Research Chair report · RonB

Near-death experience after AWARE-II

Seven methods questions · RonB, Research Chair · Library · Research Chair

Data of experience, not proof of metaphysics

The experience happened. It is real as experience. That fact does not settle whether the content was generated by a dying brain, disclosed from somewhere else, or some third thing. Ontology remains open. Methods first.

Plain-language summary

Some people who come close to death, most often during a cardiac arrest, later describe a vivid experience. Common elements are deep peace, leaving the body, another realm, meeting a presence, reviewing their life, and choosing to come back or being sent back. Researchers count these reports with questionnaires such as the Greyson scale. In hospital studies, roughly one in ten to one in five cardiac-arrest survivors report such an experience. Brain recordings show that some organised activity can occur during resuscitation. No study has yet recorded the brain of the same person who later reported an NDE. No patient has yet identified a hidden picture placed to test out-of-body perception. A minority of NDEs are frightening. Changes in values and in fear of death can last for years. This report keeps three things apart: what the evidence shows, what traditions say, and the Chair’s own labelled view. It does not decide what NDEs ultimately are.

For practitioners

If a client tells you about an NDE

Listen. Let the person tell it in their own words and at their own pace. Do not rush to interpret.
Do not pathologise. Vividness is not illness. Do not pedestal. An NDE is not a credential, a calling card, or proof of anything.
Ask directly: “Was it pleasant, distressing, or both?” Distressing NDEs are a real minority (Q4). Ask; do not assume.
Do not argue with the account. The durations, EEG and oxygen figures in this report are for coding research reports. They are never for challenging a person’s account.
Refer distress (persistent fear, intrusive memories, nightmares, low mood, or anything that worries you or them) to the person’s own medical or mental-health care.
Leave the meaning with them. Do not tell them it proves an afterlife, or that it was “just” the brain. The ontology is open.
Safety first: see the Safety box above.

This box is orientation, not a protocol or a treatment.

RonB is an NDE survivor. The Chair treats the NDE as data of experience, not as proof of metaphysics. Not a curriculum. Not a treatment protocol.

Abstract

AWARE-II recorded near-normal EEG as late as 35–60 minutes into CPR, and zero hidden-target visual identifications. The EEG findings and the experience reports come from different patients: of 28 interviewed survivors, two had EEG data and neither had explicit cognitive recall. Timing — during ischemia versus reconstructed at recovery — is therefore still unmeasured. A pre-registered, adequately powered hidden-target protocol could in principle yield a veridical OBE identification; seven hospital studies through 2023 have not. RED/classical NDE can be separated from CPR-induced consciousness, post-resuscitation dreams, and ICU delirium by phenomenology, timing, and bedside instruments, without settling ontology. Distressing NDEs are a minority (~11–22% of NDEs). Parnia’s 2022 RED criteria, which require positive transformative effects, leave them out. In the Chair’s view, that is a methods error. The Greyson/Rasch hierarchy is stable in Western scale-takers; culturally local imagery is not thereby disproved. Endogenous DMT remains unmeasured in the dying human. Aftereffects can last for years. Practitioners should listen, ask whether the experience was pleasant or distressing, and refer distress to the person’s own care (Q7).

01 · Safety, summary, the client
Stop and refer first. Then the plain-language summary, and what to do if a client tells you about an NDE.
02 · Seven questions
Timing. Hidden targets. Separation. Distress. Culture. DMT. Aftereffects for practitioners.
03 · Evidence · tradition · the Chair’s view
Three kinds of claim, kept apart. In the Chair’s view is labelled where it appears.
04 · Glossary and the record
Every abbreviation, checked against a source. Then the sources, and what is not on the record.

§0 · Instruments and labels

Greyson, NDE-C, RED

Prospective arrest series cluster at ~10–18% (van Lommel et al., Lancet 358, 2039–2045, 2001: 62/344 = 18%, 41/344 = 12% “core”; Parnia et al., Resuscitation 85, 1799–1805, 2014: 9 of the 101 survivors who completed stage-2 interviews, 9%). Greyson’s 16-item scale (J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 171, 369–375, 1983), cut-off 7/32, remains the research comparator. Lange, Greyson & Houran (Br. J. Psychol. 95, 161–177, 2004) fitted it to a Rasch model for “true” NDErs: unidimensional, interval, hierarchy of peace → insight/mystical → awareness of another place or time. Martial et al. NDE-C (Conscious. Cogn. 86, 103049, 2020): 20 items, 0–80, cut-off 27, five factors, Cronbach α = 0.85, plus a distressing-content item. Pehlivanova, Lange, Greyson & Houran (Conscious. Cogn. 139, 103979, 2026), n = 705: the scales measure the same construct (disattenuated r = 0.98); they recommend Greyson plus cut-off 7. Two Greyson items need careful reading. Item 10 (awareness of things elsewhere, “as if by ESP”) and item 11 (“Did scenes from the future come to you?” 1 = personal future, 2 = world’s future) score whether a report was made. Item 10 gives 2 only if “the facts have been checked out”. Item 11 has no accuracy check at all. A high paranormal-cluster score is therefore not evidence of foresight or remote perception (item wording: UVA DOPS, “Description of the NDE Scale (Revised)”, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2018/10/Description-of-the-NDE-Scale-Revised_.pdf).

Parnia et al. (Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1511, 5–21, 2022) proposed recalled experience of death (RED) with six components, including positive transformative effects and absence of delirium/dream features — a research proposal, not a medical-society guideline. Martial, Cassol, Laureys & Gosseries (Trends Cogn. Sci. 24, 173–183, 2020) treat classical NDE as disconnected consciousness. Two commentaries objected. Martial, Gosseries, Cassol & Kondziella (Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1517, 11–14, 2022) criticised the paper’s neurological claims about brain death and its terminology of consciousness. Evrard, Pratte & Rabeyron (Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1515, 5–9, 2022) argued that closeness to “real” death is not a decisive criterion and that the “core phenomenology” is open to criticism. Parnia et al.’s own recommendation 19 says frightening or distressing experiences often lack RED’s themes and “in many instances … likely reflect ICU delirium and delusions.” In the Chair’s view, this writes most distressing NDEs out of RED (Q3, Q4).

Seven questions

The methods, one at a time

Timing: isoelectric, ischemic, or reconstructed?

AWARE-II (Parnia et al., Resuscitation 191, 109903, 2023): 567 in-hospital arrests ≥5 minutes, 25 sites. Sustained ROSC 213/567 (37.6%); survival to discharge 53 (9.3%); interviews 28/53. Of 28, 11 (39%) reported memories; 6/28 (21%) met Greyson ≥7 (median 7, high 18) and were classed as RED. EEG on 85 subjects, 53 interpretable (466/851 images). Mean rSO₂ 43.5% (normal ~70%). Suppressed EEG 47% of images; epileptiform 5%; near-normal rhythms also appeared — delta 22% and theta 12% of images up to 60 minutes of CPR, alpha 6% up to 35 minutes, beta 1%. The paper offers these as candidate biomarkers of consciousness and RED.

The same paper: “Two of 28 interviewed subjects had EEG data, but weren’t among those with explicit cognitive recall.” EEG during CPR and RED reports are disjoint. rSO₂ did not differ with vs without memories (53.5 vs 46.7, p = 0.55). Nobody identified the tablet image. The 57-year-old AWARE-I case described events from a corner of the room, corroborated by records and AED use, ~3 minutes of awareness — in a room without a hidden shelf. That is a verified report of events, not proof that the experience happened while the EEG was flat.

Borjigin et al. (PNAS 110, 14432–14437, 2013): rats, coherent gamma surge within 30 s of arrest, preceding isoelectric EEG, exceeding waking levels. Xu, Mashour, Borjigin et al. (PNAS 120, e2216268120, 2023): four comatose patients after ventilator withdrawal; two of four showed a hypoxia-stimulated gamma surge and TPO “hot zone” connectivity. Those four did not survive. No first-person report is attached to a dying-brain gamma surge in a human.

Verdict · in the Chair’s view

Organised EEG can occur deep into CPR. A gamma surge can occur in some rats and some dying humans. Neither timestamps a reported NDE to an isoelectric or severely ischemic window. Reconstruction at recovery remains live. The closing test is co-registration: the same survivor, a Greyson-positive report, and EEG/rSO₂ through the arrest, with claimed events aligned to the trace. AWARE-II did not have that overlap. Until it exists, “during isoelectric cortex” and “reconstructed at recovery” are both under-determined.

Duration anchor

In out-of-hospital VF arrest occurring before EMS arrival (n = 1,667), Larsen et al. (Ann. Emerg. Med. 22, 1652–1658, 1993; doi:10.1016/s0196-0644(05)81302-2) modelled survival as falling about 5.5 percentage points per minute without CPR, defibrillation, or advanced care. A narrative statement of being “dead for N minutes/hours” with no chart time, ECG, or resuscitation record is therefore a claim about experienced duration, not a measured arrest interval. Code it as such (Q3, self-reported/undocumented event). This is a methods note, not a clinical statement about any individual.

Use of these numbers

The duration, EEG and oxygen (rSO₂) figures in this report are for coding research reports. They are never for challenging a person’s account of their own experience.

Read before anything else on this page is used

What this is not

Not a diagnosis. Not proof of survival of consciousness. Not a treatment protocol. (Safety lines: see the Safety box at the top of this page.) Clinicians should not treat an NDE report as psychiatric disorder or as evidence of an afterlife.

Three kinds of claim

Evidence, tradition, labeled stance

Evidence
A replicable phenomenological cluster; minority incidence after arrest; EEG during CPR that falsifies “the brain is simply off”; zero pre-registered hidden-target hits; dying-brain gamma in some animals and some non-surviving humans; questionnaire overlap with DMT that is not a human dying-brain assay; aftereffects that outlast the arrest and differ from arrest-without-NDE.
Tradition
Moody’s composite, memoirs, conference culture, and afterlife commerce supply meaning faster than co-registration can timestamp an experience. Public testimony now travels mainly through a testimony economy: long-form podcast and video interviews, donation support, free calls or groups that lead to paid offerings, and headlines that promise revelation. This describes a general media format. It is not a judgement of, or a reference to, any individual or any case in this report. Tradition is data about humans.
Labeled Chair stance · RonB, NDE survivor
The experience happened. It is real as experience. That fact does not settle whether the content was generated by a dying brain, disclosed from somewhere else, or some third thing. Ontology remains open. Methods first.

Reference

Glossary33 terms

Definitions are checked against the source named in brackets.

AED: automated external defibrillator (AWARE-I, Parnia et al. 2014).
AWARE / AWARE-II: “AWAreness during REsuscitation” prospective studies (Parnia et al. 2014; 2023).
CAM-ICU: Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit. A brief bedside delirium assessment validated in mechanically ventilated ICU patients against DSM-IV criteria (Ely et al., JAMA 286, 2703–2710, 2001).
CFA / CFI / TLI / RMSEA / SRMR: confirmatory factor analysis and its fit indices. These are the comparative fit index, the Tucker–Lewis index, the root mean square error of approximation, and the standardised root mean square residual (Stripp & Hvidt 2026).
CO₂: carbon dioxide. Measured as end-tidal and arterial values in Klemenc-Ketis et al. 2010.
CPR: cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
CPRIC: CPR-induced consciousness. Signs of consciousness during CPR, such as eye opening, jaw tone, speech, or movement (Olaussen et al. 2017), or patient-reported awareness during compressions (AWARE-II).
CSF: cerebrospinal fluid.
DIF: differential item functioning. An item behaves differently across groups who have the same underlying level of the trait. Pehlivanova et al. 2026 used DIF / response-bias analyses.
DMT: N,N-dimethyltryptamine (Dean et al. 2019).
DOPS / UVA: Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia.
DSM-IV: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, the reference standard used to validate CAM-ICU (Ely et al. 2001).
ECG / EEG: electrocardiogram / electroencephalogram.
EMS: emergency medical services.
ESP: extrasensory perception (Greyson scale item 10).
IANDS: International Association for Near-Death Studies.
ICDSC: Intensive Care Delirium Screening Checklist. Eight items: altered level of consciousness, inattention, disorientation, hallucination or delusion, psychomotor agitation or retardation, inappropriate mood or speech, sleep–wake disturbance, and symptom fluctuation. A score of ≥4 flags possible delirium (Bergeron et al., Intensive Care Med. 27, 859–864, 2001).
ICU: intensive care unit.
INMT / AADC: indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase / aromatic-L-amino acid decarboxylase, the enzymes that synthesise DMT (Dean et al. 2019).
IV: intravenous.
K⁺: potassium.
NDE / NDE-C / NDEr: near-death experience / Near-Death Experience Content scale (20 items, 0–80; Martial et al. 2020) / a person who reports an NDE. NDE-C15 is item 15 of the NDE-C (void/fear/non-existence; Stripp & Hvidt 2026).
NMDA: N-methyl-D-aspartate (a glutamate receptor type).
OBE: out-of-body experience.
OHCA: out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (Olaussen et al. 2017; Stripp & Hvidt 2026).
PICS: post-intensive care syndrome (Parnia et al. 2022).
RCT: randomised controlled trial.
SD: standard deviation.
RED: recalled experience of death. Parnia et al.’s 2022 research term, with six components: relation with death, transcendence, ineffability, positive transformative effects, illness severe enough to cause loss of consciousness, and absence of dream/delirium/delusion features (Parnia et al. 2022).
ROSC: return of spontaneous circulation (“sustained ROSC” as reported in AWARE-II).
rSO₂: regional cerebral oxygen saturation. AWARE-II’s cerebral-oxygenation measure during CPR (normal about 70%).
TPO: temporo-parieto-occipital junction, the posterior cortical “hot zone” (Xu et al. 2023).
VF: ventricular fibrillation (Larsen et al. 1993).

Sources used32 sources

Parnia et al., Resuscitation 85, 1799–1805 (2014); Resuscitation 191, 109903 (2023); Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1511, 5–21 (2022).
van Lommel et al., Lancet 358, 2039–2045 (2001).
Borjigin et al., PNAS 110, 14432–14437 (2013); Xu et al., PNAS 120, e2216268120 (2023).
Greyson, J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 171, 369–375 (1983); Lange, Greyson & Houran, Br. J. Psychol. 95, 161–177 (2004); Greyson & Bush, Psychiatry 55, 95–110 (1992); Pehlivanova et al., Conscious. Cogn. 139, 103979 (2026).
Martial et al., Conscious. Cogn. 86, 103049 (2020); Trends Cogn. Sci. 24, 173–183 (2020); Neurosci. Conscious. niae033 (2024); Nat. Rev. Neurol. 21, 297–311 (2025).
Martial, Gosseries, Cassol & Kondziella, Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1517, 11–14 (2022).
Evrard, Pratte & Rabeyron, Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1515, 5–9 (2022).
Stripp & Hvidt, Dan. Med. J. 73(7), A12251012 (2026).
Timmermann et al., Front. Psychol. 9, 1424 (2018).
Dean et al., Sci. Rep. 9, 9333 (2019).
Nichols, J. Psychopharmacol. 32, 30–36 (2018).
Olaussen et al., Resuscitation 113, 44–50 (2017).
Cassol et al., Memory 27, 1122–1129 (2019).
Kellehear, J. Near-Death Stud. 26, 249–265 (2008).
Klemenc-Ketis, Int. J. Behav. Med. 20(1), 7–12 (2013; online 2011).
Klemenc-Ketis, Kersnik & Grmec, Crit. Care 14, R56 (2010).
Stripp & Joshi, Tidsskr. Forsk. Sygdom Samfund. 20(38), 25–48 (2023).
Holden, “Veridical Perception in NDEs,” conference slides, BIAL Foundation (2026), https://assets.ctfassets.net/osaht2ckekgb/4mwFSH2FCuBAk3rFfo0gAo/c014337192a84b6014a20c4fca5d774c/Jan_Holden.pdf (non-peer-reviewed).
Holden, “Veridical perception in near-death experiences,” in Holden, Greyson & James (eds), The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, pp. 185–212 (Praeger, 2009).
Greyson, Am. J. Orthopsychiatry 71(3), 368–373 (2001).
Greyson, J. Near-Death Stud. 32(3), 123–136 (2014).
Greyson, J. Sci. Explor. 37(4), 683–698 (2023), doi:10.31275/20232843 (source for the secondary prevalence figures: Gallup & Proctor 1982, Rawlings 1978, Charland-Verville et al. 2014, Atwater 1992, Gibson 1996, Rommer 2000, Lindley et al. 1981, Garfield 1979, unpublished UVA analysis).
Bush & Greyson, Mo. Med. 111(5), 372–376 (2014).
Kellehear, Stevenson, Pasricha & Cook, J. Near-Death Stud. 13, 109–113 (1994).
Pasricha, J. Near-Death Stud. 26, 267–282 (2008).
Belanti, Perera & Jagadheesan, Transcult. Psychiatry 45, 121–133 (2008).
Athappilly, Greyson & Stevenson, J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 194, 218–222 (2006).
Li et al., Front. Psychiatry 14, 1201416 (2024).
Ely et al., JAMA 286, 2703–2710 (2001).
Bergeron et al., Intensive Care Med. 27, 859–864 (2001).
Larsen, Eisenberg, Cummins & Hallstrom, Ann. Emerg. Med. 22(11), 1652–1658 (1993), doi:10.1016/s0196-0644(05)81302-2.
Greyson NDE Scale item wording: UVA DOPS, “Description of the NDE Scale (Revised)”, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2018/10/Description-of-the-NDE-Scale-Revised_.pdf.

Unverified · not on the record11 items

Co-registration of a Greyson-positive RED with that same person’s CPR-EEG.
A pre-registered hidden-target visual hit in a prospective arrest series.
Endogenous DMT (or any named neuromodulator) measured in a dying or arresting human who later reported an NDE.
Rasch-hierarchy invariance of Greyson items across non-Western languages (DIF not published).
A controlled aftercare trial for NDE or distressing NDE.
Parnia 2022 RED as a medical-society standard (it is not).
Staff-observed CPRIC in AWARE-II’s 28 (none); the 7% is patient-report.
van Lommel’s later commentary figures (e.g. divorce rates) — not the 2001 Lancet result; not used here.
IANDS 2026 Centiment poll (23% “another realm”; IANDS press release, https://iands.org/media-center/iands-press-releases/twenty-three-percent-of-americans-say-theyve-had-near-death-experiences-according-to-major-survey/): self-report, not Greyson prevalence.
Martial 2025 Nat. Rev. Neurol. mechanistic claims: paper exists; not independently re-derived here.
Vicente et al. 2022 dying-brain EEG (Front. Aging Neurosci. 14, 813531) and Chawla et al. 2009 end-of-life EEG surges (J. Palliat. Med. 12, 1095–1100): papers exist; not re-analysed here.

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