In his letter on a television programme about “near-death experiences” (March 10), Karl Consiglio complained – and rightly so – that alternative views on the same topic were not presented in the programme, as is usually done in informed debate and intelligent discussion. The result was that the viewers were left with a distorted perception of a natural phenomenon – similar to dreams and hallucinations – presented as a “divine” vision.

The dreams and hallucinations of a dying man arise from a lifetime of indoctrination in the individual’s native religion, so that a Muslim never dreams of the Virgin Mary as he’s dying and a Catholic never has visions of Muhammed on his death bed. So called “near-death experiences” mean just what they indicate: near – not after – death experiences; and there’s a biochemical explanation for them, as The Times reported on April 12, 2010:

“People who have ‘near-death experiences’, such as flashing lights, feelings of peace and joy and divine encounters before they pull back from the brink may simply have raised levels of carbon dioxide in the blood... Researchers in Slovenia investigated 52 consecutive cases of heart attacks in three large hospitals... Eleven patients had near-death experiences but there was no common link between these cases in terms of age, sex, level of education, religious belief, fear of death, time to recovery or the drugs that were administered to resuscitate them. Instead, a common association was high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood.”