Near-Death Tunnels Come in Black and White, Wide Arches in Color, Study Finds

People who report near-death experiences describe very different scenes, but a new study suggests those scenes follow a pattern. When 50 people drew the spaces they remembered, the shape of each space was linked to the colors they recalled, according to ScienceAlert.

The classic tunnel toward a bright light is the best-known image, yet not everyone sees it. Some people describe vast, luminous spaces, curved horizons or a feeling of being surrounded by light. The research, published in Frontiers in Psychology, points to order beneath that variety and may offer clues about what the brain does at the edge of death.

How researchers mapped the memories

Standard surveys can capture some parts of a near-death experience, ScienceAlert reported, but they struggle to convey its full complexity. Neurophenomenology researcher France Lerner of the University of Haifa in Israel and colleagues tried a visual approach instead, reasoning that drawings might reveal patterns that words cannot.

They recruited 50 people who said they had gone through a near-death experience. In guided online sessions, the participants used a catalog of geometric pictograms to rebuild their memories. They split the experience into stages and drew the shape of each space. They also marked where they felt they were inside it, how they moved through it and which colors they remembered.

The numbers behind the pattern

• 50 participants: all of them reported a near-death experience and took part in the guided drawing sessions.
• Four shape categories: conical spaces, which include the familiar tunnel; broad, curved spaces such as archways; flatter, gently curving spaces; and spaces that surround the observer, like the inside of a sphere or oval.
• 28 conical spaces: 22 of them were achromatic, meaning black, white, gray or light without a discernible color.
• 31 broad, curved spaces: 27 of them were perceived in color.
• Two remaining categories: these showed a mix of colorful and colorless experiences, so the sharpest contrast was between tunnels and broad, curved spaces.

Possible parallels in ordinary vision

Lerner and her colleagues noted that perception research has already documented similar links. Tunnel vision, for example, can occur when the oxygen supply to the retina or brain is disrupted, narrowing the field of view. The dominance of black, white and gray in tunnel-like spaces also resembles ordinary vision in dim light, when the cells that work in low light take over and color sensitivity drops.

Some of the wider, enveloping spaces resemble the Ganzfeld effect, in which an unchanging, blank visual field can produce unusual perceptions, including hallucinations.

The researchers stressed that these similarities do not show what caused the experiences. The study was built to describe and compare recalled spaces, not to identify the mechanisms behind them.

Why it matters for understanding near-death experiences

Researchers have long listed recurring features such as tunnels, lights and out-of-body sensations, ScienceAlert reported, but they have paid far less attention to the spatial structure of these experiences or to how people feel themselves moving through them. The link between shape and color suggests these experiences may be less unpredictable than they appear, and it gives scientists a concrete feature to test in later work.

The finding also supports the idea that asking people to draw, rather than only to answer questions, can bring out details that standard surveys miss.

What the study cannot show

The authors listed several limits. The participants were a relatively small, self-selected group, and some were recalling events from many years earlier. The pictograms were based on earlier research, but offering a set of shapes may have influenced how people rebuilt their memories. The researchers also guided the sessions, which could have introduced subtle biases.

There was no comparison group reconstructing other kinds of unusual experiences either. Without one, it is impossible to know whether these geometric patterns are unique to near-death experiences.

Around Prague, based on reporting by ScienceAlert