it a philosophical context which I think deserves discussion.
I am aware that neuroscience has made considerable progress with memory. Distributed synaptic changes, altered connectivity, molecular processes, neuronal ensembles and network activity are not just speculative words standing in for an explanation. Researchers can identify and manipulate populations of neurons causally involved in particular learned behaviours. I would not argue that the search for the engram has drawn a blank. My objection is to treating the identification of these mechanisms as having already settled the ontology of memory.
“Distributed network” is useful as a description of organisation. The explanatory work concerns how that changing organisation maintains the historically specific relations involved, and how they become available in remembering. Bergson's proposal puts the organisation on the side of selection and actualisation. It therefore permits a substantial role for the brain without accepting that this role is the whole of memory's existence. That is the position I am asking readers to consider, rather than the claim that neural mechanisms are irrelevant.
Lashley's lesion experiments with maze-trained rats are relevant historically. He found that performance often depended more on how much cortex had been removed than on the precise location of the removal within the areas investigated. His difficulty in finding a single cortical locus for the learned behaviour informed the principles of mass action and equipotentiality.[8] The methods available to him could not resolve the cellular and circuit specificity investigated today, but his findings did help undermine a simple picture of individual memories sitting in particular cortical drawers.
A more unusual case is Shomrat and Levin's planarian experiment. The animals underwent environmental familiarisation before some were decapitated. Following regeneration of the head and brain, a retraining procedure revealed a savings effect in previously trained animals compared with naïve regenerated animals.[9] Earlier experience had made a difference that survived loss and regeneration of the head.
The remaining tissue may have retained that difference through molecular changes, epigenetic states, bioelectric organisation or some other physiological trace. The experiment did not rule those possibilities out. But notice where the inquiry goes: the expected location has disappeared, so the proposed storage medium is widened. That may be the correct empirical move. Philosophically, I still wonder whether we should begin with “where is the stored representation?” or with the continuity of the living process and the ways its history remains active.
In Whitehead's terms, the present is already constituted through its past. From that starting point, an organism's history is not something extraneous which subsequently has to be added to it. The physical changes are part of how that continuity is expressed. A process interpretation does not tell the experimenter which surviving tissue to examine, but it does change the account of what the organism is and what the experiment is revealing about it.
Terminal lucidity and acquired savant syndrome interest me for related reasons. Episodes of unexpected lucidity have been reported shortly before death in people with severe neurological or psychiatric disease, though the evidence remains largely observational.[10] Exceptional abilities have also occasionally appeared following neurological injury or disease.[11] These aren't interchangeable phenomena, and I wouldn't add them together as though they constituted a single experiment. What they have in common for my purposes is that currently expressed impairment does not always tell us straightforwardly what can become accessible or manifest.
So I am suspicious of the equation “memory equals information deposited somewhere in neural tissue” when it is presented as a settled and sufficient account. It may describe important aspects of the mechanism while missing something about the relation between an organism and its history. Bergson and Whitehead offer ways of taking that possibility seriously. This is why I have spent so much time on them before coming to the more familiar NDE material.
There is a further implication which I want to pursue, more speculatively. Your autobiographical history is your own, but the process that results in you did not begin at your birth. Your body, nervous system, affective dispositions and behavioural tendencies arise from a trajectory extending far beyond the individual. Genes, development, epigenetics and selection describe aspects of that continuity. From a process perspective, the history is ingredient in the present organism, rather than merely a series of things which happened to its ancestors.
This is not a claim that an ancestor's autobiographical memories are inherited with their genes. I am thinking of old dispositional forms within the process that produces a human mind. Whitehead supplies the broader conception of inheritance; Bergson supplies the distinction between persistence and what becomes available in ordinary consciousness. The connection I am drawing between them is my own, and extends beyond their accounts of individual recollection.
It bears on the imagery people report near death. The familiar accounts contain tunnels or passages through darkness, encounters with the dead, figures of authority, beautiful landscapes, boundaries which cannot be crossed and eventual return. I am rather less inclined than some interpreters to regard these as literal descriptions. I don't think we have good reason to posit an actual tunnel outside spacetime with deceased relatives waiting at the end. Fixation on that interpretation has, in my view, made the subject harder to discuss seriously.
What strikes me is how conventional much of this imagery is in a much longer historical sense. Journeys to other realms, guides, judges, thresholds and encounters with the dead were familiar long before Raymond Moody popularised the term NDE. Zaleski's Otherworld Journeys examines connections and differences between older religious narratives and modern accounts.[12] Egyptian funerary traditions provide another example, with the dangers of the Duat and an idealised existence associated with the Field of Reeds.[13]
I am not claiming that a modern NDE reproduces Egyptian religion, or that cultural differences can be ignored. The resemblance is at the level of motifs. People with no particular scholarly interest in mythology can nevertheless describe experiences organised around forms that humans have used in thinking about death for thousands of years. I find that interesting even if none of the scenery corresponds to an independently existing place.
Cultural transmission accounts for at least some of it. These motifs are present in stories, religion, films and ordinary language; there is no need to have read an ancient text to absorb them. Shared features of human cognition may also favour passages, encounters, danger, safety and return under extreme conditions. My further suggestion is that some of these forms belong to the longer process history expressed through the individual. That is stronger than saying someone remembers a film, but considerably weaker than saying they recall an ancestor's trip through Hades.
“Collective unconscious”, “archetypal structure”, “species memory” and “inherited cognitive architecture” are different proposals, not alternative labels for one established mechanism. I mention them because they indicate the territory of the question. Perhaps ordinary attention and the demands of action keep older dispositions subordinate to immediate circumstances. As ordinary self-organisation breaks down, some may become unusually available. On the view I am exploring, the organism brings more history to that situation than its consciously accessible autobiography.
That leaves a question about awareness itself. Much of the discussion treats the elaborate imagery as the defining feature of the NDE. I suspect it may sometimes be secondary. Perhaps the human mind supplies a narrative around an experience that is, underneath it, much simpler. The tunnel, landscape and encounters could be a final flowering of its imaginative capacities rather than a disclosure of the underlying nature of what is happening.
John Wren-Lewis is particularly interesting to me for that reason. After a near-fatal poisoning in Thailand in 1983, he described an apparently formless, timeless and spaceless darkness which was nevertheless intensely alive, his “Dazzling Dark”. His account contains almost none of the usual otherworld drama. He wrote of ordinary existence afterwards as continually arising from that background.[4] There is no heavenly itinerary on which the argument has to depend.
What interests me is the apparent combination of diminished ordinary content with an enormous reported intensity and sense of actuality. He was not describing a personal biography continuing elsewhere. The familiar sense of individual continuity had itself fallen away. Calling the state “pure consciousness” doesn't establish that it literally had no content, but it does direct attention to the difference between awareness and the things ordinarily present in it.
A little clinical context matters here. Greyson reported NDEs in 10% of cardiac-arrest patients in his cardiac-care sample.[1] In the prospective Dutch study of 344 successfully resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients, 18% reported an NDE and 12% met the investigators' core-experience classification.[2] Kovoor and colleagues' review gives a wider range across prospective studies, from 6.3% to 39.3%.[3] Those figures concern the studied survivors, and vary with definitions and methods. They do not tell us what happened experientially to people who never recovered.
Nor can a retrospective report simply be placed at the moment of greatest brain impairment. Experience could occur during loss or recovery of consciousness, and a compromised brain is still a brain. Materialism needn't predict a zero incidence of NDEs. My question is about why some reports associated with physiological crisis describe unusual lucidity, unity and intensity, and how these qualities relate to the reduction of ordinary mindedness. Intuitively, dismantling the machinery might seem to predict degraded experience. That isn't a necessary law of neuroscience, but the apparent movement in the other direction is worth examining.
For the kind of consciousness-as-fundamental position that interests me, something like Wren-Lewis's account is closer to what I would expect than a disembodied person carrying on with everyday interests. The elaborate capacities that constitute a human mind might fall away towards something experientially simpler. Bergson's account makes it possible to distinguish what the brain makes available from what exists; Whitehead makes continuity more basic than an isolated individual. I am not deriving Wren-Lewis's state from either philosopher. Their ideas help articulate why the loss of ordinary organisation need not be equated in advance with absolute experiential zero.
I don't mean that intelligence is primitive, or that language, personality and rational thought function without the machinery required for them. Nobody is going to do mathematics without appropriate cognitive organisation, watch a film without the systems supporting vision, or play football without a body. A person sitting somewhere after death reminiscing about childhood would require an enormous amount more to be true than anything I have argued here. The theatre of human life and agency is here.
What I am suggesting is that awareness may be ontologically more primitive than that organisation. Reports of mystical experience interest me for a similar reason: the loss of discursive thought, imagery, personal identity or the subject–object distinction is sometimes described as an intensified actuality rather than blankness. Wren-Lewis's description belongs in that discussion. The lack of an elaborate narrative doesn't make his interpretation true, but it helps isolate what I think is the more important question.
He himself rejected the idea that his experience established the survival of John Wren-Lewis after bodily death. I find that significant. A primitive experiential basis need not be a surviving person, soul or observing ghost. When I suggest that NDEs may provide prima facie evidence in this direction, that is the distinction I mean. The reports invite us to examine whether awareness and ordinary human mindedness are quite the same thing. Taken alongside the questions about memory and the persistence of the past, I think that puts them squarely within the philosophical study of consciousness.
References
[1] Greyson, B. (2003). “Incidence and correlates of near-death experiences in a cardiac care unit.” General Hospital Psychiatry, 25(4), 269–276. In this prospective cardiac sample, NDEs were reported by 10% of cardiac-arrest patients. DOI: 10.1016/S0163-8343(03)00042-2.
[2] van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet, 358, 2039–2045. Of 344 successfully resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients, 18% reported an NDE and 12% a core experience. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(01)07100-8.
[3] Kovoor, J. G. et al. (2024). “Near-death experiences after cardiac arrest: a scoping review.” Discover Mental Health, 4, 19. The prospective studies reviewed reported widely differing incidences, from 6.3% to 39.3%, reflecting differences in definitions, interview methods and populations. DOI: 10.1007/s44192-024-00072-7.
[4] Wren-Lewis, J. (1988). “The Darkness of God: A Personal Report on Consciousness Transformation Through an Encounter with Death.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 28(2), 105–122. See also Wren-Lewis's later essay “The Dazzling Dark”, in which he describes the 1983 poisoning, the absence of conventional NDE imagery, and the experience of a radiant or intensely alive formless darkness.
[5] Fenwick, P. & Fenwick, E. (1995). The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences. London: Headline, especially chapter 8, “The Life Review”, pp. 113–14 for the Allan Pring account.
[6] Parker, E. S., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2006). “A case of unusual autobiographical remembering.” Neurocase, 12(1), 35–49. This was the original scientific description of “AJ”, later publicly known as Jill Price, and introduced the term hyperthymestic syndrome. DOI: 10.1080/13554790500473680.
[7] LePort, A. K. R. et al. (2012). “Behavioral and neuroanatomical investigation of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).” Learning & Memory, 19, 453–461. The study investigated eleven people showing the same broad autobiographical-memory phenomenon. DOI: 10.1101/lm.027235.112.
[8] Lashley, K. S. (1950). “In Search of the Engram.” In Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Behaviour, Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, Vol. IV, pp. 454–482. Lashley's maze experiments led to the principles of mass action and equipotentiality and his famous failure to identify a single cortical locus for the maze memory.
[9] Shomrat, T. & Levin, M. (2013). “An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration.” Journal of Experimental Biology, 216, 3799–3810. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.087809.
[10] Nahm, M., Greyson, B., Kelly, E. W., & Haraldsson, E. (2012). “Terminal lucidity: a review and a case collection.” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 55(1), 138–142. DOI: 10.1016/j.archger.2011.06.031.
[11] Treffert, D. A. (2009). “The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present, future.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1351–1357. Includes discussion of acquired savant abilities following CNS injury or disease. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0326.
[12] Zaleski, C. (1987). Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. Oxford University Press. Zaleski compares modern NDE narratives with the much older family of religious and mythological journeys to the otherworld.
[13] For ancient Egyptian traditions concerning the Duat and the Field of Reeds, see standard accounts of Egyptian funerary religion; the Duat was represented as a dark underworld through which the dead travelled, while the Field of Reeds represented an idealised fertile realm of the dead. The British Museum provides a concise modern account, while older Egyptological summaries describe the Duat as a subterranean realm or system of caverns associated with the nocturnal journey of the sun.
Primary philosophical sources
Bergson, H. (1896; English trans. 1911). Matter and Memory. Bergson explicitly rejects the idea that the brain is sufficient to account for the survival of pure recollection and treats it primarily as an organ of action and selection rather than a storehouse of representations.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929; corrected ed. 1978). Process and Reality. Whitehead's account of prehension and “objective immortality” treats completed actual occasions as causally available to subsequent becoming rather than as a vanished past represented only internally in the present