A near-birth experience (also known as a pre-birth experience or pre-mortal experience) is an alleged recollected event which occurred before or during one's own

birth Birth is the act or process of bearing or bringing forth offspring, also referred to in technical contexts as parturition. In mammals, the process is initiated by hormones which cause the muscular walls of the uterus to contract, expelling the f ...

, or during the

pregnancy Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring develops ( gestates) inside a woman's uterus (womb). A multiple pregnancy involves more than one offspring, such as with twins. Pregnancy usually occurs by sexual intercourse, but ca ...

, an alleged remembering of one's own

pre-existence Pre-existence, preexistence, beforelife, or premortal existence, is the belief that each individual human soul existed before mortal conception, and at some point before birth enters or is placed into the body. Concepts of pre-existence can enco ...

, or an alleged encounter with the unborn child (usually via dream) experienced by relatives or close family friends. Under this usage, the term "near-birth experience" is analogous to the term "

near-death experience A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound personal experience associated with death or impending death which researchers claim share similar characteristics. When positive, such experiences may encompass a variety of sensations including detac ...

History

Psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...

Stanislav Grof Stanislav "Stan" Grof is a Czech-born psychiatrist who has been living in the United States since the 1960s. Grof is one of the principal developers of transpersonal psychology and research into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness ...

, in 1954 researched

LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

, and after 1967, he explored

ketamine Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a recreational drug. It is one of the safest anesthetics, as, in contrast with opiates, ether, and propofol, it suppresses ne ...

, and other methods for exhibiting non-ordinary states of

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

holotropic Breathwork is a New Age term for various breathing practices in which the conscious control of breathing is said to influence a person's mental, emotional or physical state, with a claimed therapeutic effect. There is limited evidence that breathw ...

breathing. Grof concluded that some

s are virtual recollection of birth memories, actual re-experiencing of parts of the process in symbolic form, and "movement towards the light tunnel being a memory or symbolic re-experience of being born: a memory of the 'near-birth experience'." According to Grof the NDE reflects memories of the birth process with the tunnel representing the

birth canal In mammals, the vagina is the elastic, muscular part of the female genital tract. In humans, it extends from the vestibule to the cervix. The outer vaginal opening is normally partly covered by a thin layer of mucosal tissue called the hymen. ...

. French, Chris. (2005). ''Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors''. Progress in Brain Research 150: 351-367. In 1979, science writer

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ext ...

also supported the hypothesis that near-death experiences are memories of birth. The parapsychologist Barbara Honegger (1983) wrote that the

out-of-body experience An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although this term is more commonly use ...

may be based on a rebirth fantasy or reliving of the birth process based on reports of tunnel-like passageways and a cord-like connection by some OBErs which she compared to an

umbilical cord In placental mammals, the umbilical cord (also called the navel string, birth cord or ''funiculus umbilicalis'') is a conduit between the developing embryo or fetus and the placenta. During prenatal development, the umbilical cord is physiologic ...

. The hypothesis was refuted in a statistical study by

Susan Blackmore Susan Jane Blackmore (born 29 July 1951) is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known ...

Criticism

Psychologist

Chris French Christopher Charles French (born 1956) is a British psychologist specialising in the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences, cognition and emotion. He is the head of the University of London's anomalistic Psychology Research Unit and ...

has written that "the experience of being born is only very superficially similar to the NDE" and the hypothesis has been refuted as it is common for those born by

caesarean section Caesarean section, also known as C-section or caesarean delivery, is the surgical procedure by which one or more babies are delivered through an incision in the mother's abdomen, often performed because vaginal delivery would put the baby or mo ...

to experience a tunnel during the NDE. Psychologist and skeptic

has claimed that the near-birth experience hypothesis is "pitifully inadequate to explain the NDE. For a start the newborn infant would not see anything like a tunnel as it was being born." Notable skeptic

Michael Shermer Michael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of ''Skeptic'' magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientific ...

has also criticized the hypothesis and concluded that "there is no evidence for infantile memories of any kind. Furthermore, the birth canal does not look like a tunnel and besides the infant's head is normally down and its eyes are closed." Shermer, Michael. (1997). '' Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time''. Henry Holt and Company . p. 80

References

Notes Further reading * Gerald, B. (2000) ''The Near-Birth Experience''. New York: Marlowe & Co. * Linn, Sheila Fabricant; Emerson, William; Linn, Dennis; and Linn, Matthew (1999) ''Remembering Our Home, Healing Hurts & Receiving Gifts from Conception to Birth'' Paulist Press,

External links

"Birth and the OBE: An Unhelpful Analogy"

. {{DEFAULTSORT:Near-Birth Experience New Age Paranormal terminology Parapsychology

History

Criticism

See also

References

External links