British actor, comedian, and writer Bob Mortimer, aged 64, primarily known for the TV show “Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing” on BBC Two, underwent triple bypass surgery in 2015, during which his heart stopped for 32 minutes.
When he woke up after the surgery, he recounted experiencing what is commonly referred to as a near-death experience: in particular, he saw a tunnel with light at the end and felt an extraordinary sense of peace and joy.
“I really did see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was moving towards the light, and I felt happier than I had ever been in my life. It was quite unusual, and then I woke up the next day, and everything was fine with me. And I thought, ‘That’s great. I’m not afraid of death and everything else anymore,'” Mortimer recounts.
He shared this story when he recently appeared on Katie Burke’s podcast “Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake.” Afterward, many people wrote to him suggesting that it was simply his body’s mechanism at work.
“Many people wrote to me: ‘It’s because your body releases a large amount of PCT, some chemical substance that helps you go through this state, and it causes you to have these hallucinations.’ I was a little sad about it,” he said.
This is indeed the most popular scientific hypothesis as to why many people see such things while in a clinical death state. Some scientists believe that psychoactive substances – exogenous or endogenous (produced in the human body, such as dimethyltryptamine) – induce a state of altered consciousness.
Another popular version suggests that near-death experiences are a neuropsychological phenomenon associated with the human brain’s activity under conditions of oxygen and glucose deficiency due to heart stoppage and cessation of blood flow.
However, these theories cannot explain cases where people who were successfully resuscitated after clinical death recounted hovering above their bodies and seeing medical personnel performing their duties. Moreover, they accurately reported specific details of the situation that no one had told them.
Some specialists have tried (and are still trying) to study near-death experience cases, but alas, there are still too few of them, and more serious scientists do not listen to them.
