A new study is asking a question that sits between consciousness research and the limits of language: what shapes and colors do people remember seeing during near-death experiences? Instead of relying only on spoken testimony, researchers invited participants to reconstruct the visual spaces they recalled. The result is an attempt to turn extraordinarily personal memories into descriptive patterns that can be compared without claiming to have discovered what happens after death.
The research, published in Frontiers in Psychology on October 15, 2026, was conducted by France Lerner, Paulo Cezar Rocha dos Santos and Guillaume Tahar. Fifty participants completed the main study after an eligibility process based on established near-death experience questionnaires. They gave detailed retrospective descriptions and worked through guided graphic reconstructions in which they could select, modify or draw spatial shapes.
That distinction matters. An account of a tunnel, an expanding space or a luminous boundary can be evocative, but the words may not capture what a person remembers perceiving. A drawing can instead express the perceived geometry: was the visual field conical, curved, enclosed or apparently boundless? Where did the person place themselves within it? Did their apparent point of view move?
Across the fifty participants, the researchers analyzed 112 reconstructed experiential parts, 108 of which fell into the prespecified visual-field groupings used for statistical comparisons. Four principal shape families emerged in their descriptive framework: conical configurations, elliptic arcs, less strongly curved arcs and ellipsoidal spaces.
The study also examined color. Conical visual-field reports were more often described in achromatic terms, including black, white or gray, while elliptic-arc configurations more commonly included color. Other groupings showed a mixture. These are reported perceptual qualities within a selected sample; the findings are not a map of a literal external environment.
Because near-death experiences are frequently told as narratives with a beginning, middle and end, the researchers also separated out-of-body episodes from what they defined operationally as the core near-death sequence. Some participants reported different spatial impressions at different stages, demonstrating why a single illustration or one familiar tunnel description may erase important variation.
The methodological approach is interesting because it attempts to make first-person experience more systematic without reducing it to a simple yes-or-no question. Consciousness science often measures reactions, behaviour and brain activity from the outside. Here, the data were descriptions and reconstructions supplied by the people who remembered the experiences themselves.
There are substantial limitations. Participants were recruited online through a near-death experience research network, so the sample cannot represent everyone who has undergone a life-threatening event or a similar experience. The circumstances of their experiences were based on retrospective reports rather than independently verified medical records. Memory, prior cultural exposure and the study’s own standardized drawing framework may all affect the results.
The researchers tried to reduce some types of suggestion by avoiding familiar imagery words such as tunnel and heavenly landscape in the reconstruction instructions, and participants could amend the example shapes or draw freely. That design is useful, but it does not eliminate every possible influence on recollection or choice.
Most importantly, the study cannot determine whether the reported spaces correspond to anything outside the participants’ minds. A recurring mental image can be a significant fact about human perception while leaving its ultimate explanation unresolved. Neither shared shapes nor vivid memories establish that consciousness survives biological death, and neither alone can show that the events were wholly explained by a particular brain process.
The deeper philosophical question is how to describe experiences that feel more real or spatially expansive than familiar waking perception. Visual space is normally assumed to be something encountered beyond the self. In altered states, the organization of that space may itself become a striking part of awareness. Studying those subjective structures could help researchers refine concepts of self-location and bodily identity.
For readers drawn to spiritual accounts of near-death experiences, the new work offers a disciplined way of asking more precise questions. It takes testimony seriously enough to analyze it, yet does not confuse testimony with independent proof. Its greatest contribution may be a vocabulary for comparison, not a final answer about the nature or destiny of consciousness.
References
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1760389/full — Lerner, dos Santos and Tahar, Frontiers in Psychology, October 15, 2026 (open-access primary study).