Several of my Facebook friends have linked to this interesting news item on an NDE study. Although the tone of the article is resolutely skeptical, the results of the study seem to provide some support for the idea that NDEs are ontologically real events.
Working together, researchers at the Coma Science Group (directed by Steven Laureys) and the University of Liège's Cognitive Psychology Research (Professor Serge Brédart and Hedwige Dehon), have looked into the memories of NDE with the hypothesis that if the memories of NDE were pure products of the imagination, their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., sensorial, self referential, emotional, etc. details) should be closer to those of imagined memories. Conversely, if the NDE are experienced in a way similar to that of reality, their characteristics would be closer to the memories of real events.
The researchers compared the responses provided by three groups of patients, each of which had survived (in a different manner) a coma, and a group of healthy volunteers. They studied the memories of NDE and the memories of real events and imagined events with the help of a questionnaire which evaluated the phenomenological characteristics of the memories. The results were surprising. From the perspective being studied, not only were the NDEs not similar to the memories of imagined events, but the phenomenological characteristics inherent to the memories of real events (e.g. memories of sensorial details) are even more numerous in the memories of NDE than in the memories of real events.
The article goes on to say that these findings are consistent with the idea that the NDE is an especially vivid hallucination: "… dysfunctions of the temporo-parietal lobe [could] 'create' a perception – which would thus be processed by the individual as coming from the exterior – of reality. In a kind of way their brain is lying to them …"
This is possible, but of course another possibility is that the experience is remembered as being more real than reality because it was, in fact, more real than reality – i.e., it was a partial emergence into a higher-dimensional reality in which consciousness is somewhat less restricted than it is on the physical plane.
Either interpretation is defensible, but the second approach is more consistent with the veridical observations made by some NDErs, and with the extremely limited functionality of the brain during some of these events.