Why Neuroscience Can’t Explain Near-Death Experiences

The Washington Post’s recent article on near-death experiences (NDEs) explores emerging neuroscientific efforts to explain these phenomena through brain physiology and evolutionary psychology.

The piece is thoughtful, well researched, and emblematic of a familiar reflex: when human experiences stretch beyond the comfortable boundaries of material explanation, we respond by shrinking the question rather than widening it.

The article introduces a new neuroscientific framework meant to account for NDEs through oxygen deprivation, neurotransmitter surges, and activity in specific brain regions. Versions of these explanations have circulated for decades. What remains striking is not their sophistication, but how little they explain of the phenomenon as a whole.

After years immersed in this space—interviewing near-death experiencers, publishing their stories, and walking closely with people whose lives were permanently altered by what they encountered—I’ve become convinced that reductionistic models consistently fail to account for the full complexity, coherence, and consequences of these experiences.

One of the most challenging features for purely neurological explanations involves cases researchers sometimes call “veridical perception.” In plain terms, this refers to instances in which people later describe real-world events accurately while they were unconscious or clinically dead—events that were subsequently confirmed by medical staff or witnesses. These are not symbolic impressions or vague sensations, but specific details: conversations, actions, even clothing observed while the brain should not have been capable of awareness. Any explanation that reduces consciousness entirely to brain activity must grapple with how a severely compromised brain acquires accurate external information.

Equally difficult to explain is the transformational aftermath of many near-death experiences. Hallucinations typically fade. These experiences do not. People return with a markedly reduced fear of death, heightened moral clarity, and a reorientation of their lives toward meaning, humility, and—often—God. Whatever biological processes accompany trauma, they do not adequately explain why the effects of these encounters persist for years or decades.

A personal example makes this tangible. In the final months of her life, my late wife Lynette experienced both an out-of-body episode and what is commonly described as a “welcoming committee”—encounters with deceased loved ones that brought peace rather than confusion. Whether one categorizes these events as near-death experiences or spiritual transformative experiences, their fruit was unmistakable: calm, hope, and confidence as she prepared to die. Neurology may describe what was happening in her brain, but it does not explain why these encounters consistently produce clarity rather than chaos, or courage rather than distress.

Not all near-death experiences, however, are benign—and this is where material explanations struggle even more. One man I’ve worked closely with, Bryan Melvin, initially encountered what appeared to be a warm, familiar welcoming group, closely resembling many positive NDE accounts. The experience began to unravel not through fear or prayer, but through reasoning: one of the figures presenting itself as his mother could not possibly be there, because she was still alive. That realization fractured the experience. The welcoming façade collapsed and revealed something far darker. Only after that discernment did Bryan call on the name of Jesus in response to what he now clearly perceived as deception. Whatever one believes about the spiritual meaning of his experience, it is difficult to reduce an episode involving sustained logic, self-correction, and narrative coherence to a momentary brain malfunction.

What concerns me most about articles like this is not the search for biological correlates. Of course the brain is involved—just as it is involved in prayer, love, moral reasoning, and worship. The deeper issue is philosophical: the assumption that if a biological mechanism can be proposed, the spiritual significance must therefore be dismissed. That is not a scientific conclusion; it is a metaphysical preference.

Ironically, many of these models raise a far more unsettling question than the article is willing to ask: what if the brain is not the source of consciousness, but the receiver of it? What if near-death experiences occur not because the mind is failing, but because the soul is briefly unbound?

I am not arguing that every near-death experience should be accepted uncritically. Discernment is central to my work. Not all NDEs are true, and not all true experiences tell the truth about God. But explaining away the entire phenomenon because it challenges our assumptions does not make the data disappear—it only dulls our ability to interpret it wisely.

If even a fraction of these accounts are genuine, near-death experiences are not neurological curiosities. They are signposts—warnings and invitations—pointing beyond the material world to a reality we will all one day face.

And no scientific model, however sophisticated, can substitute for that reckoning.