More important to me, however, was a comment by the Dalai Lama himself about the difference between Western science and Buddhism. Both disciplines, h… - Bruce Greyson

Respecting things that are difficult to measure, rather than dismissing them as unreal, is not rejecting science. It’s embracing science.

Try to draw an odor using crayons. You can’t even begin to try, no matter how many crayons you have in your box. That’s what it’s like describing NDEs with words. No matter how many words you use, you can’t really describe what an NDE is like. Lying awake in the dark, I tried forming sounds that would explain. Maybe music would do what speech could not. After all, no one can describe the beauty of certain sounds, sounds that move us to action or to tears. Yes, maybe music was the only form of communication that could explain the feelings of peace that never left.

The medical literature did not encourage that idea. Decades of clinical experience and research have established that brain activity decreases within six to seven seconds of the heart stopping. And after ten to twenty seconds, the electroencephalogram (EEG) goes flat, indicating no activity in the cerebral cortex — the part of the brain responsible for thoughts, perceptions, memory, and language. Analysis of the EEGs of people after life support is withdrawn show that the brain’s electrical activity in such cases actually stops before the heartbeat stops and before blood pressure ends — and after the heart stops there is no well-defined EEG activity. That seemed to answer my question about whether NDEs could be related to electrical activity in the brain.