Some people think death is merely a medical event. These experts think otherwise.
Tyler Volk, PhD, Bruce Greyson, MD, and BJ Miller, MD, have studied death from the perspective of biology, psychiatry, and palliative care, and together they reveal that it’s far more than a clinical endpoint. According to them, it’s time to change how we understand mortality, seeing it as both central to evolution and something to be reclaimed from medicine’s grip.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
BJ MILLER: Dying is not just a medical event. It’s way bigger than that. It's where everything comes to account. Our psychology, our philosophy, our spirituality, our social world, our intrapersonal lives. It is all-encompassing.
TYLER VOLK: Without death, there's no evolution. Evolution, as it works now, operates by dying, and the next generations carry on. The body, through the evolutionary process, has tuned interconnectivity of the cells and the brain. You can get a design happening out of evolution over time. Or you can get adaptations occurring that did not exist. At one point, there were no large creatures such as us walking around on land. The only way that could happen would be many generations dying. So death has really been an essential ingredient to the evolutionary process.
BRUCE GREYSON: I started being confronted by patients’ reports of things that I couldn't explain. Near-death experiences are profound, subjective experiences that many people have when they come close to death, or sometimes when they are in fact pronounced dead.
And they include such difficult to explain phenomena as a sense of leaving the physical body. And we have hundreds and hundreds of experiences that occur during a cardiac arrest or deep anesthesia, when we know the brain is not capable of functioning well enough to create complex thoughts and feelings and memories. And they often report hearing sounds they've never heard on Earth, and seeing colors they'd never seen before.
Some of the lessons that near-death experiences bring back from this event is the sense of being interconnected with other people, about how to make this life more meaningful, more purposeful, more fulfilling. But I think the important part of near-death experiences is what they tell us about this life we're in now.
BJ MILLER: The domain of death is more or less ruled these days by health care. In times past, it's been the church or the family was the center of all this. The medical piece is a little itty bitty piece, it just gets too much attention. We people, we humans, we patients, loved ones, we need to take back the subject on some level.
One of the things I see, that happens a lot around this subject, one can be made to feel ashamed, to be sick, ashamed to be dying like we're failing somehow. We end up accidentally making life even harder for each other by keeping the truth of the situation at bay. We die before we have to die.
Ideally, we come to our death without piles and piles of regret. When I'm working with patients, especially upstream of their death, I'm always encouraging them to feel things, enjoy the body they have while they have it, because it's someday going to go and you're going to miss it. As long as I can feel something, I'm interested in being alive.
