David Glowacki, physicist: “The idea of ​​living 500 years scares me more than death”

About 5% of the population has had a near-death experience . People who suffer accidents, cardiac arrests or complicated surgeries and ultimately survive often recall moments when they walked towards a light, saw their body from outside or remembered people calling them from beyond the grave. Very often, the experience changes the way they view life and reduces their anxiety about death.

This is how David Glowacki , a researcher at the Singular Centre for Research in Intelligent Technologies at the University of Santiago de Compostela (CITIUS), remembers it. Almost two decades ago, he had his own brush with death. In 2006, while hiking, he suffered a 30-metre fall that fractured several vertebrae, his hip and caused a chest contusion that filled his lungs. While he waited for the rescue helicopter, he noticed how with each breath they filled with blood and thought that this was the end.

Shattered, he recalls how his consciousness separated from his body and how his body became a light that grew and diminished in intensity with the rhythm of his breathing. He survived and no longer feared death. Now, this American doctor in molecular physics has decided to use virtual reality to help patients in mortal danger feel the same liberation that he felt. His NUMADELIC project will receive 900,000 euros over three years provided by the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation of the USA to recreate his near-death experience in virtual reality, something he has already done successfully with the experience of taking psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes .

Question: How did this project begin?

Answer. There is a lot of research showing that people who have had near-death experiences report significantly reduced levels of anxiety and depression when they think about death. They often talk about a transcendental sense of peace and acceptance of the natural cycles of existence, and often describe the feeling that despite the end of the physical body, there is a part of their consciousness that will continue on in some way. You may think this is crazy — many people do — but this observation suggests that if we had a way to simulate a near-death experience, perhaps that could help reduce the fear and anxiety that people feel in relation to death.

There have been a number of doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have been researching the use of psychedelic drugs to simulate a near-death experience. Much of that research has shown that psychedelics also help to decrease the fear of death and the anxiety it brings. However, psychedelics are tricky because they are not legal everywhere. Also, if someone has a diagnosis such as cancer, they are often already on several medications and it is not advisable to add more.

Q. It seems difficult to recreate in virtual reality something as intense as having a near-death experience or taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

A. In a 2022 paper, we showed that it is possible to recreate the effects of psychedelic drugs in people using group VR experiences, at least in the way that participants say they remember that experience. When someone takes a psychedelic drug, they get administered it, they ingest it, and then they have an experience. And after that experience, they are asked a lot of questions about what they felt and then they compare their answers to other kinds of experiences. When we did this VR research, we showed that we got the same results on those measurements as people who were given psilocybin and LSD in a clinical setting. We were very surprised.

Having that experience in VR is not the same as taking mushrooms or acid, or having a near-death experience. However, the effects on how people remember and talk about the experience afterwards are much the same. Much of our lab's work is focused on getting people into a state of mind where they are receptive to this new way of perceiving.

Q. Do personal beliefs influence the effect of therapy?

A. We are going to study that as part of this project, but the first thing I would say is that people’s perspectives will almost certainly be influenced by their beliefs. However, there are ideas that are shared by many religious traditions, such as that there is a physical reality and at the same time a spiritual or energetic reality. For me, having done my PhD in computational physics, where I studied quantum mechanics, what I find really interesting is that quantum mechanics is a theory that tells us that physical, material objects, as we imagine them, can actually be described as energetic waves, so even from a scientific point of view, in one of the most fundamental models of physics, we have a description of reality that spans these two domains.

What we perceive with our eyes is the material, physical reality. But physics works with an energetic reality that is more diffuse, more delocalized. When we talk about this work with people, we don’t present it as something about spirituality, auras, or esoteric concepts. Rather, we tell them: “Look, regardless of what you believe, whatever belief system you have, the most important model we have in theoretical physics tells us that our essence is, in fact, an energetic essence. But we don’t perceive it with our eyes. To see that energetic world, we need very specific instruments. And physics, along with many branches of science, provides us with those instruments. But the fact that we are beings of continuous energy, in constant communication and interaction with our environment, is a scientific reality.”

Part of the effectiveness of what we've done is that we've taken an approach that's not controversial to most people. Quantum mechanics is not a controversial topic. We're simply saying, "There's one reality and there's another reality, and we're going to give you a way to imagine that other reality."

Q. Could this technique be useful for healthy people to reduce anxiety about death?

A. I think everyone needs to think about these things, not just those who have a terminal diagnosis, but many people, when they are healthy, don't feel they need to think about it. When someone is diagnosed with cancer, they know they have to start thinking about these issues.

We need a cultural conversation about what it means to live and what it means to die. We have all these advanced scientific tools, but many people don't have a language to talk about death. They don't have good ways to think about it. We live in a culture that values ​​existence above all else. We have a health care system that tries to keep people alive as long as possible while at the same time pretending that death doesn't exist.

We are at a point in our technological evolution where our methods of extending life have been so successful that we have almost forgotten the reality of death. And we need to remind ourselves of it again. This project is part of a larger cultural conversation.

Q. What do you think of transhumanist projects that aim to extend life expectancy by centuries or even make us immortal?

A. The idea of ​​living 500 years scares me more than death, perhaps because I had this near-death experience and it was so enjoyable. I don't have very strong feelings about transhumanism, although many people in Silicon Valley are obsessed with living a long time.

Q. Do you think your near-death experience was real or could it have just been a hallucination? Because there is no way to find out scientifically.

A. There are examples of people who have been clinically dead for five or ten minutes and have come back to life, with no brain or heart signals. And there are a lot of questions: Are these real experiences or just hallucinations from lack of oxygen to the brain? For me, the experience was quite real, but now, obviously, I am alive and talking to you. So did I die? Maybe for a moment. But we normally think of death as a state from which you cannot return. So, if our definition of death is the irreversible loss of identity in a recognizable form, I guess I did not die, because people can still recognize my pattern in this life.

What's interesting to me, if I look at it from a purely perceptual perspective, is that the visions and the phenomenology of my experience have a lot in common with experiences with psychedelic drugs and other near-death experiences. What I experienced is not something that has happened only to me. Many people have gone through something similar.

I think that, if I'm being practical, the result of this experience is that I now have very little fear of death in my daily life. We can debate whether I actually died or whether that's what death really is, but if the goal is to reduce anxiety and depression, who cares? I have no fear of death and many people who have had this experience no longer fear death. That's a positive thing. Scientifically, it's a very interesting question, but from a practical perspective, if what we want is to help people deal with their fear, it's an irrelevant question. Let's try to give people the opportunity to go deeper into that experience. That's the logic behind this project.

Q. Just because there are common experiences doesn't mean that what you see is real or that it proves that there is life after death. It's very difficult for scientists to avoid such questions. Perhaps some would say the same about religion: it was very comforting for many people, but science questioned and undermined, by influencing the facts, many beliefs that were useful to people.

A. There are many scientists who want to explain the near-death experience in another way. But there is something important to understand about science. Science tries to explain phenomena using another level of analysis. Science is a tool to explain the world, and I am a scientist, but I understand science as a method, it always takes one thing and explains it in terms of another. And so it goes, layer after layer, each time with smaller and more detailed levels of explanation.

So of course science is going to try to explain a near-death experience in those terms. But there's also a limitation to science. If we keep breaking down and breaking down reality, at some point we get to the big question: where does it all come from? And that's a question that science will never be able to answer, because science can only study things that happen over and over again, millions of times. Experiments require repeatability. But as far as we know, the existence of consciousness and the universe itself is a unique event.

The whole miracle of existence is completely outside the scope of the scientific method. And we need to understand that as scientists. That’s why I think a lot of people within science want to discredit religion. But religion and spiritual traditions have tried to answer that question. They’re saying, “Well, we can’t explain where everything came from, but we still need to know, we need a sense of purpose, we need a sense of ethics, we need a way to understand ourselves in relation to everything else.” Because science can’t give us those things. And we need those things to live healthy, productive lives, and to enjoy the natural world. We need other ways to relate to reality beyond just offering mechanical explanations of cause and effect.

It's important to acknowledge the limitations of science, but we can take a scientific approach to studying these experiences. We can induce near-death experiences in people, observe the results, improve them, and keep working with them. But I'm not sure science can ever say anything definitive about these experiences, just by definition. Because if someone really dies, linguistically it means you'll never be able to talk to that person again. So how could we do a scientific study? It's impossible.

I think what makes the study of death so uncomfortable for science is that it represents a boundary. It's the point where the limits of the scientific method meet the mysteries of existence. Science goes so far, and the mystery of existence begins right after that. Death is one of those intersection points. That's what's fascinating. We need to be more philosophical about what science as a method really is. I love science, it's powerful, it's made our lives better. But it also can't solve absolutely all of our problems. It has limits and boundaries, and we need other ways of thinking about the world to help us when science reaches those limits.