Authors: Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Steven Laureys and Olivia Gosseries – Scientific investigation of NDEs has accelerated in part because of the improvement of resuscitation techniques over the past decades, and because these memories have been more openly reported. This has allowed progress in the understanding of NDEs, but there has been little conceptual analysis of the state of consciousness associated with NDEs.
The scientific investigation of NDEs challenges our current concepts about consciousness, and its relationship to brain functioning.
We suggest that a detailed approach distinguishing wakefulness, connectedness, and internal awareness can be used to properly investigate the NDE phenomenon. We think that adopting this theoretical conceptualization will increase methodological and conceptual clarity and will permit connections between NDEs and related phenomena, and encourage a more fine-grained and precise understanding of NDEs.

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