Anomalous Cognition and Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
Janice Miner Holden, EdD, shares her latest research
Coming Home
Jul 21, 2026
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Photo by Marek Piwnicki
Janice Miner Holden, EdD, completed her doctoral degree in 1988 and spent 31 years on the University of North Texas Counseling Program faculty, retiring in 2019 as professor emerita. Her primary research focus has been near-death experiences, after-death communication, and other transpersonal experiences—those that transcend the usual personal limits of space, time, identity, and influence. She has published and presented extensively and has received several awards and honors. Since 2008, she has served as editor of the scholarly peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies, and she is recent past-president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (2020–2026).
The focus of this paper is the phenomenon of veridical perception (VP) in near-death experiences (NDEs): research on it, whether it is “anomalous,” and the implications of research findings about it for an understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the brain. To begin this exploration, I will summarize what five decades of research have revealed about NDEs—their contents and aftereffects.
The story of these data begins with the phenomenon that psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody (1975) termed “NDE” in his book Life After Life, which is currently credited with opening the contemporary field of near-death studies. A concise summary of five subsequent decades of research could be summed up in the phrase, “What he said back in 1975.” That is, research since then has largely confirmed much of what he presented—and, of course, has also refined and expanded on it. A recent summary of research appears in psychiatrist Bruce Greyson’s (2021) book, After.
"Consciousness is, indeed, beyond the brain."
What we now know (Greyson, 2021; Holden et al., 2009) is that during a close brush with death or other extreme circumstances, 10-20% of people—an estimated 5% of the adult world population—report a lucid, real or hyperreal experience comprising five aspects. Although these aspects resemble stages, I use the term aspect because, although they tend to occur in the following order, not all experiencers (NDErs) report all aspects, and the middle three can occur in any order and can sometimes overlap:
Exit: Perceiving one’s consciousness leaving the body. The specifics vary among NDErs: For example, some report exiting through the head, some through the toes, some through the chest, and some through a total lifting out of the body.
Material: Perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body. Perception during this aspect is “normal plus:” Objects appear and sounds sound identical to perception in the body, and, in addition, physically exceptional capacities exist, such as the ability to “see” in any direction, to both see and see through physical objects such as walls, to “hear” the unspoken thoughts of living people in the vicinity, and to move “at the speed of thought” to other physical locations.
Transition: Perceiving rapid movement toward and/or through a material or non-material space toward a transmaterial location. This space may be open, either dark or illuminated, or it may take the form of a structure, often a tunnel, the specific description of which varies among NDErs.
Transmaterial: Perceiving and interacting with entities and environments not of the material world. The entities can include deceased loved ones and/or other spiritual beings, both recognized and not, with whom the NDEr communicates telepathically—directly mind-to-mind. The environments can include earthlike locations of unearthly beauty, vast structures, and cities of light. This aspect often includes a life review in which, typically, the NDEr simultaneously re-views—sees again—every moment of their earthly life while also re-experiencing it; experiencing being each person with whom they interacted in it, feeling directly the effect that their actions had on the other; and perceiving it from a “higher” or “spiritual” perspective. This aspect may also include memories of past lives and glimpses into the future, both personal and global, and typically ends with the NDEr either being told they must return to, choosing to return to, or simply finding themselves back in their physical body. When they choose to return, it is virtually always to serve one or more living people or to serve humanity at large.
Re-entry: Perceiving consciousness re-entering the body. Again, when an NDE includes this aspect, the NDEr may describe reentry in any of several ways.
Other features that pervade NDEs include changes in the perception of time, emotions experienced with unearthly intensity, and cognitive processes operating at unearthly speed. Although most NDEs are dominated by pleasurable emotions such as peace, love, and joy, a minority—perhaps 10%—are dominated by distressing feelings such as confusion, terror, horror, isolation, or guilt.
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Following NDEs, experiencers manifest changes, including psychological, such as loss of fear of death and shift toward more loving values; spiritual, including intense interest in spirituality and development of “spiritual gifts” such as precognition and telepathy; physical, such as changes in appetites, metabolism, and sensitivities, as well as electromagnetic effects whereby electronic devices in the NDEr’s vicinity malfunction, especially when the NDEr is emotionally aroused; and social, whereby the foregoing changes reverberate in the NDEr’s social world, including changes in relationships, organizational affiliations, and vocation.
NDEs have occurred throughout history and across cultures. They are equal-opportunity experiences, occurring to people of all demographics, including various belief systems. They can be understood to have three levels: universal, a deep-structure level involving features that appear universally or nearly universally; cultural, a first-level surface structure involving the experience or interpretation of a universal feature in a form consistent with the NDEr’s culture; and individual, a second-level surface structure involving the expression of a first-level feature in a form unique to the NDEr. Because experiencers often encounter phenomena in their NDEs that are not found in or that contradict their belief systems, NDEs cannot reasonably be attributed entirely to cultural expectations.
Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences
NDEs are private, subjective experiences that, as described above, typically feel as real or more real than normal waking reality. Occasionally, however, an NDEr reports something they perceived during the NDE—typically in the material or transmaterial aspect—that is subsequently verified as accurate; that is, the experience appears to be not only subjectively, but also objectively, real. These cases of VP comprise two categories.
The first category involves perceptions that can be explained with current models of brain function. For example, during the material aspect, an NDEr, from a position above their physical body, sees their surgeon performing surgery on their body, or during the transmaterial aspect, an NDEr meets a deceased relative whom they know has died. Both examples could be explained with known mental processes such as memory, expectation, and imagination—despite the typical NDEr asserting adamantly that they directly perceived the contents of their NDE rather than imagined them based on recall and imagination.
The second category includes perceptions seemingly impossible to explain with current models of brain function. For example, immediately upon regaining consciousness post-surgery, a woman tells her surgeon that she had observed the surgical procedure from a position above and through the operating room ceiling and accurately reports what each member of the medical team did. She also reports having seen through the operating room walls and describes exactly what another medical team was doing in the adjacent operating room—amputating a man’s leg and placing it in a yellow disposal bag—the latter details of which her surgeon was completely unaware but that he subsequently investigated through hospital records and found to be completely correct (Rivas et al., 2023, p. 77). An example during the transmaterial aspect is an NDEr who reports having met a physically deceased acquaintance whom the NDEr did not know had died and who is subsequently confirmed as having died prior to the NDE (Rivas et al., 2023, p. 223 ff.).
“The environments can include earthlike locations of unearthly beauty, vast structures, and cities of light.”
For second-category cases, I use the more specific term apparently-non-physical veridical perception (AVP; Holden, 2009): a report by an NDEr of a perception during the NDE that, based on the condition and position of the physical body and everything known to the NDEr at the time, should not have been physically possible—occurred seemingly outside the bounds of physical perception or logical inference—yet is subsequently verified as accurate.
This category of cases meets the definition of anomalous: Their occurrence “appears to be inconsistent with the usually accepted explanations of reality” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2026). That “usually accepted explanation of reality” is reflected currently in the philosophical physicalist/materialist worldview that dominates Western science, including the fields of medicine and psychology. Materialism is “a theory that physical matter is the only fundamental reality and that all . . . phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2026). Because AVP involves perception that should not have been physically possible, it defies physical explanation and challenges the assumption that all phenomena can be explained in physical terms.
Cases of AVP vary in their evidential value. The most evidential cases involve perception of something that occurred while the NDEr was more than 30 seconds into cardiac arrest—the point at which no brain activity can be detected by electroencephalogram (EEG), that is unique/idiosyncratic, that contradicted or exceeded the NDEr’s expectations, and that is verified by at least one credible third party. They appear to involve lucid, complex, accurate perception from a perspective outside the physical body at a time when no measurable brain activity can be detected. Of course, the brain is presumably involved in forming and in communicating about the memory of the experience—but apparently not in the experience itself.
Research Into Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences
Study of Cases of Veridical Perception Gleaned From the Professional Literature
Beginning with Moody’s (1975) book, VP in general, and AVP in particular, have periodically been reported in the professional literature. One of my early forays into systematic study of this phenomenon (Holden, 2009) was in response to a publication by Keith Augustine (2007) in which he reported a few cases of supposed AVP that had, in fact, contained error, which he labeled hallucinatory and from which he cast doubt on the veracity of AVP in general.
Rather than focus only on these cases involving error, I collected every case of VP I could find in the literature—a total of 107 cases. I separated them into those that occurred during the material and the transmaterial aspects and then analyzed them by two dimensions of evidential value: accuracy—completely accurate, some error, or completely erroneous—and corroboration source—by the experiencer only, by others per the report of the experiencer, or by objective sources such as testimony of attending physician or hospital records. Results are shown in Table 1.
In summary,
37% of cases were completely accurate and objectively corroborated,
55% of cases were completely accurate and subjectively corroborated,
6% of cases included some error, and
<2% of cases were completely erroneous.
Rather than a conclusion that AVP is hallucinatory, the totality of these data indicates that AVP is predominantly accurate.
Some critics, such as Augustine (2007), have hypothesized that these results may have been invalidly skewed toward the accuracy of VP due to the file drawer effect, whereby researchers have declined or been unable to publish cases involving error and, thus, have “filed them away.” At least two points argue against this hypothesis. One point is that the sources of some of these cases were researchers conducting prospective studies explicitly seeking, in part, to confirm or disconfirm AVP; presumably, they would have reported any negative, disconfirming cases—but the great majority did not. The other point harkens back to the work of Jessica Utts (1991), who calculated that a vast number of unreported cases would have to exist to render the reported accurate cases statistically nonsignificant.
In both cases, to assume the file drawer effect would mean to question the non-biased accuracy and integrity of many researchers—to an extent so improbable that it exceeds credibility. In other words, it seems unbelievable that so many researchers would have failed to report so many erroneous cases of VP.
Hospital Studies of AVP
In addition to Moody’s (1975) reports of AVP, cardiologist Michael Sabom (1982), in the first prospective study of NDEs and their aftereffects, also “stumbled upon” several cases of AVP. As a result, early in the field’s evolution, the question arose whether AVP might be captured under controlled research conditions.
Thus, another of my early forays into VP research was the first prospective hospital study involving visual targets placed in hospital rooms to be visible only from the perspective of the ceiling—the indoors location of consciousness that most NDErs have reported. The hope was that an NDEr, upon regaining consciousness following their medical crisis, would be able to accurately describe the contents of the hidden target. A depiction of one such study setup appears in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Example Depiction of Setup for Prospective Hospital Research on AVP. Note. Used by permission of Bruce Greyson (personal communication, 03 April 2026)
Chaplain Leroy Joesten and I conducted that first study at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois (Holden & Joesten, 1990). Six studies followed, each involving different types of visual targets, various lengths of study, and numbers of hospitals that ranged from one to 25:
1996, Madelaine Lawrence, Hartford Hospital, Hartford, CT
2001, Sam Parnia et al., Southampton Hospital, Southampton, England, UK
2004, Penny Sartori, Morriston Hospital, Swansea, Wales, UK
2006, Greyson et al., University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, VA
2014, Sam Parnia et al., AWARE study, multiple hospitals
2023, Sam Parnia et al., AWARE II study, multiple hospitals
In short, none of these researchers succeeded in capturing AVP under controlled conditions—although several yielded additional cases of verified, accurate AVP, as in the cases of patients who had been resuscitated in hospital locations not equipped with the hidden visual target.
The question arises why so many efforts in this regard have failed. One possible reason is the use of targets with contents irrelevant to the NDEr—although the entire foray into this type of research was based on multiple reports of NDErs describing phenomena that were extraneous to their medical crisis. Another possible reason is static visual targets that did not attract the NDEr’s attention—the above studies 1, 3, 4, 6, & 7. Yet another possible reason is patients under the influence of Versed, a drug intended to block memory—study 5, and some other study participants. And yet another possible reason is small sample size and relatively short study duration—studies 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5.
To address this latter challenge, pulmonologist and emergency room physician Sam Parnia conducted two multi-hospital, multi-year studies. Most recently, his AWARE-II study involved nearly three years of data collection in 25 hospitals and included both visual and auditory stimuli. His data illustrate how extremely rare is the likelihood of capturing AVP under controlled circumstances:
Out of a total of 567 (100%) resuscitations,
53 (9.5%) of resuscitated patients survived,
Of which 25 (4%) did not complete interviews, due to factors such as unwillingness to participate in the study or severe medical condition prohibiting participation, and 28 (5%) completed interviews,
Of which 6 (1%) reported recalled experience of death / NDEs,
Of which none identified the visual stimulus, and one (.002%) identified the auditory stimulus—under circumstances that could not definitively be attributed to AVP.
Parnia (2024) concluded that, because of the nature of perception during NDEs, “I now realize hiding images in a hospital room for the dying individual to see was ultimately unlikely to be sufficient to explain the phenomenon” (p. 296).
I disagree that such research should not be pursued further and propose an ideal study that, like Parnia’s is multi-hospital and multi-year, but also, as in my study with Bruce Greyson and colleague (Greyson et al., 2006), involves an electronically-generated visual target that includes motion—to capture the attention of an NDEr—and that displays the current time—to serve as a marker of the exact time of the perception that can be compared to hospital records of the exact time of cardiac arrest, and also involves questioning all patients who survived cardiac arrest—not just those who survived it in rooms equipped with targets. However, the fact is that, for now, the only available data about AVP are vetted cases.
A Collection of Cases of AVP Verified by at Least One Credible Third Party
Fortunately, in this regard, Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf Smit began with my list of 107 cases of VP gleaned from the professional literature, retained only those that involved complete accuracy and were verified by at least one credible third party, added other such cases that had occurred subsequently, researched the cases for their veracity whenever possible, and published the collection in the book The Self Does Not Die (Rivas et al., 2023). Most of the total 128 cases are of AVP; a few involve other verified phenomena such as anomalous healing.
Cases of AVP in the book include a patient who accurately
described medical personnel who had been present only during the patient’s resuscitation (numerous cases),
described idiosyncratic objects used only during resuscitation (case 1.9, and others),
described an idiosyncratic gesture that the patient’s surgeon silently made only during the resuscitation process (case 1.5, and others),
conveyed to the professional their unspoken thoughts while resuscitating the patient (case 3.13, and others),
described the conversations of people at a great distance from the patient during the resuscitation (case 2.15, and others),
reported the location of a watch that a doctor had lost during the resuscitation (case 1.19), and
reported a 12-digit number on top of a machine in the resuscitation room, visible only from the ceiling (case 2.5).
Critics have charged that no amount of case evidence can suffice to substantiate the validity of AVP. They resurrect the file-drawer-effect argument and contend that, in each case, the experiencer and their corroborator(s) were either delusional, mistaken, or fraudulent. Starting from the assumption of physicalism/materialism, they contend that although the specifics of the case seem to defy a physicalist/materialist explanation, “there must be” an as-yet-undiscovered physical/material explanation.
To assess such claims, I invite readers to join me in a thought experiment.
At the end of his most recent book, Lucid Dying, Parnia (2024) described in some detail the trauma of being an emergency room physician during the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved witnessing hundreds of deaths in a matter of a few weeks, including some members of the medical profession who, in the line of duty, themselves contracted COVID and died; feeling profound overwhelm, exhaustion, and powerlessness to treat the extreme suffering and prevent the numerous deaths he witnessed; and fearing his own suffering and death if he were to contract COVID.
One option is to believe that COVID-19 is a hoax: Parnia is either deluded, mistaken, or fraudulent. Those who corroborate his story are also either deluded, mistaken, or fraudulent. Corroborating hospital records are mistaken or fraudulent. All of these sources are part of a conspiracy to mislead the public for political purposes and/or material gain.
Another option, however, is that I, along with you readers, rely on Parnia’s sanity, accuracy, and integrity, and believe his testimony.
However, if his testimony regarding the trauma surrounding COVID-19 is credible, how can the seven accounts of AVP in The Self Does Not Die to which Parnia’s work contributed not also be credible? And what of the other 64 medical professionals who contributed to the cases of AVP in the book:
48 MDs, including two also with PhDs, who contributed to over 80 cases,
2 medically-associated PhDs, who contributed to 2 cases,
5 PhD-level nurses, who contributed to 22 cases, and
8 non-PhD nurses and two similar medical professionals, who contributed to 11 cases.
Can all these professionals—who, because of the prevailing physicalist/materialist philosophy in the field of medicine, are actually disincentivized to report such “anomalous” phenomena as AVP, and who represent 10 diverse countries—Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, Spain, the UK, and the United States—be deluded, mistaken or fraudulent witnesses? It is noteworthy that, in addition to Parnia, these medical professionals include, in alphabetical order by last name:
Tom Aufderheide, MD, Professor; Director, Resuscitation Research Center, Medical College of Wisconsin
Lauren Bellg, MD, internal and ICU medicine, Appleton, WI
Maggie Callanan, RN, CRNH, hospice nurse
Bruce Greyson, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia School of Medicine
Jeffrey Long, MD, radiation oncologist, Houma, LA
Mary Neal, MD, orthopedic surgeon, Jackson Hole, WY
Miguel Ángel Pertierra Quesada, MD, otolaryngologist, Regional Hospital, Málaga, Spain
Michael Sabom, MD, cardiologist, Atlanta, GA
Penny Sartori, PhD, RGN, intensive care nurse, Wales, UK
Pim van Lommel, MD, cardiologist, The Netherlands
Again, it seems highly improbable that so many successful medical professionals could all be misguided in providing testimony regarding AVP that they personally witnessed.
A More Detailed Examination of a Case of AVP
The Case
To explore the possibility of delusion, mistake, or fraud, I offer the following example of AVP from The Self Does Not Die (Rivas et al., 2023): Case 3.11 Lloyd Rudy’s Patient. Lloyd W. Rudy (1934-2012) was a United States cardiothoracic surgeon who practiced in Spokane, Washington, and Great Falls, Montana. The patient was a man with a heart valve infection who required a valve resection. At the end of the procedure, during which he had been in cardiac arrest and connected to a heart-lung machine, every attempt to get him off the machine resulted in plummeting blood pressure. Finally, the team turned off the machine, his blood pressure plummeted to zero, and the team pronounced the patient dead. Rudy’s assistant, cardiac surgeon Roberto Amado-Cattaneo, closed the patient’s chest. However, the team neglected to turn off the machine that monitored blood pressure and pulse, so the print-out piled up on the floor.
Rudy and his assistant changed their clothes and then returned to the operating room doorway to discuss whether they had overlooked any opportunity to save the patient’s life. Rudy estimated that at least 20 minutes had passed since the heart-lung machine had been turned off, when the two surgeons noticed sporadic heartbeats—which they dismissed as something occasionally seen but clinically meaningless—until they observed that the heartbeats were sufficient to generate potentially viable blood pressure. They called in the medical team and succeeded in resuscitating the patient, who remained unconscious throughout the procedure and for a day or two afterwards.
Upon regaining consciousness, the patient reported to Rudy and other medical staff that his consciousness had floated above the room, seen Rudy and Amado-Cattaneo standing in the doorway, seen the anesthesiologist come running back into the room, and seen a string of Post-it notes stuck to the monitor. Regarding the latter perception, Rudy explained that it was his practice, whenever his nurse took a phone call while Rudy was in surgery, to have her write the message on a Post-it note, bring it into the operating room, and stick it to the bottom of the previous Post-it note—so that, after surgery, he would have his “list” of phone calls to return.
The question arises how this patient, who was physically unconscious and somewhere between clinically dead and barely alive, could have perceived these events—in particular, the string of Post-it notes, a very idiosyncratic element that was created silently and without comment and, therefore, could have been perceived only visually—yet the patient’s physical eyes were not functional at the time.
After Rudy’s report, Amado-Cattaneo confirmed it. He also asserted that the monitor was not malfunctioning and that the patient was so “loaded” with anesthetics and sedatives that “there is no way in the world that he could have seen or be [sic] aware of anything” (p. 95).
Possible Materialist Explanations
Materialist explanations include delusion, that the experiencer and/or corroborating witness were suffering from a thought disorder, leading to misinterpretation of what had occurred; mistaken interpretation, usually involving alternative explanations to the experiencer’s assertion that their consciousness was actually functioning outside their body; and/or fraud, that the experiencer and/or witnesses were involved in a conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax.
Could the patient, Rudy, and/or Amado-Cattaneo have been delusional? The surgeons made no mention of the patient having a history of mental disorder; rather, they implied that he was mentally healthy. Regarding the surgeons, it defies logic that, regarding one isolated case, two successfully practicing cardiac surgeons were both suddenly stricken with thought disorder, generating a deluded memory that persisted for years.
Could they have been mistaken? Anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee offered an explanation based on The Lazarus Phenomenon, whereby “a person spontaneously recovers heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing, and consciousness after periods of absent heartbeat lasting sometimes as long as 26 minutes” (Rivas et al., 2023, p. 94). As Amado-Cattaneo described, the string of Post-it notes might have been located within the patient’s physical visual field; thus, he might have momentarily regained consciousness and seen them.
Amado-Cattaneo, however, summarily dismissed this explanation, confirming that “this patient was dead for 25 minutes or more with no cardiac pulmonary movement or brain function . . . I was there.” With this dismissal, he confirmed his personal observation that the patient remained consistently physically unconscious throughout the episode and for at least one day afterwards and was, therefore, unable to see the notes with his physical eyes. In addition, even if the patient had briefly opened his eyes, two factors suggest an inability to form a coherent memory. One is that this patient was heavily medicated with anesthetics and sedatives. The other is that in the first moments of regaining consciousness under these circumstances, patients are typically confused and disoriented (Greyson, 2021).
“I contend that the body of evidence of AVP is so extensive that the physicalist/materialist furniture has fallen over.”
Similarly, it might be speculated that someone mentioned the Post-it notes, which the patient overheard and “converted” into a visual memory. This explanation constitutes the sweeping “explanation” by which materialists dismiss all cases of AVP: reconstructed memory. According to this explanation, the NDEr is presumed to have created a visual memory based on having heard or put together information they had previously received through normal means but had forgotten the actual source of the information. Nothing in the account, however, supports this possibility.
The Post-it note procedure was apparently a familiar routine to Rudy and his associates, one that was carried out without comment. The weakness of this explanation is confirmed by many other cases in Rivas et al.’s (2023) book in which NDErs saw idiosyncratic, silent phenomena that were routinely known to the medical staff and, therefore, not discussed. No case exists in which an NDEr recalls having heard mention of the visual element they later reported or in which corroborators recalled having discussed the visual element before, during, or after the medical procedure. To assume that over 200 people—NDErs and their corroborators in Rivas et al. (2023)—could all have been mistaken in this way defies logic.
Could this be a case of fraud? Amado-Cattaneo asserted, “This was not a hoax, no way, this was as real as it gets” (p. 93). Again, it defies logic that two practicing surgeons would put their reputations on the line to lie about a case such as this.
Length limitation of this article prevents similar analysis of the 127 other cases in Rivas et al.’s (2023) book—and particularly the 42 cases in Chapter 3 that involved perception while the patient was confirmed to have been in cardiac arrest. I invite readers, however, to engage in such an analysis—perhaps even going so far as to apply the recently developed Veridical Near-Death Experience Scale (Greyson et al., 2025) to assess the evidential value of each case—as the weight of evidence lies not with any one case but with the cumulative value of numerous cases.
Conclusion
Charles Whitehead (2004) once said, “Anomalies tend to get swept under the carpet until there are so many of them that the furniture starts to fall over” (p. 72). I contend that the body of evidence of AVP is so extensive that the physicalist/materialist furniture has fallen over. AVP indicates that,
At times, people have experienced their consciousness functioning lucidly apart from their physical bodies, perceiving the material world and/or perceiving and interacting with beings and environments not of the material world, in ways that appear not to have involved their brains.
In these cases, these experiencers—and those who corroborated their accurate perceptions—were not delusional but sane, not mistaken but accurate, and not fraudulent but sincere—indeed, courageous—and, thus, can be believed: that the experiencers had not only a subjectively but also an objectively real experience—even though such perception cannot be explained by current materialist models.
Furthermore, AVP occurs in phenomena besides NDEs. The most comprehensive approach to the question of the validity of AVP derives not only from the study of NDEs but also from a convergence of evidence from careful research on these other phenomena, including terminal lucidity (Nahm et al., 2025), shared death experience (Shared Crossing Research Initiative, 2021), after-death communication (Streit-Horn et al., 2022), and mediumship (Beischel et al., 2015).
Together, this evidence indicates that consciousness, although closely associated with the brain during most of physical existence, can at times function independently of the brain and, thus, is not produced by the brain and is essentially independent of it. Several philosophical models have been developed that include phenomena that both can and cannot be explained in physicalist/materialist terms. For my purpose in this essay, whichever of these models emerges eventually as the most tenable is less important than the establishment of the validity of phenomena that cannot be explained in physicalist/materialist terms.
Readers may ask why this establishment is important. The question of whether consciousness is essentially independent of the brain has several implications. One implication is ontological, involving the question of reality and of who humans really are. Another implication involves whether a person’s consciousness, being fundamentally independent of the brain, might have existed prior to their physical life and might survive the demise of their physical body and brain. This question, in turn, relates to questions about the meaning and purpose of physical existence.
In particular, NDErs tend to report that the purpose of human existence was revealed to them during their NDEs: for each human to advance in one’s capacity to love, that is, to function based on love for oneself and others in every human circumstance, from moment-to-moment interactions with others to the establishment and execution of organizational and governmental policies. In a world that, to many people, feels increasingly contentious and chaotic, people are more likely to heed and implement NDErs’ message of love if they are confident that NDEs are not only subjectively, but are also objectively, real and that consciousness is, indeed, beyond the brain
