Psychedelic substances can give the living insight into a state near death

One person felt a sense of “slowly floating” as images flashed around. Another recalled “the deepest sense of love and peace” unlike anything she had experienced before. Consciousness became a “foreign entity” to another, whose “all sense of reality disappeared.”

Here are some of the personal accounts of people who participated in a study among an unusual group: all had had a near-death experience and had taken psychedelic drugs.

Study participants described their near-death and psychedelic experiences as distinct, but they also reported significant overlap. article published On Thursday, researchers used those relationships to compare the two phenomena.

“For the first time, we have a quantitative study with personal testimonies from people who have had both experiences,” said Charlotte Martial, a neurobiologist at the University of Liège in Belgium and an author of the findings, which were published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. “We can now say with certainty that psychedelic substances can be a kind of window through which people can enter a luxurious, subjective state resembling a near-death experience.”

Near-death experiences are surprisingly common—an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the general population has reported having one. For decades, scientists largely dismissed the fantastic stories of people who returned from the brink of death. But some researchers are starting to take these tales seriously.

“Recently, the science of consciousness has become interested in non-ordinary states,” said Christopher Timmermann, a research associate at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and an author of the paper. “To get a comprehensive account of what it means to be human, you have to include these experiences.”

Studying near-death experiences is complex in the laboratory because they typically involve a heart attack or other life-threatening conditions.

One way to get around this problem is to find substitute circumstances that produce a similar state but do not compromise the safety of the participants. Several studies have compared near-death experiences to deep meditation, fainting AND mind altering drugsbut they did this by analyzing reports of these experiences.

For the modern study, Dr. Martial, Dr. Timmermann and Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychopharmacologist at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 31 people who reported having had near-death experiences or been under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

Participants were primarily men from the United States and the United Kingdom whose near-death experiences resulted primarily from traumatic events such as car accidents.

Some have tried mind-altering drugs only a few times; others have tried more than 100 times. Most have used LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.

Most people said they started taking psychedelic drugs sometime after their near-death experience. “It’s possible that the near-death experience motivated people to take drugs, but we didn’t ask about that, so we don’t know,” Dr. Martial said.

The researchers asked the participants to fill out questionnaires to assess things like ego dissolution, psychological insight, and memory potential. They also answered open-ended questions.

The results revealed significant overlap in experiences. Many participants reported feeling as if they had left the earthly world, an altered perception of time, and a sense of peace and inexpressibility.

Both experiences also tended to change participants’ views on life. Near-death experiences were more likely to make people feel less fearful of death, while psychedelic drugs strengthened connections with other people, nature, and the cosmos.

“It’s significant and intriguing that the researchers’ findings replicate many of the findings from previous comparative studies, including lasting effects on the personal, psychological, and spiritual meaning of these experiences,” said Anthony Bossis, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Fresh York University who was not involved in the study.

There were also noticeable differences. Participants reported more intense visual hallucinations after taking psychedelics and a greater sense of out-of-body experiences in near-death experiences.

Dinesh Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said the results suggest that psychedelics “can be a powerful tool for studying near-death experiences, especially because they don’t involve someone teetering on the brink of death.” He was not involved in the study.

Sandeep Nayak, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, added that the study wasn’t clear on the contrast. It could be that the states “are all deeply similar in fundamental ways,” he said. But it could be that “our measurements are too crude to tell them apart.”

Dr. Timmermann acknowledged that the modern study was only a “starting point.” Future research could explore possible brain mechanisms that underlie all mystical experiences, he said, as well as how these phenomena might differ across people and cultures.

“Some of the traits seem transcultural,” Dr. Timmermann said. “But others may be influenced by our cultural narratives.”

The researchers plan to conduct additional studies to see whether some psychedelic drugs might have an even stronger link to near-death experiences, including 5-Meo-DMT, a powerful psychedelic ingredient from the venom of the desert toad.

“There are a lot of speculations that different altered states of consciousness might be the same thing — that we’re just seeing different parts of the elephant,” Dr. Timmermann said.