The veridical Near-Death Experience Scale (vNDE Scale): construction and a first validation with human and artificial raters
July 26, 2025 Bruce Greyson, Jeffrey Long, Janice Holden et al. preprint
A new scale, the veridical Near-Death Experience Scale (vNDE Scale), was developed to assess how strong the evidence is for perceptions reported during near-death experiences. Experts in near-death experiences reached consensus on eight criteria covering timing, medical conditions, third-party verification, and the type and quality of perceptions, scored on a four-level Likert scale. When 11 human raters and three artificial raters using large language models applied the scale to 17 cases, overall agreement between human and artificial judges exceeded 75% in 14 of the 17 cases (82.3%), considering adjacent levels of evidence strength. The scale offers a practical way to evaluate the evidential strength of such perceptions.