“If they experience flying through a tunnel of light, into a beautiful white open space, then that’s what they experience.” But that experience depends on brain activity. “For us, it’s important to demonstrate that death is only for the material body,” said Luján Comas, vice-president of the Icloby foundation, who joined us on the Zoom call.įREE FALLIN’: You don’t want to undermine someone convinced they had a glimpse of the other side, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. The research project aims to replicate an earlier study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2001 and led by Pim Van Lommel, a cardiologist, author, and researcher in near-death studies from the Netherlands. This fall, the foundation will also embark on a study of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients, including children, among Spanish speaking people across Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. In 2017, after years in the insurance industry, and upon graduating from a business school program in management, he formed a foundation, Icloby, to promote socially responsible business practices. The experience, he said, transformed him, but not until 25 years after his accident. “I have never been more alive, I have never felt more lucid in my life.” Regaining awareness and sense of his physical body, Melo said, was traumatic.Īs Melo relived his story for me over Zoom, from his home in Barcelona, he repeatedly became so overwhelmed with emotion that he had to stop to regain his composure. “It was like the magnetism of love, something that attracts the deepest part of you,” he told me. He felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of kinship with the trees, the wind, and the water, and saw an indescribable light that drew him in, a light he began to believe was a being. Then he began to rise, the ambulance receding from him in the distance, until he came to a tunnel, where scenes of his life as a child began to play out. He recalls that he flew out of his body and hovered above it, that he observed a nurse in the ambulance who held his hand and called out, “We’re losing him, we’re losing him,” as he watched his papers swirl and scatter in the street. Melo’s memory of the immediate aftermath of the crash is vivid and mysterious it follows the familiar arc of the near-death experience. He woke up in his hospital bed, screaming, again and again, “I have been with God!” Melo himself suffered head trauma, lost consciousness, and fell into a coma. As he pulled into an intersection, a Volkswagen Golf violently crashed into his car, destroying it. Melo retraced the familiar route home at a leisurely pace, to savor a gentle breeze and the satisfaction of a weekend’s work complete. It was one of his two weekend jobs, and his car was stacked with study notes and practice tests for an upcoming business school entrance exam. One Sunday evening in September, nearly 30 years ago, Xavier Melo, then 23, was driving home from his job as a private math tutor in Barcelona, Spain.

Pathological fear examples