A few days ago I posted an article about an interview with Dr. Caroline Watt. In that article, there was a quote from an interview of near-death experience researcher Pim van Lommel discussing the evidence that NDEs occur when there is no brain activity. That interview with Dr. Van Lommel was done in November of 2010 by Alex Tsakiris of skeptiko.com. In the interview, Dr. Van Lommel explains that 15 seconds after cardiac arrest there is no brain activity and any verifiable perception of an event that occured after those 15 seconds is evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain and that the NDE is not an illusion. Also in the interview, Alex discusses how evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain means we have to take seriously the reports from people having NDEs who say that heaven is real.
Key Points from the Interview with Dr. Pim van Lommel
- Dr. Van Lommel explains that people having an NDE experience enhanced consciousness at the same time they are experiencing physical symptoms, such as cardiac arrest, that cause almost immediate loss of brain activity.
- Dr. Van Lommel explains that 15 seconds after cardiac arrest there is no brain activity and any verifiable perception of an event that occured after those 15 seconds is evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain and that the NDE is not an illusion.
- Alex Tsakiris explains how even the most basic result from parapsychology, proof of telepathy, provides strong evidence that the mind is not produced by the brain which therefore strongly suggests that consciousness continues after the death of the body. Once you understand that you have to take the content of NDEs seriously and that means you have to take the existence of heaven seriously.
- Dr. Van Lommel explains the flaw in experiments, such as the AWARE study, that place hidden signs which if seen by people having an NDE could provide proof of out-of-body-experiences which are part of NDEs. These experiments are flawed because there are psychological reasons people are unlikely to notice the signs. People tend to only notice what interests them. In the case of an NDE, the experiencer is likely to notice their body and medical procedures being done to their body but they are not likely to notice signs placed on top of high cabinets for purposes unknown to the person having the NDE.
- Dr. Van Lommel explains how he started to research NDEs, by asking his patients if they remembered anything from the time they were unconscious. Van Lommel also explains why some doctors might not receive reports from patients having NDEs.
Key Quotes from the Interview
Dr. Van Lommel explains that people having an NDE experience enhanced consciousness at the same time they are experiencing physical symptoms, such as cardiac arrest, that cause almost immediate loss of brain activity.
Dr. Van Lommel: ... They haven’t proven the hypothesis that consciousness is a product of the brain. This topic should be discussed again because people experience an enhanced consciousness, the paradoxical occurrence of an enhanced consciousness during the period of a nonfunctioning brain.So I’ve been seeing also in the literature about what we know about what happens in the brain when the heart stops. We know also the chemical features of such a patient. He loses consciousness within seconds all of his body reflexes are gone which is a product of the cortex of the brain. But also the brain stem reflexes are gone, the gag reflex, the corneal reflex or the wide pupils are clinical findings in those patients. And also the breathing stops. So the breathing center close to the brain stem stops functioning.
The clinical findings are there is no function of the brain anymore and the electrical activity where you measure it in the EEG is. In an average of 15 seconds there’s a flat-line. And the average period you need in a coronary care unit to resuscitate the patient is at least one to two minutes or more. So there are all those patients who have a cardiac arrest in the hospital and out of hospital arrests that flat-line on an EEG and they have about 20% of having a near-death experience, which is an enhanced consciousness in combination with emotions and memories from early childhood. Also sometimes with future events, with the meeting of deceased relatives, and also at the end of the experience is the consciousness returning to the body.
So all these aspects of consciousness that the people tell you, and there are so many who have told me or written me. It’s not possible that the current medical concepts that the brain product makes the consciousness, that consciousness is a product of the brain, that is impossible. So the brain function for me, it’s not producing consciousness but it is facilitating. That means it makes it more possible to experience your waking consciousness and doesn’t produce it.
...
Alex Tsakiris: ... We’re talking about almost uniformly people reporting an enhanced-a hyper, a super-consciousness at a time when at the very least the brain is severely compromised if not completely off-line. And I just don’t understand how there can be a complete denial of this basic fact.
...
Dr. Van Lommel: ... This enhanced consciousness which I also call the non-local consciousness, there is no time and no distance. Everything is there at the same time and you have a life review during cardiac arrest for two minutes. You can talk for days about what happened to you but everything is there at the same time.
And the past and the future is there as well, so your consciousness is in a dimension where there’s no time and no space, which is totally different from the consciousness we have here. They are united in this physical world. You are the subject and the object. But in the other dimension there is only subject. You’re one with everything.
Dr. Van Lommel explains that 15 seconds after cardiac arrest there is no brain activity and any verifiable perception of an event that occured after those 15 seconds is evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain and that the NDE is not an illusion.
Dr. Van Lommel: It’s not an illusion at all. When you go to the definition of an illusion it is a misapprehension or misleading image. An out-of-body experience where they have veridical perception, what’s happening to their body during resuscitation or during the operation and these aspects can be corroborated by doctors and nurses and family members.It’s important because it can not only tell us what they perceived but also the moment that it happened can be corroborated. And that what they perceived from a position out of the body really happened at a time that they were unconscious and there was no cardiac function; there was no brain function at all. Because we also know that electrical activity in the brain stops in an average of about 15 seconds. So they have an enhanced consciousness with the possibility of perception out of the body during the period of a non-functioning brain.
It’s also interesting to mention that recently there was a study done by Jan Holden in the book, The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences where she had to review 93 corroborated reports with out-of-body experience. She found that 92% was completely accurate and 6-10% contained some error and only 1-2% was completely erroneous. So they proved that NDE cannot be an illusion nor can it be a hallucination, which is really an experience in perception that has no basis in reality like in psychosis. Neither is it an illusion, which is an incorrect assessment of a correct perception. So what they perceived really happened so there can by definition be no illusion at all.
Alex explains how even the most basic result from parapsychology, proof of telepathy, provides strong evidence that the mind is not produced by the brain which therefore strongly suggests that consciousness continues after the death of the body. Once you understand that you have to take the content of NDEs seriously and that means you have to take the existence of heaven seriously.
Alex Tsakiris: ... The second “if” question I think is really the one that winds up tripping up most people. That’s the “if” question that says: If this is true, then what else is true? If this is true, then what other beliefs do I have that have to start being re-examined? In this regard I think a lot of parapsychology or psi or consciousness researchers can do themselves a real dis-service if they undersell the importance of this “if” question.I mean, if you’re researching telepathy and you say, “Telepathy is real and I have proven it in the lab,” and if you at the same time acknowledge that that changing paradigm that telepathy implies, changes everything in science fundamentally-every area of science you can imagine it touches on. If you don’t acknowledge that then I think you leave a lingering doubt in the minds of people who are skeptical.
Because you know what? That’s one thing the skeptics have figured out. They understand the slippery slope, if you will. They understand that if our mind isn’t a product 100% of our brain, if consciousness is separate from brain function, then survival of consciousness is not just on the table, but given the data we already have, it’s fait accompli. The data is just too strong for that.
And then if you jump onto that stone and you say, “Okay, consciousness is separate from brain function and therefore maybe consciousness does survive death,” then you’re right there knocking on the gates of Heaven, if you will. Because you have to bring into the conversation the content of those experiences that says there is a higher order, there is some universal feeling of love, of consciousness, the core of cultural issues that have been battled for hundreds of years. Hey, those are on the table.
So don’t do your telepathy experiment and pretend that you can still play in a little Atheistic sandbox over here because you can. Once you start going down these series of “if” questions, it gets really scary really quick. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what trips up a lot of people who are skeptical. At some level, maybe a level they’re not fully aware of, they’ve thought through the if/then implications of opening themselves up to this information. To changing their belief systems to accommodate some of this data. It’s scary because most of us are pretty comfortable with the way that our world is, or at least we’re comfortable enough that we don’t want to turn it upside down and shake it radically. Yet that’s what paradigm shifting is all about.
Dr. Van Lommel explains the flaw in experiments, such as the AWARE study, that place hidden signs which if seen by people having an NDE could provide proof of out-of-body-experiences which are part of NDEs. These experiments are flawed because there are psychological reasons people are unlikely to notice the signs. People tend to only notice what interests them. In the case of an NDE, the experiencer is likely to notice their body and medical procedures being done to their body but they are not likely to notice signs placed on top of high cabinets for purposes unknown to the person having the NDE.
Dr. Van Lommel: ... So you need intention and attention. When you are out of your body during cardiac arrest, you just see your body or you think of your family and you will be there. You will not start looking around to see if there will be some hidden sign. It’s what you call in science inattentional blindness. If you’re not attentive you won’t see things....
Dr. Van Lommel: That positive result is when you are trying to find patients who will see the hidden sign is perhaps what you can find when you have patients with a critical perception in your out-of-body experience experiment you have to corroborate these veridical perceptions. You need doctors and nurses and family members. When you hear such a story you have to try to find out if what they tell is true.
The skeptics always say, “Well, this is just an anecdote.” But there have been so many, many anecdotes; so many patients talk about details of the situation it is totally impossible to know. Also the study of Sabom in from years ago found that patients who had an out-of-body experience who talk about details of resuscitation which was impossible to know.
And it’s also interesting to know that one patient of Penny Sartori who is English and is also performing research on NDE, she had one patient who had an out-of-body experience and who could tell exactly a lot of details about the resuscitation. But she did not see the hidden sign. She had put signs in the room. So they have no intention to look around. So I think that if critical perception can be corroborated the better. The more the better. And that’s the way we have to study it.
Dr. Van Lommel explains how he started to research NDEs, by asking his patients if they remembered anything from the time they were unconscious. Van Lommel also explains why some doctors might not receive reports from patients having NDEs.
Dr. Van Lommel: ... I started to ask my patients who survived cardiac arrest if they could remember something of the period of unconsciousness. To my big surprise, within two years out of 50 patients asked, 12 of them told me about their NDEs. And it was for me the start because it was my scientific curiosity, how it could be explained that people can have an enhanced consciousness when they are unconscious, when the heart doesn’t work and there is no breathing and their brain stops functioning....
Dr. Van Lommel: ... I’ve talked to hundreds of those patients. You get convinced that there is more than what we can see, what we can measure.
...
Dr. Van Lommel: ... There was a conference about near-death experience at a university hospital with more than 300 people in attendance. There were some lectures about NDEs. There were some people talking about NDEs. Then a cardiologist stood up and said, “I’m a cardiologist for more than 25 years. I’ve never heard such absolute stories. This is total nonsense. I don’t believe one word of it.” And then another person stood up in the audience and said, “Well, I’m one of your patients and I’ve had a near-death experience and you would be the last one I would ever tell.”
And this is how it works because they feel that it is impossible to share the experience with those physicians who are not open for it.
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