Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

1 Corinthians 15: 51-52

With modern medical techniques, many patients can be rescued from "near death" when the heart has stopped beating and in most cases the brain also ceased to function as indicated by a flat electroencephalogram (EEG). Reports of near death experiences (NDE) by those surviving patients are quite similar worldwide, regardless of cultures and religions. They can be summarized as follows:

1. Feeling of peace and contentment
2. Out of body experience
3. Moving through a tunnel toward light
4. Communication with light
5. Life review (playback of memory)

These experiences seem to prove that there is life after death. "Out of body" and "moving through a tunnel toward light" look like the person is going to heaven. However, some scientists suggest that these experiences are merely the hallucination of a dying brain. Dr. Karl Jansen pointed out that an anesthetic drug, ketamine, can reproduce several features of NDE (more info). 

In 2001, Dr. Pim van Lommel and his colleagues published a paper entitled "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest" (Lancet 2001; 358: 2039-45). Lancet is a well-respected scientific journal. Typically, a scientific journal would accept only papers with traditional scientific point of view. Dr. Lommel's paper is a rare exception. They found that induced experiences (such as by ketamine or electric stimulation) are not identical to NDE. Although some electric stimulation may induce flashes of recollection from the past, "these recollections, however, consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE".

In the Discussion section, they also posed a very challenging question:

"How could a clear consciousness outside one's body be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG?.... Furthermore, blind people have described veridical perception during out-of-body experiences at the time of this experience. NDE pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain relation."

To reconcile these phenomena, they questioned the concept that consciousness and memory are localized in the brain. As mentioned in a previous article, memory is a kind of information that can be transmitted to other places. When a person is still alive, memory is probably located in the brain. As soon as he dies, God may transfer memory from the physical body to the spiritual body. The panoramic life review may reflect this transferring process.