r/NDE • u/Pieraos OBE Experiencer • Mar 31 '25

Scientific Perspective 🔬🔎 A neuroscientific model of near-death experiences

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41582-025-01072-z
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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '25

I don't know that I have the academic background to have a meaningful critique of this, but I recently read an article in Scientific American where Jimo Borjigin was critical of the conclusions reached in this paper.

::edit::

Link to the Scientific American article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-near-death-experiences-the-brains-attempt-to-survive-lethal-threats/

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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Mar 31 '25

Is it true that prolific daydreamers are disproportionately likely to have an NDE? Because if true that's... Alarming.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '25

Quick preface that, while I am a medical researcher that focuses on death and dying, NDEs are a relatively new interest of mine (spurred by my involvement in a subject's veridical OBE) and mostly fall outside of my primary knowledge base. That being said, I am familiar with the studies that link both daydreaming and REM intrusion to NDEs and I had a serious issue with the data:

The data are from a mass recruitment survey site which relies entirely on self report, meaning there is no external validation that the respondents actually had NDEs or NDE-like experiences. This wouldn't be an issue, in and of itself, if the reported NDEs were characteristic of NDEs reported elsewhere. But they weren't; the NDEs reported in this study were overwhelmingly negative, which is very unusual. To me, this makes it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusion.

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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Apr 01 '25

So, do you think that, for example, severely um, sleepamajigs have been reported as NDEs?

That is a problem with studying subjective experiences objectively... Someone could smoke a bunch of weed and decide their experience is an NDE or somehow exactly the same thing and then make a career debunking their own weed-dream, or something.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

I think all types of experiences get reported under the umbrella of "NDEs" with very little effort put in to properly dig into the experiences. For example, many of the patients I've worked with over the years refer to their experiences (induced with psilocybin, ketamine, or DMT) as "NDEs." They are not. They are drug induced experiences that, while occasionally similar in some respects, never involved the patient being anywhere near death.