Interfaith Group

and what he's able to measure. Clearly, someone CAN be more dead than a person who eventually comes back to full consciousness and normal functioning (Napoleon would fall into that category). There may simply be cases where we can't tell the difference between mostly dead and all dead with the techniques we currently have for measuring brain activity.

And even if this particular person claims that there is no religious component to this, he has to know there is. You can't work as much as he apparently has in this area of research without knowing that many people look to it for scientific validation of the existence of an afterlife. He himself may or may not be trying to provide that validation (explicitly or subtly), but he has to know that it's what a lot of people need to hear, and that NDE research that concludes or even implies that there is something unknown "out there" is going to get more attention and more funding.