Scientists Studying Near-Death Experiences Found A Strange Connection Between Shapes And Colors

For years, people who have come close to death have described seeing a mysterious tunnel leading toward an incredibly bright light. Some recall moving through complete darkness before approaching a glowing opening, while others describe enormous spaces that seem to stretch endlessly around them. These experiences have fascinated researchers for decades, but a new study has uncovered an unusual detail that could change how scientists investigate them.

Researchers asked 50 people who had experienced near-death events to draw the strange environments they remembered seeing. When they compared the drawings, an unexpected pattern emerged. The shapes people described appeared to have a surprising connection with the colors they remembered seeing, suggesting that these extraordinary experiences may follow certain visual patterns rather than being entirely random.

Scientists Asked 50 People To Draw Their Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences remain difficult for scientists to investigate because people often struggle to explain exactly what happened to them. Some describe leaving their bodies, encountering deceased relatives, or moving through tunnels toward brilliant sources of light. Others recall enormous spaces, unusual landscapes, or environments that appear to surround them completely. Although researchers have identified several recurring features, the actual spatial structure of these experiences has received considerably less attention.

Neurophenomenology researcher France Lerner from the University of Haifa in Israel and colleagues decided to approach the subject differently. Instead of relying entirely on traditional questionnaires and written descriptions, they wanted participants to reconstruct their experiences visually. The team recruited 50 people who reported having experienced near-death events and guided them through online sessions using a collection of geometric pictograms.

Participants were asked to divide their experiences into separate stages and represent the different environments they remembered encountering. They also identified where they believed they were positioned within each space, how they moved through it, and which colors they remembered seeing. Researchers then collected the drawings and compared the geometric structures and visual characteristics to identify patterns that appeared across multiple accounts.

The approach offered an opportunity to examine details that might otherwise disappear when someone attempts to describe an extraordinary experience using ordinary language. Rather than focusing exclusively on familiar accounts of tunnels and bright lights, the researchers could investigate how people perceived the spaces surrounding them. The resulting collection of drawings revealed four recurring geometric categories, providing the foundation for the study’s most intriguing discovery.

Four Unusual Shapes Appeared Across Different Experiences

Despite the personal nature of the accounts, researchers identified four main categories of environments in the participants’ reconstructions. The first involved conical spaces, which included the familiar tunnel-like structures frequently described in near-death experiences. The second consisted of broad, curved environments resembling enormous archways, while the third involved flatter spaces with more gently curved boundaries. The final category included environments that appeared to surround the observer entirely, resembling the interior of a sphere or oval.

These categories showed that people who reported near-death experiences did not always describe moving through a narrow passage toward a distant light. Some remembered much larger environments with unusual boundaries and different regions of darkness and illumination. Others reconstructed spaces that appeared to envelop them, making the experience seem considerably different from the traditional tunnel description that has become familiar through popular culture.

The researchers also examined how participants positioned themselves within these environments. Their drawings included representations of where individuals believed they were located and how they moved through the spaces during different stages of their experiences. This gave the team an opportunity to compare both the surrounding geometry and the perceived movement within each environment, offering a more detailed picture of the experiences participants remembered.

However, the geometry alone was not the most surprising part of the research. When the team examined the colors associated with each category, a striking relationship emerged between the shapes people reconstructed and the visual qualities they remembered. Two particular categories showed a considerable difference, raising questions about why tunnel-like environments were frequently described without color while broader curved spaces were usually remembered differently.

The Connection Between Tunnel Shapes And Colors Surprised Researchers

Of the 28 conical spaces reconstructed during the study, 22 were described as achromatic. This means participants remembered seeing black, white, gray, or light without clearly distinguishable colors. The result was particularly interesting because tunnel-like environments are among the most recognizable features associated with near-death experiences, frequently involving darkness and a bright opening at the end of a passage.

The broad curved spaces showed almost the opposite pattern. Out of 31 reconstructed environments belonging to this category, 27 were perceived in color. This created a noticeable contrast between the tunnel-like spaces and the larger curved environments, suggesting that the geometric appearance of an experience may be associated with how its visual qualities are remembered.

The remaining two geometric categories contained a mixture of colorful and colorless experiences. Nevertheless, the difference between conical and broad curved spaces stood out in the researchers’ comparisons. The findings suggest that certain shapes and colors may repeatedly occur together within people’s accounts, offering scientists another feature to examine when investigating near-death experiences.

This relationship could provide clues about the perceptual processes involved in these unusual experiences. Researchers have already identified several recurring visual features, including tunnels, bright lights, and sensations of leaving the body. Examining how these features relate to one another could help scientists build a more detailed understanding of what people experience during extreme physiological events. However, the study was designed to identify and compare remembered environments, meaning it cannot establish exactly what produces them.

Ordinary Vision Could Explain Some Of The Strange Details

The researchers considered several connections between their findings and existing knowledge about human vision. One possibility involves tunnel vision, which can occur when the supply of oxygen to the retina or brain becomes disrupted. Under certain conditions, the field of vision becomes restricted, creating an effect that can resemble looking through a narrowing passage.

This offers a possible comparison with the conical environments reconstructed by participants. The researchers also considered why these tunnel-like spaces were frequently associated with black, white, and gray rather than clearly distinguishable colors. Ordinary vision provides another potential clue because the human eye becomes less sensitive to color when light levels fall.

In dim conditions, the light-sensitive cells responsible for vision in low-light environments become more influential. These cells provide limited color information, which helps explain why objects can appear increasingly gray or colorless when illumination becomes weaker. This provides a possible parallel with the achromatic environments described by many participants, although the researchers have not demonstrated that this process explains their experiences.

Another comparison involved the Ganzfeld effect, a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when someone is exposed to an unchanging, relatively uniform visual field. Under these conditions, unusual visual experiences can develop, including hallucinations. Some of the expansive environments described by participants appeared to share similarities with this phenomenon, particularly those that seemed to surround the observer completely. However, these comparisons remain possible explanations for further investigation rather than evidence establishing the cause of near-death experiences.

Researchers Warn That The Findings Have Important Limitations

Although the results revealed an interesting connection, several limitations prevent scientists from drawing definitive conclusions. The study involved only 50 participants, making it difficult to determine whether the same geometric and color patterns would appear consistently across a much larger population. The people who participated also represented a self-selected group, meaning their experiences may not reflect every type of near-death account.

Another challenge involved memory. Some participants were reconstructing experiences that had happened many years earlier, meaning their drawings depended on how accurately they could remember the original events. Near-death experiences can be deeply personal and emotionally intense, but memories may change over time or become influenced by how individuals interpret their experiences afterward. This makes it difficult to establish whether every detail in a reconstruction accurately reflects what someone originally perceived.

The researchers also acknowledged that the geometric pictograms could have influenced the results. Although the available shapes were based on earlier research, asking participants to select from a prepared collection may have affected how they represented their memories. The guided online sessions could also have introduced subtle biases, making it important to investigate whether similar findings would emerge using different methods.

Perhaps one of the biggest unanswered questions involves the absence of a comparison group. Without asking people to reconstruct other unusual perceptual experiences using the same approach, scientists cannot determine whether these geometric patterns are unique to near-death experiences. Similar shapes might appear in other types of unusual visual memories, which means further research will be needed to establish how specific the findings really are.

A New Approach Could Change How Scientists Study Near-Death Experiences

One of the biggest challenges surrounding near-death experiences is finding a reliable way to investigate something that people often struggle to describe. Traditional scientific questionnaires can capture recurring features, but they may overlook the complicated spatial details of an experience. By asking participants to draw what they remember, researchers have introduced another way to examine these unusual accounts and compare details that might otherwise remain difficult to measure.

The findings also raise several questions that future studies could investigate. Researchers may want to examine whether people from different backgrounds report similar geometric environments, whether the connection between tunnel-like spaces and colorless vision appears consistently, and whether similar patterns occur during other unusual perceptual experiences. A larger group of participants could also reveal additional spatial categories that were not identified in the original research.

The study does not establish that near-death experiences provide evidence of an afterlife, nor does it explain what happens to consciousness during the process of dying. The neurological and perceptual comparisons remain possibilities rather than confirmed explanations. Nevertheless, the findings offer a different way to approach a subject that has challenged researchers for decades, showing how visual reconstructions can reveal patterns that ordinary descriptions might overlook.

Published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2026, the research adds an intriguing dimension to the scientific investigation of near-death experiences. The familiar tunnel toward a brilliant light may be only one part of a much wider range of remembered environments. And with researchers now examining the shapes and colors within those experiences, some of the strangest details may finally become easier to investigate.