NDE Expert Peter Fenwick Left a Legacy That Continues to Inspire

During near-death experiences, many report a bright, warm comforting light.

Near-death experiences remain mysterious phenomena, despite their relatively common nature. Yet building on Peter Fenwick’s groundbreaking work, a growing number of scholars in the scientific community are beginning to accept that NDEs are worth studying and can reveal new insights into the nature of consciousness.

“Now, clearly, we don’t question anymore the reality of near-death experiences,” Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium, told Scientific American last year. “People who report an experience really did experience something.”

This wasn’t always the case. When Peter Fenwick, a British neuropsychiatrist, first started looking at NDEs in the mid-1970s, they were considered highly controversial. Fenwick himself dismissed them as “rubbish” until he encountered a patient who had experienced one.

A Scientist Faces the Unexplainable

Peter Fenwick
Credit: Galileo Commission

“You can imagine my surprise when into my consulting room came the guy who had a failed catheter, a cardiac catheter, and had a near-death experience,” Fenwick said in a talk at TEDx Berlin in 2012. “It was my moment of realization that in fact these things did happen.”

Fenwick went on to lead a BBC documentary, “Glimpses of Death,” in 1988. Afterward, he received more than 2,000 letters from people describing similar circumstances to those in the film. Common aspects of these experiences included leaving one’s body, going down a tunnel, the appearance of dead loved ones, and engaging in a life review.

Perhaps most markedly, many noted a bright light that Fenwick described in his talk as “calming, compassionate, loving, supportive.” He collected these stories, working with his wife Elizabeth to publish them in a book titled “The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences” in 1995.

Fenwick refuted the suggestion that the experiences were a result of lack of oxygen by alluding to pilots in flight training, who were exposed to similar conditions without reporting NDEs. Nevertheless, in his talk he acknowledged the scientific challenges of such phenomena. “The argument is that consciousness is created by the brain. So if I’m saying your brain isn’t functioning but there’s consciousness there, it doesn’t fit easily into our modern scientific paradigm,” he said.

Recent scientific studies have shown that humans can display heightened brain activity at the time of death, a surprising discovery that is so far inconclusive.

But Fenwick, for one, was convinced that death is not final. This perspective likely brought comfort to both himself and his family when he died at age 89 on Nov. 22, 2024, in London, according to a recent story in the New York Times.

“The Final Border may not be as frightening as you think,” Fenwick said in his Berlin Tedx Talk by the same name. “So don’t be afraid.”