After the Light: The Science and Psychology of Near-Death Experiences

Tuesday, October 14, 2025.

When people talk about near-death experiences, they talk about the light.
The tunnel. The peace. The sense that everything finally fits.

What they rarely talk about is what happens afterward — when the light fades and you come home with eternity still in your eyes.

A new study from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, led by Bruce Greyson and Janice Miner Holden (2025), asks that question.

What happens after you’ve been to the edge of everything?
The researchers call it reentry. The participants call it lonely.

The Return Flight

The UVA team surveyed 167 adults who had clinically verified near-death experiences.
Roughly 20% said the experience fractured their closest relationships. 22% percent divorced within two years.

One woman said her husband told her she’d come back “too calm for marriage.” Within a year, he’d moved out.

This isn’t unusual. In a large cross-cultural study, Charlotte Martial and colleagues (2017) found the same recurring features — light, detachment, time distortion — and the same aftermath: a feeling that life had shrunk.

Greyson’s team calls it existential displacement.
Which means: it’s not heaven that breaks you. It’s the return flight.

When the World Feels Too Small

About 70% of participants reported radical shifts in values: less interest in money or status, more concern for meaning and connection. One-third changed careers.

Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun (2004) might call this post-traumatic growth — except the trauma was a limitless bliss, instead.

They didn’t almost die in terror; they almost died in bliss.

And that sort of experience, apparently, is hard to live with afterward. You can’t unsee infinite kindness and still be fully present at the DMV.

The Brain’s Last Light

Neuroscience keeps searching for the switch.
In 2023, Jimo Borjigin and colleagues recorded surges of synchronized gamma oscillations seconds after cardiac arrest (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) — positing that a brief electrical symphony that might feel like revelation.

At EPFL, Olaf Blanke found that stimulating the temporoparietal junction can produce out-of-body illusions (Nature, 2002).
When that region misfires, you watch yourself from above and call it transcendence.

Biology may not explain away the sacred. It may simply be its on-demand delivery system.
The light could be an electrical crescendo — or the first glimpse of something larger.
Science is inclined to be agnostic. Experience isn’t.

Memory After Flatline

Sam Parnia complicated everything with the AWARE study (2014, Resuscitation).
One man accurately described hearing a defibrillator command during three minutes of recorded brain silence.

If nothing else, it proved that consciousness is harder to kill than we thought.
Parnia calls it residual cognition — the mind’s pilot light refusing to go out.

The Predictive Brain Meets the Infinite

The brain, according to Karl Friston’s predictive-processing model (Nature Neuroscience, 2018), survives by guessing what comes next.
Dying is prediction failure.
Input stops. Models collapse. The result: a flood of meaning that feels absolute.

Psychologists Jennifer Pals and Dan McAdams (2004) call the next step narrative reconstruction — rebuilding a story big enough to hold what broke it.
Near-death survivors do this instinctively. They come back and rewrite their lives around a moment the world says didn’t happen.

Phenomenologists would call it a crisis of embodiment when your body ceases to feel like home.

Validation: The Real Medicine

Across every dataset, one truth holds: validation heals; disbelief harms.
Those believed by the first person they told about seeing the light recovered faster (Holden & Greyson, 2023).
Roughly 20% described harmful encounters with doctors who dismissed their accounts as oxygen-starved hallucinations.

But when clinicians were trained to listen, outcomes changed.
In 2019, Greyson & Khanna found that even a short course on NDE-sensitive interviewing slashed patient distress by 50%.

The American Psychiatric Association already lists “Religious or Spiritual Problems” as a non-pathological category (DSM-5, 2013). Few use it.
Validation, apparently, has no billing code.

Life After the Light

Michel Thonnard and colleagues (2013, PLoS One) confirmed that NDEs appear in every culture — believer and skeptic alike.
Here’s what we see cross-culturally. Near Death Experiences dissolve fear but tend to create a sort of spiritual homesickness.

Greyson calls this existential learning, an education in impermanence.
The details differ — tunnels, music, presence — but what persists is the memory of peace.

One woman from the UVA study said it elegantly, “I died, but the part of me that saw the light is still awake.”

The Quiet Frontier

Neuroscience can chart the brain’s final storm with pinpoint accuracy.
Psychology can name the grief of returning.
But, apparently, neither can teach us how to live afterward.

Most of us will have a bit of a wait to see the light.
But before then, we might have occasion, as I did, sit beside a loved one who saw — I’m trying, in my own fashion, like my son, to prepare to return.

The hardest science can’t tell us why we still turn toward the this dying light.
Only that somewhere in us, some sacred part of us remembers.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA.

Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature, 419(6904), 269–270.

Borjigin, J., Lee, U., Liu, T., et al. (2023). Surge of neurophysiological coherence in the dying human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(16), e2216268120.

Friston, K. (2018). Does predictive coding have a future? Nature Neuroscience, 21(8), 1019–1021.

Greyson, B. (2021). After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. St. Martin’s Essentials.

Greyson, B., & Holden, J. M. (2025). Psychological aftermath of near-death experiences: Relationship and integration outcomes in experiencers. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. University of Virginia.

Greyson, B., & Khanna, S. (2019). Training clinicians to respond to near-death experiences. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 6(4), 287–296.

Holden, J. M., & Greyson, B. (2023). Near-death experiences: Problems of reentry and integration. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 63(2), 143–165.

Martial, C., Cassol, H., Charland-Verville, V., Pallavicini, C., & Laureys, S. (2017). Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: A large-scale study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11, 539.

Pals, J. L., & McAdams, D. P. (2004). The transformed self: A narrative understanding of post-traumatic growth. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 65–69.

Parnia, S., et al. (2014). AWAreness During REsuscitation (AWARE): A prospective study. Resuscitation, 85(12), 1799–1805.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Post-traumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.

Thonnard, M., Charland-Verville, V., Talik, P., et al. (2013). Characteristics of near-death experiences memories as compared to real and imagined events. PLoS One, 8(3), e57620.