I was curious about near-death experiences and if there is any definitive data to quantify these subjective ordeals. It turns out there is! A 2019 study compared the semantic similarities of 165 different drug experiences to accounts of near-death experiencers. The peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and Cognition compared near-death experiencer accounts with data the Erowid.org site, and discovered that ketamine was the drug experience most semantically similar to an NDE. Using the data from the study, I created a visualization of the top 21 most similar drugs to an NDE and also included a word cloud of similar terms.

 

This graphic was published on Voronoi on January 18, 2024.

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CHART TYPES: Ranking, Word Cloud