What are near-death experience explanations?

People report their sharpest awareness at the moment their brains should be least able to produce it. That's the part the models skip.

A failing brain should give you fog. Instead some survivors describe crystal clarity, and a few report perceiving things they shouldn't have been able to. A burst of high-frequency brain activity near death is one proposed answer, and a debated one. NEPTUNE, a leading neuroscience model, leaves features out. If the brain doesn't make all of consciousness, death's edge is where we'd see it.

• What it could changeProof that awareness outlasts a shutting-down brain would reopen the oldest question there is: what are we?
• How it touches todayResuscitation medicine brings more people back from the edge, and many come back with stories.
• Our futureDeath may turn out to be less a switch than a border we have only seen from one side.

• Critics argue that the NEPTUNE neuroscientific model omits or conflicts with some reported NDE features and does not provide a satisfactory comprehensive explanation.psycnet +1
• Some researchers focus on reports of clear or verifiable perceptions during conditions in which ordinary awareness would be expected to be severely impaired.exa +1
• A gamma-band interpretation has been proposed from observations of high-frequency EEG activity near death, but its meaning for subjective experience remains debated.exa