The Greyson study: 1,595 heart patients and 27 near-death experiences

Step 1

Before the study · The question

Nobody had asked every heart patient

In 1978, two psychiatrists in Boston estimated how many people have an NDE after a cardiac arrest. They came up with about 2 out of 100. It was an estimate, not the figure from a study.

Between 2001 and 2002, three studies were published that asked every cardiac arrest survivor in their hospitals. One is the van Lommel study, in the Netherlands. Another is the Southampton study, in England. The third is the Schwaninger study, in the United States, with 30 people. Each study gave a different figure. Between 6 and 23 out of 100 survivors described an NDE.

Those studies only asked people who had had a cardiac arrest. Nobody knew what happened with other heart patients, such as those who had a heart attack.

A cardiac arrest is when the heart stops pumping, and a heart attack is when part of the heart is damaged but it usually keeps beating.

Greyson expected NDEs to be more common with a cardiac arrest than with a heart attack or another heart problem. If NDEs have to do with being about to die, that is how it had to be.

Step 2

Charlottesville, Virginia · As the study tells it

A University of Virginia psychiatrist sets up the study

Bruce Greyson led the study. He was a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and had been studying NDEs for more than twenty years. In 1983 he created a scale to measure them. Today that scale is used all over the world.

Ian Stevenson, another psychiatrist at the same university, helped him design the study. The nurse Christina Fritz and the doctors Tiffany Pankow and Jim Tucker interviewed the patients and reviewed their medical records.

The study was done at the University of Virginia hospital, in the city of Charlottesville. It was paid for by a German institute in Freiburg that studies paranormal phenomena and other subjects psychology doesn’t usually cover.

The team spoke with every patient admitted to cardiology for two and a half years.

Step 4

A few days later · As the study tells it

A few days later, a 15-minute interview

As soon as a patient was out of danger, someone from the team explained the study. If the patient agreed, they did an interview of about 15 minutes. 9 out of 10 had it within the first 6 days of their hospital stay.

First they were asked what had happened to their heart. Then they were asked the questions of the Greyson scale. It has 16 questions about what the person might have experienced. For example, whether time went faster or slower, whether they felt peace, whether they left their body, or whether they reached another world.

Anyone who scored 7 points or more counted as a person with an NDE.

They were also asked two things about what they believed:

• Whether they lost consciousness. 302 people said yes.
• Whether they came close to dying. 37 people said they had died. 245 said they came close. More than half of the patients couldn’t say whether they had come close to dying.

Step 5

In the first interview · As the study tells it

Of 1,595 people, 27 describe an NDE

27 people scored 7 points or more. That is about 2 out of 100.

In the drawing, each circle is one person in 100. The 2 filled circles are, roughly, the people who described an NDE. In the study, it was 27 of 1,595.

People with an NDE scored far more points than everyone else. The 27 people with an NDE scored between 7 and 23 points. Of everyone else, 96 out of 100 didn’t score a single point, and nobody went above 5.

Another 81 people described an NDE they had had before, on another occasion. Those NDEs were left out of the figures, because the study only looked at what happened during that hospital stay.

How many of those 27 people had had a cardiac arrest?

Step 8

During the study · As the study tells it

Each person with an NDE is paired with a similar patient

Greyson looked for people to compare those 27 people with, to find out what was special about them.

Each time a person described an NDE, the team waited for the next patient without an NDE who was similar to them. That patient had to have the same heart condition, the same sex and nearly the same age, with at most 5 years’ difference. We call that similar patient their match. They found a match for 23 of the 27 people. For the other 4, nobody similar was admitted in the rest of the study.

The team gave the 27 people with an NDE and their 23 matches a second interview of 30 to 60 minutes. The interview measured their memory, their health before the hospital stay, the help they had from other people, and what they thought about death. It also asked whether they had had experiences before that they considered paranormal.

In addition, two members of the team read each patient’s medical record. They didn’t know whether that patient had had an NDE. They scored three things:

• How close they came to dying, on four levels. The lowest was “not seriously ill”. The highest was “lost vital signs”, meaning pulse and breathing.
• How badly their heart was working.
• A score of how their illness was likely to develop.

Step 9

Comparing the pairs · As the study tells it

The medical records show no differences

According to the medical records, the people with an NDE did not come closer to dying than their matches.

Of the 27 people with an NDE, 7 lost their vital signs. Of their 23 matches, also 7.

There were no differences either in how badly their heart was working or in the score of how their illness was likely to develop. There were none in their memory, their earlier health, the help they had, or how satisfied they were with their life.

With the same medical data, some people had an NDE and others didn’t.

The differences lay in what each person believed had happened to them.

Step 10

Comparing the pairs · As the study tells it

What does change: believing you have died

People with an NDE said more often that they had died or come close:

• Believed they had died: 7 of the 27 people with an NDE, and 1 of their 23 matches.
• Believed they came close to dying: 14 of the 27, and 8 of the 23.
• Said they lost consciousness: 17 of the 27, and 7 of the 23.

The second interview turned up two more differences. People with an NDE saw death as a passage to something pleasant more often than their matches. And they described more experiences they had had before and that they consider paranormal.

Greyson points out a problem. Those beliefs and earlier experiences were asked about after the NDE. Those beliefs may help a person have an NDE. Or it may be the other way round. Someone who has had an NDE may then believe they were dead, see death with less fear, and remember what they lived through before differently.

Greyson says that with these data it can’t be known which is cause and which is effect.

Step 11

July 2003 · As the study tells it

The study is published, and Greyson draws three conclusions

The article was published in July 2003 in General Hospital Psychiatry, a psychiatry journal for hospital doctors. Greyson draws three conclusions:

• NDEs have to do with being close to death, because they are ten times more common after a cardiac arrest than in other patients.
• The study doesn’t support the idea that something in the body causes them, because the people with an NDE and their matches don’t differ in anything medical. Greyson admits that changes in the body may have lasted only a very short time and not been noted in the medical records.
• Consciousness may not be located only in the brain. For Greyson, it is hard to explain someone having a clear mind when their brain is getting little blood. To say this, he relies on the van Lommel and Southampton studies.

The study didn’t measure anyone’s brain activity, or the oxygen in their blood. Nor does it know at what moment each person had their experience.

Let’s see what can be known from these data and what can’t.