He said: "Elements, for example, sense of a divine being, differ as a function of faith/culture. "This suggests that experients make sense of experiences by drawing on traditional societal references. "This is a well-known phenomenon in psychology – ‘effort after meaning’. "That is making sense of the world in terms of lived experience." So what exactly causes people to experience NDEs in the first place? Unfortunately, there is no scientific consensus and wide range of NDEs - from visions of deceased loved ones to out-of-body experiences - are not uniformly reported by people. Trending Dr Dagnall believes NDEs represent normal phenomena, although he could not speculate which apply to individual cases.