Near-Death Experience Science: What the Dying Brain Tells Us

In early November, much of the world turns toward the dead. In Mexico, families build altars for Día de Muertos. Across Europe, people visit graves on All Saints' and All Souls' days. It is a fitting season to ask what the dying brain experiences, and what people who come back describe. Near-death experience science has moved quickly in the past few years, and the picture emerging is both more physical and more mysterious than either sceptics or believers expected.

What people report

The accounts share a recognisable set of features: a sense of peace, separation from the body, a tunnel or a movement through darkness, a brilliant light, meeting deceased relatives or a presence, a review of one's life, and a boundary beyond which one cannot return. Many people describe the experience as more real than ordinary waking life, and many say it changed their values for good.

How common is it? In a landmark 2001 study in The Lancet, cardiologist Pim van Lommel and colleagues followed 344 patients resuscitated after cardiac arrest in ten Dutch hospitals. About 18 percent of them reported a near-death experience.

The dying brain is surprisingly active

For a long time, the assumption was that the brain simply shuts down when the heart stops. Recent data complicate that picture.

In 2023, Jimo Borjigin and colleagues reported in PNAS on four comatose patients whose life support was withdrawn. In two of them, gamma waves, fast brain rhythms associated with conscious processing, surged in the minutes after ventilation stopped, with organised activity in posterior regions including the temporoparietal junction, an area linked to out-of-body experiences. Four patients is a very small sample, and since all of them died, nobody can know what, if anything, they experienced. Critics such as neurologist Daniel Kondziella point out that some aberrant electrical activity in the dying brain is unsurprising.

The same year, the AWARE II study led by Sam Parnia at NYU and published in Resuscitation followed 567 people who had in-hospital cardiac arrest across around 25 hospitals in the United States and United Kingdom. Fewer than ten percent survived to discharge. Among survivors, roughly four in ten recalled some degree of awareness during CPR that standard clinical measures did not capture. In a subset of patients monitored with EEG, close to 40 percent showed brain activity returning to near-normal patterns at points up to an hour into CPR.

Near-death experience science gets a model

In 2025, Charlotte Martial and colleagues from the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège proposed the NEPTUNE model in Nature Reviews Neurology. It describes near-death experiences as a cascade of physiological and psychological responses to an acute crisis, such as a sudden loss of blood flow and oxygen to the brain. Serotonin and dopamine systems may shape the visual content; glutamate, acetylcholine and noradrenaline systems may support the unusually strong memory encoding. The model also frames these experiences from an evolutionary angle.

It is an integrative proposal drawing on animal studies, psychedelic research and the neuroscience of dying, and the authors present it as a basis for future testing. It explains a great deal. It leaves the deepest questions, about meaning and about consciousness itself, open, and the AWARE researchers themselves note that research has neither proved nor disproved the reality or meaning of these experiences.

The bardo: an older map

Tibetan Buddhism offers one of the most detailed maps of dying ever written. The text known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, or "liberation through hearing in the intermediate state", is traditionally read aloud to the dying and the recently dead. It describes the dissolution of the elements, the dawning of a clear light, and a sequence of visions that the consciousness is encouraged to recognise as its own projections.

The resonance with modern reports, especially the clear light, is striking. I present the bardo teachings as a contemplative tradition and a phenomenological map. Its central instruction is psychological as well as spiritual: recognise what arises as the activity of mind, and rest in awareness. Tibetan practitioners prepare for this during life through meditation and dream yoga, treating sleep and dreams as rehearsals for the intermediate state.

A practice: the rehearsal of letting go

This gentle exercise draws on the tradition's idea of practising for transitions. Skip it if you are grieving acutely or feel fragile; it is meant to feel spacious.

1. Lie down and let your body become heavy, breathing slowly for two minutes.
2. Imagine your body as earth, solid and supported. Let it soften into the ground.
3. Imagine the fluids of your body as water, flowing and settling.
4. Feel the warmth of your body as fire, slowly cooling and quieting.
5. Feel your breath as air, becoming lighter and finer.
6. Rest in the open awareness that remains for a few minutes. Notice that it is calm and clear.
7. Return slowly: wiggle fingers and toes, feel your weight, open your eyes.

People often finish this practice feeling lighter about life, which is perhaps the point of contemplating death at all.

To begin practising self-hypnosis and meditation yourself, start with the free Self-Hypnosis, Meditation & Manifestation Course.

Related reading

• Is the Self an Illusion? Meditation, Neuroscience and the Buddha's Not-Self
• What Is Hypnagogia? The Creative Trance at the Edge of Sleep
• Theories of Consciousness Put to the Test: Science, Humility and the Witness

Sources

• van Lommel, P., et al. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358.
• Borjigin, J. (senior author), et al. (2023). Study of gamma oscillations in four dying patients (description). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published 1 May 2023. Scientific American report
• Parnia, S., et al. (2023). AWAreness during REsuscitation II (AWARE II). Resuscitation. NYU Langone news release
• Martial, C., Fritz, P., et al. (2025). A neuroscientific model of near-death experiences. Nature Reviews Neurology. University of Liège release
• Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed by Karma Lingpa.