Top Near-Death Researcher Sums Up His Findings, Thoughts

What does science reveal about what happens after we die?

About fifty years ago Bruce Greyson had just begun his psychiatric training, and he was assigned a college student, whom he calls Holly, who had overdosed on an antidepressant called Elavil. As Holly lay unconscious, Greyson talked with her roommate, whom he calls Susan, in a family lounge to get information on the unfortunate girl’s case.

Greyson was himself experiencing some discomfort; earlier, while eating spaghetti, he’d spilled tomato sauce on his tie and, not surprisingly, couldn’t get rid of it.

The next day, Holly came to. She told Dr. Greyson, “I know who you are. I remember you from last night…. I saw you talking with Susan, sitting on the couch.”

Greyson was astonished. “There was no way she could have seen or heard us talking at the far end of the corridor.” But he was even more dumbfounded when Holly said, “You were wearing a striped tie that had a red stain on it.” And hardly less so when she went on to recount the whole conversation between him and her roommate, Susan.

Close to a half century later, Bruce Greyson is professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine—and one of the world’s leading researchers of near-death experiences. It all began with the incident involving Holly and the tomato-sauce stain on his tie.

“Nothing in my background or scientific training to that point had prepared me to deal with such a frontal assault on my worldview,” he comments. He had been “raised by a chemist whose perception of reality was defined by the periodic table of the elements.”

Around that time, though, Greyson came under another influence. Beginning his long career at the University of Virginia, he encountered a young colleague named Raymond Moody—whose book Life After Life, the first to use the term “near-death experience” and the acronym “NDE,” had become a surprise bestseller.

What had happened with Holly? Well, she was having an out-of-body experience—a frequent feature of near-death experiences. Clearly, there was something here that transcended the physical. Greyson, for his part, was launched on decades of intensive inquiry into the phenomenon.

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Now he offers us After, a fascinating summation of his research and findings on NDEs and what they tell us both about our lives and about what happens—according to the ever-growing evidence—after them.

Although reports on NDEs go back as far as ancient Greece, they became a widespread occurrence in the 1960s when advances in resuscitation technology enabled doctors to literally bring people back from the dead—that is, even from states of confirmed physical death without heart or brain function. A substantial minority of these revived individuals had startling stories to tell.

Based on hundreds of such cases, Greyson developed his eponymous Greyson Scale, which is now used the world over and sets forth the major, common features of NDEs. Many of these are by now familiar from media reports and popular accounts of NDEs, and include feelings of peace, pleasantness, joy, and “harmony or unity with the universe”; “see[ing] or feel[ing] surrounded by a brilliant light”; specially vivid sensations; a sense of separation from the body; and encounters with deceased individuals or a “mystical being or presence.”

Experiencers, or “NDErs” as they’re known in the field, also often report life reviews—panoramic tours of their whole life with emphasis on interactions with others and the normativity or non-normativity of their behavior. At the same time, often hovering near during the life review is that “mystical being or presence” who is a source of infinite, unconditional love.

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These reported phenomena, Greyson underlines, are universal—“the same for men and women and for people of all ages, across many cultures.” Although there’s some variance between cultures and between adherents of different religions, the same basic touchstones of the experience emerge wherever NDEs are investigated.

And so do the long-term effects of NDEs. By now, numerous studies have found that in the great majority of cases NDEs: eliminate all fear of death, with NDErs convinced they’ve visited a joyous afterlife to which they’ll eventually return; enhance spirituality—though not necessarily formal religiosity—and a sense of connectedness to others, often inspiring altruistic behavior; and decrease materialism and competitiveness while enriching life with feelings of wonder and beauty.

Skeptics counter that this is all very nice, but these experiences are illusions, tricks of a dying brain. One problem with that stance is that the most interesting NDEs—the ones that researchers like Greyson himself, Sam Parnia, Pim van Lommel, and others have mainly dealt with—occur in cases of cardiac arrest while the brain is dead, not dying. By now, accurate, verified reports from NDErs on events they somehow perceived in operating rooms, or even outside them, while they were in states of bodily death are so numerous that—in my view as an amateur NDE buff—they can no longer be reasonably discounted.

For their part, NDErs—as studies find—remain entirely certain even decades later, essentially for their whole lives, that their NDEs were real. And now that subjective certainty has scientific backing, too. As Greyson notes, “An Italian research team found that experiencers remembering their NDEs did not have brain wave patterns typical of recalling fantasies or dreams, but had brain wave patterns typical of real events.” (That study, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, is here: “Our…study showed that NDE memories are different from imagined autobiographical memories and very similar to memories of real events, in terms of detail richness, self-referential and emotional information.”)

Not that the picture regarding NDEs is entirely rosy. A small percentage of them are unpleasant or even hellish. “There is no obvious reason,” Greyson writes, “to explain why some people have blissful NDEs and others have frightening ones”; in other words, the unpleasant ones don’t appear to be punishments. While “reluctance to face frightening NDEs may lead to long-lasting emotional trauma…distressing NDEs are often interpreted as a message for the experiencers to turn their lives around.” In one case of a woman who had a nasty NDE, “her new belief that death is not the end gave her hope and motivation…, and she eventually became a counselor to people dealing with depression and substance abuse.” It’s also worth noting that not a few unpleasant NDEs turn, after some time, into pleasant ones.

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In addition, even positive NDEs can make NDErs—as far as the people around them are concerned—harder to live with. “Family and friends often have difficulty understanding and adapting to experiencers’ changes in values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior after NDEs…. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that marriages in which one partner has had an NDE are less well-adjusted and stable than they were before the NDE, with 65 percent ending in divorce.” That is indeed a high figure, and it probably reflects both changes in the NDEr that may be perceived as eccentric and unsettling, and refusal by NDErs’ spouses to be accepting of the experience.

Aside from those caveats, Greyson affirms that NDEs are having a benign “rippling effect” in the world. Six studies in the United States and New Zealand of college students who learned about NDEs report positive results such as gains in compassion, sense of self-worth, spirituality, and sense of purpose, and diminished fear of death. It’s happening in the therapeutic sphere, too: “A growing number of clinical reports in the medical literature show…the power of learning about NDEs to provide comfort, hope, and inspiration to persons who have not themselves had these experiences.”

Considering some of the NDE accounts that Greyson quotes, these effects are not surprising.

“Lynn had an NDE when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver while riding her bike at age twenty-one.” Part of what she experienced while receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation:

“…It wasn’t scary moving through the black. I was just watching. Then there was this light at the end. It wasn’t just a light, like a transparent color: it was intense love. When you are in it, it doesn’t just surround you like water does when you jump into a pool. It was like sun going through a piece of glass…. It was like warmth, comforting, a peaceful silence, and love surrounding everything and within.”

Thirty-five-year-old Róisín Fitzpatrick suffered a life-threatening brain hemorrhage. While in the ICU:

“…Surrounded by a hushed silence, I became enveloped by undulating waves of opalescent and crystalline light. Simultaneously, there was a feeling of love and bliss that extended on to infinity…. My understanding of ‘reality’ was turned 180 degrees when I learned that at our deepest level of consciousness we are energy beings of pure love and light who are temporarily residing in physical bodies.”

Rudy, “who had an NDE at age twenty-six when he rolled his car and sustained a massive brain injury and multiple fractures, also described merging with a divine presence”:

“…As I came closer to the Light, it became brighter, pure white. The Light of Love was the totality of all the richness of all the good qualities…. The Light became my wholeness, with a brightness of quality and a richness that I will only be able to understand in empty forms of definitions and physical metaphors until the day I experience it once more; beauty that takes the breath away just thinking about the experience. I went into the Light; I became one with the Light.”

Undoubtedly, we should all strive to be careful and mind our health as much as possible. But just as certain is that the stories the NDErs bring back with them are uplifting.