Esperienze di premorte: una realtà tra scienza e pregiudizio.

The near-death experiences (NDEs) are an intriguing and somewhat awkward topic in the scientific medicine. They can be defined as the memory of impressions occurred during life-threatening conditions, including a number of special elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, and a life review. Their transcendent tonality leads one to consider them a priori as doubtful or non-existent, not relevant or a matter of psychiatric disturbances at most. The apparent incompatibility between NDEs and the prevailing opinions on physical reality and physiology of consciousness, has deep epistemological implications. In fact, knowledge is closely dependent on the adopted paradigm and errors leading to false conclusions may spring from both an a priori acceptance and refusal of apparently strange and not explicable facts: the latter causes the same alienation from reality as the former making the very history of science a wonderful story of new, at times looking paradoxical, facts able to disprove previous beliefs. Our current paradigm springs form Cartesianism, Enlightment and Positivism, which have focused on the external, physical reality only, skipping Psyche in the attempt of saving natural science from Church’s oversight; thus, the freedom of Galilean sciences was achieved at the cost of leaving consciousness, essential component of human kind and interface between mind and world, to the competence of religion and philosophy only. Fortunately, an increasing dissatisfaction has emerged in recent years with a merely organic medicine and a parallel interest has arisen on consciousness and subjectivity: perhaps it is now time to reappraise our paradigm and the still mysterious mind-brain-world relationship, while the physics of XX century has already overthrown the classic view of the world.