---
title: "Near-death experience"
chunk: 3/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:06.795176+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Patients' management and after-effects ===
Moody described the correct approach to an NDE patient is to "Ask, Listen, Validate, Educate, and Refer". Due to the potential confusion or shock attributed to those who experience near-death experiences, it is important to treat them in a calm and understanding way right after their return from the NDE. NDEs are associated with changes in personality and outlook on life. Ring has identified a consistent set of value and belief changes associated with people who have had an NDE. Among these changes, he found a greater appreciation for life, higher self-esteem, greater compassion for others, less concern for acquiring material wealth, a heightened sense of purpose and self-understanding, desire to learn, elevated spirituality, greater ecological sensitivity and planetary concern, a feeling of being more intuitive, no longer worrying about death, and claiming to have witnessed an afterlife. Although people who have experienced NDEs become more spiritual, it does not mean they become necessarily more religious. Not all after-effects are beneficial, and Greyson describes circumstances in which changes in attitudes and behavior can lead to psychosocial and psychospiritual problems.

== Establishment of research framework ==
To establish a rigorous research framework for the study of experiences of encounters with death, the 2022 guidelines agreed to adopt the more precise term recalled experience of death (RED) instead of near-death experience (NDE). A RED is an authentic near-death experience (see Common Elements, 2022 Guidelines). Hence, a RED refers to a distinct cognitive and emotional event that takes place during a period of loss of consciousness associated with a life-threatening episode, such as cardiac arrest. REDs, just like authentic near-death experiences, follow the narrative arc of Moody's original transcendent experiences:

A relation with death.
A sensation of surpassing the physical or material world
Ineffability
Beneficial life changes tied to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
REDs do not feature signs of the usual coma-associated phenomena like typical dreams, delirium, or delusional thinking. The term RED eliminates the vagueness of “near-death” by including both severe, life-threatening conditions that bring a person close to death (from a medical or pathophysiological standpoint) and states involving the actual physiological processes of death itself, such as cardiac arrest or other forms of cardiac standstill. The authors of the 2022 guidelines believe that focusing on REDs will provide a more robust research framework. Studies of REDs will avoid mixing distinct phenomena such as drug induced hallucinations, dreams, misattributed memories formed during emergence out of coma, etc.

== Historical reports ==
NDEs have been recorded since ancient times. The oldest known medical report of near-death experiences was written by Pierre-Jean du Monchaux, an 18th-century French military doctor who described such a case in his book Anecdotes de Médecine. Monchaux hypothesized that an influx of blood in the brain stimulated a strong feeling in the individual, and therefore caused a near-death experience. In the 19th century a few studies moved beyond individual cases – one privately done by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and one in Switzerland. Up to 2005, 95% of world cultures are known to have made some mention of NDEs.
In the U.S., an estimated nine million people have reported an NDE according to a 2011 study in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Most of these near-death experiences resulted from serious injury affecting the body or brain. A number of more contemporary sources report the incidence of near death experiences as:

17% amongst critically ill patients, in nine prospective studies from four different countries.
10–20% of people who have come close to death.

== Near-death studies ==

Bruce Greyson (psychiatrist), Kenneth Ring (psychologist), and Michael Sabom (cardiologist), helped to launch the field of near-death studies and introduced the study of near-death experiences to the academic setting. From 1975 to 2005, some 2,500 self-reported individuals in the US had been reviewed in retrospective studies of the phenomena, with an additional 600 outside the US in the West, and 70 in Asia. Additionally, prospective studies had identified 270 individuals. Prospective studies review groups of individuals (e.g., selected emergency room patients) and then find who had an NDE during the study's time; such studies cost more to perform. In all, close to 3,500 individual cases between 1975 and 2005 had been reviewed in one or another study. All these studies were carried out by some 55 researchers or teams of researchers.
Melvin L. Morse, head of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and colleagues have investigated near-death experiences in a pediatric population. Researchers from the University of Michigan led by Jimo Borjigin discovered that areas of the brain responsible for interior visual experience were more active during cardiac arrest. Following the rapid gamma activation locally within the posterior TPO zones, the long-range, global, and interhemispheric communications in gamma oscillations between the TPO zones and the prefrontal areas were activated in the dying brain, evidenced by the delayed activation of temporofrontal, parietofrontal, and Occipitofrontal networks when heart rate began to decline. Intriguingly, the long-range gamma connectivity between the posterior hot zones and the prefrontal areas at near-death was significantly higher over baseline only for those crossing the midline. Studies suggest that interhemispheric circuitry is important for memory recall, and gamma synchrony across the midlines is critical for learning, information integration, and perception.