The term near-death experience (NDE) was popularized by Dr. Raymond Moody in his 1975 book, Life after Life.  He reported results of extensive interviews with roughly fifty people who had come very close to death, some even revived afterr being pronounced "clinically dead."  Although different in many details, he found their experiences remarkably similar.  Many had the experience of appearing to be calmly looking down on their own bodies ("out-of-body experiences"), perhaps watching physicians working frantically to revive them.  Many had a sense of moving down a dark tunnel toward a light and then entering a place of incredible brightness and beauty.  Many of his subjects were convinced that they had glimpsed a world beyond this one and found their views of life and death profoundly changed by the experience.  Moody concluded that his research provides strong evidence that there is indeed life after death.

    Several later researchers have mostly confirmed Moody's original observations.  One cardiologist, for example, studied some 2,000 patients, most having suffered a heart attack.  More than half reported having had experiences similar to those described by Moody.  A psychologist found similar results with a sample of more than 100 cases.  Some researchers even claim to have found similar results with patients in India, where religious and cultural imagery is very different from that in the United States.     Explanataions of these observations, however, differ.  In his 1974 book, Broca's Brain, the astronomer Carl Sagan promoted the idea that NDEs are, in fact, recollections of the experience of being born!  Others suggest they are produced by abnormal brain chemistry resulting from the obvious physical and psychological stress of the situation.  More recently, Susan Blackmore, in her 1992 book, Beyond the Body, offered the explanation that people's minds construct a memory of the situation that, because normal sensory output had been disrupted, they mistakenly take to be the memory of a real situation.