Testing for Veridical Perception During Ketamine-Induced Out-of-Body States

Abstract

Near-death experiences (NDEs) occasionally include claims of veridical perception — accurate information about the physical environment obtained from a reported out-of-body vantage point, ostensibly without ordinary sensory access. The largest attempt to test this directly (the AWARE I/II studies) placed hidden visual targets, visible only from a ceiling-level vantage point, in resuscitation rooms; across 1,000+ monitored cardiac arrest cases, no patient has yet correctly identified a hidden target. That naturalistic approach is constrained by low incidence and minimal experimental control. This proposal adapts the same underlying test to a controlled, legal, clinically supervised setting: ketamine, which reliably induces out-of-body phenomenology closely resembling NDE reports, administered to healthy volunteers under a design built specifically to address a confound not addressed in prior proposals of this kind — ketamine’s own well-documented impairment of specific episodic memory, which could produce a false negative (a real perceptual event that the drug prevents the participant from accurately recalling) indistinguishable from a true negative (no anomalous perception occurred at all). The study is structured as three objectives across two phases, with Phase 2 explicitly contingent on Phase 1 findings, so that resources are only committed to the central test (Objective 3) if the preceding phase establishes it is methodologically viable.