Fifty individuals who experienced near-death episodes mapped their recalled spaces in a University of Haifa study published in October 2026. Researchers discovered a systematic link between the geometry of those visual environments and the chromaticity recalled by participants, contrasting colorless tunnels with colorful, expansive arches.
For decades, accounts of near-death episodes remained locked in subjective storytelling. People described rushing through darkness toward a bright opening, meeting departed loved ones, or reviewing their lives. Standard clinical surveys struggled to capture the full spatial complexity of these accounts. To bypass those limits, neurophenomenology researcher France Lerner of the University of Haifa in Israel and colleagues designed a graphic reconstruction task. The study was published in October 2026 in Frontiers in Psychology.
How Fifty Participants Mapped Their Memories in Online Sessions
The research team recruited 50 people who reported having had near-death experiences. Participants completed guided online sessions where they broke their experiences into separate chronological stages.
Using a catalog of geometric pictograms, participants reconstructed the shapes of the spaces they remembered encountering. They marked their perceived positioning within those environments, traced their self-motion, and noted the colors present.
Four Categories of Spatial Geometry Revealed by Participant Drawings
The resulting database revealed four primary categories of spatial configurations. The drawings showed distinct geometric patterns that kept recurring across different participants despite the intensely personal nature of the accounts.
- Conical spaces, which included the familiar tunnel toward a bright opening.
- Broad, curved spaces resembling archways or vast horizons.
- Flatter environments featuring gentle curves.
- Massive, enveloping realms that surrounded the observer completely, like the inside of a sphere or an oval.
The Statistical Contrast Between Tunnels and Broad Arches
The most striking pattern to emerge from the maps involved the relationship between geometry and chromaticity. Participants rebuilt 28 conical spaces, out of which 22 lacked color entirely, appearing only in white, black, gray, or neutral lighting. Conversely, 27 of the 31 broad, curved spaces were experienced in full color.
| Spatial Category | Total Reconstructed | Achromatic Count | Colorful Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conical spaces | 28 | 22 | Not specified as primary |
| Broad, curved spaces | 31 | Not specified as primary | 27 |
The remaining two geometric categories showed a mixture of colorful and colorless experiences, leaving the sharpest contrast between tight tunnels and broad, curved spaces.
Parallels to Ordinary Waking Vision and Perceptual Effects
Lerner and her colleagues drew parallels between these geometric patterns and ordinary waking vision. A reduction in blood or oxygen flow directed toward the brain or retina naturally triggers tunnel vision, thereby narrowing the visual field. In a similar way, the prevalence of neutral tones within narrow conical volumes reflects how human vision operates in dimly lit environments, where dim-light receptors take over from color-processing cells.
Meanwhile, expansive and enveloping spaces share traits with the Ganzfeld effect, where a blank, unchanging visual field induces unusual perceptions and hallucinations. The researchers emphasized that their study was designed to describe and compare the recalled spaces rather than identify the underlying neurological mechanisms responsible for them. The authors also noted several important limitations, including a small, self-selected participant pool relying on memories spanning many years, guided sessions that could introduce subtle biases, and the lack of a comparison group reconstructing other unusual experiences.
The sense of space, feelings of motion, emotions, and sensations in NDEs.
IANDS research participation page, via Frontiersin
In addition to these methodological parameters, the broader historical framework shows how empirical investigation into these episodes has evolved. Early systematic collections date back to Heim in 1892, with the terminology itself introduced by Egger in 1896 within The Self of the Dying. Quantitative psychometric studies later examined NDE phenomenology using Item Response Theory and Rasch modeling applied to the Greyson scale. Scholarly attention also reaches toward targeted curricula, including the course Witnessing the Afterlife: Anthropological and Islamic Approaches to Near-Death Experiences that is presented by the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.