Near-death experiences have a unique EEG

Journalist Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife: “Could NDEs be incorrect memories, or fantasies that are simply imagined? Seven scientists from the University of Liège, Belgium, have studied the characteristics of NDE memories as compared with both real and imagined event memories. In 2013, they found that NDE memories have more characteristics than either, which alludes to NDEs appearing more ‘real,’ as experiencers so often report. ‘The present study showed that NDE memories contained more characteristics than real event memories and coma memories. Thus, this suggests that they cannot be considered as imagined event memories. On the contrary, their physiological origins could lead them to be really perceived although not lived in reality,’ the scientists report.

“A lengthy 2014 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by nine scientists from the University of Padova, Italy, reports on the use of electroencephalography (EEG) ‘to investigate the characteristics of NDE memories and their neural markers compared to memories of both real and imagined events.’ This team reached the same conclusion as the Belgian one. ‘It is notable that the EEG pattern of correlations for NDE memory recall differed from the pattern for memories of imagined events,’ they state. ‘Our findings suggest that at a phenomenological level, NDE memories cannot be considered equivalent to imagined memories and at a neural level, NDE memories are stored as episodic memories of events experienced in a peculiar state of consciousness.’ These memories were very similar to memories of real events in terms of their richness and strong emotional content.

 

“Something actually happens during an NDE that we have yet to understand. Experiencers have no doubt that they crossed over into a wondrous afterlife realm to which they will someday return, and that death is merely a doorway into another world.”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).