A man named Robert who temporarily died from a heart attack believes he went to heaven for a moment. While there is no proof of heaven, Robert believes he has seen the other side. Robert said that in heaven, there is no perception of time and he was given all the knowledge in the universe.
The man said the realm was full of bright lights and flowing colours, and beings were made of light.
Robert described his apparent glimpse of heaven on the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
He said: “I was aware that every action, situation, event, or decision I had made in my life was vivid and recallable, and all was and is me.
“I became aware of a bright light up and slightly towards my left. The light was infinitely brighter than anything I could ever imagine.
“It was so bright that initially, I had tried to turn my face away from it. I was in the light without shadow or explanation. I also knew that this place was perfect.
“There were colours and shimmering coming from around the edges of the light although there really were no edges as the light filled the entire area and permeated my very being.
“The instant I was in Heaven, or rather the outskirts of it, time stopped. I did not have the knowledge of time as we do here on earth.
“I also did not have the NEED TO SURVIVE, to live, to draw the next breath. The survival instinct was gone. I was safe and totally at peace.”
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However, researchers are not convinced that Robert’s experience is necessarily a sign of the afterlife.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, believes visions such as Martin’s are relatively normal.
He believes near death experience visions are typically signs the brain is running out of oxygen or scanning itself for survival techniques.
Dr Koch wrote in an article for Scientific American: “I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences. They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception.
“As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, precepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.
“That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries.
“Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.
“Modern death requires irreversible loss of brain function. When the brain is starved of blood flow (ischemia) and oxygen (anoxia), the patient faints in a fraction of a minute and his or her electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes isoelectric—in other words, flat.
“This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down.”
