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From: gasp@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Isaac Kohane)
Newsgroups: sci.med,sci.misc
Subject: NDE's in childhood
Message-ID: <2303@bucse.bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Fri, 7-Nov-86 00:41:20 EST
Article-I.D.: bucse.2303
Posted: Fri Nov  7 00:41:20 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Nov-86 22:57:44 EST
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 40
Xref: watmath sci.med:171 sci.misc:44

From: AJDC Vol.140 p 1110 (Nov. 86)

The article reports the results of interviews with 11 patients aged 3
through 16, who had survived critical illnesses, including cardiac
arrest and profound coma.

The salient and shared aspects of the children's NDE's:

1)  feeling of being out of body

2) seeing physical body from "above"

3) perception of darkness

4) travelling in a tunnel

5) return to body

Apparently, the difference between these childhood NDE's and their
adult counterparts is the concrete nature and the relative lack of
narrative detail of the former with respect to the latter.

The article also goes into some detail as to a possible pathophysiology
for NDE's. "Within the temporal lobe there are neuronal connections that,
when electrically stimulated, produce the sensation of being outside the
physical body. For example, a 33 year old man suffered from temporal lobe
seizures that produced hallucinations of seeing himself. On electrical
stimulation within the fissure of Sylvius [adjacent to the temporal lobe]
the patient exclaimed `Oh God, I am leaving my body.'... The area of the
temporal lobe is connected by serotoninergic neurons to the midbrain raphe.
Psychological stress and psychoactive drugs such as LSD and ketamine have
a neurochemical effect in the latter part of the brain that is mediated by
serotonin. We speculate that hypercapnia or hypoxia could also trigger
NDE-like experiences through direct activation of the temporal lobe
or indirectly through an effect in the midbrain [they refer to a figure
that diagrams midbrain temporal lobe connections]. We present this model
as a first neurophysiological attempt to analyze NDEs."


They could be wrong, but it's an interesting hypothesis.