Chapter 3

A Brief History of NDE Research

In 1976, a young cardiologist named Michael Sabom sat in a seminar room in Gainesville, Florida, listening to a social worker describe a strange new book. The book was Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, and it claimed that people who came close to dying often reported uncannily similar experiences — floating above their bodies, moving through tunnels, meeting beings of light. Sabom was the only physician in the room. When asked what he thought, he gave a four-word reply: he did not believe it.¹

Five years later he had changed his mind. Not because he wanted to. Because the patients on his cardiac ward kept telling him things they should not have known.

That moment — a skeptical doctor agreeing, almost grudgingly, to investigate — is a small window into a much bigger story. The history of near-death experience research is, again and again, a history of skeptics who set out to debunk and ended up convinced. In this chapter I want to walk you briefly through that story. Not to claim the field is perfect. It isn’t. But to show you something important: NDE research is no longer a fringe project. Over fifty years it has matured into a serious, prospective, peer-reviewed discipline. The evidence Marsh dismisses has been gathered by working physicians and trained scientists, in hospital wards and intensive care units, under conditions any researcher would respect.

Before Moody

It is sometimes said that Raymond Moody invented the field in 1975. He didn’t. He named it. The reports themselves go back as far as we can read.

Plato told the story of Er, a soldier who appeared dead on a battlefield, returned, and described what he had seen on the other side. Bede recorded the vision of a Northumbrian man named Drythelm in the seventh century. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes a journey of consciousness after the body fails. Even in modern medical literature, scattered case reports appeared throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.² Albert Heim, a Swiss geologist, gathered accounts from climbers who had survived falls; many described a sudden peace and a vivid life review.³ Holden and Christian have catalogued more than thirty Western scholarly articles on the topic published before Life After Life ever appeared.

What changed in 1975 was not the experience. It was the willingness of one young physician to take it seriously — and to give the rest of us a name for what he was hearing.

Moody and Life After Life (1975)

Raymond Moody was a philosophy professor turned medical student when he began collecting accounts of patients who had been resuscitated after cardiac arrest. He was struck by how much the stories resembled one another. Patients who had never met, who came from different walks of life, described similar things in the same order. He coined a term: near-death experience.⁴

Life After Life sold millions of copies. It also drew a fair share of criticism. Moody’s method was retrospective and informal. He gathered around 150 cases by talking with people who came forward voluntarily. He didn’t systematically check medical records. He didn’t use statistical controls. He didn’t measure how many cardiac-arrest patients had no NDE.

These are real limits. Marsh raises them — fairly — in his opening chapter.⁵ But Moody’s book did something important. It put the phenomenon on the table. Once people knew what to call it, they came forward by the thousands. And once the cases were named, harder-edged researchers could ask harder-edged questions. Moody opened a door. The next generation walked through it with clipboards and EEG machines.

Kenneth Ring and the First Systematic Study (1980)

Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, was the first to ask, in a structured way: just how often does this happen, and how often do the elements line up? In Life at Death (1980) he interviewed 102 people who had come close to dying. He used a standardized questionnaire. He measured how many reported the various features Moody had described.⁶

His answer was striking. Roughly 48 percent reported at least the early stages of an NDE. The features — peace, separation from the body, darkness, light, encounters — clustered together in a recognizable pattern.

Ring went on to write several more books. Some of his later work strayed into territory many serious researchers have criticized, including Marsh.⁷ But the 1980 study remains a real contribution. It showed that the experiences were common enough, and consistent enough, to study with the tools of social science.

Michael Sabom and the Prospective Method (1982, 1998)

Now we come back to Sabom. After his initial dismissal of Moody, he began asking his cardiac patients whether they had experienced anything during their resuscitations. He expected to find what he assumed was already there: vague stories that fell apart under questioning. He intended to debunk.⁸

What he actually found startled him. Patients who claimed to have watched their resuscitations from above were describing equipment, procedures, and sequences they should not have been able to describe. Sabom went further. He set up a control group of similar cardiac patients who had not reported NDEs and asked them to imagine what their own resuscitation must have looked like. About 80 percent of the controls made at least one major error. The patients who reported actually leaving their bodies got the details right.⁹

That control comparison matters more than it sounds. Skeptics often suggest that NDE patients piece their accounts together from television, prior medical exposure, or overheard conversations during recovery. But if guessing were the explanation, then the control group — same illness, same hospital, same exposure — should have done about as well. They didn’t. They didn’t come close. The difference between the two groups is exactly what an honest test of the “they made it up” theory ought to show: NDE patients knew specific details that average informed guessers got wrong.

Sabom’s 1982 book, Recollections of Death, was the first medically rigorous study of the phenomenon. He published in JAMA. He held a faculty post at Emory.¹⁰ Sixteen years later, in Light and Death, he returned to the subject as a Christian believer and added one of the most carefully documented cases the field would ever produce: the operation of Pam Reynolds, performed under hypothermic cardiac arrest by Dr. Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute. We will not dwell on the Reynolds case here; Chapter 5 takes it up in detail and answers Marsh’s six specific objections.¹¹

Bruce Greyson and the NDE Scale (1983)

By the early 1980s the field had a problem. Different researchers were using different definitions. One scholar’s “NDE” was another scholar’s “mystical experience.” Without a common measuring stick, results couldn’t be compared.

Bruce Greyson, then at the University of Michigan and later at the University of Virginia, set out to fix that. In 1983 he published the NDE Scale in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. It is sixteen questions, each scored zero, one, or two. A total score of seven or higher counts as a near-death experience.¹²

The scale has held up remarkably well. It has been used in hundreds of studies, translated into multiple languages, and validated against statistical tests of internal reliability. When researchers in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States compare their findings, they are now measuring the same thing. Chapter 2 covers the scale in more detail; here it is enough to say that with Greyson’s work, NDE research moved from collecting stories to collecting data.

Pim van Lommel and the Lancet (2001)

Then came the breakthrough. In December 2001, the British medical journal The Lancet — one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world — published a prospective study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel and three colleagues.¹³

The study followed 344 consecutive cardiac-arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. Each patient had been clinically dead by the standard medical definition: no heartbeat, no breathing, no measurable brain activity. Each was resuscitated. Each was interviewed within a few days. Of those 344, sixty-two reported a near-death experience — about 18 percent.¹⁴

Van Lommel’s team did not stop there. They re-interviewed the same patients two years later, then again at eight years. The memories did not fade. They did not drift. They stayed the same — while ordinary memories of the same events shifted, as ordinary memories do.¹⁵

And they checked the descriptions. Van Lommel reported that 92 percent of the patient accounts were completely accurate, 6 percent contained minor errors, and only 1 percent were entirely wrong.¹⁶ One of his cases — the man whose dentures had been removed during resuscitation, and who recognized the nurse who had taken them out and stored them in a drawer — has become a touchstone of the literature.¹⁷ Chapter 4 takes that case up in full.

What made the Lancet study a milestone was not just its findings but its method. Prospective. Multi-center. Published in a top-tier peer-reviewed journal. Followed by long-term follow-up. Van Lommel had begun the project as a naturalist who assumed death was the end. He ended it persuaded that something in his patients — some core of conscious awareness — had remained active when their brains, by every standard medical measure, could not produce consciousness.

One detail of his findings cuts especially deep against the “dying brain” hypothesis. Every patient in van Lommel’s cohort suffered the same physiological event: cardiac arrest, with the same drop in blood flow to the brain, the same loss of measurable cortical activity within seconds. If a starved or dying brain were producing the experience, all 344 patients should have had one. Only 18 percent did. Whatever generates an NDE, it is plainly not just oxygen deprivation. Chapter 10 takes that argument up at length.

Sam Parnia and the AWARE Studies

Sam Parnia, an intensive-care physician trained in the United Kingdom and now at NYU Langone Health, decided to push the methodology one step further. If patients really were perceiving the room from above their bodies during cardiac arrest, then a properly designed test ought to be able to confirm it.

That was the idea behind AWARE — AWAreness during REsuscitation. Beginning in 2008, Parnia and his collaborators placed visual targets on shelves high in the resuscitation rooms of fifteen participating hospitals across the U.K., U.S., and Austria. The targets faced the ceiling. Only someone looking down from above could see them.¹⁸

The first AWARE study was published in Resuscitation in 2014. It included 2,060 cardiac-arrest patients. Of those who survived and could be interviewed, 9 percent reported some kind of NDE-like experience and 2 percent reported full out-of-body perceptions. No one happened to be in a room where a visual target was placed and a cardiac arrest occurred. The targets, in that sense, were not seen.¹⁹

Skeptics pointed to the empty target boxes as a failure. But Parnia’s team also reported a fully verified case: a 57-year-old social worker described in detail what happened during his resuscitation, including the audible voice prompts of an automated external defibrillator that, by its program cycle, would have continued to operate well past the point at which his brain should have been incapable of conscious perception.²⁰ AWARE II, published in 2023, expanded the work and added EEG and oxygen monitoring during arrests. Its interpretation has been debated within the field, but the core finding remains: a meaningful percentage of cardiac-arrest survivors report lucid, structured experiences that on standard models of brain function should not be possible.²¹

Jeffrey Long and NDERF

While the hospital-based studies were going on, a parallel project of a different kind was building. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) in 1998. The foundation hosts a website where experiencers can describe their NDEs in their own words, answer the questions of the Greyson Scale, and submit responses to a structured questionnaire.²²

NDERF is not a clinical study, and Long has been honest about that. It is a database. But it is now the largest collection of detailed first-person NDE accounts in the world — thousands of cases, in dozens of languages. It allows researchers to ask big-data questions: do children describe NDEs differently than adults? Do atheists report different content than religious believers? Do features remain consistent across cultures? The cross-cultural patterns visible in NDERF have shaped a great deal of more recent analysis.²³

The Field Comes of Age: The Handbook (2009)

By the late 2000s the literature was vast. Hundreds of papers. Dozens of books. Studies in cardiology, psychology, neurology, and psychiatry. Someone needed to gather it all up.

That happened in 2009. Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James edited The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, published by Praeger. Each chapter was written by a leading researcher in the relevant area — veridical perception, children’s NDEs, cross-cultural data, explanatory models, distressing NDEs, aftereffects, clinical implications.²⁴

Holden’s own chapter on veridical perception is especially worth highlighting. She reviewed every published case in the literature where an NDE included some claim about the physical environment that could be checked against an external source — the position of objects, the people present, the conversations going on. She found 107 cases. Of those, 92 percent were entirely accurate, 6 percent had minor errors, and 1 percent were wrong. The numbers happen to mirror van Lommel’s independent finding almost exactly.²⁵

Two studies. Different countries. Different methods. Same result. That is what convergence looks like in a maturing field.

Marsh on Bias — A Brief Word

I cannot close this chapter without acknowledging something Marsh argues at length in his own third chapter. He believes the leading NDE researchers are biased — that their commitments to non-physical interpretations of the experience precede and shape their findings.²⁶

First, the bias charge is not equally fair to all the figures I have named. Marsh has a real point about some of Ring’s later, more speculative work. He has very little against Sabom, van Lommel, Parnia, Greyson, and Long, all of whom have been careful to keep their interpretive claims modest and their data foregrounded. Lumping them together flattens an important distinction.

Second, many of these researchers began as skeptics. Sabom said he didn’t believe it. Van Lommel began his career as a naturalist who assumed death was the end. Parnia entered medicine without a metaphysical agenda. Long was a working oncologist who simply found himself unable to dismiss what he kept hearing. The trajectory away from physicalism, in case after case, is not what one would predict if confirmation bias were doing the work.

Third, the prospective hospital studies are designed precisely to control for bias. Patients are identified before the event. Their accounts are checked against medical records and witness statements. Researchers do not get to pick their cases.

I will return to all of this in Chapter 19. But here is the simple historical point: by 2010, when Marsh sat down to write his book, the field he was answering had been for two decades a serious clinical discipline. To say so is not to claim every NDE researcher is right about everything. It is to ask that the evidence be engaged at the level it has reached — not at the level it occupied in 1975.

What This Chapter Has Shown

Fifty years ago a young philosopher coined a term and gathered some stories. The result was a paperback that millions of people read at the airport. Today, the field he started has produced peer-reviewed prospective studies in The Lancet and Resuscitation, a validated diagnostic scale, a comprehensive academic handbook, multiple multi-center clinical trials, and a database of thousands of detailed first-person reports. The skeptics are entitled to their objections — and we will engage them, one by one, in the chapters ahead. But the question is no longer whether NDE research deserves a hearing. It does. The question is what the evidence, taken seriously and on its own terms, actually shows. To that we turn next.