Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
People who return from the edge of death often describe seeing spaces that defy ordinary words.
Different survivors, separated by decades, keep sketching the same shapes when they are asked to draw what they saw. Researchers have long worked almost entirely from the words those survivors used.
A new study tried a different method and found an unexpected rule.
Working with 50 people who report near-death experiences, a research team led by France Lerner at the University of Haifa documented a clear link between the geometry of recalled spaces and the colors reported inside them.
The paper, published October 15, 2026 in Frontiers in Psychology, is based on guided online sessions in which participants rebuilt the memory using a catalog of geometric pictograms.
Narrow, conical “tunnel” spaces came back almost entirely without color. Of 28 conical spaces reconstructed by participants, 22 (78.6 percent) were described as black, white, gray, or uncolored light.
Broad curved archways, by contrast, were overwhelmingly colored, with 27 of 31 (87.1 percent) chromatic.
The pattern in the pictograms
Participants broke each experience into stages, then for each stage picked a shape, placed themselves inside it, marked their direction of motion, and indicated the colors they perceived. Four broad geometries emerged across the sample: cones, partial-elliptic arcs (archways), gently curving flat segments, and fully surrounding spheres or ellipsoids.
The authors tested the shape-color link with a Fisher-Freeman-Halton exact test and reported the association was unlikely to be chance (p = 3.71 x 10⁻⁶).
The flatter and more enclosing shapes split roughly evenly between color and no color; the strongest contrast lay between the gray cones and the colored archways.
Participants’ own words tracked the statistical picture. One subject described an “escalator in a pure black space. Floating upwards through pitch blackness.”
Another recalled moving through “star fields; black,” watching stationary bright stars go by.
What the authors don’t yet know
The paper offers no biological mechanism tying cones to a lack of color or arches to color.
Participants were recruited through the US-based International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), a nonprofit that supports NDE research and runs sharing groups for people who have had these experiences.
The authors warn that recruitment through such a specialized community could prime certain kinds of recall. The sample is small, self-selected, and often reconstructing memories decades old: the median gap between the experience and the study was just over 15 years.
Earlier neuroscience has offered partial explanations for one classic NDE feature, the tunnel. A 2015 review published through the US National Institutes of Health attributed the sense of a narrowing passage of light to decreased brain oxygenation, with similar visual effects seen in ordinary fainting and under drugs like ketamine.
That line of work asks why a tunnel might appear. The Haifa team is asking a different question: once the tunnel is there, what does it look like.
The paper is open-access and includes the full pictogram catalog participants chose from.
