In a recent article at ScienceAlert, Michelle Starr looks at research in which 50 near-death experiencers were asked to draw experiences that they simply could not describe in words.

When the researchers presented shapes to the experiencers, the experiencers found recollection easier and they could also recall colors: “And despite the intensely personal nature of the experiences, certain shapes kept cropping up”:

There were, the researchers found, four main categories – conical spaces, which included the familiar tunnel; broad, curved spaces, like archways; flatter, more gently curving spaces; and spaces that seemed to surround the observer completely, like the inside of a sphere or oval.

“Near-Death Experiences Seem to Follow Strange Rules of Shape And Color, Study Reveals,” November 2, 2026

And colors?

Of the 28 conical spaces reconstructed by participants, 22 were achromatic – perceived in black, white, gray, or light without discernible color.

By contrast, 27 of the 31 broad, curved spaces were perceived in color.

The other two geometric categories showed a mixture of colorful and colorless experiences, but the contrast between the tunnels and the broad, curved spaces was particularly striking. “Strange Rules”

From the open-access paper:

Recent large-scale work associated with the Dreamachine project demonstrates the use of participant drawings as a method for documenting subjective visual phenomenology under controlled stroboscopic stimulation. A corpus of 10,598 drawings produced following the Dreamachine immersive experience was analyzed, providing visual representations of experiences elicited by stroboscopic white-light stimulation (Grove et al., 2026). Building on this methodological precedent, the present Discussion considers how participants’ graphic reconstructions and written reports together contribute to a multidimensional description of the spatio-phenomenological organization of OBEs and NDEs.

Lerner F, dos Santos PCR and Tahar G (2026) The perceptual geometry and chromaticity of near-death experience spaces. Front. Psychol. 17:1760389. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1760389

Genuine curiosity about near-death experiences

As Starr points out, there are many limitations to this type of research: The 50 participants were self-selected and there was no control group who did not have NDEs. The participants were relying on memory, in some cases, old memories. The sessions were guided, not free form, and study participants were presented with existing shapes, not asked to draw shapes themselves.

On the other hand, researchers must start somewhere, preferably by building a body of research over time that reduces these limitations by trying various methods and accumulating more data.

But perhaps the real significance of this story is not the research itself but the relatively low-threat response to it. Nothing in Starr’s article, intended for a broad science-minded audience, assumes that there is a simple physiological explainaway for near-death experiences. The researchers did not offer one; they are presently concerned with documenting patterns.

At the Daily Mail, science reporter Wiliam Hunter reports,

One participant told the researchers: ‘It was like a matrix, with many, many grid points, all connecting to each other in multiple dimensions. I felt that if I entered the matrix, I would be able to travel anywhere in the entire universe.’

Another explained that they saw ‘the past, present, and future of Earth’.

“Have you had a near-death experience?,” November 3, 2026

It’s characteristic of near-death experiencers to be aware of a vast reality that they had never noticed before.

In our upcoming book, tentatively titled Life Beyond Death, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I offer five challenges that NDEs present. Anyone who wants to explain them away will need to tackle those challenges. We have noticed that one outcome of the growing body of NDE research is the growth of interest in what is really happening during NDEs and a (related) reduced interest in finding a tidy “Oh, it’s just another example of a…” box to put them in.

Good time to be doing the research!