Video By The Oprah Show | Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and near-death survivors explore how encounters with death often transform priorities, compassion, and fear of dying.
When psychiatrist Bruce Greyson began his medical career in the 1970s, he was not searching for evidence of an afterlife.
Raised in a secular household and trained in conventional medicine, Greyson accepted what most physicians were taught: consciousness is produced by the brain, and when the brain dies, consciousness ends. Then a patient told him something he could not explain.
The woman had been unconscious after an overdose. Yet when she woke up, she accurately described a conversation Greyson had held with her roommate in another room, including details she seemingly had no way of knowing. The experience rattled the young psychiatrist and launched a line of inquiry that would define the next half-century of his career.
Today, Greyson is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and one of the world’s leading researchers of near-death experiences, or NDEs. He has studied more than 1,000 cases and developed the widely used Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale, helping bring academic rigor to a topic long dismissed as fringe science.
🧠 The Mystery That Wouldn’t Go Away
Greyson recently joined Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Podcast to discuss his decades of research and a question that continues to challenge medicine: Why do so many people report remarkably similar experiences when they come close to death?
Across cultures, religions, and generations, people describe leaving their bodies, encountering deceased loved ones, reviewing their lives, and feeling what many call an overwhelming sense of unconditional love. Just as striking, many report that the experience felt “more real” than ordinary life.
Over decades of research, Greyson says common explanations such as hallucinations, oxygen deprivation, or drug-induced visions fail to account for the consistency and long-term effects of these experiences. While he stops short of claiming proof of life after death, he argues that the evidence challenges the assumption that consciousness is simply a product of the brain.
❄️ Enter Jeremy Renner
One reason the conversation has reached a wider audience is actor Jeremy Renner.
The Oscar-nominated actor nearly died in a snowcat accident on New Year’s Day 2023 while trying to prevent the vehicle from striking his nephew. Renner suffered 38 broken bones and extensive internal injuries. During his recovery, he began publicly describing what he believed was a near-death experience.
Renner later reflected on the ordeal in his 2025 memoir, My Next Breath, where he wrote about his injuries, recovery, and the profound experience he says occurred while he was close to death.
Listening to Greyson’s research on Oprah’s podcast, Renner expressed amazement at how closely other accounts matched his own.
“There was no time, place, or space,” Renner recalled. “It just is.”
Later in the conversation, he offered a conclusion that echoes thousands of NDE reports collected over decades: “Love is the only thing that you take with you when you die.”
For Greyson, that may be the most important finding of all.
❤️ The Real Story Isn’t About Death
What interests Greyson most is not what people experience during an NDE but what happens afterward.
Many return with dramatically altered priorities. They become less focused on status, money, and competition. They report stronger relationships, greater compassion, and a diminished fear of death. Researchers have documented these changes repeatedly, regardless of whether the experiencer was religious beforehand.
That pattern appeared throughout Oprah’s discussion. Whether the guest was a Hollywood actor, a physician, or an ordinary person who survived a medical crisis, the message was remarkably consistent.
The people Greyson studies rarely come back obsessed with proving heaven exists. Instead, they return convinced that how we treat one another matters more than they previously believed.
In his book After, Greyson argues that near-death experiences force us to rethink not only death, but life itself. The deeper question is not whether consciousness survives. It is what we do with the time we have now.
After all, the most surprising lesson from people who nearly died may be that they spend far less time talking about what comes after death than they do about how to live more fully, love more deeply, and become better human beings in the present.
