Near-Death Experience

A near-death experience is a profound personal experience associated with death or the approach of death, one that researchers who study it describe as sharing a set of recurring characteristics across the people who report it. When the experience is positive, as most but not all reported cases are, it can include sensations such as a feeling of separation from the body, a sense of floating or levitation, deep serenity, security, warmth and joy, a sense of complete dissolution, a review of major events from the person's life, an encounter with a presence of light, and the sense of seeing relatives who have already died. People's accounts of the experience, and how they go on to interpret it, tend to reflect the cultural, philosophical or religious framework they already hold. Near-death experiences usually occur during a period of reversible clinical death, and explanations offered for them range from the scientific to the religious, with one line of neuroscience research treating the experience as a subjective phenomenon produced by disturbed multisensory integration in the body during a life-threatening event, while some transcendental and religious traditions describe elements of an afterlife that closely resemble it.