More Real Than Real: The Question That Survives Either Answer

Let's start with what has not been shown. No experiment has demonstrated that consciousness operates outside the brain. The controlled hospital tests have found nothing (see The Hidden Targets), and the striking cases in The Accounts are testimony, not proof. Anyone who tells you the question is settled, in either direction, is ahead of the evidence.

But the veridical cases are only one way into near-death experiences, and maybe not the most important one. Listen to people who have had one describe it, and something else stands out. It is not only what they saw. It is what it was like.

What people actually describe

The accounts are remarkably consistent, across ages, countries and beliefs, and they describe things that do not occur in ordinary life:

• More real than real. Not dreamlike. Sharper, clearer and more vivid than waking life, and remembered that way for decades.
• More awake than awake. Thought is fast and lucid, often at the moment the body is least able to support it.
• Colours that don't exist. A recurring theme in experiencers' accounts is colour they have never seen before or since, and cannot describe because there is nothing to compare it to.
• A presence. An intelligence vastly greater than their own, which knows them completely.
• Love without conditions. Not love as it is felt between people, but an absolute, overwhelming acceptance directed at them, as they are, including everything they are ashamed of.
• The light. A light brighter than anything physical that does not hurt to look at, which people describe as alive, and as something they had always known.
• Peace. A total absence of fear and pain, so complete that many did not want to come back.

Raymond Moody, who coined the term "near-death experience" in Life After Life (1975), put ineffability first on his list of common features: people say over and over that there are no words for it. Bruce Greyson's NDE Scale (1983), the standard research questionnaire, asks about many of these directly, including feelings of peace and joy, a sense of unity with everything, a brilliant light, senses more vivid than usual, and meeting a mystical being or presence.

What the numbers say

This is not just a pattern in the best stories. When researchers measure it, it holds.

• Most report heightened consciousness. In a survey of 1,122 people who submitted accounts to NDERF, 835 (74.4 per cent) said they had more consciousness and alertness than normal during the experience. Only 5.2 per cent said less. Nearly two-thirds (64.3 per cent) said their vision was different from everyday vision. (Jeffrey Long, "Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality", Missouri Medicine 111(5), 2014.)
• The memories behave like more-than-real events. A team at the University of Liège compared the memories of coma survivors who had NDEs with their memories of real events and imagined events. The NDE memories had more sensory, self-referential and emotional detail than memories of real events. In the authors' words: "NDE memories contained more characteristics than real event memories." The sample was small: eight NDE survivors. (Thonnard and others, PLOS ONE 8(3), e57620, 2013.)
• They change lives. In Long's survey, 54.7 per cent of 278 respondents reported large changes in their lives afterwards. In Pim van Lommel's Dutch hospital study (The Lancet, 2001), patients who had NDEs were followed up after two and eight years and, compared with resuscitated patients who had not, showed a lasting loss of the fear of death.

Suppose it's all the brain

Here is the argument this page exists to make. Take the most skeptical position available: consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, nothing leaves the body, and every near-death experience is neurons doing something under extreme stress. There are serious candidates for what that something is. A dying brain is starved of oxygen and flooded with chemicals. In 2013, Jimo Borjigin's team at the University of Michigan recorded a surge of highly organised gamma-wave activity in rats in the seconds after cardiac arrest (PNAS, 2013). In 2023 the same group reported a similar surge in two of four dying patients taken off life support (Xu and others, PNAS, 2023). And in 2018 a team at Imperial College London gave intravenous DMT to 13 volunteers: all 13 scored above the threshold for a near-death experience on Greyson's scale, at levels comparable to a matched group who had really nearly died. (Timmermann and others, "DMT Models the Near-Death Experience", Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.)

Grant all of it. The puzzle doesn't go away. It changes shape.

If the brain is producing these experiences, then the brain contains, somewhere, the capacity for a love more complete than any person has ever felt from another person, a clarity beyond anything waking life allows, colours no eye has seen, and a sense of meeting something infinitely greater than oneself. And it produces them at the moment it is failing, not when it is at its best. It does not produce terror, which is what you would expect. It does not produce noise. For most people it produces the single most meaningful experience of their lives, one that rewrites their values for decades afterwards.

Why would that be in there? Evolution builds brains to keep bodies alive, and there is no obvious survival reason to keep, in reserve, an experience of unconditional love so powerful that it ends the fear of death. "It's just the brain" is often said as if it closes the subject. It doesn't. It moves the mystery from the afterlife to the inside of the skull, where it is just as strange.

The DMT study, often read as the skeptical answer, actually sharpens this. It shows that a single molecule can open the same door. It does not explain why the door is there, or why the room behind it is the same for so many people, or why the people who go through it come back saying it was more real than this.

Two questions, not one

So there are really two questions about near-death experiences, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is whether consciousness can perceive the world without the brain. That is what the veridical cases test, and it is the one science may eventually answer, one way or the other. The rest of the Consciousness Files is about it.

The second is what these experiences reveal about consciousness itself: that a mind, under the right conditions, can experience a reality more vivid than this one and a love more total than any it has known. That question survives either answer to the first. If consciousness is non-local, the experiences may be a glimpse of where it comes from. If it is entirely local, then every one of us is walking around with all of that inside us, unopened.

Either way, that is worth knowing.

Read the accounts yourself

The best way to understand this is not a summary. It is the accounts. The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation holds thousands, in the experiencers' own words. Read ten at random. Notice how often people say the same things, in different words, about colour, light, love and being more real. Then decide for yourself what kind of thing could produce that.

Sources

• Jeffrey Long, "Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for Their Reality", Missouri Medicine 111(5) (2014), 372 to 380, full text.
• Marie Thonnard and others, "Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories", PLOS ONE 8(3) (2013), e57620, full text.
• Christopher Timmermann and others, "DMT Models the Near-Death Experience", Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018), 1424, full text.
• Jimo Borjigin and others, "Surge of Neurophysiological Coherence and Connectivity in the Dying Brain", PNAS 110(35) (2013).
• Gang Xu and others, "Surge of Neurophysiological Coupling and Connectivity of Gamma Oscillations in the Dying Human Brain", PNAS 120(19) (2023).
• Pim van Lommel and others, "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands", The Lancet 358 (2001), 2039 to 2045.
• Bruce Greyson, "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity", Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171(6) (1983), 369 to 375.
• Raymond Moody, Life After Life (Mockingbird Books, 1975).