“Near-death experiences.”
“Oh, dear, I hope she didn’t go into V-fib and code again.”
“I don’t think so. She was up and around. The nurse had a hard time keeping her in bed.”
“I should go see her,” Joanna said, looking up the stairs.
She crept up them and opened the door a crack. “…an Angel of Light, with golden light radiating from him like sparkling diamonds,” Mr. Mandrake was saying.
She eased the door shut. “Still there.”
“Good,” Richard said, “because I haven’t had a chance to convince you to come work with me on my project yet, and you haven’t finished telling me what people experience during an NDE. And we haven’t had dessert yet.” He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out a package of peanut M&M’s.
She shook her head. “No, thanks. They’d just make me thirsty.”
“Oh, in that case,” he said. He reached in his right pocket. “Mocha Frappuccino,” he said, pulling out a bottle and setting it on the step, and then pulling out another. “Or…” he read the label, “mandarin green tea with ginseng.”
“You’re amazing,” Joanna said, taking the Frappuccino. “What else do you have in there? Champagne? Lobster thermidor? All I’ve got in my pockets is a postcard and my tape recorder and…” she fumbled in her cardigan pockets, “…my pager—oops, which I’d better turn off. I don’t want it going off and giving away our position to Mr. Mandrake,” she switched it off, “and three used Kleenexes.” She opened the Frappuccino. “You wouldn’t have a straw, would you?”
He pulled a paper-wrapped one out of his pocket. “You said there’s a sensation of darkness,” he said, handing it to her. “Not a tunnel?”
She unwrapped the straw. “The majority of them call it a tunnel, but that isn’t what they describe. For some it seems to be a spinning vortex, for others a passage or hallway or narrow room. Several of my subjects have described darkness collapsing in around them.”
Richard nodded. “The visual cortex shutting down.” He jerked a thumb up toward the door. “What about the life review?”
“Only about a quarter of my subjects describe having one,” Joanna said, sipping her Frappuccino, “but the flashing of your life before your eyes is a well-documented phenomenon in accidents. Mr. Mandrake says the NDE, or near-afterlife experience, as he prefers to call it—”
“He told me,” Richard said, grimacing.
“—has ten core elements: out-of-body experience, sound, tunnel, light, dead relatives, Angel of Light, a feeling of peace and love, a life review, the bestowing of universal knowledge, and a command to return. Most of my subjects experience three or four of the elements, usually the sound, the tunnel, the light, and a sense that people or angels are present, though when they’re questioned, they have trouble describing them.”
“That sounds like temporal-lobe stimulation,” he said. “It can cause a feeling of being in a holy presence without any accompanying visual image. It can also cause flashbacks and assorted sounds, including voices, but so can carbon dioxide buildup, and certain endorphins. That’s part of the problem—there are several physical processes that could cause the phenomena described in an NDE.”
“And Mr. Mandrake will claim that the effects produced in the laboratory aren’t the same as the ones the NDEer is experiencing. In his book Mr. Mandrake says the lights and tunnel vision produced during anoxia experiments are completely unlike the ones his patients describe.”
“And without an objective standard, there’s no way to disprove that,” Richard said. “NDE accounts are not only subjective, they’re hearsay.”
“And vague,” Joanna said. “So your project is hoping to develop an objective standard?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got one. Three years ago I was using the RIPT scan to map brain activity. You ask the subject to count to five, what his favorite color is, what roses smell like, and locate the areas of synaptical activity. And in the middle of the experiment, one of the subjects coded.”
“Because of the scan?”
“No. The scan itself’s no more dangerous than a CAT scan. Less, because there’s no radiation involved. It was a massive coronary. Completely unrelated.”
“Did he die?” Joanna asked, thinking of Greg Menotti.
“Nope. The crash cart team revived him, he had a bypass, and he was fine.”
“And he’d had an NDE?”
Richard nodded. “And we had a picture of it.” He reached in his lab coat pocket and pulled out an accordion- folded strip of paper. “It was three minutes before the crash cart could get there. The RIPT scan was running the entire time.”
He shifted so he was sitting next to her and unfolded the long strip of pictures. They showed the same black cross-section of the brain she’d seen in PET scan photos, with areas colored in blue and green and red, but in sharper detail than she’d seen in the PET scan photos, and with rows and rows of coded data along either side.
“Red indicates the greatest level of activity and blue the lowest,” Richard said. He pointed to an orangish-red area on the pictures. “This is the temporal lobe,” he said, “and this,” pointing to a smaller splash of red, “is the hippocampus.” He handed her the strip. “You’re looking at an NDE.”
Joanna stared at the splotches of orange and yellow and green in fascination. “So it is a real thing.”
“That depends on what you mean by real,” he said. “See this area where there’s no activity? That’s the visual cortex, and this and this are sensory areas, where outside information is processed. The brain isn’t getting any data from outside. The only stimuli are coming from deep inside the brain, which is bad news for Mandrake’s theory. If the patient were actually seeing a bright light or an angel, the visual cortex here and here,” he pointed, “would be activated.”
Joanna stared at the dark blue areas. “What did he see?” she asked. “The man who coded.”
“Mr. O’Reirdon,” Richard said. “A tunnel, a light, and several scenes from his childhood, all in succession.”
“The life review,” Joanna murmured.
“My guess is that those images are what account for the activation here,” he said, pointing at yellow-green spots in a succession of the pictures. “These are random firing of long-term-memory synapses.”
“Did he see a shining figure in white?” Joanna asked.
He shook his head. “He felt a holy presence that told him to come back, and then he was on the table.”
He indicated a picture near the end of the strip. “This is where he came out of the NDE state. You can see the radically different pattern. Activity drops off sharply in the temporal lobe and increases in the visual and auditory cortexes.”
Joanna wasn’t listening. She was thinking, they always talk about going and coming back, as if it were a real place. NDEers all talked about it that way. They said, “I came back to the ambulance then,” or, “I went through the tunnel,” or, “The whole time I was there, I felt so peaceful and safe.” And Greg Menotti had said, “Too far away for her to come,” as if he were no longer in the ER but had gone somewhere else.
“The greatest level of activity is here,” Richard was saying, “next to the Sylvian fissure in the anterior temporal lobe, which indicates the cause may be temporal-lobe stimulation. Temporal-lobe epileptics report voices, a divine presence, euphoria, and auras.”
“A number of my subjects describe auras surrounding the figures in white,” Joanna said, “and light radiating from them. Several of them, when they talked about the light, spread their hands out as if to indicate rays.” She demonstrated.
“This is exactly the kind of information I need,” Richard said. “I want you to come work with me on this project.”
“But I don’t know how to read RIPT scans.”
“You don’t have to. That’s my department. I need you to tell me exactly the kind of thing you’ve been telling me—”
The door banged open, and a nurse clattered down the steps. Joanna and Richard both made a dive for the landing, but it was too late. She’d already seen them.
“Oh,” the nurse said, looking surprised and then interested. “I didn’t know anything was going on in here.”
