#264 Near Death Experiences: What Do We Know? with Marieta Pehlivanova from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies

How have you gone about, you know, how did the gosh, so many interesting questions.

I mean, how did this field get developed? Because I know of at least one story, uh, of a person who.

you know, had an experience like this as a teenager and was institutionalized.

This was in the 50s, you know, and I think for a long time it was understood as an aberration.

And then at some point it shifted and people began to see there was a common thread and common qualities to these experiences and that they were something beyond just a break with reality.

You know, what's some of the history of getting into the research of this?

Yes, fascinating question.

So in terms of history, first, I will say that this is not a modern phenomenon.

Their research on NDs is a modern phenomenon, but NDs themselves have been reported since antiquity and can be found in some classical texts, or at least what looks like an ND.

In terms of the modern research, a big milestone was the publishing of the book Life After Life, I have it here for your video, but you can cut that out of the podcast.

So this book was published by Dr. Raymond Moody in 1975.

And this is believed to be the first book that introduced the term near death experience for the English public.

So the English term and this book, it outlines, um, About a hundred cases that Dr. Raymond Moody had encountered.

It talks about these typical features and it also talks about these life transformations.

So that that's not an academic book and it was published for the general audience.

And so after that, um, I think this book was a turning point and really the academic research on NDEs started.

in the late seventies, after the publication of this book, uh, most notably Dr. Bruce Grayson here, um, that is part of the division of perceptual studies.

He, uh, published a couple of papers in the late seventies, starting to look at this phenomenon and he became fairly active in the field starting in the eighties.

Extremely productive.

He's pretty much had a 50 year career.

studying this phenomenon and it was one of the big biggest if not the biggest pioneer into of the academic research on nds but there have been others as well uh most notably dr kenneth ring also michael sabom uh jan holden later and yes it is true that especially earlier now there's a lot more awareness of nds There's still some stigma around it, but I think most people have heard of the term and many or most have at least a vague idea of what it is.

And I think this is in big part because of the amazing work done by these early pioneers in the field who have, to some extent, normalized the topic.

and just knowledge of NDEs.

And I do want to say something else.

I'm glad you brought up the experience of that person from the 50s because I deeply care about changing the culture around the reporting of NDEs and how those are treated in healthcare settings.