One-fourth of people who undergo an extraordinary experience report immediate discomfort, but more than half claim the experience caused positive long-term effects, per study results. (Credit: blueberrykings111!, Pixabay, CC0)
Heard a voice or felt a presence? A new study says you’re not alone, and it’s usually not a bad thing.
In A Nutshell
- A Brazilian study of more than 5,000 adults found that “nonordinary experiences,” like hearing voices, sensing an unseen presence, or feeling sudden overwhelming awe, are far more common than clinical research suggests.
- Most people were fully awake, sober, and healthy when the experience happened, not dreaming, intoxicated, or ill.
- About 20% felt an immediate negative reaction and 25% reported some suffering, but roughly 51% said the experience had a positive long-term effect on their life.
- Researchers built a new survey specifically to separate the raw experience from religious or clinical labels, letting people describe what happened without a built-in diagnosis.
Hearing a voice when no one is there. Feeling an overwhelming sense of love or awe with no clear cause. Sensing the presence of something, or someone, that cannot be seen. Millions of people worldwide have experiences like these, and most were fully awake, sober, and healthy when it happened. A new study out of Brazil, published in the journal PLOS One, surveyed more than 5,000 adults and found that these moments are far more common, and far less catastrophic, than either the pulpit or the psychiatrist’s office tends to assume.
Researchers have long struggled to study experiences like these without boxing them into one of two camps: a symptom of mental illness, or a sign from something greater. This study set out to do neither. It simply asked people what happened, how they made sense of it, and whether it helped or hurt them in the long run. Only about 3% said they were under the influence of substances at the time, and fewer than 3% said they were sick, so these moments were rarely tangled up with the kinds of explanations doctors usually reach for first. About half of participants said the experience left them better off in the end, even when it rattled them at first.
What Counts as a ‘Nonordinary’ Experience?
Researchers used a survey tool called the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, covering 38 distinct types of unusual events. These range from intense joy, awe, or compassion to hearing sounds or seeing visions, sensing the presence of a deceased person, having an out-of-body experience, or feeling a profound sense of meaning. The inventory does not define these experiences as either spiritual gifts or psychiatric symptoms. It simply asks people whether they have had them, then probes how they interpreted what happened.
That distinction matters. Many existing scales built to measure unusual experiences have a thumb on the scale before they even ask a question. A spiritually oriented scale might ask, “Did you feel God’s presence?” A clinical scale might describe the same feeling as disordered thinking. This research team set out to separate the raw experience from that pre-packaged interpretation.
Researchers first tested their questions on 160 Brazilian adults, then ran the full survey on 5,117 more, a group whose age, sex, and region broadly matched the country’s population, though it leaned more educated than average. Each person answered questions about one specific experience they had had, from déjà vu to a near-death event to a sudden wave of unexplained love.
What People Actually Said About Their Nonordinary Experiences
Several patterns stood out. Roughly 60% of participants on average said they were awake and alert when it happened, by far the most common state. Being alone was the second-most notable pattern, reported by about 40% of participants. Most experiences were brief: nearly two-thirds lasted only up to a few minutes, and more than a quarter were almost instantaneous. Most people reported having the experience only a few times in their life, and the large majority said it first happened during adulthood rather than childhood.
Two separate questions dug into cause and meaning. Asked whether someone or something made the experience happen, roughly a third said they did not believe any agent was responsible. Asked why it happened to them specifically, chance was again the most common answer, closely followed by the idea it carried a sign or message. About 48% described the experience as spiritual or religious, 31% did not, and 21% weren’t sure.
The Emotional Toll and the Resilience
Perhaps the most telling numbers concern wellbeing. About 20% of participants reported an immediate negative reaction when the experience occurred, and roughly 25% said it caused some suffering or discomfort. Those are not trivial figures, and researchers acknowledge them directly. Still, when asked about long-term effects, approximately 51% evaluated their experience as having a positive lasting impact. Only about 15% described lasting negative effects.
Researchers also found that no matter which of the 38 experience types people described, the answers tended to cluster together instead of scattering all over the map. In other words, people seem to reach for the same small toolbox of explanations, whatever the experience actually was. That squares with the idea that culture, not the experience itself, does a lot of the heavy lifting in how people make sense of moments like these. Brazil was a fitting place to test that, given its mix of Catholic, evangelical, Spiritist, and Afro-Brazilian traditions, several of which treat these states as a normal part of spiritual life rather than something to be explained away.
Psychiatry has long struggled with how to respond when a patient reports hearing a voice or sensing an unseen presence. This study does not resolve that tension between the medical and the spiritual, but it offers a large-scale, unbiased map of how real people actually experience and interpret these moments.
These moments were not harmless for everyone, and the study does not pretend otherwise. But for many of the people surveyed, something unsettling or hard to explain eventually became something they were glad happened.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a peer-reviewed study for general informational purposes. It is not a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Anyone experiencing distress related to unusual perceptual or emotional experiences should consult a qualified healthcare provider.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Researchers note several important constraints on interpreting these findings. Each participant reported on only one experience, so the study cannot compare how the same person might interpret different kinds of unusual moments. All responses were closed-ended, which means the study cannot capture the full texture of what people went through. While the sample broadly reflected Brazil’s national population in terms of age, sex, and region, highly educated individuals were overrepresented compared to census data, which may limit how well the findings apply to people with less formal education. Finally, the study was conducted entirely within Brazil, so findings may not translate directly to populations in different cultural or socioeconomic contexts.
Funding and Disclosures
According to the paper, this work was supported by an external grant from the John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID: 62651), an external grant from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnologico (Process: 309085/2023-3) to the last author, and internal funding from the Pioneer Science Initiative of the D’Or Institute for Research and Education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Partial funding was also provided by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Finance Code 001. Funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, the decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Authors declared no competing interests.
Publication Details
Authors: Pedro Fortes, Luiza Tavares, Gustavo Granjeiro, Giovanna Bortolini, Everton Maraldi, Tiago Bortolini, Larissa Hartle, Maria Lima, Maria Laport, Jorge Moll, Ronald Fischer. All affiliated with the Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics Unit, Institute D’Or for Research and Education, São Paulo, Brazil. | Journal: PLOS One | Paper Title: Making sense of the extraordinary, an investigation of the content and prevalence of appraisals of nonordinary experiences | Published: August 5, 2026 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0353126
