People who have had a near-death experience (NDE) produce more iconic and metaphoric hand gestures when describing those events than when describing ordinary events. The gestures are interpreted as physical realizations of mentally simulated actions, indicating that NDE memories are more strongly embodied—that is, more tightly linked to sensorimotor systems—than memories of everyday experiences. The authors suggest that NDEs are perceived, recalled, and embodied through strong activation of sensorimotor systems during a state of perceptual and cognitive enhancement, even though those systems appear unresponsive to external sensory stimuli during the event itself. They conclude that the enhancement of cognitive functions during NDE results from enhanced perceptual functions.
People describing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) use more metaphoric language and gestures when recounting normally-impossible events (e.g., floating or seeing from above) than when describing normally-possible events. Two chi-square tests revealed that impossible OBE events were more frequently described with metaphoric sentences than literal ones, and with metaphoric gestures rather than iconic gestures. The authors suggest that impossibility, emotional load, and extremeness—alongside abstractness and unfamiliarity—drive the active use of verbal and gestural metaphors for normally-impossible OBE events.