Fearing death keeps us from living. 3 experts explain.

"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."

"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."

Dying is more than a medical event; it encompasses psychological, philosophical, spiritual, social, and intrapersonal dimensions and brings many aspects of human life to account. Death functions as a biological driver because generations must die for evolution to produce new designs and large land animals. Evolutionary processes tune cellular and neural interconnectivity while allowing novel adaptations to emerge. Near-death experiences are reported as profound, subjective phenomena that occur when people come close to death or are pronounced dead. Mortality should be recognized as central to biology and human meaning rather than treated solely as a clinical endpoint.

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