A very common, but not entirely universal, component of Near Death Experiences is the image of bright light at the end of a dark tunnel. In popular imagination this is supposed to be an image of heaven that a person is moving towards, but medical science can not only explain how this image is created naturally, but also predict when it will occur as well as when it won't.

G.M. Woerlee writes in the May-June, 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer:

Oxygen starvation can cause both tunnel and darkness experiences. The reason for this lies in the structure and functioning of the blood supply of the retina. The macula is the optical center of the retina; it has the greatest blood supply, while the flow of blood to the retina decreases with distance from the macula according to the inverse square law. Yet the oxygen consumption of each part of the retina is much the same, so oxygen starvation will cause failure of peripheral vision before causing total visual failure. Indeed, experiments with oxygen starvation in human volunteers prove this fact.

This is why tunnel experiences occur only in NDEs caused by oxygen starvation, while toxins and poisons cause a "pit experience" before causing failure of vision. So oxygen starvation explains why not everyone has a tunnel experience during an NDE. Oxygen starvation also explains why the tunnel experience is not a true component of the NDE, but is instead a manifestation of the cause of the NDE...

So scientists can predict which people are more likely to experience an image of a tunnel and which aren't, based entirely on the physical characteristics of what their body is going through. This is what makes something scientific rather than a pseudoscience: testable predictions which either come true or, in being false, provide more data which gets fed into refining the predictions being made.

Pseudoscientific "explanations" of Near Death Experiences are made up of completely untestable claims which seem to exist for no other reason than they make people feel good because they are consistent with traditional religious beliefs. Pseudoscientific "explanations" of Near Death Experiences are speculations at best, but can generally be characterized as little more than random and unsupported claims with no substance whatsoever.

 

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