The sudden loss of blood brought Kevin Hill to the brink of death, and in a recent interview he described what he went through in his “near-death experience.” These experiences may sound like a movie, but there is a lot of research into near-death experiences that are far more unusual than hallucinations.
In an interview with Mirror, Hill said, “I wasn’t looking down on my body, but I was separate from my body. It was as if I was in the spirit world – I was conscious of what was going on, but I was very peaceful,” he said, and continued: “I knew I was bleeding. I knew you were serious. Staff were coming and going to stop the bleeding.”
Hill’s loss of almost two and a half liters of blood was due to calciphylaxis, a rare disease that causes calcium to build up in small blood vessels. While this disease can cause necrosis of the skin and adipose tissue, it can sometimes lead to serious bleeding.
Seeing a white light, encountering an extraterrestrial being, and seeing your life flash before your eyes are all stereotypes about death. But research shows that these events are actually surprisingly common during near-death experiences reported by many people from different cultural backgrounds around the world.
In 2022, the first peer-reviewed study of the scientific study of death set out to uncover potential mechanisms, ethical implications, and methodological considerations for studying death, and made some interesting observations.
Generally speaking, the average near-death experience includes feeling detached from your body at first while being aware of impending death; then carry out a meaningful and purposeful analysis of your actions, intentions and thoughts; It includes the feeling of feeling peaceful at home before finally returning to the real world. But while they may sound similar at first glance, near-death experiences seem to have little in common with hallucinations.
While both hallucinations and near-death experiences involve witnessing events that did not actually occur, their similarities largely end there. Often, both hallucinations and near-death experiences are followed by the same kind of positive long-term psychological transformation that recent studies have associated with the use of substances such as psilocybin.
It can certainly be said that such a transformation took place for Hill as well.
“This incident made me reconsider my priorities,” Hill said. “When I got out of the hospital, my family environment changed dramatically. I have become more resilient. I know that I can overcome the difficulties,” he concludes.
Hill is not the only person to have had this experience and transformation, with one in ten people in the world reporting a near-death experience at some point in their life, according to findings presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the European Academy of Neurology, attended by more than 1,000 people from 35 countries.
Of the 289 self-reported near-death experiences, 106 were considered genuine, and the most common traits included abnormal perception of time (87 percent), extraordinary speed of thought (65 percent), extraordinary vivid senses (63 percent), and feeling detached from their body (53 percent). existed.