Chapter 18
Imagine you witnessed a car accident on the way to work. A red sedan ran a stoplight and slammed into a blue pickup. You saw it happen. You called 911. When the police arrived, they took your statement. Now imagine someone says to you, a week later, “You didn’t really see that accident. You just think you did. Your brain filled in the details afterward. Memory is unreliable, you know.”
You’d be frustrated. Maybe even angry. Because you were there. You saw it. Yes, human memory can be imperfect. Yes, eyewitnesses sometimes get details wrong. But that doesn’t mean you fabricated the entire event. And it certainly doesn’t mean the accident never happened.
This is essentially what some skeptics say about near-death experiences. They argue that NDE reports are unreliable—that the memories are distorted, confabulated (that’s a fancy word meaning “made up without realizing it”), and reconstructed after the fact. The claim is that people who report NDEs are not really remembering what happened. They’re piecing together fragments of sensory data, prior knowledge, wishful thinking, and cultural expectations into a story that feels real but isn’t.
If this objection holds, the implications are enormous. The entire evidential case for NDEs rests on the reliability of the reports. Every veridical perception, every out-of-body observation verified by a nurse or doctor, every confirmed detail from a medical record—all of it depends on NDE memories being at least substantially accurate. Pull out the memory plank, and the whole structure comes down. The skeptics know this. That is why the memory objection shows up in nearly every major critique of NDE research. It is the methodological objection, and getting it right matters.
It’s a serious objection, and it deserves a serious answer. In this chapter, we’re going to look at the strongest version of this argument—primarily as laid out by Michael Marsh in his Oxford monograph—and then we’re going to show why it fails. Not because memory is perfect (it isn’t), but because the evidence for the reliability of NDE memories is far stronger than the skeptics want you to believe. And because the veridical cases—the ones where patients report verifiable details they could not have known—are simply not explainable by memory distortion.
Marsh devotes much of Chapter 2 of his book to arguing that NDE reports are unreliable. He raises several distinct concerns, and we need to hear each one clearly before we respond.
First, Marsh worries about editing and re-telling. He notes that NDE accounts are almost never collected at the moment the person wakes up. There is usually a gap—sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes years—between the experience and the first recorded account. During that gap, Marsh argues, the story gets shaped. It gets cleaned up. The rough edges get smoothed out. Blanks in the sequence of events get filled in. He writes that “every account will become stylized, stereotyped, and edited in its subsequent tellings and re-tellings.”1 This is not necessarily conscious deception, he says, but rather an inevitable process of making the memory “internally rational, and externally presentable in public.”2
Second, Marsh raises the problem of observer error and false recall. He reminds us that memory is “fallible and openly subject to suggestion and deviant perceptions,” just as eyewitness testimony in police investigations is notoriously unreliable.3 If ordinary people misremember ordinary events all the time, why should we trust extraordinary claims made by people who were, by definition, in a state of severe physical crisis?
Third, Marsh questions the continuity of the NDE narrative itself. He suggests that what NDErs report as a single, unbroken experience may actually be something quite different. In his Introduction, he argues that NDE narratives present themselves as “a continuous narrative” but may actually consist of “isolated events interspersed with deeper levels of unconsciousness.”4 The implication is that the brain, upon recovery, stitches these fragments together into a coherent story—a story that feels seamless but is actually a patchwork of disconnected moments glued together by normal memory processes.
Fourth, Marsh presents the cautionary tale of A. J. Ayer—the famous Oxford philosopher who published an account titled “What I Saw When I Was Dead” after a cardiac arrest caused by choking on smoked salmon. Ayer initially said the experience had “weakened” his conviction about the finality of death.5 But he later walked it back, saying his brain had not actually died. More damaging still, Marsh reports that Ayer’s attending doctor revealed the medical case notes did not corroborate some of Ayer’s claims—no bits of fish were recovered from his trachea during resuscitation, for example.6 Additionally, those who knew Ayer personally acknowledged that the philosopher was “never averse to bending the data to suit local requirements.”7 Marsh uses this case to illustrate his larger point: even intelligent, truth-seeking people can produce NDE accounts that are unreliable.
Fifth, Marsh cites an even more dramatic example of fabrication. He tells the story of a woman who developed hysterical paralysis during a spinal X-ray contrast examination. When the crash team arrived, her vital signs were completely normal. She wasn’t actually dying. Yet when she “regained consciousness,” she reported a full NDE: crossing a river, seeing her father’s face, hearing beautiful music, being surrounded by angels.8 Marsh labels this a fabricated NDE—an experience reported by someone who was never in genuine medical danger at all.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin bring their own version of the memory objection to the table. They propose what they call a “three-step strategy” for explaining NDE content in physicalist terms.9 The first step is to identify how the patient could have acquired the relevant information through normal means—before, during, or after the experience. The second step is to explain how that information became part of the person’s NDE narrative. And the third step is to account for the person’s belief that they experienced this information during the NDE itself. False memory is a key component of this strategy. They argue that people can “acquire false memories, including false memories of details of past experiences,” and that such false memories can become woven into the NDE narrative in a way that feels completely genuine to the person.10
To illustrate, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that the man with the missing dentures in van Lommel’s famous Lancet study might have acquired his seemingly veridical knowledge through perfectly ordinary means. Perhaps he saw other patients’ dentures being placed in drawers during his hospital stay. Perhaps, while unconscious, he registered the sensation of his dentures being removed and the sound of the drawer opening. They suggest he may have “subconsciously pieced together these sensations” into a coherent account after the fact.11 They even suggest that a “false memory was motivated, in part, by a desire to solve the puzzle of his missing dentures.”12
Additionally, Keith Augustine has argued along similar lines, insisting that “most NDE reports are provided to researchers years after the experience itself” and that “the constant reconstruction of memory makes it difficult to know just what NDErs have actually experienced.”13
Marsh presses the point further in his chapter on narrative structure, where he performs word-count analyses of published NDE accounts. He notes that longer narratives tend to come from patients who were in prolonged, relatively light states of unconsciousness—such as toxic delirium—rather than deep cardiac arrest. He argues that the brevity of most NDE reports is consistent with his view that the experiences are momentary fragments produced during the recovery phase, not sustained episodes of genuine perception.60 He also points to the bizarre, illogical, and banal content of many NDE reports as evidence that they are brain-generated phenomena rather than genuine encounters with a transcendent reality. Reports of deceased relatives wearing familiar cardigans, conversations about ironing, and heavenly environments that look suspiciously like earth are, in Marsh’s view, too anthropomorphic and too culturally embedded to be credible accounts of another world.61
Marsh also raises a deeper philosophical concern about the very possibility of bringing back memories from a state of genuine unconsciousness. He asks: if subjects were truly dead—if their brains had ceased functioning—how could memories have been formed at all? Memory formation depends on functioning neural circuitry. If the brain was offline, there was no hardware to encode the experience. And if the brain was not offline, then the NDE occurred during a period when brain activity was present, which supports rather than undermines a physicalist explanation.62 This argument is clever, and we will address it directly in Section C.
Taken together, the skeptical case on memory is this: NDE reports are collected too late, filtered through too many re-tellings, shaped by too many cultural expectations, and vulnerable to too many forms of memory distortion to be taken at face value. The narratives are fragmented and stitched together after the fact. The content is banal and anthropomorphic. And the very mechanism by which memories could be formed during genuine unconsciousness is, on physicalist assumptions, impossible. We simply cannot trust them.
I want to be fair. Marsh raises legitimate concerns. Memory is fallible. People do sometimes misremember events. The Ayer case is a cautionary tale. And the woman with the hysterical paralysis did fabricate an NDE. These are real problems, and anyone who cares about truth has to take them seriously.
But there are significant weaknesses in the way these critics deploy the memory objection. Several of them, in fact. And they matter.
The first weakness is overreach. Marsh treats the fallibility of memory as though it were a universal disqualifier. Because memory can be unreliable, he seems to conclude that all NDE memories are unreliable. But this does not follow. The fact that some witnesses get details wrong does not mean that all witness testimony is worthless. If it did, we would have to throw out every courtroom, every police investigation, every historical record that depends on human testimony. We don’t do that. Instead, we evaluate each piece of testimony on its merits: Was the witness in a position to observe? Was the report given promptly? Was it corroborated by independent sources? These are the same standards we should apply to NDE reports—and when we do, many of them hold up remarkably well.
The second weakness is cherry-picking. Marsh builds much of his case on problematic examples—the Ayer account, the hysterical paralysis case—and then treats these as representative of NDE reports generally. But they are not. The Ayer case is precisely the kind of anecdote that rigorous NDE researchers would flag as unreliable. And the woman with hysterical paralysis was never in genuine cardiac arrest. These examples tell us that some NDE-like reports are unreliable. They do not tell us that the carefully documented, medically verified cases in the peer-reviewed literature are unreliable. Marsh is using the weakest examples to cast doubt on the strongest ones.
The third weakness is the failure to engage the best evidence for memory stability. At the time Marsh wrote his book in 2010, research on the consistency and stability of NDE memories was already available. Bruce Greyson had published his landmark study on this subject in 2007.14 Van Lommel had published follow-up data from his Lancet study. Yet Marsh does not seriously engage this research. He assumes that NDE memories degrade and distort over time—the way ordinary memories do—without testing that assumption against the data. As we will see in Section C, the data tells a very different story.
The fourth weakness is the speculative nature of the “false memory” explanation. When Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that the man with the missing dentures might have “pieced together” sensory fragments into a coherent NDE narrative through false memory, they are offering a hypothesis. They acknowledge this openly. They write, “We are not attempting to prove that the sorts of alternative scenarios described above actually took place.”15 Their point, they say, is merely that these possibilities exist. But here’s the problem: mere possibility is not evidence. It is always possible that any given memory is false. It is always possible that any given testimony was constructed after the fact. If we accept bare possibility as a sufficient reason to dismiss testimony, we can dismiss anything. The question is not whether alternative scenarios are possible but whether they are probable—and whether they can account for the full range of evidence.
The fifth weakness is the double standard. Marsh and the other critics are rightly concerned about bias in NDE reports. But they show remarkably little concern about bias in NDE dismissals. Marsh states his thesis in his Introduction—that NDEs are brain-state phenomena—before he has examined the evidence.16 He approaches the NDE narratives as stories to be debunked rather than data to be evaluated. This is not the neutral, evidence-driven approach he claims to represent. If we are going to worry about the biases that shape NDE reports, we should equally worry about the biases that shape NDE critiques.
Consider, too, how Marsh handles the relationship between memory and narrative structure. He argues that NDE accounts are suspiciously smooth and continuous—too polished to be genuine recollections of chaotic neurological events. But he never considers the alternative: that the accounts are smooth and continuous because the experiences themselves were smooth and continuous. He assumes the conclusion (the experiences were fragmentary) and then uses the discrepancy between his assumption and the actual reports as evidence of post-hoc narrative reconstruction. This is circular reasoning. He is treating the very feature that would confirm a genuine, coherent experience—a coherent narrative—as evidence against it.
A sixth weakness, related to the double standard, is the selective application of skepticism. When an NDE report contains a detail that turns out to be wrong—like the subject in one of the accounts Marsh cites who incorrectly described a deceased relative’s clothing69—the skeptics immediately seize on the error as proof that NDE perception is unreliable. But when an NDE report contains a detail that turns out to be spectacularly right—like a patient accurately describing the specific instruments used in her brain surgery—the skeptics invent elaborate alternative explanations for how the information could have been acquired through normal channels. Errors are treated as disqualifying; accuracies are explained away. This is not even-handed evaluation. This is motivated reasoning.
Now we come to the heart of the matter. The skeptics say NDE memories cannot be trusted. What does the evidence actually show?
In 2007, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia published one of the most important studies in the history of NDE research. He wanted to test a simple question: do NDE memories change over time?
To find out, Greyson went back to seventy-two people who had completed detailed NDE questionnaires after their experiences. He then gave them the exact same questionnaire again—an average of almost twenty years later. That’s two decades between the first and second interviews, using the same standardized instrument (the Greyson NDE Scale). If NDE memories degrade, distort, or get embellished over time—as the skeptics claim—then we would expect significant differences between the two sets of responses. People should remember more dramatic details the second time around. They should add elements that weren’t in the original account. The story should grow in the telling.
That is not what happened.
Greyson’s statistical analysis showed no significant change in NDE accounts over the twenty-year period. The memories remained remarkably stable. People reported essentially the same experience, with the same features and the same level of detail, two decades later.17
Think about that for a moment. Ordinary memories fade. Ask someone to describe a dinner party from twenty years ago, and you’ll get a vague impression at best. Ask them about a vacation from ten years ago, and they’ll mix up the details. They’ll confuse which year it happened, blend it with another trip, or forget entire days. Memory researchers have documented, over and over, how rapidly human memories degrade and how easily they become contaminated by subsequent experiences. This is the normal human condition. Our memories are not video recordings. They are reconstructions, assembled anew each time we recall them, and they shift a little with each assembly.
But NDE memories don’t behave this way. They stay put. They don’t fade. They don’t grow. Two decades after the event, Greyson’s subjects gave responses that were statistically indistinguishable from their original reports. The memories had neither degraded nor been embellished. They were frozen in place, as vivid and detailed as the day they were first recorded.
This is exactly the opposite of what confabulation (unconsciously making up memories) would predict. Confabulated memories are notoriously unstable. They change with every retelling, because there is no actual experience anchoring them. The person is drawing on imagination, not recall. NDE memories, by contrast, behave like memories of events that actually happened—and like particularly powerful ones at that.
Melvin Morse, a pediatrician who studied NDEs in children, reached the same conclusion from his own research. He observed that NDE memories in children do not get rearranged or altered over time the way that ordinary memories or dreams do.18 This finding is especially significant because children are widely regarded as more susceptible to memory distortion and suggestion than adults. If NDE memories were confabulated, we would expect children’s NDE reports to be especially unstable. They aren’t.
Pim van Lommel, the Dutch cardiologist who led the famous Lancet study published in 2001, conducted follow-up interviews with his NDE subjects at two and eight years after their cardiac arrests. His findings supported Greyson’s: the NDE memories remained consistent and vivid over time. Subjects described the same core experiences, with the same emotional intensity, years after the original event.19
Van Lommel’s study is particularly important because it was a prospective study—meaning it was designed in advance to collect data systematically, rather than relying on people who came forward years later to share their stories. Prospective studies are the gold standard in medical research because they minimize selection bias. And van Lommel’s prospective data confirms the stability of NDE memories.
This point deserves emphasis because it directly addresses Keith Augustine’s complaint that “most NDE reports are provided to researchers years after the experience itself.”20 While that criticism may have had some force in the early days of NDE research, when Moody and others relied on informal interviews gathered at conferences and through personal networks, it has become increasingly irrelevant as the field has matured. The major prospective studies—van Lommel’s Lancet study, Parnia’s AWARE studies, Sartori’s research in Wales, and Schwaninger’s study in the United States—all collected NDE reports while patients were still in the hospital, often within days of the experience.21 These are not stories gathered at a New Age retreat twenty years after the fact. These are clinical interviews conducted in medical settings by trained researchers, using standardized instruments, with access to the patients’ medical records for cross-checking.
In 2013, a team led by Marie Thonnard at the University of Liège in Belgium published a groundbreaking study that went even further. They didn’t just ask whether NDE memories are stable over time. They asked a more fundamental question: what kind of memories are NDE memories?
The researchers used a standardized memory assessment tool to compare the characteristics of NDE memories with memories of real events, memories of imagined events, and memories of dreams. They measured things like sensory detail, emotional intensity, self-referential processing (how much the memory involves your sense of self), and overall vividness.
The results were striking. NDE memories had more characteristics of real memories than memories of real events did. Read that again. NDE memories scored higher on the standard measures of “realness” than memories of things that actually happened in everyday life.22 They were richer in sensory detail, more emotionally intense, and more deeply connected to the person’s sense of self. They were the furthest thing from imagined or confabulated memories that the researchers had ever measured.
This is devastating for the confabulation hypothesis. If NDE memories were fabricated—assembled by the brain from fragments of imagination, prior knowledge, and cultural expectation—they should have the characteristics of imagined memories. They should feel fuzzy, lacking in sensory specifics, and psychologically distant. Instead, they have the characteristics of real memories turned up to eleven. Whatever is happening during an NDE, the brain is encoding it as intensely real experience. The memory signature matches reality, not fantasy.
Here is an analogy that might help. Suppose a detective is investigating whether a witness actually visited a crime scene or merely imagined it. One way to test this would be to compare the witness’s memory with memories known to be of real and imagined events. If the crime-scene memory has the sensory richness, emotional weight, and spatial clarity of a real memory—and lacks the vagueness, inconsistency, and detachment typical of imagined memories—that would be strong evidence the witness was actually there. The Thonnard study does exactly this for NDE memories. And the verdict is clear: NDE memories have the fingerprint of real experience, not imagination.
It is worth adding that the Thonnard findings have been replicated and extended by subsequent research. Researchers at the University of Liège and elsewhere have continued to study the phenomenological properties of NDE memories and have consistently found that they are characterized by extraordinary richness. This is not a one-off finding. It is a robust, replicable result that the confabulation hypothesis must account for—and so far, it has not.
One of the strongest weapons in the pro-NDE arsenal is the fact that many veridical NDE reports were given immediately—not years later, not after dozens of re-tellings, but right when the patient woke up.
Consider Sabom’s prospective research. Sabom, a cardiologist who began his NDE research as a skeptic, interviewed patients “as soon after the event as possible.”23 Penny Sartori, a nurse and PhD researcher who conducted a five-year prospective study in a Welsh hospital, reported that some of her patients described their NDEs immediately upon regaining consciousness.24 Maurice Rawlings, a cardiologist who was among the first to document distressing NDEs, encountered his first NDE patient during an active resuscitation—the patient’s heart kept stopping, and each time he regained consciousness, he reported what he was experiencing in real time.25
These are not faded recollections dredged up two decades later. These are fresh, vivid accounts given within minutes or hours of the experience, often confirmed by the medical staff who were present during the crisis. The memory objection has much less force when applied to reports that were given before any re-telling could have occurred.
And many of these immediate reports include veridical details that were confirmed by independent witnesses. In the case of the man with the missing dentures from van Lommel’s Lancet study, the nurse who had removed the dentures during CPR confirmed that the patient’s description of events was accurate—including the fact that the nurse himself had placed the dentures in a specific drawer of a specific crash cart.26 The patient was in cardiac arrest at the time. He was, by every clinical measure, unconscious. Yet he accurately described what happened to his dentures, who did it, and where they were placed.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that the patient might have acquired this information later—perhaps by observing other patients’ dentures being handled, or by registering the sounds of a drawer opening while unconscious.27 But this is pure speculation. There is no evidence that any of this occurred. It is an invented explanation designed to avoid the straightforward reading of the data: the patient saw what happened because he was, in some sense, there.
One of the cleverest experiments in NDE research was designed by Michael Sabom specifically to test the memory objection. The question he wanted to answer was simple: could patients who had not had NDEs accurately describe what a resuscitation looks like?
Some skeptics had argued that NDE patients were simply reconstructing their resuscitation scenes from prior knowledge—from things they had seen on television medical dramas, from conversations overheard in the hospital, from general knowledge of what happens in an emergency room. If this were true, then any cardiac patient with hospital experience should be able to give a reasonably accurate description of a resuscitation. The veridical reports would lose their evidential punch.
Sabom tested this hypothesis directly. He interviewed thirty-two NDE survivors who claimed to have witnessed their own resuscitations from an out-of-body vantage point. He also assembled a control group of twenty-five cardiac patients with similar medical backgrounds—patients who had been admitted to coronary care units and had significant exposure to hospital routines—but who had not reported NDEs. He asked the control group to imagine watching a resuscitation from across the room and to describe what they thought they would see.28
The results were dramatic. Eighty percent of the control group patients made at least one major error in their descriptions of resuscitation procedures, despite being “reasonably confident” they were correct.29 They got the placement of defibrillator paddles wrong. They incorrectly assumed that electric shocks are a standard part of every resuscitation. Some had no idea what a resuscitation looks like at all. Others based their descriptions on what they had seen on television—which, as any medical professional will tell you, is often wildly inaccurate.
In contrast, not a single one of the thirty-two NDE patients made a major error when describing what happened during their own resuscitation.30 Twenty-six of them could recall only general visual impressions, which they attributed to being more focused on the wonder of the experience than on the medical details. But six of the thirty-two provided specific, detailed descriptions of their own resuscitations, including unique details that differed from standard procedures and that they could not have guessed.31
This is extremely significant. If NDE reports were merely “imaginative reconstructions”—guesswork dressed up as memory—we would expect the NDE patients to perform about the same as the control group. They should make similar errors, fill in similar gaps, and get similar things wrong. Instead, the NDE patients were dramatically more accurate. Their descriptions matched the medical records. The control group’s descriptions did not.
Sartori conducted an independent replication of this experiment in her Welsh hospital study. She compared the resuscitation descriptions given by NDE patients with those given by resuscitated patients who did not report NDEs. The results were consistent with Sabom’s: NDE patients provided markedly more accurate and believable descriptions, while the control group made significantly more errors—errors often derived from popular television shows.32
Here is the deepest problem with the memory objection, and it is one that Marsh, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, and Augustine all fail to address adequately: if NDE reports are confabulated, the verifiable details should be wrong.
Think about what confabulation means. When a person confabulates, they are constructing a narrative from imagination, guesswork, and fragments of prior knowledge. Confabulated memories are not random—they draw on the person’s existing mental models—but they are also not accurate. They include errors, inconsistencies, and impossible elements precisely because they are not based on actual perception.
NDE reports behave in the opposite way. When they include verifiable details—descriptions of medical procedures, identifications of specific individuals, reports of events in other rooms—those details turn out to be correct far more often than they turn out to be wrong.
Janice Holden, a professor of counseling at the University of North Texas, conducted the most comprehensive analysis of veridical NDE reports ever published. She identified 107 cases of apparently veridical perception during NDEs, drawn from thirty-nine different publications by thirty-seven different authors or research teams. Using the most stringent criteria—classifying a case as inaccurate if even a single detail failed to match reality—Holden found that only 8 percent of cases involved any inaccuracy at all. Meanwhile, 37 percent of cases were confirmed as completely accurate by independent, objective sources.33
As Chris Carter observes, these numbers are remarkable. If NDE perceptions were hallucinations or confabulations, we would expect the error rate to be much higher—certainly not as low as 8 percent. The fact that an allegedly “hallucinatory phenomenon” could produce only 8 percent of cases with any apparent error, while producing 37 percent with completely verified accuracy, is something the confabulation hypothesis simply cannot explain.34
Consider the implications. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin propose that the man with the missing dentures might have pieced together his account from sensory fragments registered while unconscious. But their hypothesis predicts that such “pieced together” accounts should contain frequent errors—because the process they describe is inherently error-prone. If you are assembling a narrative from scraps of auditory data, prior knowledge, and creative gap-filling, you should get things wrong. A lot. The fact that veridical NDE reports are overwhelmingly accurate is powerful evidence that something other than confabulation is at work.
Beyond the statistical picture, individual cases illustrate the point with particular force. In The Self Does Not Die, Rivas, Dirven, and Smit document over one hundred cases of veridical perception during NDEs, many of which were verified by third parties.35 Several of these cases involve details that no amount of memory reconstruction could plausibly explain.
Consider Sabom’s case of a man who experienced cardiac arrest in December 1973 and reported a detailed out-of-body observation of his own resuscitation. He described seeing himself lying on a black-and-white tile floor, being lifted onto a metal cart with his legs strapped down, and being wheeled noisily down the hall. He described a screen that looked like an oscilloscope, a plastic tube inserted into his windpipe, two round metal disks placed on his chest (one larger than the other), and a needle being jabbed into his chest in a manner that reminded him of “an Aztec human sacrifice.” He also noted that the medical team had tried to place an IV in his left hand but failed because that hand had been crushed.36
Sabom consulted the medical records and found that the patient’s observations corresponded precisely with the documented events. The direct injection into the heart muscle was a technique commonly used in the early 1970s when IV access was impossible—a detail not specified in the medical report because it was considered routine. The patient had minimal medical knowledge; he objected to the standard term “paddles” for the defibrillator disks, preferring to call them “metal disks,” which suggests he was reporting what he actually observed rather than drawing on medical vocabulary he had acquired elsewhere.37
Cases like this are extremely difficult to explain by confabulation. The patient reported unique details of his own resuscitation—details that differed from standard procedures, that he had no prior medical knowledge to draw upon, and that were confirmed by the medical records. He wasn’t describing a generic resuscitation scene from television. He was describing his specific resuscitation, with details that no one watching a medical drama would know.
Or consider cases where patients accurately reported events happening in other rooms or even other parts of the hospital—locations they could not have observed from their physical bodies under any circumstances, whether conscious or semiconscious. These cases are documented extensively in The Self Does Not Die and in Holden’s comprehensive review.38 No amount of “semiconscious auditory perception” can explain how a patient in an operating room accurately described a conversation happening in a waiting room down the hall. No amount of “imaginative reconstruction” can explain how a patient described the specific location of a shoe on an exterior window ledge that she had never visited—as in the famous Maria case documented by social worker Kim Clark Sharp.39
One of the most striking categories of veridical NDE involves patients who, during their out-of-body experiences, encountered deceased relatives whom they did not know had died. In several documented cases, the patient met a person during the NDE and only learned afterward that the individual had recently passed away. The patient had no access to this information through any normal channel. Research by Bruce Greyson and others has confirmed that in roughly one-third of cases where NDErs encounter deceased individuals, the deceased person was someone with whom the experiencer had a distant or even poor relationship, or someone they had never met at all.63 This pattern cannot be explained by wish fulfillment, cultural expectation, or confabulation—because the patient did not know the information that turned out to be correct.
These cases transform the memory debate in a fundamental way. We are no longer asking whether a patient accurately remembered events they might have perceived through residual sensory channels. We are asking how a patient acquired new information—information that was objectively true but unknown to anyone in their immediate environment. Confabulation, by definition, draws on existing knowledge. It cannot generate knowledge the person does not possess. Yet that is exactly what some veridical NDEs appear to do.
Recall Marsh’s philosophical objection: if the brain was truly nonfunctional during the NDE, how could memories have been formed? Memory formation requires working neural circuitry. No brain activity means no memory encoding. Therefore, he argues, the very existence of NDE memories proves that the brain was active enough to produce them—which supports a physicalist explanation.64
This argument is logical within a physicalist framework. If you assume at the outset that consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, then the only way memories can be formed is through neural processes. But this is precisely the assumption that the NDE evidence challenges. The substance dualist response is straightforward: if consciousness can function apart from the brain—as the veridical evidence suggests—then memories can be formed by the conscious mind and later impressed upon the brain when the person revives. The brain does not need to be online during the experience in order to store the memory afterward.
Think of it this way. Imagine you are writing a letter, and your pen runs out of ink. You keep composing the letter in your head. When you get a new pen, you write down everything you composed mentally. The fact that the pen was out of ink during the composition does not mean the composition never happened. It means the recording device was temporarily unavailable. The NDE cases suggest something similar: consciousness was active and perceiving, even while the brain (the recording device) was offline. When the brain came back online, the memories were encoded. This is consistent with the filter or transmission model of the brain, which we will explore in depth in Chapter 24.
Marsh’s argument assumes what it is trying to prove. It assumes physicalism to argue that NDE memories must have been formed by the brain, and then concludes that the brain must have been active. But the entire debate is about whether physicalism is correct. You cannot settle the debate by assuming the answer.
Some skeptics have suggested that NDE patients may have been semiconscious during their crises and that their apparently veridical reports are based on sensory data registered while they were in a twilight state between consciousness and unconsciousness. Sabom addressed this possibility in detail and provided four compelling reasons to reject it.40
First, when patients who have been under general anesthesia are later hypnotized and regressed to the time of their operation, they sometimes recall conversations among medical personnel—but not visual impressions. Semiconscious perception during surgery is primarily auditory, not visual. Yet NDE reports consistently include rich, detailed visual content.41
Second, Sabom compared the experiences of NDE patients with those of semiconscious patients undergoing elective cardioversion (a procedure where electric shocks are applied to correct abnormal heart rhythm under light sedation). The semiconscious patients reported pain, discomfort, and the sensation of having “everything torn out of your insides.” NDE patients who watched the same procedure being performed on their bodies from an out-of-body vantage point reported something completely different: floating, peace, comfort, no pain at all.42 If NDE patients were semiconscious, their reports should resemble the reports of other semiconscious patients. They don’t.
Third, several of Sabom’s patients could clearly distinguish between periods of semiconscious auditory perception and the subsequent onset of a full NDE with visual content. They recognized these as different kinds of experience.43
Fourth, Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, in their large-scale study of over three hundred British NDEs, documented cases of patients with severe head injuries whose arousal was deeply confused—exactly what we would expect from compromised brain function—yet who retained clear, vivid, comprehensive memories of NDEs that occurred during the period of unconsciousness. The confusional state and the NDE memory coexisted. The Fenwicks concluded that it is not possible, with our current understanding of brain function, to explain how a clear, structured experience could be formed and remembered during a period when the brain should have been incapable of either consciousness or memory formation.44
There is one more point that deserves special attention because it cuts directly against Marsh’s thesis. Marsh argues that NDEs are produced by metabolically disturbed brains during the period when they are regaining functional competence—that is, during recovery.45 But recovery from brain injury is characteristically a process of confusion. Not clarity. Confusion.
Recovery from simple fainting involves a confusional state. Recovery from cardiac arrest involves even greater confusion. Recovery from a stroke or severe head injury involves profound disorientation, memory gaps, and cognitive impairment. This is well documented in the neurological literature.46
If NDEs were occurring during the recovery phase, we would expect them to have the characteristics of a confused, disoriented brain trying to get back online. We would expect fragmented imagery, illogical sequences, memory gaps, and cognitive distortion—essentially what Marsh claims to find in NDE reports. But the empirical data tells a different story. NDE patients overwhelmingly report heightened clarity, enhanced cognitive function, a feeling of being “more real than real,” and memories that remain vivid and detailed for decades. As J. Steve Miller observes, NDErs consistently report not vague, confused consciousness but vivid, hyper-clear awareness—the very opposite of what a compromised brain in recovery mode should produce.47
This is a serious problem for Marsh’s position. He wants to locate NDEs in the recovery phase because that’s when some brain activity would be present. But the phenomenology of NDEs—the clarity, the vividness, the logical coherence, the enhanced mentation—is completely unlike what recovery from brain compromise looks like. The experiences don’t match the mechanism he is proposing.
One additional line of evidence deserves mention. If NDE reports are fabricated or embellished, we need to ask: what would motivate the fabrication? What do people gain by reporting an NDE?
The answer, overwhelmingly, is: nothing good. Research consistently shows that NDE experiencers are reluctant to share their experiences. They fear ridicule. They fear being labeled mentally ill. They fear that friends, family, and medical professionals will dismiss them as delusional.48 Many NDErs keep their experiences to themselves for years or even decades before telling anyone. As one of Sabom’s patients said, “I’ve lived with this thing for three years now and I haven’t told anyone because I don’t want them putting the straitjacket on me.”49
This is not the profile of people who are making things up for attention. People who fabricate stories typically seek an audience. They want to be believed. They elaborate their stories to make them more impressive. NDE experiencers do the opposite. They hide their stories. They downplay them. They tell researchers only when directly asked, and even then they hold back details they think will sound too strange.50
The motive argument cuts strongly against confabulation. If people were unconsciously constructing NDE narratives to serve some psychological need, we would expect the narratives to be designed to impress. Instead, many NDE reports include elements that are confusing, disturbing, or contrary to the experiencer’s own beliefs—exactly what we would expect of genuine, unexpected experience, and exactly what we would not expect of fabrication.
This objection has some truth to it. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have shown that false memories can feel just as vivid and real as true memories to the person experiencing them.51 Subjective confidence is not, by itself, proof of accuracy.
But this objection misses the point. The case for the reliability of NDE memories does not rest on subjective confidence alone. It rests on multiple independent lines of evidence: the stability of NDE memories over time (Greyson’s study), the phenomenological characteristics of NDE memories (Thonnard’s study), the accuracy of veridical details confirmed by third parties (Holden’s analysis), the superiority of NDE reports over control group guesses (Sabom’s experiment), and the consistency of NDE features across cultures and demographics. This is not a case of “trust me, it felt real.” This is a case of “the memory was confirmed by independent evidence.”
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin acknowledge this when they admit that some NDE features “did reflect what really happened” and that “the medical personnel working to keep these people alive confirmed that they really happened.”52 Their response is not to deny the accuracy but to suggest alternative explanations for how the information was acquired. We have already seen why those alternative explanations are inadequate (see Sections C.4–C.9 above).
Correct. Memory stability, by itself, does not prove that the remembered event actually happened as remembered. A person could have a vivid, stable memory of an event that was distorted from the beginning.
But here’s why this objection doesn’t get the skeptic where they want to go. The confabulation hypothesis specifically predicts that NDE memories should be unstable—because confabulated memories are characteristically unstable. They shift, grow, and change with every retelling. The fact that NDE memories are stable is evidence against confabulation, even if it does not, by itself, prove accuracy. When we combine stability with the other evidence—especially the third-party verification of veridical details—the cumulative case is very strong.53
Yes, it does. No one denies that some NDE reports are unreliable. The Ayer case, the hysterical paralysis case, and the Larry Dossey hoax (where a physician published a completely fabricated NDE as though it were real)54 all demonstrate that individual NDE accounts can be questionable.
But the existence of unreliable accounts does not invalidate the reliable ones. The existence of counterfeit money does not mean that all money is fake. The existence of false witness testimony does not mean that no witness testimony is ever trustworthy. The proper response is not to throw out all NDE reports but to develop rigorous criteria for evaluating which reports are trustworthy—and that is exactly what the best NDE researchers have done. Prospective studies, standardized interviews, medical record verification, third-party corroboration, control group comparisons—these are the tools of rigorous research, and they consistently confirm the reliability of the strongest NDE reports.55
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are candid that their alternative explanations are speculative. They are not claiming to have proven that the dentures man constructed his account from false memory. They are only claiming that it is possible.56
But when we evaluate competing hypotheses, we don’t ask which one is merely possible. We ask which one best fits the full range of evidence. The false memory hypothesis might work for a single, isolated case if we squint hard enough. But it cannot explain the pattern. It cannot explain why NDE patients are dramatically more accurate than control groups. It cannot explain why NDE memories have the measurable characteristics of real memories rather than imagined ones. It cannot explain why veridical details are confirmed at a rate of 92 percent accuracy across 107 documented cases. It cannot explain why NDE patients report events in other rooms that they could not possibly have perceived through any normal sensory channel. And it cannot explain why NDE memories remain stable over twenty years when confabulated memories characteristically degrade.
The false memory hypothesis explains individual cases by inventing ad hoc scenarios for each one. The NDE hypothesis explains the entire pattern with a single, coherent mechanism: these people perceived what they reported because their consciousness was, in some real sense, present. When we weigh the two hypotheses against the full body of evidence, the NDE hypothesis is not just more plausible—it is the only one that accounts for the data.57
There is something else worth noting about the false memory hypothesis as Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin deploy it. They apply it selectively. When the dentures man reports seeing the nurse remove his dentures, they invoke false memory. When Pam Reynolds reports seeing the bone saw, they invoke semiconscious perception. When Colton Burpo reports seeing his parents praying in separate rooms, they invoke prior knowledge. Each case gets a different explanation—and each explanation is custom-designed to fit the specific details that need explaining. This is not a unified theory. It is a patchwork of ad hoc rescues. As we will argue in Chapter 31, a patchwork of individually plausible but collectively unrelated explanations is not more parsimonious than a single explanation that accounts for all the data. The “piecemeal strategy,” as Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin themselves call it, is an acknowledgment that no single physicalist explanation can account for the full range of NDE evidence.65
This is worth considering. Perhaps people who report NDEs are simply people with better-than-average memories, and their accurate reports reflect this general memory advantage rather than genuine out-of-body perception.
But there is no evidence for this. NDE experiencers come from every demographic, every level of education, and every walk of life. There is no identified personality trait, cognitive ability, or psychological profile that predicts who will have an NDE.58 Moreover, this hypothesis cannot explain how patients would remember events they never perceived through normal sensory channels in the first place. An excellent memory helps you recall things you experienced. It does not help you recall things that happened in a room you were not in, while you were clinically dead.
Even more telling is the fact that van Lommel’s Lancet study found that the vast majority of cardiac arrest survivors (82 percent) reported no memory at all of the period of unconsciousness.66 This is exactly what we would expect from brains that have been deprived of blood flow. The brain cannot form memories when it is not receiving oxygen. The 18 percent who did report NDEs are the anomaly—and their reports are not vague or confused but vivid and detailed. If memory ability were the explanation, we would expect a gradient: some patients would remember a little, others a lot. Instead, we see a sharp divide between those who remember nothing and those who remember a rich, coherent, transformative experience. This binary pattern is much more consistent with something qualitatively different happening to the NDE group—not just better memory but a genuinely different kind of experience.
This concern about selection bias is addressed more fully in Chapter 19. But it is worth noting here that the strongest evidence for NDE memory reliability comes from prospective studies—studies where researchers interview every cardiac arrest survivor in a hospital unit, not just the ones who come forward with dramatic stories. Van Lommel’s Lancet study, Parnia’s AWARE studies, and Sartori’s Welsh hospital study all used this prospective method. They did not pre-select patients. They interviewed everyone who met the inclusion criteria. And within this prospective data, the NDE reports that emerged were consistently vivid, detailed, and stable over time.67
Holden’s analysis of veridical cases also addresses this concern. She deliberately cast the widest possible net, including every published case of apparently veridical perception from 1975 onward, and she used the most stringent criteria for classifying cases as inaccurate. The 8 percent error rate and 37 percent fully verified accuracy rate are not the result of cherry-picking. They are the result of a comprehensive, systematic review.68
The memory objection, for all its surface plausibility, does not hold up when tested against the evidence. Yes, memory is fallible. Yes, some NDE reports are questionable. Yes, it is theoretically possible to construct false memories. Nobody disputes any of this.
But the strongest NDE reports—the ones collected in prospective studies, documented within hours of the experience, verified by medical records and third-party witnesses, and tested against control groups—are remarkably accurate and remarkably stable. NDE memories do not behave like confabulated memories. They do not degrade over time. They do not match the profile of imagined experiences. They score higher on measures of phenomenological richness than memories of verified real events. And they include veridical details that no amount of prior knowledge, educated guessing, or semiconscious perception can explain.
Marsh is right that we should be careful about accepting NDE reports uncritically. But being careful does not mean being dismissive. When the evidence is evaluated rigorously—with the same standards we would apply to any other form of eyewitness testimony—the reliability of the best NDE reports is firmly established. The memory objection, like the other skeptical arguments we have examined in this book, raises important questions. But it does not have the answers the skeptics think it does.
And this matters for the larger argument we are building. If NDE reports are unreliable, then the veridical evidence collapses. There is nothing to explain. The physicalist can go home. But if NDE reports are reliable—if the memories are genuine, the details are accurate, and the reports are stable over time—then we have a body of evidence that demands explanation. Patients are reporting accurate, verifiable perceptions of events that occurred while their brains were profoundly compromised or clinically nonfunctional. This is not a memory problem. This is a consciousness problem. And it is a problem that physicalism has not solved.
The memories are real. The details check out. And the skeptics have yet to offer an explanation that accounts for the full picture.59
In the next chapter, we will turn from the question of whether NDE memories can be trusted to the question of whether NDE researchers can be trusted. If the memory objection aims to undermine the data itself, the bias objection aims to undermine the people who collect and interpret it. As we will see, that objection, too, has far less force than its proponents believe.
↑ 1. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 30.
↑ 2. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 30.
↑ 3. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 31.
↑ 4. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 2. See also his claim in the Introduction (pp. xix–xx) that NDE narratives can be understood as “awakenings from states of unconsciousness” involving “dreamlets espousing scenes of great beauty.”
↑ 5. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 30. See also A. J. Ayer, “What I Saw When I Was Dead,” in Terry Miethe and Antony Flew, eds., Does God Exist? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 223–228.
↑ 6. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 30.
↑ 7. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 30.
↑ 8. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 31.
↑ 9. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 11. Their three-step strategy is introduced in the context of the Leininger case and then applied to the Burpo case and the dentures man.
↑ 10. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11. See especially their discussion on pp. 124–125 of their text.
↑ 11. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2. See their speculative reconstruction of the dentures case on pp. 19–20 of their text.
↑ 12. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11.
↑ 13. Keith Augustine, “Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences,” Internet Infidels, accessed online. Cited in J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language, endnote 18.
↑ 14. Bruce Greyson, “Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts over Two Decades: Are Reports Embellished over Time?” Resuscitation 73 (2007): 407–411.
↑ 15. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2. They candidly state, “We are not attempting to prove that the sorts of alternative scenarios described above actually took place.”
↑ 16. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. xv–xvi. Marsh announces his thesis that NDEs are “brain-state phenomena” in his Introduction before engaging the evidence in subsequent chapters.
↑ 17. Greyson, “Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts,” 407–411. His conclusion is unequivocal: “Contrary to expectations, accounts of near-death experiences were not embellished over a period of almost two decades. These data support the reliability of near-death experience accounts.”
↑ 18. M. L. Morse, “Near-Death Experiences of Children,” Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 11 (1994): 139. Morse concludes that “unlike ordinary memories or dreams, NDEs do not seem to be rearranged or altered over time.”
↑ 19. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Van Lommel discusses his two-year and eight-year follow-up findings in several chapters. See also Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 20. Augustine, “Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences.”
↑ 21. Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven, endnote 19. Miller notes that Sartori’s patients reported their NDEs immediately after regaining consciousness (Sartori, 260–264), and Sabom interviewed patients “as soon after the event as possible” (Sabom, Recollections of Death, 11).
↑ 22. Marie Thonnard et al., “Characteristics of Near-Death Experience Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 3 (2013): e57620.
↑ 23. Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 11.
↑ 24. Penny Sartori, The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 260–264.
↑ 25. Maurice Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978), 17–22.
↑ 26. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. The dentures case is also discussed extensively in Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010), chap. 14.
↑ 27. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2.
↑ 28. Sabom, Recollections of Death. See also Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13, for a detailed discussion of Sabom’s experimental design.
↑ 29. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13.
↑ 30. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13.
↑ 31. Sabom, Recollections of Death. Sabom notes that the six patients who provided specific details included unique, patient-specific elements that differed from other resuscitations.
↑ 32. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (Durham, NC: IANDS Publications, 2016), Intermezzo following Case 2.6. The authors discuss both Sabom’s and Sartori’s control-group experiments.
↑ 33. Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009). See also Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14.
↑ 34. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14.
↑ 35. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 1–3.
↑ 36. Sabom, Recollections of Death. This case is also reproduced in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 37. Sabom, Recollections of Death. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit note that Sabom “determined that the man barely had any medical knowledge; among other things, he objected to the customary term ‘paddles’ for the ‘metal disks’ of the defibrillator.” The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 38. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. See also Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 2–3, which document cases of veridical perception in other rooms and at a distance.
↑ 39. Kim Clark Sharp, “Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiencers,” in Bruce Greyson and Charles Flynn, eds., The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1984). The Maria’s shoe case has been debated extensively in the literature. See Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14, for a defense of the case.
↑ 40. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13. Carter summarizes Sabom’s four arguments against semiconscious perception as an explanation for veridical NDE reports.
↑ 41. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13.
↑ 42. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13. Carter reproduces three excerpts from Sabom’s patients describing the peaceful, painless quality of watching their own cardioversion from an out-of-body vantage point.
↑ 43. Sabom, Recollections of Death.
↑ 44. Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (London: Headline, 1995). The Fenwicks’ conclusion is cited in Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13: “Except by special pleading, it is not possible with our current understanding of cerebral functioning to explain, on a simple chemical theory, how, within dense unconsciousness and with absence of memory, the brain can structure and remember a clear comprehensive experience.”
↑ 45. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. xvi. Marsh states that NDEs are generated by “metabolically disturbed brains especially during the period when they are regaining functional competence.”
↑ 46. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13. Carter notes that “recovery from any sort of insult to the brain is via a state of confusion. Even recovery from simple fainting is recovery via a confusional process. An acute cerebral insult results in even greater confusion.”
↑ 47. Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven. Miller observes that NDErs report “not vague, confused consciousness, but vivid, ‘realer than real’ consciousness.”
↑ 48. Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven. Miller notes that “all studies show NDErs overwhelmingly reluctant to share their experiences for fear of ridicule.”
↑ 49. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13, citing Sabom, Recollections of Death.
↑ 50. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. Van Lommel discusses the reluctance of NDE patients to share their experiences in his chapter on the psychosocial consequences of NDEs.
↑ 51. Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Creating False Memories,” Scientific American 277, no. 3 (1997): 70–75.
↑ 52. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2. They write that the NDE reports “did reflect what really happened” and that “the medical personnel working to keep these people alive confirmed that they really happened.”
↑ 53. The cumulative case approach is discussed more fully in Chapter 31 of this book.
↑ 54. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 29. Marsh reports that Larry Dossey “shamefacedly admitted to a cleverly crafted hoax” regarding a case involving a congenitally blind woman who supposedly gained vision during an NDE.
↑ 55. For a comprehensive overview of NDE research methodology and its increasing rigor, see Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation.
↑ 56. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2.
↑ 57. The cumulative weight of NDE evidence is addressed in full in Chapter 31.
↑ 58. Janice Miner Holden, Jeffrey Long, and B. Jason MacLurg, in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, conclude that “research has not yet revealed a characteristic that either guarantees or prohibits the occurrence, incidence, nature, or aftereffects of an NDE. Perhaps the conclusion of research so far—that everyone is a potential NDEr—is the most mysterious, provocative, and important message for readers to take away.”
↑ 59. In Chapter 19, we will address the related charge that NDE researchers are biased—the claim that the people collecting these reports are predisposed to find what they are looking for. As we will see, that objection fares no better than the memory objection addressed here.
↑ 60. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 72–73. Marsh performs word-count analyses and notes that the longest NDE narratives come from patients like Drycthelm and Howard Storm who were in prolonged, relatively light states of unconsciousness.
↑ 61. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 80–81. Marsh finds the anthropomorphic content of NDE reports—deceased relatives in familiar clothing, mundane heavenly conversations—to be evidence against their veridicality.
↑ 62. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 261–262. Marsh argues that “if they, or their brains, were dead the question arises as to how they were able to bring back memories of their supposed encounters, assuming these to be true and not completely fabulous, when such memory function depends on the cerebral organization of appropriate neural circuitry.”
↑ 63. Greyson, Kelly, and Kelly, in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 231. Cited in Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven, endnote 34.
↑ 64. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 261–262.
↑ 65. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11. Their “piecemeal strategy” is discussed and critiqued in Chapter 31 of this book.
↑ 66. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 149. Van Lommel notes that “most of them did not even realize that they had had a cardiac arrest.”
↑ 67. For a comprehensive overview of prospective NDE studies and their methodology, see Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.
↑ 68. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.
↑ 69. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 82. Marsh notes an instance where a subject reported a deceased relative wearing specific clothing that did not match reality, which he takes as evidence of the unreliability of NDE perception. See his footnote 30: “He was NOT wearing a grey suit. In fact, he wore something completely different. This is another typical instance of the inaccuracies which accompany ECE reportings.”