Hidden Targets: What the Best Test So Far Found

The AWARE Studies, and What They Do and Don’t Show

If you want to know whether people really perceive things during cardiac arrest, there is a wonderfully blunt way to find out. Put a picture on a high shelf, face up, where no patient could see it from the bed. If someone tells you they floated up and looked down, ask them what was on the shelf.

No interpretation, no poetry, no arguing about what “felt real”. Either they name it or they don’t. It’s the closest thing this field has to a fair fight, and it’s the idea behind the AWARE studies, led by Sam Parnia.

What AWARE found

The first study began in 2008 and ran across 15 hospitals in the UK, the US, and Austria. There were 2,060 cardiac arrests. Of those, 330 people survived, and 140 were well enough to be interviewed. About 9% described experiences that fit the pattern of a near death experience. Around 2% described explicit memories of seeing and hearing events during their resuscitation.

One of those cases matters a great deal. A 57-year-old man described accurately what went on around him, and the team could time his account using sounds from the equipment. His awareness appears to have lasted about three minutes after his heart stopped. I’d call it the strongest single case from the project because it is tied to a known time. Last time, I said memory has no clock. In this case, the machine supplied one.

Now the part my own side won’t enjoy. The picture test did not produce a match. Not one patient identified the images on the shelves. AWARE II, published in 2023, found the same. None of the survivors interviewed named the hidden images or sounds, though some reported memories or perceptions that suggested awareness.

I’m not going to dress that up. If you believe these experiences are real perceptions, the best test anyone has run has not produced a verified visual match. That is a gap, and anyone who skips past it is selling something.

What the test doesn’t show

Sceptics, this part is for you.

A hidden target test only works if a cardiac arrest happens in an equipped room, the patient survives, the patient can be interviewed, and the patient has that particular kind of experience. Every one of those conditions is rare, and they all have to line up at once. So the test has had very few chances to succeed.

A study with very few chances can’t say no. It can only say it hasn’t found one yet. Imagine searching for a rare bird by walking through a single field for an afternoon. You come home empty-handed and announce that the bird doesn’t exist. Nobody would accept that from a birdwatcher, and nobody should accept it from a headline writer either.

So what do I take from it? The design is right. The evidence so far is thin in both directions. And anyone who tells you AWARE proved these experiences are real, or proved they aren’t, has not read it.

What I’d like to see

I'd like to see more hospitals, more targets, and results published whether they are good news or not. Plans filed before the first patient is enrolled, so the rules for what counts as a hit can’t quietly change afterwards. If I’m asking the establishment to take this seriously, I have to accept that the same rules bind me when the results come back empty.

And I’d like to see more of the one thing AWARE did well: a sound or image presented at a known time, so a report can be checked against it. That is what turns a moving story into a piece of data. Everything else is just a very good story, and I’ve told enough of those.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, an independent researcher in consciousness studies, and a shamanic practitioner of more than forty years, working in Q’ero, Norse and Celtic traditions. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.