Near-death Experience, Consciousness and the Brain - A new concept about the continuity of our consciousness based on recent scientific research
Pim van Lommel, Rijnstate Hospital, Arnhem, The Netherlands
(published in World Futures, Issue 62, 2006)
Author:
Dr. Pim van Lommel, Cardiologist, Rijnstate Hospital, Arnhem, Netherlands
Summary:
In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001 (Link to this study). In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our 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
Conclusions (except):
The inevitable 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 with a diagnosis of brain
death. Such understanding also fundamentally changes one’s opinion about death,
because of the almost unavoidable conclusion that at the time of physical death
consciousness will continue to be experienced in another dimension, in an invisible
and immaterial world, the phase-space, in which all past, present, and future is
enclosed. “Death is only the end of our physical aspects.” Research on NDE
cannot give us the irrefutable scientific proof of this conclusion, because people
with an NDE did not quite die, but they all were very close to death, without a
functioning brain. But it has been clearly shown that during NDE consciousness
is experienced independently of brain function.
Download: http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/vanLommel2006.pdf
Additional information:
A 45-minute interview with Dr. Pim van Lommel is available in the Resource section.
