A New NDE Scale on the Horizon?
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by Jody A. Long, J.D.



A Review of The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale: Development and psychometric validation[1]

Since 1980 when Ken Ring developed the Weighted Core Experience Index (WCEI) scientists have been trying to determine a survey that distinguishes an NDE from related experiences. Bruce Greyson developed the NDE Scale survey in 1983, shortly after the WCEI was published. The NDE Scale for decades has been the standard tool to distinguish NDEs from non-NDEs based on what occurred during the NDEs. The Scale gives a weighted score using answers to 16 multiple-choice questions. The maximum score is 32, with a score of 7 or above considered to be an NDE. The questions were developed from NDE narratives and classified into four groups with themes pertaining to the transcendent, paranormal, physiological and environmental.

The French NDE-C scale was recently designed to address some of the limitations inherent in the NDE Scale. Bruce Greyson is listed as one of the investigators in the publication describing the NDE-C scale. One of the largest issues of the NDE-C scale is the reliability of self-reported subjective experiences. Another valid point is that there are two questions in the original NDE Scale that are very similar: "Did you have a feeling of joy?" and "Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness?" Because the latter question is deemed theoretically redundant it was deleted. The remainder of the questions were re-worded to make positive, clearer statements. New items were added to address the content of NDEs including negative emotions, the experience of a gateway, the impression of being dead, the decision to come back from the experience, and ineffability. The answers to the NDE-C scale questions are not a multiple-choice format, but rather a scale of 0 to 4 with 0 being "Not at all; none" and 4 being "Extremely; more than any other time in my life and stronger than 3."

In the NDE-C scale, there are six questions that are clustered in a category called "Beyond the usual"; two questions address "Harmony", five questions address "Insight"; five questions address "Border"; and two questions that address "Gateway." The tunnel has not been excluded and can now come in under the category of the "Gateway." The group used three other survey scales relevant to spiritual experiences to develop and validate the NDE-C scale. Of note, the category of experiences evaluated by the NDE-C scale developers consisted of NDE, NDE-like, Drug, Meditation and Trance experiences. Researchers found that NDE-C scale “Border" and 'Gateway" questions distinguished NDEs from Drug, Meditation and Trance experiences. The "Insight" category distinguished NDEs from the Drug and Meditation groups. Significantly, NDEs could not be distinguished from NDE-like experiences. The NDE-C scale admits to study limitations such as the study population being fairly homogenous and not necessarily representative of a global population because it disproportionately included French speaking participants from France and others mainly from North America and Western Europe. The group was self-selected and might have issues of selection bias. Notably there was also a lack of detailed information regarding how the presence of a life-threatening event was determined.

Would I consider this a hit or a miss in advancing the study of NDE? I think there are some very good attributes of the NDE-C scale that might add clarity. For example, anesthesia experiences are hard to classify because we don't know how much of the experience is caused by brain chemistry, and/or the multiple anesthetic agents in use, or if the experience is a true NDE. Or in drug experiences, at what point does a person go from brain chemistry altered by the drug, to being dead and experiencing an NDE? Sometimes it is easy to make this determination, but at other times it may be much less clear. I do like that the NDE-C scale is able to distinguish between Drug, Meditation, and Trance experiences. But it is very problematic that there is no mechanism to distinguish between NDE and NDE-like experiences. Yet, taking into account the closeness to imminent death, we can tell the difference between an NDE-like experience and an NDE. So, while there are some great changes in the NDE-C scale, there are other changes or omissions that leave me scratching my head.


How does this affect the classification of experiences of over 4800 experiences submitted to NDERF?

The short answer is that it doesn't really affect us much. The longer answer is that NDERF uses a definition that takes into account that an NDE is close to death, "A lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death." The person must be so physically compromised that they are generally unconscious for us to consider an experience to be an NDE. When Dr. Long analyzes NDEs for study, he reads the narrative and evaluates it according to how well it fits the NDERF definition. He also evaluates the closeness to death by using the medical physical impairment criteria known as the Karnofsky scale. Since experiencers have answered the original NDE Scale questions as part of the NDE survey, he includes for research only NDEs that have an NDE Scale score of 7 or above. The combination of these methods results in more consistent results with less variability in experience classification. Our research also includes NDEs from people all over the world and NDEs shared in many different languages.

[1]Martial, C., Simon, J., Puttaert, N., Gosseries, O., Charland-Verville, V., Nyssen, A., Greyson, B., Laureys, S., Cassol, H. (2020) The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale: Development and psychometric validation Consciousness and Cognition 86, 103049.