Scholars Crossing
August 29, 2026
Renata B McAllister
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported in approximately 6.3% to 39.3% of patients who survived death or critical illness. Research indicated that health care professionals, of whom nurses are the largest group, received little education or training on NDEs. Nurses' responses to a disclosure could help the patient integrate the experience or contribute to stress and isolation. National...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 28, 2026
Acharya Kumarr
This paper explores the possible relationship between Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and reincarnation-type memories within a unified framework called the Continuity of Consciousness Model (CCM). The author does not claim reincarnation is proven but proposes a research program to test whether these phenomena may reflect a common underlying process. Key Points Near-Death Experiences (NDEs):...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 24, 2026
Mo Lin
Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have consistently shown a highly consistent structural pattern across decades of research—white light, tunnel, life review, peace, out-of-body experience—and correspond precisely to the sequential shutdown of brain regions. This paper proposes that this phenomenon is not a random hallucination, but a data retrieval and upload process triggered by the decoupling of...
Studia Mythologica Slavica
August 18, 2026
Tina Ivnik
This article examines the connection between the ideas adherents of alternative spiritualities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have about the afterlife and their understanding of dreams involving the dead. It explores how these ideas and interpretations are connected to the perceived agency of the dead, as experienced by my interlocutors in their dreams. Focusing on ideas about the afterlife within...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 14, 2026
Christopher Macachor
Abstract Background Near-death experiences (NDEs) exhibit a core phenomenological architecture—out-of-body experiences, tunnel passage, bright light encounters, life reviews—yet no systematic framework explains why this architecture varies between individuals. The Enterarchon Hypothesis (Macachor, Ω-S-004) posits that the enteric nervous system (ENS) is the primary neural substrate of...
OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)
August 11, 2026
Destiny Hankerson
preprint
This is a working paper I created about how near-death experiences can help scientists become more open to studying other spiritually transformative experiences.
ThéoRèmes
August 5, 2026
Renaud Évrard
An intermediate space seems to be constituted by the "spiritual but not religious", which we will consider from the angle of its implications in the field of health. We study experiences of the "wildly sacred," particularly at the frontiers of death: near-death experiences, terminal lucidity and necrophany. Presented in spontaneous forms or induced in experimental devices, these experiences are...
The Journal of Neurobehavioral Sciences
August 1, 2026
Peter Lugten
Living beings bring more order to the world, and are required by the second law of thermodynamics, to simultaneously produce more disorder through metabolic heat dissipation. Consciousness in living beings produces even more order, enhancing survival and reproduction, and incurs an entropy debt that must be paid separately, and non-metabolically, through heat dissipation produced by Landauer’s...
European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing
July 1, 2026
L Pina Astete, M I Munoz Gomez, A Tur Sainz et al.
Abstract Background Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been increasingly studied due to their recurrent and structured nature in patients who survive cardiac arrest (CA). These experiences often include sensations of peace, out-of-body perceptions, or encounters with luminous presences. The Light Project was designed to replicate the seminal study by van Lommel et al. (The Lancet, 2001) in a...
Nursing in Critical Care
July 1, 2026
Kailai Gu, Jingying Huang, Jin Yang et al.
Near-death experiences occur in approximately 15% of intensive care unit survivors. Despite their profound impact on post-intensive care syndrome and long-term psychological recovery, near-death experiences remain under-addressed in clinical settings. To systematically map and synthesize evidence regarding the subjective experiences, influencing factors, assessment tools, and prognostic impacts...
Frontiers in Psychology
August 15, 2018
Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, L. Williams et al.
228 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are complex subjective experiences, which have been previously associated with the psychedelic experience and more specifically with the experience induced by the potent serotonergic, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Potential similarities between both subjective states have been noted previously, including the subjective feeling of transcending one's body and...
PLoS One
February 14, 2018
Héléna Cassol, Benoît Pétré, Sophie Degrange et al.
131 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) refer to profound psychological events that can have an important impact on the experiencers' (NDErs) lives. Previous studies have shown that NDEs memories are phenomenologically rich. In the present study, we therefore aimed to extract the common themes (referred to as "features" in the NDE literature) reported by NDErs by analyzing all the concepts stored in the...
PLoS One
March 27, 2013
Marie Thonnard, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Serge Brédart et al.
140 citations
Since the dawn of time, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have intrigued and, nowadays, are still not fully explained. Since reports of NDEs are proposed to be imagined events, and since memories of imagined events have, on average, fewer phenomenological characteristics than real events memories, we here compared phenomenological characteristics of NDEs reports with memories of imagined and real...
American Psychological Association eBooks
October 27, 2004
Bruce Greyson
133 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs), profound events reported by people who have been close to death, often include feelings of peace, a sense of being outside the physical body, a life review, and meeting apparent nonphysical beings and environments; and they often precipitate profound changes in attitudes and values. Research on NDEs has focused on their epidemiology, psychophysiological...
Psychological Science
March 24, 2004
Willoughby B. Britton, Richard R. Bootzin
156 citations
Many studies in humans suggest that altered temporal lobe functioning, especially functioning in the right temporal lobe, is involved in mystical and religious experiences. We investigated temporal lobe functioning in individuals who reported having transcendental "near-death experiences" during life-threatening events. These individuals were found to have more temporal lobe epileptiform...
General Hospital Psychiatry
July 1, 2003
Bruce Greyson
195 citations
Near-death experiences, unusual experiences during a close brush with death, may precipitate pervasive attitudinal and behavior changes. The incidence and psychological correlates of such experiences, and their association with proximity to death, are unclear. We conducted a 30-month survey to identify near-death experiences in a tertiary care center cardiac inpatient service. In a consecutive...
The Lancet
December 1, 2001
Pirn van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers et al.
679 citations
BackgroundSome people report a near-death experience (NDE) after a life-threatening crisis. We aimed to establish the cause of this experience and assess factors that affected its frequency, depth, and content.MethodsIn a prospective study, we included 344 consecutive cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest in ten Dutch hospitals. We compared demographic,...
The Lancet
February 1, 2000
Bruce Greyson
149 citations
BackgroundSome people who come close to death report having experiences in which they transcend the boundaries of the ego and the confines of time and space. Such near-death experiences (NDEs) share some features with the phenomenon of dissociation, in which a person's self identity becomes detached from bodily sensation. This study explored the frequency of dissociative symptoms in people who...
Psychiatry
February 1, 1992
Bruce Greyson, Nancy Evans Bush
226 citations
Most reported near-death experiences include profound feelings of peace, joy, and cosmic unity. Less familiar are the reports following close brushes with death of experiences that are partially or entirely unpleasant, frightening, or frankly hellish. While little is known about the antecedents or aftereffects of these distressing experiences, there appear to be three distinct types, involving...
The Lancet
November 1, 1990
J. Owens, E.W. Cook, I. Stevenson
182 citations
The medical records of 58 patients, most of whom believed they were near death during an illness or after an injury and all of whom later remembered unusual experiences occurring at the time, were examined. 28 patients were judged to have been so close to death that they would have died without medical intervention; the other 30 patients were not in danger of dying although most of them thought...
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
December 1, 1987
Lee A. Kirkpatrick, Carol Zaleski
318 citations
This book represents the first objective, comprehensive survey of the evidence for life after death provided by 'near-death' experiences. Carol Zalewski demonstrates that the eyewitness account of life after death is a common motif in the folklore and religious literature of the world, and shows that medieval Christian visionary narratives in particular offer surprisingly close parallels to the...
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
June 1, 1983
Bruce Greyson
404 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been described consistently since antiquity and more rigorously in recent years. Investigation into their mechanisms and effects has been impeded by the lack of quantitative measures of the NDE and its components. From an initial pool of 80 manifestations characteristic of NDEs, a 33-item scaled-response preliminary questionnaire was developed, which was...
American Journal of Psychiatry
October 1, 1980
174 citations
The authors studied retrospectively 78 reports of "near-death experiences using subjects narratives and questionnaires, interviews, and medical records. Prior experiences suggestive of transcendence of death were more common among these subjects than among control populations, but prior experiences suggestive of extrasensory phenomena were less common. Subsequent changes in attitudes were more...
Psychiatry
August 1, 1980
Russell Noyes
172 citations
(1980). Attitude Change Following Near-Death Experiences. Psychiatry: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 234-242.