David Glowacki, physicist: ‘The idea of living for 500 years scares me more than death’

Around 5% of the global population has had a near-death experience. People who have survived accidents, cardiac arrest or complicated surgeries often remember moments when they walked towards a light, saw their body from the outside, or heard people calling them from beyond the grave. Very often, the experience changes their way of seeing life and reduces their anxiety about death.

David Glowacki is a researcher at the Singular Research Center in Intelligent Technologies (CiTIUS), part of the University of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Almost two decades ago, he had his own brush with death. This is what he remembers from the 2006 incident: while hiking, he suffered a 100-foot fall that fractured several vertebrae and his hip. It also caused a chest contusion that filled his lungs with blood. While waiting for the rescue helicopter, he noticed how with each breath, he felt like he was choking on his own blood. He thought that it was the end.

He recalls how his consciousness separated from his shattered body and how that body became a light that grew and diminished in intensity with the rhythm of his breathing. He survived. And he no longer fears death.

Now, this American scientist with a PhD in molecular physics has decided to use virtual reality (VR) to help patients in mortal danger feel the same liberation that he once felt. His NUMADELIC project will receive over $900,000 over the next three years, provided by the US-based Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. The funding will allow him to recreate his near-death experience in VR, something that has already been done successfully via clinical trials that administer psychedelic drugs to patients for therapeutic purposes.

Question. How did this project get started?

Answer. There’s a lot of research showing that people who have had near-death experiences have significantly reduced levels of anxiety and depression when they think about death. They often talk about a transcendental sense of peace and acceptance [regarding] the natural cycles of existence. They often describe feeling that, despite the end of the physical body, there’s 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, then perhaps this could help reduce the fear and anxiety that people feel in relation to death.

There have been a number of clinicians — doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists — who have been investigating the use of psychedelic drugs to simulate a near-death experience. A lot of that [research] has shown that psychedelics also help to decrease the fear of death. Obviously, psychedelic drugs are tricky, because they’re not legal everywhere […] Also, if someone has a diagnosis like cancer, they’re oftentimes already on several medications and it’s not advisable to add more.

Q. It must be difficult to recreate something as intense as having a near-death experience.

A. In a 2022 paper, we showed that it’s possible to recreate the effects of psychedelic drugs in people using group VR experiences, [in a way in which] participants can remember that experience. When someone takes a psychedelic drug, [it’s given to them], they ingest it and they have an experience. And, after that experience, they’re asked a lot of questions about what they felt. Then, [researchers] compare their answers to other kinds of experiences.

When we did this research with VR, we showed that we were able to get the same measurement results as with participants who were given psilocybin and LSD in a clinical setting. We were very surprised. Now, having that experience with VR isn’t the same as taking mushrooms or acid, or having [an actual] near-death experience. However, the effects on how people remember and talk about the experience afterwards are almost the same. Much of our lab’s work is focused on getting people into a state of mind where they’re receptive to this new way of perceiving [things].

Q. Do personal beliefs influence the effect of the therapy?

A. We’re going to study that more 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’s a physical reality and, at the same time, a spiritual or energetic reality. For me, having done my PhD in computational physics, 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 energy waves. So, even from a scientific point of view, in one of the most fundamental models of physics, we have a narrative description of reality that spans these two domains.

What we perceive with our eyes is the material, physical reality. But physics is dealing with delocalized, energetic reality. When we talk about this work with people, we don’t present it as [having to do with] spirituality, auras, or esoteric concepts. Rather, we say to 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 actually an energetic essence. But we don’t perceive this 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’re 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 isn’t controversial to most people. Quantum mechanics isn’t a controversial topic. We just say: “There’s one reality and there’s another reality… and we’re going to offer you a way to imagine that other reality.”

Q. Couldn’t 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’re healthy, don’t think they need to think about it. When someone gets a cancer diagnosis, they know they have to start thinking about these questions. 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 healthcare system that tries to keep people alive as long as possible and, at the same time, pretends that death doesn’t exist.

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

Q. What do you think about transhumanist projects, which want to extend life expectancy by centuries, or even make us immortal?

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

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

A. There are examples of people who’ve been clinically dead for five or 10 minutes, with no brain or heart signals, and have come back to life. [This raises] a lot of questions: are these real experiences, or just hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain? For me, the experience was quite real: my lungs were filling up with blood and I felt like I was drowning. But now, obviously, I’m alive and I’m talking to you. So, did I really die? Maybe for a little while. But we normally think of death as a state from which you cannot return. If our definition of death is the irreversible loss of identity in a recognizable form, I guess, in that case I didn’t die, because people can still recognize my pattern in this life.

What’s interesting to me, if I just take a purely perceptual approach, is that the visions and the phenomenology of my experience have a lot in common with psychedelic drug experiences and with other near-death experiences. What I experienced isn’t something that has only happened 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’m not afraid of death. And many people who have had this experience are no longer afraid of 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 somebody sees is real, or that it proves that there’s life after death. For scientists, it’s very difficult to avoid these questions. Maybe some would say the same about religion: it was very comforting for many people, but science questioned and weakened 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’s something important to understand about science: science tries to explain phenomena using another level of analysis. Science is a tool to explain the world. I’m a scientist, but I understand science as a method: it always takes one thing and explains it through another layer of analysis. And it goes on, 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 in science. If we keep breaking down reality, at some point, we come to the big question: where does everything 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 the same 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 recognize the limitations of science, but we can take a scientific approach to studying these [near-death] experiences. We can induce near-death experiences in people, observe the results, improve them and continue to work with them. But I’m not sure science can ever say anything definitive about these experiences. Because if someone actually dies, linguistically, it means you can never talk to that person again. So, how could we possibly 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 improved our lives. 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.

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