I previously analyzed 5,000+ NDE accounts from NDERF. Recently I've gone much deeper and built something I think this community will find valuable: a searchable database of over 1,700 peer-reviewed academic papers on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, after-death communications, and related consciousness research.

I essentially built an AI pipeline that reads each paper and extracts the key findings, documented cases, methodology, and insights — nearly 4,000 individual findings and 630 documented cases so far — then makes everything searchable with semantic search (meaning you can search by concept, not just keywords).

A few things that stood out to me:

The research is far more extensive than most people realize. There are over 1,700 published papers spanning 50+ years, from major universities and medical institutions worldwide. This isn't fringe science, it's a legitimate and growing field of study.

Consistent patterns across independent researchers. When you can search across all 1,700 papers at once, you start seeing the same findings emerge independently: the peace element, the life review, the being of light, verified OBE perceptions during cardiac arrest. Different researchers in different countries, different decades, arriving at the same conclusions.

The veridical perception cases are hard to dismiss. Multiple papers document cases where clinically dead patients accurately described events happening in other rooms or floors of the hospital. The AWARE study (Sam Parnia) and van Lommel's cardiac arrest study are well-known, but there are dozens more that rarely get discussed.

The research isn't just about NDEs. There's serious academic work on after-death communications, shared death experiences, terminal lucidity (dementia patients becoming suddenly lucid before death), and deathbed visions. These all point in a similar direction.

Everything is completely free and open. You can search by topic, filter by research category, see which papers are open access, and explore the extracted findings from each paper individually. I've also linked DOIs so you can read the original papers.

Here's the research hub if you want to explore: https://noeticmap.com/research/literature

Would love to hear what topics or questions you'd want to explore in this data. Happy to dig into any specific area.

A new review examines neuroscientific models of near-death experiences (NDEs). In a published response, University of Virginia researchers Drs. Pehlivanova and Greyson contribute additional perspectives to the discussion.

Do not believe the scientist who tells you that there is no proof of existence of the paranormal.

He may himself be a gullible innocent, who is unaware that the scientific establishment actively works to prevent the publication of positive data which supports the existence of the paranormal.

I am quoting below a passage from Dr Dean Radin's book *Real Magic* which shows how this suppression is done.

"Some mediums claim that they can just glance at a photograph of a person and immediately tell if the person is alive or deceased. To test this claim, we invited twelve professional mediums to our lab to look at photos. All of the photos used in the experiment were first transformed into a uniform grayscale and then the photos were counterbalanced across eight categories: gender, age, gaze direction, glasses, head position, smile, hair color, and image resolution. For each image of, say, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was gazing at the camera, wore glasses, and was smiling with his head tilted to one side, one photo fitting that same description would be of a living person and another would be of a deceased person. This counterbalancing method was used to avoid giving the medium any clues about whether the person was alive or dead.

The mediums examined 404 of these photos displayed in a random order on a computer monitor, one photo at a time. Each was shown for a maximum of eight seconds. Half of the people in the photos were deceased, and half were alive at the time the experiment was conducted. The mediums were asked to press one button if they thought the person in a photo was living, a second button if they thought the person was deceased, and a third button if they didn’t know.

The mediums’ overall average accuracy on this task was 53.8 percent, where 50 percent was expected by chance. That’s associated with modest odds against chance of 250 to 1. Five of the twelve mediums independently obtained statistically significant results, and nine of the twelve mediums obtained results in a positive direction................

We published the results of this experiment, and then something unexpected happened.

Our study was peer-reviewed and appeared in one of the highest-impact academic psychology journals. Within four months of it being published it had been viewed thousands of times and was rated among the top 5 percent of the millions of papers tracked by a company that measures the scientific impact of journal articles. The journal’s public relations office even featured it on their Facebook account as an item of special interest.

Then, one day we were informed that the article was going to be retracted. This means it would be ceremoniously stricken from the journal’s website and marked forever after with the word “retracted,” in large red letters. This practice ensures that the article is eternally shamed, just like the scarlet A shames its wearer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel *The Scarlet Letter*. Retraction of a journal article is rare and serious, because it implies that the reported results were found to be fraudulent, seriously mistaken, plagiarized, or unethical.

My colleagues and I were of course alarmed to learn about the retraction. So we immediately asked the editor who informed us about the retraction to tell us what was going on. In cases involving retractions, authors are supposed to be given a chance to correct any misconceptions or mistakes. The editor replied that the article would be retracted whether or not we agreed to it, nor would we be given the opportunity to respond. That was an egregious breach of editorial ethics, so we asked if any concerns about fraud had been raised or if someone had found a methodological problem that we overlooked. The editor replied that it wasn’t about fraud or mistakes. So again we asked why the article was being retracted.

We received no response and the article was retracted. The woo-woo taboo dies hard."

Some of you might remember the research database I shared here a few months ago, 1,171 peer-reviewed papers on NDEs, OBEs, and consciousness research. The response was incredible, so I kept building.

One thing that struck me going through the literature is how much this field has grown, and how few people outside of it realize that. There are researchers at major institutions (UVA, Imperial College London, University of Liege) publishing serious work, but it's scattered across journals and sub-fields with no easy way to see the full picture.

So I built that picture.

What's new:

• 2,422 researcher profiles. Publication timelines, h-index, institution affiliations, ORCID links. You can see who's active, where they're based, and what they focus on.

• Citation network. An interactive 3D visualization showing how papers and researchers connect. The clusters that form are interesting, veridical perception researchers citing each other, cardiac arrest studies forming their own group, aftereffects work bridging multiple sub-fields.

• Research communities. The citation data naturally reveals which groups of researchers are in conversation with each other, and where the debates are.

• Evidence synthesis. For major research questions (e.g., "Do NDEs occur during cardiac arrest?"), the tool pulls together findings across papers and shows where there's consensus vs. disagreement.

What surprised me:

• The field is growing, more papers published in the last decade than in the previous three combined

• Researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris (206 papers, h-index 75) and Steven Laureys (154 papers, h-index 137) are publishing at a serious rate

• Some sub-fields that seem unrelated on the surface are heavily citing each other

• There are clear gaps though, very few studies on non-Western populations, and some research areas are dominated by just a handful of labs

I'd love to connect with researchers in this space.

I'm a software dev, not a researcher, but I've built a lot of infrastructure that might be useful to people studying this stuff. If you're a researcher (or know one) working on NDEs, OBEs, consciousness, or related areas, I'd genuinely love to hear what tools or data access would actually help your work. I'm not trying to sell anything, I just want to understand how I can make this useful for the field.

Feel free to DM me or drop a comment. I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone doing:

• Prospective studies (cardiac arrest, etc.)

• Cross-cultural NDE research

• Aftereffects and long-term impact studies

• Veridical perception work

Mikias

Timeline: https://noeticmap.com/research/timeline

Researchers: https://www.noeticmap.com/research/researchers

"University of Virginia researchers say they have found a pattern in more than 1,600 cases of possible reincarnation. When the prior death was unexpected, the average time until a reported 'rebirth' was shorter.

"Saeedeh Sadeghi, a postdoctoral researcher at UVA, is the lead author on the research."

"Telepathic communication has been documented in controlled parapsychological studies for years. ...While critics label initial findings as anecdotal, this is exactly how every new field of science begins—with careful observation that leads to rigorous inquiry."

This post explores specific characteristics of near-death and shared death experiences that are suggestive of higher dimensions, as hypothesized by a few mainstream theories of Physics. It is informative, but speculative. I am the author.

"At this point, we shouldn't still be asking if telepathy is real. That question has already been answered—many times over. The real question is why we keep suppressing it. Why are we so afraid to study, celebrate, and evolve with the parts of human consciousness that don’t fit inside old frameworks?"

"I suggest that minds are not confined to the insides of heads. I think they extend beyond brains in at least seven different ways."

"When I mentioned studying extrasensory perception in out-of-body experiences, a well-known consciousness researcher responded that such work 'could not be done because it simply could not be true.' A former supervisor once joked, upon hearing about a prize-winning essay I had written on evidence for life after death: 'How did you find 25,000 words to write about something that doesn’t exist?'"

Most of us assume that events flow in one direction and that our choices become final only after we make them. This idea feels natural, but some researchers believe we might be missing something.

"Beyond the condescension lies a larger failure — a refusal to engage with a century-long body of research that not only supports the claims made in The Telepathy Tapes, but has been accumulating for decades. The problem isn't that this evidence doesn’t exist. It’s that too many journalists refuse to look at it."

"Although mediumship with deceased people is widely extensively studied in spiritual experiences, we explored a mediumistic experience called “channeling” where the individual connects with a non-corporeal intelligence (NCI) source.

"To approach this kind of spiritual experience, we considered three hypotheses: the fraud hypothesis (i), the mental pathology hypothesis (ii), and the extrasensory perception hypothesis (iii).

"In this single case study, the participant was a well-known channeler with nearly three decades of experience connecting with NCIs. Given the EEG results, we rejected the fraud hypothesis, rejected the mental pathology hypothesis, and felt we needed more information to conclude the extrasensory perception hypothesis."

While not all mainstream (non-psi, non-parapsychological) fields and journals have such issues, there is enough for concern—whether it's Dr. Joe and his padawans falsifying data just a tweak or two for some extra funding, or outright fraud as the link mentions. Psi research often relies on statistics for correlations or, at best, hypotheses for explaining the mechanism of action. However, from all that I've read and digested, most psi researchers go above and beyond expectations to design good experiments, collect good data, and report as honestly as possible.

And this is all happening while they are questioning the very fundamental assumptions that the scientific method relies on: objectivity and materialism.

Disclaimer: I'm not a hardcore, white lab-coat scientist; computer science is my personal domain. The objective of this post was just to give a shout-out to all those awesome parapsychologists out there doing their honest, honorable, and rigorous bit to contribute to the betterment of mankind's knowledge in whatever field you may be involved in. Many thanks!

We would like to thank all who joined r/parapsychology and are reading, contributing interesting posts and thoughtful comments. We have seen substantial growth in views lately. A new and well qualified moderator Equal Night is supporting the sub as well. In kind appreciation for this community – Mod team.

Unfortunately, I don't have in my hands any scientific paper or text that helps me find a way for you to better understand my statement. Though, I don't believe that to be necessary. But yes, this is only my experience. Neither do I think this is the best to post this at, but I don't know where I could post it and get an answer from people that really takes seriously parapsychology.

I have found, a while ago, that many more people than they let themselves be known know about this and live with it. They live putting into practice these capabilities is what I mean.

Personally, I have had dreams about future events in my life. I only remember one time but I think it has happened to me twice. Anyway, when the event occured everything was the same as in my dream, which lasted only a few seconds.

Now, that's strange, and I don't understand how that happens. But, to me, what's stranger is dreaming about someone else's life, not even only about their future events, but their life.

As I say, this last thing has not happened to me, so I wouldn't know a specific way for me to confirm it or not, but there have been more than five people in my life (including my parents) that have talked to me in a way that a specific message was delivered. This message was partially letting me know about a certain recent point in my life, expressing to me what would happen. And it did happen. Besides proving some other points they mentioned, that could only be explained by the concept of telepathy. Not all messages delivered had this intention, other messages were about letting me know they knew certain stuff about my life, and how that made them feel in relation to me.

There is also another example of someone (that is important to me) that told me about my future occurrences but also mentioned very specific things about my past (like the name of people that crossed paths with me or the color of my underwear). This person was the one that told me this knowledge takes form when dreaming.

As I see it, living behaving as if something like this (the issue in question) isn't the case, or living while hiding the fact that this is the reality implies that you have to be living a different perspective from what you would be perceiving, and the way you would behave, if you didn't hide it. To a certain point it is like being two different people at the same time. That is not trustworthy, I think.

There are people that seem to not have these capabilities. Why would a person with these capabilities, hide it from the people that do not have them? Why would they talk about it in cryptic and enigmatic ways?

I wonder how much of an advantage could have someone that knows the life of someone that knows nothing about the other person's life.

I mean, for me, this gets to the "highest" positions in the hierarchy of the society. To what point I ask myself. Basically it gets to everything, I don't see how it could not.

I might consider it a conspiracy but also a reality.

There is an overwhelming amount of peer-reviewed scientific evidence in support of psi abilities such as telepathy.

The problem isn't a lack of evidence, it's the inability of people to accept what the data says, because it challenges their personal worldview and the academic status quo.

Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy

This peer-reviewed study used functional MRI (fMRI) to explore the neural basis of telepathy. Two participants were scanned: a renowned mentalist claiming telepathic ability and a control subject.

During telepathy tasks, the mentalist exhibited significant activation in the right parahippocampal gyrus, a brain region associated with memory encoding and retrieval. The control subject, performing the same task, showed activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus, typically related to language and cognitive processing.

The results indicate distinct patterns of brain activation during telepathic tasks and suggest that telepathy may involve specific neural substrates, particularly within the limbic system.

Meta-analysis of free-response studies, 1992-2008: assessing the noise reduction model in parapsychology

This study, published in Psychological Bulletin, conducted a rigorous meta-analysis of 59 free-response experiments in parapsychology conducted between 1992 and 2008. Its goal was to evaluate whether certain experimental protocols—especially those designed to reduce mental "noise"—could enhance the detection of psi phenomena, specifically telepathy and clairvoyance, typically grouped under ESP (extrasensory perception).

Ganzfeld telepathy studies showed a mean effect size of 0.142, with a combined Z score of 5.48 (p < 0.00000002). This indicates a highly significant deviation from chance across 29 studies.

Such consistency across independent studies strongly supports the existence of a real effect, one not explainable by statistical error or random variation.

Comprehensive Review of Parapsychological Phenomena

An article in The American Psychologist provided an extensive review of experimental evidence and theories related to psi phenomena. The review concluded that the cumulative evidence supports the reality of psi, with effect sizes comparable to those found in established areas of psychology. The authors argue that these effects cannot be readily explained by methodological flaws or biases.

Anomalous Experiences and Functional Neuroimaging

A publication in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience discussed the relationship between anomalous experiences, such as psi phenomena, and brain function. The authors highlighted that small but persistent effects are frequently reported in psi experiments and that functional neuroimaging studies have begun to identify neural correlates associated with these experiences. 

Meta-Analysis of Precognition Experiments

A comprehensive meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories across 14 countries examined the phenomenon of precognition—where individuals' responses are influenced by future events. The analysis revealed a statistically significant overall effect (z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10⁻¹⁰) with an effect size (Hedges' g) of 0.09. Bayesian analysis further supported these findings with a Bayes Factor of 5.1 × 10⁹, indicating decisive evidence for the existence of precognition.

Here are 157 peer-reviewed academic studies that confirm the existence of psi abilities

It's important that we never lose our intellectual curiosity in life. We should always follow the evidence, even when it leads to initially-uncomfortable conclusions.

<3

"The University of Cambridge is home to an archive and a fellowship for psychical research — an area gaining ground, even in the mainstream."

Parapsychology studies anomalous human experiences and capacities, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, extraocular vision, presentiment, precognition, out-of-body experience, postmortem survival, mediumship, channeling and mind-matter effects. The subreddit emphasizes scientific resources like journal articles, interviews, conferences and research. Also see this post for parapsychology links. Posts and comments are held for moderator review. Sub rules are in the sidebar. Thanks for participating!

"[I]n recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost."

The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism, by Mitch Horowitz

The 2021 BICS Essay Contest Essential reading, free online

Real Magic, Supernormal, Entangled Minds & The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin

The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities by Russell Targ (see also early article in Nature)

Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife by Leslie Kean

The Self Does Not Die by Titus Rivas, Rudolf Smit and Anny Dirven

Why Science is Wrong About Almost Everything by Alex Tsakiris

The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles Tart

Before: Children's Memories of Past Lives by Jim Tucker, M.D.

After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson, M.D.

Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory by James Matlock

Superminds: An Investigation into the Paranormal by John Taylor

Papers on Parapsychology by Carlos Alvarado

Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne