After Actor, Al Pacino told leading media outlets that his brush with death led him to conclude that “There’s nothing there,” IANDS President Jan Holden, EdD, sent a letter to Pacino detailing near-death experience (NDE) research and the mounting evidence that the consciousness survives physical demise.

Pacino’s comments have been carried by numerous outlets including Variety,  Vanity Fair, and People magazine as he has embarked on a book tour for his autobiography Sonny Boy.

“As someone who has spent her academic career studying near-death experiences (NDEs) and who leads the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), I noticed that the recent Variety article about you mischaracterized your experience.

From your description, you did not have an NDE; you had a close brush with death without an NDE,” Holden wrote. “Like you, about 85% of people survive their close brush with no memory of anything or anything unusual. However, about 15% of people report that during the medical crisis, they had a vivid, emotionally intense experience of lucidly perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body and/or perceiving and interacting with beings and environments not of the material world. Afterwards, experiencers are
usually profoundly changed.”

Holden provided Pacino with the IANDS NDE fact sheet and recommended additional readings to learn more.

“Most researchers who have studied NDEs and related experiences deeply have concluded that human consciousness is not a product of the brain and that it survives physical demise,” she said. “I'm happy you recovered from your illness, and I hope that when your time comes -- and mine as well! — we find that our consciousness, including our memories, continues, and that our experience is as peaceful and wonderful as the majority of near-death experiencers have described.”