I hope to show that science and spirituality are compatible, that being spiritual doesn’t require you to abandon science - Bruce Greyson

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 Analysis of the EEGs of people after life support is withdrawn show that the brain’s electrical activity in such cases actually stops before the heartbeat stops and before blood pressure ends — and after the heart stops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.

There are many paths up the mountain to reach God and it really doesn’t matter which one you take, because when you get there to that mountaintop it is all the same love, light, peace, harmony, gratitude, wisdom, truth, and victory for everybody. There are no religions in heaven, just ‘jelly.

Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible — fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.