What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Consciousness
Investigate the commonalities in near-death experiences across cultures and their implications for understanding consciousness.
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Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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A review of the research sections of this article on near-death experiences found that most of the underlying studies were accurately described, but several specific details were incorrect, including one direct quotation attributed to a real historical patient that could not be verified anywhere in the researcher's published work.
What the page claimedThe article stated that a landmark 2001 study found no relationship between near-death experience frequency and either age or gender, when the study actually found that younger patients reported these experiences significantly more often and that women reported significantly deeper experiences. It described a researcher's affiliation at the time of a landmark 2002 study and a landmark study period between 2008 and 2014 using each researcher's later, more recent institutional affiliation rather than their affiliation at the time. It gave an imprecise frequency range for a documented brain-activity pattern. It attributed a specific direct quotation to an unnamed patient of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield describing a 'previous life,' a quotation that could not be verified in Penfield's real published case reports, which instead describe patients reliving specific personal memories rather than describing past lives. It described a 2012 brain-stimulation study as confirming an earlier finding about a specific brain structure, when the study's real conclusion pointed to a different, though related, structure. It described a researcher as a nurse when she is actually a professor of counseling, and cited a specific statistic from her work that appears to invert the real, differently framed finding from her published analysis. It also presented one study's outcome rate as applying to its full sample when the rate actually applied only to the smaller subset of survivors who could be interviewed.
What was correctedThe article now accurately reflects that age and sex showed real associations with near-death experience frequency and depth in the landmark 2001 study, correctly identifies each researcher's affiliation at the time of the relevant research, gives an accurate description of the brain-activity frequency ranges involved, removes the unverifiable quotation attributed to Penfield's patient in favor of an accurate general description of his real documented findings, corrects the description of the 2012 brain-stimulation study's actual conclusions, corrects the researcher's title and describes her real, differently framed finding, and clarifies which subset of the study sample the cited outcome rate applies to.
Why: Web searches for each cited study, researcher affiliation, and figure found a mix of small factual errors and one clear case where an emotionally evocative direct quotation attributed to a real historical patient could not be sourced anywhere. Since attributing unverified wording to a real, once-living, non-consenting individual carries particular weight beyond an ordinary citation error, that quotation was removed and replaced with an accurate description of the real documented phenomenon, alongside corrections to the other specific details found.
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