Near Death Experience NDE: What It Is
A near death experience NDE is a cluster of vivid perceptions reported by some people who come close to dying, or who believe they are about to. It is not a diagnosis and not a single event. It is a pattern: a set of features that turn up again and again in accounts from very different people.
The phrase itself is fairly young. Raymond Moody, then doing his medical residency in psychiatry at the University of Virginia, interviewed people who had survived brushes with death and gathered their stories in Life After Life in the mid-1970s. That book named the phenomenon and sketched its recurring elements, and it brought the subject to a mass audience.
The experience is far older than the name. Moody himself pointed to echoes in Plato’s dialogues, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In 1892 Albert Heim reported what later researchers considered the first academic note on a near-death experience. By the mid-2000s, researchers reckoned that about 95 percent of world cultures had some mention of experiences like these.
What People Report: The Common Features
No two near-death experience accounts are identical, and very few contain every element. Still, the same features keep surfacing. Researchers usually group them into a few families.
- Feelings: overwhelming peace, calm, joy or a sense of unconditional love, often in sharp contrast to the pain or panic just before.
- Thinking: thoughts that seem faster or clearer than normal, time that stretches or disappears, and a life review in which memories play back in a rush.
- Apparently paranormal elements: the sense of leaving the body and watching from above, known as an out-of-body experience, and occasionally impressions of future events.
- Transcendent elements: moving through darkness or a tunnel toward light, entering an unearthly landscape, meeting deceased relatives or a presence, and reaching a border or being told to go back.
Then comes the return, which survivors often describe as abrupt and sometimes unwelcome. Many say the experience changed their values afterwards, softening their fear of death or shifting what they cared about. Kenneth Ring later built a questionnaire, the Life Changes Inventory, specifically to measure those shifts.
The aftermath is not always simple. Bruce Greyson, one of the field’s most prolific researchers, has written on the different varieties and types of NDE, and has argued that the aftermath of a near death experience NDE can, in some cases, lead to psychological difficulties. That is one reason he pushed for it to be taken seriously in clinical settings. For a closer look at how individual survivors tell their stories, see our piece on near death experience accounts and why people report them.
A Short History of Near-Death Research
Before it had a name, the near death experience NDE sat inside Victorian psychical research. In the 1880s and 1890s, investigators such as Frederick W.H. Myers and William Crookes and groups like the Society for Psychical Research in England studied these phenomena alongside apparitions and other reported oddities. Mainstream science was skeptical, and interest faded in the early twentieth century.
The revival came in the 1970s. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross addressed the subject publicly, George Ritchie published autobiographical books about his own experience, and Moody’s work gave everyone a shared vocabulary. Russell Noyes then began pulling the subject toward medicine, collecting stories from personal reports and medical records. His 1977 paper with Kletti on depersonalization in response to life-threatening danger became the most cited article in the field.
That same year, a group of researchers met in Charlottesville, Virginia. Out of that circle, which included Moody, Greyson, Ring, Michael Sabom and John Audette, came an association that later became the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), along with the field’s first peer-reviewed journal, Anabiosis, later renamed the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
The key early books and tools
- Kenneth Ring, Life at Death (1980): identified a “core” experience with stages. The same year, Ring developed the Weighted Core Experience Index to measure depth.
- Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death (1982): considered a significant publication in launching the field, and one that drew academic attention.
- Bruce Greyson, the NDE Scale (1983): a 16-item questionnaire that became the standard measuring tool.
- Melvin Morse and colleagues (1980s): studied children and found their experiences resembled adults’.
The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, founded by Ian Stevenson in the late 1960s, also became a home for the work, alongside research on reincarnation claims, apparitions and deathbed visions. The field has always lived on the edge of mainstream medicine, met with academic disbelief and limited funding.
What Hospital Studies of the Near Death Experience NDE Found
The first decades relied on retrospective studies: people came forward, sometimes years later, to describe what had happened. That method has obvious weaknesses. Memory reshapes stories, and the people who volunteer are not a random sample.
From the late 1980s, researchers began prospective studies instead. They followed a defined group, usually cardiac arrest survivors, and interviewed everyone, so they could see who reported an experience and who did not. These studies are slower and more expensive, but they give the most useful picture of how often a near death experience NDE occurs.
| Study | Setting | What it reported |
|---|---|---|
| Pim van Lommel and colleagues (began 1988) | 10 Dutch hospitals, 344 cardiac arrest survivors | 62 patients (18%) reported an NDE; 41 (12%) described a core experience |
| Schwaninger and colleagues (1991 to 1994) | Barnes-Jewish Hospital; 30 interviewable survivors | 23% reported an NDE |
| Bruce Greyson (30-month survey) | University of Virginia Hospital cardiac service | About 10% of cardiac arrest patients and 1% of other cardiac patients reported NDEs |
| Sam Parnia and colleagues (2001) | Southampton General Hospital, 63 survivors | 11.1% had memories of their unconscious period, several with NDE features |
| Klemenc-Ketis and colleagues (2010) | Slovenian intensive care units | 21.2% reported NDEs; linked to higher carbon dioxide and potassium levels and to previous NDEs |
| AWARE (published 2014) | Hospitals in the US, UK and Austria | 9% of those completing in-depth interviews reported NDE-like experiences |
| AWARE II (published 2023) | Multicentre follow-up | 11 of 28 interviewed participants reported experiences suggestive of consciousness during cardiac arrest |
Two patterns stand out. First, a near death experience NDE is a minority experience: most people who survive cardiac arrest remember nothing of the kind. Second, the rates vary widely, from under 10 percent to over 20 percent, depending on who was studied and how the questions were asked.
Other findings complicate any simple story. A 1990 study by Owens, Cook and Stevenson examined the medical records of 58 people who believed they had been near death. Only 28 had actually been in danger. Both groups reported similar experiences, though those genuinely close to death described more core features. Research on combat veterans found their experiences tended to be less intense than those of civilians.
How Researchers Measure a Near Death Experience NDE
Because the experience is subjective, researchers needed a consistent way to decide whether a story counted. Greyson’s NDE Scale is the most widely used answer. It asks 16 questions across four dimensions: cognition (such as faster thoughts or a life review), affect (peace and joy), paranormal features (leaving the body, glimpses of the future) and transcendence (an unearthly realm, meeting the dead). The maximum score is 32, and a score of 7 or higher has been the standard threshold for a near death experience NDE.
A worked example
Imagine a hypothetical survivor of a heart attack who recalls three things: a sudden, deep calm; the impression of looking down at the medical team; and a sense of time stopping. On the scale, each of those touches a different item, and depending on how strongly each was felt, the total might land just above or just below the cutoff. Add a meeting with a dead grandparent and a bright light, and the score climbs clearly into near death experience NDE territory.
The example shows why the scale matters. Without it, one person’s “I felt calm” and another’s “I visited another world” would be lumped together. With it, researchers can compare depth across studies, and Greyson has argued it helps distinguish NDEs from confusion caused by organic brain problems or general stress responses.
The tools have limits. Ring’s earlier index was a pioneering effort but, as Greyson noted, was not built on statistical analysis. More recently, Martial and colleagues identified weaknesses in Greyson’s own scale and proposed a 20-item alternative, the NDE-C scale. Measurement in this field is still being refined.
Explanations: Brain, Mind or Something More?
Explanations for the near death experience NDE generally fall into three groups: physiological, psychological and transcendental. Put more bluntly, the debate is between “in-brain” theories and “survivalist” theories, which hold that consciousness may continue independently of the brain.
The physiological case
The strongest ordinary explanation is that a brain in crisis produces these experiences. Cardiac arrest, trauma and severe illness disrupt blood flow, oxygen, carbon dioxide and body chemistry, and a stressed brain can generate intense imagery, feelings of detachment and distorted time. The Slovenian finding that NDEs were more common in patients with higher carbon dioxide and potassium levels fits this approach, since it ties the experience to measurable body states.
The psychological case
Noyes and Kletti framed many features as depersonalization: a detachment the mind produces when facing mortal danger. The 1990 finding that people who only believed they were dying had similar experiences supports the idea that expectation and fear play a role. Greyson and Stevenson suggested in 1980 that social and psychological factors explained some components of the experience.
The transcendental case
Here is where it gets harder. Greyson and Stevenson also said those factors explained some, but not all, of what people describe. Van Lommel and colleagues argued that transcendental explanations belong in the framework, and researchers including Parnia, Fenwick and Greyson have called for a wider discussion of how mind and brain relate and what human consciousness may be capable of. Several researchers in the field have expressed reservations about purely psychological or physiological accounts.
Skeptics answer that timing is the weak point. An experience could form in the moments before collapse or during recovery and only feel as if it happened while the heart was stopped. AWARE II reported that 11 of 28 interviewed participants described experiences suggestive of consciousness during cardiac arrest, but how to read that result remains a matter of debate, and it has not settled the question either way. For more on the mind’s stranger territory, our consciousness, dreams and the mind section collects related reading.
Reading Near-Death Experience Stories: Common Mistakes
The internet is full of stories of near death experiences, from forum threads to video countdowns of the “best” cases. They can be moving, and some are carefully told. A few habits make it easier to weigh any near death experience NDE story fairly.
- Treating “clinically dead” as a precise term. Accounts often say someone was dead for a set number of minutes. What that means medically varies, and the 1990 study shows people can have NDE-like experiences without being in danger at all.
- Assuming every account is typical. Hospital studies suggest most survivors recall nothing. The stories that circulate are a self-selected slice.
- Ignoring the time gap. A story first told years later has been retold many times. Prospective studies exist precisely because memory drifts.
- Dismissing the experiencer. Doubting an interpretation is different from doubting that someone had a powerful experience. The experiences are consistently reported; their meaning is the open question.
- Reading cultural detail as proof or disproof. Who people meet and how they describe the place often reflects their background. That variation is real data, not a gotcha.
Our companion piece on near death experience testimonies and the debate around them looks at recurring themes in more depth. Some readers also find overlap with altered states such as lucid dreams; our article on why some say lucid dreaming is dangerous covers what research says about that very different experience.
What Remains Unexplained About the Near Death Experience NDE
After close to 3,500 cases reviewed between 1975 and 2005 and a string of hospital studies since, some things are settled. The near death experience NDE is real as an experience, reported across cultures and ages, including by children. It is relatively uncommon even among cardiac arrest survivors. It can reshape how people live afterwards.
What remains open is the central question. Why do so many people, under such different circumstances, describe such a similar sequence? Why do some report clear, structured experiences at moments of severe physical crisis? Is the experience a final, extraordinary performance by a failing brain, or a glimpse of something the brain does not fully contain?
| Documented | Claimed or disputed |
|---|---|
| A minority of cardiac arrest survivors report NDEs in prospective studies | That consciousness continues while the brain is not functioning |
| Features are consistent enough to be measured with standard scales | That out-of-body perceptions are accurate observations |
| Similar experiences occur in people who only believed they were dying | That NDEs offer evidence of an afterlife |
| Some blood chemistry measures correlate with NDE reports | That brain chemistry fully explains the experience |
The field has not answered those questions, and no single study is likely to. What it has done is move the near death experience NDE from campfire story to something measured in intensive care units, without making it any less strange.
If this subject pulls at you, the paranormal accounts section and the full journal archive hold more cases worth weighing, and the Troubled Minds Vault gathers the radio show’s long-form conversations about the unexplained.
Questions and answers
What is a near death experience (NDE)?
A near death experience is a set of vivid perceptions some people report after coming close to death, often during cardiac arrest, serious injury or illness. Common elements include deep peace, a sense of leaving the body, moving toward a light, a review of one's life and meeting deceased relatives. The term was popularised by Raymond Moody's 1970s book Life After Life, and researchers now measure these experiences with standardised questionnaires.
How common are near-death experiences?
Studies of cardiac arrest survivors give different figures depending on method and setting. A Dutch study of 344 survivors found 18 percent reported an NDE. Bruce Greyson found about 10 percent of cardiac arrest patients at a US hospital did, against 1 percent of other cardiac patients. A Slovenian study reported 21.2 percent, while the AWARE study found 9 percent among those interviewed in depth.
Are near-death experiences real?
The experiences are real in the sense that people genuinely have them and describe them consistently across cultures and decades. What is disputed is what they mean. Some researchers see them as products of a brain under extreme stress, others as psychological responses to danger, and some argue they point to consciousness continuing beyond normal brain function. The evidence has not settled the question.
Do you have to be clinically dead to have an NDE?
No. In a 1990 study, researchers compared 58 people who believed they had been near death. Medical records showed only 28 had actually been in danger, yet both groups reported similar experiences. Those truly close to death described more of the core features. NDE-like episodes can follow accidents, illness and moments of perceived danger, not only cardiac arrest.
Can a near-death experience have lasting effects?
Many experiencers say it changed their values and outlook, and Kenneth Ring developed the Life Changes Inventory to measure those shifts. The aftermath is not always easy. Bruce Greyson has argued that NDEs deserve clinical attention because, in some cases, adjusting to the experience can lead to psychological problems. Anyone struggling after a brush with death is best served by talking with a qualified professional.
Do children have near-death experiences?
Yes. In the 1980s, Melvin Morse and colleagues investigated near-death experiences in a pediatric population and found that children reported experiences similar to those described by adults. Morse later co-wrote two books for general readers on the subject, Closer to the Light in 1990 and Transformed by the Light in 1992. How to interpret the similarity remains part of the wider debate.
Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
