When people experience near death experiences (NDE) they often give rich, vivid and detailed reports of their experience. Some of the well-known stories include having an out-of-body experience, seeing a bright light, feeling peace and perceiving a tunnel.
A new research examines how frequently these experiences occur and in what order is it experienced by Near-Death Experiencers (NDErs).
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To do this, the researchers collected 154 French freely expressed written accounts of NDErs recruited via the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS France) and the Coma Science Group (GIGA-Consciousness, University of Liège and University Hospital of Liège, Belgium).
They took note of which specific aspects of NDE were present in the narrative and then they examined the order in which they appeared in each different story.
The researchers found that on an average a person experiences 4 different phenomena during a NDE. The most frequently reported experience is the feeling of peace which was reported by 80 per cent of the participants, followed by seeing a bright light (69 per cent), and then the experience of encountering spirits or people (64 per cent).
The two most uncommon experiences were speeding thoughts reported by 5 per cent of the participants and precognitive visions felt by 4 per cent of the participants.
Chronologically the researchers found that 35 per cent of the participants experienced out-of-body experience as the first phenomena and the most frequent last feature was the returning-to-body experience reported by 36 per cent of the participants.
The researchers found that overall the order of commonly shared experiences seem to follow this pattern: out-of-body experience, experiencing a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and finally feeling of peace.
This sequence was reported by 6 participants accounting for 22 per cent of all participants.
However, the researchers could not establish a universal sequence of events in this study group, suggesting that everyone’s NDE is unique.
The findings of this study suggest that NDE seem to be regularly triggered by the sense of leaving the physical body and ends with returning to one’s body.
But all NDE may not feature all the elements and the elements do not appear in the same order in all experiences, suggesting that all near-death experiences are different and unique to the individual.
Source: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
