Did Emanuel Swedenborg have near-death experiences? Envisioning a developmental account of NDEs.

Abstract

Article examining the phenomenological commonalities between Emanuel Swedenborg's experiences and near-death experiences (NDEs). It argues that a distal cause of Swedenborg's experiences was neural changes induced by his lifetime of unusual respiration, in conjunction with a predisposition to temporal lobe seizures. It concludes by proposing a number of empirically testable hypotheses emerging from the arguments, centered around a developmental approach to NDEs.