plosone | Since the dawn of time, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have intrigued
and, nowadays, are still not fully explained. Since reports of NDEs are
proposed to be imagined events, and since memories of imagined events
have, on average, fewer phenomenological characteristics than real
events memories, we here compared phenomenological characteristics of
NDEs reports with memories of imagined and real events. We included
three groups of coma survivors (8 patients with NDE as defined by the
Greyson NDE scale, 6 patients without NDE but with memories of their
coma, 7 patients without memories of their coma) and a group of 18
age-matched healthy volunteers. Five types of memories were assessed
using Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ – Johnson et al., 1988):
target memories (NDE for NDE memory group, coma memory for coma memory
group, and first childhood memory for no memory and control groups), old
and recent real event memories and old and recent imagined event
memories. Since NDEs are known to have high emotional content,
participants were requested to choose the most emotionally salient
memories for both real and imagined recent and old event memories.
Results showed that, in NDE memories group, NDE memories have more
characteristics than memories of imagined and real events.
