Preface: Between Heaven and Hallucination
This inquiry into the afterlife experiences of the near dead began with a relatively simple question around John Burke's enormously popular titles, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You, and its later companion, Imagine the God of Heaven.
The occasion for the inquiry originated from a conversation with Christian friends who enthusiasticlly spoke about Burke's books and the near-death experiences recounted within them that confirmed the Christian belief in the type of afterlife God's faithful were to inherit. Later, as I thought of their excitement, and the books themselves, I was reminded that Burke's themes belong to something larger than the work of a single author. Let me explain....
Every generation seems to produce its own popular narratives about death, heaven, and what may lie beyond ordinary human existence. This faith-behavior also seems to happen frequently around Jesus' prophesied return created within expectant church cultures issuing near-term dates and current events for God's second coming. There may be other examples of recurring Christian interest, but death, the afterlife, Christian victory over secular culture, and faith assurance, seem to be the more popular recurring themes.
As I was thinking about all of this it came to me that I've seen something like this before. During the early 2010s another similar thematic wave appeared within popular American culture. Todd Burpo's Heaven Is for Real became an extraordinary publishing success and was adapted into a major film in 2014. Very quickly thereafter, a multitude of books, testimonies, speaking tours, church discussions, and films followed. Moreover, beyond explicitly designated Christian culture, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter (2010), starring Matt Damon, reflected a wider cultural fascination with near-death experiences, communication with the dead, and the possibility that consciousness might somehow continue beyond death.
Perhaps this explains something more about the recurring popularity of such narratives.
They do not arrive merely as claims requiring further evaluation and proof. Rather, they enter already established worlds of cultural meaning. To most, heaven means reunion with those we have lost. It means that death is not final, that personal identity persists, that suffering will be redeemed, that God remains present, and that the deepest promises of one's faith may ultimately prove true.
These are wonderful, soul-healing testimonies to the grieved and suffering, the harmed and unwanted, the wounded and forgotten. Such narratives provide to skeptical readers powerful emotional and theological reasons for wanting the stories to be true.
Which raises an uncomfortable but important epistemological question.
Religious communities, like all human communities, do not always apply the same standards of evidence to claims that confirm their existing worldview -- as they do to evidence that challenges those deeply held worldviews. A testimony affirming heaven may be received enthusiastically, while findings from evolutionary biology, archaeology, neuroscience, comparative religion, biblical history, or textual criticism may encounter considerably greater resistance when they require inherited understandings of faith to change.
This is not a uniquely Christian problem. It is a very human one. We evaluate evidence from within existing communities, identities, hopes, fears, narratives, and worlds of meaning. Evidence that reinforces those worlds is often easier to receive than evidence requiring their reconstruction.
The extra-dimensional phenomenon therefore raises a larger question than whether any particular near-death experience is authentic. It asks,
How do personal or societal experiences become interpretations, interpretations become narratives, narratives become communal convictions, and communal convictions eventually come to feel like reality itself? We have asked this question before.
We might describe this experience this way (we'll let reality be something undefined and nebulous for now... unlike what we have developed in our philosophical series on reality):
Reality → Experience → Interpretation → Narrative → Community → Reinforcement
Seen from this perspective, near-death literature becomes quite interesting for reasons extending well beyond the question of heaven. It provides a revealing illustration in how human beings construct, preserve, and sometimes defend their worlds of meaning.
But this observation cuts both ways...
Popular Christian treatments can move too readily from extraordinary experience to evidence of heaven. A person approaches death, leaves the body, encounters light or deceased relatives, experiences overwhelming love, and returns convinced that another reality exists. The testimony then becomes evidence for an afterlife, and the afterlife becomes confirmation of a particular religious understanding of reality.
Popular skeptical treatments can make an equal and opposite move. Near-death experiences are attributed to oxygen deprivation, neurotransmitter release, abnormal electrical activity, memory reconstruction, or some combination thereof. Having identified possible neurological contributors, the mystery is pronounced solved: the dying brain manufactured a hallucination.
Both approaches move too quickly.
We know considerably more about near-death experiences than we did even ten years ago. As example, they have been studied prospectively in cardiac-arrest survivors. Researchers have developed standardized methods for identifying and comparing them. Their phenomenology, memories, cultural differences, psychological consequences, and possible neurological correlates have become subjects of serious scientific investigation.
But we still do not possess a comprehensive explanation of them.
More importantly, scientific explanation and metaphysical interpretation are not the same thing.
To identify neural processes accompanying an experience does not automatically tell us everything about the ontological status of consciousness. Conversely, to have an extraordinarily vivid experience while approaching death does not demonstrate that consciousness has traveled independently of the brain or visited an objectively existing afterlife.
What follows here in this essay does not attempt to prove or disprove heaven, God, faith, or the afterlife.
It asks a more preliminary question:
What do we actually know about near-death experiences, what might reasonably explain them, and where does scientific evidence end and philosophical or theological interpretation begin?
That question eventually leads beyond near-death experiences themselves.
It leads into the still unresolved relationships among brain, consciousness,
embodiment, memory, experience, interpretation, and death.
I. At the Boundary of Death
Near-death experiences, commonly abbreviated NDEs, are distinctive subjective experiences sometimes reported by people who have survived situations involving actual or perceived proximity to death.
They have been reported following cardiac arrest, severe trauma, medical emergencies, complications of anesthesia, drowning, and other extreme physiological circumstances.
Not everyone who nearly dies reports an NDE.
Nor does every NDE contain the same elements.
Nevertheless, recurring characteristics have been documented. People may describe unusual peace, absence of pain, heightened clarity, altered perception of time, separation from the body, apparent observation of their surroundings from elsewhere, passage through darkness or a tunnel, brilliant light, deceased relatives, spiritual beings, unusual landscapes, panoramic memories or life reviews, boundaries beyond which they believe they cannot return, and profound reluctance - or sometimes a command - to return to embodied life.
Prospective cardiac-arrest studies demonstrate both the reality of these reports as psychological phenomena and their limited prevalence among survivors. In the landmark Dutch study led by cardiologist Pim van Lommel, 344 successfully resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients were interviewed; a minority reported experiences meeting the researchers' criteria for an NDE. Later prospective investigations have continued to document cognitive experiences associated with resuscitation.
This immediately establishes an important distinction.
Whether everything apparently perceived during that experience correspondsAn NDE is unquestionably an experience reported by a human being.
to an independently existing reality is another question entirely.
Experience and interpretation must therefore be distinguished from the beginning.
II. Why Does It Feel More Real Than Reality?
Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of NDE testimony is not what people report seeing.
It is how they describe the quality of consciousness itself.
Near-death experiencers frequently insist that their experience was unlike an ordinary dream. Some describe extraordinary lucidity. Colors appear unusually intense. Thought seems effortless. Time disappears or expands. Personal identity may remain intact even when bodily identity appears absent. Encounters with others may seem overwhelmingly immediate.
For some experiencers, ordinary waking existence subsequently seems less real by comparison.
That phenomenon deserves attention regardless of what one believes about an afterlife.
Research into NDE memories has found that they can possess unusually rich phenomenological characteristics. In one study, NDE memories contained substantial self-referential and emotional information and were reported with greater clarity than memories associated with coma; remarkably, they could possess more phenomenological characteristics than memories of ordinary real or imagined events.
This helps explain why simply telling an experiencer, "You hallucinated," often fails to address what actually happened psychologically.
The person is not merely remembering an image.
They may be remembering what they regard as one of the most coherent and consequential experiences of their existence.
Extreme emotional salience (something which stands out, is highly noticeable, or important relative to one's surroundings) can strengthen memory. Mortal danger profoundly reorganizes attention. Ordinary temporal processing may become disrupted. Familiar distinctions among perception, memory, imagination, bodily awareness, and self-location may become unstable.
Consciousness is already capable of generating astonishingly convincing experiential worlds. Dreams demonstrate this every night. Psychedelic states, dissociation, epilepsy, sensory deprivation, anesthesia, and neurological disorders provide additional examples.
Therefore, an experience does not have to correspond perfectly to an independently existing environment to possess extraordinary phenomenological realism.
This gives us our first important principle:
Phenomenological realism does not necessarily establish ontological realism.
But the reverse is equally important.
Calling an experience a hallucination does not explain it.
A label is not a mechanism.
III. The Brain at the Boundary of Death
The popular neurological explanation of NDEs frequently sounds something like this:
oxygen deprivation → chemical flood → electrical storm → hallucination.
There are legitimate scientific ideas contained within this account.
But the confidence with which the sequence is sometimes presented greatly exceeds the evidence.
Factually, during cardiac arrest, cerebral circulation is profoundly disrupted. Oxygen and glucose availability decline. Ordinary patterns of neural coordination deteriorate. Neurochemical conditions change dramatically.
Researchers have consequently investigated numerous possible contributors to NDE phenomenology: hypoxia and anoxia, cerebral ischemia, altered carbon dioxide levels, endogenous opioid activity, serotonergic mechanisms, glutamatergic processes, temporal-lobe activity, REM intrusion, dissociation, multisensory disturbances, and alterations in large-scale brain networks.
A prominent neuroscientific interpretation argues that recognizable components of NDEs can be understood through known brain mechanisms. Dean Mobbs and Caroline Watt, for example, proposed that several apparently paranormal characteristics have plausible neurological analogues. Their argument has itself generated criticism from researchers who believe such explanations do not account for the entire NDE phenomenon.
More recently, researchers have observed striking electrical phenomena in some dying brains. In a 2023 study of four comatose patients from whom ventilatory support was withdrawn, two demonstrated surges of gamma activity and increased connectivity, including activity involving a posterior cortical region associated with conscious processing. The sample was extremely small, and the researchers could not know whether subjective experience accompanied the activity. Nevertheless, the observations complicate the simplistic image of a brain becoming instantaneously and uniformly silent as death approaches.
This is fascinating evidence.
It is not evidence that scientists have located heaven in the brain.
Neither is it evidence that scientists have explained heaven away.
It simply tells us that the neurophysiology of dying is more dynamic process than medical descriptions sometimes suggest.
IV. Tunnels, Lights, Life Reviews, and Leaving the Body
Individual components of NDEs may have plausible neurological explanations.
Tunnel-like vision, for example, has been associated theoretically with disturbances in visual processing during reduced cerebral perfusion and oxygenation. Changes in retinal and cortical processing may contribute to narrowing visual fields or unusual experiences of brightness.
That is a plausible hypothesis.
But it is not a universal explanation of NDEs.
Not everyone reporting an NDE experiences a tunnel. Not everyone experiencing hypoxia reports an NDE. Bright lights and tunnel-like experiences can occur under circumstances unrelated to dying.
The same caution applies to life reviews.
Popular accounts sometimes describe the hippocampus of the brain as suddenly "dumping" memories while the organism itself desperately searches its past for survival information.
The brain does not store autobiographical life as a film inside a single memory bank. Autobiographical memory is distributed across extensive neural systems. Temporal-lobe phenomena and extreme stress can certainly alter memory retrieval, but the panoramic life review remains incompletely understood.
There is nevertheless something psychologically striking about many reported life reviews.
Moreover, they are often relational.
Experiencers sometimes report not merely remembering their actions but experiencing their effects upon other people. The life review becomes an experience of relationship, consequence, empathy, and participation.
Out-of-body experiences create another challenge.
Our ordinary sense of being located inside our bodies depends upon the integration of visual, vestibular, tactile, proprioceptive, and spatial information. Disrupting this integration can produce altered self-location and experiences resembling aspects of being outside the body.
This establishes something important:
Noteably, reeling located outside one's body does not itself demonstrate that consciousness actually left the body.
The more difficult question concerns reports of accurate perceptions supposedly obtained while the experiencer could not normally have perceived them beyond their unconscious body.
And here controlled research becomes especially important.
V. Experience, Memory, and Culture
Human memory is reconstructive.
We do not retrieve perfect neurological recordings of previous events. Memories are continually reconstructed and may be influenced by later conversations, expectations, emotional meaning, cultural narratives, questioning, repetition, and reinterpretation.
This becomes particularly important when dealing with experiences occurring during catastrophic medical emergencies.
A patient may experience something during cardiac arrest, awaken later, hear descriptions of the resuscitation, encounter religious or cultural interpretations, repeatedly tell the story, and gradually integrate these elements into an increasingly coherent narrative.
That possibility must be considered.
But reconstruction cannot simply be invoked as a universal dismissal.
The unusual phenomenological richness of NDE memories itself requires explanation. Research indicates that these memories can remain exceptionally vivid and possess characteristics distinguishable from ordinary imagined memories.
Culture adds another layer.
NDEs have been reported across societies and religious traditions, and there are both similarities and significant variations. Cross-cultural research therefore creates difficulties for anyone wishing to identify NDE imagery straightforwardly with a single religious cosmology. As example,
A Christian may interpret a luminous presence as Jesus.
Another person may understand a similar presence through another religious vocabulary.
Others report deceased relatives, unidentified beings, landscapes, voids, or experiences containing little recognizable religious imagery.
Several possibilities remain.
Culture may substantially construct the experience.
An underlying experience may subsequently be interpreted through culturally available symbols.
A transcendent reality, if such a reality exists, might be encountered through culturally conditioned consciousness.
Or the experiences themselves may simply be substantially different.
The evidence does not presently allow us to choose confidently among these alternatives.
And not all NDEs are beautiful.
Some are distressing. Researchers have documented frightening, empty, threatening, or "hellish" experiences as well as peaceful ones. Distressing NDE literature has identified experiences involving inversion, terrifying voids, and explicitly frightening imagery.
This matters because popular literature can inadvertently create an idealized NDE:
death → tunnel → light → unconditional love → deceased relatives → heaven.
But human experience is considerably more diverse.
VI. When Experience Becomes Evidence
Claims of perception outside the body provide perhaps the clearest opportunity to move from testimony toward experimental testing.
If someone believes consciousness actually occupied a position above the body and observed the resuscitation room, then hidden visual targets should, at least theoretically, provide a way of testing the claim.
This was one purpose of the AWARE research program.
The original AWARE study examined awareness during cardiac arrest across multiple hospitals and attempted to develop methods for testing the accuracy of visual and auditory perception. Researchers found that some survivors reported memories or awareness associated with resuscitation, although the controlled visual component did not produce robust confirmation of visual perception from an extracorporeal location.
AWARE II extended this research.
Published in 2023, the multicenter study investigated consciousness and electrophysiological activity during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Researchers reported that some survivors described memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness and that EEG recordings in some cases showed activity patterns potentially compatible with conscious cognitive processes during prolonged CPR.
This finding deserves careful attention.
But it does not demonstrate that consciousness survives irreversible biological death.
Cardiac arrest is not equivalent to irreversible death. Resuscitation occurs during a dynamic physiological process in which circulation and brain function may be severely compromised while medical intervention attempts to restore them.
Near-death experiences are therefore exactly what the term says:
near-death experiences.
They are not reports obtained from people who remained irreversibly dead.
The AWARE research makes simplistic claims that meaningful cognitive activity is impossible during cardiac arrest increasingly difficult to sustain.
It has not established that a disembodied consciousness travels through an independently existing afterlife.
Both statements can be true simultaneously.
VII. Why Imagine Heaven Is So Compelling
This brings us back to author John Burke. Imagine Heaven is powerful because Burke does something scientific papers cannot - and do not attempt to - do.
He tells stories.
And those stories address some of the oldest human questions.
Will I continue to exist?
Will I remain myself?
Will I recognize the people I love?
Will I see my parents again?
My spouse?
My children?
What happens to those who suffer?
Does death hurt?
Will I be alone?
Is God loving?
Did my life matter?
NDE testimony gives these questions narrative embodiment.
A theological proposition becomes a human voice saying:
I died. I experienced something. I encountered overwhelming love. I remained myself. And I came back.
For grieving or frightened people, the emotional power is enormous.
Burke then adds another interpretive layer. He places contemporary NDE narratives alongside Christian biblical imagery. When he did, then -
Ancient promise and modern testimony appear to converge.
Heaven ceases to be solely an article of faith.
It begins to look like something for which witnesses have returned.
This helps explain the extraordinary popular attraction of Imagine Heaven.
Hope begins to feel more like evidence.
And precisely because that transformation is so psychologically powerful, it requires careful scrutiny.
VIII. When Near-Death Experience Becomes Theology
Burke's fundamental problem is not that he takes NDEs seriously. They should be taken seriously. The difficulty arises when selected testimony is asked to carry more evidential and theological weight than it can sustain.
Burke is not conducting a prospective controlled clinical study. He is collecting and interpreting testimony through a Christian theological framework. Several questions consequently become unavoidable.
Which stories are included?
Which are excluded?
How representative are they?
How are contradictory experiences treated?
When does an unidentified luminous presence become Christ?
When does an extraordinary landscape become the biblical heaven?
When does similarity become confirmation?
These questions reveal a danger of both author and reader confirmation bias.
If experiences resembling one's theology are treated as evidence for that theology while experiences contradicting it are dismissed, reinterpreted, or ignored, the argument becomes circular.
There is an additional irony.
NDE testimony does not always fit comfortably within traditional evangelical Christianity.
Many accounts emphasize unconditional love, interconnectedness, acceptance, compassion, relational consequence, and transformation rather than doctrinal correctness.
If NDE testimony were granted genuine revelatory authority, some of it might challenge conventional Christian doctrines as readily as other accounts appear to confirm them.
One cannot consistently maintain:
NDEs are trustworthy when they confirm my theology
but unreliable when they contradict it.
The Bible itself further complicates the matter.
Biblical understandings of death and afterlife are historically diverse. They include Sheol, resurrection, judgment, paradise, kingdom, heaven and earth, new creation, and richly symbolic apocalyptic imagery. These concepts developed within different historical settings and cannot responsibly be flattened into a single modern travel guide to heaven.
Consequently, placing contemporary NDE descriptions beside isolated biblical passages and declaring correspondence can create an illusion of precision that neither the biblical texts nor NDE research warrants.
This does not invalidate Christian hope.
It simply distinguishes hope from demonstration.
IX. Consciousness and the Philosophical Question
Eventually every serious investigation of NDEs reaches a question science has not yet resolved:
What is consciousness?
If consciousness is wholly produced by neural activity, then near-death experiences presumably arise from unusual activity within a severely compromised but still functioning nervous system.
If consciousness cannot ultimately be reduced to neural activity, other possibilities remain philosophically open.
But NDE research cannot simply assume either conclusion. Which exposes a philosophical error frequently committed on both sides.
The skeptic argues:
Brain activity accompanies the experience; therefore the brain created the experience; therefore there is no afterlife.
The believer argues:
The brain was severely compromised while experience continued; therefore consciousness must have left the brain; therefore there is an afterlife.
Neither conclusion follows necessarily from the available evidence.
Neural dependence is extraordinarily well established. Alter the brain and consciousness changes. Anesthesia alters consciousness. Brain injury can alter personality. Dementia can alter memory and identity. Psychoactive substances can transform perception. Electrical stimulation can produce unusual experiences.
Any philosophy of consciousness that ignores these facts is inadequate.
But dependence and identity are not automatically synonymous.
Discovering that consciousness is profoundly dependent upon embodied neural organization does not, by itself, solve the metaphysical question of what consciousness ultimately is.
And here near-death experience becomes part of a much larger philosophical problem.
X. Toward a Relational Understanding of Consciousness and Death
A relational philosophy suggests another way of approaching the problem.
Instead of beginning with the binary:
Does the brain manufacture consciousness?
versus
Can consciousness escape the brain?
we might ask:
What kind of relationship exists among consciousness, embodiment, environment, memory, identity, and participation?
Why?
Because human consciousness is profoundly embodied.
The brain does not exist independently of a body. The body does not exist independently of an environment. Memory develops through experience. Identity develops through relationship. Consciousness participates in a world before it interprets that world.
From this perspective, consciousness need not be imagined either as a substance secreted by neurons or as an immaterial ghost temporarily inhabiting a biological machine.
Consciousness may instead be approached as an extraordinarily complex form of relational organization through which responsiveness, experience, memory, interpretation, selfhood, and participation become possible.
Under catastrophic physiological conditions, that organization changes radically.
Ordinary sensory integration breaks down.
Temporal organization changes.
Bodily self-location may destabilize.
Memory may behave unusually.
The normal boundaries through which consciousness organizes its world may become radically altered.
A near-death experience may therefore represent an extraordinary boundary condition of embodied consciousness.
That formulation deliberately explains neither heaven nor hallucination. It identifies the phenomenon requiring explanation. And it suggests another important sequence:
Reality → Experience → Interpretation
Reality occurs. Living beings participate within it. Conscious beings experience aspects of that participation. Human beings interpret their experiences. Those interpretations become memories, narratives, philosophies, religions, scientific hypotheses, and cultural worlds.
The error occurs when these levels collapse into one another.
Burke can move too rapidly from:
experience → Christian interpretation → ontological reality.
The reductive skeptic can perform the mirror image:
neural correlation → neurological interpretation → ontological unreality.
Both exceed what the evidence establishes.
A relational approach allows the experience to remain real without prematurely determining what kind of reality the experience represents.
Conclusion: Remaining With the Question
Near-death experiences confront us with something larger than tunnels, lights, angels, deceased relatives, or visions of heaven. They confront us with the unresolved relationship among brain and consciousness, experience and reality, memory and interpretation, embodiment and identity, death and meaning.
Several conclusions appear warranted.
Near-death experiences are genuine human experiences.
They can be extraordinarily vivid, coherent, emotionally powerful, and personally transformative.
Severe physiological crisis produces profound alterations in brain function capable of contributing to unusual conscious experiences.
Several neurological mechanisms plausibly explain components of NDE phenomenology.
No single neurological theory has yet provided a comprehensive explanation for every major feature of the phenomenon.
Human memory is reconstructive.
Culture influences experience and interpretation.
NDEs vary considerably, and some are frightening rather than peaceful.
Controlled research has not established reliable extracorporeal visual perception.
Moreover, research has not demonstrated an afterlife.
But neither has neuroscience demonstrated that every dimension of NDE phenomenology has been completely explained by a dying brain.
We therefore arrive at a position that is less satisfying than certainty but perhaps more intellectually responsible:
NDEs should neither be treated as proof of heaven
nor dismissed as scientifically solved hallucinations.
Books such as Imagine Heaven become compelling partly because they remove uncertainty. Extraordinary experiences become recognizable religious geography. Mystery becomes testimony. Hope becomes evidence.
Reductionism can perform the same maneuver from the opposite direction. Extraordinary experiences become biochemical disturbances. Mystery becomes mechanism. And mechanism becomes metaphysics.
Neither move is presently justified.
A better approach allows neuroscience to investigate the physiological conditions of NDEs; psychology to examine perception, memory, trauma, and interpretation; anthropology to investigate cultural variation; philosophy to examine consciousness and ontology; and theology to ask what these experiences might mean without prematurely converting them into revelation.
Perhaps near-death research therefore teaches us something more important than whether people have glimpsed heaven. It teaches us how much remains unknown about consciousness itself. At one of the most extreme boundaries of embodied human existence, consciousness remains remarkable, relational, and incompletely understood.
Which leaves us with the question with which this inquiry ultimately must end:
What happens to consciousness when the relational organization
through which a human life has been embodied can no longer persist?
Near-death experiences do not yet answer that question.
But they may reveal why the question remains one of the deepest inquiries human beings can ask.
Greyson, Bruce. “The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–375.
Parnia, Sam, et al. “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study.” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805.
Parnia, Sam, et al. “AWAreness during REsuscitation—II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest.” Resuscitation 191 (2023): 109903.
van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–2045.
Mobbs, Dean, and Caroline Watt. “There Is Nothing Paranormal about Near-Death Experiences: How Neuroscience Can Explain Seeing Bright Lights, Meeting the Dead, or Being Convinced You Are One of Them.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 10 (2011): 447–449.
Xu, Gang, et al. “Surge of Neurophysiological Coupling and Connectivity of Gamma Oscillations in the Dying Human Brain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 19 (2023): e2216268120.
Thonnard, Marie, et al. “Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories.” PLOS ONE 8, no. 3 (2013): e57620.
Bush, Nancy Evans. “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics.” Missouri Medicine 111, no. 6 (2014): 486–490.
Hashemi, Ahmad, et al. “Explanation of Near-Death Experiences: A Systematic Analysis of Case Reports and Qualitative Research.” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023).
Shushan, Gregory. “Diversity and Similarity of Near-Death Experiences across Cultures and History.” International Review of Psychiatry (2025).
Facco, Enrico, and Christian Agrillo. “Near-Death Experiences between Science and Prejudice.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012).
Kovoor, Joshua G., et al. “Near-Death Experiences after Cardiac Arrest: A Scoping Review.” Discover Mental Health 4 (2024).
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Greyson, Bruce. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021.
Parnia, Sam. Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. New York: Hachette Books, 2024.
Research Note
Near-death experience remains a contested interdisciplinary field. The bibliography intentionally includes researchers approaching the phenomenon from different perspectives rather than selecting only literature supporting either neurological reductionism or survival of consciousness. Prospective cardiac-arrest research is particularly important because it provides greater methodological control than retrospective collections of personal testimony. Interpretations of the resulting evidence remain disputed.
The scientific literature continues to develop. Consequently, claims concerning the ultimate relationship between NDEs, brain activity, consciousness, and survival after death should be regarded as provisional rather than settled.
One last, at a later time, this essay may be repositioned into the current R&M Series, Section X, re Consciousness and Experience. Where, or how, will be determined later.
