Pim Van Lommel

Dr. Pim Van Lommel will explain how his long-term study of near-death experiences (NDE) occurring during cardiac arrest for 344 patients (as was published in The Lancet in 2001) has convinced him that survival of our consciousness beyond death is a distinct possibility.

After more than 25 years of clinical study of the near-death experience as reported by patients describing what their consciousness experienced during periods of complete cardiac arrest, he believes we can now conclude that our consciousness, rather than being generated by the brain’s functioning, could instead be based on fields of information, consisting of waves, and that it originates in the phase-space.

Brain functions are severely compromised during cardiac arrest, with complete cessation of cerebral flow, and electrical activity in both cerebral cortex and the deeper structures of the brain has been shown to be absent after 10-20 seconds. So, we have to conclude that during cardiac arrest, the NDE is being experienced during a transient loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem.   

All this raises three questions:
1) How could clear consciousness be experienced outside one’s body at the same moment that the brain can no longer be functioning during a period of clinical death (i.e., with a flat EEG)?     

2) How is consciousness related to the integrity of brain function?

3) Is there proof of a actual beginning or an end to consciousness?

 Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind-brain relation, because we now have to admit that it is not possible to reduce consciousness to neural processes, as is often conceived by contemporary neuroscience.

The conclusion that consciousness can be experienced independently of brain function might well induce a huge change in the scientific paradigm in western medicine, and could have practical implications in actual medical and ethical problems such as the care for comatose or dying patients, euthanasia, abortion, and the removal of organs for transplantation from somebody in the dying process with a beating heart in a warm body but a diagnosis of brain death.

There are still more questions than answers, but, we now must seriously consider the possibility that death, like birth, may well be a mere passing from one state of consciousness to another.