There have been many people and in particular those who have experienced the NDE but also some scientists who have argued that the experience gives an indication of an afterlife. These are essentially based upon a number of points. First it has been argued that the because the experience occurs universally and has been described from all over the world it would mean that it is unlikely to be a hallucination, as hallucinations tend to have more of a personal component, which is coloured by people's cultural backgrounds to them. People of different cultures would be expected to have different experiences as their memories would be dependent on their previous life experiences. Another argument against NDE being a hallucination is that these experiences have also been described in children who have been too young to have any concept of death or an afterlife. In these cases the children could not have formed the memories related to death and an afterlife that adults are familiar with and therefore they should not have similar experiences to adults.

Another major aspect of NDEs that cannot be accounted for with traditional scientific arguments is that many people have described watching in detail what had been happening to them. They have for example been able to recall the colour of clothing of people in the resuscitation area whom they had never met. They have watched nurses writing at a desk or seen dust in areas that they would not have been able to see from their bed such as above the curtain rails. They have described colours of drills used in an operation room, or even described events occurring at a distance. In some cases it may be possible to argue that maybe the patients were not fully unconscious and hence had been able to gather information through ordinary senses such as hearing. This would possibly account for some of the conversations heard but would not account for the things that the patients had seen. In addition their memories would be patchy and although they may possibly be able to remember patchy events but would not be expected to recall longer details. More importantly in many cases these detailed narratives have been recalled at a time when objective studies have shown that the patient's brain could not have been functioning and the patients had reached the clinical criteria of death. This raises the question of how lucid memories can form during this time from a brain that is not working.