Near death experiences are real, some experts say. What survivors saw

Near death experiences are real, some experts say. What survivors saw.

Key points

• Their answers are analyzed and rated on a scale developed by Greyson in 1983 that has become the standard scientific tool to evaluate reports of near-death experiences.
• After her surgery at Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv, she awoke in her hospital bed.
• Death occurs, Nelson remarked, when the 100 billion neurons that constitute our brain trust – they burst.
• "Dead is irreversible, " remarked Nelson, a professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Kentucky.
• Outside the emergency room entrance, Katie Winschief floated above her body as paramedics put her in a wheelchair and rushed her toward the hospital doors.

Everyone on the ground grew smaller as she drifted higher, until all she could see was their legs beneath the hospital awning. Within seconds, she could create out the top of the hospital and the mall next door. Off in the distance, she could see a glowing light that looked like a full moon. "Where am I going?" she wondered.

In a flash, she was sucked upward, through the light and into an ethereal room without borders. She sat quietly, her knees pulled up to her chest. Throughout from her was a Jesus-like figure, with the most vibrant greenish-blue eyes she'd ever seen, sparkling like jewels. She'd never felt such overwhelming joy. She never wanted to leave.

Then, disturbing scenes from her life began to appear. Her mother, crying after they'd had an argument. Anguish on her children's faces. Then, the future: Her family broken by her absence, one of her children forced to live apart from the others since no one could care for all five of them. She knew she had to go back.

Instantly, she was jolted back into her body, lying on a gurney inside the trauma room at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola, Florida, where the emergency room crew worked frantically to keep her alive. "God help her, " she heard a nurse exclaim.

She drifted outside of her body again. She could see a small Indian man – a Catholic priest – at the head of her bed, rubbing oil on her and performing last rites. She could see her husband, Joe, in a different hospital room furnished with an artificial plant and ugly burgundy carpeting. He was bent over in a chair, crying.

Afterwards, Winschief would come to understand what had happened. Her lungs had collapsed, and she had fallen into a coma. Her breathing halted. Her heart quit beating. She had seen, she was convinced, what happens when we die. Does consciousness continue after death? Everybody dies. And then?

For most of us, what happens next is a mystery. But millions of individuals like Winschief have returned from the precipice of death with remarkable tales of briefly entering an altered state of consciousness, one in which they existed outside their bodies and watched life around them unfold.

Researchers estimate that as plenty of as one in 20 residents have had a near-death experience. A study earlier this year suggested the number could be even higher. Almost a quarter of American adults – more than 60 million residents – documented having a near-death experience in a survey by the International Association For Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina.

Individuals can be reticent to talk concerning near-death experiences, but even some celebrities have discussed these brushes with death. While filming "Cleopatra." Jamie Foxx "saw the tunnel" during a medical emergency in 2023, elizabeth Taylor famously discussed having an out-of-body experience during a coma. And Jeremy Renner "could see everything all at once" while unconscious after being crushed by a snow plow in 2023, he wrote in his memoir. Actors who survived shocking near-death experiences.

Notably, a number of Hollywood stars have bravely opened up concerning their chilling brushes with death. Unbranded – Entertainment Vertical.

Near-death experiences are frequently triggered by a life-threatening event, such as cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury or a car accident. Every near-death experience is different. But plenty of who've had them noted seeing an unearthly light or sensing they were floating through a tunnel. Some remarked they encountered dead relatives and friends or spiritual figures, like Jesus or Buddha. Often, they sensed their entire life flashing before them.

After the body has died, the phenomenon happens so often that some researchers say there is a growing body of evidence that consciousness continues at some level, for at least some period.

Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist and pioneering researcher in the field, has studied more than a thousand cases of near-death experiences. Those cases "tell me enough to make me think that our consciousness does not end when our bodies die, " remarked Greyson, former director of the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies.

More than 5, 000 accounts of near-death experiences shared by individuals all over the world are published in a long-running registry maintained by the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1998 by husband-and-wife researchers Dr. Jeffrey Long and Jody Long to document and study such cases.

To be included in the registry, individuals volunteer a detailed summary of their experience and fill out a 64-question survey. The questionnaire asks, among other things, whether their experience was associated with a life-threatening event, whether they were separated from their body, whether time seemed to speed up or slow down and whether they seemed to enter some other unearthly dimension.

Their answers are analyzed and rated on a scale developed by Greyson in 1983 that has become the standard scientific tool to evaluate reports of near-death experiences. Scores of seven or higher out of a feasible 32 points are considered credible.

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While so much remains unknown, they strongly suggest the possibility of a post-death existence, those who've had near-death experiences and some of the researchers who've studied them say that.

"We are now at a point in history where near-death experiences provide powerful enough evidence for the reality of a life after death, " remarked Long, a Kentucky radiation oncologist and author who has spent years studying near-death experiences.

Greyson remarked almost five decades of studying near-death experiences has convinced him there is probably something after death. "What it is, " he remarked, "I have no idea." How Hospice care workers backing sick patients close to death.

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Nurit Niskala remembers every detail as clearly as the day it happened.

It was April 4, 1984. She was a young, healthy, expectant mother in Tel Aviv, Israel. But things went terribly wrong while giving birth to her daughter. She felt herself separate from her body and float away.

"I saw a light, a light like I never saw again, not even at sunset, " she recalled.

Niskala, who now lives in Southport, North Carolina, and other individuals who shared their near-death experiences with USA TODAY, provided copies of their medical records to backing their accounts. While the documents don't mention their near-death journey, they do confirm details of the medical crises they remarked triggered the experience.

Niskala's labor pains began around midnight. She knew from a previous pregnancy how tough childbirth could be, so she chose to have her delivery overseen by a gynecological surgeon.

When the doctor arrived, he injected her a number of times with Pitocin, a synthetic drug employed to induce contractions. But the drug caused Niskala's uterus to rupture in five places. The baby was delivered safely, but Niskala lost a dangerous amount of blood and was slipping into a coma when doctors wheeled her into surgery.

She felt as light as a butterfly as she separated from her body, "floating freely in an open space beyond time and place, " she remarked. "I was like air – something you can't see or smell, only feel."

She saw a cloudlike formation, a dark grey ball of energy that, like a magnet, pulled her toward it. Once inside, she saw other figures. It she assumed were souls of the deceased, moving together in a circle. She felt happier and more at peace than ever before.

But she remarked she felt she needed to return to her newborn and the 5-year-old daughter she'd left behind.

After her surgery at Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv, she awoke in her hospital bed. She remained there for another two or three weeks. But she felt like she'd been born again.

More confident than before, she created a number of life changes. She concluded an abusive relationship, left a good-paying bank job and kicked off her own clothing firm.

"God wants me here, " she believes. "Even the doctor told me, 'It's a miracle.'". Science searches for an explanation.

Near-death experiences seem so real that individuals who've had them often feel as if they've returned from the dead.

But being near death is not the same as actually being dead, remarked Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neuroscientist who has studied what happens to the body as it dies.

Death occurs, Nelson remarked, "when the 100 billion neurons that constitute our brain trust – they burst. They burst like a balloon, like a water balloon bursting. If enough of those burst, then you are dead."

During near-death experiences, he remarked, "residents are lying there, and they look dead to most individuals. But they're particularly much alive. They're hearing. Most often, they're seeing as well."

For now, near death experiences are real, some experts say. What survivors saw remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.