March 2026
ILLUSTRATION: Screen shots from washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post’s Mark Johnson did an excellent job reviewing opposing sides of the NDE research field for a story on Feb. 5 story. The tone was set by the headline and subhead:
“These patients saw what comes after death. Should we believe them?
Researchers have developed a model to explain the science of near-death experiences. Others have challenged it.”
Johnson didn’t answer the question in the headline. He left it to the reader.
The piece is significant because it’s a sign that NDEs have become a mainstream topic of coverage, and because the topic was treated without the usual materialist approach.
The article centered around NDE research published last year by a team led by post-doctoral researcher Charlotte Martial at the University of Liège in Belgium, but it gave as much attention to a rebuttal of that research by psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson and assistant professor Marieta Pehlivanova at the University of Virginia.
(The FJN has previously reported about both the study and the rebuttal.)
The paper by Martial et al is a meta study creating a pioneering model called NEPTUNE (Neurophysiological Evolutionary Psychological Theory Understanding Near-Death Experience). The authors link NDEs to certain chemical and electrical processes in the dying brain. For instance, they suggest that sensations resembling out-of-body experiences may be generated by electrical stimulation of the temporoparietal junction, an area just behind the ears.
Greyson and Pehlivanova criticize the NEPTUNE study for omitting evidence that does not support their theory. They also disapprove of the paper’s references to brain induced illusions that are nothing like the profound experiences of NDE accounts, like meeting, seeing, feeling and hearing deceased loved ones or other beings, and remembering everything vividly afterwards. The NEPTUNE model also cannot satisfactorily explain NDEers’ accurate accounts of what has taken place in the emergency room or other parts of the hospital during the time of their clinical death, per Greyson and Pehlivanova.
The Washington Post article mentioned a symposium in Portugal in April called Behind and Beyond the Brain, where both Martial and Pehlivanova are among the speakers, as well as UVA’s Jim Tucker.
“At stake are questions almost as old as humanity, concerning the possibility of an afterlife and the nature of scientific evidence,” wrote Johnson. The effort to impose rigor on the study of NDEs, “forces researchers into an uncomfortable zone that straddles the line between the scientific and the spiritual.”
This article is a fine example of how journalists in the mainstream can cover an existential topic that has been stigmatized for a long time due to a wrongly perceived lack of scientific rigor.
Written by Anders Bolling
Edited by Liza Horan
