Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Near-death experiences, or NDEs, have become a prominent way to study consciousness in the past 50 years.

• A new literature review surveys nearly 40 years of NDE research and finds that children’s experiences are often excluded from findings.

• The authors argue that more children NDEs should be studied using arts- and play-based approaches, especially as evidence suggests that a child’s description of the event is free from cultural, religious, or experiential bias.

Death is a part of life, but when scientists try to analyze the widespread phenomenon of close calls with non-being, one major age group is often left out of the discussion—children. Whether through illness, injury, or some other mishap or malady, children regularly survive near-death experiences, or NDEs, just like anyone else. But a new study published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practicenotes that very few researchers actually speak with this critical age group, despite the special insights it offers for experts exploring human consciousness.

Led by Donna Thomas (a research fellow from University of Lancashire) and Graeme O’Connor (a pediatric dietician from Great Ormand Street Children’s Hospital in London), this literature review analyzed studies from 1983 to 2020 that specifically explored NDEs and found that only eight of them directly included children.

“Most claims made about NDEs are based on extensive research with adults, with children left on the margins of the field, despite the value of children’s involvement,” the authors wrote. “We agree that studies in children’s NDEs are extremely limited compared with adults, and children need to be lifted out of the footnotes of the field to understand just how similar/different their NDEs are to adults.”

While NDEs have been around since the dawn of… well… consciousness, it’s only within the last 50 years or so that scientists have begun to use them as a means to probe the inner workings of the mind. Over the decades, studies have compiled what Thomas and O’Connor call “core features of NDEs,” which include feelings of deep peace, out-of-body sensations, life reviews, and sensations similar to traveling through a tunnel. Early studies on NDEs in the late 1970s and early 1980s garnered attention, as the experience of a brush with death appeared to conflict with our then-current understanding of how the brain works.

“NDEs surpass the explanatory power of current models of consciousness, challenging dominant physicalist/materialist explanations for consciousness as emergent from the brain,” the authors write. “Some scientists widen the scope of explanation for NDEs, suggesting mind may be nonlocal to the brain, warranting wider ontological explanations of the nature of consciousness to explain NDEs.”

In their review, the authors noticed that children reported some similar “core features,” including tunnels, bright lights, and out-of-body sensations. In the authors’ own pilot study from 2024, they interviewed seven children who survived cardiac arrest in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) using arts- and play-based approaches, rather than the more direct questions used in most adult-based NDE interviews.

Strikingly, however, the children’s self-reported NDE experiences did not include every hallmark found in adult descriptions of NDEs. For example, there are no life reviews or messages from loved ones present in children’s descriptions. Culture and religion also played little to no role in their responses, leading the authors to assert that a child’s NDE may be more “raw”—or, at the very least, less biased by culture and experience—than adult NDEs, and should be considered extremely valuable data for future research.

Unlocking the secrets of NDEs could help us understand consciousness, but scientists need more data to draw those kinds of conclusions. Thankfully, as resuscitation techniques become ever more advanced, it’s likely that more and more people will experience these events instead of simply dying before they can share what happened to them. And as more people’s lives are saved and that data pool grows, these researchers have one simple plea: Think of the children.

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