Seven Seconds of Light: a Neuroscientist Has a Near Death Experience
Wednesday, October 22, 2025.
Let’s start with the facts before the light gets too blinding.
Dr. Álex Gómez-Marín is not your usual mystic. He’s a Spanish neuroscientist and theoretical physicist — a man whose day job involves equations, not incense.
A few years ago, he suffered a severe internal hemorrhage that briefly stopped his heart. In those seven seconds, he says, he found himself in a well of golden light.
Three figures appeared. They didn’t speak, exactly — more like radiated intent. They offered him a choice: stay or go back.
He thought of his daughters, said “not yet,” and returned.
What makes this story remarkable isn’t the headline version (“Scientist meets glowing entities!”), but the tension it exposes between subjective experience and scientific caution.
Gómez-Marín describes his own near-death experience (NDE) as “more real than reality itself.” For a man of science, that’s a strong claim — and one worth examining without either reverence or ridicule.
When the Brain Fizzles, Does the Mind Gets Poetic?
Researchers have been cataloging NDEs for decades.
According to the American Psychological Association’s review on near-death experiences and dream phenomena (APA Spotlight), survivors often describe dream-like continuity — tunnels, light, peace, reunion — but neuropsychologists point out that these patterns overlap with altered brain states: REM intrusion, anoxia, and temporal-lobe activity.
In short: when oxygen dips and neural networks desynchronize, perception can collapse inward, producing vivid, coherent imagery. The “tunnel” may literally be the last flickering of visual cortex activity.
That doesn’t make the experience fake — it just reframes it. As the philosopher Thomas Metzinger once put it, NDEs just might be “the best possible simulation of transcendence our brains can manage.”
The Light as Threshold
The light has always been the headline act.
Across reports and cultures, from cardiac arrest patients in Ohio to monks in the Himalayas, the image of a bright, encompassing light repeats with eerie consistency.
A 2025 study from the University of Virginia, summarized in Neuroscience News, found that while people interpret NDEs differently — some mystical, some secular — the “light” symbol recurs most often in accounts tied to positive psychological aftermaths: reduced death anxiety, increased empathy, and sometimes career pivots toward caregiving or spirituality. The pursuit of a greater sense of meaning is an obvious outcome of returning from a near-death experience.
So, when Gómez-Marín calls his seven seconds or so “transformative,” he’s in good company.
The aftermath of many NDEs looks less like delusion and more like meaning-making — consciousness doing its best to navigate the unchartable.
FAQ
What did Álex Gómez-Marín actually experience?
He reports a brief near-death episode following internal bleeding, describing a “well” of golden light and three figures offering him a choice to live or die. He chose to return — a decision he says reshaped his understanding of consciousness.
Did his heart really stop for seven seconds?
That detail appears in tabloid summaries, but it’s not independently confirmed in his actual published work. His verified account is that he reached the brink of death during a hemorrhage, not necessarily sustained clinical death.
How do psychologists explain experiences like this?
Research from the American Psychological Association and others suggests near-death experiences often occur when the brain is deprived of oxygen. The sensations — tunnels, lights, out-of-body perception — mirror changes in the visual cortex and temporal lobes, but their meaning is constructed afterward.
Is the “light” universal?
Across hundreds of studies, people from different cultures describe a radiant or enveloping light during NDEs. Whether viewed as divine, neurological, or symbolic, “the light” consistently represents peace, understanding, and release.
What lasting effects do NDEs have?
According to studies published in Neuroscience News and Psychological Reports, survivors often experience less fear of death, increased empathy, and deeper existential curiosity. Many, like Gómez-Marín, report long-term psychological integration and some abrupt lifestyle changes rather than a spiritual epiphany.
The Scientist in the Well
What sets Gómez-Marín apart isn’t the story but the storyteller.
He directs research at the Pari Center in Italy, where he studies consciousness and animal behavior.
His published paper, “What Happens with the Mind When the Brain Dies?”(Organisms Journal, 2023), is not a confession of the afterlife but a meditation on how science can best approach death’s phenomenology.
He writes that the experience didn’t make him religious — just less certain that consciousness is a by-product of the material world.
I would call that progress: moving from “I know” to “I wonder.”
The Light We Keep Seeing
If the notion of “the light” impacts you more on a intimate level — not as curiosity but as a poignant memory — see my related essay.
The bright-light moment functions psychologically — as a repair story, a metaphor for integration, and, sometimes, a re-entry point for a few souls whose brush with mortality suddenly rewired their attachment to life itself.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
American Psychological Association. (2024). Spotlight on near-death experiences and dreams.https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/spotlight/near-death-experiences-dreams
Gómez-Marín, Á. (2023). What happens with the mind when the brain dies? Organisms: Journal of Biological Sciences,7(2), 43–54. https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa04/organisms/article/download/17861/16937/39226
Neuroscience News. (2025). Near-death experiences profoundly alter outlook on life, study finds.https://neurosciencenews.com/near-death-experience-life-psychology-29805/