Professor Wilfried Kuhn is head of the neurology department at Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt, Germany, and a board member of the German Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V. In a long-form conversation with Thanatos TV he discusses near-death experiences (NDEs) from a neurological and neuroscientific perspective – carefully, expertly, and without reducing the phenomenon to a simple label. Below is a summary of the central points. The original interview is in German; this article makes it accessible for English readers.
Are NDEs "just" hallucinations?
Kuhn starts with a definitional clarification. In medicine, a hallucination simply denotes a perception without an adequate sensory stimulus. The word carries negative connotations because it is often tied to psychosis or schizophrenia – but in fact, says Kuhn, roughly 60 to 70 percent of all hallucinations are non-pathological. Examples include hypnagogic hallucinations (falling asleep) and hypnopompic ones (waking up), familiar to many people.
"Purely by definition, near-death experiences are hallucinations – but they are not the same thing we normally understand by that word in medicine."
The literature often uses the term "complex hallucination" for NDEs. But:
"The term 'complex hallucination' is not standardised in medicine. It is simply a catch-all for something we don't understand well."
Structurally, says Kuhn, NDEs differ clearly from classical pathological hallucinations:
- Positive in content – around 95 % are experienced as pleasant (joy, light, contact with other beings). Schizophrenic hallucinations, by contrast, are typically fear-laden.
- Structured sequence – NDEs usually begin with an out-of-body experience, followed by tunnel and light. Pathological hallucinations show no such orderly sequence.
- Complex content – life review, encounters with the deceased, light beings. Such structures are not found in clinical hallucination psychiatry.
The drug hypothesis: endorphins and DMT
Another explanatory model: NDEs are caused by endogenous drugs. Kuhn regards the once popular endorphin hypothesis as implausible. His argument is pharmacokinetic:
"When someone in a near-death experience is suddenly pulled back into the severely ill body, they immediately feel the pain again. That cannot be the case with endorphins, because these have a longer-lasting effect."
More interesting, in his view, is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), used in shamanic infusions. Injected DMT can produce NDE-like elements. But to Kuhn this does not prove that NDEs are purely organic. His interpretation:
"Medications and drugs alter perception and can modulate or partially switch off receptors in such a way that a different form of perception becomes possible. It is, as it were, a sealing off of our world […] and then a different mode of perception suddenly emerges."
Kuhn uses an image familiar from other NDE researchers: the brain as a receiver – a radio, a TV, a computer. Tune to a different frequency and you receive something different. Whether "receive" means that consciousness actually originates outside the brain is not thereby proven – but also not disproven.
Out-of-body experiences and verification
Kuhn cites Raymond Moody – the first to describe NDEs – who said: whoever explains the OBE explains the NDE. Neuroscience is trying to do exactly that, by interpreting OBEs as hallucinations of the brain. For some OBEs outside the NDE context, Kuhn considers this plausible – but not for OBEs within NDEs. His argument is verified perceptions:
"There are about 100 cases that have already been verified, where the observation made during a near-death experience actually matched reality. […] One study found that about 90 to 95 percent of the perceptions during an NDE were one hundred percent correct."
Patients describe what the doctors wore, which devices were used, what was said. Kuhn also quotes Pim van Lommel with a sober observation:
"Sceptics will never be convinced by this. If ten cases are reported, they want 100. If 100 are reported, they want 1,000."
Flat-line EEG, clinical death and brain death
A recurring misunderstanding: "brain death" and "clinical death" are often conflated. Kuhn lays out the gradation clearly:
- Brain death is irreversible. Neurology has a strict protocol for this – two independent examiners, testing of brain-stem reflexes, re-examination after 12 or 72 hours, today often supplemented by ultrasound to confirm the absence of cerebral perfusion.
- Clinical death (cardiac arrest, e.g. during a heart attack) produces a flat-line EEG within 20–30 seconds. This is reversible. People come back – and in rare but documented cases, they report NDEs from exactly this phase.
- Definitive cell death sets in after about half an hour without oxygen.
Kuhn cites Sam Parnia on an important detail:
"An initially established loss of brain function in the sense of brain death does not yet mean, with absolute certainty, that the brain cells are completely gone."
This helps explain some of the exceptional cases where people are resuscitated after 45 minutes.
Consciousness without a brain – the open question
The naturalist assumption is that consciousness is produced by the brain. A currently popular hypothesis: synchronised gamma waves across distributed brain regions "generate" consciousness. Kuhn does not reject this outright, but pushes back on the leap from correlation to proof:
"It is by no means absolutely certain that these gamma waves really produce consciousness. They appear in parallel, but not always."
His impression: gamma waves correlate primarily with attention, not necessarily with consciousness as such. On van Lommel's thesis – consciousness is independent of the brain – he positions himself cautiously but clearly:
"Neither the organic thesis is proven, nor is the other thesis proven. The possibility is completely open. You can believe either."
If you take mediumistic contacts, after-death contacts and repeated observations at the deathbed seriously, then, for Kuhn, the hypothesis of some form of continuing consciousness is at least an equally valid position for discussion.
Terminal lucidity and the gamma peak
Particularly striking is a relatively recent observation. EEG studies in recent years – both in dying humans and in animal experiments with decapitated rats (Borjigin) – have documented the following:
"Just before death, activity in the brain waves drops. But very shortly before death, there is another very strong peak. […] In about one-third of people. And this peak was linked to gamma activity, even though the people were about to die."
According to conventional assumptions, nothing should be happening at that moment. That, at the point when cell function collapses, high-frequency activity associated with consciousness and attention briefly reappears, is currently unexplained – and, Kuhn speculates, may be linked to the NDE phenomenon. The interviewer sums it up provocatively – and Kuhn, remarkably, lets it stand:
Interviewer: "A layperson unaffected by naturalism might say: the soul is taking off."
Kuhn: "Yes, you can … you can even say that. Yes."
A worldview question
Kuhn avoids turning the survival hypothesis into a scientific claim. He frames it consistently as a worldview question:
"There is no counter-proof in science that says: there is no soul. And there is no scientific proof that says: there is no afterlife. These are all dogmatic assumptions."
He reminds readers that science has revised many once-"proven" dogmas over the past century – from the genetics dogma (today: epigenetics) to classical physics (Einstein, Heisenberg, quantum theory).
After an NDE – and why support services are needed
The practical side is often forgotten in this debate but matters: an NDE changes people. They become more spiritual, less materialistic, they value things differently – and precisely this frequently creates conflict with partners and their social environment. Kuhn reports documented cases up to divorce – not because the NDE itself was negative, but because the person's new value compass no longer matches that of those around them.
This is exactly why Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V. was founded – as a point of contact, for counselling, and to refer people to qualified psychotherapists familiar with the phenomenon.
Teaching and training
Asked whether NDEs are taught anywhere systematically, Kuhn answers drily: "Absolutely nowhere." The topic is not part of curricula at universities or schools. In his experience, interest comes mostly from parts of the Catholic Church – with congregations often being more open and less dogmatic than the priests themselves.
Context
Kuhn's position is methodologically clean and notable: as a neurologist he grants the hallucination critics their formal definition – and then shows why that definition does not explain the phenomenon. He remains agnostic on the organic hypothesis, but makes clear that the stance "materialism = proven" is philosophically untenable. This places him alongside serious German-speaking NDE researchers such as Walter van Laack and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – with the particular weight his clinical role as department head and neurologist brings.
Source:Leben nach dem Tod: Was sagt ein Neurologe? Wilfried Kuhn im Gespräch, Thanatos TV (YouTube, in German), youtube.com/watch?v=q80lFz3TNwE. Quotations from the interview are translated by us and rendered in quotation marks.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it links to further material from NDE research (among them Walter van Laack, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Markolf Niemz).