Making Sense of the Extraordinary
You've probably heard someone describe an out-of-body experience, a moment of extrasensory perception, or just the strange feeling that an unseen presence was standing nearby. These are nonordinary experiences (NOEs). They're far more common than most people realize—and, as it turns out, they matter more than we've been led to believe.
A recent study published in PLOS One by Ronald Fischer and colleagues at the Instituto D'Or de Pesquisa e Ensino in São Paulo, Brazil, challenges the way we think about these events. The research didn't just catalog what people experience. It separated the raw experience itself from what happens afterward: how people interpret, frame, and make meaning of the event. That distinction—that gap between what happens and what we tell ourselves about it—is where everything changes.
What Nonordinary Experiences Actually Look Like in the Wild
The researchers validated a 47-item Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences and administered it to a general population sample of 5,117 adults. That's not a small or self-selecting group. These are everyday people, not a clinical sample drawn from psychiatric clinics.
Here's what emerged:
- 25% of participants reported immediate suffering or discomfort during their nonordinary experience.
- 51% of participants reported positive long-term effects and personal growth from the experience.
- 20% of participants noted a net negative impact overall.
- 57% were fully awake and alert when the event occurred.
- 39% were alone at the time.
Most participants attributed their experiences to random chance. Most also reported having some degree of control over what happened. And critically, nonordinary experiences most often arrive in entirely ordinary moments—when we're awake, alert, and by ourselves.
That last point matters. These aren't confined to extreme states, drug-induced trips, or near-death scenarios. They happen during normal daily routines. You're folding laundry, driving home, or staring at a wall—and suddenly something shifts. The study found that features overlapping with symptoms used to define psychosis or dissociation are common in non-clinical populations without signaling underlying mental illness. That's a finding worth sitting with.
The Appraisal Effect: Interpretation Drives Outcome
The study's central insight is this: cognitive appraisal—the way an individual interprets, frames, and integrates the event—is the primary driver of psychological outcome, not the phenomena itself.
Think about it. Two people experience the same thing. One walks away transformed, reporting lasting personal growth and insight. The other is left shaken, struggling with fear or confusion. The event was identical. The difference lies entirely in how each person processed it.
Previous research often failed to differentiate the experience from how people made sense of it. Fischer's work stands out because it squarely focuses on where and when these experiences happened, and how people tried to make sense of them. By clearly separating the context, the experience, and the meaning-making processes, the patterns they observed challenge various assumptions that have guided previous theory, research, and clinical practice.
Pedro Fortes, one of the study's contributors, put it bluntly: "What struck us was the mismatch. These experiences share features with symptoms used to define psychosis and dissociation yet are frequently observed in a general-population sample."
That mismatch is the whole story. If something looks like a symptom of mental illness but shows up routinely in healthy people who go on to function normally, maybe the symptom label is wrong. Or maybe we're looking at the wrong thing.
What This Means for Clinical Practice
Jorge Moll, another researcher involved in the study, offered a direct implication: "Our findings suggest that how a person interprets an unusual experience matters more than the experience itself in determining whether it becomes a source of distress or of meaning. That has direct consequences for how clinicians and families respond when someone describes something extraordinary."
So what should clinicians do? Instead of immediately pathologizing or dismissing the experience, they should focus on how the individual is interpreting the event. If the person frames it productively and experiences no impairment in daily functioning, the experience should be normalized to prevent unnecessary stigma and anxiety.
Ronald Fischer himself emphasized this point: "We hope our work can help to remove stigma by focusing on the diverse ways that people experience and make sense of them. However, we would also stress that if people feel that these experiences interfere with their daily activities, then they should talk to a professional or seek help from somebody that they trust."
It's a balanced take. The researchers aren't arguing that NOEs are harmless or that clinical intervention is never needed. They're arguing that the default response shouldn't be pathologization. Most people who report these experiences are not unwell, and most describe them as neutral or positive—both at the time they occur and when looking back.
Why a Security & Compliance Analyst Should Pay Attention
If you work in security and compliance, you deal with incidents constantly. Credential theft. Data breaches. Unauthorized access. Every event triggers a cascade of appraisals: Who's responsible? What broke? How do we fix it? What does this mean for our posture going forward?
The cognitive appraisal framework from this study applies directly to how teams process security incidents. Two organizations can experience the same breach. One treats it as a learning opportunity, investing in better controls and emerging stronger. The other spirals into blame, fear, and reactive patching. The incident was the same. The outcomes diverged entirely because of how each team interpreted and responded to it.
A security & compliance analyst who understands cognitive appraisal knows that the event itself is only half the story. The meaning-making process—the post-incident review, the blame assignment, the lessons learned, the cultural response—that's where the real impact lies.
This isn't an abstract observation. It's a practical lens. When you're writing an incident response playbook or evaluating a cloud security incident, don't just catalog what happened. Ask: How is our team making sense of this? Are we framing it productively? Are we normalizing the experience of dealing with a real-world breach instead of treating it as a catastrophe or a failure of character?
The study's findings on human resilience and the complex role of protective factors in promoting health map directly onto organizational resilience after a security event. Teams that normalize the experience, focus on learning, and avoid blame tend to emerge stronger. Teams that pathologize the incident tend to repeat the same mistakes.
The Takeaway
Nonordinary experiences are common. They happen to healthy people. They're not inherently pathological. What determines whether someone flourishes or languishes afterward is how they interpret the experience.
For clinicians, that means shifting focus from the event to the meaning-making process. For organizations, it means designing incident response and compliance cultures that emphasize learning, normalization, and growth over blame and fear.
The research was supported by external grants from the John Templeton Foundation (Grant ID: 62651), the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnologico (Process: 309085/2023-3), and internal funding from the Pioneer Science Initiative of the D'Or Institute for Research and Education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, or preparation of the manuscript.
Original research: Kubota, M., Kurose, S., Tagai, K., Momota, Y., Ichihashi, M., Endo, H., Seki, C., Moriguchi, S., Yamamoto, Y., Kataoka, Y., Goto, R., Tamura, T., Shiwaku, H., Matsuoka, K., Suzuki, H., Onaya, M., Tokuda, T., Uchida, H., Takahashi, H., Kawamura, K., Zhang, M.-R., Higuchi, M., & Takahata, K. (2026). "Making sense of the extraordinary – An investigation of the content and prevalence of appraisals of nonordinary experiences." PLOS One. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0353126
Source: Neuroscience News – Nonordinary Experiences Lead to Long-Term Personal Growth
This article was written by Flynn Guard, a security & compliance analyst focused on cloud security posture, incident response, and organizational resilience. The research discussed here was published in PLOS One on August 5, 2026.
