评论
打印
For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated.
几年来，密歇根大学神经学教授吉莫·博尔吉金一直被一个问题所困扰，那就是我们死去的时候会发生什么。她读到过某些心脏骤停幸存者的濒死体验，这些人在复苏之前经历了非凡的灵性旅程。
Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness.
有时候，这些人说，他们离开了身体躯壳，走向无比耀眼的光源，已经逝世的亲人在那里迎接他们。其他人谈到濒死体验让他们对生活有了新的理解，或者遇到了至善的生灵。
Borjigin didn't believe the content of those stories was true -- she didn't think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld -- but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients' brains.
博尔吉金并不相信那些故事的内容是真实的----她不认为垂死之人的灵魂真的会前往来世----但她怀疑在这些病人的大脑中确实发生了一些非常真实的事情。
In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen.
在她自己的实验室里，她发现老鼠在心脏停止跳动和大脑缺氧后，会经历许多神经递质的剧烈活动，包括血清素和多巴胺。
She wondered if humans' near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn't be revived.
她想知道人类的濒死体验是否可能起源于类似的现象，以及这种现象是否也发生在那些无法复苏的人身上。
Dying seemed like such an important area of research -- we all do it, after all -- that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death. But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment.
死亡看起来是一个非常重要的研究领域----毕竟我们都会经历死亡----所以博尔吉金以为其他科学家已经对死亡过程中的大脑情况有了深入的了解。但当她查阅科学文献时，她几乎没有得到什么启发。
Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies.
自20世纪60年代以来，复苏技术的进步帮助挽救了成千上万人的生命，否则他们可能已经死亡。其中大约10%或20%的人带来了他们濒死体验的故事，在这些故事中，他们感觉自己的灵魂或自我离开了身体。
A handful of those patients even claimed to witness, from above, doctors' attempts to resuscitate them.
有少数病人甚至声称，他们从上方看到了医生试图复苏他们的过程。
According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death.
根据几项国际调查和研究，每10个人中就有1个人声称有过涉及心脏骤停的濒死体验，或在可能接近死亡的情况下有过类似濒死的经历。
That's roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.
这就意味着全球大约8亿条灵魂可能已经一只脚踏进过来世。
As remarkable as these near-death experiences sounded, they were consistent enough that some scientists began to believe there was truth to them: maybe people really did have minds or souls that existed separately from their living bodies.
虽然这些濒死体验听起来非同寻常，但它们也足够一致，以至于一些科学家开始相信其中有真相：也许人们真的有独立于他们身体而存在的思想或灵魂。
In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.
20世纪70年代，北美和欧洲的一个由心脏病专家、精神病学家、医学社会学家和社会心理学家组成的小型网络开始调查，濒死体验是否证明死亡并非生命的终结，以及意识是否可以独立于大脑而存在。
The field of near-death studies was born.
濒死研究领域就此诞生。
