#10 Death Is The End. Or Is It?

One of humanity's oldest questions is whether or not death is the end of our experiences. All religious speculation aside, scientifically we know that death is the end, right? Actually, the scientific community is still debating whether or not there is an afterlife.People who have legally died and come back have had claims of experiencing the afterlife, including a skeptical neurosurgeon.

#9 The Near Death Experience

People who have died and come back have had what is called a near death experience, or NDE. The interesting thing about NDEs is that many patients claim to have very similar experiences, which suggests that they may be more real than imagined. The question is: Are these experiences only similar because popular culture has put these common 'afterlife' images into their heads?

#8 Light At the End of the Tunnel

This is a representation of the so-called 'light at the end of the tunnel', which is one of the most commonly reported NDE experiences. Thousands of people who have died and come back report that they saw a white light at the end of a dark tunnel and that they were drawn to go 'towards the light' which represented an exit from the body and into the spirit world.

#7 People Afraid to Tell Their Stories

It is speculated that many people who have had NDEs don't share them because of the stigma associated with them. People who have had NDEs often admit that they were reluctant to share them because they were embarrassed and they were afraid that people would think they were crazy. This makes us wonder if perhaps these experiences are more common that we think.

#6 "Even More Real Than Real"

People who experience NDEs have a hard time accepting the theory that what they experienced was a fantasy or dream. These people often say that their experience was more real than real, even more vivid than reality, so much so that the reality they come back to feels dreamlike and unreal to them.

#5 Is It Just Human Physiology?

One possible explanation of NDEs is that it is a result of a physiological malfunction in the human brain. Dr. Steven Laureys of the Coma Science Group believes that when certain parts of the brain malfunction, a patient will experience a warped sense of reality.But there is still no hard science that completely explains the phenomenon of NDEs.

#4 Dr. Eben Alexander

Dr. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who was skeptical about the idea of an afterlife; that is until he experienced it for himself. Alexander suffered from a rare form of meningitis that put him in a coma for 7 days, and when he was on the brink of death he claims he had an afterlife experience from which he returned.

What has him convinced that there's an afterlife is the fact that his cortex - the part of the brain that would create a dream or fantasy - was completely shut down while having this experience. His experience included flying through clouds with higher beings and communicating with them telepathically. He documented his experience in a book titled 'Proof of Heaven'.

#3 Surge of Brain Activity Explanation?

Another possible explanation for NDEs is a surge in brain activity that is reported to happen when a patient is near death. Researchers believe that the electrical activity in the brain can be increased as much as eight times higher than normal when a patient is near death. This hyperactivity in the brain could be responsible for what people think are NDEs.

#2 Anita Moorjani's NDE

Anita Moorjani is a Hong Kong cancer survivor who fell into a coma and crossed over to the other side. She said in her NDE she was "engulfed in a total feeling of love", got a firm understanding of reality and realized what a gift life was. Her experience has been documented in her book, "Dying to Be Me".

#1 The Unethical Experiment

Human death research presents moral issues. There have been been experiments conducted on rats to try and understand the brain science behind death, but rats have very different brain physiology than humans so this research doesn't necessarily apply to human death experiences. Research would need to be done on the brain of a dying human, but no one has ever studied the brain of a dying patient because it is considered to be an unethical experiment.